These days I find myself feeling deeply weary where discussions about ethics and politics are concerned. I reflect on this, I wonder why. Why is it that I grow so tired, so jaded, whenever discussions of politics and ethics come up. I’m divided between two tendencies, two orientations. On the one hand, there is my desire for justice, equity, and fairness. On the other hand, there is my Lucretian and Spinozist desire for peace of mind and beautitude. Ethico-politico desire, the first orientation, is a desire to transform the world, to render it just, and to denounce injustice; injustice that we see all about it. The desire for beautitude and peace of mind is something quite different. It is a desire to simply delight in the machines of the world, the beings of the world, taking them for what they are. The person who has what Spinoza called an “intellectual love of God” does not desire to change things, but rather takes delight in understanding what they are. It is a desire without telos, without aim, without purpose, that simply delights in things for their own sake: rigid machines, octopi, tanuki, storms, and shifting tectonic plates. The Spinozist does not wish to change things because she knows that she cannot. She knows that everything that is results from the causes that preceded it and therefore could not be otherwise. She understands that her rancor and despair arises from believing that things could be otherwise than they are, and understands that if she just knew the causes of things she would no longer experience this despair because she would know that things can’t be any different. Consequently, the only thing she wishes to transform is her own psychology, her own mind, so that she might delight in how things are rather than in willing them to be otherwise. I’m too much of a Lucretian– which is to say, I believe too much in freedom and the aleatory –to adopt this sort of Spinozism, but I certainly see the appeal. I do think there’s a wisdom in this Spinozism.
Why this ethico-politico weariness, then? I think maybe because I’m keenly aware of political and ethical psychology. Here the issue is not so much about the correctness of ethical and political positions, but rather in how our ethical and political zeal affectively transforms how we experience ourselves and the world. When I go through periods of ethical and political zeal, I do not like myself or the world. When I encounter people filled with political and ethical passions, I do not like these people. In my normative attunements I become ugly. When my intentionality is primarily structured around ethico-politico considerations, my internal world becomes one filled with rage and despair. Everything appears as if it is falling short, as if it is unjust, as if it is horrible. I develop a mania for judgment and denunciation. Like the man on a personal mission to show that everything we enjoy is bad, I become intoxicated with a hermeneutics of suspicion that finds something in every project, in every form of human relation, in every positive proposal, suspect. It’s as if everything– every love, every formation of a collective, every work of art, every movie, every novel, every scientific discovery comes to be seen as harboring a dirty secret. Everything must be denounced, everything is suspect, everyone is a servant of an ugly ideology. My lived inner face becomes transfigured like the faces in painting to the right above. I become puritanical and filled a self-righteous zeal. I don’t like how I feel in these moments of zeal, nor how I relate to others. I don’t like how I come to see the entire world as broken. I don’t like the others I encounter that seem filled with this zeal, who always seem to accuse you of being guilty, who always seem to ask you for your papers. Here there is a deep performative contradiction in so much critical ethical and political theory. Our aim is to change the world, but we make ourselves so unpleasant, we relate to others with such puritanical intolerance, that we end up driving people away rather than forming collectives. We end up doing more to advance conservative and reactionary causes, rather than advancing emancipatory causes. The best friend of the economic and social conservative is the leftist kill-joy who finds everyone impure and who sees every enjoyment as suspect and worthy of condemnation.
read on!
And then, when I reflect on the extent of my own concrete political engagement and that of my more politically inclined academic colleagues, I become cynical. All of these cries for a politics that seem, at best, to be calls to show your papers and, at worst, partially veiled ad hominem attacks accusing simple scholars of being guilty of the worst atrocities rather than businesses, politicians, armies, and industries, seem rather absurd when we notice that these things are presented at expensive conference hotels and written in books and journal articles that no one save another academic can read. One wonders who these things are all for as they never seem to enter the broader social world and it is rare to encounter an academic who has a real political engagement beyond attending the occasional protest or writing the occasional open letter. In these dark and cynical moments, I find myself thinking that politics is what came to fill the void opened by the collapse of theology. Where the humanities used to be organized around theology and knowledge of God and advancement of his glory, the humanities encountered a void in the movement towards secularization. Something was needed to function as a telos or justification of our work. Politics became that replacement. But it’s been a weird sort of politics that is seldom addressed to the broader population and that seldom takes to the streets. I repeat, who is it for? What does it do? It’s as if we can’t admit that we just genuinely love Shakespeare for his own sake.
