Another Anonymous comment in the Moot quips that libertopian greed-heads should be forced to pay back the value of the public services on which they relied for their rugged individualist profit-making and then have their citizenship revoked. I realize that the comment was a joke, and definitely I sympathize with the irritation which inspired it, but I want to take the recommendation more seriously than the spirit in which it was intended and use that as a springboard for making, yet again, a few points that I often return to here.
First of all, if citizenship were annulled by error or foolishness few of us could secure it -- and least of all me.
I think that progressives need to actually say out loud and say often that some indispensable public goods are better provided by accountable government than by for-profit enterprise. We need to say that the provision of a legitimate alternate space for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes and to facilitate consensual self-determination is something only democratic governance can do. We need to say that government is funded by taxation, and hence that taxes really are the price we pay for a democratic civilization. We need to say that taxation coupled to representation assures that government is accountable quite as definitively as does the universal franchise and right to seek office.
I find the anti-tax and anti-government zealots truly ridiculous and despicable, but I must say that few who find them foolish do the good service of explaining quite simply why they are wrong, and so it isn't entirely unexpected that greedy, short-sighted, ignorant people (and all of us are prone to these things in some non-negligible measure, surely) get caught up in this sort of destructive foolishness.
I know very few democratic progressives who celebrate or can even explain why progressive taxation is indispensable to democratic society (however unpleasant in the moment of exaction), even if they know better, and it seems to me we all of us abet the know-nothings in their looting spree so long as we fail to set the record straight and stand by it with conviction and educate our young people and fellow citizens into a responsible awareness of these basic facts of political life.
Rather than indulge in fantasies of revoking the citizenship of the foolish or the greedy, I think we should simply criminalize fraud, regulate and render considerably more accountable the provision of public goods, and progressively tax income (including investment income) and property. We should do this in order to (and the echo of our Constitution's Preamble in the following is very much intentional) fund the legitimate execution of laws to which all have equal recourse, to secure such domestic order as is compatible with the free exercise of consensual self-determination among a diversity of peers, to provide for a defense from foreign invasion and aggression, and to promote the health, education, access to reliable information, and general welfare of every citizen so as to produce a scene of legitimate informed nonduressed consent in which we exercise and actualize our freedom peer to peer.
It's no kind of insoluble or intractable problem that many people are stupid, foolish, or wrong (all people at least some of the time, in fact) so long as we are properly protected from fraud, abuse, and criminality, and so long as the diversity of our citizens has secured the equity of the scene of legitimate informed nonduressed consent in which error and abuse are least likely to prosper for long.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
More On Freedom
An Anonymous comment in the Moot wants to know what I mean when I bemoan the "reductionism that misconstrues human freedom as instrumental power." Just who and what sorts of things do I have in mind when I say this? It is actually a question that takes us right to the heart of political thinking, really, especially for somebody indebted to Arendt as I am.
In a nutshell, I would worry about the reductionism of anybody who says that the more tools you have at your disposal to do things with, the more free you are. Especially if the person saying it seems inclined to treat this as anything like the end of the story. This is not to deny that it is nice to have more tools with which to do useful and edifying things (all other things being equal), but it is to say that this is to confuse efficacy for freedom.
Freedom is a political matter, the quintessential matter of politics indeed. In politics, we are not billiard balls banging meaninglessly into one another across a felted surface, in trajectories that can be exhaustively calculated in advance, where what matters is the augmentable or diminishable intensity of force with which the balls are flung and colliding. Where we assume the vantage of the political we are not billiard balls banging about, and we do not treat one another as billiard balls to bang. (This is not to deny that there are other salient vantages we can assume in respect to human conduct and understanding, by the way.)
Freedom is present or not, experienced or not, facilitated or not, from moment to moment -- but it does not accumulate, it does not amplify, it does not hoard, it does not improve. Freedom plays out in the world.
We are free when we act in the world in the company of the diversity of our peers. We are experiencing and actualizing our freedom when we offer up out of our thinking, out of our judgment, out of our privacy a text, declaration, or deed to the hearing and responsiveness of a diversity of our peers in the world. We do this without any certainty what will finally come of our releasing this eruption, this interruption into the world, knowing well that in taking up our text, our declaration, our deed the world will collaborate in the meaning available in it.
What matters is our owning of the text, the declaration, the deed, and the recognition, the substantial being, conferred on us by that diversity of others when it is taken up in the world, a recognition and substantiation in which our own-ness, our public self is produced and maintained in the world, as a peer among peers, as a legible subject with a critical purchase and take on the world that obliges response and responsibility from our fellows.
This recognition conferred in the transaction of free action doesn't require agreement from our fellows, but only the affirmation that the assessment to which we attest, the exertion arising out of our intention is legible as issuing from a peer. A peer is emphatically not an equal, nor an intimate, but one who registers in their alterity both their equity in respect to us and their diversity from us. An action is our own, and that we are our own can be conferred only by the collaborative recognition of our actions as actions among peers -- we can no more substantiate ourselves on our own than we can be free in isolation from one another. In declaring a thing beautiful (or offering up a beautiful thing to the reception of the world), for example, we seek less the affirmation that our judgment is shared but that even where it is not shared the declaration is taken to issue from a subject of a taste that is their own who values a thing that is valu-able even by those who do not value it.
Freedom can be easily destroyed -- it is incredibly fragile -- by the obliterative instensities of pain or of pleasure, by violence, by duress, by immiseration, by isolation, by the lack of a context of trust or legitimacy to give a home to these precarious transactions.
Freedom is usually present when we collaborate toward the accomplishment of a shared task, each contributing their separate measure to that accomplishment, each co-ordinating that effort through the communication of their ongoing re-assessments of the scene. This may be part of what makes us so prone to confuse efficacy with freedom, especially since the capaciousness enabled by tool and technique is often experienced, for a time, as freedom is, as novelty, interruption. Freedom is indeed often present when we take up a tool, and especially when we turn the tool to some unexpected use, or teach another what can come of the tool, or when we declare in the hearing of company that the tool is fine or failed, good or evil, beautiful or ugly.
But freedom is not a matter of making a selection from a menu provided by others, and not augmented by the expedient of being provided ever more items on the menu from which to make a selection. Freedom doesn't accumulate like gold pieces in a vault. It cannot be saved, or hoarded, or amplified. Freedom isn't dumb force, however ferocious, however capacious.
One is either free or not, from moment to moment, one is either experiencing freedom or not, from moment to moment, one is either actualizing freedom or not, from moment to moment. Nobody is free every minute of the day, even in a free country, nor are many of us ever so unspeakably miserable as to be unfree every minute of the day -- outside the hideous extremities of deeply criminal regimes and personal devastations.
But it is true that a form of government that values freedom can provide for more occasions for its actualization among its citizens, while another that disvalues freedom can frustrate its play. It is important to recognize that a society of uncritical conformists and consumers is quite as threatened in its freedom as a society of totalitarian tyranny isolated by terror and mistrust from taking up the risk of freedom and savoring its bounty.
The robotic world of the futurologists is a barren world without freedom in it, only meaningless calculations and amplifications of force. And what is to be most repudiated and feared is not the eventual consummation of their inhuman utopia of heartless hopeless crystal -- horrifying enough though that obliterative consummation would be. No, what is to be repudiated and feared is the degradation of our sense of ourselves in the present, the indifference to ourselves in our freedom and fragility in the present, the obliteration of regard for our social and embodied and contingent agency as it is, peer to peer, equitable and diverse, promising and forgiving, assertive and uncertain in the present.
