John Protevi's Blog

Notes on Columbia Foucault seminar 6/13: "Society Must Be Defended"

Notes on meeting 6/13 (video), Monday 23 November 2015, on “Society Must Be Defended," of the Foucault 13/13 seminar held at Columbia. 

I’d like to make two comments here.

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First, about the “boomerang effect” (SD 103): seminar participants mentioned several names, including that of Césaire and the Discourse on Colonialism where Nazi genocide is seen as a return from the colonies. Here are some others.

I would point out, following Professor Stoler in discussion after the seminar, the work of Sidney Mintz in Sweetness and Power (also mentioned by Thomas Holt in his selection from the recommended readings), which looks at, among other things, productivity enhancing discipline in New World sugar plantations coming back to European factories.

The connection with biopower is here noticeable, as, following Robin Blackburn’s work, we can point to the awareness of the relation of death rates to work output to purchase and importation rates of “fresh” enslaved people. (See here for remarks on why I've come to believe that “enslaved people” is preferable to “slaves.”)

Another boomerang effect is of course the thesis of CLR James’s The Black Jacobins, the radicalization of the French Revolution by the action of the rebels of Saint-Domingue. (James’s mention of suicide and infanticide as resistance techniques among the enslaved population brings us back to the above point.)

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Second, on the relation to notions in Deleuze and Guattari on two points: the notion of “savage war” in the context of Foucault’s treatment of Hobbes (SD 90), and on the distinction of savage and barbarian in Boulainvilliers (SD 194-199).

-- About the sketch of the “barbarian” presented in indirect discourse as Foucault ventriloquizes Boulainvilliers (SD 194-199). The barbarian is opposed by Boulainvilliers to the “savage” of social contract theory and classical economics, the man of exchange (of rights or of goods, i.e., homo politicus or homo economicus). The savage exists before or outside history (and hence must be opposed by Boulainvilliers's radically historical discourse). For jurists, the savage exists before history and comes to exchange rights to found the social body, while for economists, the savage is without history, motivated only by self-interest in exchange. The barbarian, by contrast, is essentially historical, dominating, and free. He is always in an exterior relation to pre-existing civilization. He is essentially dominating; he takes and enslaves rather than exchanges. And he is essentially free: he never trades freedom for security.

One of the participants mentioned here the tripartite division in Anti-Oedipus of savages, barbarians, and civilized. However, in AO, “barbarian” refers to imperial state formations; the exterior, anti-state forces or “war machine” is not developed until A Thousand Plateaus; the point of highest intensity of the war machine is the steppe nomads (as in the quote from Desnos at SD 198-199).

I don’t want to make any strong claims about influence here, but I’m struck by the resonances between Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the war machine and what Foucault writes about in his brief sketch of the centralization of the power of war in the European State. Foucault writes “what was actually called ‘private warfare’ was eradicated from the social body… gradually, the entire social body was cleansed of the bellicose relations that had permeated it through and through during the Middle Ages” (SD 48). (On the twists and turns in the notion of "war" in Foucault, here is my entry on the subject in the Cambridge Foucault Lexicon.)

-- About the notion of "savage war" in Foucault's treatment of Hobbes, another of the participants mentioned Pierre Clastres, suggesting that his work in Society Against the State [French publication of this essay collection was in 1974, but his articles were well-known before then] could clarify Foucault’s formulation of the reference to the savage peoples of America cited by Hobbes. Foucault writes “First, what is this war that exists before the State, and which the State is, in theory, destined to end? What is this war that the State has pushed back into prehistory, into savagery, into its mysterious frontiers, but which is still going on? And second, how does this war give birth to the State?” (SD 90).

Things are very complex here (I’m confident the seminar participant mentioning Clastres knows all this, so I’m just expanding on what he would have said had he had more time), so I’d like to mention this essay of mine that goes into some detail.

Briefly, however, I can make the following points.

As detailed in a fine recent book by Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc, Politique et État chez Deleuze et Guattari (Paris: PUF, 2013), Clastres can't determine the conditions for the emergence of state; he can only state the conditions of its non-emergence: “savage war” as anti-State mechanism relies on keeping chiefs from becoming kings by trapping them in a prestige-war cycle: to maintain prestige they must wage war from the front lines but in doing so they condemn themselves to high risk of death so they won’t survive long enough to consolidate sovereign power.

Sibertin-Blanc lets us see what Deleuze and Guattari are doing with their notion of the Urstaat and the "auto-presupposition" of the state: it needs a surplus to feed its specialists but it needs specialists to produce and other specialists to monitor and confiscate that very surplus. This is a rewriting of Wittfogel (1957), who himself rewrites the Marxist “Asiatic mode of production.” The state is not the instrument of a pre-existing dominant class: it is itself the direct organization of society enabling surplus production which it then immediately appropriates; it is therefore itself what produces the dominant and subordinate classes. It is to address this problem of auto-presupposition that Deleuze and Guattari have recourse in Anti-Oedipus to Nietzsche's idea of the break into history of the immediately arriving conquerors.

Leaving Sibertin-Blanc to the side, we could contrast Clastres’s anti-State mechanism of inter-group war with Christopher Boehm’s recent ethnography of nomadic foragers revealing intra-group mechanisms of ridicule, exile, and “capital punishment” aimed at maintaining radical egalitarian structures. Boehm’s Moral Origins also speaks of vendetta as an inter-group mechanism that is both anti-State and anti-war. His work can be connected with that of Raymond Kelly, whose Warless Societies and the Origin of War discusses the lack of a “logic of social substitution” that keeps personalized vendetta as inter-group violence below the threshold of “war.” (See here for Kelly's paper upon induction into the National Academy of Sciences.) 

