Tech Progressive, So Regressive.

There's nothing progressive in policy discussions premised on technocratic authority rather than democratic deliberation. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in "disruption" that amounts to the deregulatory enablement of fraud. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive about "innovation" that simply loots and privatizes public goods or externalizes public risks. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in eugenic "enhancement" promoting conformity and docility as competitiveness and as health. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in treating wanted human lifeways as diseased and criminal kinds of personhood demanding "cure." #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in pretending robocalypse is an existential threat and climate change an engineering problem. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive about dreams of escaping our shared responsibilities into outer space or virtual reality. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive about identifying with robots or treating people as robots. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive about turning education into television or even into video games. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in treating consumer fashions as activism or consumer fandoms as movements. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in the pretense that corporate-military status quo amplification is progress. #TechProgressive

I am embarrassed to admit my own complicity in the emergence of the technoprogressive term now current in some circles of neoliberal tech talkers and "Thought Leaders." Interested readers will note the appropriated arguments and even phrases in the wikipedia entry for technoprogressivism, alluded to in the 2014 robocultic transhumanist Technoprogressive Declaration, all from my own Technoprogressivism: Beyond Technophilia and Technophobia, published nearly a decade before that Declaration. I realized quite soon after writing that rather programmatic piece that its formulations were being taken up in stealth-reactionary futurological "tech" circles seeking to sanewash eugenic, libertarian, neoliberal, digi-utopian, greenwashing, facile reductionist and determinist views about technodevelopmental politics. I soon came to believe that the susceptibility of my formulations to these deceptive and tech-propagandistic appropriations was a product of my own under-interrogated use of the term "technology" in the piece as monolithic and extricable from and hence apparently substitutable for politics in ways that facilitated what I now recognize as a host of familiar reactionary futurological gestures -- the naturalization of elite incumbent interests as a-political, the substitution of marketing norms and forms for modes of reflection and analysis, the treatment of wish-fulfillment fantasies as scientific predictions, the investment of such speculation with transcendental significance, and the transformation of these discourses into subcultural formations, identity movements and consumer fandoms. For a recent and concise elaboration of the critique eventuating in part from experience of the techno-transcendental appropriation of my early efforts I recommend Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains.

Nature's Artiface: Negative Liberty, Spontaneous Order, and Reactionary Tech

"Negative" liberties are forms of positive liberty that manage to disavow, by naturalizing, their contingent and artificial affordances. "Spontaneous" orders are forms of order that manage to deny their parochialism, history and costs through the force of their incumbency. "Nature" derives from the Latin nasci, to be born, to appear, but it matters that labor precedes birth and preparation enables appearance.

The essential work of the discourse of naturalization has come to be its disavowal of the artifice of what passes for the natural, this is an accomplishment indicated not least by the treatment of nature as the contrary to artifice rather than as a species of it. To belabor the obvious here, naturalization conduces to the maintenance or amplification of the status quo and to reactionary politics.

There is an affinity in the de-politicizing gesture through which always only some artifacts/techniques are constituted as "technology," and then the ready investment of some technologies so constituted with the work of a-politicizing conservatism. Techno-libertarian ideology absolutely depends on these discursive ploys, as when the end-to-end principle is implicitly identified with negative liberty, then enables the advocacy of plutocracy as meritocracy, or when prior faith in natural, virtuous spontaneous order (confirming its advocates they should rule, naturally) transforms encryption from technique to world-historical force that would abolish the unnatural, vicious barriers to the flowering of that spontaneous order.

Scattered Speculations on Vulgar Science Fiction Through the Futurological Looking Glass

Although I am a passionate fan of science/speculative fiction literature, film, fandom, I realize that I rarely write about sf here and that I probably should. The exception that proves the rule happens to be one of my favorite essays here at Amor Mundi, by the way: Raised Vulcan Eyebrows and Hopeless Human Hopes. I do take sf seriously, and I make very regular recourse to it in my science-technonlogy-studies (STS) and environmental-justice-movement (EJM) teaching at Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute. If you scroll down to the "Science Fiction" heading in The Superlative Summary you will find seven other pieces on sf there, tho' I'd say the quality is mixed at best.

The focus of my work and my writing here and elsewhere has, for whatever reasons out of the strange vicissitudes of personal and professional biography, turned out instead to be mostly the critique of futurological discourses and futurist sub(cult)ural formations. I happen to think that futurology is the quintessential discourse of neoliberal corporate-militarism, and that the strange exhibitions made by robocultic futurisms are a kind of reductio ad absurdum or iceberg tip symptomizing prevailing pathologies of postwar-to-ecocatastrophist capitalism. As a democratic socialist (or social democrat, if you like) Green, all this matters to me enormously, of course.

I do often make the point that futurological "scenarios" are in my view the definitive literary genre of the neoliberal epoch -- which really amounts to the truism that marketing norms and forms disastrously suffuse postwar public discourses -- and this observation also often leads me to joke that these futurological "scenarios" are actually just impoverished forms of science fiction, but, you know, entirely bereft of clever plots, interesting characters, or sustained themes. Indeed, most futurological “scenarios” amount to little more than stipulated settings of a scene (hence their name) and then filled with dystopian/utopian wish-fulfillment fantasizing. Again, I daresay the connections to advertising are obvious. Hilariously, these settings are themselves inevitably borrowed from actual science fiction writers, and given the plausibility that attaches to the familiar, futurologists tend to recycle those conceits real writers would disdain as cliches.

I will also say that I regard the familiar pretense that science/speculative fiction is an essentially or even primarily "predictive" genre to be a vulgar futurological fallacy. Works in any literary genre can be accidentally or incidentally predictive -- but sf, like all great literature, is constitutive of and responsive to living, earthly polyculture. It is the open futurity inhering in the diversity of stakeholders contending and collaborating in the present, in their presence, that provokes the allegories, commentaries, myths, testimonies of science/speculative fictional futures. It will perhaps seem paradoxical from the vulgar futurological vantage that has come so much to define the sfnal in the neoliberal epoch, but for me it is because it is so exquisitely the genre not of the future but the future anterior tense that sf is indeed a prophetic literary form.

Leave it to capitalists idiotically to mis-identify sales pitches for prophesies. You can be sure that the same futurological impulse that would loot and dismantle the (to be sure, deeply flawed) Academy and substitute for it a promotional for-profit archipelago of corporate-military think-tanks and universities re-made by financial managers and techno-fixers in the image of the same think-tanks, and who extol venture-capitalist skim-and-scam artists and self-promoting celebrity CEOs and guru-wannabes as "Thought Leaders," would also insist we celebrate as "The Literature of Ideas" sf as an exhortation to mass acquiescence to status-quo amplification marketed as progress, disruption, accelerating change, and transcendence!

Another vulgar futurological gesture is embodied in the periodic policing of science/speculative fiction for "positivity" -- and this impulse seems to me equally in evidence in the recent facile Stephensonian call for cruelly optimistic can-do science fiction as well as in the ugly racism and sexism of the Sad Puppies who also fancy themselves to be defending the civilizational citadel. To clarify, in each of these cases a gesture that would reduce sf literature to consumer-capitalist or white-supremacist or patriarchal (that is, sexist/heterosexist/cissexist) agitprop -- which would be bad enough -- but actually amounts to the even worse, but by now completely conventional, subsumption of sf literature into the prevailing deceptive, hyperbolic, triumphalist, apocalyptic, eugenic, techno-fetishistic faith-based norms and forms of neoliberal corporate-militarist marketing, promotion, self-promotion, advertising as public discourse.

As I always insist, every futurism is a retro-futurism, inasmuch as "The Future" is always a parochialism rationalizing and reassuring elite-incumbents of forever ongoing status-quo amplification. "Disruption" usually amounts the deregulatory dismantlement of democracy in the service of plutocracy, "innovation" usually amounts to the promotional re-packaging of stale and discarded commodities as novelties, "resilience" usually amounts to exploiters congratulating those who manage to survive their exploitation to be exploited still more, "accelerating change" usually amounts to the increasing precarity of majorities as experienced by minorities who either benefit from that precarity or foolishly identify with those who do. Again, the only thing more typical of postwar capitalism than compulsory "positivity" about our soul-wrecking planet-wrecking extractive-industrial-consumerist corporate-militarism is to add the insult to these injuries that we testify endlessly to the progressive productivity of this wreckage.

Benjaminian angel of history, smh.

