Can someone be morally responsible for how they perceive? I’ve been thinking a lot about a genre of racist memes that occasionally come across my feed. There will be a picture of a white woman next to a Latino man with a caption about how he murdered this woman and this is why we need to stop undocumented migration. If it were a picture of a white man, people would say that person needs to be prosecuted for murder. The white man would be perceived as an individual that committed the crime. But in these memes, the Latino man is not perceived as a person that committed the crime. He is a synechdoche. He is taken as a part representing the whole, like Homer’s forty sails that set forth for Troy, where sails stand in for ships. Returning to my post on appearing, there is a sort of transcendental aesthetic, a logical of visibility, governing how the Latino is seen. And as a result, it is not that man that needs to be prosecuted for his crime for such people, but the entire group of which he is a member. The racism is not at the discursive level of propositional thought, but at the very level of their perception and how others appear to them. Their very way of seeing things is ethically wrong. If this is true, then the question arises of how we can work at the level of this transcendental aesthetic, this regime of visibility, to transform the very sense of the visible and how things appear.
July 6, 2018
From the beginning there is a curious horror of materialism. Legend has it that the Platonic school strove to destroy the writings of Epicurus and his followers. Later there was a concerted attempt to destroy Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura. This assault was so successful, that only one copy of the book was ever found by Poggio in the 15th century. Before proceeding, I should be clear that I’m not advocating for any particular form of materialism (e.g., classical atomism). For reasons that I hope will become a bit clearer in this post, the concept of matter must necessarily remain underdefined, such that the materialist must necessarily become comfortable working with what I call “anomalous concepts”. At most we can say that materialism is the thesis that being is essentially composed of physical stuff. What that stuff might be—indivisible atoms in a variety of shapes, energy, something else besides –remains open.
From a religious point of view, it is easy to understand hostility towards materialism. Materialism undermines and challenges the immortality of the soul, along with the idea nature is providential, reflecting the will and plan of the divine. However, these considerations aren’t sufficient to explain widespread opposition to materialism, for we find widespread hostility towards materialism in secular circles as well. It is not at all unusual to hear those who would never dream of claiming that the soul is immortal or that nature reflects a divine plan hurling epithets at materialist thought accusing it of everything from mechanism (modern science, I think, has safely undermined the thesis of mechanism advocated by thinkers like Laplace), to claiming that the concept is fundamentally incoherent such that we should abandon the idea of matter altogether, e.g., Ladyman and Ross’s Everything Must Go.
read on!
July 5, 2018
Let’s return to the case of Plato. Philosophy has often taken mathematics as its model of knowledge. “Let none enter here who have no knowledge of geometry!” it says over the doors of the academy. The mathematical presents us with the clarity of the pure concept—one itself and not one orange or person or star –and its claims are deductively demonstrated without remainder (at least until Gödel came along). Math, as Serres points out in Geometry, attains true universality overcoming the indeterminancy of difference and interpretation, and attains certainty. It doesn’t matter whether you’re Greek or Persian, you cannot fail to come to the same conclusions when confronted with the Pythagorean Theorem. It’s not that the content of geometry is particularly important to the philosopher, but rather that geometry gives the philosopher the ideal of knowledge and the method of how to attain that knowledge. We see much later the fruition of this ideal in texts like Spinoza’s Ethics.
In the open to Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates asks what piety is an Euthyphro responds, “piety is doing what I’m doing now; prosecuting the wrongdoer.” Socrates responds that that’s not what he asked. Euthyphro is confused. “Well suppose, Euthyphro, I asked you what oikonomia is? And you gave me a list of things like knowledge of how to cook, maintain a home, maintain finances, etc. That would not answer the question, because I didn’t ask for a list, but for that common feature that all of these things share in common.” Perhaps we could call this the function that haunts all of the instances of oikonomia, in the sense of the mathematical function. This is the concept of oikonomia. Cooking, managing a home, and household finances are all very different from each other, but they must nonetheless share a common concept (form) or essence that makes them what they are. 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15… All of these numbers are very different from each other. A list tells us very little. Yet when we know the concept or function behind the list—f(x) = 2x + 3 –we know what is common to them all and how to proceed to find the next in the series. We even have a rule that allows us to determine whether the new thing that we haven’t encountered before belongs to the series or not. This is the mathematical ideal in philosophy.
read on!