Jesús Navarro, "How to do philosophy with words: Reflections on the Searle/Derrida debate."

Blurb for the English translation of Jesús Navarro's book on the missed encounter of Derrida and Searle (Spanish original is here; the translation will appear with John Benjamins). 

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Jesús Navarro’s fine book stages the non-encounter of Searle and Derrida. With impartiality, care, and precision he explains the misunderstandings and ill will that made this a missed opportunity and reinforced the “analytic / continental divide” that has plagued the professional philosophical scene for decades.

The book proceeds on two levels, a first order recapitulation of theses, and then a second order reflection on the speech acts of the encounter itself, showing that it’s not simply theoretical misunderstanding – of which there is plenty – but also conflicting political visions that beset the encounter.

First, Navarro sketches the traditions of each thinker (Wittgenstein and Austin – but of course he is shared – on the one hand, Saussure, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas on the other), and establishes the different understandings of key terms such as “intentionality,” “iterability,” and so on. He also pinpoints the difference between the “either / or” logic of Searle and the logic of impurity or contamination of Derrida (in which the condition of possibility of a term or concept is the condition of impossibility of its pure application).

Secondly, the book then, wonderfully, applies speech act theory to see how and why the encounter failed, as each side failed – or refused – to see the philosophical aims for which each side marshaled their theses and arguments: not just the theoretical aims of systematization for Searle and deconstruction for Derrida, but also the political aims of Searle’s denunciation of threats to rationality and Derrida’s denunciation of non-reflective instantiations of the “metaphysics of presence.”

The conclusion then asks what might have been, had the encounter gone otherwise; in so doing it asks whether an encounter on the terrain of “philosophy” in the singular (i.e., without regard to “analytic” and “continental” varieties) would be possible. That is, is there “philosophy” or only “philosophies”? A difficult question which we can thank Navarro for posing.

Notes on Ideology, loosely tied to Eric Swanson's "Slurs and Ideologies"

I recently met Eric Swanson at the conference on Jason Stanley's work in Valladolid (where I presented this paper). We had some very nice discussions about the paper he presented there entitled "Slurs and Ideologies" (latest version here [in PDF]).

I've spent some time since then thinking about the paper and realized that, despite some desultory reading of the classics, I had never really written down my thoughts on ideology. So I thought I'd compose these notes, without doing any re-reading, just trying to let my thoughts crystallize. While these notes were prompted by reading Eric's paper (and Jason's propaganda book), they are largley independent of those works and shouldn't necessarily be seen as a commentary on them.

Comments welcome, of course, here or by email.

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Here's how I think of ideology: it's a set of affective-cognitive dispositions, instilled in people by their participation in practices.* Its implantation starts with kids growing up in an environment in which certain verbal and physical practices are common and once that implantation takes hold actions coming from those dispositions reinforce the ideology. An ideology doesn’t act, but it makes it easier for those who consent to the ideology to act in ways that are consonant with the content of the ideology.

I don’t think practices are part of ideologies; practices are sets of actions that interact with ideologies, implanting and being reinforced by actions that are the components of practices. For instance, mortgage redlining is a practice that is part of, and reinforces, the general practice of racial segregation which is itself part of and reinforces the way of life of white supremacy ("way of life" would be an interacting set of practices and ideologies).

I don't think a practice is like a belief, norm, value, or way of interpreting the world, which all seem cognitive / subjective. Practices are instead ways of acting in the world (but I wouldn't call it a way of interacting *with* the world, since that installs a subject / world split I think). They find their unity in a "script" which brings together affective-cognitive dispositions that guide actions, beliefs, and so on, so that by following a script different iterations of an action become a practice.

"Interests" is another difficult term here. They aren’t parts of ideologies, but they are a principle of explanation of ideology-guided actions and practices. They are more objective than a norm or value. Hence the occasional problem of a mismatch between the "true" interests of someone and their norms, values, and actions.

For example, the practice of mortgage redlining upholds the interests of certain actors who benefit from the way of life of white supremacy (e.g., white homeowners in segregated neighborhoods in which blacks can't get mortgages), and hurts the interests of those denied mortgages by that practice, but I'm not sure it’s in the same ontological class as belief, norm, value, and way of interpreting the world.

Verbal practices: some actions and the supposed motives that produce them, and the characters of people who repeatedly produce those actions, are repeatedly praised or blamed. Exposure to those verbal practices produces affective-cognitive dispositions to believe / feel in certain ways, thus leading to repetition of the actions, thus providing scripts by means of which the actions might congeal into a practice.

The same with physical practices: all the way from facial expressions: smiles, squints, frowns; bodily expressions: shrugs, recoils; social interactions: shaking hands, patting on the back, hugging, kissing, or pushing, shoving, fighting, killing....

Relating slurs to ideology is a socializing move. The power and danger of slurs is not just that they produce a series of internal representations linking words and classes of people; instead they do that *and*, by cueing ideologies, they trigger affective-cognitive dispositions and scripts resulting in thoughts and feelings and actions that conform to practices that reinforce a way of life.

