"Same Sex"

It is surely inherently patriarchal to pretend that the ways in which penises differ from one another and the ways in which vaginas differ from one another are so much less salient than the ways in which penises "in general" are different from vaginas "in general" that we will treat those differences of all things as the foundation of all civilization.

This is one of the reasons why I find it so patently absurd and annoying that queersex is so regularly described as or, worse, thought of as "same-sex."

Of course, homo means "same," just as hetero means "different" -- hence "homogeneous" as against "heterogeneous" -- so the same-sex terminology is just a straightforward translation of homo-sex. But my point is that it is actually deranging of the sense of what queerness often practically and imaginatively consists to imagine that its formations are based less on the eroticization of salient differences than are the formations of heterosexuality, so-called.

Honestly, you'd think that those who assume a more primordial narcissism or mimeticism prevails among queer folks than among straights, whoever they are supposed to be, had never heard of tops and bottoms, butches and femmes, ferocious "type"-tourisms articulated around race, class, morphology, and so on. I personally have had sex with more women (one) than I have had sex with blond haired people of either sex (zero, unless it was really dark or I was really drunk), for example. Is that homo-sex or hetero-sex, after all? Is there even a name for that (help me, Krafft-Ebing)? Have I signed onto the wrong gay agenda all these years?

As I say, I think the identification of queer-sex with same-sex functions to obliterate the substance of much if not most of that sex, but also to blunt our openness to ways in which the register of sexuality promisingly connects human beings to one another -- and I don't primarily mean sexually so much as in their shared differentiating aesthetic projects, via sex and otherwise, of assertive-narrative self-creation -- by positing some of them and so policing all of them as instead ineradicably "opposite."

It is even clearer that this insistent opposition at the heart of the heteronormative understanding of queerness as same-sex is even more obliterative of the substance of those queernesses -- bisexuality, transsexuality, intersexuality, to name the most obvious -- which seem to provoke sex-panics equally among both the heterosexuals and the homosexuals who cling to this patriarchal opposition in order to stabilize their respective sexualities more or less into scripts in which conventional couples couple conventionally the better to get on with the more serious business of business.

Desire is provoked by difference, whatever its objects. To want is precisely not to have, but also, crucially, there is a having of that wanting that leaves us more than wanting.

And indeed desire is often experienced first as a shattering difference within oneself that demands of the self that it become otherwise ("that's when I realized I was gay…" "oh my god, I don't hate her, I love her!").

This is one of the reasons why it is right to say of sex that it objects: sex is an objection through which we find our way to subjection (if we are lucky).

That "sex ob-jects" is the crucial discursive operation disavowed in the foregrounding of the dismissively reductive phrase "sex objects," in which we name the fear that we risk a dehumanizing objectification through our sexual relations. I believe that the risk disavowed through anti-sex discourses of a threatening universalizing sexual objectification is, more often than not, a phobic recoiling from the risk of sexual subjectification, the threat/promise of the sex in which we risk objecting to the selves we have been and thereupon embark upon a different selfhood.

The risk in the face of which generalized anti-sex retreats looks to be the risk of freedom itself, the freedom without which it makes no sense to bemoan a loss of subjecthood in the first place. None of this, I hasten to add, should be taken as a trivialization of the violence of rape or harassment or exploitation, which seem to me rarely to be about sex, proper, so much as about control and its pathologies, and hardly seem to me to be the lens through which to think the sexual in general, however urgently they demand an accounting and accountability as well.

Far from a threatening site from which universalizing objectification in the mode of violations articulated by hierarchy spread, the sexual seems to me instead a promising site from which universalizing subjectification in the mode of affiliations articulated by differentiation spread.

Crucial to this formulation is the sense -- to take up too clumsily and quick Judith Butler's terms from Undoing Gender here -- that desire is a site in which we embrace our own undoing ("I have come undone in my desire for him") as the way in which we do ourselves, engage in the doings in which we are rendered as legible, capable, among other things gendered beings. To be undone by gendered desire is to do the gender we would have (in a performative account of gender, again to abbreviate brutally, it is in the reiterated doing of the conventions of gender that we substantiate for ourselves and for others the salience in the gender we then experience ourselves as having; the having is indispensably a function of an ongoing doing) and in having which we are legible as capacious, free beings.

That is to say, in doing our gender and in being undone by its desire we engage in the performative substantiation of ourselves as socially legible beings in the crucial register of sex-gender, and are read in the world as capable of bearing agency.

It is this ethical universality inhering in the sexual, this interminable affiliation in differentiation (directly correlated, I would say, to the constitutive tension of equity in diversity that articulates the scene of consent on which the whole democratic imaginary also uneasily rests, so the stakes here are really rather fraught) which would be circumscribed and domesticated by the gesture in which queersex is identified with the Same (in a way that is Other, and Other in a way that is always also less than) and straight sex with the Other (in a way that is always also less than).

It Isn't True That There Have Always Been So Many Commercials, Such Loud Commercials, or Permanent Commercials in the Corner of Ongoing Programming

Just as billboards should be attacked as pollution, television commercials should be attacked as harassment. Ubiquitous repetitious interminable ever-higher volume commercials are not just insulting, are not just stupefying, are not just undermining critical faculties on which democratic citizenship depends for its flourishing, but they amount to criminal harassment and should be litigated and regulated as such. The logic of short-term profit-taking is literally incapable of putting the breaks on this development, and hence this deranging demoralizing degenerating trend simply will not stop, stall, or slow, let alone reverse, until there are laws to see to it that it does.

Every Republican Accusation Is Actually A Confession

It's not accidental, it's not incidental, it's not superficial, it's not occasional.

When Republicans accuse you of racism for noticing the racism entailed by some claim they have made or of an outcome of some policy they advocate, their accusation that you are racist is precisely the displaced and perplexing confession of their own racism that it weirdly feels like it is.

When Republicans accuse you of elitism for caring more about everyday people than billionaires, their accusation that you are elitist is precisely the displaced and perplexing confession of their own elitism that it weirdly feels like it is.

When Republicans campaigning for a place in government accuse government as such of incompetence, corruption, profligacy, fraud, thuggery you can be sure that their accusation is precisely the confession of the assumptions that will guide their governance, and you can be sure that the incompetence, corruption, profligacy, fraud, and thuggery they author will further substantiate the accusation and confessional declaration of the next generation of Republicans to follow them into the slaughterhouse of their making.

When Republicans accuse you of pining for tyranny because you believe in good government of, by, and for the people, their accusation that you are a tyrant ready to unleash the jack-boots of police brutality is precisely the displaced and perplexing confession of the promptings of their own authoritarian id, the one that dismantles civil liberties and lies us into endless wars and sends riot police into citizen assemblies literally every time they are in any position to do so.

When Republicans accuse you of thwarting their "Culture of Life" theirs is precisely the displaced and perplexing confession of the hater of women who wants them to die in back alley abortions for daring to have pleasure in life, the hater of actually living children who wants them to die of starvation, abuse, ignorance, hopelessness, and should they survive long enough, eventually as cannon-fodder in their wars, the hater of laws regulating machine guns in our streets or poisons in our homes or the soundness of our children's educations or the safety of our food supply or the reliability of our infrastructure or protection against pandemic or catastrophic weather, they are instead the dread armies of a palpable Culture of Death, and their accusations stink of the death on their breath and in our their heartless hearts.

When Republicans accuse you of hating America their accusation is precisely the displaced and perplexing confession of their hatred for the actual diversity of American lifeways in this secular, multicultural, continent-scaled scrum of collaboration and contestation and everyday people, and for the actual democratizing promise, never yet fulfilled but always breaking out anew, of our American ethos, our founding, immigrating, emancipating, progressing, unionizing, New Dealing, civil righting, war-protesting, secularizing, ecologizing, queering, browning, legacies into a presence pushing from and into elsewhere and other-wise, peer to peer.

When Republicans accuse you of meddling in private life, undermining individual choice, strangling innovation their accusation is precisely the displaced and perplexing confession of the wiretapping spy, the anti-intellectual who thinks his is the Party of Ideas, the hyperbolic huckster who thinks his wishes are assets, the bully and bore who mistakes self-promotion for creativity, the relentlessly conventional individualist, the mocker of difference, the pinched, puritanical, moralizing crusader against the happiness of gay folks and women who choose to end unwanted pregnancies or facilitate wanted ones against convention and kids in school with questions and single folks and slackers and pot smokers and poets and freethinkers and people with a cause or an idea or a creation or who care enough to do something the least bit unexpected.

It is not enough to declare these perplexing displacements self-deceptions, propaganda lies, or even the Big Lies of fascist mass-mediation (although a full accounting would testify to all these facets): This projection is the quintessential gesture of alienated moralizing oligarchs in a modern (if I may telescope this brutally briefly, I mean "modern" in the sense of the ongoing and in fact interminable re-enactment of the querelle des Anciens et des Modernes and, hence, yes, that "modern" includes late-moderns, post-moderns, a-moderns, and all the rest of that hoo-hah) that is to say, our whole secular/aestheticized ethical/democratizing sociocultural terrain. This confessional displacement into accusation is the very architecture of reaction that makes the politics of the Right what it is properly grasped as in its fundamentalism, in its moralism, in its hostility to democracy and worldiness -- in a word we seem all too readily and wrongly to have set aside -- Reactionary.

The Dead Zone Decade

When VH-1 coughs up its hairball of false nostalgia for the Bush decade a decade from now, they will find that music and fashion and graphic design and commercial tropes that seemed fresh and fun in 1999 felt precisely as fresh and fun in 2010, they will find that the anti-french, anti-latte, anti-nuance, anti-science, anti-Geneva Conventions Appleby's America crap narratives endlessly circulated through the media puke funnels into phony consensus lodged in no one's spirit and in no one's memory, that nothing happened, that nothing began, that nothing was made, that even all the death-dealing dwelt in death...

The 90s GAP commercials have returned for the 2009 holiday season, the streets of Paris and San Francisco fill the screens of American films and television commercials again with the romantic vibrant French surrender monkeys and Pelosi values that almost no actual Americans ever really hated however loudly the corporate-militarists barked to the contrary for a decade, and even Appleby's now promises sandwiches with arugula on artisan bread in a last-ditch pitch for survival in the reality-based community we are all incarcerated in whatever our denialism to the contrary, and just look at all the non-closeted faggots and uppity negroes and competent women reflecting the real world back to us on our television sit-coms and home-renovation shows, all as if to cry out in anguish, in panic, in denial of all the denialism, it never happened! Bush never happened! America did not expose its rot, its rancidness, its ridiculousness to a world now yawning and calling in its debts, the regularly scheduled programming is to resume, the never begotten need not even be forgotten...

Even while the Teabbagers scream even now to illegalize abortions and re-closet queers and to deny the science on which they depend to survive and to murder or incarcerate or draft all the brown people into the wage machine and the war machine, weeping that White Warmaking Wal-Mart Baby Jesus wants Our America back for the Real Americans, in a full froth of hysteria and hate they want back the lie that passes for the life of dead-eyed life-sucking Republican life, the America that never really existed and that nobody really wants, all the while a few evil old angry white men with lies in their eyes lies in their lives making fists of their hearts smelling of death and madness hold hostage the Change millions voted for, the Chance millions broke their hearts for, the Sanity to save something of the world to save some few lives to correct course the least bit before all hope is lost...

