Author: logocentric

Alenka Zupančič in India

“Fantasies of Capital: Alienation, Enjoyment, Psychoanalysis”
— A Jnanapravaha Mumbai Conference (December 16 – 18, 2016)

Repetition and the End, recurring fantasies is the fantasy of the end, of capital even, this fantasy of the end also existed prior to capital, but the way it is structured in capitalism and look at the shift in this structuring. Namely the shift that took place end of 80s and beginning of 90s, Francis Fukuyama’s book the End of History, this book marks the opposite of what it seems to suggest, it marks the IMPOSSIBILITY to end capitalism, the impossibility for capitalism to come to an end, this transhistorical formation will continue.

The disappearance of all real OUTSIDE to capitalism: the end of the Cold War, socialism existing outside marking boundary of capitalism, now the outside is on the way to the inside, or already included in the inside, and this INSIDE is all there is. The End of History, means we are living in times that cannot END, not for any intrinsic or dialectical reasons.

This is turn plays an important part of how the fantasy of the end is structured. It can only come from the outside, but outside as a ‘natural universe’, it involves total destruction of earth, like hit by comet, at least extinction of biological basis of humankind. The only way we can think of capitalism is the end of the world, the end of the earth or at least end of the human. Post-POST-Human endorses Fukuyama, end of history.

In the past decade this capitalist resilience, its capacity to turn all contradictions/resistances into its own advantage, to feed on these contradictions, no way out, the way out is appropriated by the inside. No Way Out should not be confused with the non-existence of an OUTSIDE.

SUGGEST: the idea of the end is Capital, functions as an ideological fantasy screen that obfuscates 2 levels,

  1. capitalism prospers on its own Contradictions are not NEW but are built in,
  2. the historical disappearance of the outside, is not the same and should not be taken as one with its reliance on the internal contradiction.

That there exists no symbolic Other to capitalism is a HISTORICAL contingency that can be changed.

Capitalism is changing all the time, but we should not take this as condescending to the two levels.

We should not conceive the END as the end of the perpetuation of something, but is the end perpetuated by the repetition itself

I can end it whenever I want. Why bother now. The possibility of ending what we are doing is condition of its repetition. Not having the strength to end it, is the possibility of ending it. Why bother now, it can wait. POSSIBILITY. Every sperms is sacred, catholic family has 50 kids, dance and sing the song, perspective shifts to Protestant couple, Bloody Catholics, why do they have so many children, husband replies, because everytime they have sexual intercourse they have to have a baby, … Protestant can use condoms, french tickler wife says why don’t you, its the POSSIBILITY, the END IS STRUCTURED as a POSSIBILITY.

Freedom of possibility, expressed in FREEDOM of choice is the best antidote to freedom (Abolishing Freedom Frank Ruda),

It should be counter-acted by comic fatalism: Act as if the END HAS ALREADY HAPPENED, act as if you were dead, as if everything were already lost.

To stop smoking, ACT as if you’ve ALREADY stopped. The cigarette you smoked 30 minutes ago was actually your LAST one.

Once the possibility enters the game and structures freedom RESIST presenting the stakes as POSSIBILITY versus ACTUALITY or Realization of this possibility

This opposition is precisely how freedom as oppression works in practice

Kant: You must therefore you can. if it needs to be done, no matter how difficult you can do it

SUPEREGO: You CAN THEREFORE YOU MUST, there is this possibility you can do it, You MUST. Possibilities are to be realized by all means and by any price. You can do it therefore you MUST. We not to MISS out on ANY of these possibilities capitalism has to offer.

But never to question of framework of these possibilities as possibilities.

Unscrew the very framework of “Freedom as possibility to be realized.”

Protestant Couple: NOT YET CAUGHT INTO SUPEREGO IMPERATIVE OF ENJOYMENT. The Risk of this swift conclusion, were they to act on these possibilities, then they would have been really free, but this is NOT the case, the problem is not that they didn’t act although they could have, EVEN IF THEY WERE TO ACT, this act would have been caught up in this logic of freedom of possibilities.

They can go on practicing their puritanism because they believe they could stop it whenever they want.

To go on smoking while the possibility of quitting is here to help me to smoke. How many people would start smoking if the state instead of putting warnings, threats and disgusting images on cigarette packages, but

Pass a law: if you start smoking you can never quit, once you start you commit to it for life.

