A Stiegler Follow Up Post

Peter Gratton links to my review of Stiegler's For a New Critique of Political Economy and notes:

I would think Devin would question some of the Marxian categories he introduces–the task of some of his current work–but I think he brings them up not to say Stiegler is wrong because he’s fallen afoul of doctrinaire Marxism, but simply that if you’re going to critique Marx, you better get him right.

Discussing Marx--without becoming mired in the numerous debates over Marx and Marxist theory--in the forum of a book review can be challenging, especially in discussions of political economy, where it is quite easy to come off as dogmatic. Peter thankfully points out that this is not what I am doing. And yet, unfortunately, my recent work on Rancière and Marx has yet to see the light of day in published form, which means the reader sees the results of the work, and not the process of critique behind it. 

What I am trying to do, in the review of Stiegler, is discuss his work in relation to those aspects of Marx's thought that I think have (or should have) bearing on contemporary debates. If we're going to talk about political economy, then I think we have to talk about expropriation and class within capitalism, and if we're going to talk about neoliberalism, then--following David Harvey--I think it is necessary to discuss aspects of what he calls accumulation by dispossession. Especially if you're going to pay tribute the to the 150th anniversary of Marx's Contributions to a Critique of Political Economy (1859).

But I'm doing more in other parts of the review than using Marx as a heuristic device for criticizing Stiegler. So, when I bring up the distinction between objectification (Vergegenständlichung) and alienation or externalization (Entfremdung or Entäußerung) from the 1844 manuscripts, I'm taking the point very seriously. If you read Marx through French debates (post-Althusser or post-Foucault), the difference between objectification and alienation will not be on your map, as Althusser dismisses, as we all know, much of the early Marx as too humanist--not to mention that Marx's work was dismissed by Foucault as an anthropologizing discourse--think The Order of Things, the sand on the beach, etc. But I came to this problem through Lukacs, or I used to come at these problems after Althusser and Foucault, until Lukacs (and, since he doesn't get enough credit, Karl Korsch) convinced me otherwise.

That aside, I think one of the central problems of the Stiegler's and Agamben's of contemporary philosophy is to mistake the fact that humans produce things with alienation. That is, you make something, or, in Agamben's more extreme moments, use language, then you're already captured in an apparatus, and thus ultimately alienated. The distinction between objectification and alienation is to differentiate between humans mediating, through making things, their relations with each other and with nature, and a historically situated mode of production, capitalism, which expropriates so much of human activity. If you don't, you run the risk of bemoaning cellular phones as the worst and most ubiquitous of apparatuses.

But it's not just the Heideggerian approach that runs into trouble, there's a Sartrean version of the same problem, which causes trouble for Rancière: the question turns on what it means to activate and maintain egalitarian practices without them reifying into inegalitarian institutions. I'm still working this out, but I can say this question is the reason that the problem of objectification and alienation has become one of my concerns.

Dr.Strangelove, Iran, the US, and Israel

Today, Sunday December 4, Iran claims it has shot down a an unmanned American drone over its eastern territory. David Goldstein of McClatchy Newspapers reports:

The incident comes at a time of rising tension with Iran over its nuclear enrichment program. Tehran insists that the program will be only for domestic use, but Western nations and Israel, in particular, remain highly skeptical and worry that the true purpose is to develop nuclear weapons.

The real concern is not about Iran attacking the US or Israel. The issue is Iran being a nuclear big-shot just like Israel and the US. Israel is so concerned that they might attack Iran with or without US help or approval. The Israeli news source Haaretz shows how Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is drumming up for war. He publicly stated:

"Great statesmen as well as friends of the Jews and of Zionism" warned Ben-Gurion that declaring a Jewish state in 1948 would bring an invasion of Arab armies and a "grave and difficult battle", Netanyahu said.

"He understood full well the decision carried a heavy price, but he believed not making that decision had a heavier price," Netanyahu said. "We are all here today because Ben-Gurion made the right decision at the right moment.”

In other words, even though the US and some Israeli officials are telling him attacking Iran is a bad idea he still may do it. O what a dangerous political game. Who is advocating suicide bombing now?

Since US President Bush, several messages have been received by enemies of the US (and to some of its allies such as Israel). If a country does not possess weapons of mass destruction it can and will be invaded. Iraq knows best. If a country stops its nuclear program and cooperates with the US, along other Western powers, it can still get invaded and bombed. As Qaddafi of Libya learned the hard way. What Iran knows is that it may get attacked with or without nuclear weapons, but it most certainly will not get attacked if it does have them. This is why countries go nuclear. It is supposed to be a deterrent. It's a gamble. Every nation with these weapons of mass destruction play a risky game of "Russian" roulette. The ones that already have them can also get delusional. Netanyahu thinks he is Ben-Gurion ready to take risks and recreate Israel despite all odds. I refer him to Karl Marx's thoughts on Louis Bonaparte:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Netanyahu is a farce. He acts as if he'll keep stability and peace in the region. It looks like he may set off another goddamned war.

