John Protevi's Blog

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

JASON STANLEY AND THE RECOVERY OF ARTISANAL KNOWLEDGE IN PLATO

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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.

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).

BBC News - Belgian coma 'writer' Rom Houben can't communicate

In re Schiavo and other cases. Technically speaking, this is a separate case, as the patient here had a catastrophic brain injury, whereas Terri Schiavo had destruction of brain tissue from oxygen deprivation. But you can be sure that this detail and this retraction won't be mentioned the next time the forces that aligned behind the Schindlers come up with another case with which to capture media attention.

via news.bbc.co.uk

"Haiti and Human Nature" talk and time line

Have uploaded two new pieces to my research page at www.protevi.com: the pdf version of a PowerPoint on "Haiti and Human Nature" as well as a time line of events in Haitian history.

The people in Haiti "were their own first responders"

Click here for Anderson Cooper interviewing Russell Honoré about Haiti.

Honoré tells the truth about widespread and immediate prosocial behavior in disasters. And another truth: "security" fears lead to an unnecessary militarization of rescue efforts that can sometimes produce violence due to that very delay. And he hints at the racism behind "security" fears: "just because people are poor doesn't mean they are dangerous."

Anderson Cooper money quote: "neighbors helping neighbors."

UMP | University of Minnesota Press Blog: Author Q&A: On Gilles Deleuze, philosophical tools, and "Political Affect"

A preview from a recent Q&A with me. 

Q: How did you decide on case studies as a method of doing philosophy?

A: I think case studies are an important and under-used tool in philosophy, as opposed to thought experiments ... with case studies we’re not after essential distinctions at the borders of categories. Instead, we’re trying to explore concrete situations and the “problems” they express. Here is where my reliance on the thought of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze comes in. Deleuze did not think in terms of essences that would slot things into categories, but thought that events are the points of intersection of “multiplicities.” That’s a technical term for Deleuze which, roughly speaking, means a field in which several processes meet to produce events, much as a crystal or a lightning bolt or a hurricane forms out of a field of multiple processes. In dealing with analogous multiplicities in our social fields we see that (1) any one move changes the conditions for future moves and that (2) no one solution exhausts the potentials for future creatively different solutions ... The more we explore the Schiavo case, the Columbine case, the Katrina case, the more we realize that concrete situations are “crystallizations” of a problematic field, and that a change here or there, if it occurs at a critical point, might make all the difference in the world. (READ THE FULL Q&A)

via www.uminnpressblog.com

Q & A with me at the U Minnesota Press blog, about Political Affect.

Notes on McKinnon, Neo-liberal genetics

URL is here: http://www.protevi.com/john/Morality/McKinnon.pdf

Notes on Bruce Wexler, Brain and Culture

Have just uploaded notes on this excellent book to my Evolution and Biology of Morality course webpage.

Remarks on Alva Noe's new book, Out of Our Heads

A few remarks on Alva Noë's Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessors from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009.

Alva Noë follows up his wonderful Action in Perception (MIT, 2004) with this book aimed at a popular readership. This post will be less formal than a book review, but I would like to set out some reactions.

First, I think it's great that philosophers write this kind of book. There is a well-established popular science genre, but by and large philosophers have not taken up the challenge of addressing ourselves to the educated lay public. That's a shame, as we should all take seriously our obligations to now and again take on the role of the "public intellectual." There's a complex history here with the mid-20th century turn of mainstream American philosophy away from pragmatism cutting us off from the great example of John Dewey, as well a rather different cultural landscape from Europe, where Bergson, Russell, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, Habermas and many others have filled the role of "public intellectuals." Noë thematizes just these issues of public engagement in his Preface, where he writes "Natural science … is not discontinuous with broader human concerns." Rather than being "value neutral," it is a human project, aimed at broadening the human understanding of the world. I would have liked a reference here to Dewey. Not that I know too much about him, but I do recognize these themes as resonating with his.

Second, it's not easy writing this kind of book, for you have to balance some technical precision (why else have a professional philosopher be the author, rather than a journalist?) with a format and writing style accessible to educated but not specialized readers. Noë succeeds, I think, in setting forth his main thesis – that consciousness is an activity arising from the interplay of brain, body, and world, and is thus not located purely in the brain – in clear, precise terms that allow the professional philosopher to recognize the issues involved as well as allowing the intended lay readership to grasp what's important in the debate.