There is little that is more precarious than freedom. Even where it is valued and facilitated, it scarcely outlasts the moment of the transaction in which it is actualized, the judgment offered up to the hearing of the world, the enterprise offered up to the co-ordination of one's collaborators. Although there is more to flourishing than the experience and actualization of freedom, and although a life lived interminably in the exactions of freedom would little likely be a flourishing one, a life without freedom is no more worth living than an unexamined life is. And again, while it is unquestionably nice to have nice and useful things at one's disposal it is the worst kind of nonsense to confuse such possessions with freedom or in the mad pursuit of them find freedom a mirage.
In a nutshell, I would worry about the reductionism of anybody who says that the more tools you have at your disposal to do things with, the more free you are. Especially if the person saying it seems inclined to treat this as anything like the end of the story. This is not to deny that it is nice to have more tools with which to do useful and edifying things (all other things being equal), but it is to say that this is to confuse efficacy for freedom.
Freedom is a political matter, the quintessential matter of politics indeed. In politics, we are not billiard balls banging meaninglessly into one another across a felted surface, in trajectories that can be exhaustively calculated in advance, where what matters is the augmentable or diminishable intensity of force with which the balls are flung and colliding. Where we assume the vantage of the political we are not billiard balls banging about, and we do not treat one another as billiard balls to bang. (This is not to deny that there are other salient vantages we can assume in respect to human conduct and understanding, by the way.)
Freedom is present or not, experienced or not, facilitated or not, from moment to moment -- but it does not accumulate, it does not amplify, it does not hoard, it does not improve. Freedom plays out in the world.
We are free when we act in the world in the company of the diversity of our peers. We are experiencing and actualizing our freedom when we offer up out of our thinking, out of our judgment, out of our privacy a text, declaration, or deed to the hearing and responsiveness of a diversity of our peers in the world. We do this without any certainty what will finally come of our releasing this eruption, this interruption into the world, knowing well that in taking up our text, our declaration, our deed the world will collaborate in the meaning available in it.
What matters is our owning of the text, the declaration, the deed, and the recognition, the substantial being, conferred on us by that diversity of others when it is taken up in the world, a recognition and substantiation in which our own-ness, our public self is produced and maintained in the world, as a peer among peers, as a legible subject with a critical purchase and take on the world that obliges response and responsibility from our fellows.
This recognition conferred in the transaction of free action doesn't require agreement from our fellows, but only the affirmation that the assessment to which we attest, the exertion arising out of our intention is legible as issuing from a peer. A peer is emphatically not an equal, nor an intimate, but one who registers in their alterity both their equity in respect to us and their diversity from us. An action is our own, and that we are our own can be conferred only by the collaborative recognition of our actions as actions among peers -- we can no more substantiate ourselves on our own than we can be free in isolation from one another. In declaring a thing beautiful (or offering up a beautiful thing to the reception of the world), for example, we seek less the affirmation that our judgment is shared but that even where it is not shared the declaration is taken to issue from a subject of a taste that is their own who values a thing that is valu-able even by those who do not value it.
Freedom can be easily destroyed -- it is incredibly fragile -- by the obliterative instensities of pain or of pleasure, by violence, by duress, by immiseration, by isolation, by the lack of a context of trust or legitimacy to give a home to these precarious transactions.
Freedom is usually present when we collaborate toward the accomplishment of a shared task, each contributing their separate measure to that accomplishment, each co-ordinating that effort through the communication of their ongoing re-assessments of the scene. This may be part of what makes us so prone to confuse efficacy with freedom, especially since the capaciousness enabled by tool and technique is often experienced, for a time, as freedom is, as novelty, interruption. Freedom is indeed often present when we take up a tool, and especially when we turn the tool to some unexpected use, or teach another what can come of the tool, or when we declare in the hearing of company that the tool is fine or failed, good or evil, beautiful or ugly.
But freedom is not a matter of making a selection from a menu provided by others, and not augmented by the expedient of being provided ever more items on the menu from which to make a selection. Freedom doesn't accumulate like gold pieces in a vault. It cannot be saved, or hoarded, or amplified. Freedom isn't dumb force, however ferocious, however capacious.
One is either free or not, from moment to moment, one is either experiencing freedom or not, from moment to moment, one is either actualizing freedom or not, from moment to moment. Nobody is free every minute of the day, even in a free country, nor are many of us ever so unspeakably miserable as to be unfree every minute of the day -- outside the hideous extremities of deeply criminal regimes and personal devastations.
But it is true that a form of government that values freedom can provide for more occasions for its actualization among its citizens, while another that disvalues freedom can frustrate its play. It is important to recognize that a society of uncritical conformists and consumers is quite as threatened in its freedom as a society of totalitarian tyranny isolated by terror and mistrust from taking up the risk of freedom and savoring its bounty.
The robotic world of the futurologists is a barren world without freedom in it, only meaningless calculations and amplifications of force. And what is to be most repudiated and feared is not the eventual consummation of their inhuman utopia of heartless hopeless crystal -- horrifying enough though that obliterative consummation would be. No, what is to be repudiated and feared is the degradation of our sense of ourselves in the present, the indifference to ourselves in our freedom and fragility in the present, the obliteration of regard for our social and embodied and contingent agency as it is, peer to peer, equitable and diverse, promising and forgiving, assertive and uncertain in the present.
There is little that is more precarious than freedom. Even where it is valued and facilitated, it scarcely outlasts the moment of the transaction in which it is actualized, the judgment offered up to the hearing of the world, the enterprise offered up to the co-ordination of one's collaborators. Although there is more to flourishing than the experience and actualization of freedom, and although a life lived interminably in the exactions of freedom would little likely be a flourishing one, a life without freedom is no more worth living than an unexamined life is. And again, while it is unquestionably nice to have nice and useful things at one's disposal it is the worst kind of nonsense to confuse such possessions with freedom or in the mad pursuit of them find freedom a mirage.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Futurological Reification, Reduction, Reaction
There is no such thing as "technology" at the level of generality at which people tend to talk about "technology." It makes no sense to celebrate or to abhor "technology in general," it makes no sense to champion, defend, resist "technique" as such, "artifice" as such.
There are techniques and devices that are useful in some contexts and less useful in other contexts and damaging in other contexts, there are particular technoscientific developments, applications, distributions that are, for the moment, and never universally, disruptive, empowering, provocative, indifferent, unexpectedly potent when conjoined with other developments and so on. But there is no "technology in general" that is monolithically "liberating," "alienating," "progressing," "accelerating," and to speak this way is always, always to peddle mystifications and obfuscations.
There is never anything clarifying to the process of technodevelopmental social struggle -- the collective, collaborative, antagonistic struggle of the diversity of stakeholders to technoscientific changes as they opportunistically make recourse to and sense of those changes -- by speaking of that complex, dynamic, open process of technodevelopmental social struggle through the vapid abstraction "technology."
Already we are well aware of the tendency of the word "technology" to attach very selectively, never to describe all the things in our environments which are artificial, but especially those artifacts which are taken to be provocative in their novelty or unfamiliarity or salience. That is to say, we fail to think of our everyday clothes as "technology" but only our presently-fetishized wearable devices, we fail to think of our everyday language as "technique" but only our jargon. The artifactual is ubiquitous, quotidian, and yet our imagination of the "technological" is freighted with the special fears and fantasies of agency, especially at its disturbing edges, with fears of impotence and fantasies of omnipotence, with death-defying medicines and wish-fulfilling devices and apocalyptic weapons of mass destruction and industrial-extractive pollution and catastrophic climate change. These assignments of what is to us familiar or not, novel or not, salient or not, and just how, are in fact the furthest thing from universal or obvious. These assignments are historical, they are social, cultural, and political.