I thought a clip from Stanley Kubrick's Dr.Strangelove(1964) would be quite fitting.

This Semester...

...is the first semester during which I have no institutional affiliation as either a student or professor since I started my college studies in the mid-1990s. True, I had a year between my Master's and PhD studies, but even then I spent that time taking French and German courses to improve my language skills. I'm not unemployed, however. But I do have to figure out how to balance working 40 hours a week while completing several commitments (publications and conferences, such as the upcoming CSCP meeting) that I took on over the summer under the premise that I would be working at the University of Ottawa.

Just in case you were curious, I do have teaching for the Winter Semester, in the Department of Visual Arts, reprising my "Art Theories" course, although I will be changing up a lot of the material.

Finally, I have been reading Kevin B. Anderson's Marx at the Margins, which ought to be the handbook if you're reconsidering Marx's writings on nationalism, ethnicity, and non-western societies (yes, I pretty much cribbed that from the subtitle), as well as his works on the American Civil War or Ireland. There's a passage from Marx's ethnological notebooks (as cited by Anderson) that is just waiting for Zizek to turn it into a post-Marxist slogan. Marx writes:

the seemingly supreme independent existence of the state itself is only an illusion, since the state in all its forms [is] only an excresence [sic] of society.

Descartes's Philosophy: "Made in Bavaria"

Over the last few days, I have been putting the finishing touches on a paper on what I call "Cartesian egalitarianism," which discusses the work of Descartes, Poullain de la Barre, Beauvoir, and Rancière. As you can imagine, getting the connections between these four into focus has been fairly time-consuming, especially the effort of keeping the paper right near the upper limits of the word count (9000 words, if you're curious). Which is why I haven't been posting much. 

At some point, while reading and writing about Descartes, I had the vague recollection that Schelling had made an odd 'nationalist in an imagined communities kind of way' comment about Descartes in his On the History of Modern Philosophy. These kind of comments are usually associated with Hegel, but Schelling was not inoculated against them. Turning to page 45, we discover that Descartes's philosophy was "made in Bavaria" (note that it also ends with a reference to Spinoza):

A special peculiarity lies for us in the fact that this beginning of completely free philosophy was, to all appearances, made in Bavaria, that, therefore, the foundation of modern philosophy was laid here. Descartes had, as he says himself in his essay De Methodo, which I take this opportunity to recommend to everyone as a splendid exercise, come to Germany in order to see the beginning of the Thirty Years' War; he had been present under Maximilian I at the battle on the white mountain and the capture of Prague, where, though, he primarily only made inquiries about Tycho Brahe and his unpublished work. In 1619, when he returned to the camp from Frankfurt, from the coronation of Ferdinand II, he had his winter quarters in a place on the Bavarian border, where he, as he says, found no one with whom he would have liked to converse, and there he conceived (aged twenty-three) the first ideas of his philosophy, which he, however, published much later. In the same way as Descartes began to philosophise in Bavaria, he later found in Princess Elisabeth, daughter of the unfortunate Elector of the Palatinate, Karl Friedrich, the so-called Winter King, a great and devoted admirer, just as it was later again a prince from the house of the Palatinate who became Spinoza's protector.

The irony of these kinds of statements is that they provide ample evidence for Marx's sarcastic remark that "we Germans have experienced our future history in thought, in philosophy. We are philosophical contemporaries without being historical ones. German philosophy is the ideal prolongation of German history."

Jason Read on Jameson's Representing Capital

We've all, I know, been waiting for the publication of Fredric Jameson's Representing Capital. Though I have not yet acquired a copy, I should be getting it soon, while reading his Hegel Variations is still on my mind. In the meantime, Jason Read has posted (on my birthday no less, not that he knew that...but I digress) some thoughts on a few of the central themes: separation, unemployment, alienation, and extinguishing (auslöchen). This passage caught my eye, though the whole post is worth reading:

The interest in this extinguishing of history can perhaps be read as an explanation of Jameson’s most often cited remark, the one about how it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. History is effaced not just in the commodity but also in the eternal present of the precarious employment situation, where all those years worked do not add up, or they do, but in the form of an increasingly alien capital, in machinery and the wealth of the company. Separation and extinguished are ultimately terms that make it possible to make sense of both Capital and capitalism.

Going to Texas to Read Marx

I'll be heading to the Society for Social and Political Philosophy's roundtable on Marx's Capital, Volume 1, tomorrow. The schedule is up here, and it looks like a strong selection of presentations. I'll be giving a paper entitled "Equality and Differentiating Totality: Reading Marx after Rancière," in which I argue two things:

1. That Rancière's principle (as he sometimes calls it) of equality must be thought as a contribution to a praxis that seeks to produce forms of social relations that both break the governmentality of elitist expertise and overturn the logic of capital.
2. That his critique of the intersection of state functions of expropriation and the logics of capital under neoliberalism should be complimented by David Harvey's work on the uneven geography of capitalism, including his analyses of capital accumulation and accumulation by dispossession.