Having said all that, I would like to bring up some fairly technical issues here, but as they concern the political context in which consciousness arises, I think that's warranted. Also, I won't write so much about all things I agree with, or that I like in the book, which are many (for instance – but this is only an example – the great stuff on the "mind in life" thesis). But I hope it's clear that I wouldn't write at all if I didn't think the issues were very important and that Noë's contributions need to be taken seriously. It's more praise to disagree with someone on important issues, I think, than agree with him or her on trivial ones. To be more precise, it's not that I *disagree* with Noë on many of these points, it's just that I would like to extend the argument a few more steps.

End of life issues.
On page 34, Noë writes about the end-of-life issues concerning the difference between PVS (Persistent Vegetative State) and locked-in syndrome. Noë writes:

When the family of a person who has 'become a vegetable' refuses to give up on that person, refuses to consider 'pulling the plug' or 'pulling out the feeding tubes,' what they are saying is that the kind of love and commitment they feel for the daughter or parent or partner is simply incompatible with making the kind of cost-benefit decisions that would justify making the life-ending decision. Others, of course, reach very different kinds of decisions.

There are a number of things to say here. I've tackled many of them in my study of the Terri Schiavo case, which can be read here, here, and here.

First, there's a difference between respecting the wishes of a person, recorded before the onset of PVS, not to receive feeding tube care after the onset of PVS, and a third-party decision. In the Schiavo case, it was never a third-party decision, but a matter of respecting Terri Schiavo's wishes. I explore why most people tend to think of these kinds of decisions as self-centered: "I don't want to be a vegetable, so please pull the plug on me!" But it's also possible that one can wish not to receive feeding tubes for the sake of others. In other words, you might know that your loved ones could never make that decision on their own, so you make it for them.

Second, to be legally ratified, third-party decisions have to be made on a "best interest of the patient" basis. There's a way this could be said to be a "cost-benefit" basis, but just that phrase alone makes it seem like just a monetary decision.

Third, the use of "person" with regard to PVS cases is philosophically fraught. There are many, many issues involved here, but let me just refer to the longer pieces mentioned above, along with this distinction: it might be that when a person before the onset of PVS asks not to receive feeding tubes, that the death aimed at here is not suicide (killing the organism in order to kill the person), but "organismcide," that is, killing the organism that used to support a person but is now only the remains of the person, who died when the parts of the brain necessary for consciousness (but not sufficient – I agree with Noe here totally) were destroyed.

Fourth, I think we need to support the right of persons to direct in advance that they not receive tubal feeding not just in PVS, but also in MCS (Minimally Conscious State) and the locked-in condition. In MCS, severe cortical damage has occurred, but some, "minimal," cognitive function remains. A catatonic "locked-in syndrome" occurs with no cortical damage, hence full cognitive function, but with a closing off of motor control. I would speculate that most people fear a "locked-in condition" when they don't want tubal feeding, though the only reason to believe an MCS is any better than being locked in would be the lowered cognitive function. An other-directed motivation for refusing tubal feeding would not be to avoid the horror of the locked-in state (though that is horror indeed), but to allow some peace of mind, closure, and the ability to grieve, to come to our loved ones.

Again, I don't want to make too much out of just a few sentences, and I don't want to criticize Noe for not going into the details of these knotty issues in a popular book. I just wanted to lay out these reactions.

Dynamics of Consciousness
Noë writes at 50-51: "the baby-caretaker 'dyad' is a unity from which the child only gradually emerges as an individual. We can speak of attachment here, but I prefer to speak of oneness.” This bothered me, as it seems to neglect the Meltzoff-Moore experiments on neonate imitation, which Shaun Gallagher interprets in terms of an early body schema of the infant, which would belie the talk of "unity" and "oneness." Now I completely agree with Noë that independence as isolation is not the correct way to talk about maturation of human beings: "There is no such thing as complete detachment from the community of others" (51). But if you're going to do away with isolation as the telos, you should do away with fusion as the arche.

But I also worry about Noë's reading of maturity as "growing comfortably into one's environmental situation," or as "integration" (51). Many people grow up and become mature but precisely into social situations that are disempowering for them, because they belong to disempowered political categories. It's not that this disempowering experience is limited to immigrants, as Noë seems to imply; it's right here at home that many people never quite feel at home, if you see what I'm getting at. Even though it's a great advance to talk about the embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, affective subject (4EA), we shouldn't talk about "the" 4EA subject, but about populations of subjects, many of whom suffer disempowering subjectification practices.