And even now we are shutting down, just plain bushed by the decade of Bush, starting already to sleep-walk through the actually demanding shattering realization that the death-dealing dot-eyed denialist epoch of Republican rule was a vast wasteland of heartlessness, thoughtlessness, lifelessness, an unreality teevee show with an ugly fake tan and a beer gut and a soulless leer with twice the commercials and a logo in the corner of the screen that never goes away, that grinds into your brain to the place where consciousness and conscience should reside, denying a decade of denialist death in life that none of us will ever get back, and from which we may never in fact recover...

Meanwhile, the futurologists ever more hysterically still declared that technology is accelerating, that acceleration of acceleration is accelerating, a kind of stillness in their silly thrill shrill shilling unstillnessology still, we are rushing still ever toward that sooper-human "post-human transition," toward that sooper-intelligent post-historical "singularity," rocketing onward up and up, is all this on the up and up? and in the pastel-hued tonalities of soft-porn the television commercials match their hysteria, hawking fetish-phones in petrochemistench bubble-wrap already tugging toward landfill and happy-pills and boner-pills in consumer go-getter bubble-brains tugging toward suicidal depression and cardiac arrest IP-enclosure side effects in the unread small print scrolling by at the spped of light, while all the super-sonic passenger planes were grounded and our space missions exploded and our computers bloated and stalled and our actual health outcomes degenerated and our water and crops and energy supplies shuddered and our biosphere fever-sweated...

And all the white boys with all their plastic-digital toys lie louder and louder, especially to themselves, and flap their hands and show off their thumbs-up in their faith in The Future, high-five future-sooper-tastology, no limits, man, looking for all the world like the most abject fools imaginable, futurological fraudsters making one last desperate pitch for that death-dealing something for nothing knee deep in the shit of the financial fraudsters and hucksters and corporate-militarist scenarists who prepared the way for them, one last techno-immortalizing digital-totalizing plastic-fantastic teledildonic robo-nano-bio-neuro-info cornucopiasmic geo-engineering late-night informerical or motivational seminar or Ponzi scheme or think-tank pie-chart, one last faith-based initiative to eat the world to build a crappy crumbling McMansion before they do us all a favor and blow their brains out.

Curriculum Vitae

DALE CARRICO

dcarrico@sfai.edu
ndaleca@gmail.com
amormundi.blogspot.com

CURRENT POSITIONS

Senior Lecturer, Liberal Humanities, San Francisco Art Institute, from 2004 to the present.
Lecturer, Department of Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley, from 2005 to the present.

EDUCATION

Ph.D., Department of Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley, 2005

Dissertation: Pancryptics: Technocultural Transformations of the Subject of Privacy
Committee: Judith Butler, Chair (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature); Mark Poster (History, UC Irvine); Pamela Samuelson (School of Law and School of Information Management and Systems); Linda Williams (Rhetoric and Film Studies)

M.A., Department of Philosophy, Georgia State University, 1995

Thesis: Technology and Proliferating “Queer” Bodies
Committee: Timothy Renick, Chair; Linda Bell, Stephen Prothero
Many of the themes of the thesis were summarized and published as an article, Technology Is Making Queers of Us All, published by the magazine BetterHumans, January 5, 2004.

B.A., cum laude. Department of English, Georgia State University, 1989
Indiana University, Department of Comparative Literature, 1983-1986

TEACHING FIELDS AND AREAS OF ACADEMIC INTEREST

Aesthetics and Politics
Art and Philosophy in Greek and Roman Antiquity
Critical Theory
Digital Media and Network Criticism
Gender Studies and Queer Theory
Environmental Justice
Rhetorical History, Theory and Argumentation
Peace and Reconciliation Studies
Science and Technology Studies

ONLINE PUBLICATIONS

A Neoliberalization of Basic Income Discourse? Power to Persuade: Creating and Implementing Public Policy, Cross-Sectoral Debates, September 14, 2015.

Artificial Intelligence As Alien Intelligence, boundary 2, March 25, 2015.

Geekdom Is Having a Diversifying Effect on Culture, New York Times, "Room for Debate" forum, When Geeks Rule, September 18, 2014.

Futurological Discourse and Posthuman Terrains, Existenz, Volume 8, No. 2, Fall 2013.

Review (originally titled, "Schlock and Awesome: Why Futurism Is Worse Than You Think") of the book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler (Free Press, 2012) published by the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives, May 24, 2012.

Overview of "Geo-Engineering" As Futurological Greenwashing, on Worldchanging, August 10, 2010.

Superlative Futurology, Re-Public: Re-Imagining Democracy, June 2009.

Is Obama the Face of Ongoing p2p Democratization? Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives, March 16, 2009.

Selections from My Recurring Column of Anti-Futurological Critique, published by the World Future Society:

Ten Reasons to Take Seriously the Transhumanists, Singularitarians, Techno-Immortalists, Nano-Cornucopiasts and Other Assorted Robot Cultists, March 15, 2012.
Futurological Brickbats (A Selection), March 22, 2012.
Ten Futurological Admonitions, March 29, 2012.
What Are People Really Talking About When They Talk About "Geo-Engineering"? April 14, 2012.
"Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again" May 5, 2012.
The Unbearable Stasis of Accelerating Change, May 27, 2012.
SpaceX Space Cadets Set Their Sights On Libertopian Mars, June 3, 2012.
How to Write Your Transhumanist Article (A Helpful Guide for More Profitable Prophesying) June 13, 2012.
The "Financial Singularity" Is Not About Mystery But About Fraud, June 17, 2012.
Singularitarian Hype and the Denial of History, June 17, 2012.
"Am I Going To Become A Cyborg In The Future?" July 7, 2012.
"I Tweet From Basement, Home of Mom": Time For A Cyberspace Manifesto 2.0? July 15, 2012.
Performance Artist and Sousveillance Activist Steve Mann Assaulted in Paris McDonalds, July 17, 2012.
Exxon-Mobil's "Geo-Engineering" Discourse Is Just More Futurological Greenwashing, July 23, 2012.
All Humans Are Mortal. Socrates Is Human. Therefore, Socrates Is Mortal, August 1, 2012.
Tributaries: Somebodies That Used Gotye To Know Themselves, August 15, 2012.
Futurological Defenses of Automation, Outsourcing, Crowdsourcing, and Precarizing Labor, August 29, 2012.
Techno-Immortalists Exploit Dying Women To Peddle Pseudo-Science and Threaten Critics, September 3, 2012.
A Comment on Artificial Imbecillence, October 7, 2012.
Dressing for The Future, October 17, 2012.
Is "Geo-Engineering" Really Just Gardening? November 19, 2012.
Insecurity Theatre: How Futurological Existential-Risk Discourse Deranges Serious Technodevelopmental Deliberation, November 28, 2012.
Paul Krugman Flirts With Futurism, January 2, 2013.
"Driverless Cars" As Dead-Ender Car Culture Apologia, January 7, 2013.
Private Space Follies, January 10, 2013.
Tim O'Reilly on: "The Golden Age,"January 24, 2013.
p2p is EITHER Pay to Peer OR it is Peers to Precarity, March 23, 2013.
"The Future" Is Always Somebody Else's Pain and Payment for Our Sins, April 3, 2013.
Why Does Tim Wu Side With the Technoblatherers?, April 14, 2013.
Farhad Manjoo's Camera Reassura, April 19, 2013.
Zuckerberg's Privation, April 27, 2013.
Peter Thiel Against Hollywood Against "The Future," May 15, 2013.
Googlenature, May 16, 2013.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tweet, June 1, 2013.
Transcending the Lawnmower Man, April 17, 2014.
What Is the Futurological?, November 29, 2014.
Eric Garner and the Cop Cam Sham, December 5, 2014.
Techbro Mythoppoetics, December 24, 2014.
The Inevitable Cruelty of Algorithmic Mediation, December 26, 2014.
Futurology's Shortsighted Foresight on AI, January 15, 2015.
The Yearning Annex: Google Commits Millions for Robot Cult Indoctrination in Plutocratic Venture-Capitalist Dystopia, January 28, 2015.
We Are The Killer Robots, February 4, 2015.
Artificial Intelligence As Alien Intelligence, February 25, 2015.
Tools for Techno-Transcendental Tricksters: The Turing Con and the Reductionist Shell Game, March 14, 2015.
#FuturologicalFollies, April 25, 2015.

GRANTS, AWARDS AND HONORS

Outstanding Instructor Award, Undergraduate Student Union (SFAI), 2019
Outstanding Faculty Award, Undergraduate Student Union (SFAI), 2016
LOGS Outstanding Graduate Faculty Award, Legion of Graduate Students, San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), 2010
Departmental Research Award, UC Berkeley, 2006
Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics (CCLE), Summer Fellowship, 2004
Pedagogy Departmental Grant, UC Berkeley, 2004
Wollenberg Grant, 2003
Fletcher Jones Memorial Fellowship, 2000-2001
Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, UC Berkeley, 1998-1999
University Block Grant, Department of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley, 1998

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS, PUBLIC TALKS, AND PANELS

"Futurological Discourse and Posthuman Terrains," American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Annual Meeting, San Francisco, March 27-31, 2013.

Panel Chair, "Thinking Outside the Frame: Avant-Garde Calligraphy, Relational Art, and New Cinema," Drawing, Interpreting, Synthesizing: Robert and Colleen Haas Scholars Tenth Annual Spring Research Conference, University of California at Berkeley, May 2, 2008

"The Sense and Significance of the Emerging Netroots: Digby, Benkler, Arendt in the Progressive Blogosphere," Roosevelt Institution, University of California at Berkeley, October 24, 2007

“Media Tactics for the New World Order: A Screening and Panel Discussion of the Film Loose Change,” San Francisco Art Institute, October 11, 2006

“Alone With My Thoughts: Private and Public Faces of Cognitive Self-Determination,” Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights, Stanford University, May 27, 2006

"Pay to Peer: Basic Income and the Emerging Peer-to-Peer Network Culture," The Fourth Congress of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network: "The Right to Economic Security," New York, NY, March 5, 2005

“Setting the Scene: Creating Conditions in Which Students Teach Themselves to Read and Write Argumentatively,” Center for Individual Learning, San Francisco Art Institute, February, 2005

“Parables of Virtuality: ‘Burning Chrome’ and the Dark Night of Bodies,” Representations of the Virtual, University of California at Berkeley, February 17, 2005

“Teaching the Four Habits of Argumentative Writing,” Pedagogy Workshop, University of California at Berkeley, Department of Rhetoric, October 25, 2004

“Vulgar Biocentrism Among the Technophiles,” Art in the Posthuman Era, University of Toronto, August 6, 2004

“Doin’ What Comes Naturally: Margaret Somerville’s Bio-Conservative Deployment of the Precautionary Principle in Her Case against Gay Marriage,” New Feminist Perspectives on Biotechnology and Bioethics, University of California at Berkeley, March 12, 2004

“’Keep Your Laws Off My Body!’: Biotechnology and the Politics of Choice, from Reproductive to Morphological Freedom,” New Feminist Perspectives on Biotechnology and Bioethics,University of California at Berkeley, March, 11, 2004

“Problems in Teaching Rhetoric,” Department of Rhetoric Pedagogy Seminar, University of California at Berkeley, October 20, 2003

“Technocultural Singularity and the Shifting Terrain of Humanist Politics: Liberal Humanism, Transhumanism, Posthumanism.” Born of Desertion: Singularity, Collectivity, Revolution, Marxist Reading Group, University of Florida, March 21, 2003

“Abject Beasts: Impurity, Solidarity, and the Politics of Vegetarianism,” Subject, Object, Abject, University of California at Berkeley, February 28, 2003

“Animal Rites: Vegetarian Criticism, Vegetarian Selves,” Culture Is Ordinary, Bowling Green State University, April 18, 1997

“The New Market: Intellectual Property Rights and the Technology Debates,” Interface, Southern College of Technology, October 21, 1993

CONFERENCE ORGANIZING

Organizing Committee, Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights Conference, Stanford University, May 26-28, 2006

Chief Organizer, the 13th Annual, Boundaries in Question Conference -- Feminists Face the Future: New Feminist Perspectives on Biotechnology and Bioethics, University of California at Berkeley, March 11-13, 2004

Chief Organizer, the 12th Annual, Boundaries in Question Conference, University of California at Berkeley, February, 28-March 1, 2003

Co-Organizer, OutSouth: Queer Arts Festival, Asheville, North Carolina, September 24-27, 1992.