I suppose what I find most objectionable is the perpetual call for a telos of our work. Work, research, can never be an end in itself, it can never be something valuable for its own sake. We are never given a space for investigation that doesn’t have a utilitarian end. No, we must either be engaging in critique or the art of showing that dirty secrets and motives lie behind something else, or we must show that such and such a thing has revolutionary ethical and political implications. Of course, when we talk about ethical and political implications, we also must take care not to propose any positive projects because then we either reveal ourselves as hopelessly naive (“oh, that will never solve all the problems!”) or are inviting horror as every utopian project, we’re told, necessarily leads to disaster. We’re always, it seems, rushing towards an articulation of what the “cash-value” of x is.
What if, however, this rush to a “cash-value”, to an ethico-politico “moral” of every investigation, of every form of inquiry, isn’t part of the problem? Here my thoughts this evening cannot fail but to be ironic or paradoxical, for I am simultaneously suggesting that we should be reluctant to call for a political and ethical cash-value to everything, while claiming that doing so has political and ethical value. In calling for a political and ethical moral to every investigation, we instrumentalize all things, foreclosing the possibility of letting them be themselves. We turn everything into a means to an end. Yet in transforming everything to a means to an end, we divest it of its own value. As a means to an end it can be dominated and destroyed so long as the end is still fulfilled. Yet isn’t this the ground of violence and exploitation? Moreover, in seeing everything as a means to an end, we undermine our ability to love certain things for their own sake and thereby undermine one of the primary inspirations for fighting for things. Perhaps, given this, we should be a little less rushed to move to politics and ethics. Perhaps letting things be is already an ethics and politics.
Now I realize that there are some that will be constitutively unable to understand this post. They will suggest that I am rejecting politics and ethics, thereby repeating the mania for denouncing dirty secrets that I outline above. My real question, however, is that of how we might avoid this loathsome ethical and political psychology that causes so much destruction, conflict, and horror in the world. If we are to envision a politics, what kind of politics might we imagine based on building rather than critique, and what sort of politics might we imagine based on joy and love rather than resentment, faux superiority, and teeth gnashing? We desperately need critique, but above all we need composition or building.
Larval Subjects . 
October 20, 2012 at 2:01 am
Right on!
October 20, 2012 at 5:27 am
I’ve been in and out of activist causes for more than 50 years. Again and again, I’ve found I had to back off, suffocated by too many around me who would found the very meaning of their lives on the fight… as though it was the conflict itself that nourished them, and not a vision of how they wanted to live. I fight because my friends get beat up and put in cages, because we are forced to deny our most basic communal, human pleasure to work as wage slaves for an elite, insane with the need for power & no idea how to use to increase even their own pleasure. But like Emma Goldman, who didn’t want to be part of any revolution where you can’t dance, there is nothing worth fighting for if it there isn’t a vision of a life infused with those deeper pleasures that compensate for the inevitable loss we all must suffer. All my life I’ve foundered about, going back and forth–art to activism to failed attempts at intellectual “respectability. Failed and failed and failed. What you write here resonates to the depth
Now,. I live in a warehouse with 20 other people, sleep on the floor–and have a place to make art, and time for poetry… and do jail solidarity for my comrades and stand up to the Banksters (we’ll be the first Occupy group to have a jury trial come February–after being found guilty for an action in a Wells Fargo Bank last November).
I’ve never been happier in my life.
“No revolution without poetry, no poetry without revolution!
Thank you Emma… you helped show the way!
October 20, 2012 at 3:32 pm
You say: “I think maybe because I’m keenly aware of political and ethical psychology. Here the issue is not so much about the correctness of ethical and political positions, but rather in how our ethical and political zeal affectively transforms how we experience ourselves and the world.”
I had to reread this a few times and let it register completely. The heart of your notions center on zeal and affectivity: the psychology of the political as you state. I kept returning to what Hardt and Negri in The Affective Turn were talking about in how the realm of causality enters us through afftctitivity, how “our power to affect the world around us and our power to be affected by it, along with the relationship between these two powers.”
Thinking back on the early abuses of such power to affect and be affected as we understand it through propaganda systems from reading of such strange notions as Edward Bernays Propaganda influenced our own politicians to use the media and other systems to enter WWWI, which in turn influenced Joseph Goebbels and the theatrics of fascism we see how both zeal and affectivity – what we can term the power of rhetoric and sophism – to sway peoples emotions and thereby their very passions, rather than to touch their minds with truth. I’ve always felt leary of passion and affectivity within the political.
Bernays influenced Wilson with such notions of affectivity stating that the rhetoric of any political program should align affectivity and zeal, and that the emotional content must: (a) coincide in every way with the broad basic plans of the campaign and all its minor details; (b) be adapted to the many groups of the public at which it is to be aimed; and (c) conform to the media of the distribution of ideas.
