Consensual Prosthetic Self-Determination and Progressive Democratization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transhuman Eugenicism

I have regularly accused "transhumanist"-identified futurists of parochial, at best, and outright eugenicist, at worst, ideas about what constitutes "enhancement" treated as self-evident truths to guide public policy.

An "Anonymous" commenter responded in the Moot:

I've been reading your blog for quite some time, and every time you mentioned this I've always wanted to pipe up and say that I have never actually read about any transhumanists wanting to enhance humanity. Instead, I hear them talking about 'enhancing' themselves (whatever that entails -- it seems entirely reasonable that they want only to modify themselves to whatever manner they deem to be improvement). And, to me, there's absolutely nothing with this. If someone wants to do something to her own body, let her.

I just don't see [this] as being a fair criticism, since, as far as I know, there isn't anybody advocating for widespread 'improvement' of the human race. Though, I could very well be wrong -- I tend not to follow quacks too much

I advocate consensual prosthetic self-determination myself, after all, so I can't say I disapprove of folks seeking to change themselves, either, so long as they aren't under duress or unduly misinformed about risks and costs and benefits and so on. I take consensual prosthetic self-determination to be the usual Pro-Choice politics, simply elaborated to include both the right of all women to end their unwanted pregnancies safely as well as to facilitate wanted ones through assistive reproductive techniques, but also elaborated further to include a host of familiar civil libertarian positions on biomedical and lifeway issues concerning the self-determination of end-of-life conditions, informed consensual comparatively harmless recreational drug use, consensual body modification (cosmetic procedures, sexual reassignments, body modifications like tattoos and piercings and so on), and elaborated further still in the context of actually emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive interventions to affirm and protect the choices of sane competent adult citizens either to make recourse to or refrain from entering into emerging therapeutic regimes, whether they are normalizing or not, even when their eventual and combinatorial effects are imperfectly understood (as is usually the case after all), so long as participation is not under duress (where "duress" marks force, the threat of force, but also precarity: insecure legal status, the pressure of poverty, and the disruptions of war, pandemic, or catastrophic climate change), the decision to participate is informed (not compromised by fraud, secrecy, or misinformation), and the regime is regulated, transparent, and accountable. Inasmuch as I ultimately take all culture to be prosthetic and all prostheses to be culture I also believe a defense of consensual prosthetic self-determination to connect in the largest sense to the championing of access-to-knowledge and public education and the celebration of lifeway diversity and convivial consensual secular civilization.

However, it seems to me that far too many "transhumanists" (and so-called "liberal eugenicists" more generally, whether so described themselves -- as, incredibly, some do -- or taking up comparable descriptions -- "better humans," "humanity plus" -- or deserving of the moniker come what may) have a distressing tendency to describe as "objectively suboptimal" many capacities, morphologies and lifeways that are actually viable and wanted (deafness, neuro-atypicalities, among others) but which happen to fail to accord with their own parochial values.

Much desolating talk of "efficiency," "competitiveness," "performance" tends to get megaphoned where this sort of "enhancement" cheerleading is afoot, you can be sure. It is rather what you would expect, frankly, from a "movement" whose members so often seem to treat "Science Fiction plus Vegas plus self-esteem workshops plus nutritional supplement informercials" as equaling "civilization."

Especially charming I must say are the discussions of the ways in which "atypicalities" and "sub-optimalities" impose social costs that should not be borne by the more typical and more optimal, as well as the discussions which seem to pine for bodies transformed into interminable arms races of ever more enhanced competitiveness. Quite apart from the fact that one never quite knows how to square such puritanical frugality with the predictions these futurologists are endlessly making about the stunning techno- nano- robo- info- sooper-abundance that is always just around the corner if we will truly believe in it enough, one also has to wonder about all this hardboiled hard-edge hardcore utilitarian diversity policing just what kind of person thinks this would be a marvelous way to live one's life in this breezing buzzing befuddling bedazzling world of ours?

Even those "enhancement enthusiasts" who don't go so far as to advocate coercive implementation of their stainless-steel vision of post-human sooper-models, still collaborate in the denigration of perfectly legible actually wanted lifeways of present-peers while peddling facile visions of "better-humans" who I daresay would still know hardship and humiliation contrary to the glossy brochures.