Futurologists, Who Needs 'Em? A Twitterrant On Familiar Themes

A futurist is not who you want to talk to if you want to understand the technoscientific state of the art in research or engineering. A futurist is not who you want to talk to if you want to understand the stakeholders contesting a technodevelopmental outcome politically. A futurist is not who you want to talk to if you want to grasp critical or creative responses to technoscientific vicissitudes. A futurist is who you want to talk to if you want to go to a corporate pep rally (innovate!) or see an ad peddling consumerism (gizmos!).

There are already-constituted disciplines and experts doing every single legitimate thing one might foolishly turn to futurists for. Futurism is an anti-disciplinarity pretending to be an inter-disciplinarity.

In all this, futurism is of a piece with an anti-intellectual, anti-academic corporate-military think-tankification of public discourse as well as the suffusion of all public life with the deceptive, hyperbolic norms and forms of promotional and marketing discourses.

Syllabus for This Fall's "Homo Economicus: Modern Political Economy and the English Comedy of Manners"

"Homo Economicus: Modern Political Economy and the English Comedy of Manners"

September 1-December 8, 2015, Seminar Room 18, Tuesdays, 1.00-3.45
Instructor: Dale Carrico; dcarrico@sfai.edu
Course Web-Site: http://homoecoonstage.blogspot.com/
Rough Grade Breakdown (subject to contingencies): Attendance/Participation 12%; Notebook 12%; Precis 16%; Essay 1 30%; Essay 2 30%

Course Description

Capitalism is so funny we forgot to laugh. In this course we will be reading plays drawn from over three hundred years of mannered comedy, some of the most coarse, witty, perverse, lively, and stylish works in English literature. From Early Modern Restoration comedies modeling the libertine rebel Rochester like The Man of Mode, The Rover, The Way of the World, and the Beggar's Opera, to High Modern high camp fascinated by the figure of Oscar Wilde from Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience to The Importance of Being Earnest to Noel Coward, up to Late Modern work from Joe Orton and Jennifer Saunders resonating with the space oddities of David Bowie: we will not only be reading these hilarious and hellraising plays, but staging their key scenes in class for one another in an effort to inhabit them more viscerally. The premise of the course is that these plays stage efforts to satirize and cope with definitive contradictions of modern capitalism but also with paradoxes of corporate-militarist societies and cultures more generally, especially what I will call the plutocratic paradox (a meritocratic rationalization and enactment of aristocracy), the patriarchal paradox (a sexist, heterosexist, cissexist homosocial order that must disavow its queer possibilities), and the planetary paradox (a nationalist project impossibly comprehending ramifying multicultures in "the cultural" while embedded in a global nation-state system in which it impossibly competes via the racist war-machine of "the social"). Readings from political economy and cultural theory from Hobbes, Smith, Marx, and Mill, Pateman, Berlant, and Edelman, Williams, Sontag, and Bruce LaBruce will help us grapple with the plays and the spectacle they make of themselves. Consider the course a contribution to Urbane Studies.

Provisional Schedule of Meetings:

Week One (September)

1 Administrative and Course Introductions.

Week Two

8 Lawrence Dunmore, dir. "The Libertine"

Week Three

15 Fontenelle, Digression on the Ancients and Moderns. Hobbes on Equality, on Power, on Laughter. A selection of poems by Rochester.

Week Four

22 Etherege, The Man of Mode. Raymond Williams, on Culture, Society, Urbanity

Week Five

29. Aphra Behn, The Rover. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract

Week Six (October)

6 Wycherley, The Country Wife. Texts in the Jeremy Collier controversy.

Week Seven

13 Congreve, The Way of the World, including the Preface. Paul Parnell, "The Sentimental Mask"

Week Eight

20 Sheridan, Rivals. Adam Smith. Kant, History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather.

Week Nine

27 Gay, The Beggars Opera. (The Threepenny Opera) Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party

Week Ten (November)

3 Gilbert and Sullivan, Patience. Oscar Wilde, Preface to Dorian Gray and Phrases and Philosophies for the Young; Wilde on the witness stand.

Week Eleven

10 Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest. Sontag, Notes on Camp; Bruce LaBruce Camp/Anti-Camp

Week Twelve

17 Noel Coward, Private Lives; Hands Across the Sea (screening a performance starring Joan Collins).

Week Thirteen

24 Joe Orton, The Good and Faithful Servant. Lauren Berlant, "Cruel Optimism" and Lee Edelman, "No Future."

Week Fourteen (December)

2 Todd Haynes, dir. "Velvet Goldmine." From Dick Hebdige: Style: The Meaning of Subculture.

Week Fifteen

8 Bacchanal: Jennifer Saunders, Absolutely Fabulous, "Death," "Doorhandle." Videos: Sun Ra, Bowie, Glam, Disco, Jarman, New Romantics, Ga Ga, Janelle Monae, Hi Fashion, so much more…

Hole/Whole

Liberty is an empty hole in the world compared to freedom. Freedom is a world full of recognition, care, and support.

Resilient Precariat

The neoliberal futurological term "resilience" celebrates people surviving abuse and neglect so that plutocrats can accumulate more wealth.

The Vienna Circle Was A Gerbil Wheel And Techbros Are Still On It

Today's techies and nerd pundits rather remind me of logical positivists and Anglo-American analytic philosophers. They too fancied themselves the Smartest Guys in the Room and after superficial readings of rich archives rolled up their shirtsleeves. They declared themselves eager and able to circumvent or dismiss philosophical quandaries and topple moral/political Business As Usual. They confidently declared themselves masters of topics they largely missed the point of, re-invented a lot of wheels to run around on. They established lots of marginal fandoms devoted to official puzzle-solving and ignored everybody while everybody else ignored them.

Now our nerd pundits offer up reductive superficial pie-charted "explainers" as our techies breathlessly re-invent laissez-faire pieties. Our nerds are so "smart" they think appliances are intelligent and our tech-talkers peddle "progress" while denying commonwealth. Our anti-intellectual "Thought Leaders" are so uneducated they don't even know their facile errors are a stale re-run of earlier errors.

I know that nerds and geeks Rule now (at least the dim white reactionary reductionist ones) but nobody cares about logical positivists. I don't expect people outside the clubhouse to care much for long for our innovative Thought Leaders "getting to the bottom of things." Sure, the coterie of super-rich techies can do some damage with their market fundamentalist pieties but that's just because they're rich. But the anti-historical sociopathic reductionist nerds and geeks are mostly just dumb, another American anti-intellectual boy's club.

By way of conclusion I'll add that I don't think geekdom had or has to play out in this cramped uncritical fashion http://t.co/1HvsNweAa0

Over-Clarked

Any sufficiently advanced magical thinking is indistinguishable from technology journalism.

The More Things Stay The Same The More They Are Marketed As Change

I truly do not understand popular representations of retired folks presumably befuddled by an internet that actually hasn't substantially changed much since they began surfing it, texting on it, making transactions with it themselves in what was at most middle age. In American popular culture the moment you hit retirement age you are transformed into someone who lived through the New Deal and World War II even if your adolescence was spent on rollerskates listening to Disco. I have noticed that cultural signifiers of the seventies and eighties and now even the nineties are weirdly mulching into an archive of indifferent simultaneity. I wonder will the real stasis of the contemporary US culture finally become palpable when kids realize their cellphone selfies and jeans and t-shirts are indistinguishable from their parents' cellphone selfies and jeans and t-shirts?

Disturbing!

Abortion isn't more "disturbing" than an appendectomy. If you support women's healthcare stop conceding this ridiculous point to the forced pregnancy zealots.

Humans ARE Animals

Cruelty to nonhuman animals enables cruelty among human animals.
Solidarity with nonhuman animals builds solidarity among human animals.

Queen of the Libertechbrotarians

From Business Insider, Wall Street's Former Queen of Commodities Just Made Her Pitch for Why Bitcoin Is the Future:

Bitcoin technology could reshape the way financial markets operate. That is according to Blythe Master[s], the chief executive of Digital Asset Holdings, and one of the biggest names in the business... Everything from stock to bonds and derivatives could be exchanged and paid for in the same way the cryptocurrency community is executing bitcoin transactions, Masters said. Still, it is early on. Masters compared where Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are now in terms of their development to early 1990s Internet. "In reality, the world is not there yet," Masters said. She said the industry would have to address regulatory hurdles as it confronts issues like authentication and security in coming years. Masters was one of a group of JPMorgan executives who helped create the market for credit default swaps in the 1990s, and later went to head its global commodities division.

Yes, a "Thought Leader" who helped engineer the global crash just a few years ago by peddling fraudulent financial instruments to circumvent regulations and sound investment norms is at it again.

And why not? This Business Insider piece wasn't written after a visit to Blythe Masters in the prison cell she belongs in, after all, and it's not like she has common sense or conscience to constrain her, that much is clear. Why, she's "one of the biggest names in the business," we are told! What else does anybody need to know?