– Edward Bernays. Propaganda
Listen to Goebbels: “How could we have overcome them had we not waged an educational campaign for years that persuaded people of their weaknesses, harms and disadvantages? Their final elimination was only the result of what the people had already realized. Our propaganda weakened these parties. Based on that, they could be eliminated by a legal act.”
Goebbels, Joseph (2009-05-31). Goebbels on the Power of Propaganda
As Chomsky tells us, “It is also necessary to whip up the population in support of foreign adventures. Usually the population is pacifist, just like they were during the First World War. The public sees no reason to get involved in foreign adventures, killing, and torture. So you have to whip them up. And to whip them up you have to frighten them. Bernays himself had an important achievement in this respect. He was the person who ran the public relations campaign for the United Fruit Company in 1954, when the United States moved in to overthrow the capitalist-democratic government of Guatemala and installed a murderous death-squad society, which remains that way to the present day with constant infusions of U.S. aid to prevent in more than empty form democratic deviations.
Noam Chomsky. Media Control, Second Edition: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda
Affectivity and zeal are our enemies not our friends. The abuse of passion and emotions have led to human engagements that have always left us full of fear and madness and death. I would rather teach people how to counter such affectivity rather than persuade them to use those tools to promote what Bernays and Goebbels entailed.
October 20, 2012 at 3:51 pm
Sorry forgot to add that your final question: “My real question, however, is that of how we might avoid this loathsome ethical and political psychology that causes so much destruction, conflict, and horror in the world. If we are to envision a politics, what kind of politics might we imagine based on building rather than critique, and what sort of politics might we imagine based on joy and love rather than resentment, faux superiority, and teeth gnashing? We desperately need critique, but above all we need composition or building.”
More than anything we need to teach people how to think for themselves; give them the tools to know the difference that makes a difference. If we can teach them how not to be influenced by such things as propaganda, how to understand when it is being used, and how to effectively counter it with truth rather than affects then we might at least have a chance. And, I agree that we do need a positive program, we need to teach people ways of constructing models of change through composition or building.
It seems that we waver among ourselves within the philosophical and political community, we have no focus, no models of any type, no rallying point: we battle among ourselves over nuances and fine points of method and application rather than building up a set of models and putting them to work. We need more modeling and less bickering….
October 20, 2012 at 3:54 pm
Reblogged this on noir realism and commented:
Levi has another fine post, and I left some comments there, but I will add to this and repeat what I said there….
October 20, 2012 at 4:12 pm
“We end up doing more to advance conservative and reactionary causes, rather than advancing emancipatory causes.”
Maybe that is the most efficient avenue towards change, to propel people further into their premises until those premises reveal themselves to those that hold them as unsatisfactory.
Here in Southeastern Missouri I have a cherished friend, an anarchist, who lives in a shimmering rustic cabin in the woods. On his roughhewn bookshelf is a copy of Emma Goldman’s autobiography–Living My Life. And amazingly, it’s inscribed by Emma herself. It says: “I hope this work will help you to interest yourself in the struggle of humanity for freedom and wellbeing.”
Her handwriting is as you might expect it to be–full of motion and energy and stylistic flourishes. Her y’s in particular are fetching.
October 20, 2012 at 4:39 pm
Sorry Levi for being long winded…
To counter arguments like Goebbels: “How could we have overcome them had we not waged an educational campaign for years that persuaded people of their weaknesses, harms and disadvantages?”
What we need is to educate people not through persuasion about their weaknesses, harms, and disadvantages; what we need is to help them overcome these weaknesses, harms, and disadvantages by providing them the necessary tools to rise above such obstacles. We need to teach them that they are not alone, cut off, abandoned; but that they belong to a wider network and communal vision of empowerment for each other, a caring network based on partnership and togetherness rather than on solitude and freedom. For too long this isolated ideology of fate and freedom that has provided the core of most democracies must be overcome through the empowerment of the multitude working together in unison to build and compose a future that is viable for both us and all the creatures of our planetary habitat.
We do not need new “models of freedom”, instead we need new “models of togetherness and sociality”.
If privacy and private property are the foundations of republics, then what would a new model of togetherness and social property entail? Can we return to the old style communisms? The twentieth century shows us that at least the Marxian turn in this form or model led to forms of tyranny and enslavement. If we turn to such writers and Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Hardt and Negri, Agamben: do they offer anything viable toward the rehabilitation of this notion of Communism for our time? Or could we shape a new model out of the creative destruction of these older systems of failure? How to begin? We need open dialogue and communal efforts and engagements. The time of the isolated individual is over, now comes the time of collaboration and change…
It is only through the efforts of a mutltitude that such models of change can come about. We see the fragements of a vision scattered across the filaments of the internet, small pockets of resistance here and there; and, yet, we do not see a rallying point, a site or place of interaction where the multitudes themselves can have a say. Oh yes, there are many individual voices, but there is know gathering place, a moder agora where the Intellectuals and the Multitude can come together and commune and build together this model of the future. We need a modern Agora, a public site that brings together the great and the small, that offers empowerment to all who seek to understand what must be done….