Before going, with the news of people fighting the attack against unions in Wisconsin and Indiana (among other states), I would like to mention that my travel is funded by our part-time professors union's (the APTPUO) travel grant fund. Yet another benefit of union membership.

Reading Capital

I finished reading the first volume of Capital yesterday. However, as most of you know, finishing a book like Capital is really only the beginning. The next step is working up a short (but what counts as short when the book is 800+ pages?) draft of its essential-- relative to my research-- points, before reading through a few of the classic secondary sources.

On a more personal note, finishing Capital brings back a few personal memories from the first time I read excerpts during my the period of my Master's work with a Marx reading group of a few of Peter Linebaugh's students and one of their union friends. We started with 'Part Eight: So-called Primitive Accumulation' because we were interested in the 'prehistory' of capital. And this approach has probably colored my interpretation of the structure of the book to this day: Marx begins with commodity exchange and works through the consequences of the self-valorization of capital to show that, even constrained to the sphere of economics, capitalism is social organization designed to expropriate social wealth from the masses who create it. 'Part Eight' is added to show that so-called primitive accumulation was not an idyllic process of accumulation through labor that eventually became capital, but rather that accumulation was a method of dispossession on a global scale. In England (the link is here):

The spoliation of the church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism, were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalistic agriculture, made the soil part and parcel of capital, and created for the town industries the necessary supply of a “free” and outlawed proletariat.

And elsewhere (the link is here):

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.

Far from being a purely 'economic' system, capitalism requires violence to perpetuate its development: "Force [Gewalt, violence] is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power." 

You might be able to tell that I'm getting prepared for the Radical Philosophy Association's conference in November, which has the theme: "Violence: Systemic, Symbolic, and Foundational."

"Freedom, Equality, Property, and..."

There's a great, and well-known, passage in Capital that marks the transition from the critique of the process of exchange to the critique of the process of production that reads:

This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all. 

As our reading of A Brief History of Neoliberalism underlined (see especially Chapter 2), many of these same elements are still part of the justification of deregulated markets, etc. We see, in contemporary ideology, the ascription of sanctity to freedom and property, with the presupposition that each individual enters the market as an equal. But I've been wondering for the past few weeks about who would be-- in the hypothetical case that one of my papers would be paraphrasing this passage, more specifically a paper on Lukacs-- a good contemporary replacement for Bentham. 

At first I thought of busting Zizek's move of replacing 'Freedom, Equality, Property, ...' with academic buzzwords like 'desiring-machines, multitudes, etc.' but this doesn't work for what I want to do. My point isn't a critique of competing philosophical approaches, but a critique of capitalism, so the important point isn't how our French comrades talk about it, but how liberals and neoliberals talk about it. It needs to be a figure that the 'responsible' political theorist (if he or she accidentally walked into the conference room) would feel obligated to defend because obviously I'm making a mockery of the serious thought that this particular figure represents.

So I've got two names: Rawls and Nozick. They obviously have different connotations. Rawls might be good, because in the general liberal way of thinking, he supplies the 'veil of ignorance' quality to the legal structures surrounding the market, replacing the history behind it with a very thought experiment-y abstraction. Then again, Nozick's best-known justification for the market and its apparatus, the labor and transfer Lockean jive (although I hear he backtracked a bit at some point), basically boils down to what I called, in a similar context, the philosophical equivalent of money laundering. I've also considered Habermas, and even Sloterdijk (although the latter's recent work might just be a bit too outlandish for these purposes).

I find that Rawls is more likely to be the figure that the 'responsible' political theorist feels obligated to defend. But now that I think of it, I might work this very discussion about substitution into the paper itself, proceeding from Bentham, to Rawls, to Nozick, to Habermas.

Reading Feuerbach

Ludwig Feuerbach is one of those figures of philosophy who for various reasons has become reading material for primarily specialists, despite the extraordinary impact of his book The Essence of Christianity (1841) in his time. Most everybody knows of him through Marx's famous "Theses on Feuerbach," but very few have read him.

Until recently, I had only a passing familiarity with his work, which is why I decided to read The Essence of Christianity, in George Eliot's-- Mary Anne Evan's, that is,-- translation from 1881, which was reprinted by Dover Books in 2008. My interest derives from his contemporaneity with Schelling and Marx, and his place between Schelling's positive philosophy and a nascent historical materialism. 