So, for example, when Noë writes at 77: "The body is present in our normal, active, engaged experience … as a range of possibilities of movement and action" I want to say that such an empowered body schema is not available to everyone at all times. Leaving aside for the moment the issue of disability (but what a sentence that is to write!), I also want to refer here to Iris Marion Young's great essay "Throwing Like a Girl" which  discusses the restricted body competence of the feminized body-subject. Young's critique is aimed at Merleau-Ponty, in which the assured competence of the presumably neutral or non-gendered body subject hides a masculinist presupposition. Feminized and masculinized body subjects have different "spheres of competence": a flat tire can appear as a mildly irritating challenge or as an insurmountable problem; a subway entrance as the enticing gateway to the city or as an anxiety-producing danger.

It would be, in my opinion, an unacceptably reductive biologization to generalize the analysis of anorexia Noë gives at 78 ("Her body schema is likely to be just fine…. Her problem is that she feels bad about her body, about how it looks and about her ability to control it.") to cover Young's analysis. In other words, I don't want to say that we all have the same body schema as set of capacities, but that some people have culturally installed distorted body images – in other words, that feminization is a matter of giving people falsely limited opinions about their bodily capacities and / or installing a set of limiting emotional reactions over a body schema that functions just like that of masculinized subjects. Rather – and I think Noë would be open to this approach given his interest in "plasticity" – since our biology is to be open to our culture, we have to locate the analysis of feminization and masculinization at the level of body schema, not just body image.

The key here is to propose a level of analysis that would not be merely idiosyncratic, but that produces traits that would be reliably repeated (to use the distinction Paul Griffiths uses in discussing Developmental Systems Theory in biology) and that would be open to political analysis. This is of course the major problem of feminism, race theory, queer theory, and other such analyses: where to locate the analysis so that you avoid the Scylla of personal anecdote and the Charybdis of ignoring difference altogether. Can we isolate structured subjectification practices that reliably reproduce what we can call a feminized or masculinized body subject? And can we propose that as a philosophical desideratum for the discussion of 4EA cognitive science?

I'll just end these remarks by saying those are the stakes of Political Affect. And by repeating my admiration for Noë's book that it brings up so many important issues, far beyond the few points I treat here.

Music Torture

Discussed here in an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Historical context on torture that doesn't leave a visible somatic mark here in Darius Rejali's Torture and Democracy.

Let me put it this way: the reason this is torture is that the aim of torture is to destroy the personality of the victim. You do that by creating an overwhelmingly hostile world in which they are helpless to defend themselves and must depend totally on the will of the torturer.  And you can do that via physical pain, or psychological stress, or both. It's just different paths to the same result: the destroyed personality. So to tell whether technique X is torture, look to its effects, not to the "inherent properties" of technique X.

Actually, since technique X is typically used in conjunction with techniques Y and Z ..., you have to look to the effects of the treatment as a whole.

I posit destruction of the personality of the victim as the aim of torture because it gives the lie to the extraction of useful information excuse.

Video presentation on the Terri Schiavo case

Just found out about a video of a presentation of mine on the Terri Schiavo case, done for the English Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University in December 2007. You can access the video here.

Please note that I have a new text version of this talk which nuances several key points. You can access a pdf version of that talk by clicking here.

Power Point on "Deleuze and the Brain: Ontology and Neuropolitics"

I'll be traveling next week to the "Trans-Thinking the City" conference at the Delft School of Design, organized by Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich. Here's a link to the Power Point that I'll present there.

History of Affect (updated 6 October)

History of Affect

Developmental Systems Theory or DST (Lewontin, Triple Helix; Oyama, Ontogeny of Information; Jablonka and Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions) gets us into extrasomatic inheritance (whatever is reliably reproduced in next life cycle). Thus with humans we’re into realm of bio-cultural evolution, with all its complexity (Boyd and Richerson, Not by Genes Alone). In terms of affective cognition the units of bio-cultural evolution are sets of cultural practices, thought in terms of their ability to produce affective structures (tendencies to react to categories of events) by tinkering with neuro-endocrine developmental processes.