October 20, 2012 at 6:15 pm
very much hits a nerve. as we approach election time (even though that’s hopeless) my bookshelf grows ever higher with Aurelius, Epictetus, etc. A neo-Stoicism perhaps, interestingly consistent, I think, with an OOO sort of stance. thanks for providing me a moment of ataraxia before the tension mounts up again…
October 20, 2012 at 6:22 pm
Sorry Levi, my final say… you made me think!
We need an ethics and poltics that will allow us to make a difference that is a difference.
Only through relationship and engagement can we begin the process of healing necessary to overcome the politics of failure that has for too long kept us back from inventing new models of change and participation, both egalitarian and democratic. The key elements in such a model would entail a more democratic and egalitarian structure in both the family and governance systems; equal partnership beween women and men; and realignment of laws to eliminate the abuse and violence at the heart of most State based models of governance.
Economics and gender would need to be at the forefront of such engagements. Also as Levi R. Bryant in his Questions for Flat Ethics reminds us: “While almost no one, in the humanities, would claim that humans are somehow more real than other entities, nor that humans are somehow sovereigns of all other entities, there seems to nonetheless be a treatment of humans as sovereigns at the level of our theoretical practice.” (Warning: pdf download) We must overcome the anthropocentrism that binds us to ideologies of control and domination, and replace them with non-ideological systems of caring and partnership. With these two factors of a true engagement based on partnership and equality for both women and non-humans we see the beginnings of a model.
As Levi explains it a “flat ethics would be one that contests this human privilege, extending the scope of ethics beyond the human and how we should use other things for ourselves, developing operations that would have ethical regard for nonhumans…” And, I would extend it by saying that we would contest male privelege as well; for at the center of all present systems of governance, it is male privelege and power that need to be contested, along with our priveleging of the “human” over “non-human”. Male privlege and exceptionalism have over centuries brought about these notions of human soverignty as centered in humanistic ideology and philosophy. To overcome such systems we need to renegotiate the contractual agreements at the heart of our democratic and/or other systems and redefine a model that is inclusive of both women and non-humans.
Even our notions of subjectivity must be challenged. As Rosi Braidotti reminds us there is little time or space left of nostalgia. That the Deleuzian nomads, the multitudes of feminist-operated becoming-woman of women, Irigaray’s woman as not-one, Haraway’s cyborgs, and Cixous’s new Medusa have become in the eyes of conservative ideology and thought monstrous, hybrid, scary diviants. She goes on to ask: “What if what was at fault here, however, were the very social imaginary that can only register changes of this magnitude on the panic-stricken moralistic register of deviancy? What if these unprogrammed others were forms of subjectivity that have simply shrugged off the shadow of binary logic and negativity and simply moved on?” (RB 262-263)1
Yet, as Nicklas Luhmann once remarked we must now assume a universality of selection criteria and “constraints, the universality of differentiation and boundary drawing. Reason that refuses to acknowledge this is not far from totalitarian, if not terroist, logic.(Theory of Society: Vol 1)” To refuse such selective criteria and constraints is to spin ourselves utopias beyond both human and non-human flights of fancy. Instead we need an ethics of engagement that clarifies and centers us in a material world of becoming and process, one that offers hope for change and a true egalitarian society free of oppressive systems of law and governance.
1. Rosi Braidotti. metalnorphoses: towards a materialist theory of becoming. (Polity Press 2002)
October 20, 2012 at 7:21 pm
Levi, this might be the best post you’ve ever written. Thank you for the food for thought.
October 21, 2012 at 11:49 am
[…] Levi with a fantastic post on the all-devouring power of ethics and politics in philosophy. Must-read. HERE. […]
October 21, 2012 at 1:51 pm
Reblogged this on the anthropo.scene and commented:
Some good Sunday thoughts from Levi Bryant – especially interesting are his comments on the way(s) that politics come to replace theology. Here is a snippet:
“Where the humanities used to be organized around theology and knowledge of God and advancement of his glory, the humanities encountered a void in the movement towards secularization. Something was needed to function as a telos or justification of our work. Politics became that replacement. But it’s been a weird sort of politics that is seldom addressed to the broader population and that seldom takes to the streets. I repeat, who is it for? What does it do? It’s as if we can’t admit that we just genuinely love Shakespeare for his own sake.”