Too often, "technology" is a word through which a partisan (or simply an uncritical inhabitant) of a particular parochial and interested vantage within the ongoing dynamism of technodevelopmental social struggle renders or simply uncritically acts as if every other vantage within that struggle is inconsequential or invisible altogether. "Technology" is a word that would identify some particular constellation of devices and techniques and the assignment to them of particular saliences and ends with every conceivable or relevant instance of artifice or device or technique, every vicissitude of technoscientific change in history, every impact of that change on whatever stakeholder to it, whatever their differences.
It is interesting to note that the ongoing historical distinction in discourse of what passes for "the natural" from what passes for "the artificial" has always functioned to delineate the customary from the novel, the familiar from the unfamiliar, the taken-for-granted from the threat/promise of the disruptive, and so has functioned in the service of a depoliticizing assignment of "inevitability" to the status quo as well as in the service of a politicizing insistence that things can be otherwise if we educate, agitate, and organize to make them so. The "technological-in-general" tends to function as a kind of depoliticizing re-naturalization within the de-naturalized "artificial," a way of divesting that which is made by us and so could be made different by us of their openness, weighting them down with the parochial assumptions and ends of incumbent interests. The open futurity available in every moment of technodevelopmental social struggle, vouchsafed by the enabling and frustrating contestation of an ineradicable diversity of stakeholders to the terms of change in the moment of change, in the presence of that change -- the open futurity in the present that is freedom -- is depoliticized, re-naturalized, through the substitution of a false "technology in general" for the always-partial always-contingent always-uncertain always-opportunistic engagement in that technodevelopmental social struggle on its own terms and our own.
That is why I say that "the future" is a racket, a de-politicizing substitution of some funhouse mirror of the present for the open futurity in the present that is freedom. "The future" of the futurologists is always a retro-future, always a dream of a maintenance and amplification of the prevailing or romanticized terms of incumbency.
Consider this tendency to reactionary reification in futurological discourse in connection with its tendency as well to a reductionism that misconstrues human freedom as instrumental power, and so with its characteristic gesture of reducing human beings to machines. The endlessly-deferred futurological predictions of the arrival of artificial intelligences and robots indistinguishable from humans are in fact symptomatic expressions of their prior misconstrual of actually-existing social and organismic human intelligence as computation and actually-existing social and organismic human people as robots. Futurological discourse at its most extreme (and consistent) seeks to compensate for this inaugural mutilation of humanity and human freedom by investing in a fantasy of an ecstatic amplification of instrumental capacities amounting to demi-deification.
Of course, this pined-for "transcension" through "technology" of their humanity into a superlative post-humanity, is simply the reductio ad absurdum consummating their initial mistaken and infantile assumptions, their would-be transcension amounts to little more than an evacuation of meaning and sense and humanity, their "post-humanity" an exaggerated testament to their palpable alienation in the present. The bankruptcy of the status quo confronts the Superlative mirage of "The Future" that is uniquely its own -- its rugged possessive isolated individualism exaggerated into promises of prosthetic near-immortalization (superlongevity), its valorization of short-term greed exaggerated into promises of better-than-real immersive digital virtualities, and robotic or nanobotic wish-fulfillment devices (superabundance), its reductive consequentialist and profit-taking rationality and "neutral" cost-benefit analyses exaggerated into promises of post-biological artificial intelligences reckoning with consequences in the abstract, searching through digital "problem-space" and thereby finding in a flash "the solutions" to all our problems (superintelligence).
"The future" of the futurologists is nothing but an absurd and delusive imperializing fantasy of the amplification and eternalization of the neoliberal status quo. It is nostalgia peddling itself as innovation. It is incumbency peddling itself as novelty. It is stasis peddling itself as change. It is hype peddling itself as seriousness. It is navel-gazing peddling itself as problem-solving. It is conservative politics peddling itself as progressive politics.
There are techniques and devices that are useful in some contexts and less useful in other contexts and damaging in other contexts, there are particular technoscientific developments, applications, distributions that are, for the moment, and never universally, disruptive, empowering, provocative, indifferent, unexpectedly potent when conjoined with other developments and so on. But there is no "technology in general" that is monolithically "liberating," "alienating," "progressing," "accelerating," and to speak this way is always, always to peddle mystifications and obfuscations.
There is never anything clarifying to the process of technodevelopmental social struggle -- the collective, collaborative, antagonistic struggle of the diversity of stakeholders to technoscientific changes as they opportunistically make recourse to and sense of those changes -- by speaking of that complex, dynamic, open process of technodevelopmental social struggle through the vapid abstraction "technology."
Already we are well aware of the tendency of the word "technology" to attach very selectively, never to describe all the things in our environments which are artificial, but especially those artifacts which are taken to be provocative in their novelty or unfamiliarity or salience. That is to say, we fail to think of our everyday clothes as "technology" but only our presently-fetishized wearable devices, we fail to think of our everyday language as "technique" but only our jargon. The artifactual is ubiquitous, quotidian, and yet our imagination of the "technological" is freighted with the special fears and fantasies of agency, especially at its disturbing edges, with fears of impotence and fantasies of omnipotence, with death-defying medicines and wish-fulfilling devices and apocalyptic weapons of mass destruction and industrial-extractive pollution and catastrophic climate change. These assignments of what is to us familiar or not, novel or not, salient or not, and just how, are in fact the furthest thing from universal or obvious. These assignments are historical, they are social, cultural, and political.
Too often, "technology" is a word through which a partisan (or simply an uncritical inhabitant) of a particular parochial and interested vantage within the ongoing dynamism of technodevelopmental social struggle renders or simply uncritically acts as if every other vantage within that struggle is inconsequential or invisible altogether. "Technology" is a word that would identify some particular constellation of devices and techniques and the assignment to them of particular saliences and ends with every conceivable or relevant instance of artifice or device or technique, every vicissitude of technoscientific change in history, every impact of that change on whatever stakeholder to it, whatever their differences.
It is interesting to note that the ongoing historical distinction in discourse of what passes for "the natural" from what passes for "the artificial" has always functioned to delineate the customary from the novel, the familiar from the unfamiliar, the taken-for-granted from the threat/promise of the disruptive, and so has functioned in the service of a depoliticizing assignment of "inevitability" to the status quo as well as in the service of a politicizing insistence that things can be otherwise if we educate, agitate, and organize to make them so. The "technological-in-general" tends to function as a kind of depoliticizing re-naturalization within the de-naturalized "artificial," a way of divesting that which is made by us and so could be made different by us of their openness, weighting them down with the parochial assumptions and ends of incumbent interests. The open futurity available in every moment of technodevelopmental social struggle, vouchsafed by the enabling and frustrating contestation of an ineradicable diversity of stakeholders to the terms of change in the moment of change, in the presence of that change -- the open futurity in the present that is freedom -- is depoliticized, re-naturalized, through the substitution of a false "technology in general" for the always-partial always-contingent always-uncertain always-opportunistic engagement in that technodevelopmental social struggle on its own terms and our own.
That is why I say that "the future" is a racket, a de-politicizing substitution of some funhouse mirror of the present for the open futurity in the present that is freedom. "The future" of the futurologists is always a retro-future, always a dream of a maintenance and amplification of the prevailing or romanticized terms of incumbency.
Consider this tendency to reactionary reification in futurological discourse in connection with its tendency as well to a reductionism that misconstrues human freedom as instrumental power, and so with its characteristic gesture of reducing human beings to machines. The endlessly-deferred futurological predictions of the arrival of artificial intelligences and robots indistinguishable from humans are in fact symptomatic expressions of their prior misconstrual of actually-existing social and organismic human intelligence as computation and actually-existing social and organismic human people as robots. Futurological discourse at its most extreme (and consistent) seeks to compensate for this inaugural mutilation of humanity and human freedom by investing in a fantasy of an ecstatic amplification of instrumental capacities amounting to demi-deification.