ACTIVITIES AND ACADEMIC SERVICE

NASAD Submission Committee for New San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) Degree Program, "Art, Place, and Public Studies," 2018

Editor, SFAI (San Francisco Art Institute) Adjunct Faculty Newsletter, 2016-2019.

Research Team and Draft Committee for the Liberal Arts Program Assessment at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) for the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), 2010-2011

Pedagogy Working Group, Department of Rhetoric, University of California at Berkeley, 2004-2005

Steward, Dept. of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley, Association of Graduate Student Employees, 1996-1998

TEACHING

Graduate Courses

CS 500 Introduction to Critical Theory (San Francisco Art Institute) Spring 2020
Trans Theories, Histories, Practices (SFAI, Independent Study) Spring 2020

CS 500 Introduction to Critical Theory (San Francisco Art Institute) Spring 2019
HTCA 520 Designs On Us: The Politics and Anti-Politics of Design Discourse (SFAI) Fall 2018
CS 500 Introduction to Critical Theory (San Francisco Art Institute) Spring 2018
Un/Doing Subjects: Jewish, Queer, Crip (SFAI, Independent Study) Spring 2018
CS 520 Queer Manifestations (SFAI) Fall 2017
CS 500 Fact, Figure, Fetish (SFAI) Fall 2016
CS 500P Biopunk! Bioart and Bioethics (SFAI) Spring 2016
CS 500A Introduction to Critical Theory (SFAI) Spring 2015
CS 500 Designs on Us: Anti-Politics in Green, Media, & Medical Design Discourse (SFAI) Fall 2014
EMS 590 Thesis I: Independent Investigations (SFAI) Spring 2014
CS 500A Introduction to Critical Theory (SFAI) Spring 2014
EMS 590 Thesis I: Independent Investigations (SFAI) Fall 2013
EMS 590 Thesis I: Independent Investigations (SFAI) Spring 2013
CS 500 Fetish, Figure, Fact (SFAI) Spring 2013.
EMS 590 Thesis I: Independent Investigations (SFAI) Fall 2012
EMS 590 Thesis I: Independent Investigations (SFAI) Spring 2012
CS 500 What Now? Aesthetics and Politics Between Past and Future (SFAI) Spring 2012
EMS 590 Thesis I: Independent Investigations (SFAI) Fall 2011
EMS 590 Thesis I: Independent Investigations (SFAI) Spring, 2011
CS 500 Designs on Us: Anti-Politics in Green, Media, & Medical Design (SFAI) Spring 2011
EMS 590 Thesis I: Independent Investigations (SFAI) Fall 2010
EMS 590 Thesis I: Independent Investigations (SFAI) Spring 2010
EMS 590 Thesis I: Independent Investigations (SFAI) Fall 2009
CS 500 Design for Living: Artifice and Agency (SFAI) Spring 2009
EMS 590 Thesis I: Independent Investigations (SFAI) Spring 2009
EMS 590 Thesis I: Independent Investigations (SFAI) Fall 2008
EMS 590 Thesis I: Independent Investigations (SFAI) Spring 2008

Upper Division Undergraduate Courses

CS300A Critical Theory A, "The Point Is to Change It" (SFAI), Fall 2021

RHET 116 "Introduction to Critique and Critical Theory" (UC Berkeley), Summer 2021

CS301 Critical Theory B: Peace in Pieces: Everyday Violences and Nonviolent Resistances (SFAI), Spring 2021
CS301 Critical Theory B: For Futurity: A Clash of Futurisms (SFAI) Summer 2020
HUMN 224 Patriarchy in Greek and Roman Antiquity (San Francisco Art Institute) Spring 2020
CS300B Critical Theory B, "Queer Manifestations"(SFAI) Fall 2019
CS300A Critical Theory A, "The Point Is to Change It" (SFAI) Fall 2019
CS300A Critical Theory A, "The Point Is to Change It" (SFAI) Spring 2019
CS300A Critical Theory A, "The Point Is to Change It" (SFAI) Fall 2018
CS300B Critical Theory B "Digital Democracy, Digital Anti-Democracy" (SFAI) Fall 2018
RHET 153 Green Rhetoric (UCB) Summer 2018
HUMN 237 Peace in Pieces: Nonviolence (SFAI) Fall 2017
RHET 166 Digital Anti-Democratization Under the Law (UCB) Summer 2017
RHET 153 Green Rhetoric (UCB) Summer 2017
CS301 Critical Theory B: For Futurity: A Clash of Futurisms (SFAI) Spring 2017
RHET 103A Patriarchal Conviction in Greece and Rome (UCB) Fall 2016
HUMN 300A Critical Theory A "The Point Is to Change It" (SFAI) Fall 2016.
HUMN 224 Are We Not Men? Patriarchy in Greek and Roman Antiquity (SFAI) Spring 2016
HUMN 300A Critical Theory A "The Point Is to Change It" (SFAI) Fall 2015
HUMN 207 Homo Economicus: Staging the Contradictions of Modern Political Economy in the English Comedy of Manners (SFAI) Fall 2015
RHET 103A Patriarchal Convention and Conviction in Classical Antiquity (UCB) Summer 2015
HUMN 300B Critical Theory B "Digital Democracy, Digital Anti-Democracy" (SFAI) Spring 2015
HUMN 300A Critical Theory A "The Point Is to Change It" (SFAI) Fall 2014
RHET 103A Patriarchal Convention and Conviction in Classical Antiquity (UCB) Summer 2014
HUMN 300B Critical Theory B Planetary Thinking and Environmental Justice (SFAI) Spring 2014
HUMN 300A Critical Theory A "The Point Is to Change It" (SFAI) Fall 2013
RHET 103A Patriarchal Convention and Conviction in Classical Antiquity (UCB) Summer 2013
HUMN 300A Critical Theory A "The Point Is to Change It" (SFAI) Spring 2013
HUMN 300B Critical Theory B p2p Democratization and Anti-Democratization (SFAI) Fall 2012
HUMN 300A Critical Theory A "The Point Is to Change It" (SFAI) Summer 2012
RHET 103A Rhetoric in Classical Antiquity (UCB) Summer 2012
HUMN 300B Critical Theory B "The Point Is to Change It" (SFAI) Spring 2012
HUMN 300A Critical Theory B "Technoscience and Environmental Justice" (SFAI) Fall 2011
RHET 121 The Rhetoric of Narrative Selfhood in the Graphic Novel (UCB) Summer 2011
HUMN 300A Critical Theory A "The Point Is to Change It" (SFAI) Summer 2011
HUMN 300B Critical Theory B "Democracy, Peer to Peer" (SFAI) Fall 2010
HUMN 300A Philosophy to Post-Philosophy, Humanism to Post-Humanism (SFAI) Summer 2010
RHET 171 Altars and Alters to the Market: Rhetoric in the Neoliberal Epoch (UCB) Spring 2010
RHET 105 Homo Economicus: Setting the Stage for Enterprising Modernities (UCB) Spring 2010
HUMN 300B Critical Theory B "Green Theories, Green Practices" Spring 2010
Rhetoric 181: Green Rhetoric (UC Berkeley), Fall 2009
HUMN 300A: Critical Theory A, "Theory After Philosophy, Humanity After Humanism" Fall 2009
HUMN 300A: Critical Theory A, "Crisis and Critique," Summer 2009
Rhetoric 199 (Independent Study): Obama's Rhetoric (UC Berkeley), Spring 2009
HUMN 300B: Critical Theory B, "Theory and Technoscience, Peer to Peer" Fall 2008
HUMN 300A: Critical Theory A, "Theory, Science, and the Human," Fall 2008
HUMN 300A: Critical Theory A, "Crisis and Critique," Summer 2008
RHET 103B Politics and Aesthetics (UC Berkeley), Spring, 2008
HUMN 300A Critical Theory A, “The Point Is to Change It” (SFAI), Spring, 2008
HUMN 300B Critical Theory B, “Nature and Criticism” (San Francisco Art Institute), Fall, 2007
HUMN 300A Critical Theory A, “Theory, Thing, Fetish” (San Francisco Art Institute), Fall, 2007
RHET 181 Green Rhetoric (UCB) Fall 2007
HUMN 300A Critical Theory A, “The Point Is to Change It” (SFAI), Summer 2007
RHET 189 Mediated Republic: From Broadcast to p2p [Peer-to-Peer] (UCB) Spring 2007
RHET 103B Politics and Aesthetics (UC Berkeley), Spring, 2007
HUMN 300A Critical Theory A “The Enterprise of Interpretation” (SFAI) Spring 2007
RHET 121A "Biopunk and the Bioethical Imaginary" (UCB) Fall 2006
RHET 132 "Design for Living: Artifice and Agency" (UCB) Fall 2006
HUMN 300B Critical Theory B, “Theory Faces Technoscience” (SFAI) Fall 2006
HUMN 300A Critical Theory A, “The Point Is to Change It” (SFAI) Fall 2006
HUMN 300A Critical Theory A, “Thinking What We Are Doing” (SFAI) Summer 2006
HUMN 300A Critical Theory A, “Objectification and Objection” (SFAI) Spring 2006
HUMN 300A Critical Theory A, “Critique, Subjection, Prostheses” (SFAI) Fall 2005
RHET 110 Varieties of Techno-Ethical Discourse: Bioethics/Neuroethics/Roboethics/Media Criticism (UCB) Summer 2005
RHET 199 (Independent Study) Arendt on the Given, the Forgiven and the Gift (UCB) Summer 2005
HUMN 300B: Critical Theory B, "Political Discourse of Digital Networks” (SFAI), Spring, 2005
RHET 110 Deliberation, Demonstration, Debate about Technological Change (UCB) Summer 2004
RHET 110 Close Reading as Argumentative Discourse (UCB) Summer 2002