Now almost all of us reliably develop a set of basic emotions (rage, sadness, joy, fear, distaste) we share with a good number of reasonably complex mammals (Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience). We also have prosocial emotions (fairness, gratitude, punishment – shame and guilt are controversial cases) we share with primates, given certain basic and very wide-spread socializing inputs (Haidt, "Moral Emotions"; De Waal, Primates and Philosophers; Joyce, Evolution of Morality). In many sets of cultural practices, these prosocial emotions are partial and local (Hume’s starting point in talking about the “moral sentiments”). Some cultural practices can try to expand the reach of prosocial emotions to all humans or even all sentient creatures (with all sorts of stops in between).

Why is the partiality of prosocial emotions a “default setting” for sets of bio-cultural practices? One hypothesis (De Waal, Primates and Philosophers; Bowles and Gintis, "Origin of Human Cooperation") is that war has been a big selection pressure in bio-cultural evolution, producing very strong in-group vs out-group distinctions, very strong rewards / punishments for in-group conformity.

[UPDATE 6 October]

There is a big controversy about the history of warfare in anthropology (Otterbein vs Sponsel). Some critics will say that the alleged universality of warfare among contemporary tribes (and this is a very loose layperson's use of that term) doesn't provide a window onto the environment of evolutionary selection because a lot of that contemporary warfare follows Western contact which changed the conditions (e.g., by creating territorial restrictions). I take those critiques seriously, and I also certainly don't mean to support any "killer ape" hypothesis about the alleged inevitability of war: that's way too close to original sin for my tastes. The question would be how much war was needed to form an effective selection pressure for strong in-group identification and hence partiality of pro-social emotions? NB: Richerson and Boyd, Not by Genes Alone, 209-210, argue that between group imitation can also be a factor in spreading cultural variants. They cite the example of early Christianity. The selection pressure there was the high rate of epidemics in the Roman Empire. So war need not be the only selection pressure, nor does group destruction and assimilation of losers have to be the only means of transmitting cultural variants. [End update.]

If war was a selection pressure, then, we have to consider the history of warfare. With tribal warfare, you get loose groups of warriors with charismatic leaders. Virtually all the males of the tribe take part in this type of warfare; IOW, there is no professional warrior class / caste (Clastres, Society against the State).

This tribal egalitarianism changes with agriculture and class society (despite all the difficulties, I still think we have to consider what Engels says in Origin of the Family ...) . Consider thus the situation in Homer: we see big split btw affective structures of the warriors (bravery) and peasants (docility) who support them (and the artisans who supply the arms and the bards who sing their praises and who thus reinforce the affective structures of the warriors: the feeling that your name will live on if you perform bravely is vey important). (And of course we haven't even mentioned gendering practices.) Thus here the selection pressure is for sets of bio-cultural practices producing specialized affective structures relative to position in society, that is, relative to their contribution to the effectiveness of wars fought by that society. 

All this shifts with the triumph of hoplite warfare. Compare Aristotle's golden mean of courage with what the Homeric warriors meant by courage. For Aristotle, it's staying in the phalanx with your mates: charging ahead rashly is as much a fault as cowardly retreat. But for the Homeric heroes, charging ahead rashly is all there is. (Consider also the famous debates about Spartan women vs Athenian women!)

All this means we can’t assume an abstract affective cognitive subject but have to investigate the history of affect.

But, the objection might go, don't we risk leaving philosophy and entering historical anthropology? Answer: we only "leave" philosophy to enter history if we've surreptitiously defined philosophy ahead of time as ahistorical. Well, then, don't we leave philosophy and enter psychology? Only if you've defined philosophy as concerned solely with universal structures of "human" affective cognition. But that's the argument: the abstraction needed to reach the "human" is at heart anti-biological. Our biology makes humans essentially open to their cultural imprinting. But just saying that is typological thinking, concerned with "the" human: we need to bring concrete biological thought into philosophy: it’s the variations in a population which are real: the type is an abstraction. Thus as often is the case, we repeat an old philosophical debate: nominalism and realism of concepts.

Affect and political economy

This is an interesting review by the excellent Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. Notice the role affect plays in Henwood's story:

The Morning in America election of 1984 was about an exhilarating boom. Though the boom was uneven and crazy, and came after a deep recession, it was real enough to be believed by enough people to keep the story going.
....
Sure enough, the application of the Friedman agenda raised profit rates and ended the great inflation—though it put the working class into a semipermanent state of anxiety, which was part of the point. That does suggest a permanent shock strategy is part of the system’s normal operating procedure, not an extraordinary event.