By April 1841 Marx had only received his doctorate, and the debates that would rage around his work were still many years off. That year they would circle around Schelling and Feuerbach. The former had been invited to the University of Berlin to assume the seat formerly held by Fichte and, more recently, Hegel, with the hope (expressed within royal circles) that he would stamp out the "dragonseed" of Hegelianism. His pan-European audience included Engels, Kierkegaard, and Bakunin. Nevertheless, Schelling's positive philosophy or philosophy of revelation appeared-- despite its critical elements-- to be the retrenchment of religious content in philosophy just at the time that religion as a source of value was in question. Many of the Young Hegelians (including Feuerbach) were turning to history or materialism for the basis of philosophical and political critique, and Schelling had returned to Berlin  with the question of revelation. In a letter to Feuerbach, dated October 3, 1843, Marx writes:

Schelling has not only been able to unite philosophy and theology, but philosophy and diplomacy too. He has turned philosophy into a general diplomatic science, into a diplomacy for all occasions. Thus an attack on Schelling is indirectly an attack on our entire policy, and especially on Prussian policy. Schelling's philosophy is Prussian policy sub specie philosophiae.

Marx proceeds to call Feuerbach "Schelling in reverse," the person who could carry through Schelling's critique of religion found in the Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795-1796) that Schelling himself could not accomplish (the Letters is, incidentally, one of my favorite texts of Schelling's).

What, then, is Feuerbach's reversal of Schelling? His general thesis is that "the secret of theology is anthropology," that all  of religious life can be traced back to human ideas and activities. Feuerbach argued for what Marx would later refer to as "sensuous materialism." Each religious doctrine, he claims, is an alienated expression of human values. Each doctrine reflects either a human value or human desire. In general, Feuerbach affirmed the positive aspects of religion as the expression of a disguised humanism, but he also criticized religion for its pernicious effects on society and human values. I will confine this discussion to three points that I think might be of interest (especially if you might be reading Nietzsche at the moment).

1. Although religion initially is an objectification of human values and desires, Feuerbach argues that religious faith-- especially in its Christian version--has become anti-naturalist. Because Christian virtues are characterized by sacrifice, they require that one renounce the sensuous life. For the Christian, the "more anything contradicts man and Nature, the greater the abnegation, the greater the virtue" (216).
2. Faith is indifferent to moral duty and contrary to reason. The emphasis on faith in religion teaches dogmatism rather than the cultivation of virtue for its own sake, or the cultivation of the love of wisdom. Regarding reason: Feuerbach shares with many of his contemporaries a belief in progress, with which religious superstition interferes. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about historical progress, some which were raised here. What is more interesting for our discussion is that Feuerbach accuses religious practice of a variant of nihilism: "the belief that God is the necessary condition of virtue is the belief in the nothingness of virtue in itself" (167).
   
3. Faith is divisive. It separates people on the basis of doctrine. To faith, Feuerbach opposes love, which he argues is the basis not only of religion, but also the social bond. Hence the "the practical, palpable ground of necessity that we should raise ourselves above Christianity, above the peculiar standpoint of religion." Once philosophy reveals theology as anthropology, we ought to reject religion's rejection of sensuous life. Only through the sensuous life can we truly live as humanists.
   

The obvious reason why Feuerbach has become a figure for specialists is his humanism, for as long as 'man' was maintained as a historical invariant and measure of value we have not yet completed 'religious criticism.' Despite a number of criticisms that anticipated Nietzsche and Freud, Feuerbach replaced God with humanity.

And, Marx would add, a historically peculiar kind of humanity. In the "Theses on Feuerbach," he writes: 

Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the essence of man is no abstraction inhering in each single individual. In actuality it is the ensemble of social relationships.

The result is that Feuerbach abstracts from historical processes, more specifically the relationship between history and political economy. The result is that Feuerbach mistakes the life of the bourgeois individual, within civil society for the essence of humanity. This theoretical mistake is to be rejected by  revolutionaries because it assumes one historical form of social relationships for the measure of these relationships themselves, rather than locating them within political economy. 

My suspicion is that this spectre of 'Feuerbachianism' lurks behind both the humanism and belief in progress of the New Atheists and, sometimes, the religious-exegetical impulse of the post-secular turn in continental philosophy.

Historical Opportunity: Marx, Heidegger, Benjamin

Two of our contributors will be participating in a round-table at the Canadian Philosophical Association's annual meeting next week. Matt McLennan, Devin Zane Shaw, and their colleague David Tkach (also completing his PhD at the University of Ottawa) will be discussing "Historical Opportunity" in the works of Marx and Marxism, Heidegger, and Benjamin. We've included a partially updated version of their panel description below (the original is here in PDF format):

The collapse of Communist regimes in the late 80s and early 90s seemed to have offered a stark choice between two competing philosophies of history. On the one hand, grand narratives of progress and emancipation were claimed to have definitively foundered, leaving in their wake a plurality of individual viewpoints and social micro-histories (Lyotard). The collapse of Communism was also read in precisely the opposite way, as heralding the triumph of a grand narrative of historical progress, specifically that of liberal democracy (Fukuyama).