July 3, 2018
Returning to my meditations on examples…
Psychoanalysis, at least in its Lacanian formulation, promises a form of theory that aims not at the reduction of the patient to a particular of a universal, an instance of a kind, but rather that strives to reach the singularity of the patient or that which is without equivalent. The degree to which it is successful in this endeavor is another question. In this regard, psychoanalysis is—at its best –the opposite of a university (universal) discourse. In the university discourse, the anomalous (a) is subordinated to a classificatory scheme (a system of S2’s). Everything must find its place within that classificatory scheme. In pre-Einsteinian astronomy, the irregularity of Mercury’s orbit (an a) must be made to fit with Newtonian theory (S2). The irregularity is a secret regularity. There must be a moon or other astronomical object that we haven’t observed that accounts for its irregular orbit. Perhaps we can even calculate the missing mass that would be required to explain Mercury’s orbit. In the case of psychology, we have the DSM-V, a bestiary of symptoms that function as signs for an underlying pathology and its etiology. Symptoms for this or that disorder are this and have this or that causation. The very idea of disorders is itself a university discourse. Symptoms are conceived on a medical model indicating a specific underlying pathology. Fever, vomiting, weakness, etc., are signs that stand for the flu. This is the model in psychology as well. We are told that we can read the underlying pathology off from the symptoms.
read on!
June 28, 2018
If it didn’t risk raising the ire of my archeologist friends, I would say that what I am after—in part –is an archeology of things and matter. More properly, I am after a theory of forgetting. However, the forgetting in question here is not an empirical forgetting. It is not the sort of forgetting involved in misplacing your keys or forgetting what you did on a particular day last week. No. The sort of forgetting I’m referring to is an a priori forgetting. It is a forgetting that is something like a Kantian transcendental illusion, where there’s a certain inevitability to these illusions of thought, and where there’s a sort of inevitability to this sort of forgetting. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that philosophy needs to free itself from the idea that the greatest danger of thought is error. “It is noteworthy that the dogmatic image, for its part, recognizes only error as a possible misadventure of thought, and reduces everything to the form of error” (DR, 148). He continues,
…there are facts with regard to error, but which facts? Who says ‘Good morning Theodorus’ when Theatetus passes, ‘It is three o’clock’ when it is three thirty, and that 7 + 5 = 13? Answer: the myopic, the distracted and the young child at school. These are effective examples of errors, but examples which, like the majority of such ‘facts’, refer to thoroughly artificial or puerile situations, and offer a grotesque image of thought because they relate it to very simple questions to which one can and must respond by independent propositions. Error acquires a sense only once the play of thought ceases to be speculative and becomes a kind of radio quiz (DR, 150).
In contrast to the puerile misadventure of error, Deleuze dreams of misadventures internal to thought such as Kant’s transcendental illusions, madness, stupidity, monstrosity, Hegel’s concept of alienation, the 18th century concept of superstition, and so on. These are not simple errors, but are things that haunt thought from within. The sort of forgetting I’m after would fall into this class.
read on!
June 27, 2018
5, 8, 11, 14, 17… What’s the rule? What’s the concept? That’s the question that Socrates asks Euthyphro and perhaps repeatedly the question of philosophy. “What is piety?”, Socrates asks. “Piety is doing what I’m doing now, prosecuting the wrongdoer”, Euthyphro responds. “But I didn’t ask about this or that version of piety, but piety itself! Certainly there are other things that belong to piety!”, Socrates rejoins. He wants to know the rule behind all the instances of piety: prayer, sacrifice, prosecuting the wrongdoer, funny hats and outfits, treating certain things as sacred, observing certain sacred days, dietary requirements, and all the rest. 5, 8, 11, 14, 17… “You’ve given me a list, what’s the concept?” Knowledge for Socrates (or Plato?) is the concept. What’s the concept behind the diversity of 5, 8, 11, 14, 17…? It’s a simple rule: F(x) = 3x + 2. Plug in a value 3 into x and you get 11.
Now we know the concept. If I plug in 6 I can play the game. The result will be 20. The prisoners in the cave play the guessing game. What image will appear in the wall next? The prisoner escapes and returns. He can guess the next image in the series with uncanny accuracy because he knows the concept behind the images, the rule. Plug in 7 and you’ll get 23. 20 came before, so now we get 23. There’s a sort of Lacanian Real at work, a repressed. The secret number of the game is always repressed: first 6 and then 7 (generating 20 and 23). They never appear. But they’re the cypher that functions as the input that generates the output: 20 and 23. A whole hermeneutics of suspicion! A secret number that makes another number manifest. So there are two features of the concept: the function that is the rule and the secret number put into the function that generates the outcome of the rule. 4 and 14. Socrates (in Plato’s version) wants to know the rule behind the series and the secret cypher or input that generates the result. That’s the dream. That’s the reality/appearance, essence/existence distinction.
read on!