We are infinitely approaching the end as a limit, potentiality the very precondition of the movement of repetition, what structures it, what buys us the freedom to enjoy, structures the enjoyment of ending it. Enjoyment of the postponing of the end as a kind of absolute enjoyment

This is the end this is the last time I do it.This cigarette right here and now is the LAST cigarette I will smoke. The ultimate cigarette. Think of every cigarette you smoke as your last one and enjoy it accordingly.

But you have to believe it is your last one, that this is the END. In other words you have to be a neurotic.

The economy of enjoyment, you cannot say to yourself, I will act AS IF this is my last cigarette. You want to stop you do everything in your power to stop, but you end up accumulating 1 cigarette after another infinitely repeating the end. and Enjoying against your will THIS IS THE ECONOMY of the UNCONSCIOUS.

Different from the previous configuration as THE END AS POSSIBILITY AS INHERENT TO THE REPETITION,

What is at stake here is REPETITION is INHERENT to the END. There is something about the end itself that drives repetition, and repetition is repetition of an end.

Why does he want to stop to end it so badly? Doctor’s strategy: There is no reason for you to stop. Smoking isn’t bad for you. Doctor imposes is the absolute freedom to smoke which throws out the imperative to end but the framework of possibility of ending it. NO END IN SIGHT

this changes the configuration radically. He goes on smoking like a chimney for a while.

ends analysis and stops smoking. “I have been able to Abolish the freedom that the foolish doctor granted me.”

Imperative to smoke and the imperative to quick smoking come from the same structural place and efficiently PROTECT each other and sustain the core of repression.

ABSTRACT FREEDOM OF CHOICE is the very form of existence of an imperative. The freedom to choose between products is the form of existence of the imperative to buy.

The fact that he was cured the moment he stopped going to analysis. Zano’s obsession with smoking has been successfully changed into transference neurosis. He ends smoking by ending his analysis … he needed to end this other thing in order to end the first thing. ?????

AN ACTING OUT: subject acts out the very core of his symptom in a flagrant way but doesn’t notice it. Example: solution proposed by doctor, patient, every noon when I leave here, I walk through these streets, in one of the restaurants I find my favourite dish “fresh brains”.

CONCLUDING PART OF NOVEL: sickness and the sick will prosper and flourish, by devices outside our body, extensions of arm, by now the device has no relation to limb, creates sickness, loss of healthful selection, it will take much more than psychoanalysis to cure this sickness, it will take no less than the end of the world. We will return to HEALTH after the catastrophe. An enormous explosions and earth will wander through heavens free of parasites and sickness.

its no longer about quitting smoking but the whole world exploding.

The intellectual climate of our times. The THEME OF THE END. APOCOLYPSE, end of human beings. Fantasmatic character of these representations of the end. The idea of most radical end, serves as framework in which we interpret our present reality. Serves as means of ideology consolidation. Provides a spectacular answer to question, what needs to change for our present troubles to end. Answer: nothing, or the total catastrophe will happen and the new will begin. PEOPLE TODAY CAN IMAGING EARTH BEING HIT BY A COMET RATHER THAN change in socio-economic system.

Many cheer some total catastrophe.

Idea of the end is framework we use to interpret present reality

Just how much is needed to change present reality. What has to end in order for our present troubles to end. We have our pick. Something new can begin, silver lining of catastrophe fables.

Only a radical catastrophe can save us from ourselves. here that we should

It has already happened, radical extinction ? is not too optimistic. Total extinction cannot guarantee a way out. Our we need already living a repetition of this scenario. Distinguish actual possibility of ending in planetary disaster, from end of our troubles as a future possiblity.

Delegating our end to another end, which will take care of it in one go.

IT is a real symptom of an utter impotence to intervene in course of events .. this impotence is real, it should not let us confuse with absolute necessity that could only be dealt with the end of it all

ANOTHER SLOGAN: THE WORLD WILL SURELY END BUT IT WON’T BE THE END OF OUR TROUBLES.

We seem to be delegating our present end to another end which will take care of it. Impotence is real, our inability to intervene.

Another Slogan: The world surely end but it won’t be the end of our troubles.