It wouldn't be fair to say that every "transhumanist"-identified person is an explicit braying coercive eugenicist, certainly -- and I do not make, nor have I ever made, that claim. But I do think "enhancement" discourse is saturated with implicit eugenicist assumptions (often under-interrogated by more or less well-meaning or at any rate deluded advocates) and unwarrantedly intolerant consequences.

What is troublesome in so much of this "enhancement" discourse is the suggestion that viable wanted difference parochially designated "suboptimal" translates inevitably to inequity, that disapproved difference is dis-ease, and that ideally a commitment to justice demands arriving at homogeneity via medical intervention peddled as the arrival at an "optimality" that inevitably reflects very parochial prejudices concerning what human beings should look like and be like and what we are for.

It is not surprising to stumble upon suggestions even from "liberal" and insistently anti-authoritarian enhancement-enthusiasts that deaf parents screening for a wanted deaf child is equivalent to deafening one's actually hearing child, that parents with differently-enabled children inevitably find themselves in an especially tragic circumstance. As if a child with mild Down's cannot be a flourishing cherished person, familiar, and peer? And also as if the parent of a "normal" child, however construed, won't be beset by heartbreak, distress, tragedy as well?

It is not surprising either to hear "transhumanists" insist that we have a moral duty to "uplift" nonhuman animals into human consciousness if we can do so. Notice that this is not just a claim that it might be interesting or useful or warranted to nudge non-human animal cognition into conformity with more human forms of cognition, it is the claim that such a transformation would objectively constitute an improvement or enhancement of that cognition, that difference-from-human-norms (in whatever construal) is tantamount to inferiority, nonviability, even a kind of harm, and that, hence, policing cognitive diversity into anthopocentric homogeneity becomes a kind of moral imperative a righting of the "injustice" of parochially disvalued differences.

There is an interminable tension in democratic societies that must struggle, reform, and experiment in an ongoing way to institutionally implement the values of equity and diversity, both of which are indispensable to a properly democratic vision of social justice, a consensualist vision of equity in diversity.

It seems to me that "enhancement" advocates identified with the left (however ambivalently) too readily err on the side of "equity" over "diversity" to the cost of freedom, while "enhancement" advocates on the right too readily err on the side of affirming a facile "diversity" including most or all choices, however duressed they may be by inequitable conditions of poverty, violence, ignorance, misinformation, exploitation.

It seems to me that those "enhancement" advocates and especially "transhumanists" who are not explicit eugenicists or who abhor eugenicism (of whom there are some I'm sure) would do well to spend less time in defensive denial about how this problem relates to them, and far more time addressing its causes and symptoms among so many fellow-members of their sub(cult)ural "movement" with whom they are nonetheless so eager to affiliate despite this asserted disagreement and abhorrence.

UPDATED from some subsequent exchanges in the Moot:

Another "Anonymous" poster to the Moot declared she or he "didn't get it" when I protested the position of some transhumanists who declare "screening for a wanted deaf child is equivalent to deafening one's actually hearing child." Brave "Anonymous" wanted to know "What is wrong with that claim? (Assuming the deafening is done right after birth, assuming equivalent means morally equivalent, etc.)"

After a brief shudder I pointed out, in response:

A fetus -- actually, since we are talking here about screening, a not even conceived potential fetus -- isn't a person who can be harmed and "who" must in "their" vulnerability be protected from violation or unwanted unnecessary risk. But a woman contemplating pregnancy or actually pregnant most certainly is just that, a person who can be harmed and who must be protected from violation or unwanted unnecessary risk -- and as an actually-existing hearing child threatened with such violation most certainly is, too.

A person cannot reasonably be said to suffer violation or harm simply by virtue of being different from every one of indefinitely many alternate persons who might have emerged out of the circumstances of their conception with whatever benefits and problems that that different person would differently incarnate. All that sort of rhetoric is just the usual obfuscatory anti-choice bullshit as far as I can see.