June 27, 2018
What is a space of visibility? We should not think visibility in a naïve empiricist fashion as something that is merely given to anyone. We should think visibility as Heidegger thinks it with his aletheia, Foucault with his visibility produced in the clinic or hospital, Ranciere with his politics of aesthetics, or with Badiou and his appearing, or yet against with Butler and her logic of that which can appear. The visible is never merely given. Perhaps Heidegger is the launching point here. Things become manifest or withdraw from hiddenness in terms of our concernful dealings with the world. The garage is a very different place for the person dropping their car off and the mechanic. To the person dropping their car off, the garage is a sort of bewildering chaos. Attention is directed at the mechanic and the car. The rest lacks meaning and significance. To the mechanic, by contrast, all of the tools and places are imbued with meaning and function with respect to the dealings she has with cars. Certain things come into relief that are invisible to someone who is not the mechanic.
There are regimes of visibility everywhere and in all aspects of our lives. When Butler speaks of appearing, her point is that a people might be there, but they are unable to appear for that society. The structure of society is coded against their appearing; against their membership in the society. Yes, the homeless are there. We might even see them. Yet for a particular regime of appearance, for a particular society, they do not count as members of that society. As I argue elsewhere, they are “dim objects”, beings that are there but that don’t appear. Or rather, they appear not as what they are, but as what they are not. They are coded as the negative of society, as that which should not be there, as that which does not belong. One speaks of a plague of homeless people in San Diego creating a health crisis through the spread of hepatitis b. Democracy is said to be the rule of the people, but who the people are is always in question. There is always a set of distinctions, a semiotic sorting machine, determining who is and who is not the people. This sorting machine, in its turn, decides who and what can appear; who belongs.
read on!
June 25, 2018
Working notes on an article on examples I’m working on:
I would like to know what it means to think from the example. In the university discourse, the example is always a particular of a universal. It exemplifies the universal and is only of interest insofar as it exemplifies the universal. A particular is an individual that exemplifies or embodies the features of the universal. It is in this sense that the example becomes an ornament. Since the universal already contains all of the essential content, pointing at a triangle does nothing more than allow the student to discern, in the flesh, a specific case of the universal. “See here, it has three sides.” In the university discourse, the example, as a particular, serves a dual function. On the one hand, the particular allows the student to discern the essential features that define the essence of the universal (a triangle is a three-sided figure). However, on the other hand, the particular only functions to illustrate the universal by way of also indicating the accidental or the non-essential. “This triangle is made of wood. That triangle is made of steel. This triangle is graphite on a piece of paper. This triangle is equilateral, while that triangle is scalene. Despite these differences, they’re all triangles.” The particularity of the individual lies in it embodying what is invariant in the universal despite its individuality. The university discourse is essentially classificatory. It aims by making sure that everything is placed in its proper box or category. Let us never forget that there’s a place for the university discourse.
Aside: Let us call theory done in this way imperial theory. An imperial theory is a theory that only acknowledges cases or examples insofar as they exemplify the universal comprehension of the theory. This was Deleuze’s criticism of Hegel and his “insipid monocentering” (the same could be said of Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel). Hegel endlessly finds the same thing again and again, revealing that he is incapable of thinking the singularity of the singular. This attitude towards the singular is already foreshadowed in his critique of sense-certainty in the open of the Phenomenology. We wish to say that everything begins with the individual, with the “this-here”, with this specific triangle, only to discover that we can only ever speak the universal (cf. Hyppolite). However, lest we make Hegel out to be the bad guy, we must also remember Badiou’s critique of Deleuze and the sheer monotony of his work. Here we must raise the question of whether this critique is valid. As Deleuze argues in DR, it might be that the singular always erases itself in its actualization or movement into extensity. This would also be why a philosophy that begins from existence or the singular must always proceed based on an encounter. (In this connection, it bears recalling Derrida on how the “origins” are always effaced and erased). Another instance of imperial theory would be Luhmann, who always and everywhere finds the same thing in the phenomena he investigates. The individual, the singular, is always erased in the name of the theory.
read on!
March 1, 2018
Perhaps it’s something of a cliche to speak of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. “Yes, yes, we’ve all heard of the Allegory of the Cave! We all learned about the Allegory of the Cave in our Intro to Philosophy courses!” That’s true. I’m sorry to speak of it again. I can’t help it. I think the Allegory of the Cave is a good myth. What’s a good myth? A good myth is a time machine. By that, I don’t mean that it takes us back to the past like the Delorean in Back to the Future. No, a good myth is a myth that is able to exceed its historical horizon, explode the context in which it’s inscribed, and travel into the future. A good myth is a myth that is open to endless interpretation; which is to say that a good myth is a myth that is able to speak across history. A good myth is slippery and without a determinate signified. For that reason, it can take on many signifieds. What did Plato think? I don’t care. He wrote a good myth and therefore wrote a myth capable of going beyond Plato.