Freedom as such as something yet to be realized. Entraps us in a certain logic. PREDETERMINES OUR VERY FRAMEWORK OF POSSIBILITIES. There could be a choice that dismantles this framework. But the way the choices are structures, a certain framework excludes certain things as impossible. The way possibilities induce us to follow the logic of Freedom as realization of potential of possibility The way the choices are structured.

Political Act, a political intervention, a choice that makes a DIFFERENCE.

AS IF … I would not follow all the way through this modality. THE END SHOULD BE TAKEN AS SOMETHING THAT ALREADY HAPPENED.

Our universe itself is inconsistent … To what extent when we think about capitalism, end it get out of it, we think what follows from these ideas of the end, capitalism as so much as one with our BEING the only way to get rid of it, is to get rid of the last trace of human nature.

RUDA. END as the Beginning … SPLIT … This outside can be created, an alternative social reality …

SLAVOJ: A possibility which has to be evoked, though we know it won’t be used. I compete with a job with my friend, my friend wins, my friend says to me, you deserved it, should I step down, and you are supposed to reject his offer. We have to go through this gesture. We have to go through gesture of doing an empty possibility. You are free to choose, on condition that you make the right choice. There is something in the very basis of our symbolic order. The only way to make a demand, it would be impolite to ask for it indirectly, ask for it directly, enigma … logic of primitive exchanges … do it as if its doing a pure act of generosity, and the returned in the same way …

Introduce something, at some point the Absolute freedom as another kind of possibility becomes oppressive, doctor says you CAN continue smoking! Parents often react, child doesn’t want to go to bed at 9 o’clock, ok if you don’t want to go, you can stay … do whatever you want I won’t pressure you anymore …

Jnanapravaha Mumbai

Time: Thirteen minutes 8 seconds , is a good summary of her argument. Compulsive repetition of a catastrophe, people who end up in the same relationships, a catastrophe even bigger which would prevent this compulsive repetition to go on, but this is delegating the solution to a more imaginary re-articulation of this end … For me something else, some other kind of DIFFERENCE should appear, it should not happen at the END, but in the MIDDLE of something

Runciman

LRB Vol. 42 No. 7 · 2 April 2020
Too early or too late?
David Runciman on political timing and the pandemic

But it isn’t just Johnson. In the fights about crisis management we have all been following our political instincts, even when we insist we’re just talking about the science. It’s true that there has been a big difference between the response of the British government – which appears genuinely to have been guided by the scientific advice it received – and that of the US government, which for a long time seemed to be operating on a wing and a prayer. Yet there’s no such thing as simply doing what the science says. This is partly because the science itself is political – how could it not be, when so much of it is the science of human behaviour? […]

 If you believe that most citizens are more or less capable of doing what is asked of them at the appropriate time then a more interventionist approach will almost certainly save lives in the long run. This is a real argument, based on real evidence. But it still starts with an ‘if’.

Hayek was wrong about the slippery slope. If planning inevitably led to public demands for more and more preferential treatment and therefore to more and more planning we would hardly be where we are today, trying to deal with a crisis for which we are so ill-prepared, with government bureaucracies stripped of many of the capabilities they are going to need. But the reason we’re in this situation is that Hayek won the argument. Some Western democracies elected Hayekians to government, beginning with Thatcher, who once banged down a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty in a meeting and declared: ‘This, gentlemen, is what we believe!’ The direction of travel over the last forty years has been in the Hayekians’ favour: towards deregulation, market competition, global interdependence and winner-take-all economies. The 2008 financial crisis arrested the momentum of that movement but didn’t fundamentally alter its course. Now, though, the future may be more open to lasting change. If this crisis does represent a turning point towards the assertion of greater government control over economic outcomes it won’t be because we were on that slippery slope all along. It will be because – as Hayek claimed to believe, without ever seeming to think the lesson applied to him – politics is never predictable.

Adam Kotsko

The Invisible Hand Wants You Dead
Rick Santelli has apologized for suggesting the populace should be infected with coronavirus, but his sadistic worldview is still a threat.
By ADAM KOTSKO
March 6, 2020

Rick Santelli is at it again. Speaking from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Thursday, the stock trader and frequent CNBC commentator shared his views about the best way to handle the coronavirus. Dismissing the possibility of containing it through quarantines, he suggested that “maybe we’d be just better off if we gave it to everybody, and then in a month it would be over.” He went on to make the questionable claim that “the mortality rate of this probably isn’t going to be any different if we did it that way than the long-term picture.”