McLennan, Tkach and Shaw begin from the intuition that each option, starkly posed, misses something vital: a proper assessment of the concept of historical opportunity. Events since the collapse of Communism (the rise of religious fundamentalisms, the current crisis of capitalism) fuel the suspicion that we have neither reached the end of the era of grand narratives, nor properly accounted for the power of competing micro-histories. For theoretical and practical reasons, the present historical conjuncture renders a critical re-visitation of the “happy 90s” of utmost importance.

Matthew McLennan

Presenting a grand narrative of historical progress alongside an emphatic insistence on the importance of human agency, the works of Marx contain fascinating material for the philosopher of history. The seeming tension between determinism and freedom at the heart of his work has led to widely divergent interpretations of Marx, from the more or less deterministic, evolutionary historical picture of German Social Democracy and the Second International, to the voluntarism of Lenin, Luxemburg and Guevara. McLennan begins the proposed roundtable by arguing that Marx‟s philosophy of history is not only consistent, to the extent that the tension between determinism and freedom is only apparent, but also that it better lends itself to interpretations tending towards voluntarism. More specifically, after showing to what extent Marx was able to square his notion of the end of history with his emphasis on human agency, McLennan offers an argument that the Leninist notion of historical intervention, of “hitting upon the right moment”, was a more faithful application of Marx in its day than was that of the evolutionist faction of German Social Democracy and the Second International; this will set the stage for Shaw and Tkach‟s contributions by suggesting that Germany missed its opportunity to grasp the concept of historical opportunity, at least in the way Marx intended. Finally, tentative reflections will be offered with regard to the question of how such an interpretation of Marx might figure in an approach the present historical conjuncture.

Update: Matt adds a more recent abstract:

Matt McLennan surveys the development of Marxist philosophies of history, providing a schematic interpretation. Weighing in on where he thinks the emphasis of a properly Marxian philosophy should lie with respect to the question of historical opportunity (i.e. the "right moment" for revolutionary or militant activity) as well as that of eschatology or "the end of history", he argues that the most important advances in recent Marxism come from David Harvey. The notion of historical opportunity is enriched via Harvey to include a necessary spatio-geograpihical dimension; essentially, historical opportunity is interpreted as meaning that there is a "right space-time" for revolution.

 David Tkach

David Tkach's paper is a close reading of several sections of Heidegger's Being and Time, conducted in order to outline the problem of 'historical opportunity' in relation to the understanding of political action derivable from that work. In light of the book's three interrelated concepts of historicity, freedom, and the eschatological understanding of death in relation to Heidegger's understanding of a people [ein Volk], the result for the purposes of the round table is ultimately to call into question any possibility of political action that is directed toward a better situation for everyone. Thus, in contradistinction to certain attempts to rehabilitate aspects of Heidegger's book for ostensibly 'progressive' political purposes, Tkach concludes that it is at least problematic, not to say impossible, to do so.

Devin Zane Shaw

Shaw argues that class struggle is central to Walter Benjamin's concept of history. It is Benjamin's solidarity with the oppressed class that drives his critique of progress, and that orients his discussion of the legibility of dialectical images. It is only when an image is recognized as an image of emancipation that the history of its transmission becomes legible. Thus history is not the site of realizing Progress (Soviet Marxism), nor is it the site of a recovery of a past or heritage that has been covered over by an inauthentic understanding of history (Heidegger). History can only be written by blasting the events of the past out of the continuum of linear (or as Benjamin states, "empty, homogenous") historical time. Only then is it possible to clearly evaluate the documents of culture as both redemptive and barbaric.

BE prepared to get up bright and early; the panel is on Tueday, June 1st, from 9:00 ­ 12:30 in MB ­ S2-455 -- which we hear is the John Molson School of Business building.

In addition, Devin will present a paper at this year's meeting of the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, on Wednesday, June 2nd, from 3:40-4:50pm at EV 2-204. He will be presenting:

"Cartesian Reversals: Badiou and Heidegger on Mathematics and Modernity"

This paper examines the relationship between philosophy, ontology (or onto-theology) and mathematics an in the work of Martin Heidegger and Alain Badiou. Despite Badiou's praise for Heidegger's 'subtraction' of truth from the domain of epistemology, he attacks Heidegger's equation of mathematics with the essence of modern technology. Against Heidegger, Badiou shows that mathematics thinks ontology, because it must decide on what is. He does this by drawing the philosophical consequences of the continuum hypothesis. I argue that these consequences undermine Heidegger's connection between poeisis and ontology and his claims about the essence of technology. If mathematics is a thought, it cannot be essentially a projection of calculation into being or equated with the essence of technology.

Teaching Marx, Part 2

As I mentioned before, I spent a few days teaching Marx to my Great Philosophers class. The first day was dedicated to a bit of intended disorientation for them, while on the second, we looked at the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (here). I will spare you my notes, but I discussed how this text has an ambivalent place in many interpretations of Marx; while it provides a concise statement on historical materialism, it seems to veer toward a deterministic account of social change. The voluntarist side of Marxism, to which I incline, is often forced to reject Marx's strict distinction between base and superstructure, or to reject passages such as

No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.