We know the story. The prisoners have been in the cave since birth. They don’t know they’re prisoners. Behind them the guards walk back and forth in front of a fire with different shapes of things on long poles. The shapes cast shadows on the cave wall. The prisoners think the shadows are reality. After all, they’ve never seen anything else, right? Clearly there is only one possible interpretation of the Allegory of the Cave. The fire is obviously capitalism. The guards are most certainly the journalists, pundits, editors, and politicians. And the shadows on the cave wall are television news, newspapers, social media, and the political blogs. The shadows are images and images are copies of something else. Plato was most definitely diagnosing the times in which we live. As a careful reader of Niklas Luhmann– especially Luhmann’s Reality of the Mass Media –and other media theorists, he knew very well that it is the mass is our primary access to reality and constructs our sense of reality. Think about it. How do you know that North Korea exists? Have you been there? Probably not. You saw it on a map or a globe (an image). You read about it (an image). You heard someone who says they’ve seen it talk about it (an image). You saw a photograph or film footage (an image). You watched a documentary on the forgotten war (images again). The vast majority of your beliefs about the world are through images. That’s your reality. That’s my reality.
read on!
November 16, 2017
People say that the kids these days are whiny, little twerps. They have been spoiled, they say, by their parents, and led to believe that they should live in a world where everything is handed to them without work, where there is no danger of bodily harm, where they never need to worry about being offended by how others talk or what they say. The argument runs that a million tiny cuts by poor parenting and bad policies led to the creation of these delicate little snowflakes: an obsession with safety that advises parents to wrap their children in bubble wrap. Sports where all participants receive a trophy and they only play to a tie. An educational system that allows students to take tests over and over again until they get a passing grade. Homes where children never have to do any chores and where they are never disciplined. And all the rest.
Perhaps all of this is true. I don’t think so, as I work with the “kids these days” and find them pretty impressive. What if, instead, we were to interpret these phenomena and practices not in moralistic terms, but symptomatically as expressions of a sort of dreamwork as described by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams? What if we were to interpret the obsession with safety and things like sports teams that play to a tie as a series of displacements and condensations, metonymys and metaphors, referring to a fundamentally different desire and unconscious awareness of circumstances? The world that parents and children have inherited is one of fundamental precarity and the absence of opportunity. It is a world where those that came before us on both the “left” and the right, deregulated every aspect of institutions that make social life possible, bringing about the disappearance of jobs, worker representation, the realistic possibility of retirement as a result of getting rid of pensions and replacing them with poor investment plans, and all the rest. They created a world that funneled money to the top 1% on the backs of everyone else, creating the largest wealth disparity in nearly a century. They created a world in which people are drowning in both college and credit debt, not because people or irresponsible or wish to live ridiculously lavish lifestyles, but because now, living from paycheck to paycheck, people are more or less forced into debt to make ends meet. They made a world where the planet is burning and dying in ways that might very well bring about the collapse of civilization as we know it. And they created a world where people feel powerless to do anything about it.
Doesn’t it stand to reason that in a world such as this, where people feel utterly powerless, doesn’t it stand to reason that people would become obsessed with what they think they can control? Isn’t the passion for safety a reflection of how everywhere we experience our lives and ability to live as precarious, and therefore do everything we can to protect ourselves and our children, whether with knee pads and helmets or public health measures or surveillance or regulating speech in every way possible to prevent offense? In a world where there is such gross injustice and inequality, does it come as a surprise that egalitarian impulses would arise, manifesting themselves in things like every child getting a trophy, recognizing the worth of everyone in a world where the vast majority are treated as if they have no worth as can be seen in perpetual layoffs and firings at every level of industry and the uberfication of the economy rendering everyone disposable? Likewise, we could read the policy of allowing students to take tests over and over again as a sort of distortion of the desire to right the injustices of a rigged and grossly unequal society.
Behind all of this, can we not discern a profound desire to control something, anything, in a world that is profoundly beyond our control. We can discern an egalitarian impulse and desire for justice or fairness, where these things are entirely absent. If psychoanalysis has taught us anything, it is that the symptom is both a substitute form of satisfaction, a way of satisfying a repressed wish or desire, and a diversion that functions to lead us astray like a red herring. What is sad in these symptomatic impulses is that they suggest a revolutionary, egalitarian impulse that is nonetheless impotent because it directs itself at the wrong things. They see the world truly, but in a distorted fashion as if through the bottom of a glass.