The extreme optimism of Santelli’s armchair epidemiology notwithstanding, it’s clear that his real concern isn’t public health at all. Compared to his brutally efficient plan of mass infection, his seeming problem with the more drawn-out containment attempts was that they “[wreak] havoc on global and domestic economies.” So, whoever is going to die from coronavirus had better get it over with as quickly as possible—for the sake of capitalism.

It would be too easy to dismiss this unforeseen outburst as the ranting of a sociopath, or even a sick attempt at humor. Santelli’s ravings reflect a coherent worldview, one that has previously demonstrated its appeal by kicking off an entire social movement. I am speaking, of course, of the Tea Party, which Santelli summoned into existence in an infamous 2009 harangue that found an enthusiastic reception among conservative commentators.

Raging against what he saw as the Obama administration’s excessive generosity, and claiming that government largesse was “promoting bad behavior,” Santelli called for the tech-savvy administration to “put up a website to have people vote on the internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages; or, would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give ’em to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road?” Exclaiming, “This is America!” he built to a crescendo, ultimately calling for a “Chicago Tea Party” to head off the nation’s decline into Cuban-style collectivism.

In his Tea Party rant, Santelli’s “get it over with” philosophy is not stated quite so baldly as it is in his more recent statement on the coronavirus. Santelli nevertheless makes it clear that he would prefer the undeserving to be kicked out of their homes as quickly as possible, so that they will stop draining resources that others could use more productively. Such an approach, he contended, would “reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water.”

What would happen to the thirsty people deprived of water? In typical fashion, Santelli didn’t care enough to make it explicit. Instead, he turned his attention to the “silent majority” represented by the stock traders who stood in the background of CNBC’s live coverage, cheering his Tea Party oration. Those colleagues, he averred, are “a pretty good statistical cross-section of America,” showing the same fast-and-loose approach to statistics as in his claims that intentionally infecting all Americans with coronavirus would lead to a similar death rate as attempting to contain it. Still, we should resist our impulse to dismiss Santelli as ignorant here. This is not a simple error, but a statement about who really counts—namely, people like him and his fellow stewards of the market, who are never going to be underwater on their mortgage, just as they will presumably never be among the unwashed masses dying of coronavirus.

Capitalism has always created winners and losers, of course, and capitalist ideology has always aimed to portray those outcomes as legitimate and just. Hence we should not be surprised that a privileged person like Santelli views himself and his colleagues as uniquely deserving. What is surprising, indeed disturbing, is the element of malice toward the losers. Santelli travels far beyond the more conventional view that acknowledges the destruction wrought by the market—the job losses, the failed businesses, the bad bets—as a necessary evil that is outweighed by the benefits of economic growth overall. Within such a framework, even ardent pro-market theorists like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman concede that society owes something to those left behind. For Santelli, by contrast, the fact that some people are harmed by the market is a positive good, to the point where offering aid and comfort to the losers can appear as an injustice worthy of the condemnation of an enraged overclass.

Back in 2009, many Americans among the hoi polloi were willing to be drafted into Santelli’s aristocratic revolution, dressing up in Founding Fathers drag for their contemporary Tea Party. There were serious questions about the extent to which the Tea Party was an authentic grassroots movement or a corporate-sponsored “astroturf” campaign, but it is undeniable that it was, at the time, the most effective American protest movement in this young century. The Tea Party tipped the balance of power in Congress and within the Republican Party itself, putting Obama on the defensive for the rest of his presidency. More than that, with its anti-intellectualism and its vulgar provocations (most notably on the topic of rape), it cleared the way for Trump, who has shown just as much malice toward society’s “losers.” It may not represent a numerical majority, but enough Americans are on board with a program of vengeance against society’s most vulnerable to allow the anti-democratic aspects of our system to stymie any movement toward a less punitive society.

How could such a cruel and seemingly irrational view gain such purchase? Once more, we need to resist purely individualistic explanations—such as the idea that Tea Party or Trump supporters are simply bad people whose negative urges have finally found an outlet. Santelli’s remarks do not reflect the universal facts of human nature, but a very specific historical situation: the aftermath of the global financial crisis, which produced a permanent ratcheting down of incomes and life chances for entire populations. The usual bromides about hard work and individual virtue could not make sense of such a system-wide shock. And to add insult to injury, many of the victims got into trouble by pursuing homeownership, which is supposed to be the ultimate sign of personal responsibility and prosperity.