October 21, 2012 at 2:44 pm
“If we are to envision a politics, what kind of politics might we imagine based on building rather than critique, and what sort of politics might we imagine based on joy and love rather than resentment, faux superiority, and teeth gnashing?”
Your call for us to adopt a politics based on “joy and love,” building rather than critique, seems naive to me, because if we just focus on building and improving society without a fundamental critique, then we are left constructing a building with a cracked foundation, so to speak. That is, the people who have real power today will continue to perpetuate injustices such as neo-colonialism and corporatism, and to simply avert our eyes and try to build a politics of love and joy will do nothing to change that. If critical academics were to give up the critical stance they have towards those who have power and merely seek to form alliances, those with power will continue to perpetuate unjust practices, and academics will be little more than an ideological instrument serving them. So a politics of alliances cannot replace a politics of critique, if we’re to strive towards a truly just and progressive political order.
That being said, I do think you’re onto something important when you denounce resentment, faux superiority, and teeth gnashing. I find this psychological attitude as abhorrent as you do. The solution, in my opinion, should be to work towards deliberative democracy, and achieving a rational consensus around universal principles, which can then be translated into legal and political measures. Achieving consensus around and commitment towards a critical human rights project might well serve this purpose.
October 21, 2012 at 5:31 pm
It’s always easier to say “stop them” than it is to say “help me”, and so rabble rousing is a great way to get a load of people together on a project.
And being more charitable/internalist, artistic fields are often simply not about people’s problems. They are incredibly well suited to dealing in beauty, joy, and everything that we value; you can compare works, emphasise techniques that work, flag up beauty and brilliance wherever it appears and emphasise that which is powerful or insightful. The problem is that you can’t live on just one affect; people have problems, and those problems need solutions.
My proposal is that some forms of critique are people who have time to think and ponder, thanks to their reflective jobs, trying to apply their familiar tools vigorously to problems that do not suit them, but which they do not want to simply ignore. Anyone who has an academic job has been isolated from many of the pressures of the world of work, but also doesn’t have the levers at his disposal to change them quickly. Yes they can make progress, but it’s pretty hard going. And so trying to be balanced will leave a disproportionate amount of your time devoted to the horrors of the world.
My attempts at internalism hit a limit here, someone closer to the ground of academic critique will have to tell me if that’s true, and where to go from there.
The world is broken, but it is still beautiful, and perhaps if we understand better the interfaces between the broken and the beautiful, we can possibly draw things to beyond their own weaknesses.
Here’s what I personally want to understand at the moment:
Occupy wall street showed a functional connection between anti-corporate dissatisfaction, unemployment, portable networked computing, mostly flat discussion, consensus voting, working groups, festival-derived collectivist camping style living, and chanting ragtag spectacle, situated in the provisions for freedom within protest and in the disconnect between the symbolic and functional natures of certain inner city spaces.
It was opposed by a combination of riot policing, non-lethal sensory-shock technology, street cleaning technology, bailiffs, health and safety legislation, and the influence of certain corporations.
It seems to me that homelessness and it’s sicknesses formed the thing that shifted the balance, unlocking the latter alliance by allowing “health and safety” to trump “right to protest”. These open structures collected those with very serious problems, problems that were then used as excuses to motivate destruction of the structure itself, as if it somehow created these problems, rather than giving these people a place to be respected.
If this theory is correct, it suggests to me that attempts to create democratic collections of the dispossessed will always attract the mentally ill and ostracised, and creating human spaces of passional living will always risk excesses. How to keep openness and deal with these problems seems a particularly knotty problem, at a cross-section of political theory, psychology and even semiology, how do we articulate a community that should be listened to, made not merely from the strong and insightful, but equally not defined by the weaknesses of some of it’s members?
So there you have it, an example of a problem I’d love people to look at, if some people could find books of fiction, casework or theory that deal with this particular cross-section, and talk about their insights, features and warnings, I’d be very grateful, because I think it will help.
If I was to make this a complete example of what I think a “balanced affects” call to political humanities work entails, I’d now show my current work on the subject, but I obviously don’t have any more than I’ve just said.
October 21, 2012 at 6:33 pm
m142861,
I don’t call for an end to critique, but explicitly say we need it.
October 21, 2012 at 7:38 pm
Great post. Reminds me of Ivan Illich (I keep v. few bks but I still have all of his). ‘Tools for Conviviality’ is a great one.
“For Thomas ‘austerity’ is a complementary part of a more embracing virtue, which he calls friendship or joyfulness. It is the fruit of an apprehension that things or tools could destroy rather than enhance eutrapelia (or graceful playfulness/conviviality) in personal relations.”
