John Protevi's Blog

Notes on Geroulanos and Meyers manuscript workshop: case studies and organismic integration

Yesterday I had the chance to participate in a pre-publication workshop on a book by Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers of NYU. The book concerns concepts of integration and individuality in early 20^th century medicine, with special attention to military medicine in World War I.

In this note, I’d like to talk about Chapter 2, on case studies. I’ll talk about the manuscript, but also about what thoughts the ms provoked in me. As a philosopher, I was drawn to this chapter for four reasons. 1) The wide variety of logical relations involving individuals. 2) The epistemological question of a “science of the individual.” 3) The mind / body relation in shell shock. 4) The methodological one; we don’t do very many case studies in philosophy, but I think we should.

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Fall 2010 Talks

I'll be delivering four talks this fall: 

1. Yi-Fu Tuan Lecture Series, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Friday, October 1. I'll talk on my Deleuze and War Music paper. 

2. Keynote speaker, Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy / Société canadienne philosophie continentale, University of Alberta, Edmonton. Thursday, October 14. I'll speak on my "New Transcendental Aesthetic" paper.

3. SPEP panel on Evan Thompson's work, organized by Donn Welton of SUNY Stony Brook. SPEP is hosted by McGill University and Université de Montréal. Saturday, November 6. This is also based on the "New Transcendental Aesthetic" paper. 

4. APA invited talk, Symposium on "The Concept of Life in Continental Philosophy." Other panelist is Tony Steinbock, Southern Illinois University. Boston MA, Monday December 27. Talk will be based in part on my Deleuze and Biology lectures. 

Toward a New Transcendental Aesthetic and a New Panpsychism

http://www.protevi.com/john/NewTA.pdf

Uploaded a conference paper I'll give twice this fall, to the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy (CSCP) and to SPEP. Comments welcome!

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.”

Complex Adaptive Systems Theory in Military Affairs

Robert Farley of Lawyers, Guns, and Money writes about the need to complement math and science courses in the service academies with courses in social science. There might not be that much of an opposition, if the courses are done right, for the math that many sciences (hard and social alike) use is no longer exclusively the sort of linear equations that engineers might use. For instance, a neat book in which science using non-linear math (aka "complexity theory") is applied to military affairs is Andrew Ilachinski, Artificial War: Multiagent-Based Simulation of Combat (London: World Scientific, 2004). Takeaway quote from the jacket:

combat is more like an interpenetration of two living, coevolving fluids rather than an elastic collision between two hard billiard balls

I'd say this complex adaptive systems approach is a good model for social situations as well. For instance, it's pretty much the model for the excellent new book by Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007), which I highly, highly recommend for its analysis of various strategies by a number of different Israeli actors (settlers, government, military, business) in creating the famous "facts on the ground" in the Occupied Territories. Weizman is Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He also runs his own blog, which is very much worth visiting.