Another commenter wondered if I really "think all screening by parents is acceptable. If not then what criteria separate good screening from bad screening."

I think this question raises genuinely difficult issues. Here was my response:

The first thing to say is that every woman makes the right choice, by which I mean to say every woman's choice is the choice she has every right to make in respect to how she wants to end or facilitate a pregnancy in her own body, as far as I'm concerned.

Does that mean that I am unaware of the irrational prejudices (in respect to race, gender, atypicality, different-enablement, and so on) that can articulate many of these choices? Not at all. Certainly, I am aware of all this.

Let me make the point in the most personal way I can think of.

I'm a gay man whose own mother would very likely have aborted me had she known I was going to be gay. She has said as much to me, and it is clear that she would have made this choice at the time as much because she didn't know she would become a person who could love a gay child as easily as a straight one when the issue arose (which it turns out, happily, she could and did), as because she was too ignorant at the time, as most people were, I suppose, to know that society would afford a gay child a flourishing life rather than a miserable one (which it turns out, happily, it could and did).

But let me be very clear, that as a pro-choice person I fully defend the right of any woman to end an unwanted pregnancy for whatever reason makes it unwanted to her, even a person in an exactly analogous position as my Mother's in respect to the prospectively gay me.

Of course I know that pregnancies can be unwanted for reasons that are hateful, irrational, or deeply ignorant (as would have been the case with my Mother at the time, as she would now be the first to agree).

What is wanted in such cases is to shame the hateful, address the irrational, and educate the ignorant, so that differences that don't make a difference in the way they are sometimes hatefully, irrationally, or ignorantly imagined to be are no longer unwanted, so that whatever choices are made are better informed than not. The way to address hatred, irrationality, and ignorance is not through infantilization and prohibition of choices that symptomize these wrongheaded states of mind, but through argument, education, and wider exposure to differences that only seem threatening to those who lack the experience to know better.

I think that there is an incredible amount of misinformation and mystification and pernicious wish-fulfillment that takes place when talk turns to "screening away" unwanted kinds of people or "selecting for" especially wanted kinds of people as a matter of fact.

And I think much of this talk is enormously hurtful and relentlessly stupid, deeply disrespectful and insensitive to the actually viable, actually wanted, actually differently flourishing lifeways of any number of peers with whom the would be "optimizers" and "enhancers" are actually already sharing this world.

But it is crucial to distinguish the politics through which one would address this sort of hatefulness and irrationality from the politics through which one affirms the right of competent sane adults to informed, nonduressed consensual prosthetic self-determination where healthcare choices, cultural investment, and so on are concerned.

I understand that it can be really tricky to hold all these demands together.

That complexity and difficulty is of course one of the reasons why those who make recourse to "enhancement" discourse in the first place seek to simplify these quandaries through a depoliticizing would-be neutralization of what are truly parochial value-judgments, treating them as already settled simply by calling them, simply, "enhancements" at all -- when "enhancement" is always actually "enhancement" to whom? "enhancement" in respect to what end? "enhancement" at what cost to what other possible ends? -- and when these values and ends and costs and risks and benefits are all manifestly under contest in fact.

But whatever the difficulty and complexity, it does seem to me that resisting the impulse to undue simplification here is what democratic commitments to consent, equity, and diversity actually require of us here.

Re-Public Piece

The journal Re-Public has published a piece of mine called Superlative Futurology. Most of the arguments there will be quite familiar to readers here. The piece appears together with a number of others that are considerably more sympathetic to transhumanism and futurology than I am myself, and I will be reviewing each of the other contributions as time allows.

Against Anarchy: The Politics Nonviolence, Civitas and p2p Democratization

I don't want to smash the state, I want to democratize it.

The following is a reverse-chronological anthologization of posts thinking democracy in relation to anarchist aspirations, nonviolent politics, and the question whether there really can be anything utopian about millions of citizens engaging in boring harm-reduction policy administration accountable both to consensus science and to its actual stakeholders on the public dime. Preview of coming attractions: if the world is not to be slaughterhouse forever, then the answer to that question has to be something like "yes."