Of course, this pined-for "transcension" through "technology" of their humanity into a superlative post-humanity, is simply the reductio ad absurdum consummating their initial mistaken and infantile assumptions, their would-be transcension amounts to little more than an evacuation of meaning and sense and humanity, their "post-humanity" an exaggerated testament to their palpable alienation in the present. The bankruptcy of the status quo confronts the Superlative mirage of "The Future" that is uniquely its own -- its rugged possessive isolated individualism exaggerated into promises of prosthetic near-immortalization (superlongevity), its valorization of short-term greed exaggerated into promises of better-than-real immersive digital virtualities, and robotic or nanobotic wish-fulfillment devices (superabundance), its reductive consequentialist and profit-taking rationality and "neutral" cost-benefit analyses exaggerated into promises of post-biological artificial intelligences reckoning with consequences in the abstract, searching through digital "problem-space" and thereby finding in a flash "the solutions" to all our problems (superintelligence).
"The future" of the futurologists is nothing but an absurd and delusive imperializing fantasy of the amplification and eternalization of the neoliberal status quo. It is nostalgia peddling itself as innovation. It is incumbency peddling itself as novelty. It is stasis peddling itself as change. It is hype peddling itself as seriousness. It is navel-gazing peddling itself as problem-solving. It is conservative politics peddling itself as progressive politics.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Dispatches from Libertopia: Going Galt on the High Seas (to Infinity and Beyond!)
Brad Reed has some good fun with the latest -- Remember Sealand? Remember Residensea? -- klatch of deluded market fundamentalists who are now threatening to pack up their toys (whatever those might be) and deprive us of their talents (whatever those might be) and found separatist libertopian enclaves on concrete platforms or cruise ships or under domes on the seafloor or comparable corporate futurological nonsense. Perhaps they could build a lovely casino and vacation home complex Dubai style on that oceanic landfill of discarded plastic blobbing upon our wide blue still under-polluted oceans.
Although these fantasies of self-appointed sooperman sequestration are a recurring libertopian wet-dream, it is apparently an especially alluring notion now that these would-be titans and grifters fear they might actually be taxed and regulated a little in an Obama Administration (if only) thus slowing by a smidge their relentless ongoing (or at any rate pined for) looting and raping of the planet and of the overabundant majority of the people and other beings who share it with them.
You can tell these boys are serious because, among other things, they've founded an Institute. And they've published an online manifesto and FAQ. Always with the "Institutes" and "manifestos" with these boys, ain't it though?
Anyway, Patri Friedman (from neolib Milton to anarcho-capitalist David to anarcho-separatist Patri, from bloody-cuffed shirtsleeves to straightjackets in three generations) is a high muckety-muck in this endeavor. And it's interesting (I can't say it's surprising) to find Peter Thiel right at the heart of this laughable sociopathic libertopian endeavor as well, in addition to his involvement in the laughable sociopathic Singularitarian endeavor.
No doubt he would prefer that his Ayn Raelians "Go Galt" instead in nanobotic treasure caves secreted away in the asteroid belt, but he'll have to settle for now for a li'l patch of libertarian heaven and dysentery and piracy on some crappy abandoned oil rig. Without Big Brother's prying eyes on them every minute of the day, you can be sure that the legion of soopergeniuses in the Robot Cult will be able to code that superintelligent Robot God at last, and the hott sexy slavebots, and the immortalizing shiny robot replacement bodies, and the programmable nanobotic treasure-swarms and all the rest.
Then we'll be sorry for making fun of them! Then we'll be sorry for doubting them! Then we'll be sorry for treading on them! Then we'll be sorry for our regulatory shackling of their genius and our confiscatory taxation of their bounty! Yeah, give it, er, let's see, twenty years, yeah, twenty years from now, and Libertopia will spontaneously order into Robotopia and then they'll transcend into post-humans and, and, and, oh boy, won't we be sorry then!
Although these fantasies of self-appointed sooperman sequestration are a recurring libertopian wet-dream, it is apparently an especially alluring notion now that these would-be titans and grifters fear they might actually be taxed and regulated a little in an Obama Administration (if only) thus slowing by a smidge their relentless ongoing (or at any rate pined for) looting and raping of the planet and of the overabundant majority of the people and other beings who share it with them.
You can tell these boys are serious because, among other things, they've founded an Institute. And they've published an online manifesto and FAQ. Always with the "Institutes" and "manifestos" with these boys, ain't it though?
Anyway, Patri Friedman (from neolib Milton to anarcho-capitalist David to anarcho-separatist Patri, from bloody-cuffed shirtsleeves to straightjackets in three generations) is a high muckety-muck in this endeavor. And it's interesting (I can't say it's surprising) to find Peter Thiel right at the heart of this laughable sociopathic libertopian endeavor as well, in addition to his involvement in the laughable sociopathic Singularitarian endeavor.
No doubt he would prefer that his Ayn Raelians "Go Galt" instead in nanobotic treasure caves secreted away in the asteroid belt, but he'll have to settle for now for a li'l patch of libertarian heaven and dysentery and piracy on some crappy abandoned oil rig. Without Big Brother's prying eyes on them every minute of the day, you can be sure that the legion of soopergeniuses in the Robot Cult will be able to code that superintelligent Robot God at last, and the hott sexy slavebots, and the immortalizing shiny robot replacement bodies, and the programmable nanobotic treasure-swarms and all the rest.
Then we'll be sorry for making fun of them! Then we'll be sorry for doubting them! Then we'll be sorry for treading on them! Then we'll be sorry for our regulatory shackling of their genius and our confiscatory taxation of their bounty! Yeah, give it, er, let's see, twenty years, yeah, twenty years from now, and Libertopia will spontaneously order into Robotopia and then they'll transcend into post-humans and, and, and, oh boy, won't we be sorry then!
Monday, May 18, 2009
Designs On Us: First Contentions
We have proceeded first of all under the simple assumption that design practices are always also political practices as well. This isn't a particularly controversial notion, since it is easy to show that design decisions are often driven by assumptions, values, problems that are conventionally understood as political, just as it is easy to show that design decisions inevitably have political impacts, directing resources, policing conduct, circumscribing our palpable sense of the possible and the important, and so on. Our next assumption was also straightforward, but somewhat more controversial: While it is easy to see that design both arises out of political assumptions and has manifold political impacts, we asserted as well that design typically does its political work in a mode of disavowal. The quintessential gesture of design, we said, is that of a circumvention of the political altogether, and the foregrounding of what it poses as technical questions instead.
Technical questions, questions directing themselves to instrumental prediction and control, differ from properly political ones -- among other reasons -- in that technical questions are those for which a consensus as to best means and ends either already exists or is always imagined to be achievable (provoking the aspiration for that achievement), whereas political questions are those which always attest and respond to an ineradicable diversity of stakeholders -- and thereby arise out of a diversity of judgments, desires, problems, capacities, situations -- a diversity that is interminably reconciled, always only imperfectly and contingently, all the while collaborating, contesting, and testifying in concert to that diversity. One way to get at the difference in play here is to recall that science (the quintessential technical or instrumental discourse, since it strives to substitute publicly-testable efficacy for priestly authority) aims at a valid consensus and indeed manages, if only provisionally to achieve it, whereas democratic politics (the quintessential political discourse, since it strives to substitute publicly-legible consent for elite rule) aims at a flourishing dissensus.