The best intro is ‘The Rivers north of the Future: the testament of Ivan Illich.
October 21, 2012 at 8:00 pm
I guess Stengers’ “Capitalist Sorcery’ does engage with some of the questions you raise. esp. in part IV, ‘needing people to think’. ‘Empowerment. Reclaim……another world is possible, etc.
Illich again:
‘It’s strange to think that in modern Californian English it’s easier to speak of yoga than ascesis, but what the word ascesis meant for 2,000yrs is something like what yoga now signifies in our Western World.’
‘Ascesis’ for Illich is like ‘virtue’, ‘a word which is difficult to pronounce today’,: ‘repeated acts of faith, hope, and love which slowly create in you, psycho-physically, an ease in performing them; and, in order to sustain yourself in a disciplined way, ascesis, self-training, is of a certain importance, although it has to be said again that training for our contemporaries always implies instrumental purposes, which is not what I’m talking about.’
October 22, 2012 at 5:08 am
I guess I wonder exactly who you are referring to when you speak of those who demand a kind of “ethico-political” payoff. There are of course a whole range of lame academic “leftists” who are just point-scoring careerists, and who can be bracketed immediately. And there are also the career activists, who I have a tiny bit more respect for, but who finally don’t really have an investment in the questions — call them “ontological” — that are important to you. But this does not meant that the exact relation between philosophy and politics is not essential, that the relation between politics and ethics is not complex and equally essentially, and that these questions can be waived away by referring to the various academic or militant trolls that are in our midst. And there are philosophers among us who have spent a great of deal hashing these questions out, not least Badiou. Badiou would never subordinate philosophy to politics, as you well know. Yet he is a committed militant. Wouldn’t that be the place to begin working through this kind of thing, rather than letting armchair academic activists get under your skin? It’s a very serious question, and not a new one, this uncertain articulation of philosophy and politics. It has nothing to do with teleology. It requires a real philosophical labor to even begin addressing it.
Clootz
October 22, 2012 at 3:07 pm
The more I think about the beginning of your essay, the more I see that these two tendencies support antagonistic views of the world. Isn’t this aligned with Hannah Arendt’s antagonism between vita activa (active life) and vita contemplativa (contemplative life)? Of course in here sense of it Vita activa was originally identical to the political actions of free citizen in the ancient Greek Polis. As this system of governance waned, so the meaning of political life got demoted to the concept of social life. In the same manner, starting with Plato, philosophy began to see itself as following the vita contemplativa and aiming to experience the eternal, outside and above the political sphere.
So this type of argument does have a history. If some choose to commit themselves to an either/or situation in this history should we grow weary of it? Can we reconcile these two tendencies? And, if not, what do we do? To castigate one side or the other is to make a distinction, a judgement, to choose. Are maybe we have these tendencies at differing times during our own lives, and there is no either/or dissection?
Should we remain neutral on the issue? And, if we do, what does this say about our own stance? And as you say in the end: “Perhaps, given this, we should be a little less rushed to move to politics and ethics. Perhaps letting things be is already an ethics and politics.” Isn’t this already to choose a pacifist, vita contemplativa?
October 22, 2012 at 3:16 pm
sorry for the typos above… lol
October 22, 2012 at 10:54 pm
Well said well said, I had a similar reply to one of the usual floggers accusing a CLC conference of being too ‘detached’ from da real world. Good words…
October 22, 2012 at 11:00 pm
Great post. First off, thank you for all your blogging – for those of us who do not have access to academic journals, this is an amazing resource.
Second, I’m wondering how or if all of this might play into your ideas about machine-oriented ontology. Do you think that academic institutions are ineffecient or improper machines for the dissemination of ethical ideas? What might a more efficient machine be?
Also, do you think the discrepancy might be in part caused by the complexity and radical nature of abstract thought and philosophy versus the relatively mundane nuts and bolts work that is required for any kind of major political change? For example, I am interested in ecocriticism and material philosophy and I love reading as much as I can about those subjects. They are very exciting and offer totally new ways of looking at how the world works. Yet a lot of the details of those philosophies have little to do with the political actions I do make. I live off the grid, I volunteer for environmental restoration projects, etc. When I am actually doing those things, philosophical concepts are not of much help. They won’t get a solar panel up, they won’t convince my power-wasting friends to unplug their cellphone chargers when they’re not using them, etc. But at the same time, I am not sure that I would make any of those actions were it not for my interest in related philosophical concepts. It seems if anything like political or ethical concepts should not try to directly influence political or ethical action, but rather should engender a perspective from which those actions would come naturally. I’m thinking here especially about Taoist views of government – the idea that the leader who doesn’t try to force his subjects into a rigid order will naturally produce subjects who respect their leader and each other. It’s kind of a naive idea in a Daisy World sort of way, but I think it points to a different and new direction for ethics and politics.