Slurs are on-the-spot psychologically violent, and by cueing / reinforcing ideologies, they increase the chances of further psychological violence (by further slurs, and by internalization), and they increase the chance of physical violence by (on the outside reading) triggering scripts for practices, or (on the inside reading) by triggering the practices directly.

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* In my own work I talk about "bodies politics" in order to mark social and somatic interaction which result in replication of "affective-cognitive structures", as I think including affective dispositions in "ideology" produces a lot of tension in the expanded concept with the traditional (cognitive) components of beliefs, norms, and values. But if we want to use an expanded notion of ideology I think the affective components should be made explicit.

Paris

"The writerly attitude" in Alva Noë's "Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature"

Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (NY: Hill and Wang, 2015).

In this note, I want to focus on the notion of a “writerly attitude” in the key Chapter 4 of Strange Tools, “Art Loops and the Garden of Eden.”

Let’s recap from the previous posts, where I mostly articulate Noë’s theses, but also flesh out some implications. The key distinction of ST is that between level 1 (“organized activities”) and level 2 (“reorganization practices”).

Level 1 organized activities have 6 features: they are 1) naturally rooted, 2) cognitively demanding, 3) temporally / rhythmically structured, 4) emergent from endogenous dynamics [in the case of breast-feeding neither nurse nor infant is in charge], 5) functional, and 6) potentially pleasurable. Organized activities are bio-cultural; they become habits; and they are complexly interwoven at multiple scales. The resonance of these activities then provide a functional integration to our lives and their dissonance allows for innovative mixing and matching to create new patterns of activity.

Level 2 is that of the practices that provide a “perspicuous representation” of an organized activity, where “the nature of the organization at the lower level gets put on display and investigated” (ST 29). For instance, choreography displays dancing to us, as (bio-culturally informed) organized activity.  

Now, for Noë philosophy is also a level-2 practice: it “stands to our level-1 cognitive undertakings – reasoning, argument, belief formation, and crucially, the work of science – [as] choreography stands to movement and dancing, or painting stands to picture-making activities” (ST 29-30).

So philosophy shows thought as organized in a particular way – as conforming to a particular image of thought, we could say – and in so doing allows for that organization to be shook up and re-organized. I would say here that, as with all activities put on display by arts, working on our thought patterns to de-/re-organize them relies on plasticity and multiple processuality. That is, in order to be organized in the first place, activities presuppose both a capacity to be organized (plasticity) and a capacity to mesh together multiple biological / neurological processes with cultural processes (multiple processuality).

To pick up with Chapter 4 after this recapping, in a key move, Noë will claim that philosophy and art are necessary because organized activities need a supplement of reflective practices. This is because “we may lack a sense of the lay of the land” the meshwork of activities prepare for us, so that art and philosophy are practices of “making sense” (ST 30). (We may also find ourselves not just dis-oriented but in situations of injustice so that art and philosophy can also indicate points of strength and weakness of the meshwork of activities we find ourselves in and hence help us make sense of how to flee or strike.)

Noë follows this with a series of reflections on writing, which for us in literate societies is the “image of language” (ST 32; italics in original). But writing doesn’t represent a pre-existing, independent language; it loops down and informs our language: “The looping doesn’t stop. The result is a dense, historical, many-layered scriptoral-linguistic structure” (ST 36).

Now comes an extremely important move: Noë generalizes from writing in the restricted sense to a general notion of “graphical practices,” such as the cave paintings “that are at least as old as our linguistic capacities (or as old as we have reason to think our linguistic capacities are” (ST 41).

But that’s not all. In an even more radical move, writing for Noë is beyond any physical, empirical graphical practice, even drawing. Let’s follow the steps.

Even before such graphical practices is a need for them based on an irreducible dimension of misunderstanding inherent in social life: “Language began with the possibility of misunderstanding” (ST 41). That is, there could never be language without the need for reflection on whether or not a communication was successful. The possibility of misunderstanding always haunts attempts at understanding, so “there was never a Garden of Eden, and so there never was a language that we carried out and made use of freely, automatically, always without need for reflection” (on whether or not misunderstanding or understanding had taken place) (ST 42).

This ever-present need for reflection on linguistic practice caused by the irreducible or even necessary possibility of misunderstanding is what Noë calls “the writerly attitude” (ST 42). And this writerliness is an essential part of speech: “We had been using speaking to model speech long before we started using drawing (that is to say writing) for this purpose” (ST 42). In other words, our ancestors would have always already adopted the writerly attitude to deal with the necessary possibility of misunderstanding as soon as they had linguistically mediated social life.

What this means is that writing, which in its empirical form comes later, is a transcendental structure interwoven with empirical speech: “My point is that whether we actually invent a way to write down our speech, we do what is, conceptually, at least, the equivalent” (ST 42). This “writerly attitude” is essential: “There wouldn’t be speech without these practices of self-organization… The second order penetrates the first order through and through” (ST 42).

So we have here, under the name of “the writerly attitude,” an interweaving of transcendental condition (universal and necessary normative reflection responding to the necessary possibility of misunderstanding constitutive of social life) and empirical production (everyday speech and writing).

Statement by Kirk Sanders, Chair of Philosophy at UIUC

In an email earlier today to faculty and staff of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson announced the approval of a negotiated settlement with Dr. Steven Salaita, whose offer of appointment as an Associate Professor of American Indian Studies had been revoked last year. Throughout the ensuing controversy, the Department of Philosophy at UIUC repeatedly proved itself a vocal opponent of the revocation of Dr. Salaita’s offer and a strong supporter of academic freedom and shared governance more generally.