The word design comes from the Latin designare, which is to mark out or devise, that is to say, de- "out" conjoined to signare "to mark," derived in turn from signum, "mark" or "sign." Palpable here is the kinship of the word design with the word designate, to name or specify. Also palpable is the connection of design to the primordial cultural technology of writing, as a "marking out." Thinking both naming (designation) and making (design) through the figurative conjuration of a scene of "marking out" is richly evocative: For one thing, a clarifying (and prejudicial) association is made here between the unilateral experience of the staking out on the ground of a layout and the eventual building that arises out of this foundational marking, and a still more foundational transaction (no less unilateral) through which an abstract ideal or plan or eidos arising first in imagination is thereupon implemented in material reality. To be sure, there are other associations in play here as well in this figurative working through of a design akin to designation: To name a thing is by some reckonings to "master" it, as in the primal Adamic scene recapitulated in so much magickal as well as scientific discourse, but by others it is to circumscribe its connotations both to its cost and our own, whatever the benefits that also eventuate from it. Naming certainly has its politics, too, as we shall see especially when the politics of designating just which lives are really lives at all becomes the focus of design.
Return to Preface and Table of Contents
Go on to Next Contentions
Technical questions, questions directing themselves to instrumental prediction and control, differ from properly political ones -- among other reasons -- in that technical questions are those for which a consensus as to best means and ends either already exists or is always imagined to be achievable (provoking the aspiration for that achievement), whereas political questions are those which always attest and respond to an ineradicable diversity of stakeholders -- and thereby arise out of a diversity of judgments, desires, problems, capacities, situations -- a diversity that is interminably reconciled, always only imperfectly and contingently, all the while collaborating, contesting, and testifying in concert to that diversity. One way to get at the difference in play here is to recall that science (the quintessential technical or instrumental discourse, since it strives to substitute publicly-testable efficacy for priestly authority) aims at a valid consensus and indeed manages, if only provisionally to achieve it, whereas democratic politics (the quintessential political discourse, since it strives to substitute publicly-legible consent for elite rule) aims at a flourishing dissensus.
The word design comes from the Latin designare, which is to mark out or devise, that is to say, de- "out" conjoined to signare "to mark," derived in turn from signum, "mark" or "sign." Palpable here is the kinship of the word design with the word designate, to name or specify. Also palpable is the connection of design to the primordial cultural technology of writing, as a "marking out." Thinking both naming (designation) and making (design) through the figurative conjuration of a scene of "marking out" is richly evocative: For one thing, a clarifying (and prejudicial) association is made here between the unilateral experience of the staking out on the ground of a layout and the eventual building that arises out of this foundational marking, and a still more foundational transaction (no less unilateral) through which an abstract ideal or plan or eidos arising first in imagination is thereupon implemented in material reality. To be sure, there are other associations in play here as well in this figurative working through of a design akin to designation: To name a thing is by some reckonings to "master" it, as in the primal Adamic scene recapitulated in so much magickal as well as scientific discourse, but by others it is to circumscribe its connotations both to its cost and our own, whatever the benefits that also eventuate from it. Naming certainly has its politics, too, as we shall see especially when the politics of designating just which lives are really lives at all becomes the focus of design.
Return to Preface and Table of Contents
Go on to Next Contentions
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Designs On Us: Some Basic Contentions on the Politics of Design
The following contentions are offered up by way of a summary and a conclusion for the community of my graduate seminar "Design for Living," which took place in the Spring term of 2009 at the San Francisco Art Institute. Each contention summarizes a recurring theme or problematic or author that especially preoccupied our attention over the course of the term.
We find ourselves in a world we make, and find that we are made and unmade in the making of it. What are we to make of the abiding artifice, the polis, that sustains "the political"? What are we doing when we are doing design and what do we do when we discern that design has designs on us?
Here we will think about design as a site through which politics are done, but typically done by way of the gesture of a circumvention of the political. At the heart of this disavowed doing of politics we will contend with a perverse conjuration of "the future." The Good Life for biopolitical moderns contending in the world in the aftermath of "The Social Question" is a life with a future, and it is to "the future" that design devotes its politicity. The human species, that fantastic figure of the humanist imaginary, that Good Life that pretends to be Just Life, that universality that never arrives and always excludes, has a future, too, and its City is the one that demands design most of all.
We will direct our attention to the reiterated gesture of a futurological de-politicization of political aspiration through the figure of design, especially as this gesture articulates three urgent contemporary design discourses: First, a design discourse that would achieve sustainability (and ultimately secure social justice) through Green design; a Second design discourse that would deepen democracy through social software coding; and a Third design discourse that would achieve human equity (and ultimately a parochial vision of "optimality" misconstrued as liberation) through a eugenic policing of lifeway diversity.
In summary, we will note the regularity with which [1] the typically de-politicizing gesture of design tends to underwrite actually conservative endorsements of the status quo and the politics of incumbency; [2] any embrace of the typically unilateral implementation of design tends to underwrite anti-democratic circumventions of stakeholder politics among an ineradicable diversity of peers with whom we share the world; [3] identification in the present with "the futures" typical of design tends to be purchased at the cost of a reactionary dis-identification with the diversity of one's peers and the open futurity of politics arising out of that diversity in the present; [4] typically, the rhetorical motor of design's futurisms tends to involve a divestment of freedom of its lived worldly substance through a reductive instrumentalization then compensated for by authoritarian wish-fulfillment fantasies of hyperbolically amplified instrumental powers misconstrued as freedom and sold, incoherently, as earthly deification.
We have proceeded first of all under the simple assumption that design practices are always also political practices as well. This isn't a particularly controversial notion, since it is easy to show that design decisions are often driven by assumptions, values, problems that are conventionally understood as political, just as it is easy to show that design decisions inevitably have political impacts, directing resources, policing conduct, circumscribing our palpable sense of the possible and the important, and so on. Our next assumption was also straightforward, but somewhat more controversial: While it is easy to see that design both arises out of political assumptions and has manifold political impacts, we asserted as well that design typically does its political work in a mode of disavowal. The quintessential gesture of design, we said, is that of a circumvention of the political altogether, and the foregrounding of what it poses as technical questions instead.
Technical questions, questions directing themselves to instrumental prediction and control, differ from properly political ones -- among other reasons -- in that technical questions are those for which a consensus as to best means and ends either already exists or is always imagined to be achievable (provoking the aspiration for that achievement), whereas political questions are those which always attest and respond to an ineradicable diversity of stakeholders -- and thereby arise out of a diversity of judgments, desires, problems, capacities, situations -- a diversity that is interminably reconciled, always only imperfectly and contingently, all the while collaborating, contesting, and testifying in concert to that diversity. One way to get at the difference in play here is to recall that science (the quintessential technical or instrumental discourse, since it strives to substitute publicly-testable efficacy for priestly authority) aims at a valid consensus and indeed manages, if only provisionally to achieve it, whereas democratic politics (the quintessential political discourse, since it strives to substitute publicly-legible consent for elite rule) aims at a flourishing dissensus.
The word design comes from the Latin designare, which is to mark out or devise, that is to say, de- "out" conjoined to signare "to mark," derived in turn from signum, "mark" or "sign." Palpable here is the kinship of the word design with the word designate, to name or specify. Also palpable is the connection of design to the primordial cultural technology of writing, as a "marking out." Thinking both naming (designation) and making (design) through the figurative conjuration of a scene of "marking out" is richly evocative: For one thing, a clarifying (and prejudicial) association is made here between the unilateral experience of the staking out on the ground of a layout and the eventual building that arises out of this foundational marking, and a still more foundational transaction (no less unilateral) through which an abstract ideal or plan or eidos arising first in imagination is thereupon implemented in material reality. To be sure, there are other associations in play here as well in this figurative working through of a design akin to designation: To name a thing is by some reckonings to "master" it, as in the primal Adamic scene recapitulated in so much magickal as well as scientific discourse, but by others it is to circumscribe its connotations both to its cost and our own, whatever the benefits that also eventuate from it. Naming certainly has its politics, too, as we shall see especially when the politics of designating just which lives are really lives at all becomes the focus of design.