October 29, 2012 at 8:58 am
Wow, great conversation!
All I can think of to add is: Stoicism, the concept of narcissism, scapegoating, villainization, Timothy Morton’s Beautiful Soul Syndrome, and the discussion of metonym vs metaphor (metonym being what is used in scapegoating, while metaphor is the ability to perceive structural isomorphisms).
Stoicism: Applying the test of “good” or “bad” to external phenomenological content is vicious, while applying the test of “good” or “bad” to structures is virtuous. This yields interesting seeming-paradoxes, like: It is perfect to try tp be virtuous, but it is vicious to try to be perfect. That is to say, one cannot improve one’s ethical stance any further than this — to try to improve one’s ethical stance further is vicious. For the Stoic, it is vicious “when my intentionality is primarily structured around ethico-politico considerations” and virtuous when I am not concerned with such judgments of external things. The result of such vicious beliefs in external things being good or bad is that “my internal world becomes one filled with rage and despair. Everything appears as if it is falling short, as if it is unjust, as if it is horrible. I develop a mania for judgment and denunciation.” This could have easily been written by a contemporary Stoic in describing the idea of vice.
Narcissism: Among the many approaches are Winnicott’s false self, Niebuhr’s work on pride, Horney’s neurotic quest for glory, Lacan’s Imaginary register (incidentally, Lacanian psychosis is essentially extreme narcissism to the point of self-identification with God). The key signifier narcissism could be used to describe some of the reason for moral outrage. One might say that moral outrage is self-stimulation in an effort to gain narcissistic supply. Note that narcissistic supply is not pleasure, but rather is a stopgap to give one’s life meaning — a temporary plug in the bottomless pit or void which everyone feels more or less, but is extremely painful to those we might designate “narcissists.” Of course I don’t want to suddenly make this about “othering” and scapegoating some group of people or whatever — I mean, I’ve struggled with narcissism as long as I can remember, and been called a narcissist by many, many people in my life. Indeed, that’s the problem with talking about ethics, again, because as soon as you even talk about it, it’s almost breaking the cardinal rule … it’s like that riddle, “what is the thing which is broken by speaking it?” “silence.” To even speak of ethics is unethical! How paradoxical.
There are also more positive approaches to narcissism like Bersani, or even Jung for that matter, who admonished those who would ever attempt to “cure” narcissism lest we have no more artists, creatives etc. I only introduce the signfier into this discussion on account of the link between what might be called Jungian projection and narcissism — i.e. narcissism is when I project my own unintegrated inferiority onto others.
Scapegoating: Girard has done work on this, as well as the field of Generative Anthropology/Anthropoetics. Jung’s projection describes such a mechanism, as does Lacan’s notion of fantasy. Zizek came up with a great description of scapegoating in THE REALITY OF THE VIRTUAL (2003). Zizek explains it thusly: for a Right-winger (read: ‘scapegoater’), society is a harmonious whole but it is disturbed by some antagonistic element outside of society. This is crucial, because the Right-winger is basically totalitarian without understanding what Zizek claims is Hegelian totality: by setting some “x” outside of society, the Right-winger fantasizes a harmonious whole, a synthesis without antagonism, a discourse free from conflict etc. This is a whole narcissistic fantasy supplement of love, harmony, cooperation, joy, imagination — in other words, all those “ooey” “gooey” things which are supposed to be the opposite of fascist totalitarianism! But Zizek claims these are indeed the fantasy supplements of totalitarianism itself. This is why he disagrees with the ideology of Orwell’s 1984 which subtly encourages one to oppose love and hope as opposed to fascism. What such a perspective fails to grasp is that love and hope are always-already present as the fantasy supplement of totalitarianism, thus professing the need for a more loving (or harmonious etc) way of being is itself already the condition which causes totalitarianism to persist.
The reason that the myth of synthesis, harmony, cooperation, love etc causes totalitarianism to persist is because it is the Right-wing perspective which views some antagonistic “x” as preventing these things from occurring. Zizek claims that the Left-wing retort to this is to say: No, that “x” which you reject as not part of society actually is part of society. And the antagonism which you force that scapegoated other to carry in its entirety must not be imagined as stemming from the Other, but must be acknowledged as a split running through society itself. Society itself has a zero-level of antagonism, difference, asymmetry, split, lack, multiplicity, whatever you want to call it.