The plausibility of "Bitcoin" and comparable crypto-currency schemes always derives (surprisingly explicitly surprisingly often) from anarcho-capitalist fantasies of natural market forces (of which there are literally none) generating optimally efficient and just "spontaneous orders" (of which there has never been nor ever will be one). The usual popular postwar Randroidal and Friedmaniacal just-so stories and nonsense rationalizations for plutocracy and white supremacy bubble and boil this discursive cauldron to its froth, of course. Note that regulation is figured here as a "hurdle" for "the industry," for example.

But notice as well that problems are figured as merely technical, and therefore technically solvable: "authentication" and "security" await their programming fixes, no social or ethical questions bedevil the pristine instrumental prospect... let us unleash the bulldozers! What the last thirty years has taught us above all is that it is techno-transcendental rhetoric in particular that transforms these commonplace confusions, deceptions, and self-congratulatory cons into the cadences of progressive and spiritual revelations that drive the popular imagination from solidarity and suicide.

The wistful call back to the glory days of the "early 1990s Internet" is a tip-off: You remember the early 1990s, surely, the beginning of The Long Boom, in which space was abolished, cryptoanarchy smashed all the states, Cyberspace was the Home of Mind, virtuality transformed reality, nanotech delivered superabundance, California Extropians said "No!" to Death and Taxes, and pop futurists were revealing on a daily basis the techs That! Would! Change! Everything!

Oh, for a to return to the days of Irrational Exuberance! The Smartest Guys in the Room could really squeeze a fortune from the rubes back then!

Even in this short, throwaway piece, you should notice that it is a futurological formulation that provides all the juice: "The world is not there yet."

A denial of basic knowledge is articulated in the form of a prophetic utterance, whereupon the brute force of technological determination and superlative destining are called forth to shunt the realities of precarious bodies, historical struggles, lawless violations, and ecosystemic limits out of sight, out of mind to make way for frictionless flows of capital and fountainheads of cyberspatial spirit-stuff.

Of course, state forms are the point of departure for any macroeconomics. So sorry to harsh your bliss, but what passes for "the market" in any historical epoch will be an artifact of laws, norms, pricing conventions, and infrastructural affordances articulated and maintained by states and public investment. Meanwhile, currency itself, not to put too fine a point on it, is what states authorize as instruments for the payment of public debt.

There is of course much more to say on these topics (do read Polanyi), but there is no point in saying anything at all before all the participants in the conversation grasp these fundamental and foundational facts of the matter at hand. To deny such things is not to have revolutionary thoughts but to testify in public either to complete ignorance on the topic at hand or to a willingness to engage in fraud. I don't know whether she is a market fundamentalist zealot, or a full on techno-utopian True Believer, or just a con-artist looking to hack together her next personally profitable bit of financial fraud, indifferent to the lives and hopes ruined by her clever schemes and technical gew-gaws. Blythe Masters is advocating nothing short of looting and warlordism and the neoliberal tech press, settled in the midst of the still smoking ruins and ballooning bodies of a world wrecked by these facile frauds, cheers her stupid destructive pieties as a "Deep Think," natch.

"Tech's" Assertive Disavowals of History: A Twitter Essaylet

The power of "tech" discourses to incumbent interests arises from the way they disavow history while appearing to assert substance. The work of "tech" discourses of prosthetic or therapeutic "enhancement," for example, is to disavow the interdependence of human agency. The one to be "enhanced" is always already the isolated neglected precarized individual "self," their "enhancement" (setting aside the hyperbole & deceptions typical in such presentations) valorizes and naturalizes this isolated self, then offers compensatory fantasies of "capacity" that never redeem violations compelled by the sociopathic model of selfhood they fortify.

The real work of "tech" discourses of AI is to disavow the incarnation of intelligence and responsibility in living bodies and history. The investment of human-made machines with intelligence and agency -- as when we treat "autonomous" weapons as killers, or algorithms as bureaucrats -- divests humans of intelligence and agency, denigrates intelligence and responsibility in their human forms: the better to rationalize the mistreatment of humans as if they were robots, the better to disavow responsibility for murderous uses of artifacts or rationalize callous decisions by bureaucrats.

As Evgeny Morozov mentioned in a tweet yesterday (an observation that set me off on this twitter-essaylet), the real work of "tech" discourses of Smart this'n-that is to disavow the artificial imposition by elites of austerian scarcity: What makes a smart device "smart" is its promise to make do with less, and quite apart from the fact that "Smart" gizmos rarely live up to the hype with which they are marketed -- indeed, what gets peddled as "smart" tends to end up looking stupid before it gets tossed into the landfill to poison the world --what one is not paying attention to when one is celebrating coping with less is the question just why are we compelled to cope with less? 

Why are we coping with less? Is the leanness necessary? Is it shared? Are some benefiting disproportionately from the leanness of others? It is one thing to grasp sustainable civilization must stop fantasies of limitless growth and harmless waste with shared problem-solving, but quite a lot of the "tech" that gets called Smart seems instead to facilitate the erosion of social support and collective humanity.

"Smartness" figures unintelligent artifacts as intelligent: the literal denigration of humans follows upon their figurative denigration. The real work of "tech" discourses of Design and Technocratic policy is to disavow their hostility to and demolition of democracy. Designers amount to small cohorts of privileged individuals claiming to solve political problems by circumventing political processes: So digirati promise to code democracy from privileged enclaves, green design promises sustainability without threatening consumerism, designers fail to accomplish their avowed universal ends while succeeding in self-promotion and parochial profitability for incumbents. In a related development, Paul Krugman has taken to describing so-called neoliberal technocrats as "faithocrats":

Espousing faith in serially failed austerity and trickle-down, they peddle their plutocratic politics as neutral apolitical engineering. Of course, no "tech" has a single politics, but the disavowal of politics through the conjuration of "tech" is indeed a "tech" politics.

It is never true that all artifacts and techniques are discerned as "tech": We describe only some of the field of the artifactual as "tech" while naturalizing the rest of that field as the natural, the customary. There is an inevitable de-politicization of that which is naturalized, and that naturalization always conduces to the status-quo and its beneficiaries.

Further, when "tech" fixates on power as capacitation then promises to solve/circumvent political problems with instrumental rationality, such "tech" discourses always disfigure freedom and progress as political categories as they also disable democratic processes.

The disavowal of history at the heart of prevailing "tech" discourses is reactionary, reductionist and anti-democratizing in its thrust. Only by pluralizing, narrativizing, politicizing "tech" can we engage critically in real progressive technoscientific social struggle. fin.

Why "Stupid Or Evil?" Is So Often Stupid And Evil

For a conception of good connected to democratic virtues (eg, reliably informed nonduressed people are capable of consenting to the terms on which they freely associate with one another, government is legitimated through the consent of the governed, the scene of consent is secured by the provision of general welfare -- basic income, healthcare, education -- and equal recourse to the law and civil rights, government facilitates the nonviolent adjudication of disputes including disputes over the question of what violence consists of) the evil it opposes is often conjoined to stupidity, to the extent that stupidity is mostly the denial of warrantedly assertible beliefs about matters of fact that otherwise attract the consensus of reasonable people or relevant scientific experts.

Wonder V Plunder

Science is suffused with Not Knowing. Pseudo-science is enthused with Know-Nothings and Know-It-Alls.

UPDATED: Zandria Robinson Fired From University of Memphis for Saying Obviously True Things About Racism in America?

I agree with Zandria Robinson that there is no substance to "whiteness" apart from white supremacy. I say so in my classes and I won't stop saying so.

If, like me, you are legible as a "white" person in terms of the irrational rationality of race in America, you can be anti-racist but you cannot be not-racist: you are a beneficiary of white supremacy and positioned by whiteness to incarnate racist biases. There is no way to be "white" and also "right" when it comes to race in America -- this is a demanding and uncomfortable and often quite heart-breaking recognition -- but surely you will have noticed that to be "black" in white-supremacist America is also demanding, uncomfortable, and heartbreaking? There is no way to be right under racism. Racism is wrong. And the wrongness hurts.

It is surely a measure of white-privilege to fancy that you could opt out of racism in a way that would not cost you something, that you could simply decide your way out of racism by understanding it a bit better. You better believe that black people understand racism a whole lot better than white-allies do, and you certainly don't see that understanding rendering them immune to racist violence, exploitation, and bias. This sort of thinking is almost as bad as would-be anti-racist white folks who seem to expect to be petted and praised for trying to do what they say is the right thing, rather than simply trying to do the right thing because it is the right thing, or who expect special immunity from criticism when they fail to do the right thing because they say they are trying to do the right thing, rather than simply trying harder to do the right thing because they say they are trying to do the right thing.