We find ourselves in a world we make, and find that we are made and unmade in the making of it. What are we to make of the abiding artifice, the polis, that sustains "the political"? What are we doing when we are doing design and what do we do when we discern that design has designs on us?
Here we will think about design as a site through which politics are done, but typically done by way of the gesture of a circumvention of the political. At the heart of this disavowed doing of politics we will contend with a perverse conjuration of "the future." The Good Life for biopolitical moderns contending in the world in the aftermath of "The Social Question" is a life with a future, and it is to "the future" that design devotes its politicity. The human species, that fantastic figure of the humanist imaginary, that Good Life that pretends to be Just Life, that universality that never arrives and always excludes, has a future, too, and its City is the one that demands design most of all.
We will direct our attention to the reiterated gesture of a futurological de-politicization of political aspiration through the figure of design, especially as this gesture articulates three urgent contemporary design discourses: First, a design discourse that would achieve sustainability (and ultimately secure social justice) through Green design; a Second design discourse that would deepen democracy through social software coding; and a Third design discourse that would achieve human equity (and ultimately a parochial vision of "optimality" misconstrued as liberation) through a eugenic policing of lifeway diversity.
In summary, we will note the regularity with which [1] the typically de-politicizing gesture of design tends to underwrite actually conservative endorsements of the status quo and the politics of incumbency; [2] any embrace of the typically unilateral implementation of design tends to underwrite anti-democratic circumventions of stakeholder politics among an ineradicable diversity of peers with whom we share the world; [3] identification in the present with "the futures" typical of design tends to be purchased at the cost of a reactionary dis-identification with the diversity of one's peers and the open futurity of politics arising out of that diversity in the present; [4] typically, the rhetorical motor of design's futurisms tends to involve a divestment of freedom of its lived worldly substance through a reductive instrumentalization then compensated for by authoritarian wish-fulfillment fantasies of hyperbolically amplified instrumental powers misconstrued as freedom and sold, incoherently, as earthly deification.
We have proceeded first of all under the simple assumption that design practices are always also political practices as well. This isn't a particularly controversial notion, since it is easy to show that design decisions are often driven by assumptions, values, problems that are conventionally understood as political, just as it is easy to show that design decisions inevitably have political impacts, directing resources, policing conduct, circumscribing our palpable sense of the possible and the important, and so on. Our next assumption was also straightforward, but somewhat more controversial: While it is easy to see that design both arises out of political assumptions and has manifold political impacts, we asserted as well that design typically does its political work in a mode of disavowal. The quintessential gesture of design, we said, is that of a circumvention of the political altogether, and the foregrounding of what it poses as technical questions instead.
Technical questions, questions directing themselves to instrumental prediction and control, differ from properly political ones -- among other reasons -- in that technical questions are those for which a consensus as to best means and ends either already exists or is always imagined to be achievable (provoking the aspiration for that achievement), whereas political questions are those which always attest and respond to an ineradicable diversity of stakeholders -- and thereby arise out of a diversity of judgments, desires, problems, capacities, situations -- a diversity that is interminably reconciled, always only imperfectly and contingently, all the while collaborating, contesting, and testifying in concert to that diversity. One way to get at the difference in play here is to recall that science (the quintessential technical or instrumental discourse, since it strives to substitute publicly-testable efficacy for priestly authority) aims at a valid consensus and indeed manages, if only provisionally to achieve it, whereas democratic politics (the quintessential political discourse, since it strives to substitute publicly-legible consent for elite rule) aims at a flourishing dissensus.
The word design comes from the Latin designare, which is to mark out or devise, that is to say, de- "out" conjoined to signare "to mark," derived in turn from signum, "mark" or "sign." Palpable here is the kinship of the word design with the word designate, to name or specify. Also palpable is the connection of design to the primordial cultural technology of writing, as a "marking out." Thinking both naming (designation) and making (design) through the figurative conjuration of a scene of "marking out" is richly evocative: For one thing, a clarifying (and prejudicial) association is made here between the unilateral experience of the staking out on the ground of a layout and the eventual building that arises out of this foundational marking, and a still more foundational transaction (no less unilateral) through which an abstract ideal or plan or eidos arising first in imagination is thereupon implemented in material reality. To be sure, there are other associations in play here as well in this figurative working through of a design akin to designation: To name a thing is by some reckonings to "master" it, as in the primal Adamic scene recapitulated in so much magickal as well as scientific discourse, but by others it is to circumscribe its connotations both to its cost and our own, whatever the benefits that also eventuate from it. Naming certainly has its politics, too, as we shall see especially when the politics of designating just which lives are really lives at all becomes the focus of design.
Monday, May 04, 2009
Ridiculing the Ridiculous
Giulio Prisco has called me out again on his blog, and has accused me (not for the first time, probably not for the thousandth time) of name-calling without any substance and then accuses me of being a "bioluddite." I leave the delineation of the self-referential hilarities of this gambit as an exercise for the reader.
On a side note, compare Singularitarian Ben Goertzel's assessment of the post and thread in question, "bizarrely retarded luddite ranting," where again from the vantage of superlativity it seems apt to decry demurral from membership in the Robot Cult as tantamount to luddism, despite pesky little things like, you know, the actual history of the term, the actual meaning of words, and the actual views that tend to be espoused by those who presently take up that term -- I suppose, John Zerzan? Kirkpatrick Sale? -- with which I importantly disagree. I do wonder how many champions of consensus science, boosters of medical r & d funding, accountability, and science education, and advocates of informed, nonduressed consensual prosthetic self-determination, whether it is normativizing or not, throng the ranks of "the bioluddites" after all?
In any case, here is my response to His High Holy Pontifex of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, Robot Cultist Giulio Prisco, of whom I expect Ben Goertzel approves far more than he does the likes of me:
Transhumanism is a discourse, and so it can be analyzed as a discourse; transhumanism is a movement, self-described, with members, self-identified, and so it can be analyzed as a movement. Any criticism at the level of generality of the discourse or the movement you disapprove of you then declare to be defamation of individuals because each individual differs (obviously, however minutely) in her deployment of the discourse and in her affiliation as a member.
But that’s not the way it works. In deploying the discourse, in assuming the membership you open yourself to scrutiny vis-a-vis the general discourse, as a self-identified member of the movement or sub(cult)ure -- just as, presumably, you gain the unique pleasures of that deployment and membership that attract you to it -- just as, in publishing opinions you open yourself to critical scrutiny.
When a discourse with which you are affiliated -- especially a marginal one you assume very conspicuously by choice -- is criticized you should first determine if the shoe fits and then, if it does, wear it or not, but if you find the criticism inapplicable to you the question remains whether or not it is applicable more generally and if it is whether your own disapproval of it creates a special obligation for you resist it as someone who still affirms the affiliation despite the disagreement.
As anybody with the meanest intelligence who reads my critique will discover soon enough, I argue not that all transhumanist-identified individuals (most of whom I don’t know after all, and few of whom I know at all well) are explicitly fulminating Nazis but simply that there is a structural endorsement of parochial visions of optimality that trump consent in “enhancement” discourses like transhumanism, sometimes against the grain of actually expressed convictions (which can mean hypocrisy, incomprehension, skewed priorities, any number of things), and also that the True Believer/Would-be Authority circuit most pronounced in cult formations is also exhibited in marginal and hence defensive transhumanist sub(cult)ure, as a movement defined by affiliation based less on arguments than on shared identification with idealized and marginal technodevelopmental outcomes (and you can whine all you want, the distinctive views and aspirations of transhumanism are indeed flabbergastingly marginal from scientific consensus and mainstream progressivity, and that marginality is a factual question for which the evidences are legion).