Now, I feel fairly ambivalent about these kinds of passages, because while they seem to endorse an economic determinism, they also seem to support Marx's argument that changes that do not affect the base will not lead to liberation. However, by removing the subjective aspect of social struggle, they seem to describe better the transitions from one capitalist superpower to another: once one economic center's productive forces are fully developed and become an impediment to further development, another economic center takes its place. 

I have, nevertheless, started rethinking my take on the distinction between the base and the superstructure. This division is often criticized for making the superstructure (political, intellectual and social life) dependent on the economic base.

Unlike many of the other approaches that historicize social forms, historical materialism requires that these forms must be understood as embedded in capitalist and imperialist forms of social relationships. Furthermore, we ought to look at how the financialization of capitalism produces a failure of meaning in the transition from economic forms to forms of political struggle. By this I mean that radical political struggle, and radical philosophy, has not yet 'mapped' these new social relations and organized clear political demands to change these relationships, which is why so much of the critique of finance capitalism has focused on bankers or has demanded administrative solutions to financial crises. This is not enough.  As Christian Marazzi points out, in The Violence of Financial Capitalism, reform must start at the base. This means questioning assumptions about consumption, production, and investment in new ways. Marazzi argues that reform at the base ought to return the right of social ownership to the forefront of criticism. His specific example is the right to housing as a social right rather than a private right, but we could also add better financial access to education and intellectual commons, amongst other things.

Teaching Marx

On Thursday morning, I start teaching Marx to my Great Philosophers course (I posted part of my introduction to the course here). Up to this point, we've covered Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Rousseau, but with Marx there is an important rupture. As Marx states in the 11th thesis on Feuerbach, "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it." Now, this doesn't tell the complete story of philosophy, because, to be fair, the German idealists recognized the changes and crises that accompanied industrialization. Nevertheless, if they did not view these crises as spiritual crises, they gave only an incomplete picture of what the historical determinations of thought were. As Marx states in the 'Introduction' to his Toward a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, the criticism of theology must become the criticism of politics. This turn had yet to be fully realized in either Schelling or Hegel.

More importantly, however, there are a series of questions that become comprehensible within philosophy only after Marx. These are the kind of questions that I start my first lecture with, and I am writing them out here because this format is allowing me to overcome the writer's block I was experiencing (and then I found the page in Michel Beaud's A History of Capitalism that I was searching for, that has a few of these questions). Usually I just ask these questions as I think of them, as I lecture, but I haven't been so sharp in the morning classes. Hence I need to write them down. Often I wonder if this are the first time that some of my students have thought about them, even if this won't be the last, because after Marx I teach de Beauvoir and, this semester, I've added Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism.

These are things we ought to be thinking about, and we ought to be seeking their cause in the capitalist relations of production, not in what I've called Anything But Capitalism (culture, modernity, etc.). These are questions of economic justice (so "Is it fair" = economic justice). 1a, 2a, and 3 are adapted from Michel Beaud, A History of Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 2001: p. 310).

1a. Is it fair that the most important resources and effort of the world populace are directed toward the satisfaction of a minority of the planet's inhabitants (which I will call the global north, which includes the US, Canada, and Europe-- although China and India are very rapidly joining the most economically advanced part of the world economy), while a large majority lives tenuously and in destitution?

1b. Is it fair that the richest part of the world commands the social organization of a majority of the world's population, who often labor as providers of raw materials and producers of commercial goods at wages far below any acceptable standard in the Global North?

2a. Is it fair that satisfying the needs, for a few generations, of that proportion of humanity who possess purchasing power should threaten the resources and stability of our planet (its geopolitics and its ecology), to the point where interests of future generations are irreversibly harmed?

2b. Is it fair that the Global South must bear much of the cost of the industrial production already developed in the North?

3. Is it fair that choices which involve the future of the earth and human society should be abandoned to agencies that possess either a very restricted vision (a market or a slice of market) or a shortsighted vision (the expectation of a more or less short-term profit)?

4. Is it fair that just as the world gets smaller for us (travel is more available and less expensive) that the majority of the world's population is confined, for various reasons (poverty or legal restriction on travel), to their local areas? Does not the influx of tourist dollars reproduce the dependency of these economies on the post-colonial metropoles?

5. Finally, a local question for us. Is it fair that our institutionally established public goods are being privatized (or, forced to join the market) when it shifts the cost from society as a whole to individuals, and the benefit to private companies? Should public goods like health care or education be organized according to profit motive rather than toward generating social wealth?

Of course, I'm not going to answer these questions in my class, but I am going to show how Marx proposes that we can only grasp these questions by interpreting them through the lens of social antagonism.