Robinson's recent comments about the Confederate and US flags are easy for me to sympathize with as well -- I said some roughly similar things in public here. Nothing I am saying now is the least bit original or exemplary on my part. I try to be an ally to people of color in white-racist America but I cannot say that my efforts have ever been worthy of attention or are the least bit extraordinary. They are at best a matter of common decency with a bit of historical awareness thrown in. I don't expect to get fired for saying these sorts of things in teaching contexts -- as I very regularly do -- and nobody should. I don't expect to get a lot of grief for pointing these things out in writing here and there, though this is not the emphasis of my work or my politics.

As far as I can make out, it is nothing but obscene that Zandria Robinson has lost her job over her unpopular but useful public critiques, if that is what has happened here. I can't see that many people have even been paying attention to this apart from a lot of howling reactionaries (anti-civilizational Daily Caller and David Horowitz witch-hunting and book-burning for free-dumb types) who decided to organize to attack a vulnerable academic in anti-intellectual America for trying to teach her students to question their worldviews a bit in the service of equity-in-diversity. I hope she is supported by academic and activist communities and rises to new heights from this attack to continue her work.

UPDATE: The University of Memphis is now saying that Robinson was not fired but has left for a better position -- but their earlier announcement seemed to be shaped in response to right-wing pressure in a way the lead much of the right-wing to celebrate her leaving as a great victory. There would appear to be more to the story than we know now. I sure do hope Robinson was not fired and that she is already moving on to do better things with more support.

Tex Lex

disruption=looting
innovation=repackaging
risk-taking=upward-failing
acceleration=precarization
sharing=sharecropping

Teaching, Atheism and Nonviolence

The least study of the theory and history of nonviolent resistance turns up its conspicuous connection to religious belief. Some of the earliest formulations of the notion appear in foundational Buddhist and Christian texts, the examples of nonviolence readiest to hand tend to have religious movements in tow, Tolstoy, Gandhi, King, Day, Nhat Hanh, and on and on.

The premise of my Berkeley summer intensive course "What Is Compelling?" is that persuasive discourse is a site for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes, not because it is an "outside" to violence -- the naive distinction of persuasion and violence disavows, after all, both the threat of violence that inheres in so much persuasion as well as the deeper trouble that any testimony to violation secures its legibility as such only through a circumscription of norms that constitutes an epistemic violence of its own, rendering other possible testimonies to violation illegible -- but because rhetoric, with its definitive focus on the traffic between literalization and figuration in signification attends to the terms on which these legibilties are conferred and volatized and hence provides the opening for dispute over the ongoing constitution of violence and hence competing claims in dispute that would be nonviolent.

This premise is, whatever else, separable from questions of theology. For me personally, as an atheist and both a scholar and activist of nonviolence, this separability is hardly surprising, but for me that doesn't quite get at the connection at hand, because my interest and commitment to nonviolence was not only preceded by my arrival at atheist conviction but was provoked and shaped by that atheism. Obviously, mine is not the only path to nonviolent commitment -- nor, would it seem, the usual one -- but it is my path, and hence a possible one. For me the arc of the moral universe does not bend toward justice, but bends from just us: that the world is what we make of it and that all we have is one another seems as firm a foundation for nonviolence and the democratization with which it is connected as any faith to my eyes.

That is why it is striking to me how rarely this connection is elaborated in such terms. The Levinasian distinction of discourse from violence (with which the influence of Judith Butler has given me affinities) is leveraged explicitly on the Biblical injunction "Thous Shalt Not Kill"; the Arendtian account that has (unsurprisingly) long been an influence is a formalism (I take quite seriously, on literally her terms, her assertions that "nonviolent politics" is a redundancy and "violent power" a contradiction in terms), regard her assimilation of violence to instrumentality useful but incomplete, and note that when the account is fleshed out, things get theological quite soon after all: forgiveness is a "miracle," political action "redeems" political cycles of retribution, natality resonates with its Augustinian genuflection to "a child is born unto the world," and Eichmann must hang. The Foucauldian supplement of productive power is still mucked in the red thread of disciplinarity, the repressivity of which is (at least chronologically) continuous with the formulation of the power without a Kingly head (it got chopped off, you know). Zizek's little book on violence is some help, perversely enough, but his usual glib recourse to "Lacan" is, I don't know, Jesuitical.

We take up some of these questions in class today, but in a way that reflects my frustration, reading essays claiming pretty much everything but what I would want to myself: various religious believers asserting that atheism supports and implies violent politics, various atheists asserting that religious belief supports and implies violent politics, and strategists of nonviolence who circumvent questions of faith in a way that also divests nonviolence of an ethical dimension.

Priestly Futurists

"Elias Altvall" commented elsewhere in the same Moot I mentioned in the last post, "I see futurologists like priests." To this observation I responded:

This analogy is definitely clearest in the guru-wannabe layer of the organizational archipelago of robocultic sects. But I tend to think the more apt analogy is the crass salesmanship of the middle-managers and PR-glad handlers, barking on cellphones and laser-pointing at PowerPoint slides the latest line in BS.

Consumer capitalist marketing is an endless peddling of stasis as novelty and crap as wish-fulfillment. And I think futurological discourse is just a slightly amplified variation of that dance of death. That most futurologists likely disdain or at any rate fail to grasp their kinship with their more prevalent middle-brow discursive cousins just goes to show that they aren't exactly very sensitive or bright, even as they congratulate themselves on their superior scientificity and visionary genius. No doubt there are plenty of banksters with the same delusions of grandeur.

Neither is it surprising on these terms to see that futurologists so readily fancy themselves parts of futurist "movements" -- eugenic transhumanism, history-shattering singularitarianism, greenwashing geo-engineering, the various techno-immortalisms, plastic/nuclear/nano/3Dprinter-cornucopisms, and so on -- after all, consumer fandoms around Apple gizmos fancy themselves movement no less. In No Logo, Naomi Klein described a company exec declaring Diesel Jeans "a movement."

Think of those self-esteem hucksters and the authors of management technique best-sellers, offering up their vapid but lucrative consolations in packed Vegas auditoriums -- they are the same sort of guru-wannabes some lucky TED-talking futurologists manage to become, spouting slogans and neologisms and offering up their desperately hyperbolized advertorial promises, sex and success, like every empty ad shouting its lies on every screen.

"The Future" -- that would-be heaven of certainty and satisfaction and youthful skin -- is the faith that suffuses our catastrophically stupid society, its deceptive, hyperbolic norms and forms distract and derange us on our way to death as we destroy the world and the weak for no good reason any one of us can say, corrupt priests and dumb postulants all the way down.

No Beginnings: More on Anarchist Pre-Politicism

A couple of days ago I posted a throwaway observation the glibness of which was sure to cause trouble:

Anarchism means "No Beginnings," from archein, "to begin, to rule": There is no need for a word "archism" because "politics" is that word.

In the Moot to that post friend-of-blog "Elias Altvall" made some reasonable objections:

Actually no. Anarchism is derivations from anarchy which is anarchos which translates to without rulers. I understand the decreipt state anarchist movement is in America with the so called "lifestyle" and libertarians but your always your weakest when you desperately tries to make all anarchists and especially historical anarchism (socialism) into the samething. If archism means rulers then why is politics that word. I atleast thought politics original etymological meanings, especially in its aristotelian meaning, was active engagement with ones community structures and decision making. Yet politics as has been referred to since 16th century has always meant the rich and powerful decision making not the peoples, so to speak.

I am pleased to use the occasion to further elaborate my point, especially since the demands of summer teaching intensives seem to rob me of the capacity for original longform posting on topics outside my lectures these days, but conversation still works. Upgraded and adapted from the same Moot:

archon, ruler, derives from archein, to begin, to rule. My point is not to deny the familiar derivation but to point out that beginning is inherent in that ruling, which is less familiar and provocative. That sense is conspicuous in, for example, our "archetype," a comparable derivation, which is the origin/master/model from which subsequent variations/copies arise.

The nature of such rule is citational and reiterative in a performative account of the political of the kind one discerns in works by Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler (which I have always found congenial), in which norms and institutional forms are enacted in an ongoing way, a matter of improvisation within constraints. What matters to me in proposing politics to be in some sense an "archism" is that it highlights the performative character of ruling as acting-in-public, even -- perhaps especially -- in democratizing contexts.