All of this had the potential to call the legitimacy of the system as a whole into question. In that context, Santelli’s rant and its subsequent embrace by conservatives represents a desperate attempt to harness this populist rage and declare that the suffering the crisis inflicted was a feature, not a bug. We realize in retrospect that Santelli’s fears were groundless, because no shift toward collectivism was on the Democrats’ agenda under Obama. We are living in the aftermath of the right’s cruel preemptive assault against a program of radical reform that never came.

Thankfully, Santelli’s novel idea of infecting the populace with the coronavirus was greeted with the opprobrium it deserved, compelling him to apologize for his suggestion Friday morning. Nevertheless, we should not let that distract us from the fact that the conservative movement has successfully taken his earlier vision to stratospheric heights. We may be spared a forced pandemic, but they will keep on doubling down and doubling down, until we do what Santelli feared the most: make the choice to improve the lives of others, whether they “deserve” it or not. Until that day comes, we cannot be surprised that, with no prospect of any positive change, a vocal plurality of our fellow citizens will continue to be seduced by the consolations of sadism.

Adam Kotsko teaches in the Shimer Great Books School of North Central College. He is the author, most recently, of Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital.

Byung-Chul Han

Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. 2017 Verso

True happiness comes from what runs riot, lets go, is exuberant and loses meaning — the excessive and superfluous. That is, it comes from what luxuriates, what has taken leave of all necessity, work, performance and purpose.

page 52
Byung-Chul Han

The art of living is the art of killing psychology, of creating with oneself and with others unnamed individualities, being, relations, qualities. If one can’t manage to do that in one’s life, that life is not worth living

Michel Foucault cited in Byung-Chul Han

The art of living stands opposed to the ‘psychological terror’ through which subjugating subjectivation occurs.

Neoliberal psychopolitics is a technology of domination that stabilizes and perpetuates the prevailing system by means of psychological programming and steering. Accordingly, the art of living, as the praxis of freedom, must proceed by way of de-psychologization. This serves to disarm psychopolitics, which is a means of effecting submission. When the subject is de-psychologized — indeed, de-voided — it opens onto a mode of existence that still has no names: an unwritten future. 79

Martin Hägglund

The James Wood Review in the New Yorker on This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

The problem with eternity is not that it doesn’t exist (Hägglund is uninterested in the pin dancing of proof and disproof) but that it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value. This is a difficult truth to learn, because we are naturally fearful of loss, and therefore attached to the idea of eternal restoration.

But Hägglund’s central claim is that a good deal of what passes for religious aspiration is secular aspiration that doesn’t know itself as such. He wants to out religionists as closet secularists. When we ardently hope that the lives of people we love will go on and on, we don’t really want them to be eternal. We simply want those lives to last “for a longer time.” So his reply would probably be: Just admit that your real concerns and values are secular ones, grounded in the frailty, the finitude, and the rescue of this life.

Feuerbach wanted to liberate human beings from their harmful self-deceptions, but Hägglund sees no imperative to disdain this venerable meaning-making projection, no need to close down all the temples and churches and wash them away with a strong dose of Dawkins. Instead, religious practice could be seen as valuable and even cherishable, once it is understood to be a natural human quest for meaning. Everything flows from the double assumption that only finitude makes for ultimate meaning and that most religious values are unconsciously secular. We are meaning-haunted creatures.

A hundred pages or more on “Capital,” “Grundrisse,” and the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” might at first seem like an extended session of literary-theoretical self-pleasuring. But Marx is at the living center of “This Life,” not just as the slayer of religious and capitalist illusion but, more important, as the utopian who saw beyond merely negative critique. For it’s not enough to claim that religious values can be subsumed by secular ones. One has to lay out new, better secular values. Otherwise, why would religionists ever want to become secularists?