The Politics of Student Debt

Let me get something out of the way before directly addressing the topic of student debt. I have spent 13 consecutive years at some combination of universities, and, at the beginning, a community college, working through various degrees toward a PhD in philosophy. At the completion of this degree, barring any serious financial difficulties, I will personally have, due to scholarships and a significant amount of help from my grandparents, no student debt (although through marriage, I am apparently responsible for some of my wife's accumulated debt).

I have, however, over the years, encountered many students who have struggled to balance some amount of debt (through student loans), scholarships and work, along with their education, and know that this combination often puts less financially able students at a disadvantage in time management in terms of study, due to the fact that having to work introduces a perverse set of incentives regarding use of time.

But above all, student debt is political. Which is why two pieces by Jeffrey J. Williams, in Dissent Magazine, are a must read (the first is from Summer 2006, the second from Fall 2008). Student debt is a political question because it limits the later choices of students through financial burden. The numbers cited by Williams tell the story:

The reason that debt has increased so much and so quickly is that tuition and fees have increased, at roughly three times the rate of inflation. Tuition and fees have gone up from an average of $924 in 1976, when I first went to college, to $6,067 in 2002. The average encompasses all institutions, from community colleges to Ivies. At private universities, the average jumped from $3,051 to $22,686. In 1976, the tuition and fees at Ivies were about $4,000; now they are near $33,000. The more salient figure of tuition, fees, room, and board (though not including other expenses, such as books or travel to and from home) has gone up from an average of $2,275 in 1976, $3,101 in 1980, and $6,562 in 1990, to $12,111 in 2002. At the same rate, gasoline would now be about $6 a gallon and movies $30 [for updated numbers see his 2008 piece].

As I discuss in my courses (usually the one called Reasoning and Critical Thinking), there are two primary problems with the accumulation of debt:

1. it shifts the burden of one's education from a social cost to a private cost
2. it constrains student career choice. This means that future political activists are more than likely forced to choose careers because of money rather than interest (think of the tight budgets of non-profits). Unless, of course, you want to go work for the bad guys: business and finance work, or right-wing think tanks that provide the ideological justification for the exploitation of the lower classes and the subversion of democracy, are usually quite well-funded. I have a hard time believing that Right Wingers don't explicitly recognize this. They know that the sides are not equal and that money and its resources are tilting the scales to their side.
   

So first, about the shift in the social burden. The organization of post-war education sought to transform the university system into a social good, training future members of a complex industrial society. While this education certainly possessed a strong ideological component, it aimed toward the inculcation of values compatible with combination of democratic and meritocratic ideas. While there are worthwhile questions to ask about the role of the university in propagating a particular ideology, it had strong benefits in terms of social mobility. However, higher education has not been excepted from the neo-liberal program of de-funding government programs under the logic of 'fiscal restraint' and balanced budgets and the concomitant privatization (or partial privatization) of public goods (or, in stronger terms, public property). When fiscal austerity is implemented, one target is often public education. This is currently happening in California; and UC Berkeley's plight is a well publicized example of a larger trend. A friend's blog often discusses the relationship between Californian politics and his life as a contract professor at CSU Stanislaus, where I did my BA in philosophy (let me also add that he is a fine person and educator).

Ideologically, society has also shifted in its approach to higher education. Like many other issues, it is no longer seen in terms of its societal benefit, but as a private benefit. Each individual now receives an education, and its public benefits are down-played or ignored. Education is less about developing one's interests or interaction with others than it is about job potential. Throw a business school into a university, and you get a well-funded propaganda arm for the privatization of education and the ideology of atomistic education, rather than education as a form of social solidarity. So, while the humanist and meritocratic (and, more egalitarian) view of education

aimed to create a strong civic culture [, the] new funding paradigm, by contrast, views the young not as a special group to be exempted or protected from the market but as fair game in the market. It extracts more work—like workfare instead of welfare—from students, both in the hours they clock while in school as well as in the deferred work entailed by their loans. Debt puts a sizable tariff on social hope.

Not only that, but debt, as Williams so eloquently points out, is a mode of pedagogy. I can't quote all his points without violating fair use, but I can summarize in point form. Again. READ the ORIGINAL. In sum, debt teaches a worldview. For our purposes:

1. Debt teaches that higher education is a consumer service. I can't tell how wide-spread this conception of education has become. The number of students who approach me as if their mark is a business transaction is unbelievable, and it justifies (in their minds) a fairly disrespectful approach to their peers and to their professors.
2. "debt teaches career choices. It teaches that it would be a poor choice to wait on tables while writing a novel or become an elementary school teacher at $24,000 or join the Peace Corps. It rules out culture industries such as publishing or theater or art galleries that pay notoriously little or nonprofits like community radio or a women’s shelter."
   