Yes, of course you are right that politics derives from polis, and names the values/experiences emerging from the state of plurality in which one is immersed in settlements/cities. That plurality is the condition in which Arendtian action -- a matter of beginnings or at any rate interruptons introduced into the given with unexpected consequences -- and the performative rematerialization/refiguration of Butler's forceful but flexible public norms. There is nothing desperate, I hope, about this proposal or weak about its premises, tho' of course it may turn out to be wrongheaded like anything one thinks through so theoretically, but it is just meant to be illuminating if unfamiliar.

I do continue to think anarchist theory misses much that is indispensable to a proper conception of the political, and in its evocations of "spontaneous order" -- whether in the market pieties from its right or in the consensus pieties from its left (I leave to the side the unfortunate Propaganda of the Deed and recurring insurrectionist strains, that cannot be wished away, and tend to exhibit the limitations of spontaneism even more forcefully still) -- anarchism tends to be a reactionary disavowal of the contentious plurality recognition of which is the point of departure for political thinking.

This error sometimes yields bad politics on the ground, and definitely yields some terrible sloganeering, but I still think that anarchist-identified activists are often congenial and indispensable allies in democratizing politics practically speaking, usually in spite of the anarchist notions in the name of which they think they are acting (at their best, which is often, activist and artist anarchists are doing vital democratizing work in my view).

Finally, let me note that the querelle des anciens et modernes in its political face is the distinction of a politics conceived as providing occasions for the excellence of the few as against amelioration of hardship for the many. I am not one to deny the abiding reality of plutocratic power throughout history, but surely what is interesting about politics since the 16th century is precisely the democratizing and sometimes revolutionary insurgencies of people-power?

UPDATE: This exchange has continued on in the Moot linked above. Feel free to join in.

Neoliberal Futurology Twitterrant

Futurology is not social science, nor historical analysis, nor policy making, nor cultural criticism, nor philosophical thought.

Futurology is a genre of marketing and promotion. Like all advertising, futurology is deception & consolation peddled as information in the service of wealth accumulation & concentration. Quintessentially neoliberal, futurology sells stasis as progress, exploitation as liberty, violence as virtual, conquest as development.

The suffusion of personal and public life by the norms and forms of promotion and self-promotion is our prevalent religiosity now. Faithful advertising mobilizes irrational passions: Denial -- of aging and death, isolation, insecurity, error, life's contingency and wish-fulfillment fantasies -- of youthful health, sex appeal, easy money, relevance, and control.

In Robot Cults like transhumanism, singularitarianism and immortalism the techno-transcendental religiosity of futurology is conspicuous. But techno-transcendentalism isn't confined to such extremities: it drives venture capitalism, consumer fetishism, advertorial journalism. Futurist sub(cult)ures merely expose the underlying and ubiquitous deception and derangement of the neoliberal-neoconservative epoch.

Syllabus for My "What Is Compelling? Argument, Reconciliation, Obligation" Summer Intensive at Berkeley

Rhetoric 10: The Rhetoric of Argument 
"What Is Compelling? Argument, Reconciliation, Obligation"

Summer 2015, Session A, 10-12.30pm., Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 88 Dwinelle

Instructor, Dale Carrico: dcarrico@sfai.edy; ndaleca@gmail.com

Participation/Attendance/In-Class Activities, 20%; Reading Notebook, 20%; Precis, 2-3pp., 10%; Mid-Term Exam, 25%; Final Paper, 5-6pp., 25%. (Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies)

A Provisional Schedule of Meetings

Week One
May 27 Course Introduction
SKILL SET: Rhetoric as occasional, interested, figurative; The literal as conventional, the figurative as deviant. Definitions: Rhetoric is the facilitation of efficacious discourse and the inquiry into the terms on the basis of which discourse comes to seem efficacious or not.
An argument is a claim supported by reasons and/or evidence.
May 29 Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose
SKILL SET: Reading Critically/Writing Critically; Audience/Intentions; Ethos, Pathos, Logos; Writing A Precis

Week Two
June 1 Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence
SKILL SET: Four Habits of Argumentative Writing: 1. Formulate a Strong Thesis, 2. Define Your Terms, 3, Substantiate/Contextualize, 4, Anticipate Objections; Audience/Intentions; Performativity
June 3 Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail
SKILL SET: Audiences: Sympathetic, Unsympathetic, Apathetic; Intentions: Interrogation, Conviction, Persuasion, Reconciliatio; Rogerian Rhetoric; Writing A Precis
June 5 Randal Amster, Anarchism and Nonviolence: Time for a "Complementarity of Tactics"
Arundhati Roy, War Is Peace
George Ciccariello-Maher, Planet of Slums, Age of Riots
Mike Davis, Slum Ecology
Chris Hedges, Evidence of Things Not Seen
Precis should be posted to the blog by six pm, Thursday, June 4 

Week Three
June 8 William May, "Rising to the Occasion of Our Death"
SKILL SET: The Toulmin Schema
June 10 Workshopping
SKILL SET: Propositional Analysis; Enthymemes, Syllogisms, Formal Fallacies, Informal Fallacies
June 12 Nietzsche, On Truth and the Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense; Workshopping
SKILL SET: Literal/Figurative Language; Figures, Tropes, Schemes; Four Master Tropes

Week Four
June 15 Mid-Term Examination
June 17 Screening and Discussion of the Film, "A History of Violence," dir. Cronenberg
June 19 Tom Beasley, The American Atheist, Atheism and Violence;
Edward Oakes, First Things, Atheism and Violence;
Rabia Terri Harris, Fellowship of Reconciliation, On Islamic Nonviolence
Jeremiah Bowden, Jihad and the Qur'an: The Case for a Non-Violent Interpretation

Week Five
June 22 Frantz Fanon, Concerning Violence from The Wretched of the Earth
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, The Case for Reparations
Richard Rothstein, Economic Policy Institute, From Ferguson to Baltimore: The Fruits of Government Sponsored Segregation
June 24 Hannah Arendt, Reflections On Violence and "Must Eichmann Hang?"
June 26 Workshopping Final Paper: Producing a Strong Thesis; Anticipating Objections; Providing Textual Support

Week Six
June 29 Octavia Butler, Kindred
July 1 Concluding Remarks: Judith Butler, from Undoing Gender and Precarious Life
Final Paper Due

Syllabus for My "Patriarchal Philosophistry" Summer Intensive at Berkeley

Rhet 103A: Approaches and Paradigms in the History of Rhetorical Theory:
Patriarchal Philosophistry

Course Description

Rhetoric was conceived in antiquity as the art of speaking well. But the act of speaking in public was always also a doing of deeds, and even well done it could do you in -- whether one was declaiming in the assemblies and courts of the radical (and radically exclusive) democracies and anti-democracies of the Greek city-states, or drawing up ideal Republics in dreamy discourses among scholars, or engaging in the rough and tumble of state-craft and electioneering in the all too real and corrupt Republic of Rome, or circulating satires among sardonic snickers in the shadow of Emperors. In Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian engagements with and through rhetoric delineated critical, deliberative, civic, pedagogical visions of human agencies fraught with inhumanity.

The societies of Greek, Roman, and Christian antiquity were conspicuously patriarchal, they were societies in which Homeric heroes made history and conquered death with great words and deeds in an aspirational fantasy of masculine agency; they were horrific rape cultures in which women were conceived as beasts, slaves and dutiful wives, a patriarchy finding perhaps its quintessential expression in the Roman paterfamilias, the authoritarian male head of the household who held the power of life and death over his children, female relatives, and household slaves. But in philosophy and in poetry, in Greek tragedies and in Roman comedies we find glimpses of a considerably richer and more complicated world of gendered relations, erotic imaginations, and human possibilities, we encounter profound anxieties, ambivalences, and resistances to patriarchal practices and prejudices.

Although we will be reading texts in which philosophy declares its opposition to rhetoric's opportunism and deceit, we will read them as rhetorical skirmishes in the politics of truth-telling. Although we will read discourses on civic deliberation, we will read them as anxious testaments to ubiquitous corruption and violence. Although we will be reading orations aspiring to a world of Heroes and of Men, we will read them as brutal reflections on a world in which many were not heroes and many were not men. We will be reading works by Aristophanes, Aristotle, Augustine, Marcus and Quintus Cicero, Euripides, Gorgias, Homer, Juvenal, Libanus, Petronius, Plato, Quintilian, Sappho, Seneca, Suetonius, Terence, and Thucydides. All of the readings will be available either online or in a course reader.