Many of the aphorisms anthologized as Dispatches from Libertopia speak to these themes as well, I guess. As aphorisms go they are not as funny as you might like, but they don't take as long to read as my posts do.

Sometimes, in these posts I find myself trying to find new ways of talking about what seem to me very basic political ideas, even points of departure for political thinking as such. For example, there are quite a few posts that offer variations on the claim that taxation is indispensable to the creation and maintenance of public alternatives for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes rather than a form of violence, let alone the paradigmatic state violence. In spats with anarchist friends I offer up many variations on the argument that even though states notoriously can and do operate to rationalize violence and enforce hierarchies the struggle is not so much to smash states but to democratize them (as my slogan goes), since violence and hierarchy both precede and exceed state forms in a finite world shared by a diversity of stakeholders.

These can seem unconventional and even paradoxical ideas, and so I have to admit that people of good will can misunderstand or disagree with them. I know, of course, that there are plenty of people who are allies on important issues, in political campaigns, during particular actions, making radical art, and who are generally right on with their right on and yet who think of themselves as anarchists. But I personally think that what genuinely lefty, genuinely thoughtful anarchists think of as "anarchy" -- when they are not simply being naive narcissistic tools enabling reactionary politics and consumer complacency in bubbles of privilege -- is better thought of as "democracy." I get that it might seem something of a dick move to tell so many of the few people anywhere near my own wavelength as a queer atheist vegetarian democratic socialist feminist anti-racist anti-corporatist anti-militarist aesthete that their anarchism is aligned with American consumer-complacency and racist plutocracy when all is said and done -- but, honestly, if somebody who allied with me as much as so many lefty anarchists do sincerely thought I was enabling reactionary politics that horrify me, and offered up considered formulations to that effect to public scrutiny, I would want to hear them out on the subject more than I would want to devote myself to filing report after report to the hurt feelings department over it. But, hey, maybe that's just me.

Anyway, also anthologized here are posts on issues of access-to-knowledge and peer-to-peer democratization and on the anti-democratizing politics of elite-incumbent design culture (some of the posts anthologized under the separate heading Futurology Against Ecology are also relevant to this topic). What all these pieces share is the conviction that democratization is an interminable process of social struggles and experimental implementations, efforts to give ever more people ever more say in the public decisions that affect them, struggles for a sustainable, consensual, equitable, and diverse shared and made world, peer to peer.

A Clash of Spontaneisms: Howard Kunstler on Thomas Piketty, posted April 29, 2014.

The Military-Industrial Complex Is Not A Deeper State Than Our State of Democratizing Capability, posted February 23, 2014.

American Anarchism Is Racist Through and Through, posted July 20, 2013.

The "Mixed Economy" Isn't A Mix, It Is "Ideal" Capitalism and Socialism That Are Mixed Up, posted June 15, 2013.

Beyond "No Gods, No Masters," posted September 30, 2012.

Non-Violent Politics and the Democratization of the State, posted September 24, 2012.

Nonviolent Statism? posted September 20, 2012.

Conversations With Anarchists and Democrats, posted September 19, 2012

Nonviolent Revolution As the Democratization of the State, posted September 17, 2012.

And Many More! (A Happy Birthday to Occupy As It Is Growing Up) posted September 17, 2012.

The Ambivalence of Investment/Speculation As the Kernel of Reactionary Futurology, posted March 29, 2012.

"Stand Your Ground" As Secessionist Treason, posted March 24, 2012.

To Be Anti-Establishment Is Not the Same Thing As To Be Anti-Government -- In Fact Anti-Governmentality Is Almost Inevitably A Crypto-Establishmentarianism!, posted January 10, 2012.

Why I Am Not One of Those Democrats Who Are Fond of Ron Paul, Not Even Up To A Point, posted December 19, 2011.

Belgium Is Not Anarchy; Or, Scattered Speculations on the Radical Democratic Imaginary Against the Anarchic Imaginary, posted September, 2011.

cDc's Oxblood Defines "Hactivism" and Critiques Anonymous, posted August, 2011.

It Turns on Power: A Schematic Distinguishing the Politics of Technodevelopmental Social Struggle from Futurological Anti-Politics, posted August, 2011.