Ours was the first unit on campus outside of American Indian Studies to approve a resolution of “no confidence” in the Chancellor, President, and Board of Trustees. Several members of our faculty were deeply involved in efforts in the Academic Senate and across campus to seek Dr. Salaita’s reinstatement and to publicly reaffirm the university’s commitments to core principles of academic freedom and shared governance.

While the university remains under AAUP censure as the result of the actions of its administration and Board of Trustees at the time, it is important to note that the key players in the decision to fire Dr. Salaita no longer occupy positions of power at UIUC. The former Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Chris Kennedy, no longer sits on the Board; former President Robert Easter retired; and former Chancellor Phyllis Wise and former Provost Ilesanmi Adesida resigned their respective positions following the revelation that they had used non-university email accounts for university business in an apparent attempt to evade Freedom of Information Act requests, including ones related to the Salaita case.

Now that Dr. Salaita himself has agreed to a financial settlement, the motivation for the academic boycott of UIUC that arose in response to his case would seem to be entirely gone. While the pledge that so many of our colleagues in Philosophy signed (http://proteviblog.typepad.com/protevi/2014/09/over-550-philosophers-now-boycotting-uiuc-over-the-handling-of-the-salaita-case.html) stated in part: “We, the  undersigned,  will  not  visit  the  University  of  Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus until Professor Salaiata is reinstated to the position offered him …,” the terms of Dr. Salaita’s settlement effectively preclude the possibility of reinstatement.

While we respect Dr. Salaita’s decision to settle rather than to continue to pursue the matter in the courts, despite the clear merits of his case, a financial settlement of the sort agreed to leaves many of the core issues regarding the university's commitment to principles of academic freedom and shared governance unresolved in a way that his reinstatement would not. The AAUP report on UIUC suggested that a retraction -- or at least clarification -- of certain comments made by Chancellor Wise and the Board of Trustees concerning "civility" in the infamous mass emails of August 22, 2014, will also be a necessary condition of ending censure. Now that the legal issues surrounding Dr. Saliata's firing seem to have been resolved, one hopes that such a retraction will soon follow.

In the meantime, it is my sincere hope that colleagues in Philosophy across the country and around the world will once again feel comfortable accepting invitations to come and speak on our campus. We’ve missed having you here.

 

Sincerely,

Kirk Sanders

Associate Professor and Chair

Department of Philosophy

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The Salaita settlement and the philosophers boycott

Steven Salaita has settled his suit against Illinois. 

While I was not in any sense the "director" or what have you of the philosopher's boycott, I was a catalyst, so I think I should say something here. 

Unfortunately, there was some inconsistency in my statements: the letter sent to UIUC and BOT officials said "until Professor Salaita is reinstated" whereas many of the blog posts which alerted people to the boycott effort said "until an equitable resolution is reached." On reflection the latter standard seems the right one to me, but people should make up their own minds here.

The last word I think should be directed to Steven Salaita himself, thanking him for the courage he displayed in this long fight. 

UPDATE: Corey Robin finishes his post on the matter in this way: 

As I was finishing up this post, Steven responded to an email I had sent him with the following:

We fought hard.  I tried my very best to represent those invested in the issue with dignity and decency.  And I hope this sort of thing never happens to anybody else.

I would say that Steven did more than try his very best to represent those invested in the issue with dignity and decency. He actually did represent those invested in the issue with dignity and decency. And while I don’t have a crystal ball, I’d be surprised if any university ever tried to pull this kind of stunt again.

 

On the notion of philosophy in Alva Noë's "Strange Tools"

Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (NY: Hill and Wang, 2015).

In this note, I want to focus on the presentation of philosophy as a “level 2 reorganization practice” in Strange Tools.

Chapter 4 of ST is entitled “Art Loops and the Garden of Eden.” Here Noë lays out many of the most important ideas of the work. (In my next post, I’ll tackle the notion of “writerly attitude” laid out in Chapter 4; here I’ll focus on philosophy.)

Noë begins by recapping the difference between Levels 1 and 2. Level 1 is that of organized activities (see the previous post); level 2 is that of the practice that provides a perspicuous representation of the organized activity, where “the nature of the organization at the lower level gets put on display and investigated” (ST 29). For instance, choreography displays dancing to us, as (bio-culturally informed) organized activity.  

Now, for Noë philosophy is also a level-2 practice: it “stands to our level-1 cognitive undertakings – reasoning, argument, belief formation, and crucially, the work of science – [as] choreography stands to movement and dancing, or painting stands to picture-making activities” (ST 29-30).

So, to fulfill the analogy that Noë leaves implicit, if dancing taps into a “culturally shaped motion bank” that is informed by downward looping of choreography so that our “spontaneous” dancing is “cliché-like,” (ST 31), then we have a culturally shaped thought bank whereby our everyday thoughts are informed by previous philosophical concepts. (Keynes said that the most hard-headed practical business people are ruled by the thoughts of long dead philosophers; Dreyfus diagnosed the Cartesianism of AI; there are many other diagnoses, grist for the mill of cultural critics.)

I would say that these “banks” are virtual or potential or transcendental with regard to the actual / empirical thoughts we think. But that virtual / potential / transcendental realm is not unstructured; far from it. There are lines running through it, lines that make it more or less likely that we will have a certain thought at a certain time. In other words, by being organized in cultural thought activities we become predisposed to have certain patterns of occurring thoughts.