Villainization: same thing as scapegoating, but it highlights another part of scapegoating, namely that the one being scapegoated is always villainized. Another good word is “fictimization,” used by Boundary Logic folks. To put it in pseudo-Lacanian, I might say that I villainize some other in my imaginary narrative, the stories I tell myself and tell others about myself. I craft my ego-ideal not only in idolization of an ideal-ego but also in contradistinction to an “othered” metonym which I quilt negativity to: “the banker,” “the Jew,” “the Muslim,” or whatever the case may be.
Timothy Morton’s Beautiful Soul Syndrome offers a good description of this process. The idea is that one is a “beautiful soul” (in the strictly negative sense, here — we want to avoid being beautiful souls!) if one has this rich subjective narrative of good intentions and so on. To the beautiful soul, looking out at the world, you can split people into good and evil. There are good innocent people being taken advantage by other, evil people. I might add, the beautiful soul considers him or herself to be somewhat of a healer, always meaning well, helping others, trying hard to do the best he or she can, to heal the world in some small way. The solution to this is of course subjective destitution: loss of one’s fantasy supplement, no longer being able to attest to one’s good intentions or appeal to one’s depth of humanity.
Metonym vs metaphor is relevant because scapegoating typically lacks the metaphoric dimension. Another way to look at it would be that scapegoats fail to grasp the archetypal, or the semiotic. These are all basically the same thing. I might even make the claim that Lacan’s Symbolic and both Deleuze and Zizek’s virtual (while having slight distinctions, both attempting to describe the same thing in some sense). Whichever vocabulary you use, the idea is the same: there is a metaphoric dimension of structure which is separate from phenomenological content. There exist structural isomorphisms which can be grasped by “those who have eyes to see,” so to speak. The level of structural isomorphism is grasped when one comprehends something metaphorically rather than literally. To see the archetypal dimension rather than merely the concrete — or to be open to the numinous, sacred dimension of e.g. a pop song. These are examples of being cognizant of metaphor.
One can only identify scapegoating by grasping the structural isomorphism of all scapegoating statements. When one observes the same formula at work in all statements which say “we would have harmony, love, joy etc if only some x weren’t preventing us from having these things” then one is no longer doomed to perpetuate the very thing one is fighting against! This is Morton’s point about boycotting, and perhaps a point Zizek makes as well with the idea: anti-capitalism can be a mode of capitalism. In any case, the crucial distinction between metaphor and metonymy is that being able to understand things metaphorically allows one to ask which are the right questions and which are the wrong ones, whereas relying on metonymy relegates one to trying to answer the question, failing to grasp that there are also “wrong questions” which should be dismissed — we shouldn’t even try to answer them, we shouldn’t even try to solve the false problems lest we perpetuate the very problem we ostensibly wish to solve.
November 16, 2012 at 11:51 pm
Two possible avenues forward that suggest themselves to me as I read this:
1) Delineating robustly between ethics and politics/the ethical and the political – that meta-delineation as well would be important in this enterprise – which, not only here but virtually everywhere, seems to grow more likely to fall by the wayside directly with the strength and breadth of the argument being made. Using machine-oriented and originarily technological approaches to ontology to formally reconstruct each term, non-anthropomorphically, from the bottom up (to build a xenopolitics, or an ethical technics), coupled with a strictly non-philosophical (Laruellean) analysis of their division-without-separation, strikes me as hugely promising.
2) Focusing from the point of view, so to speak, of the ‘secrets’ themselves – thus, not presupposing them as ‘dirty,’ at least not in a sense that equates between ‘dirty’ and ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ – in order to expropriate and reverse the machinery of critique from its deconstructive function to a reconstructive one, without for all that indulging in the hoary anarcho-philosophical or utopian fallacy of presupposing the ability to finally condemn or excise what is thought ‘secret(ive)’ or ‘dirty.’ Alternative terms, of course, are the first explicit requirement. Shadows? Dorsality? The real?
Perhaps we need to – get our hands dirty. (I couldn’t resist.) Hard to do while remaining on the inside of the institution and/or the outside of the war, though; which is where I think, with Nietzsche (and differently, Laruelle), that this particular form of virulent, self-marginalizing ressentiment comes from, ultimately. Hermeticism that – perhaps constitutively – can’t remember why it is isolated forces itself into these vicious, impotent circles of self-defensive self-attack.
November 16, 2012 at 11:59 pm
Another link into (1) that slipped my mind – you made an interesting choice in calling the requirement of a telos/EP cashout for theoretics a “utilitarian” requirement, which is of course a potentially ethical term, and one whose framework has the most explicit potential/desire for automatic or technical calculation of what is right. However, in the following ‘graphs you’re talking about instrumentalization – which is entirely proper to a discussion of teloi. But what is the relation between the utilitarian and the instrument(al)?
December 9, 2012 at 12:44 am
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