Riot, Try It: A Pragmatics of Urban Disruption in a Planet of Slums, posted August, 2011.

Why I Am Still Not An Anarchist (Or Am I?), posted July, 2011.

Indebtedness As A Lifelong Condition of Existential Precarity, posted July, 2011.

Politics of Design. Anti-Politics of Design, posted April, 2011.

The Egyptian Revolution Is Not Miraculous, posted February, 2011.

Democracy and Nonviolence, posted January, 2011.

p2p-Democratization, posted August, 2010.

Democracy Is Not Anarchy, posted July, 2010.

The Peer, posted February, 2010.

Prologue for Futural Politics, posted August, 2009.

Consensual Prosthetic Self-Determination and Progressive Democratization, posted June, 2009.

More on Freedom, posted May, 2009.

Arendt, Fanon, King On Violence, posted May, 2009

Designs on Us: Same Basic Contentions on the Politics of Design, posted May, 2009.

Science, Politics, and Administration, posted March, 2009.

Is Obama the Face of Ongoing p2p-Democratization? posted March, 2009.

Democracy, Consent, and Enterprise (And Their Contraries), posted September, 2008.

p2p Is Not Anarchy, posted April, 2008.

Left and Right, Back to Basics, posted December, 2007.

Eight Propositions on Taxes, posted December, 2007.

What's Wrong With Elitism? What's So Good About Democracy? posted December, 2007.

Thinking About the Politics of Design, posted December, 2007.

Democratic World Federalism Discussion on CRN, posted September, 2007.

Thinking Out Loud About Democratic World Federalism, posted September, 2006.

Why I Want to Democratize the State Rather Than to Smash It, posted June, 2006.

Democracy Among the Experts, posted June, 2006.

People-Powered Politics and the Emerging Technoprogressive Mainstream, posted June, 2006.

The Politics Are Prior to the Toypile, posted June, 2006.

Technology and Terror, posted March, 2006.

Technology Needs Democracy, Democracy Needs Technology, posted February, 2006.

World Without Work, posted January, 2006.

Trouble in Libertopia, posted May, 2004.

We the People, Peer to Peer

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

Arendt, Fanon, King on Violence

Upgraded and adapted from an exchage with "Kate" in the Moot:

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. 

More On Violence

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, an exchange with "Seth":

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.

Superlative Strategery

STEP ONE: Read science fiction.

STEP TWO: Circle-Wank.

STEP THREE: Techno-heaven!

More Reductionism

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:

The repudiation of reductionism in the sense I mean is not an embrace of supernaturalism but a simple reminder that one cannot derive ought from is, coupled with the reminder -- unfortunately, less widely affirmed but quite as crucial -- that oughts are nonetheless indispensable to human flourishing.

That life, intelligence, freedom are not supernatural but natural phenomena suggests that they are, indeed, susceptible, in principle, of natural analysis. But this is certainly no justification for treating our own conspicuously preliminary empirical understandings of life, intelligence, freedom -- or, better yet, essentially figurative formulations that scarcely even pretend to factuality (or consensus, whatever futurological protests to the contrary) except to their faithful -- as already adequate to these phenomena when they palpably are not adequate, just because it is not logically impossible that eventual understanding may become adequate.

Superlatvity Exposed

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:

I hate to break it to you but these figures Kurzweil, Drexler, Moravek, even enormously likable fellows like de Grey (and don't even get me started on that atrocity exhibition Yudkowsky) and so on you like to cite as your authorities are quite simply not taken seriously outside the small circle of superlative futurology itself -- at least not for the claims you are investing with superlative-endorsing significance.

Scientists rightly and reasonably cherish outliers, they benefit from provocation, and at their best will give a serious hearing to the extraordinary so long as it aspires to scientificity -- but there is a difference between this appreciation and the actual achievement of the standard of scientific consensus, just as there is a difference between the achievement of a popular bestseller and that of passing muster as science.

Ever heard of a citation index? You claim to care about facts above all. Well, citation indexes tell a story about the relation of superlativity to scientific consensus that there is no denying if you are truly the reality-based person you want to sell yourself as.