Lower Division Undergraduate Courses

RHET 10 The Rhetoric of Argument, "What Is Compelling?" (UC Berkeley) Summer 2019
RHET 10 The Rhetoric of Argument, "What Is Compelling?" (UC Berkeley) Summer 2018
RHET 10 The Rhetoric of Argument, "What Is Compelling?" (UC Berkeley) Summer 2016
RHET 10 The Rhetoric of Argument, "What Is Compelling?" (UCB) Summer 2015
RHET 20 The Rhetoric of Interpretation, "Fact, Figure, Fetish" (UCB) Summer 2014
RHET 20 The Rhetoric of Interpretation, "Fact, Figure, Fetish" (UCB) Summer 2013
RHET 20 The Rhetoric of Interpretation, "Who Holds the Keys?" (UCB) Summer 2012
RHET 1B Argument Against Violence, Argument As Violence (UCB) Summer 2011
RHET 20 The Rhetoric of Interpretation, "Who Holds the Keys?" (UCB) Summer 2010
RHET 20 The Rhetoric of Interpretation, "Who Holds the Keys?" (UCB) Summer 2009
RHET 10 The Rhetoric of Argument, "What Is Compelling?" (UCB) Summer 2009
RHET 10 The Rhetoric of Argument, "What Is Compelling?" (UCB) Spring 2009
RHET 10 The Rhetoric of Argument, "What Is Compelling?" (UCB) Fall 2008
RHET 10 The Rhetoric of Argument, Conviction, Compulsion, Obligation (UCB) Summer 2008
RHET 10 The Rhetoric of Argument, "Persuasion, Violence, Nonviolence" (UCB) Summer 2007
RHET 20 The Rhetoric of Interpretation (UCB) Spring 2006
RHET 1A Ranting, Raving, Writing (UCB) Spring 2006
RHET 2 Public Speaking (UCB) Summer 2005
ENGL 100 Composition A, Ranting, Raving, Writing (SFAI) Spring 2005
RHET 2 Public Speaking (UCB) Summer 2004
RHET 1A Technology and Democracy (UC Berkeley) Summer 2003
K50, Ind. Study “Rhetoric of Liberal Citizenship” (NYU, Gallatin School) Fall 2002
RHET 1B Ranting and Raving (UCB) Fall 2001
RHET 10 An Introduction to Rhetoric and Argumentation (UCB) Summer, 2001
RHET 1A The Craft of Writing “The Presence of the Future” (UCB) Spring 2000
RHET 1B The Craft of Writing “The Violence in Everyday Life” (UCB) Fall 1999
RHET 10 Introduction to the Field of Rhetoric, with Jill Stauffer, Co-Instructor (UCB) Summer 1999
RHET 1B The Craft of Writing “Derangements of Desire” (UCB) Spring 1999
RHET 1B The Craft of Writing “The Subject of Pedagogy” (UCB) Spring 1998
RHET 1B The Craft of Writing “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (UCB) Fall 1997

MASTERS THESES DIRECTED

Taylor Shell -- Fragile, Contains Feelings -- Public Intimacies: The Stressed Body in Contemporary Performance Art 2020 (SFAI)
Henry Chambers -- Anonymous Activist Artist Collectives and Occupation of Space Through Remnants of A Performative Assembly 2020 (SFAI)
Giuliana Funkhouser -- Software for Vibrating Bodies: Scores in Sympathetic Translation, 2020 (SFAI) 
Jordan Taylor Holms --  After Necessity: Codifications of Labor, Space, and Difference in Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art, 2019 (SFAI)
Candace Cui -- Bridging the GAP: Audience Interaction in the Digital Age and the Google Art Project, 2012 (SFAI).
Ian Paul -- Border Politics, Border Poetics, 2011 (SFAI)
Bokyung Kim -- Presence in Present Tense: The Significant Moment in JoAnn Verburg, Carla Shapiro and Kimsooja, 2011 (SFAI)
Adam Prince, Dams, Discourse, and Development: Refiguring the Flows of Progress, 2010 (SFAI)

HONORS THESES DIRECTED

Jason Dang, "Just Laughs: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as a Comedic Insurgency against Mass News Media," Spring 2009 (UCB)
Ian Ferguson, "Promoting the Progress: A Comedy," Spring 2009 (UCB)
Eugene Chow, "Peer to Peer: Ethnic Resistance By Way of Incongruity," Spring 2008 (UCB).
Nicolas Lauricella, "Godard on YouTube: Peer to Peer and True Montage," Spring 2008 (UCB)
Nicole Holly Gordon, "The Architecture of the Invisible: On Women, Workers, and Water in New Argentine Cinema," Spring 2008 (UCB)
Chad Lott, "Iron John Conner," Fall 2008 (UCB)
Bryn Esplin, "Reality, Tradition and Device: A Critique of Judgment in Reality Television," Fall 2007 (UCB).

Let A Bazillion Flowers Bloom

Upgraded from the Moot:

"Martin" in the Moot: So you wouldn't care about transhumanists if they dropped all pretenses of respecting science and just called their views a faith?

Yeah, pretty much, actually.

Of course, one has to remember that not all religious people disrespect science just because they are religious. The problem isn't that people deeply respect beliefs/values other than scientific ones: moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political beliefs are indispensable and can even be reasonable or unreasonable in my view in ways that are open to reasonable discussion, but are none of them properly construed by way of the criteria of reasonable scientific belief.

The problem arises when one confuses or seeks to reduce the terms proper to various modes of belief/value into those of another mode. I don't doubt that there are Catholics or Singularitarians who respect science (or sensible policy-making in relatively accountable and consensual diverse-stakeholder democracies) in a non-negligible way, but this wouldn't make them right to describe their Catholicism or Singularitarianism as scientific enterprises or policy think-tanks.

Even if the superlative futurologists admitted that they are essentially science fiction fanboy salons that have taken on the definitive character of sub(cult)ural faith-based initiatives aspiring toward faithly personal transcendence I would surely still think them quite silly -- as I do most forms of religiosity (being a crusty athiestical type myself) -- indeed, in their case, not just silly but also marginal and defensive faith-based communities aspiring somewhat sadly to become at most something like Mormonism or Scientology when they grow up.

Among the more interesting or reasonable adherents of their faith I would probably just quietly translate their expressions of faith into signals of moral/subcultural membership or assertions of aesthetic taste in order to make sense of them in a way that enabled me to engage with them as my peers on a case by case basis and not let their weird religiosity get too much in the way of keeping up the conversation. That's how I am with most religious folks so long as they don't try to convert me, or with nice and/or interesting people about whom I discover at some point that they have an unexpected religious side but thankfully which they almost never bring up because it is for them a personal matter and they grasp that it is not one of the things about them I am interested in.

But, again, if a person of faith tries to convert me, tries to insist their faith is not a faith but a kind of scientific or policy practice, or if their faith has an organizational life with anti-democratizing impacts I will publicly criticize and oppose those dimensions of their faith, while respecting their right as citizens to be faithful and celebrating the perfect reasonableness of their faith in its moral and aesthetic dimensions however much the form of those beliefs/values happen to differ from my own morals or tastes.

So long as people don't seek to undermine warrantable scientific belief-ascription by substituting the faithful/normative (the dissensus which depends on consent) for the factual (the consensus which depends on dissent) and so long as people don't work against consensual democratic equity in diversity, peer to peer, my rule is let a bazillion flowers bloom, hell, let a bazillion powers vroom.

However, to the extent that a faith takes on an organizational and political life, I will of course disapprove hierarchical or authoritarian tendencies that harm its members and I will criticize and oppose its work in the service of anti-democratizing ends, including anti-democratizing impacts it denies having a hand in either out of dishonesty or incomprehension.

Futurology Is the Quintessential and Consummating Discourse of the Unwholesome Whole That Is Neoliberal/Neoconservative Corporate-Militarism

The Me Generation denigrated the We and then, utterly predictably, found that me without we is incapable of a flourishing life (Ayn Randian pious puke to the contrary notwithstanding), let alone survival for anybody but the luckiest or most brutal few.

After a generation of chirping Reaganesque "government is the problem" and Clintonesque "era of big government is over" mantras, America is now a "No, We Can't" society, not just incapable of improving infrastructure and public investment, but at this point incapable of keeping its existing highways from crumbling, its neglected bridges and pipes from collapsing and bursting.

Americans have settled for CGI space stations in action films and military recruitment ads, ageing-and-death-denialist Americans sigh and pine to hyperbolic press releases from pharmaceutical companies peddling youth and pep and to reassuring futurological lies mis-shelved in science sections peddling nanoscale Everything for Nothing Machines and techno-longevity just around the corner, or imaginary geo-engineering technofixes to real climate crises, deceptions and delusions and derangements of The Future in pastel-hued soft porn tonalities handwaving away an utter bankruptcy and parasitism and inertia of conscience and criticism in the face of the demands, threats, and promises of our shared present.

Just as: The neoliberal financialization of economy fraudulently sells ever more fantastically leveraged debts as if they are assets, criminally externalizes costs onto the next generation or the next continent, and idiotically mistakes logos for stuff.

So too: The industrialization of ecology fraudulently sells the net loss of superficially increased yields purchased through wasteful, toxic, monocultural, energy-input intensivity as a "Green Revolution," pollutes the atmosphere and ground water, depletes topsoil and aquifers, disrupts local ecosystems beyond healing, externalizing the costs of contemporary waste and harm onto the next generation or the next continent, and idiotically mistakes the GDP and skyrocketing stock arrows for commonwealth.

And finally: Futurology is the consummation of neoliberal fraud, peddling the dislocations of global financialization as "the acceleration of acceleration" (which is indeed, perhaps, how an ever more precarious world feels, for a time, for those who are lucky enough to be relative beneficiaries of neoliberal dislocations, especially if they are stupid and short-sighted enough to imagine that riding the gravy train can last forever, and heartless enough not to notice or care about the distress and waste it imposes on the lives of their neighbors), peddling altogether-imaginary responsibility-deferring wish-fulfilling non-solutions to actual problems, from Robot God parental-supercomputers to "solve" intractable historical and political dilemmas, to nanobotic genies-in-a-bottle and immersive virtual pleasure palaces to "solve" intractable quandaries of poverty, to masturbatory megascale corporate-militarist geo-engineering and off-world migratory science-fiction scenarios to "solve" intractable ecological quandaries, to "mind-uploading" "bio-engineering" and "nano-medical" quasi-immortalizing super-therapies to "solve" intractable dilemmas of mortality, malnutrition, neglected diseases, vulnerability in all living bodies.

And like our fraudulent modern corporatists, selling hyperbolic expectations and barking PR pitches and debts and stealthily externalized costs and vaporware as if they were real assets, futurological discourses are suffused with the same contempt for the material, for the real: disdaining organismic brains and bodies in which intelligence and life are actually materially incarnated, disdaining the diversity of stakeholder knowledges and aspirations and struggles of which history and progress actually consists, disdaining the practices of laboratory testing and peer-review publications out of which consensus science generates its contingently warranted assertions (preferring, as they do, computer models and computer coders as their ideal "scientists" -- which is rather like preferring accountants as one's ideal "poets" -- grand hypotheses depending on glib general analogies from biology by non-biologists, charismatic cranks, pop-science bestsellers, and would-be gurus over actually widely cited and well-substantiated consensus scientists).