Savagely compressed, Hägglund’s argument goes something like this: If what makes our lives meaningful is that time ends, then what defines us is what Marx called “an economy of time.” Marx is, in this sense, probably the most secular thinker who ever lived, the one most deeply engaged with the question of what we do with our time. He divided life into what he called the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. Hägglund adopts these categories: the realm of necessity involves socially necessary labor and the realm of freedom involves socially available free time. Rationally, Hägglund says, we should strive to reduce the realm of necessity and increase the realm of freedom. But capitalism is systemically committed to exploiting most of us, and to steadily increasing the amount of labor at the expense of our freedom. Capitalism treats the means of economic life, labor, as though it were the purpose of life. But, if we are to cherish this life, we have to treat what we do as an end in itself. “The real measure of value,” Hägglund says, “is not how much work we have done or have to do (quantity of labor time) but how much disposable time we have to pursue and explore what matters to us (quality of free time).”

Rather than simply replace the realm of necessity with the realm of freedom—which would be impossible anyway, because there is always tedious and burdensome work to be done—we should be able to better “negotiate” the relationship between those realms. Hägglund gives an example of how this might be done when he talks about the way his own work on the book we are reading unites the two realms: writing “This Life” was labor, of course, but it was pursued as an end in itself, as a matter of intellectual inquiry. In a Hägglundian utopia, labor would be part of our freedom. Even drudgery—his example is “participating in the garbage removal in our neighborhood on a weekly basis”—could be an element of our freedom if we see it as part of a collective understanding that we are acting in order to reduce, in the aggregate, socially necessary labor time and to increase socially available free time. This revolution, he says, will require the “revaluation of value” (in Nietzsche’s phrase); and he criticizes a number of thinkers on the left, such as Thomas Piketty and Naomi Klein, for wanting to alter capitalism (via redistribution) rather than effectively abolish it (via a deep redefinition of value). Such people, he says, are stating that capitalism is the problem while also stating that capitalism is the solution.

And yet Hägglund’s very vulnerability increases my regard for his project. I admire his boldness, perhaps even his recklessness. And his fundamental secular cry seems right: since time is all we have, we must measure its preciousness in units of freedom. Nothing else will do. Once this glorious idea has taken hold, it is very hard to dislodge. Hägglund offers a fulfillment of what Marx meant by “irreligious criticism,” a criticism aimed at both religion and capitalism, because both forms of life obscure what is really going on: that, as Hägglund puts it, “our own lives—our only lives—are taken away from us when our time is taken from us.” We are familiar with the secular charge that religion is “life-denying.” Hägglund wants to arraign capitalism for a similar asceticism. Religion, you might say, enforces asceticism in the name of the spiritual; capitalism enforces asceticism in the name of the material.

I finished “This Life” in a state of enlightened despair, with clearer vision and cloudier purpose—I was convinced, step by step, of the moral rectitude of Hägglund’s argument even as I struggled to imagine the political system that might institute his desired revaluation of value. As if aware of such faintheartedness, he ends the book with a beautiful examination of Martin Luther King, Jr.—in particular the celebrated last speech he gave, in Memphis. Hägglund reminds us that King had studied Marx with care while a student, and that he told the Montgomery Advertiser, in 1956, that his favorite philosopher was Hegel. Toward the end of his life, King had begun to insist that society has to “question the capitalistic economy.” He called for what he described as “a revolution of values.” At a tape-recorded staff meeting for the Poor People’s Campaign in January, 1968, King appears to have asked for the recording to be stopped, so that he could talk candidly about the fact that, in the words of a witness, “he didn’t believe capitalism as it was constructed could meet the needs of poor people, and that what we might need to look at was a kind of socialism, but a democratic form of socialism.” King told the group that if anyone made that information public he would deny it.

Hägglund does his usual deconstructive reversal, and argues that King’s religiosity was really a committed secularism. At this point in the book, this looks less like a hermeneutic move than like an expected reality. We read the famous words of King’s last speech with new eyes, alert both to his secularism and to a burgeoning critique of capitalism that had to stay clandestine:

It’s all right to talk about “streets flowing with milk and honey,” but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can’t eat three square meals a day. It’s all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God’s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.

Martin Luther King Jr.

After the theory and the academic reversals and the grand proposals, Hägglund’s book ends, stirringly, with a grounded account of a man who died trying to use his precious time to change the precious time of oppressed people, aware that the full realization of his vision would likely involve a revaluation of value that could not yet be spoken in America. We still haven’t seen that system, and it’s hard to imagine it, but someone went up the mountain and looked out, and saw the promised land. And that land is in this life, not in another one. ♦

Judith Butler

Judith Butler intervew in The New Yorker February 9, 2020

’m not a completely crazy idealist who would say, “There’s no situation in which I would commit an act of violence.” I’m trying to shift the question to “What kind of world is it that we seek to build together?” Some of my friends on the left believe that violent tactics are the way to produce the world they want. They think that the violence falls away when the results they want are realized. But they’ve just issued more violence into the world.