I think superlative futurology is ridiculous and dangerous and symptomatic and all that shows in my writing about it and I cheerfully stand by that. I don’t mince words nor do I dissemble my views. I’m not trying to persuade you, Giulio, heaven knows, because it is my honest assessment after literally years and years of sparring with you, that you are unavailable to such persuasion. Instead, not to put too fine a point on it, I’m trying to expose you, and thereby to warn others from being taken in, so as to limit the very real damage I think you do to sensible public technodevelopmental deliberation at the worst possible historical moment.
You needn’t worry, I don’t feel particularly “insulted” by your clumsy misapplication of the term "bioluddite" to me -- I am simply pointing to the obvious stupidity of the assignment, given the things words actually mean, the histories and dispute actually in play around such designations, and given my positions on relevant issues actually easily available to be read by anybody who cares to do.
I eagerly await your scintillating reply. Some variation of I know you are but what am I usually seems to suit you. Go with what you know.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Arendt, Fanon, King on Violence
Upgraded and adapted from an exchage with "Kate" in the Moot:
You wonder:
Much more substantially, King later declares that it can be just as much a demonstration of one's fidelity to the rule of law to violate the letter of the unjust law in the full expectation that one will suffer the unjust penalty for that violation as to obey the letter of the just law in the full expectation that one will escape any unjust penalty thereby.
Is King an "outside agitator" or one of "we the people"? Do his action violate community rules or appeal to the Constitution? Are the judgements to which he testifies, the deeds to which he is committed making the world more deranged or more capacious, more brittle or more enduring? What matters about King's declaration is that in judging the law unjust and soliciting its unjust penalty through a violation, one expects to expose its injustice and so contribute to its improvement. But one cannot ever actually know whether or not one's judgments in these matters are indeed the right ones or whether this strategy is one that will vindicate your judgment or rewrite the law in your own image of its more perfect justice.
It may be that your violation is judged as a violence and its punishment just and the letter of the law will be consolidated in the image of injustice by your lights. This is especially true in the sorts of struggles King is writing about, in which, as he also says in the Letter, it is so easy to mistake the exposure of social violence (through demonstrations and civil disobedience, say) as the commission of social violence (undermining conventional mores, disrupting public order, fomenting unrest, say). And so, as you say:
But again, the lack of a palpable guarantor that one's judgment will be endorsed, that one's resistance will succeed in re-enacting the rule of law differently is inescapable, since these are political phenomena we are talking about, phenomena arising out of and in the midst of the ineradicable diversity of the peers with whom we collaboratively and antagonistically share and substantiate and change the world, peer to peer.
This is the risk of the political as such, the register of its freedom. It is a mark of this very risk that while King is canonized as a prophet of nonviolence Fanon is often viewed as a glorifier of violence, despite the fact that it is the historical conditions into which they would intervene that distinguished them most in many cases, while their radicalism reveals profound continuities (of course the domestication of King's radicalism by way of his distorted mainstream canonization in the US is part of this story).
All of this provides some context explaining why for Arendt political judgment is illuminated by reference to aesthetic judgment: we release meaningful and beautiful forms into the world, we assess forms as meaningful and beautiful, and in so doing we offer up our judgments to the tribunal of public assessment. That the aesthetic object or event is valu-able is objective and universal, that it is valu-ed is subjective and contingent. Of course, like all universals, the valu-able will always be exposed retroactively as contingent, as human beings are not gods, but its distinctive force is aspirational. To be judged as valu-able is always to be offered up as a candidate for enduring value, that value making and partaking of the world that exceeds us, while to be attested to as value-ed is a measure of the worldly pleasures afforded by and within that durable excess.
In offering up the judgment -- or our political opinions -- to the hearing of our peers and owning up to it we engage in a transaction in which we are substantiated (even if our judgments are not always so substantiated) as judges, as agents, as peers among peers, as worldly worldmakers, an experience of freedom (the Founding Fathers described this experience as "public happiness") we cannot produce on our own, on which we depend on the presence of a diversity of others. It is crucial to grasp that politics so construed is the opposite of violence -- indeed, Arendt describes "nonviolent politics" as a redundant expression.
While it is true that Arendt is one who declares Fanon to be glorifying violence in her "Reflections on Violence" -- albeit recognizing the sophistication of his case and the circumstances that probably justify his acceptance of violence in the colonial instance -- it seems to me her understanding of the political provides one of the best ways of grasping the significance of Fanon's project as an emancipatory one. It is one of the great frustrations of reading Arendt that she did not seem to recognize the kinship between the anti-colonial struggles testified to by Fanon and the anti-Nazi struggles of the French Resistance she celebrates so forcefully in the preface of Between Past and Future, and that she did not fully connect the racism she examines in the Antisemitism volume of The Origins of Totalitarianism with the American racism she treats with terrible clumsiness amidst the insights in her "Reflections on Little Rock" and elsewhere.
Are you saying that in order to be remembered in the future as having made some kind of progress towards "peace" one must occasionally resort to violence, or that in some cases the only way to make any kind of difference in the direction of peace one must occasionally resort to acts of violence that might put them in an unfavorable light in future historical lenses?It is obviously true that sometimes people make recourse to violence because they see no alternative, and it is true that in retrospect such rationales are sometimes accepted as justifications and sometimes they are not, just as it is also true that sometimes efforts at nonviolent resistance fail either to accomplish their ends or even fail to be accepted in retrospect as nonviolent at all (they are remembered as disturbances of the peace, they are associated with incidental property crimes, and so on). The only generalization I have proposed so far suggests very much the contrary sort of principle, namely, that the resort to violence always unleashes forces at least as bad as the ones it would combat.
You wonder:
when someone in such a situation would know that the only recourse left is violence?The crucial thing to grasp is that you cannot know. Think about King's "Letter from Birmingham City Jail." The bumper sticker people tend to take from that piece is that "Injustice Anywhere Is Injustice Everywhere," as though King is proposing that we already know of what justice consists in all its instances. Of course, reading the text itself we realize that this particular sentence arises in the context of a dispute, not at all a universally accepted assertion, between King and the "dear fellow clergymen" whose editorial he directly addresses in the Letter, a dispute in which the question at hand is what does it mean to describe somebody as an "outside agitator" in a world of complex mutualities.
Much more substantially, King later declares that it can be just as much a demonstration of one's fidelity to the rule of law to violate the letter of the unjust law in the full expectation that one will suffer the unjust penalty for that violation as to obey the letter of the just law in the full expectation that one will escape any unjust penalty thereby.
Is King an "outside agitator" or one of "we the people"? Do his action violate community rules or appeal to the Constitution? Are the judgements to which he testifies, the deeds to which he is committed making the world more deranged or more capacious, more brittle or more enduring? What matters about King's declaration is that in judging the law unjust and soliciting its unjust penalty through a violation, one expects to expose its injustice and so contribute to its improvement. But one cannot ever actually know whether or not one's judgments in these matters are indeed the right ones or whether this strategy is one that will vindicate your judgment or rewrite the law in your own image of its more perfect justice.
It may be that your violation is judged as a violence and its punishment just and the letter of the law will be consolidated in the image of injustice by your lights. This is especially true in the sorts of struggles King is writing about, in which, as he also says in the Letter, it is so easy to mistake the exposure of social violence (through demonstrations and civil disobedience, say) as the commission of social violence (undermining conventional mores, disrupting public order, fomenting unrest, say). And so, as you say:
[T]here's no clear event or moment at which attempts at peaceful reconciliation is beyond possibility, when violent action is the only way to bring about change (which obviously won't in any way assure peaceful change). Isn't that how oppressors manage to keep the victim group in a disadvantaged place for interminable amounts of time -- by claiming that change must come slowly and peacefully?That's right. King pointed out that the privileged rarely relinquish even their unjust privileges voluntarily, and hence pleas for moderation (nonviolent resistance is not, in its nonviolence, also automatically "moderate") often amount to de facto endorsements and enforcements of the unjust status quo, whatever the expressed convictions of the "moderators" toward the unjust realities at hand.