It is very much to be hoped that President Obama's jobs bill, coming swiftly on the heels of the heartbreaking sausage-making of healthcare reform, will re-open the long-relinquished progressive-to-New Deal era of infrastructure building and public investment (driven if nothing else by the pragmatic exigencies of mid-term elections, for which jobs jobs jobs will equal votes votes votes to maintain precarious Democratic majorities without which no actual governing seems possible given the monolithic obstructionism and ideological anti-governmentality of the Republican opposition, as Obama must surely grasp as keenly as anybody), employing millions of citizens in the repair of our catastrophically stressed infrastructure, in the construction of intercontinental high-speed rail to connect our cities, building an intelligent grid of dozens of millions of windmill farms and solar rooftops, building inner-city farmers markets, subsidizing the proliferation of small-scale organic and polyculture farms, planting a billion trees, building and healing community colleges and not-for-profit research universities and sending a generation of young people to school.

The market fundamentalists who have the President's ear make that a hard hope to maintain, given their role in the substitution of ponzi-scheming financialization and logo-ization for production, and in their penchant for prosperity on the cheap, purchased through outsourcing and crowdsourcing, cost-externalization and risk-shifting onto ever more precarious planetary populations they deem to be expendably infra-human (I'm talking to you, Lawrence Summers, you disgusting death-dealing actually dim-witted self-important scum-bag, and your whole neoliberal wrecking crew).

Americans need to wake up from the delusive dreams of neoliberal corporatist financial-fraudsters and neoconservative militarist imperial-adventurists (which, as David Harvey insists, are not antagonistic but in fact inter-implicated, a neoliberal/neoconservative, corporate-militarist unwholesome whole).

And, just the same, indeed, of a piece with the same, we need to wake up from the quintessentially American futurological fantasies -- originating in nuclear-plastic-petrochemical compensations for too-palpable apocalyptic technoscientific nightmares of nuclear war, accumulating trash, and suburban sprawl, by means of a constellation of schemes and frauds and daydreams of unbounded abundance -- and now consummating in faith-based initiatives like the transhumanists peddling their consumer-age eugenicism, the digital utopians peddling their vaporware, the techno-immortalist hucksters peddling their stainless-steel skin creams and boner pills, and the geo-engineers peddling their glossy corporate-militarist scenarios to combat corporate-militarist climate catastrophe, and so on and on.

Bruce Sterling once had Oscar, the protagonist of his quintessential Clinton-era neoliberal sf novel, Distraction histrionically declaim that America "invented The Future, godammit!" in a moment of hysterical huckster denialism in the face of real limits, and like the shattered protagonist in William Gibson's early sf story "The Gernsback Continuum," it's true, we Americans are still wading deep down in the muddy murky swamp of The Future we sold ourselves, vestigial futuristic chrome gew-gaws and art deco masonry fading in and out of the funk and fog like scarcely discernible sign-posts guiding us nowhere.

The Market is fueled by The Future: two dumbed-down deceptions like the ads on a sandwich-board holding each other up for scrutiny only so long as neither rickety face leans too far under the least pressure and collapses the whole mess.

And the free market fundamentalists are selling The Future most of all. Futurology is the quintessential discourse of neoliberalism, its starkest most insane unsanitary reductio. (I would say that this is activist-scholar Mike Davis's most urgent and abiding insight.)

And be sure, it is the palpable substance of futurity, that openness inhering in the diversity of contending collaborating co-dependent perspectives, productions, projects of self-creation in our present, in our presence, peer-to-peer, that we are selling for this parochial, packaged domestication of The Future -- futurity for The Future, freedom for force, foresight for hyperbole, investment for scams, problem solving for debts, products for logos, governance for landfill, our commonwealth for their shit.

Arendtian Exercises

Loss, Connection, Transformation, March 2008

Hannah Arendt on Futurology, April, 2009

Hannah Arendt on Common Sense, April, 2009

Hannah Arendt on AI, April, 2009

Arendt, Fanon, King on Violence, May, 2009

More on Freedom, May, 2009

The Peer, February, 2010

Rhetoric and Nonviolence, June, 2010.

My Own Opposition to Capital Punishment, September, 2011.

Judith Butler at the People's Mic, October, 2011.

Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains, published in the Fall 2013 issue of Existenz. (Sections four and seven, especially, take up Arendt.)

"Public Happiness," August, 2014.

Of Natal Politics, February, 2015.

Natality, Tech "Disruption," and Killer Robots, February, 2015.

Returning to the Arendtian "Turn" on Judgment, February, 2015.

The name of this blog, "Amor Mundi," was the personal motto of the political thinker and cultural critic Hannah Arendt.

Arendt is both my earliest and certainly my most abiding philosophical influence, and only Judith Butler has had anything like a comparable impact on my thinking. Sometimes I feel almost as though the whole of my own thinking has just been an interminable effort to reconcile with one another the ways in which Arendt and Butler keep mattering to me in ever different, ever deepening ways however much everything else seems to change.

I have sometimes quipped to my students that whereas most philosophers have written about politics like it was marriage (a matter of contracts, compromises, housekeeping), Arendt wrote about politics like it was sex (a matter of agony, ecstasy, fraught collaborations moment to moment, peer to peer) and that I will always cherish her for that.

In a somewhat programmatic statement I offered up once to explain what I hoped to accomplish -- if that's the right word -- with this blog and get at the temperament out of which it arises I wrote:

"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.

I feel keen kinship with Arendt's statement about herself, quoted in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's magnificent biography of her teacher and friend Arendt, For Love of the World (a title which itself refers, of course, to Amor Mundi), that "I have a kind of melancholy, which I can only grapple with by understanding, by thinking things through." It was only through this grappling, writes Young-Bruehl, that Arendt could "hold to an attitude she called amor mundi, love of the world" (xvii), an attitude with which she meant to confront and reject "the philosophical tradition of contemptus mundi" (324).

I think it is also quite crucial to think of amor mundi as cognate with Nietzsche's amor fati, what he took to be the affirmation of the threatening, promising contingency of worldly life as it is, characterized most essentially in the eternal return, the intensive interminable responsibility, refigurability, resignifiability of reality. With his own motto amor fati Nietzsche likewise demanded a repudiation of what he to took to be a fearful, resentful (to wit, "The Fearful Ones," ressentiment) unworldliness in traditional philosophy.

But where for Nietzsche loving the world was a matter of stamping the obliterative dynamism of the relentless encounters of the self and the living world with a significance one would sign and resign one's own name to (this is "How one becomes what one is"), for Arendt loving the world was accomplished through the no less dynamic but as supportive as obliterative encounters of the self with the pluralities within and without us: The plurality within is the dialogue of the "I and the me" that constitutes thinking, the ongoing reconciliation of our histories with our hopes, out of which come the assertions of judgment offered up to the hearing of the diversity of our peers, the plurality without us, the testimonies to fact and to value, the making of promises and the offerings of forgiveness, the clash of opinions through which we collectively make the world and substantiate our selves in the world.

I am anthologizing here some of my posts which have taken up the work of Hannah Arendt in an explicit, sustained way. Although Arendt's name comes up a lot here on the blog, and in my conversation more generally, I was surprised how rarely I have really devoted significant space to her here. I definitely mean to write quite a bit more about Arendt on the blog, and someday to transcribe and elaborate lectures I have devoted to her work over the years in my teaching life.

Futurology by Analogy

Foresight is to futurology as investment is to speculation.
Policy is to futurology as deliberation is to marketing.
Thinking is to futurology as sense is to hyperbole.

"The Future" Is Not Beyond Left and Right

I have never once heard a person who claimed to disdain those who "cling to outdated political classifications," or who crowed about being "beyond Left and Right" or who fancied they had found their way to the latest "Third Way" or the next "New Way" or the next "Post Politics" whose politics were not completely and transparently legible within the most conventional political terms: Democracy, consent, and equity in diversity across the Lefts. As against incumbency, authority, and hierarchy across the Rights.

And I find that such claims to post-politicizing novelty or innovation are not only readily translated back into these conventional political terms, but also disproportionately tend to expose essentially right-wing assumptions and aspirations once they are so translated. This should not be surprising, since to fancy oneself post-political, a-political, anti-political is usually simply to take for granted as natural or inevitable or necessary or optimal or most practical incumbent states of affairs that in fact could be otherwise and very likely have been otherwise hitherto and most surely will be otherwise eventually come what may.

To naturalize the status quo is to express an essentially conservative world view, to police its maintenance through de-politicizing inattention to the actually open futurity inhering in plurality, peer-to-peer (and usually this passive-aggressive epistemic policing is supplemented with actual police, or at any rate with engineers, pencil-pushers, and salesmen acting as police collaborators). These de-politicizing gestures typically: [one] invest some self-appointed elite with an unearned (unearnable) position of unaccountable authority over the majority of their peers in a naturalized hierarchy as in conventional ideological formations of the aristocratic/oligarchic type; or [two] treat historical arrangements or outcomes as "spontaneous" when they are in fact facilitated -- sometimes to an extent that approaches outright determination -- by contingent legal, normative, and infrastructural formations as in the endlessly proliferating variations of "market" rhetoric pervading neoliberal, developmental, libertarian discourses (it sometimes seems as though libertarianism is re-discovered and asserted as a rationale for naturalized hierarchy among would-be aristocrats on a daily basis, each time with some neologism to mark its "discovery"); or [three], treat as a technical problem for engineers or bureaucratic/technocratic quasi-engineers acting (in a sense perhaps better denoted as "behaving") on a warranted consensus what is in fact a political problem of a diversity of stakeholders to ongoing change actually acting to reconcile their dissensus of histories and hopes while maintaining a shared world.

Politics, recall, arises from the fact that we share the world with a diversity of peers with a diversity of aspirations that provoke an open and interminable diversity of contingent reconciliations. It is this open and endlessly re-opening force of futurity inhering in plurality that is disdained and denied by the politics of the right in its many variations, including those prevailing discourses that clothe themselves in the false futurity of "The Future." Typically, this gesture takes the form of [one] a parochial extrapolation from the status quo demanding calculation rather than deliberation or [two] a fraudulent salesman spiel promising a hyperbolic amplification of the privileges and pieties of incumbent interests or [three] a reassuring rationalization of present problems and injustices enabled either through an expedient location of the present within a progressive developmental narrative that pretends to infuse present imperfection with the coloration of inevitable perfections toward which it presumably aspires and in which it is asserted already partially but definitively to partake or presumes to survey present imperfection from a vantage of superiority from which it assigns imperfections the status of atavisms and to itself the authority (often depicted as responsibility) to impose conformity to itself in the name of education or treat difference from itself as consent to exploitation.

Every futurism is a retro-futurism: every solicitation of identification with or effort at selling through the conjuration of a "The Future" would evacuate plurality of the substantial futurity with which it presents us, in our own we-presence, peer-to-peer. This gesture is essentially reactionary, and almost inevitably authoritarian, despite its tendency to celebrate duressed outcomes as consensual, despite its tendency to celebrate conformism as spontaneism, despite its tendency to celebrate incumbent triumphalism as progress or even transcendence, despite its tendency to celebrate reductionism as imagination, despite its tendency to celebrate moralizing as ethics, despite its tendency to celebrate instrumentality as freedom.