But, and this is the key, those virtual / potential / transcendental lines are not static Platonic Ideas; they are instead experimentally made and remade by the interplay between philosophical re-organization and cultural organization. The transcendental realm of our “thought bank,” in other words, is always in relation with the empirical realm of our reading and writing philosophy. So that philosophy is a practice of de-organizing our thought patterns and thereby alerting us to our having-been-organized in a particular way so that we might undertake a re-organization of our virtual thought bank.

Now, “undertake” might be too voluntaristic, or at least it’s not the whole story; sometimes I think we “undergo” a de- / re-organization, in relation to our “undertaking” it: sometimes you are shocked into incomprehension but then find glimmers you can follow, by a concentrated undertaking, that might lead you into a new set of thought potentials.

The same conditions of plasticity and multiple processuality we talked about yesterday are the conditions for this de- / re-organization of thought that philosophical practice affords us. So we find philosophy here as the art of thinking.

Notes on "organization" in Alva Noë's new book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature

Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (NY: Hill and Wang, 2015).

In this brief note, I want to focus on the idea of “organization” Noë puts forth here in his wonderful new book.

He opens the book with a discussion of breast-feeding as an activity that “organizes us. The task itself shapes, enables, and constrains us; we find ourselves put together and made up in the setting of the activity” (ST 5; italics in original).

Organized activities have 6 features: they are 1) naturally rooted, 2) cognitively demanding, 3) temporally / rhythmically structured, 4) emergent from endogenous dynamics [in the case of breast-feeding neither nurse nor infant is in charge], 5) functional, and 6) potentially pleasurable.

First of all, I think the example is important, for, following Colwyn Trevarthen, we can see breast-feeding and other infant/caretaker rhythmic interchange as setting up “primary intersubjectivity” which lays the ground for later turn-taking behavior characteristic of “secondary intersubjectivity” in conversation (Noë’s next example at ST 6-7), dance (ST 11), and so on.

For developmental psychology research here, see the essay collection Communicative Musicality (OUP, 2009); for philosophy see, inter alia, Thomas Fuchs & Hanne De Jaegher, Enactive intersubjectivity: Participatory sense-making and mutual incorporation, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (2009): 465–486 and Shaun Gallagher, Two problems of intersubjectivity, Journal of Consciousness Studies 16, No. 6–7 (2009): 289-308.

Next, such organization happens in and enmeshes into the characteristic activities of our culture: “To be alive is to be organized, and insofar as we are not only organisms but also persons, we find ourselves organized, or integrated, in a still larger range of ways that ties us to the environment, each other, and our social worlds” (ST, 6).

Organization, Noë insists, cannot be understood by neuro-reductionism or by hyper-intellectualism, but needs to be analyzed at the “embodiment level,” which is neither sub-personal nor personal; AN refers here not to Merleau-Ponty as might be expected but to Dana Ballard of UT Austin. The point he’s trying to make here is that not all organized activities are social; perception is a case whereby “the environment itself organizes us individually” (ST 8). I’m not sure about this with regard to seeing anything other than just objects; I would think that our concrete perception (“this thing isn’t just a thing, it’s a table”) is irreducibly social.

But leave that be; the interesting thing for me comes next: “Our lives are one big complex nesting of organized activities at different levels and scales… We are always captured by structures of organization…. And crucially, these structures of organization are not of our own making” (ST 10). This is key to our radical historical sociality: our growing up is a process of being organized into evolving structures of organized activity. I’d like to put in a plug here for variation in practices: I don’t think we have a culture, but rather we have cultures, in the plural, and it's the resonance and dissonance of organized activities that lets us achieve both comfortable habits and creative novelty.

In shifting to his discussion of art, Noë distinguishes dancing as organized activity from choreography, which is a practice that “puts dancing itself on display” (ST 13), that aims at producing a “perspicuous representation,” something that “illuminat[es] the ways we find ourselves organized, and so, also, the ways we might reorganize ourselves” (ST 17).

So at this point I want to thematize plasticity and process.

Plasticity has to be as the ground for organization / re-organization. But re-organization implies as well a capacity for de-organization as an intermediary between a state of being organized and a later state of re-organization.

But I also want to inject a process perspective here: aren’t we just always ratios of processes heading toward (re-)organization and de-organization? A fully organized (fully habituated) state is a limit; no one, no thing is ever so locked into repetition without a difference that it just rolls along with no bumps, no variation. On the other hand I fully agree that there’s no life without some degree of organization, some resonance, some habituation: the heart just has to start up again and again and again after each one of its cycles and its rhythm has to get enmeshed with a multiplicity of other processes.

I think this biological necessity for harmony in multiple processes scales up to the level of organized activities: “talking, walking, eating, perceiving, driving” are Noë’s examples (ST 10) but we can extend the list. They have to harmonize to some extent just so we can get through the day, but there’s enough dissonance to open possibilities for experimentation with the interplay of those activities.

I’m tempted to a pun here to conclude. Can we call this experimentation with organized activities – underpinned by plasticity and multiple processuality – and resulting in de-organizing ourselves for novel re-organizations, can we call this the “art of living”? 

Catherine Hall on Edward Long's disavowals

Great talk by Professor Catherine Hall of UCL at CUNY yesterday (Oct 1, 2015). Just a few observations / developments on the theme of disavowal: 

1) Hall pointed out a move by Locke: Africans did the enslaving via right of conquest; Europeans just bought the enslaved. But this makes enslavement into a essential property attributed once and for all to a subject, whereas Hall reminded us that in reality enslaving was a continually re-worked process through countless daily practices of humiliation and torture.