But again, the lack of a palpable guarantor that one's judgment will be endorsed, that one's resistance will succeed in re-enacting the rule of law differently is inescapable, since these are political phenomena we are talking about, phenomena arising out of and in the midst of the ineradicable diversity of the peers with whom we collaboratively and antagonistically share and substantiate and change the world, peer to peer.
This is the risk of the political as such, the register of its freedom. It is a mark of this very risk that while King is canonized as a prophet of nonviolence Fanon is often viewed as a glorifier of violence, despite the fact that it is the historical conditions into which they would intervene that distinguished them most in many cases, while their radicalism reveals profound continuities (of course the domestication of King's radicalism by way of his distorted mainstream canonization in the US is part of this story).
All of this provides some context explaining why for Arendt political judgment is illuminated by reference to aesthetic judgment: we release meaningful and beautiful forms into the world, we assess forms as meaningful and beautiful, and in so doing we offer up our judgments to the tribunal of public assessment. That the aesthetic object or event is valu-able is objective and universal, that it is valu-ed is subjective and contingent. Of course, like all universals, the valu-able will always be exposed retroactively as contingent, as human beings are not gods, but its distinctive force is aspirational. To be judged as valu-able is always to be offered up as a candidate for enduring value, that value making and partaking of the world that exceeds us, while to be attested to as value-ed is a measure of the worldly pleasures afforded by and within that durable excess.
In offering up the judgment -- or our political opinions -- to the hearing of our peers and owning up to it we engage in a transaction in which we are substantiated (even if our judgments are not always so substantiated) as judges, as agents, as peers among peers, as worldly worldmakers, an experience of freedom (the Founding Fathers described this experience as "public happiness") we cannot produce on our own, on which we depend on the presence of a diversity of others. It is crucial to grasp that politics so construed is the opposite of violence -- indeed, Arendt describes "nonviolent politics" as a redundant expression.
I read... that some people interpreted [Fanon's] text as saying that the only effective means of change was violence, but I also heard that this interpretation was in part due to Sartre's rather passionate introduction to the book, that it was Sartre who was advocating violence, not Fanon. Also, didn't Arendt promptly write a counter-argument to that section of the book?I definitely do not agree that Fanon is making an argument that the only effective means of change arises from violence in some general way. I think that even when he is backed up against the wall and argues that violence is justified by the ubiquitous inescapable violence of organized criminality in colonial administration based on the "irrational rationality" of racist pseudo-science, he also knows that the "effectiveness" of this means is profoundly undermined by the afterlife of violence in the new order it would establish and also he pines quite clearly in "Concerning Violence" but even more stunningly in Black Skin, White Masks for the life-giving world-building practice of politics, peer to peer, in terms very close indeed to Arendt's own.
While it is true that Arendt is one who declares Fanon to be glorifying violence in her "Reflections on Violence" -- albeit recognizing the sophistication of his case and the circumstances that probably justify his acceptance of violence in the colonial instance -- it seems to me her understanding of the political provides one of the best ways of grasping the significance of Fanon's project as an emancipatory one. It is one of the great frustrations of reading Arendt that she did not seem to recognize the kinship between the anti-colonial struggles testified to by Fanon and the anti-Nazi struggles of the French Resistance she celebrates so forcefully in the preface of Between Past and Future, and that she did not fully connect the racism she examines in the Antisemitism volume of The Origins of Totalitarianism with the American racism she treats with terrible clumsiness amidst the insights in her "Reflections on Little Rock" and elsewhere.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
More On Violence
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, an exchange with "Seth":
Well, this is politics we are talking about and so one can never say never when all is said and done... But, as far as it goes, yeah, I do think it is pretty overwhelmingly generally true that violent revolution unleashes forces as bad as the ones it would address.
This is not to say that this means that there actually always will be nonviolent alternatives available -- the organized criminality of Nazi totalitarianism as discussed by Arendt in "Moral Responsibility Under Dictatorship" and the organized criminality of colonialism as discussed by Fanon in "Concerning Violence" in Wretched of the Earth both seem to demonstrate that violent revolution indeed can be justified.
But it is crucial to note that this justification does not circumvent the recognition by either Arendt or Fanon that this justified violence nonetheless unleashes forces as bad as the ones it would combat. It's just that for those caught up in that organized violence, the exchange of one evil for another is literally the only available route into history. No reasonable or ethical person under any circumstances but those would ever affirm the evil of violence once they understood this reality.
These circumstances of organized criminality differ in kind from the evils confronted even by King in the segregated South, even by those who suffered under the flabbergasting dictatorship of Stalin, or who suffer and die now from neoliberal precarization in a planet of slums (as described so well by Mike Davis among other). This is absolutely not to diminish the suffering or horror of the latter forms of violence and exploitation as against the former, but to grasp structural differences in the organization of these horrors that impact the resistances actually available in the face of their evil.
Me, too.
You can be sure that it does and it will. Plurality is the occasion of the political, unpredictability the ineradicable price of its freedom. Still, the general principle that violence unleashes forces at least as bad as the ones it would combat remains both profound and very useful to remember when the chips are down and to weave as deeply as may be into one's personal practice, even, or especially, when it seems difficult, all the same. At any rate, that's my personal call.
Dale, when you say that "Violent revolution unleashes forces as bad as the ones it would address," do you see that as being always true?
Well, this is politics we are talking about and so one can never say never when all is said and done... But, as far as it goes, yeah, I do think it is pretty overwhelmingly generally true that violent revolution unleashes forces as bad as the ones it would address.
This is not to say that this means that there actually always will be nonviolent alternatives available -- the organized criminality of Nazi totalitarianism as discussed by Arendt in "Moral Responsibility Under Dictatorship" and the organized criminality of colonialism as discussed by Fanon in "Concerning Violence" in Wretched of the Earth both seem to demonstrate that violent revolution indeed can be justified.
But it is crucial to note that this justification does not circumvent the recognition by either Arendt or Fanon that this justified violence nonetheless unleashes forces as bad as the ones it would combat. It's just that for those caught up in that organized violence, the exchange of one evil for another is literally the only available route into history. No reasonable or ethical person under any circumstances but those would ever affirm the evil of violence once they understood this reality.
These circumstances of organized criminality differ in kind from the evils confronted even by King in the segregated South, even by those who suffered under the flabbergasting dictatorship of Stalin, or who suffer and die now from neoliberal precarization in a planet of slums (as described so well by Mike Davis among other). This is absolutely not to diminish the suffering or horror of the latter forms of violence and exploitation as against the former, but to grasp structural differences in the organization of these horrors that impact the resistances actually available in the face of their evil.
I agree that in this context, "progressive reform is all that remains [and] it is pointless to contemplate whether or not it is 'adequate' to the weight of incumbency and injustice," and I think that this perspective offers a way out of many forms of political apathy, and undermines many tendencies toward the fetishization of one's politics, and the consequent fracturing of the power that's available to be taken up in the space between people.
Me, too.
But couldn't that formulation, conceivably at least, measure out differently in a different place, or even here at a different time?
You can be sure that it does and it will. Plurality is the occasion of the political, unpredictability the ineradicable price of its freedom. Still, the general principle that violence unleashes forces at least as bad as the ones it would combat remains both profound and very useful to remember when the chips are down and to weave as deeply as may be into one's personal practice, even, or especially, when it seems difficult, all the same. At any rate, that's my personal call.
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