Not Offensive, Just Delusive

Michael Anissimov writes, over at Accelerating Future:

Dale’s post on cryonics, when he talks about the brain being “hamburgerized” -- he is making no sense. Vitrified brains don’t get “hamburgerized”. Dale probably knows about vitrification, so he is just forwarding propaganda because he is politically and morally uncomfortable with cryonics. That is because cryonics symbolizes the affirmation of the individual and potential avoidance of death in a way that can be offensive to hyper-socialistic, here-and-now-and-nothing-else politics. Well, too bad.

I did not quite realize that the designation "hamburgerized" was such a term of art for your modern day cryonicist, that it had the technical force to blur a distinction between frozen as against vitrified brains that is cherished by Robot Cultists of the techno-immortalist sect. Since I think intelligent minds of the human sort are indispensably biological rather than bio-dispensably informational I can't say that I agree that the distinction properly affords Michael his apparent triumphalism on this score as I reckon these things myself. Whatever our differences, I do hope he will be reassured to hear that in describing corpses disposed of by cryonics firms as "hamburgerized" (as against what tends to happen to them in graveyards or crematories) he does not think I mean to suggest by this that they should find their way with pickles and mustard onto a sesame seed bun.

As for the "hyper-socialism" and rabid "here-and-now-ism" of my politics, dude, get a grip. Why be stupid if you don't have to be?

My Irreligiosity

Upgraded and Adapted from the Moot. "Mitchell" asks:

Dale, I was wondering the other day - were you ever a transcendentalist or utopian in any form?

I was raised Catholic -- and went to a Catholic school for a few years when I was very young. My faith was habitual and never considered, and did not survive for more than a few weeks after I left home for the first time for college. There I confronted peers of different faiths and drew the conclusion that faithful attachments were arbitrary almost at once, and I became an atheist quite soon thereafter. I've never looked back.

When you ask about "transcendentalism" though, you know of course that folks like Emerson and Thoreau are taken up through that moniker explicitly, and I will say that I have a deep fondness and affinity for much that they wrote (though not all), as I do for Aldo Leopold's "Land Ethic" and the discussions of a "web of mutuality" in Martin Luther King, and the "web of life" in George Eliot, all of which seem to me inter-implicated notions.

When William Burroughs declares that we live in a "magic universe," a universe susceptible to poetic refiguration it seems to me that this is less a conventionally supernatural claim than a recognition of the force of re-signifying practices, of rhetoric (my trade, after all), connecting the shamanic-qua-poetic imaginary to the American Pragmatist/post-Nietzschean European philosophical traditions. I find these connections edifying, and they come up quite a bit in my teaching.

Despite the fact that I do not believe in either God nor gods, I tend to be rather laid back about those who do believe in these things, unless they want to get all authoritarian or judgmental about them. This is because I have noticed that when people affirm such beliefs they tend to be saying things I can make good sense of if I simply translate them (to my self, out of politeness) into terms of affirming matters of personal aesthetic taste or affirming matters of we-intentions concerning moral communities to which they happen to belong. Likewise, I have noticed that when people do terrible things they rationalize through recourse to the affirmation of such beliefs I can make better sense of what is afoot if I simply translate them into terms of authoritarian/incumbent political views or, sometimes, mistaken or deranged claims that fail to pass muster as warrantedly assertible descriptions of the world for purposes of prediction and control.

The power of such translations tells me that there are more warranted modes of belief ascription than just the instrumental claims of the naturalist (indeed, I believe there are different criteria that render reasonable or not beliefs in instrumental, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political modes, about which more here), and although this doesn't inspire a faith in the supernatural in my case, I do not doubt that those who cherish reductionist epistemologies would likely decry as "transcendental," or possibly menacingly relativist, in me what seems to me simply like sensible pluralism.

As for utopianism -- surely every progressive is properly speaking utopian at least some of the time? Progress is always progress toward an end, and there is something utopian about any unrealized end toward which one aspires through political education, agitation, and organization. I will say that I consider my "progressivism" subsidiary to my devotion to democracy, consent, equity, and diversity as ends. I struggle for progress toward the realization of these values, hence I think of myself as more of a democrat than a progressive, strictly speaking. I don't think this is a big deal, since most progressive-identified folks are really struggling for a more peaceful democratic world, too, and terminological squabbling doesn't seem very useful to me for the most part outside the context of academic philosophy.

I have argued that democracy relies for its intelligibility and force on a scene of consent that is actually informed and actually nonduressed, and that access to reliable knowledge and social security (non-duress) demand at best (as close as we can get to) the provision of universal education and a free cultural commons, universal healthcare, and a universal basic income guarantee -- political ends which many would surely describe as plenty utopian. I happen to be more interested in the ongoing social struggle for democratization -- the struggle through which ever more people achieve ever more of a real say in the public decisions that affect them -- than in "democracy" as some abstract ideal. And so I am interested in the actual educational, agitational, organizational, legislative struggles through which more and better education, more and better access to knowledge, more and better healthcare, more and better welfare are accomplished, and ongoing democratization achieved, than in the distance intellectuals claim to discern between the present state of affairs and some ideal. So, I don't know if you really want to call me utopian or not given all that.

Like many a good pragmatist, I think it is enormously important to remember that the perfect can be the mortal enemy of the good. Like many a fine idealist, I think it is no less important to recognize that pragmatists who assert the previous can in their fixation on what seems possible, lose sight of the good in ways that undermine their grasp of the actually possible. I think both insights are indispensable and I don't think there are any criteria on hand to assure us which is the more relevant perspective in any generally useful sort of way, and so that one must remain rather self-critical and attentive and persistent in the face of inevitable frustrations, come what may. All of this seems to me simply a straightforward matter of intelligence.

Nazi Futurism

I am currently reading Peter Sloterdijk's important little book Terror from the Air, published in English just this year, about which I will have more to say later, I think, but for now I wanted to note this striking little tidbit, from page 43, calling our attention to the "pseudo-normalizing" Nazi category of Volksschadling, the "public nuisance," which was, rather horrifyingly but unsurprisingly, "a term covering a vast semantic domain, including defeatism, black marketeering, anti-Fuhrer jokes, criticizing the system, and a lack of belief in the future" [emphasis added --d]. Here's why, in a nutshell, I cannot help but find this striking.

Updated from the Moot, Below: In their obsession with speed (think, "acceleration of acceleration") and with the metalization of the body (think, cyborgic-ecstasies and "techno-immortalization"), among many other topoi the Italian Futurists anticipate quite a lot of the quirks of trans/post-humanist futurological handwaving. Like the transhuman-types, the Italian Futurists were mostly just alienated white boys barking and banging into one another, flirting with fascism (think, "optimizing" humans with science, stainless steel technocracy, hostility to "degenerate" humanities, soft-porn and advertising imagery mistaken for art, disasterbatory Götterdämmerung fantasies of bad god AIs and nano-goo). Unlike our Robot Cultists, many of the Italian Futurists at least could write reasonably well -- no doubt due to their dabbling with avant-garde art movements. Most of the superlative futurological writing coming from transhumanists, extropians, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, and digital utopians sounds, to the contrary, something like a pastiche of Ayn Rand potboilers, an instruction manual for assembling a lawn mower, a Fox News broadcast, and garbage-disposal-loud commercials hawking teeth whitening and boner-pills after midnight.

The Non-Innocence of Incumbent Distribution

In a post last week I wrote:

A pattern emerges [among the Movement Republicans who have been ever more the defining force in that Party since the frowny face-smiley face Nixon/Reagan aftermath of Goldwater] -- not just the usual soulless profits over people that lead Republican President Calvin Coolidge to assert that "the business of America is business" back in the 1920s -- but an especial eagerness to disable our solving of shared problems precisely to enable the profit-taking of a few, to deal dirty in Washington so their cronies can steal ugly across the world.

To this, a Reader responded in the Moot:

True but what does one say to people who honestly [the bolding was in the original comment --d] believe that legislating the redistribution of money is not justice and that it doesn't produce equality?

It depends. I happen to think fewer people "honestly" believe this than say they do, and that many who do "honestly" think such things are frankly so stupid or so blinkered it doesn't much matter what you would say to them anyway, and so one simply needs to marginalize them through better arguments directed at better people, or to work to insulate majorities from the harm these honestly wrongheaded people cause in their ignorance and prejudice and stupidity by means of better policy.

But, okay, to that vanishingly small minority of decent intelligent sufficiently critically-minded and argumentatively reachable people who believe for now that something they think of as "redistribution" is unjust, an intervention that may be useful is to ask why exactly it is that so often one tells the story of "redistrubtion" as one always beginning only with the apportionment of resources, authority, capacity and so on that represents the status quo, even though it is easily demonstrable that the status quo is an historically situated state of affairs, depending on any number of factors, many of them complete accidents, that have little to do with earning or merit or use at all.

Why do charges of the "unjustness" that would attend any "redistribution" of wealth, authority, opportunity from very comfortable minorities to very vulnerable majorities assume that "redistribution" is a matter of, say, disowning naturally owned substance from some for others rather than noting that what has come to be owned by some rather than others arises out of an historical re-distribution in which some preferentially benefit from historical accomplishments out of an actually more common cultural inheritance or commons, or some preferentially benefit in their contribution to collective accomplishments of an unfathomably complex functional division of labor through the denigration of other contributions, just as indispensable as an objective but not subjective matter to those accomplishments, from the peers with whom they share and maintain and build the world?

Before we accept the terms of a discussion of "inevitable" and "intolerable" evils of "redistribution" of incumbent distribution -- especially when in the service of widely affirmed goals like maintaining a legal and regulatory framework to ensure equality before the law, and police, defenses, public works, basic health, education, and income, and access to reliable knowledge to ensure that acts of consent are genuinely informed and nonduressed, outcomes that "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity," peer to peer -- it is crucial to interrogate first any prejudicial framing or figuration or formulation of that incumbent distribution as innocent, natural, or originary in some way and not itself an historically contingent, often altogether arbitrary, distorted, unfair, intolerable redistribution of the commons that demands justification rather than being treated as beyond question.

Culture and Anarchy

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives. -- John Stuart Mill

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. -- Oscar Wilde

In America, Republicans simply are the worst people you know.

This is not to deny that plenty of Democrats as people are plenty lousy, corrupt, and stupid themselves, nor to deny that there are universes of logical possibility in which legibly conservative ideas might lead an intelligent civic-minded person to some sort of idealized or historical Republican identification.

But Republicans here are the worst people around, because what Republicanism has devolved into at this point really is an appeal to the worst person you could be -- that is to say, to the worst that is in us all in some measure.

Republican politics drives and is driven by the part of you that is scared of change even when things must change to make things better, by the part of you that wants to break rules when you can get away with it even when you defend the rules because you depend on them yourself to keep what you got by bending or breaking them on the sly, by the part of you that sees the public world as a stage in which profits are made rather than people encountered, by the part of you that wants to win on any terms more because you don't want to lose on those terms than because there is actually something you want for its own sake, by the part of you that conforms without question or without joy for fear of taking responsibility for taking a stand that might be unpopular, by the part of you that wants your pleasures now in the expectation that the costs later can always be borne by those suckers who behave within their means and with an eye to the longer-term, by the part of you that can rationalize any selfishness, any meanness, any indifference, any thoughtlessness, any short-sightedness because the squalling endlessly needy infant inside, the bullying territorializing monkey inside dictates what you do rather than your critical and ethical intelligence.