Rhet 103A: Patriarchal Convention and Conviction in Classical Antiquity
Summer 2015

Instructor: Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu, ndaleca@gmail.com
Course Blog: http://patriarchalphilosophistry.blogspot.com
Session A, May 26-July 2, 2015, TWR 4-6.30pm, 160 Dwinelle

Participation/Attendance/In-Class Activities, 10%; Reading Notebook, 30%; Precis 1, 2-3pp., 15%; Precis 2, 2-3pp., 15%; Final Paper, 5-6pp., 30%. (Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies)

Provisional Schedule of Meetings

Week One

May 26 –- Introduction, and a selection of poems by Sappho
May 27 –- Homer, Books I, II, IX, and XXIV from the Iliad, Gorgias, "Encomium of Helen"
May 28 –- Thucydides, Books I and II and The Melian Dialogue from the History of the Peloponnesian War, Plato Menexenus

Week Two

June 2 –- Euripides, Hecuba, Plato, Protagorus
June 3 –- Plato, Apology, and also Book V and Book VII from Republic
June 4 –- Aristophanes, Wasps; Plato, Symposium

Week Three

June 9 -- Plato, Gorgias, Phaedrus
June 10 –- Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book I and Book II and from Topics
June 11 –- Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book III and from Poetics

Week Four

June 16 –- Marcus Tullius Cicero, Against Verres, Against Cataline, Against Antony -- First Essay Due (5-6pp.)
June 17 –- Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Ideal Orator
June 18 –- Terence, Eunuchus; Quintus Tullius Cicero, Commentariolum Petitionis

Week Five

June 23 –- Juvenal, Satires
June 24 -- Quintillian, from Institutio Oratoria: Book I -- Preface, Chapters 1-3; Book III -- Chapters 1-5; Book VI -- Chapter 1; Book VII -- Chapters 8-10; Book VIII -- Chapter 1-3, and also Chapter 6; Book IX -- Chapter 1; Book XII -- Chapter 1
June 25 –- Workshopping Final Paper

Week Six

June 30 –- Suetonius, Caligula; Seneca, Apocolocyntosis (divi) Claudii
July 1 –- Gaius Petronius, Satyricon
July 2 -- Augustine, from City of God, Read as much as you will, but Books I and XI are crucial, Libanius, "The Silence of Socrates" -- Final Essay Due (5-6pp.)

Intolerable

It is intolerant, not tolerant, to tolerate intolerance.

GOPuhDUMpum

What do Republicans call a hundred clowns climbing out of a clown car? A deep bench.

A hundred clowns walk into a bar. It's a Republican presidential primary.

How many clowns does it take to screw in a light bulb? The same one clown it takes for Republicans to screw the country.

Why did a hundred clowns cross the road? They were all Republicans running for president.

Republican clowns destroy the country. We call it "The Aristocrats."

SFAI Adjuncts Invoke San Precario

On bended knee
We pray to Thee
For the Majority
Of SFAI Faculty
Living in Uncertainty

How Do You Solve A Problem Like the Neoliberal Academy?

How do you solve a problem like the neoliberal academy?
How do you catch their spin and pin it down?
How do you find a word that means the neoliberal academy?
A PR release? A digital app? A killer clown?

Many a thing you know they'd like to sell us.
Many a fraud we ought to understand!
But how do you make them stop,
And listen as standards drop?
How can you steal supply and meet demand?

Oh, how do you solve a problem like the neoliberal academy?
How do you eat the future with your hands?

Goods and money get confused,
All the teachers just get used,
While administrators multiply at will...
Unpredictable your fate,
Until Death demands his date:
You’re a cypher! You're a loser! Take a pill!

All that's solid melts in air,
Individualize your hair,
Education's just like tee vee, if you're hip!
MOOCify the classroom, stat!
All the think tanks tell you that.
School's a TED Talk!
Feudalism!
Sinking ship!

How do you solve a problem like the neoliberal academy?
How do you stop them while they tear it down?
How do you find the words that scream neoliberal academy?
A faculty of temps? Thought Leaders and pimps? A company town?

Many a con you know they'll try to sell us
Until the day we finally understand,
That nothing will make them stop,
But fighting back they drop!
Can't you see ruination 'cross the land?

Oh, how do you solve a problem like the neoliberal academy?
Now you must see the future's in our hands.

"Get Out Of My Office!" President Charles Desmarais Responds to His Students and Faculty

Yesterday, SFAI student Drew Grasso invited visiting faculty members to join him at his scheduled meeting with President Charles Desmarais.

The purpose of the meeting: to give the president a student's perspective on the need for a more stable, secure, cohesive faculty to provide continuity and consistency, and to deliver a letter from visiting faculty (see full text below) asking the president to intervene in contract negotiations and instruct his administration to make an acceptable counter proposal on job security.

President Charles Desmarais's response to his student and faculty? "Get out of my office!" Visiting faculty and students posted a letter to Charles Desmarais (see below) all over campus after he refused to accept it in his office.

Since he refused to listen to us or read the letter in his office, we made sure he would see it by posting it all around campus. But his utter disregard for 85% of his faculty--and even students--is unacceptable. We need to make sure he gets our message. If he won't listen to us in his office or in contract negotiations, maybe he will listen to us at Gala Vernissage?

While Vernissage is a celebration of our MFA students' work and talent, and Gala Vernissage raises funds for the noble purpose of student scholarships, there is no better time or place to get his full, undivided attention.

Donors and students also deserve to know how SFAI's administration has treated and plans to continue treating the majority of their faculty. Students have volunteered to help make our protest party outside Gala Vernissage a memorable--and meaningful--event, and will also be wearing "Adjuncts Unite" buttons in support of us.

But the party would not be complete without the backbone of SFAI, the visiting faculty.

Join us to tell Charles that justice won't wait another semester!

See you there! Wednesday, May 13, 5 PM at Fort Mason Center, Pier 2 (Herbst Pavilion), 2 Marina Blvd., SF.

In Solidarity, The SFAI Visiting Faculty Bargaining Team

Full text of the letter to President Charles Desmarais from the SFAI VF Bargaining Team and Action Team:

President Charles Desmarais:

For many years now, more than three-quarters of the teaching taking place at the San Francisco Art Institute has been the work of adjuncts who have no job security, who can be dismissed at the discretion of the administration without notice, who are provided no benefits, professional recognition, or seniority even after contributing decades of exemplary service to the community. We have long been described as “Visiting Faculty” at SFAI, even those of us who have been an integral part of the work of the school for decades. Lately, we have been described instead as “Contract Faculty,” a no less ironic designation since our “contracts” confer on us no security, no status, no stability, no respect for our service and loyalty, no recognized stake in the community to which we devote so much of our lives.

Given all this, it is unsurprising that last year adjuncts at SFAI voted to be represented by SEIU in unprecedented numbers. And this year we have been negotiating the terms of a new adjunct faculty contract with the administration. Throughout this process of negotiations, our priorities have been the same as the ones that impelled us to organize in the first place: we have sought real job security, recognitions of excellence and seniority, and a greater voice in governance to reflect the unique insights emerging from our experience doing so much of the actual teaching of the actual students for whom SFAI actually exists.

Throughout the year we have made many proposals and regularly offered compromises in the face of administration counter-proposals, proceeding in good faith, but the bargaining progress has recently stalled. The administration’s representatives have become less timely in responding to our proposals in what has begun to seem an effort to run out the clock as the academic year draws to a close and public attention strays from the injurious impacts of administration policies. More and more unionized adjuncts with many years of service to SFAI are finding that they will no longer be offered courses for the coming year; meanwhile, advertisements for new replacement instructors grow apace. The most recent administration proposal has not remotely met any of our concerns or reflected the least awareness of our core values: it refuses to provide any job security, any recognition of excellent or long service, any relevant stake in governance. This is worse than unacceptable, it is an outrageous expression of indifference and disrespect to the history that brought us to this moment of distress.

In a communication to tenured faculty -- but apparently not to adjuncts -- Dean Schreiber expressed incredulity at our response to the administration’s blanket rejection of our key demands, then went on to explain that any “job security proposal… must take into account our obligation to the entire institution to create a system that provides the level of flexibility that we need.” It is very clear “the level of flexibility” that the administration thinks it “needs” amounts to arbitrary discretion over hiring and firing at will, precisely the intolerable state of affairs that inaugurated this dispute. So long as “flexibility” amounts to absolute unaccountable control over the terms of our employment it is antithetical to any security for the dedicated, talented, professionals who do most of the teaching at SFAI. It should go without saying that the administration’s “obligation to the entire institution” actually includes obligations to all the people who are working here, to the maintenance of a community that includes us, and also requires support of ongoing academic standards and traditions and a shared ethos that is ill-served by a precarious, short-term, isolated, ill-respected cohort of teachers.