You can't claim at once to be a paragon of science while eschewing its standards.

You simply can't.

You keep trying to divert these discussions of the conceptual difficulties and figurative entailments of your futurological discourse into superficially "technical" discussions about superficially predictive "differences of opinion" about trumped up technodevelopmental timelines -- but you have not earned the right to be treated as somebody having a technical or predictive discussion in these matters.

No developmental "timeline" will spit out the ponies you are looking for at the end of the rainbow. This isn't a question of "predictions."

Pining for an escape from error-proneness, weakness, or mortality isn't the same thing as debating how best to land a rocket on the Moon or cure polio.

I am a teacher of aesthetic and political theory in the academy, precisley the sort of person many superlative futurologists like to deride as a muzzy effete fashionably-nonsensical relativist, but I am for all that a champion of consensus science, a champion of more public funding for research and more public science education, and as a proper champion of consensus science I am the one who tells you that consensus science is no ally to Robot Cultism, no ally of yours.

The proper questions provoked by the phenomena of superlative futurology are: just what renders the aspirations to superintelligence, superlongevity, and superabundance so desirable and so plausible to those who are personally invested in superlative futurological sub(cult)ures organized by shared desire for and faith in these transcendentalizing aspirations?

Turning to these questions one no longer participates in any of the preferred topics that preoccupy the Robot Cultists themselves, who like to treat pseudo-science and superficially scientific forms as shared public rituals, the indulgence in which substantiates in the present the reality effect of their wish-fulfillment fantasies about "The Future," so-called. No, when we treat superlativity as it is, as a narrative genre and a faithful sub(cult)ure, then quickly and quite properly the discussion instead turns terminological, discursive, literary, psychological, ethnographic.

It is no wonder that so many would-be superlative futurologists, as the pseudo-scientists they are, so disdain the thinking of humanities scholarship, which -- while it is indeed non-scientific is not ultimately anti-scientific like their own tends to be -- is precisely the most relevant and capable of exposing them for what they are.

No, You're the Cultist!

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot: "Extropia" declares me to be no different from a fulminating Creationist in my assessment that the curious claims of the Robot Cultists are faith-based in their essence. He declares the very confidence of my belief to reveal me to be the True Cultist. From inside the charmed circle of True Belief, glimpses of the outside world seem to get a bit... skewed sometimes, don't they, though?

As it happens, I don't claim to be completely correct in any aspect of my life, I'm not that sort of person at all. I'm a pragmatist by conviction and temperament both, and have no truck with certainties. I do hold strong opinions and delight in testifying to them and am well pleased to own up to the consequences. That is the substance of freedom in my view.

Among these opinions of mine, I am quite confident in declaring Robot Cultism to be a constellation of faith-based initiatives connected in only the most superficial way to the secular democracy of sensible educated enlightened people. The various branches of superlative futurology and their organizational life in the various Robot Cults are marginal both to consensus science and to prevailing progressivity.

Do I need to recite those views of the Robot Cultists again for the peanut gallery, by the way? The preoccupation with "migrating" organismic intelligence into cyberspace? Thereby to "immortalize" or super-longevize it? And so to "live" on in a virtual or nanobotic-slave Heaven? All under the beneficent eye of a history-shattering superintelligent Robot God?

Deny the obvious marginality of these beliefs all you want, you simply expose yourself instantly thereby as a loon (though the beliefs themselves have gone a long way in preparing us for that possibility already). No "arguments" are necessary on this score and, indeed, to indulge them at this level is actually to concede you ground you could not earn on your own crazy terms.

Once we are clear that it is you who are making the extraordinary claims (and, to be fair, I'll cheerfully concede and celebrate that extraordinary claims have often contributed their measure to human progress and delight, especially as aesthetic matters) then we should be agreed that yours are not the terms that define these debates, it is the skeptics you need to convince on terms intelligible to us, with evidences that pass muster on the terms of consensus science, with patient elaborations rather than impatient declarations of your self-evident superiority and certainty despite your utter marginality.