It's enough to make you think Keynes was onto something with his talk of "animal spirits"!

Political Physiology, the book

Good news yesterday as I agreed in principle to a contract with University of Minnesota Press for my book Political Physiology. It will appear in the Posthumanities series, edited by Cary Wolfe of Rice University. My thanks to Cary and to Doug Armato, Director of UM Press and the commissioning editor for philosophy.

Here's a brief description of the book:

The book investigates embodied, embedded, and affective cognition. It challenges both the exclusion of affect from cognition and the individualism of most treatments of the subject, insisting that subjectivity be studied in terms of the distribution of affective cognitive traits in a population. The standpoint is named “political physiology” in order to indicate that subjectivity is sometimes bypassed in favor of a direct linkage of the social and the somatic. After a theoretical and historical base in the first part, the second part offers three case studies of contemporary instances of political physiology:  the Terri Schiavo case, the Columbine high school massacre, and Hurricane Katrina.

Video Interview on Hurricane Katrina

Jennifer Martinez, who's affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice at the University of Nottingham, did a video interview with me prior to my talk there in December. In the interview I discuss the outlines of my Katrina paper, which on this occasion I put in the context of Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine, which I blogged about here and here.

PTSD blackout violence

One of the things I've been fascinated with is "blackout" or "reflex" violence, when a person claims that "something snaps" and then they have to infer, after the fact, that they must have performed a violent act. I've treated this in passing in my papers on Columbine and on contemporary military training. In this New York Times article, we see in the first anecdote what sounds like blackout or reflex violence. I wonder if the person in question here had received "shoot / no shoot" training, which I talk about in the military training paper?

Cross posted at 4EA Cognition.

Notes on Melinda Cooper

I've been reading some excellent essays by Melinda Cooper of the Centre for Biomedicine and Society at King's College, London.

The essays in question are: "Insecure Times, Tough Decisions: The Nomos of Neoliberalism," Alternatives 29 (2004): 515-533; "On the Brink -- From Mutual Deterrence to Uncontrollable War," Contretemps 4 (September 2004): 2-18; "Pre-Empting Emergence: The Biological Turn in the War on Terror," Theory, Culture & Society 23.4 (2006): 113-135; and "Life, Autopoiesis, Debt: Inventing the Bioeconomy," Distinktion 14 (2007): 25-43.

Here are the notes I've taken:

1. Cooper cites Schmitt on New World conquest as exporting Euro-conflict and allowing for classical liberal economic growth (extensive expansion). New World is to geopolitics as state of exception is to sovereign juridical power.

2. post-WWII Cold War / MAD / Fordist / Bretton Woods / Keynesian world (based on state intervention to provide equilibrium conditions for classical liberal economics: assumption of calculable / insurable risk: accidents happen in normal distribution)

3. 1970s crises: linkage of US domestic financial crisis with Club of Rome type recognition of limits of industrial growth (“eco-crisis”)

4. Washington consensus as response to 1970s US domestic financial crisis, exporting risk into international financial speculation. Use of IMF and WB to promote free trade and to put foreign sovereign states under regime of international financial speculation: hot-money flows, threat of capital flight, currency exchange fluctuations. Speculative auto-affection: actualization of a virtual field of crisis that serves to discipline foreign political sovereignty regarding domestic economic policies.

5. Biotechnology as response to eco-crisis: biological intensification would replace traditional capitalist overcoming of limits via geographical expansion (cf. Schmittian analysis of New World): bioremediation for pollution / biofuels for energy / “extremophiles”

6. Clinton neo-liberalism as euphoria of New Economy growth transformed after dot.com and biotech crash into Bush war on terror: thus an “affective shift” on part of investors from hope to “alertness.”

I would add that neocon foreign policy uses consumer / employee affect in the following way: personal insecurity from 80s downsizing / 90s outsourcing (“one paycheck from street” / employment based health insurance) generates a sort of “civilian PTSD”: constant altertness leads to physiological exhaustion (cortisol overload leading to low panic thresholds, etc.). But this is not "post" as there was no identifiable "trauma": the alertness cannot ideologically have its true causes identified (or if they are identified, there’s no hope of changing the situation). Thus many are relieved when presented with an external personal target (a “bad person”) that is threatening them (gays, blacks, women, liberals, “terrorists”), because it’s better to have a target than to be the subject of constant alert with no target (difference between anxiety and fear: fear is a relief: endorphins are released to help you deal with the emergency: cf. horror movie squeals of relief when villain / monster is revealed; “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t”). Thus neocon domestic and foreign policies that target these bad guys win support.