This was my second point, stated in a less partisan manner. Debt also teaches that activism is a poor venture compared to contributing to greasing the wheels of capitalism, whether in business or in the right-wing lobby and ideology industry (which is very well funded). But the important point is that not just future activists and artists are bought out, everybody with debt is. Williams also proposes various measures to end the problem of debt, and it is more surprising that progressives/radicals don't make it a much more important part of their platform. Let us not forget that The Communist Manifesto included the demand, which today, is rarely considered 'communist,' for "Free education for all children in public schools [and the] Abolition of child's factory labor in its present form." To most, unless one is an advocate of school vouchers, this demand is obviously beneficial for society.

Which is why a free university is my preferred solution to the problem of debt. While many would balk and say it's impossible, it is just one more social program demolished by inflated and unjustified military-industrial spending. As Williams notes,

Adolph Reed, as part of a campaign of the Labor Party for “Free Higher Ed,” has made the seemingly utopian but actually practical proposal of free tuition for all qualified college students. If education is a social good, he reasons, then we should support it; it produced great benefits, financial as well as civic, under the GI Bill (see his “A GI Bill for Everyone,” Dissent, Fall 2001); and, given current spending on loan programs, it is not out of reach. He estimates that free tuition at public institutions would cost $30 billion to $50 billion a year, only a small portion of the military budget. In fact, it would save money by cutting out the middle stratum of banking. The brilliance of this proposal is that it applies to anyone, rich or poor, so that it realizes the principle of equal opportunity but avoids “class warfare.”

Free education is not an impossibility.But it will only happen with significant pressure and within a culture where professors and students see a common solidarity in the social benefit of education. Professors and students share a common struggle in fighting against the commodification of higher education. It should be part of the package that free university, in order to function correctly, insured proper funding and a return to the emphasis on tenure and professorial investment by the university, instead of the reduction of university teaching to part-time and contract work, especially in the humanities. As I have already stated, this situation is political: the transformation of the university to a semi-private and pro-business institution, insofar as it emaciates the schools and faculties that encourage the cultivation of critical thinking skills, has a definite bias toward the neo-liberal status quo. In a world where the ideals of neo-liberalism are practically discredited, there is no reason to let them uncritically dominate the world of education.

Brains, Beliefs and Religion

I am currently working on a paper in which I argue that the tradition of French atheism, starting with Sartre, presents a much stronger ethical and political commitment than that of the New Atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Sam Harris), who typically hold highly questionable political positions, ranging from a kind of status quo liberalism to being downright reactionary. The latter would be Harris, who argues that we should be not be afraid to torture people or install 'benign dictatorships' in order to further our 'democratic' ideals.

However, I often find the science that they utilize interesting. A study by Sam Harris (the same person I just criticized above), et al., is no different in this regard (for a summary, go here, for the study, here). It found that religious beliefs, such as whether God exists, are processed in the brain in the same manner as nonreligious statements such as, Alexander the Great was a very famous military leader.

While religious and nonreligious thinking differentially engage broad regions of the frontal, parietal, and medial temporal lobes, the difference between belief and disbelief appears to be content-independent.

Content independence means that all beliefs are believed by the brain in the same way, even if we have a tendency to divide them by content. This indicates, Harris argues, that there is no distinction between beliefs that are commonly distinguished as facts or values (or faith). From this, Lisa Miller, writing in Newsweek, draws a questionable conclusion:

If a believer's brain regards the Second Coming the way it does every other fact, then debates about the veracity of faith would seem—to the committed believer, at least—to be rather pointless.

Now, remove that caveat between those em dashes, and from Miller you get the same old canard that it's pointless to debate religious beliefs. However, if they are processed like other beliefs, this lends credence to the argument that there is no reason to treat them as a special category (under the rubric of faith). Perhaps then, we can jettison the typical metaphor that faith is somehow deeper than other beliefs. Which is another way into the paper I was working on because the French philosophers I am working on all supply ways to think about truth, belief or ethics, without the appeal to 'deep faith' (i.e. blind faith).

Where I am going to differ with Harris, again, is science's role in all this. In the Newsweek piece, he argues that his results show that science can tell us important things about issues we often call 'values.' And while I agree that science may help us hone our perspective on 'values' it certainly is not the ultimate arbiter as the New Atheists sometimes imply. First, because science is often conducted through research governed by the profit motive (see Dan Hind's Threat to Reason, a must read really), or that science has gotten these issues so absolutely wrong (for example, with eugenics. See Robert Whitaker's Mad in America, and Stefan Kuhl's The Nazi Connection). Nor do I think that science authorizes the view that we should install "benign dictatorships" around the world to further Harris' 'democratic' ideals. That is, Enlightenment does not come at the end of a gun. We ought to treat religious movements in their political context, because they cannot be separated from them. As Marx says, and as the New Atheists ignore, religious suffering is a expression of real suffering, and the abolition of religion suffering demands the abolition of the conditions that create real suffering.

Of course, there is already a tradition of thought that recognizes this, leading from Sartre to Deleuze and Badiou.