Civics Lesson

I know that raising the specter of Big Government shuts down American brains more or less automagically at this point (as presumably the specter of Soulless Sociopathic Corporations does not?) and that conjuring up the image of government bureaucracy makes all American mouths curl up instantly and inevitably into a cynical dismissive smirk (as presumably images of corporate suits, meddling managers, and telemarketers in veal-fattening pens do not?).

But those who are fighting for real health care reform are always at the same time fighting against the feudal corporate-militarist mindset of tinpot tyrants barking can-do platitudes, celebrating as inevitable the merciless brutality of unaccountable monied masters, isolating and exploiting the vulnerable, hyping useless crap and distraction to the ruin of the world all the while denigrating and punishing expressions of fellow-feeling, critical awareness, nonconformity of any kind, or demands that authority always be prepared to make an accounting of itself.

To fight for healthcare is always already to fight for democracy and accountable, consensual governance, in our diversity, peer-to-peer, it is always already to fight against the anti-democracy of incumbency and the authoritarian order of corporate-militarism (the global neoliberal/neoconservative circuit).

It may seem like biting off more than we can chew to take all this on when taking up the fight for real commonsense healthcare reform, but the fact is that this is already the actual fight in which we are engaged, and we might as well grasp it in the terms that actually prevail. To win this fight is to facilitate the next step in the struggle toward more, better democratic governance -- likely to be collective bargaining rights, with campaign finance reform next, then global access to knowledge, then planetary governance over environmental criminality, but who is to say exactly how these struggles will play out? To lose the healthcare fight will be to make the next struggle that much harder, to confront us with the same arrayed forces of incumbency, the same hegemonic barrier of corporate-militarist platitudes we face now, again and again and again.

Why not fight them here and now, clear-eyed, with the strength of numbers and the wind at our backs? I'm not advocating muddying the issue of urgent healthcare reform with theory-head meditations on good-governance, but I am insisting that we grasp the way in which ignorance of or an entrenched habitual hostility to the very notion of good-governance forms an insuperable barrier through which commonsense discussions of issues rarely penetrate remotely intact. Be aware of the ways in which our metaphors and formulations and assumptions mobilize merciless, uncivil, cynical assumptions about our shared problems and the peers with whom we share them, how these anti-democratizing circumscriptions of possibility serve best that vanishingly small minority of authoritarian incumbents who stand between us all, whatever our differences otherwise, and the solution of our shared problems, peer to peer.

It doesn't matter how you put the points, what language you use, how you draw on your own experiences and metaphors to remind us all of the political assumptions without which none of our struggles make sense -- it doesn't even matter if you prefer the more philosophical sorts of language my own analytic temperament and academic training suits me to... However you put them, there are several basic ideas that we need to reiterate over and over to combat the inertial ignorance, short-term thinking, and deranging whomping up of greed and mistrust by those who thrive best wherever arbitrary men and not legitimate laws rule:

One: Democratically accountable governance indispensably provides ill-commodifiable goods and services that solve shared problems for the general welfare (the things so urgent that we don't comparison shop for them and hence are not subject to competitive forces that check abuses, or services the efficient provision of which creates institutions too big or complex to fail in ways that would subject them to such competition either) and it is the promotion of this general welfare as much as anything that secures the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

Two: Taxes are the price we pay for such civilizational goods, taxes ensure that governance is representational quite as much as regular and regulated elections do by yoking authority to the consent of the governed who also fund it, and it is, of course, only sensible that the people who benefit most from their inhabitation of a civilizational order to which others who benefit less are nonetheless indispensable contributors pay their fair share for its proper maintenance as well.

Three: The separation of powers, federalist subsidiarity (the principle that problems should always be addressed at the most local layer of governance actually adequate to their resolution), the defense and strengthening of the scene of actually informed actually non-duressed consent, the celebration of consensual multiculture, peer-to-peer, and the institution of elections to public offices at regular intervals provide the necessary checks on abuses in the provision of these unique public goods that is provided by competition for commodities available for exchange in well-regulated markets.

Middle (Age) March

Monday -- er, that is, today, although I'm actually off to bed now -- is my forty-fourth birthday.

I begin teaching the fall term later in the week, on Thursday, and so my vacation comes to an end all too soon, after teaching too many too much too intensely for too long this last half-year.

This has been a real vacation, though -- for a week now I haven't blogged particularly, you may have noticed, and I haven't paid any attention to the news for the first time in what seems like years, since well before the 2000 election debacle certainly, and I haven't surveyed any of the latest vulgar sales-pitches brute-brained futurologists think of as "thinking."

My companion instead has been an old friend, George Eliot's Middlemarch, and an intelligence that enriches, elicits, and elevates rather than debases, disgusts, depresses...

What a joy and relief and demand Middlemarch is! Have you read it? Have you re-read it?

I doubt the soopergeniuses of the Robot Cult would have much time for such a thing, nor the lying armies of the complacent middle or the tumescent right.

Middlemarch is a drama consisting essentially of the delineation of humane consciousness, as a richly historical, lushly overdetermined concern (check out the etymology of that word, concern, if you want a story worth thinking on). Setting aside the dramatic twists and turns and vivid characters and so on, the stuff you can skim off the back cover of a paperback or drink in through a sun-dappled BBC dramatization, Middlemarch is really the drama of intellectual, ethical, poetical consciousness, all at once, inter-implicated, from the beginning to the end, and I mean from the very first words to the very last ones, an illustration of and, even more crucially, a provocation to real adult liberality of mind.

Maybe you already know those famous last words of the book, probably the best most beautiful words to close any novel in my estimation: "But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Even if you haven't read the book the words are moving, but reading them at the end of the reading of the book, even if you already knew them by heart, is nothing you can be prepared for, like a conversion experience that is the throwing off of infantile conversions for good, indeed, for the growing good of the world.

It seems to me, as it happens, that both futurological bulldozers and the ongoing heartbreak of politics are woven into the web of life Eliot discerns (there's a story in that word, too, by the way). And I'll be returning to both subjects soon enough, sure enough. For a couple more days, though, I'm staying away from here, if it's all the same to you. Thanks for all the birthday messages in my inbox and elsewhere!

The Achievement of Superlative Futurology

Singularitarian Robot Cultist Michael Anissimov responds yet again to my critique of superlative futurology:

Dale Carrico, one of the more prominent critics of transhumanism, frequently refers to “superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance” as transhumanist goals, of course in a disparaging way. Yet, I openly embrace these goals. Superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance are a perfect summary of what we want and need. How can we achieve them?

Strictly speaking, I don't think superlative aspirations are "achievable" at all. I am not saying that because, as the Robot Cultists would have it, I lack their own "can do" attitude, or their boundless imaginations, or their sooper-science skill-sets, but because I do not think superlative aspirations are really the sorts of things that are meant to be "achieved" in the first place. I don't think Anissimov is right, really, even to call them "goals."

Let's live for thousands of years through "medical advancement" or through "transferring our selves" into invulnerable Robot Bodies isn't exactly the sort of "goal" that has any specifiable impact on conduct in the real world, beyond signaling membership in certain sub(cult)ures of futurological faith. I would maintain in fact that such sub(cult)ural signaling is indeed the actual substance of these assertions of superlative belief, such as it is, and that the work of these assertions is not to mobilize instrumental rationality at all but to mobilize moral rationality. That is to say, I think these faithful utterances aren't really about achieving goals so much as enabling the pleasures of subcultural identification, belonging, support for folks who happen to have found their way to a curious marginal futurological sub(cult)ure.

Let's have everything we want at no cost, let's arrive at always being right about everything, let's create something that solves all our problems for us… These utterances may have the superficial form of goals, of projects, of efforts but they don't so much orient pragmatic conduct in the world as protest against the pragmatic conditions under which we orient and conduct ourselves in the world in fact. As such, they are far more like the utterances of the more conventionally faithful: let's redeem our sinful natures or pasts, let's pray for guidance, let's be worthy of Paradise

Anissimov writes sometimes as though the super-predicated aspirations of superlative futurology (Robot Cultism) are just slightly more "ambitious" or "optimistic" versions of already ongoing technoscientific practice. The "goal" of superlongevity is just kinda sorta a more ambitious optimistic kind of everyday healthcare practices, the "goal" of superintelligence is just kinda sorta a more ambitious optimistic kind of everyday software coding practices, the "goal" of superabundance is just kinda sorta a more ambitious optimistic kind of everyday manufacturing practices.

This rhetoric might seem initially to lend a cozy coloration of plausibility to what upon closer scrutiny reveals itself to be batshit crazy articles of faith in a version of "The Future" in which immortal post-humans have somehow "uploaded" their "minds" into cyberspace or robot bodies to "live" in virtual or nano-slavebotic Treasure Caves under the watchful gaze of a history-shattering Robot God. But quite apart from the odd articles of faith it would countenance (which aren't after all really any odder than the articles of faith that fuel most essentially religious outlooks), Anissimov's claims are bedeviled by profound conceptual double-binds.

Either his viewpoint amounts to an affirmation of the idea of healthcare provision, software improvement, and advances in production at such a level of generality that one would be hard pressed to find anybody anywhere who disapproves in the first place (thus eliminating the need for affirming them at all, let alone affirming them in the form of joining a conspicuously self-marginalizing Robot Cult) or his viewpoint amounts to a commandeering of the idea of healthcare provision, software improvement, and advances in production in the service of some project at odds with these already-affirmed practices as they are already playing out in the world (thus eliminating the pretense that these assertions have anything to do with actual science at all, but nicely explaining why they would be affirmed especially by folks who have joined a conspicuously self-marginalizing Robot Cult).

No technoscientifically-literate person has any doubt that properly funded, regulated, accountable technoscience research and development directed to the solution of shared human problems can be enormously useful, nor that ongoing and proximately upcoming genetic, cognitive, and prosthetic medical research is yielding unprecedented impacts and enormously interesting results, nor that problems of software usability and network security are enormously thorny and increasingly important in globally mediated and surveilled societies, nor that advances in automation, distributed production, and materials science enabled by discoveries at the nanoscale and otherwise are enormously exciting and provocative. There are millions of people around the world who are involved in the ramifying inter-implications of these truisms, identifying problems and forming actual goals in respect to these problems everywhere all the time. But not one of these problems, not one of these goals is the least bit clarified by reading it through the lens of superlative aspiration.