2) In her discussion of a landscape description in Long's History of Jamaica she pointed out how, behind a waterfall, there was a grotto where maroons could hide.

3) The ever-present possibility of flight that is marronage (I've been reading Neil Roberts lately) was one of the reasons for the need for continual enslaving as an ongoing process.

4) Long's continual disavowal of the humanity of slaves was particularly acute in describing the tortuous execution of rebels, whose agonies were disavowed with a claim that they didn't really suffer all that much.

I didn't get to make a comment at the talk, but if I had it would have been this:

5) But this disavowal renders inexplicable the practice of public torture with the aim of terrorizing the gathered slaves: if the tortured didn't really suffer all that much due to their sub-human nature, then what was the use of gathering the others? They could only be terrorized by sharing the pain of the tortured, but that pain is what was disavowed.

Revised paper, "Jason Stanley and the Recovery of Artisanal Knowledge in Plato"

JASON STANLEY AND THE RECOVERY OF ARTISANAL KNOWLEDGE IN PLATO

Download PDF version

SIUCC 2015
University of Valladolid
October 2015

John Protevi
Phyllis M Taylor Professor of French Studies
Professor of Philosophy 
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge LA 70803 USA
[email protected]
http://www.protevi.com/john

 

FORECAST

The talk has two parts, epistemological and political. I will proceed in the “sympathetic hypothetical” mode. Rather than delve into the linguistics-oriented critical literature on Stanley’s intellectualist thesis on know-how (e.g., Poston 2015), I will instead strive for a charitable exposition of the neuroscientific elements of latest version of that thesis (as presented in his 2013 Frontiers in Human Neuroscience piece with John Krakauer) in order to elucidate the stakes of his work: if we assume his position withstands criticism, what then follows for both our epistemology and our politics?

First I show how Stanley critiques the mental knowledge / manual skill distinction by means of his deflationary sense of (not necessarily verbally articulable) propositional knowledge. Stanley and Krakauer claim non-conceptual “motor acuity” (reduction of variance in movement) is only one part of “motor skill.” Not necessarily verbally articulable propositional knowledge provides a scaffold for the exercise of such acuity, and it’s the combination of knowledge and non-conceptual acuity that constitutes motor skill. Conversely, non-conceptual forms of perceptual ability inhabit manifestations of perceptual knowledge, and it is even the case that prototypical intellectual work such as mathematics involves “neural computations equivalent to those underlying both perceptual and motor acuity.” There is thus a sort of “non-conceptual intellectual acuity” just as there is “factual knowledge in motor skill.” This criss-cross allows us rethink the distinction of mental knowledge and (merely) physical skill or knack. With Stanley’s help we can now see the distinction presupposes an underlying form with elements of both sides; we can call this “artisanal knowledge.”  

Now the mental / manual distinction is not just an epistemological point, but also a political one: “Our society is divided into castes based upon a supposed division between theoretical knowledge and practical skill” (Stanley 2012). The philosophical justification of this political structure can be seen in Plato, to whose foundational status Stanley often refers: “Plato’s Republic is the wellspring from which all subsequent Western philosophy flows, and political philosophy is no exception” (Stanley and Weaver 2014).

So in the second part of the talk I show how the concept of “artisanal knowledge” illuminates a seemingly minor, though in fact key, passage in Plato’s Laws about how the childcare provided by slave nurses provides the emotional basis of moral and political education. Plato denigrates the choice by the slave nurses of the proper lullaby (and by extension other forms of morality-influencing childcare) as mere “guesswork.” So, there are political stakes to Stanley’s epistemological work: although denigrated by philosophers as mere knack, the entire moral / political system of Plato’s Laws rests upon the “artisanal knowledge” of these slave nurses, just as, we could argue, using developmental psychology, the emotional bases of our moral-political system rests upon contemporary childcare.

I will conclude the talk with some reflections on the role of political emotion in Stanley’s recent book, How Propaganda Works.

Notes on Richard Drayton's "European Empires and the origin of modern inequality"

Wonderful talk by Richard Drayton​ at CUNY Graduate Center (the Advanced Research Collaborative, which seems to be as cool as its name) yesterday afternoon. Some notes follow: 