And you point out that in the liberal individualist way of thinking, the individual is always an adult male in his prime, who, just at this particular moment when we encounter him, happens to have no needs and dependencies that would bind him to others.

That model of the individual is comic, in a way, but also lethal. The goal is to overcome the formative and dependent stages of life to emerge, separate, and individuate—and then you become this self-standing individual. That’s a translation from German. They say selbstständig, implying that you stand on your own. But who actually stands on their own? We are all, if we stand, supported by any number of things. Even coming to see you today—the pavement allowed me to move, and so did my shoes, my orthotics, and the long hours spent by my physical therapist. His labor is in my walk, as it were. I wouldn’t have been able to get here without any of those wonderful technologies and supporting relations.

Acknowledging dependency as a condition of who any of us happens to be is difficult enough. But the larger task is to affirm social and ecological interdependence, which is regularly misrecognized as well. If we were to rethink ourselves as social creatures who are fundamentally dependent upon one another—and there’s no shame, no humiliation, no “feminization” in that—I think that we would treat each other differently, because our very conception of self would not be defined by individual self-interest.

It enraged me then, as it does now, that some lives were considered to be more worthy of grieving publicly than others, depending on the status and recognizability of those persons and their relations. And that came home to me in a different way in the aftermath of 9/11, when it was very clear that certain lives could be highly memorialized in the newspapers and others could not. Those who were openly mourned tended to lead lives whose value was measured by whether they had property, education, whether they were married and had a dog and some children. The traditional heterosexual frame became the condition of possibility for public mourning.

We can also see this in broader public policies. There are those for whom health insurance is so precious that it is publicly assumed that it can never be taken away, and others who remain without coverage, who cannot afford the premiums that would increase their chances of living—their lives are of no consequence to those who oppose health care for all. Certain lives are considered more grievable. We have to get beyond the idea of calculating the value of lives, in order to arrive at a different, more radical idea of social equality.

If “that is just the way the world is,” even though we wish it were different, then we concede the intractability of that version of reality. We’ve said such “realistic” things about gay marriage before it became a reality. We said it years ago about a black President. We’ve said it about many things in this world, about tyrannical or authoritarian regimes we never thought would come down. To stay within the framework of Realpolitik is, I think, to accept a closing down of horizons, a way to seem “cool” and skeptical at the expense of radical hope and aspiration.

Sometimes you have to imagine in a radical way that makes you seem a little crazy, that puts you in an embarrassing light, in order to open up a possibility that others have already closed down with their knowing realism. I’m prepared to be mocked and dismissed for defending nonviolence in the way that I do. It might be understood as one of the most profoundly unrealistic positions you could hold in this life. But when I ask people whether they would want to live in a world in which no one takes that position, they say that that would be terrible.

We see how socialist ideals, for instance, are dismissed as “fanciful” in the current election. I find that the dismissive form of realism is guarding those borders and shutting down those horizons of possibility. It reminds me of parents who say, “Oh, you’re gay . . .” or “Oh, you’re trans—well, of course I accept you, but it’s going to be a very hard life.” Instead of saying, “This is a new world, and we are going to build it together, and you’re going to have my full support.”

Our interdependency serves as the basis of our ethical obligations to one another. When we strike at one another, we strike at that very bond.

In a couple of places in the book, you say that nonviolence is not an absolute principle, or that you’re not arguing that no one has the right to self-defense—you are just suggesting a new set of guiding principles. I found myself a little disappointed every time you make that caveat. Does it not weaken your argument when you say, “I’m arguing against self-defense, but I’m not saying that no one has a right to self-defense”?

If I were giving a rational justification for nonviolence as a position, which would make me into a much more proper philosopher than I am—or wish to be—then it would make sense to rule out all exceptions. But we don’t need a new rational justification for nonviolence. We actually need to pose the question of violence and nonviolence within a different framework, where the question is not “What ought I to do?” but “Who am I in relation to others, and how do I understand that relationship?”