Unfortunately, I suspect you will find that once you engage in a good-faith effort to translate your project into such terms all that will be left that compels any kind of attention will consist of fairly mainstream secular progressive support of well-funded well-regulated equitably-distributed open technoscience in the service of solving shared problems.

Nobody needs to join a Robot Cult to work on actual software security, or actual healthcare, or actual materials science. The deeper psychological and social needs that are truly the ones the Robot Cult answers to -- for the overabundant majority of its True Believers -- are just as well met by a good therapist, a big bottle, a fine book of poems, some modest non-moralizing faith-practice, a good sound occasional fuck, or what have you. As they are for the rest of us.

Hell, Robot Cultists can still indulge for aesthetic and subcultural kicks in sf fandoms and futurological daydreams for all I care (I'm a big sf geek myself after all, I get the sensawunda thing) -- they just shouldn't keep pretending and trying to sell that what they're doing is science or policy or progressive politics in any sense of the word.

Once all that is well and truly cleared up Robot Cultists are just silly people following their idiosyncratic bliss and doing nobody any harm but possibly themselves. Who cares? Let your freak flags fly, as I will mine, for all the world to see.

It is the superlative futurological derangement of public technodevelopmental deliberation, it is the anti-democratizing politics of superlative futurology, it is the deeper more prevailing anti-democratic corporate-militarist futurology the Robot Cultists symptomize in their extremity that are the real dangers and problems that interest me.

Sure, little the Robot Cultists say makes sense on its own terms, either, but that's true of lots of other people and viewpoints that I don't devote my energy to critiquing.

Hannah Arendt on AI

And now for the third and final excerpt of something like an unexpected trilogy of excerpts from Hannah Arendt today. Although this is likely to be the first many readers encounter in consequence of the chronological arrangement of posts in a blog, I do want to stress that this is the third, and in many ways least interesting, of the trilogy, an excerpt that needs the earlier two (first here and second here) to take on its real salience as a complement to what I criticize as superlative futurology. This passage appears in The Human Condition, on pp. 171-172, and nicely ties together some of the themes from the preceding discussion.

If it were true that man is an animal rationale in the sense in which the modern age understood the term, namely, an animal species which differs from other animals in that it is endowed with superior brain power, then the newly invented electronic machines, which, sometimes to the dismay and sometimes to the confusion of their inventors, are so spectacularly more "intelligent" than human beings, would indeed be homunculi. As it is, they are, like all machines, mere substitutes and artificial improvers of human labor power, following the time-honored device of all division of labor to break down every operation into its simplest constituent motions, substituting, for instance, repeated addition for multiplication. The superior power of the machine is manifest in its speed, which is far greater than that of human brain power; because of this superior speed, the machine can dispense with multiplication, which is the pre-electronic technical device to speed up addition. All that the giant computers prove is that the modern age was wrong to believe with Hobbes that rationality, in the sense of "reckoning with consequences," is the highest and most human of man's capacities, and that the life and labor philosophers, Marx or Bergson or Nietzsche, were right to see in this type of intelligence, which they mistook for reason, a mere function of the life process itself, or, as Hume put it, a mere "slave of the passions." Obviously, this brain power and the compelling logical processes it generates are not capable of erecting a world, are as worldless as the compulsory processes of life, labor, and consumption.

Again, we have in the reference to the "worldlessness" of instrumental calculation and its effects a unique Arendtian usage. For Arendt the "world" is profoundly political in its substance, akin to the sense in which when we speak of "worldly" concerns we often mean to indicate more than just planetary or natural concerns, but public and cultural affairs more generally. On p. 52 of The Human Condition, she writes that "the term 'public' signifies the world itself." She continues

This world... is not identical with the earth or with nature... It is related, rather, to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together [emphasis added --d]. To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.

Among other things, it seems worthwhile to draw attention to Arendt's idiosyncratic understanding of the "world" especially since this is the world the love of which Arendt announced in her personal motto, Amor Mundi. Think of the way in which we are born into a speech, a "mother tongue," the existence of which long precedes our birth and will continue on long after our death, but which, for all that still consists entirely of our own performances of it, performances that at once sustain it in its existence but also change it (through coinages, figurative deviations, and so on).