1. Global history looks beyond the spatial and temporal scales of much history-writing: The 10-100 year window into an ethno-national group's activities. Instead, it looks for multiple time scales, up to the "deep history" (see also) Drayton evoked in his discussion of Neolithic state-formation. And it looks to multiple spatial scales, such as the pan-European inheritance of Roman imperial practices. It is not that the local and short-term are not important, Drayton explained, but they can't be our sole focus -- while it is true that you can't see a forest if there are no trees, we do know what happens to our vision when we see *only* trees. 
2. Along with the multiple spatial and temporal scales, Drayton had recourse to a multi-disciplinary matrix of research in archeology, primatology, ethnography, political science, and economics, as well as history from Roman to modern European times.
3. Drayton referenced Christopher Boehm's work on "reverse dominance hierarchies," or the economy of violence that maintains egalitarian social relations. I have a short post here on this aspect of Boehm's work, and he appears in this paper, where I contrast his notion of intra-group anti-state violence to the inter-group violence that Clastres investigated. Drayton noted, correctly IMO, that such pre-state anti-hierarchical practices can be genealogically traced in various contemporary resistance practices.
4. Another Drayton reference was to Susan Ousthuizen's 2013 paper on common property rights (those rights that allow control of what Elinor Ostrom dubbed common pool resources), which, once beset by dominance hierarchies, involve "nested" regimes of exclusive and common control. I have some notes on Ostrom's work here involving the ongoing struggle between collective control and "policies that crowd out reciprocity and collective action."
5. Another theme in Drayton's talk was the stacking of egalitarian levels within hierarchical structures. In the discussion, the topic of "military egalitarianism" came up, the notion that citizenship is extended to the lowest common denominator of the leading military formation: hence -- using Athenian examples -- the "hoplite revolution" taking over from aristocratic calvary and in turn leading to citizenry dropping to the level of the trireme rowers. (Here's a video of a presentation of mine that touches on this notion; here's the power point.)
6. The egalitarian / hierarchical struggle of course brings up "the Spinoza question": "why do people fight for their servitude as if it were their freedom?"
7. Finally, a question that went unasked, but I think might be relevant to Drayton's insistence on repeated practices of violence installing and maintaining dominance relations: Could it be that longue durée domination involves epigenetic transmission of trauma? 

Power Point for upcoming Utah conference

I'll be presenting a talk on, among other things, PTSD and "moral injury" among USAF drone pilots (5.6 MB PDF file: Download Images and Affects -- Utah 2015) at an upcoming conference on "Affect, Images, and Digital Media" at the University of Utah (Sept 3-5).

Jason Stanley and the Recovery of Artisanal Knowledge in Plato

JASON STANLEY AND THE RECOVERY OF ARTISANAL KNOWLEDGE IN PLATO

ABSTRACT: In this paper I first lay out the way Jason Stanley deconstructs the mental / manual labor distinction by way of insisting on his deflationary (because not requiring verbal articulability) notion of propositional knowledge occurring as a scaffolding for motor skill. I then show how this allows us to recover a sense of “artisanal knowledge” in what Plato had denigrated as mere “knack” or “guesswork,” even as the supposedly purely manual labor of slave nurses caring for the children of citizens occupies a crucial role in the Laws.

Linda Zerilli on Affect Theory

Linda Zerilli of the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago has a very interesting piece, "The Turn to Affect and the Problem of Judgment" forthcoming in New Literary History. The typescript is here. There's a lot going on here, much of it very well put, but, at the risk of special pleading, I want to offer some nuances to her portrayal of my work in Political Affect (see also here for a summary). I first though want to thank her for the attention to my work; as the old saying goes, "I don't care why my name is in the paper, as long as it's spelled correctly."

Zerilli takes up the deflationary account of conceptual / propositional knowledge (see here and here for my take on Jason Stanley's version of this) in which it need not be linguistically articulable to count as knowledge. This deflationary account is then set up as an alternative to what she sees as the intellectualist account of conceptual / propositional knowledge -- which would require linguistic articulability (here she locates Ruth Leys, whose critique of, and reply to,  William Connolly features in the paper) -- and which serves as the foil to what she sees as the nonconceptuality shared by Dreyfusian phenomenologists, Deleuzian / Spinozist affect theorists (where she counts Nigel Thrift, Biran Massumi, William Connolly, and myself), and Damasio / Panksepp and other affective neuroscientists. For Zerilli, these latter schools are caught in a mirror-image binarism and a "layer-cake" ontology.

It's a rich paper, which, after the scene-setting critique of the intellectualism / affect binary, develops a theory of judgment with Wittgenstein, Kant, and Cavell among the resources.

Here I just want to focus on where Political Affect fits into the picture.

First, I have to admit that parts of Zerilli's diagnosis of affect theory will make me reread some of my stuff now (again, as I do here after reading Stanley) to make sure I don’t fall into the trap of this position: "turn judgment into a kind of post hoc rationalization of primed responses.” That's Jonathan Haidt’s position in “Emotional Dog and Rational Tail” (my notes here), though to be fair, he says that while it holds for most everyday cases, if you’re careful and work at it in a disciplined way, you can eventually pull yourself into a position where reflection and dialogue can get you out of just arguing for the position that came to you at first — or you may end up staying with that position, but with better reasons for it. Having read a lot of Nietzsche early in my life I’m sympathetic to primacy of affect, but again, only in a kind of empirical or statistical way, and not as ruling out, a priori, any kind of judgment with intellectual content. 

That is to say, I think I avoid the intellectualism vs non-cognitive affect opposition Zerilli posits as structuring much contemporary political theory on the question of judgment. I think that in Political Affect I may often have an overly rigid notion of the "rational cognitive subject" as my foil, but I'd say my notion of "affective cognition" takes both elements all the way down, in keeping with the Varela / Thompson Mind in LIfe (my article on that book is here) or enactivism school's notion of sense-making, which is found even in single-celled organisms. So I'm not sure I want to accept being classified as a layer-cake thinker. 

For instance, at Political Affect 55-56 I say: 

Following Freeman and Gallagher then, we can say that a dynamic systems approach to situated cognition enables us to think the actualization phase of sense-making—the adoption of a direction for action—as sometimes encompassing deliberate intention, without compromising our commitment to a materialist, naturalistic, take on the embodied-embedded nature of bodies politic. 