In your welcome message at the official SFAI website, you speak of the Institute as a “tight-knit community of peers and accomplished faculty” and that word “faculty” links to a directory that includes us all. You say that “SFAI must apply its distinct culture and long-held values in a contemporary context.” We are sure you understand that we are indispensable to that distinct culture and that we are doing the work of applying those shared values. You immediately recognized the verdict of our vote to unionize and expressed a commitment to work with us on what you agreed were shared concerns. That is why we are exhorting you now to become involved in the bargaining at this crucial moment. Come to the table yourself and offer up an acceptable and respectful proposal to restore the good faith bargaining to which we must all remain committed.

Over the next two weeks there will be a number of events celebrating the accomplishments of our wonderful students at the close of another academic year. As you know these events will be thronged with students, donors, alumni, celebrated figures and press. You should expect that we will be a presence in these events, educating all the interested (and often, we fear, misinformed) stakeholders to this institution about our circumstances and the present status of our bargaining. Let us be clear, we are as dedicated to and proud of our students as only their teachers could be, and we are more thrilled than anybody to celebrate their work and achievements with our community. The information we provide the public will not disrupt their events or distract from their accomplishments. If you could provide a tentative proposal by May 12 on job security that satisfies the Bargaining Team that administration is finally showing real movement reflecting our demands for a system recognizing tiers of seniority, providing a path for advancement including multi-year contracts, offering a grandfathering system to recognize the long service of many adjuncts, and a greater voice in our coursework and school governance you can be sure that the information we provide the public would reflect that promising change and provide a congenial end-of-term for all.

SFAI Visiting Faculty Bargaining Team and Action Team

An Open Letter to SFAI President Charles Desmarais

President Charles Desmarais:

For many years now, more than three-quarters of the teaching taking place at the San Francisco Art Institute has been the work of adjuncts who have no job security, who can be dismissed at the discretion of the administration without notice, who are provided no benefits, professional recognition, or seniority even after contributing decades of exemplary service to the community. We have long been described as "Visiting Faculty" at SFAI, even those of us who have been an integral part of the work of the school for decades. Lately, we have been described instead as "Contract Faculty," a no less ironic designation since our "contracts" confer on us no security, no status, no stability, no respect for our service and loyalty, no recognized stake in the community to which we devote so much of our lives.

Given all this, it is unsurprising that last year adjuncts at SFAI voted to be represented by SEIU in unprecedented numbers. And this year we have been negotiating the terms of a new adjunct faculty contract with the administration. Throughout this process of negotiations, our priorities have been the same as the ones that impelled us to organize in the first place: we have sought real job security, recognitions of excellence and seniority, and a greater voice in governance to reflect the unique insights emerging from our experience doing so much of the actual teaching of the actual students for whom SFAI actually exists.

Throughout the year we have made many proposals and regularly offered compromises in the face of administration counter-proposals, proceeding in good faith, but the bargaining progress has recently stalled. The administration's representatives have become less timely in responding to our proposals in what has begun to seem an effort to run out the clock as the academic year draws to a close and public attention strays from the injurious impacts of administration policies. More and more unionized adjuncts with many years of service to SFAI are finding that they will no longer be offered courses for the coming year; meanwhile, advertisements for new replacement instructors grow apace. The most recent administration proposal has not remotely met any of our concerns or reflected the least awareness of our core values: it refuses to provide any job security, any recognition of excellent or long service, any relevant stake in governance. This is worse than unacceptable, it is an outrageous expression of indifference and disrespect to the history that brought us to this moment of distress.

In a communication to tenured faculty -- but apparently not to adjuncts -- Dean Schreiber expressed incredulity at our response to the administration's blanket rejection of our key demands, then went on to explain that any "job security proposal… must take into account our obligation to the entire institution to create a system that provides the level of flexibility that we need." It is very clear "the level of flexibility" that the administration thinks it "needs" amounts to arbitrary discretion over hiring and firing at will, precisely the intolerable state of affairs that inaugurated this dispute. So long as "flexibility" amounts to absolute unaccountable control over the terms of our employment it is antithetical to any security for the dedicated, talented, professionals who do most of the teaching at SFAI. It should go without saying that the administration's "obligation to the entire institution" actually includes obligations to all the people who are working here, to the maintenance of a community that includes us, and also requires support of ongoing academic standards and traditions and a shared ethos that is ill-served by a precarious, short-term, isolated, ill-respected cohort of teachers.

In your welcome message at the official SFAI website, you speak of the Institute as a "tight-knit community of peers and accomplished faculty" and that word "faculty" links to a directory that includes us all. You say that "SFAI must apply its distinct culture and long-held values in a contemporary context." We are sure you understand that we are indispensable to that distinct culture and that we are doing the work of applying those shared values. You immediately recognized the verdict of our vote to unionize and expressed a commitment to work with us on what you agreed were shared concerns. That is why we are exhorting you now to become involved in the bargaining at this crucial moment. Come to the table yourself and offer up an acceptable and respectful proposal to restore the good faith bargaining to which we must all remain committed.

Over the next two weeks there will be a number of events celebrating the accomplishments of our wonderful students at the close of another academic year. As you know these events will be thronged with students, donors, alumni, celebrated figures and press. You should expect that we will be a presence in these events, educating all the interested (and often, we fear, misinformed) stakeholders to this institution about our circumstances and the present status of our bargaining. Let us be clear, we are as dedicated to and proud of our students as only their teachers could be, and we are more thrilled than anybody to celebrate their work and achievements with our community. The information we provide the public will not disrupt their events or distract from their accomplishments. If you could provide a tentative proposal by on job security that satisfies the Bargaining Team that administration is finally showing real movement reflecting our demands for a system recognizing tiers of seniority, providing a path for advancement including multi-year contracts, offering a grandfathering system to recognize the long service of many adjuncts, and a greater voice in our coursework and school governance you can be sure that the information we provide the public would reflect that promising change and provide a congenial end-of-term for all.


SFAI Visiting Faculty Bargaining Team and Action Team

***
BACKGROUND:

San Francisco Art Institute Touts Diego Rivera Fresco Celebrating Labor Politics While Engaging in Union Busting
It's Now Or Never: An Adjunct Responds to SFAI's Latest Talking Points
It's Not Just SEIU They Oppose, That's Just the Line They've Settled On
The Willfulness of the "At Will" Academy
SFAI's Adjunct Union Voting Commences -- As Does the Latest and Last Union-Busting Gambit
SFAI Adjuncts Vote Overwhelmingly to Unionize With SEIU!

So, Just How Large Can A "Lesser" Evil Grow Before It Becomes Too Evil For Me?

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, a question is asked of a certain democratic socialist of your acquaintance who has the temerity to support the less progressive and occasionally quite awful by my lights Hillary Clinton:

How large can a "lesser" evil grow before it becomes too much evil for you?

Ethically? Morally? I condemn evil by my lights as evil in no uncertain terms. Always. Just read through my archive to discern whether this green anti-racist anti-militarist vegetarian socialist feminist atheist queer teacher and writer and activist passes muster by the reckoning of your moral compass, my friend.

But how evil can the lesser evil get before it no longer recommends itself over the greater politically? Let me be as clear as I can be: ANY difference that makes a difference is enough of a difference to adjudicate a political decision to vote one way or another.

I make a lot of fun of what I see as falsely equivalent "a plague on both house" complaints about (obviously often awful) Democrats, ridiculing these as amounting to treating voting as looking for a dream date or perfect parent or Revolutionary Daddy or what have you. But, putting the point more modestly, you really do seem to think voting for a candidate is an endorsement of their every policy in some sense. What nonsense! Politicians scarcely know what their policies will even play out as in the scrum of events themselves, for heaven's sake. I'm nearing fifty years old and there hasn't been a President whose every policy I was remotely close to endorsing my whole life. What part of green anti-racist anti-militarist vegetarian socialist feminist atheist queer in the United States of America are you not getting? But do I vote in every election every time? Oh, yes, I do! Trust that.

I am a broken record on this score. Let me repeat the chestnut once more: The lesser of two evils is still evil, but the difference between them can still make a difference. Ethics Is Not Politics.

Look, I'm all for uncompromising ethical and factual and aesthetic stands, but to demand them of political compromises in a diverse shared world is no sign of high principles but of a straightforward mis-recognition of the nature of politics -- especially what passes for representative politics in capitalist countries!

Why the repeated recourse to atrocity porn? Parading all the war crimes and rapes you want is quite beside the point actually at hand. Can you possibly be self-congratulatory enough to imagine you know more or care more about such atrocities than I do? Because I am a pragmatic voter, among the other ways in which I engage in political struggle? You don't know me very well, to say the least.