7. Securitization and pre-emption as response to emerging catastrophic risk: shifting catastrophe risk from insurance market to capital market: capitalism in its most delirious phase: speculation on catastrophe breeds demand for securitization. Brings together privatization and government sovereign power. US declares “war on terror” as well as privatizing security [prisons, mercenaries, etc] in literal political physiology: “affective dynamics of fear and (in)security.”

8. Biodefense: bringing together of public health and national defense. US defense policy shift: from equilibrium of MAD to pre-emption of emerging catastrophes / “full-spectrum dominance.” Pumps govt money into biotech that had collapsed at end of Clintonian neo-liberal euphoria. Permanent war rather than permanent hope.

a. Cold War linked to Weismannian scheme: vertical reproduction / fixed spatial – species barriers

b. Terrorism and microbial transversal evolution: “it’s everywhere!”

c. “Emergence” as sudden phase transition: catastrophic / uninsurable / transformative of conditions

d. Incorporation of “whole of life” into national defense

Here I would put the Schiavo case as an experiment in intensification complementing the expansive / extensification processes laid out by Cooper. Here a single life would warrant the mobilization of the federal government: but a bare life w/o regard to quality of life. Not an Agambenian de-politicizing exposure of bare life allowing it to be killed, but precisely a hyper-politicizing capture of bare life forbidding it from being killed, thereby breaking down the “privacy” barrier to exert government control.

9. Pre-emption: founds legitimate use of violence on collective apprehension of emergent threat. Future-based rather than “clear and present danger.” Pre-emption of uncalculable catastrophe rather than prevention of calculable risk. Future-invocative rather than representative: future is generated by our anticipation / speculation. “Affective skills” of speculators: sense and respond to virtual / nascent collective moods / movements; promotion of affect before a threat / opportunity appears.

10. US position as focal point of financial flows: requiring countries to buy US Treasury notes: “debt imperialism”

a. Parallel with autopoiesis: auto-affective life / money

b. Bioeconomy is meeting point: US biotech investment funded by debt imperialism: experimentation with auto-affective life funded by auto-affective political economy

c. Further meeting point as Bush war on terror takes biodefense turn: “life itself” is the stakes / the arena / the method / the enemy (bio-terrorism as weapon / microbial transversalism as the method / mode of being of terrorism)

11. What is resistance in a situation of militarization / privatization / securitization of life? Cannot be a simple call to “right to life” or “health care” or “respect for nature.”

Interview with Naomi Klein on "Disaster Capitalism"

Check out this brief Salon interview with Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. I'll be integrating her take on "disaster capitalism" into my Katrina paper, which I'll be giving in December at the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice at the University of Nottingham.
If you're a subscriber to Harper's (and if you're not, why aren't you?), you can read her article on the topic here. I'll be interested to see how her ideas resonate with what I've been calling "political physiology."

Update 9/23/07: Jeff Roland sends a link to this Klein interview at Democracy Now.

Perverse Justice and the Securitarian Position

Lindsay Beyerstein, who blogs at Majikthise, has an In These Times article on the destructive use of solitary confinement in the Jose Padilla case, and by extension, elsewhere. Read it; here's the punch line: "it seems perverse that the government could deliberately undermine Padilla’s will to defend himself and treat him as competent to stand trial on those very charges."

On the thread about the article on her home blog, the resident securitarian, "Phantom," first tried to derail the thread with a completely bogus implicit claim that Beyerstein was asking for our "sympathy" for the person, Jose Padilla, rather than talking about legal precedent. He finally dropped that line after being hammered for it repeatedly, but then decided to use the classic securitarian trope "the first duty of a state is to protect its citizens." 

In replying to him, I said that he was completely wrong in applying this supposed truism to our republic. The first duty of those serving in the American government is to protect and uphold the US Constitution, whose prime principles are liberty and equality.

I concluded with a little pop quiz, asking him to identify who said the following:

Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis–that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it.

Any guesses from my readers? It shouldn't be too hard to google!