I'd say it's certainly true that I'm fascinated / horrified by desubjectifying experiences of rage and panic and so on, but I think they are pretty rare episodes of complete empyting out of subjects and activation of "affect programs" to use Paul Griffiths's phrase. *Sometimes" I think affect undermines conscious control, but that's pretty rare. Most of the time they are entangled, modulating each other, etc. Affect provides salience (draws cognitive attention) but most of the time doesn't overwhelm / undermine. Desubjectivation is a limit, I suppose we could say, but when we get close to the limit our qualitative analyses should change. I try to do that in my case studies of Columbine, Katrina, and Schiavo (newer versions of those papers are in Political Affect, but these drafts give the essentials). 

Finally, I'm not sure where to put this, but I think it's relevant, so it can go here in lieu of a conclusion: here is my survey article on "Political Emotion."

Professional issues poll: which of these Leiter tweets is the most lol-worthy instance of projection?

Preamble: this is a tit-for-tat post. Leiter overstepped his bounds in allowing anonymous metabro speculation about Leigh Johnson to appear on a thread devoted to "professional issues." (He's so desperate at losing his central position in the philosophy blogosphere that he's taken to lending his megaphone to the metabros. No links, but you can find the evidence if you want.) Now Johnson roundly boxed Leiter's ears on her blog and on Twitter, but I think a little supplemental mockery of Brian is in order here. Now ordinarily I ignore the guy (though he's obsessed with me, as when he went over to a Daily Nous thread to tweet out an attack on me, even though it was directed at someone else and even though he's blocked me on Twitter) but I do respond when he attacks SPEP just for malice, or when he plays the SPEP card to distract from lots of non-SPEP criticism of the PGR, so why not a response here? 

So without further ado, here's the professional issues poll. Vote for 1, 2, or 3 for most lol-worthy instance of projection on Leiter's part:

1) 

 2)

 3) 

 Bonus LOL. Leiter's blocked me on Twitter. Must be because I'm not a serious contributor to "professional issues" threads which megaphone the meta-bros. 

 

Update on an update in the McAdams case

UPDATE by Justin Weinberg: 

The copy of the letter of intent to pursue termination proceedings for McAdams, from Richard Holz, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Marquette, which McAdams linked to, was altered to omit some information. This information includes, among other things, the fact that McAdams was the official academic advisor of the undergraduate who illicitly recorded his conversation with Abbate. This (a) reinforces Holz’s point that McAdams knew, or ought to have known, that the student did not drop the course for reasons concerning personal or political beliefs, and was lying or reckless when suggesting otherwise, and also (b) shows that McAdams acquired the information on which he based his blog posts about Abbate in virtue of his role as an official of the university. The full version of the letter from the dean (which does not reveal the student’s identity), is here.

Left unanswered is whose idea it was to record Abbate, or whether the idea was discussed, in advance, during one of the advising meetings between McAdams and the undergraduate.

Original update here. 

#slatepitching John McAdams

This is why ‪#‎slatepitch‬ is a thing (for facile and lazy contrarianism). It ignores the MU admin claim (p 14 of the Holz letter) that the 2008 and 2011 incidents show that McAdams has established a pattern of provoking harassment of female students. 

1) These pieces should always let McAdams speak for himself regarding the 2011 incident, in which he prints the name and email address of an MU undergraduate woman, phones her at home, and then prints how to find her phone number. 

2) This piece neglects Abbate's own take, including her claims as to McAdams' deliberate word choices designed to inflame her harassers.

3) The piece is lazy; it doesn't cite the very relevant piece by Peter Kirstein at Academe. 

4) Or the equally relevant piece by Ira Allen at Academe.

My take: 

1) I think we can and should separate a) civil society / professional discussion (in which we should exercise appropriate critical reasoning, neither too credulous nor too skeptical, but for which the term "due process" is misapplied); and the following, for all of which some notion of "due process" is essential: b) institutional proceedings, in which the AAUP guidelines for due process can be a model; c) civil proceedings and d) criminal proceedings, each of which have their own standards of proof and process.

2) I don’t know the provisions of the MU process (which now begins in earnest), but I hope it includes the possibility of outside counsel, AAUP observation / participation, and other such actions, so that it will provide a rigorous testing of the administration’s claims and proposed penalty.

3) It seems to me that what MU's procedure will have to do is decide whether McAdams's claims to "academic freedom" are appropriate, or whether they are misused as an excuse for harassment (or whatever technical term the MU administration will seek to use). I take it everyone agrees AF does not excuse harassment (or whatever term is appropriate here), so the question is whether McAdams's actions fall inside or outside the scope of AF protection, that is, whether they constitute harassment (or the term MU wants to use).

This does nothing to lower my estimation of Brian Leiter

Tweeting about someone he's blocked on Twitter and claiming that the description of someone else's thought was aimed at me: what would you expect from him? It does indicate his obsession with me. 

 

PIKSI 2015!

From the website: http://rockethics.psu.edu/education/piksi

The Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute ... is designed to encourage undergraduate students from under-represented groups to consider future study in the field of philosophy. PIKSI will emphasize the on-going project of greater inclusiveness that is transforming the discipline, inviting students to be participants in the conversation.... If you know promising undergraduate women or men from underrepresented groups such as African Americans, Chicano/as and Latino/as, Native Americans, Asian Americans, LGBTQA persons, economically disadvantaged communities, and people with disabilities, please call this program to their attention. In addition, please consider serving as their “sponsor.” Faculty sponsors mentor students, helping them to prepare their applications, and, when possible and appropriate, work with the students after the Summer Institute to help further the gains the students have made.