Partisan politics, especially the partisan politics focused on voting and contributions of time and money and that sort of thing are not the place for making ethical stands. Perhaps running for office, or organizing campaigns to inspire legislative outcomes come closer. Certainly broader educational and agitational spaces of action are fine places for such unqualified judgments. At any rate, it isn't unless politics in the other domains I mentioned has done the real work of preparing the way for viable partisan politics on such questions. That simply isn't what voting is for, or usually even should be for.

Perhaps you lack the stomach for the debased choices that happen at the level of voting for the best actually-existing candidate actually on offer, or the heartbreaking reconciliations at the heart of legislative reform. But don't expect me to admire you for it, or to pretend that you are a more ferocious activist for justice and sanity in history than I am because I can walk and chew gum at the same time. If you can't vote for the lesser of two evils to restrain the greater of them -- all the while condemning the evil for the evil it is and organizing to defeat it or expressing yourself creatively to change general perceptions to better accord with your sense of that evil -- then I just think you are being lazy, irresponsible, and narcissistic.

Voting is certainly usually insufficient to achieve justice, but it remains necessary all the same. I can't say I admire those who confine their politics to voting and yet declare themselves principled, but I have less patience still for those who refrain from the costly demands of voting in the compromised service of principle and who would pretend this is the sign of their principle. At best, it indicates profound ignorance, at worst it is privileged self-indulgence.

Calls For Nonviolence Can Be Calls for Violence

Not every reaction and testimony to the suffering of violence is a form of organized non-violence, but neither is every call to "non-violence" a form of organized non-violence. As an advocate and, to this day, a teacher of nonviolent civil resistance and nonviolent revolutionary organizing, and as an activist trained in nonviolence in the 1990s as part of Queer Nation Atlanta with the King Center, I am disgusted by the superficial appropriation of nonviolent terminology to police false and facile respectability politics and enable privileged beneficiaries of systematic violence to indulge in self-congratulatory castigations of sufferers of that violence. Nonviolent critique and resistance exposes normalized violence and creates and transforms crises to elicit collaboration from the sufferers and beneficiaries of violence alike to overcome that violence. Collusion in the violence of the status quo is the furthest thing from non-violence, it is violence. White supremacy itself is a riot that has come to be mistaken in the long centuries of its relentless and catastrophic life for law and order.

Smart Or Spy?

Whenever a gadget is peddled to you as "smart," substitute the word "spy" and ask yourself if you still want the dumb thing.

Richard Jones on My Critique of Transhumanist/Singularitarian Futurisms

Richard Jones is a Professor of Physics and the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Sheffield in the UK. He writes quite a lot about public science policy, and these days he has been elaborating a forceful perspective on public investment in innovation, but he is surely best known by readers of my blog as the author of Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life, a book about both the reality and some of the speculative projections that attach to nanoscale technoscience.

Jones has written several contrarian pieces over the years about the hyperbolic expectations that freight the popular imagination of nanotechnology resulting from what I would call superlative futurological handwaving by the likes of Ray Kurzweil and Eric Drexler, and lately he has taken on another superlative futurological proposal (one to which I have devoted no small of attention myself), so-called, mind uploading.

Because Jones criticizes these imaginary techniques from a technical perspective attuned to the actual scientific consensus in the relevant fields his writing are different from my own, but like the writings of Athena Andreadis -- who is also a working scientist ferociously critical of techno-immortalist hyperbole and evo-psycho reductionism -- Jones is also aware of the cultural and rhetorical dimensions that play out in transhumanist and singularitarian and nano-cornucopiast discourses and takes seriously that much of the seeming force and plausibility of futurological belief does not ultimately derive from its technoscientific claims and hence neither is it effectively engaged simply by exposing the deficiencies in these claims.

I am happy to say that just as I have learned quite a bit by reading Jones' technical criticisms of futurological fancies, he has often seemed to appreciate my own rhetorical criticism (which is not to imply that he agrees with me on particulars), and in his most recent piece Does Transhumanism Matter? Jones has done me the extraordinary compliment of summarizing in a scrupulous and sympathetic way some of the key themes of a piece of mine Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains in a way that reveals the complementarity of our critical vantages. I strongly recommend Jones' piece to those who find my critique congenial but who may find my way of writing -- emerging out of a lifetime love of paradoxical literature exacerbated by my training in dense critical theory -- a chore: Richard Jones, again like Athena Andreadis, may be the graceful and also more concise and clear writer you are pining for.

I cannot say that I found much if anything to disagree with in Jones' reading. And so I will simply mention a few things I was especially pleased to see in Jones piece. The first of these was that Jones takes seriously the political thrust of my critique of futurology, which I would not necessarily have expected and was enormously gratified to see revealed:

To Carrico, there is a continuity between the mainstream futurologists – “the quintessential intellectuals propping up the neoliberal order” – and the “superlative” futurology of the transhumanists, with its promises of material abundance through nanotechnology, perfect wisdom through artificial intelligence, and eternal life through radical life extension. The respect with which these transhumanist claims are treated by the super-rich elite of Silicon Valley provides the link. One can make a good living telling rich and powerful people what they want to hear, which is generally that it’s right that they’re rich and powerful, and that in the future they will become more so (and perhaps will live for ever into the bargain)... One could argue that tranhumanism/singularitarianism constitutes the state religion of Californian techno-neoliberalism, and like all state religions its purpose is to justify the power of the incumbents.

I was also pleased that Jones emphasized my proposal that transhumanist futurisms are not so much opposed to their most conspicuous critics, the various "bioconservative naturalists," as complementary to and co-dependent on them:

Another prominent critique of transhumanism comes from the conservative, often religious, strand of thought sometimes labelled “bioconservatives”. Carrico strongly dissociates himself from this point of view, and indeed regards these two apparently contending points of view, not as polar opposites, but as “a longstanding clash of reactionary eugenic parochialisms”. Bioconservatives regard the “natural” as a moral category, and look back to an ideal past which never existed, just as the ideal future that the transhumanists look forward to will never exist either. Carrico sees a eugenic streak in both mindsets, as well as an intolerance of diversity and an unwillingness to allow people to choose what they actually want. It’s this diversity that Carrico wants to keep hold of, as we talk, not of The Future, but of the many possible futures that could emerge from the proper way democracy should balance the different desires and wishes of many different people.

If I have the least quibble with Jones' understanding of my critique it comes when he distinguishes his own optimism from my skepticism:

One can certainly construct... lists of regrets for previous technologies didn’t live up to their promises, and one should certainly try and learn from them. I would want to sound more optimistic, and point out that what this list illustrates is not that we shouldn’t have set out to develop those technologies, but that we should have steered them down more congenial roads, and perhaps that we could have done so had we created better political and economic circumstances. Ultimately, I think I do believe that there has been progress.

Of course, I quite agree that wonderful scientific discoveries and clever useful inventions have been made that are worthy of celebration, even in the midst of a generation of tech bubbles and irrationally exuberant libertechbrotarian con-artisty. I am, after all, as big a NASA and renewable energy/agriculture/tramsportation and universal healthcare geek as anybody I have ever met.

What I specifically insist on is that progress is always [1] progress toward a specified end, and that [2] politically speaking democratic progress is progress in the direction of equity-in-diversity, and that [3] technoscientific vicisstitudes, to be progressive in my sense, must equitably distribute the costs, risks, and benefits of change to the diversity of their stakeholders by their lights. Historically speaking, the chief beneficiaries of technoscientific developments have only rarely been the same as the ones who have borne the brunt of their costs and risks, and I refuse to describe such outcomes as progressive -- even if generations later I must count myself among the beneficiaries of the compulsory and unnecessary sacrifice of multitudes myself. What should be clear about such a perspective is that it is scarcely a comment on "technology" at all, but on the reactionary plutocratic politics that governs these injustices.

That I address my concerns and pin my hopes for progressive change to the hearing of an audience that shows every sign of reluctance in the main to be distracted in their pleasures by awareness of their real costs in the long term and to majorities of fellow earthlings seems to me to be the surest evidence of my optimism, if anything. I actually don't think Jones fails to recognize this in my work or disagrees with the conviction particularly -- I just think he likes to strike a balance of cheer with his denunciations and has more patience than I do with coddling readily alienated potential allies prone to defensiveness about their complicity in any too sweeping a critique of the status quo the amplification of which is so much of what passes for "The Future" of the futurologists. As I said, I lack the patient temperament to sustain such an approach for long, but I happily concede its force and consider myself lucky to have such a reader and ally as Jones who does.

RJ Escow and I Talk About AI As Artificial Imbecillence on The Zero Hour