No one working to solve a particular healthcare problem is helped in their valiant efforts by the insistence of some Robot Cultist that one day medicine will deliver "superlongevity" (although you can be sure that loose talk about "playing god" has done more than its fair share to ensure that medical research that might solve actual problems and save actual lives didn't get proper funding). No one working to make software more user friendly or address a particular network security problem is helped in their painstaking efforts by the insistence of some Robot Cultist that one day we will code a superintelligent Robot God who will solve all our problems for us (although you can be sure that loose talk about "artificial intelligence" has, as Jeron Lanier has endlessly documented, inspired no end of bad software that frustrates its users by simulating "thinking" for them and "making decisions" for them in ways they strongly disapprove). No one working to make particular materials or products safer, cheaper, less toxic, more useful, or more sustainable is helped in their diligent efforts by the insistence of some Robot Cultist that one day immersive virtualities, or ubiquitous robots, or cheap as chips programmable multi-purpose room temperature desktop nanofactories will one day deliver a superabundance that will circumvent the impasse of stakeholder politics in a finite world that is home to infinite and incompatible aspirations (although you can be sure that loose talk about Drexlerian "nanotechnology" has made it next to impossible to talk sense about regulating or funding or forming reasonable expectations about the problems and possibilities of nanoscale technoscience in actual reality).

Anissimov writes:

Achieving superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance will be incredibly challenging, but seemingly inevitable as long as civilization continues to progress and we don’t blow ourselves up or have a global fundamentalist dictatorship on our hands. There is no guarantee that we will achieve these goals in our lifetime — but why not try? Achieving any of these milestones would radically improve quality of life for everyone on Earth. The first step to making technological advancements available to everyone is to make them available for someone.

As I said, Anissimov sometimes talks as though superlative futurological aspirations are "challenges" and "goals" that can be "achieved" if we simply "try" hard enough. Of course, the first step to making technological advancements available is actually to engage in actual technoscientific practices of research, funding, regulation, publication, education, application in the real world. While Anissimov rallies the faithful with a Mouseketeer Cheer of "Let's Try!" it is notable that the immediate consequence of taking up superlative discourse is to disengage from the actual technoscientific practices in which one actually tries, works, participates in the efforts through which actual technoscience connects to the actual world, achieves actual results, solves actual problems.

It is especially intriguing that Anissimov raises the specter of "fundamentalism" as one that would be warded off by the can-do declarations of the futurologically faithful, because it is of course fundamentalist formations, with their authoritarian circuits of True Believers and would-be guru-priests, that the Robot Cults themselves most conspicuously resemble, and never so much as when they declare their most marginal beliefs as the ones that are freightest most with "certainty" and "inevitability" -- as Anissimov has freighted his futurological faith with "inevitability" at the beginning of the very sentence that concludes by disavowing fundamentalism.

It is no surprise that Anissimov turns the spotlight onto the archipelago of marginal Robot Cult organizations like the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the SENS Foundation when he wants to make plain who he considers to be the "leaders" in the "fields" devoted to the "work" of superlative futurology. For nobody who isn't already a Robot Cultist would it ever occur to describe Aubrey de Grey, or Eric Drexler, or Eliezer Yudkowsky as "leaders" in any kind of actually-existing technoscientific field. These are not serious organizations. These are not people cited in serious peer reviewed publications. These are not projects with serious grant money at their disposal.

I mean no offense, really, since compared especially to the brainless nutcases who accumulate in orbit around them Aubrey de Grey, Eric Drexler, and, say, Nick Bostrom (neither Kurzweil nor Yudkowsky even passes muster as peers of oddball outliers like Drexler or de Grey, Bostrom is the closest you really get to a non-utter-nutjob Singularitarian) are all fairly genial intellectuals who have interesting things to say as often as not. In England there is a fairly robust and attractive tradition that encourages oddball intellectuals and even expects intellectuals to be oddballs. Nick Bostrom certainly isn't as off-the-wall as Wittgenstein was (nor as much a genius either, probably, but who's to say, really, when all is said and done?), and Aubrey de Grey actually even looks quite a bit like Lytton Strachey. All of this is quite par for the course in England.

And I have no doubt that just as ancient historians will regularly profess a fond bemused attachment to sword and sandal epics like "Quo Vadis" and "Ben Hur" as part of the initial inspiration that draws no small number of students into their fields, but would never mistake these gorgeous cinematic gargoyles as anything passing muster as the actual practice of the field of history itself, I have no doubt at all that plenty of biochemists and gerontologists will admit a fond debt to the popular handwaving issuing from Drexler and de Grey.

But anybody who thinks these figures are leaders in their fields, or even, frankly, manage to inhabit anything close to the consensus in which all the real work in these fields is getting done is demonstrating though such assertions their own complete ignorance of the actual science at hand.

As I often have occasion to say, superlative futurology is not itself science, but a constellation of faith-based initiatives that opportunistically frame themselves as scientific precisely to yield for their wish-fulfillment fantasies the reality-effect that attaches especially to scientific pronouncements in our own historical moment. The assertions of futurological faith do not function to mobilize instrumental rationality to implement goals in reality, but to substantiate the "reality" of articles of faith in idealized imaginations of "The Future" that do not exist in the present except through the mobilization of moral rationality that solicits shared identification, shared aspiration, the "real substance" of subcultural solidarity (especially the defensive solidarities of marginal sub(cult)ure).

It is at this point that I think many are apt to misunderstand the force of my critique. Although I am an atheist myself, I do not disparage people of faith for the same reasons I do not disparage people whose aesthetic practices of judgment and self-creation differ from my own: It is in my view the substance of freedom to assert moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political judgments to the hearing of the diversity of one's peers without any expectation that one's judgments will be shared or will prevail but only that they should be affirmed as legible as judgments. In offering up our judgments to our peers, and owning up to them (whether they are admired or ridiculed) in the hearing of our peers, we own ourselves, we arise as our own selves, we constitute ourselves as selves in the world. That is the work of freedom in my view, the work of meaning-making among our living peers in an otherwise mineral meaningless existence. To the extent that Robot Cultists are just indulging in a kooky poetical enterprise I have no complaints about their enterprise in the least.

Superlative futurology, as I have often taken pains to point out, shares no small amount of common ground with sf fandoms, and as a queergeek myself I have had plenty of occasion to wallow in speculative space operatic sensawunda. Who needs Yudkowsky when you can be reading A Fire Upon the Deep? Who needs Kurzweil when you can be reading the Dune cycle? I am the last person on earth to chuckle derisively at geeks who gawk at anime, or artist renderings of space elevators, or city-scaled space-freighters in cinematic flight. Let a bazillion flowers bloom, let your freak flag fly, make meaning where and as you would. I'm a silly nerd myself, for heaven's sake.

I personally disapprove of religiosity only when it pretends to scientificity, and I personally disapprove of morality only when it seeks to prevail over politics. It is not the religiosity of fundamentalist formations that makes them pernicious in my eyes so much as their authoritarian policing of facts and moralizing policing of political diversity.

It is precisely in its insistence that it is a kind of scientific practice (indeed, often that it amounts to an urgent championing of True Science against the "anti-science" of "relativists" and "pessimists" who do not share its idiosyncratic taste in "The Future"), and precisely in the curious tendency of its investment in scientificity to yield a politics couched as a "neutral" pre-politics or even an outright anti-politics (always in the service of incumbent interests figured as "natural" interests) that superlative futurology exhibits a chilling kinship with such fundamentalist formations. That the organizational archipelago of Robot Cultism is suffused with would-be gurus and True Believers is a symptom of the underlying rationality of futurology itself, it is not -- as the Robot Cultists themselves rationalize in the face of this sort of observation -- simply a matter of an unfair generalization from "extreme" but "unrepresentative" (of course!) sub(cult)ural figures and texts that keep unaccountably cropping up so conspicuously among their number.

But more than this, I think there is an endemic double danger in futurological discourse, not only (first) that it subverts scientificity by stealthing its faith-based initiatives as scientific practice and subverts sensible policy-making by declaring its sub(cult)ural solidarities as developmental deliberation, but also (second) that it subverts freedom itself, the understanding and practice of freedom that is the heart of the political.

If I disparage the notion of "The Future" it is emphatically because I champion what I describe instead as "futurity," by which I mean to evoke the open futurity inhering in the plurality of peers in the present, collaborating and contesting in their diversity the shared world in the present always in the form of presents-opening-onto-presents-to-come.

I believe that notions of "The Future," in whatever forms they take in the mouths of those who imagine themselves to see "It" more clearly than everybody else, and to speak like would-be Priests in "Its" name, are always ideological constructions, always bespeaking a parochial perspective in the present projecting onto the openness of futurity in an effort to domesticate and control that openness, to police and curtail that diversity.

The substance of the gesture of attributing "future-likeness" to ideas in the present or even to the style of artifacts in the present (this is something Daniel Harris has written about in his famous essay on "The Futuristic") is always just the repudiation of the present, often perversely so. The work of this gesture is ultimately political -- even though it typically cloaks itself in the langauge of pre-political or a-political instrumentality. It is a refusal or disavowal of the demanding substance of politics, plurality and freedom, and an infantile fantasy to substitute for these The One True Way That Ends History and an instrumental amplification of capacities through which the Elect Become Godlike by Eluding Human Finitude.

Robot Cultists cling to the insistence that the superlative outcomes they presumably are "fighting for" (a "work" that ultimately amounts to re-iterating in the presence of fellow Robot Cultists that they do indeed "believe" in "the future" and all its works) are possible in principle, even if they are not practically realizable in the present. That no actually-serious scientists or policy makers share their own preoccupations with non-existing non-proximate medicinal techniques to deliver thousand year lifespans, or upload minds into computers, or create superintelligent Robot Gods, or create cheap-as-dirt desktop Anything Machines never enters into their reckoning of their superior scientificity. They imagine themselves to be indulging in a scientific enterprise despite the fact no scientific consensus ever forms around their actual assumptions or models or goals, and so they confuse the equivalent of medieval monks debating the number of angels who can dance on pin-heads as some kind of hard-nosed sooper-scientific practice.

But quite apart from all that, the deeper pathology in play in Robot Cultism is its very specific repudiation of the political, a repudiation signaled by its preoccupation with "The Future" over futurity in the first place. Whatever they want to say about their "fearlessness" for "daring" to dream Big Dreams it seems to me that their discourse is one saturated by fear -- with "big dreams" that usually look to me more like infantile wish-fulfillment fantasies, testaments to sociopathic alienation from their peers in all their confusing and threatening diversity, damaged denials of their vulnerable error-prone bodily selves, authoritarian pretensions to certainty or the complementary desire to evade the responsibilities of uncertain existence through True Belief in charismatic gurus claiming to hold the Keys to History in the midst of the distress of disruptive change. Politics is a matter of reconciling the indefinitely many logically possible but also logically incompatible aspirations of the diversity of stakeholders in a shared world, peer to peer, and that makes politics prior to technoscience, especially to a "technoscience" evacuated of all practical substance and left with anemic assurances of "logically possible" outcomes.

And all of this is still just circling around the drain of the futurological imaginary, for the substance of the present politics of the superlative futurology of the Robot Cultists is not a matter of working (without ever really working) to bring about "The Future" in which they have invested their fervent faith, but the politics of indulging the delusion that "The Future" is already here, already now, in the eyes of the fellow-faithful, in the ritual re-iterations of Its possibility, Its palpability, Its inevitability. This is the faithful repudiation of fact by means of pseudo-scientific derangements of facticity as such, this is the moralizing identification with "The Future" by means of the anti-political dis-identification with the plurality of their peers in the open futurity of the present opening onto presents-to-come peer-to-peer.

This is the real achievement of superlative futurology.