Once social equality becomes the framework, I’m not sure we are deliberating as individuals trying to come up with a fully rational position, consistent and complete and comprehensive for all circumstances. We might then approach the world in a way that would make violence less likely, that would allow us to think about how to live together given our anger and our aggression, our murderous wishes—how to live together and to make a commitment to that, outside of the boundaries of community or the boundaries of the nation. I think that that’s a way of thinking, an ethos—I guess I would use that word, “ethos,” as something that would be more important to me than a fully rational system that is constantly confounded by exceptions.

You talk about nonviolence, rather unexpectedly, as a force, and even use words like “militant” and “aggressive.” Can you explain how they go together?

I think many positions assume that nonviolence involves inhabiting the peaceful region of the soul, where you are supposed to rid yourself of violent feelings or wishes or fantasy. But what interests me is cultivating aggression into forms of conduct that can be effective without being destructive.

A leader can defy the laws of his own country and test to see how much power he can take. He can imprison dissenters and inflict violence on neighboring regions. He can block migrants from certain countries or religions. He can kill them at a moment’s notice. Many people are excited by this kind of exercise of power, its unchecked quality, and they want in their own lives to free up their aggressive speech and action without any checks: no shame, no legal repercussions. They have this leader who models that freedom. The sadism intensifies and accelerates.

I think, as many people do, that Trump has licensed the overt violence of white supremacy and also unleashed police violence by suspending any sense of constraint. Many people thrill to see embodied in their government leader a will to destruction that is uninhibited, invoking a kind of moral sadism as its perverse justification. It’s going to be up to us to see if people can thrill to something else.

The tweet acts as an incitation but also as a virtual attack with consequences; it gives public license to violence. He models a kind of entitlement that positions him above the law. Those who support him, even love him, want to live in that zone with him. He is a sovereign unchecked by the rule of law he represents, and many think that is the most free and courageous kind of liberation. But it is liberation from all social obligation, a self-aggrandizing sovereignty of the individual.Advertisement

Just to be clear, you’re not saying that these juries saw violence being perpetrated against somebody nonviolent and decided to let the perpetrator off. You’re saying that they actually perceived violence—

—in the radically subjugated black body, or the radically constrained black body, or the black body that’s running with fear away from some officer who is threatening them with violence. And if you’re a jury—especially a white jury that thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to imagine that a black person, even under extreme restraint, could leap up and kill you in a flash—that’s phantasmagoria. It’s not individual psychopathology but a shared phantasmatic scene.

Surveillance Capitalism

Shoshana Zuboff

In 2017, a leaked Facebook document acquired by The Australian exposed the corporation’s interest in applying “psychological insights” from “internal Facebook data” to modify user behavior. The targets were 6.4 million young Australians and New Zealanders. “By monitoring posts, pictures, interactions and internet activity in real time,” the executives wrote, “Facebook can work out when young people feel ‘stressed,’ ‘defeated,’ ‘overwhelmed,’ ‘anxious,’ ‘nervous,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘silly,’ ‘useless’ and a ‘failure.’” This depth of information, they explained, allows Facebook to pinpoint the time frame during which a young person needs a “confidence boost” and is most vulnerable to a specific configuration of subliminal cues and triggers. The data are then used to match each emotional phase with appropriate ad messaging for the maximum probability of guaranteed sales.

Aaron Benanav

Countries with high levels of robotization are not necessarily the ones that have lost the most industrial jobs.

Automation isn’t wiping out jobs. It’s that our engine of growth is winding down.

‘Our collective sense that the pace of labor-saving technological change is accelerating is an illusion.’

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/23/robots-economy-growth-wages-jobs

An army of robots now scrub floors, grow microgreens and flip burgers. Due to advances in artificial intelligence, computers will supposedly take over much more of the service sector in the coming decade, including jobs in law, finance and medicine that require years of education and training.

Will automation-induced job loss tear society apart? The question has even influenced the US presidential race. Candidate Andrew Yang blames automation for a long-simmering crisis of underemployment. He plans to hand out free money to every American citizen in the form of a monthly “dividend” of $1,000.

Poor job quality and stagnant wages are major problems in America and across much of the world, but it is wrong to blame these problems on an accelerating pace of automation, which is hardly in evidence.

Automation Cassandras often point to the manufacturing sector as the precedent for what will happen to the rest of the economy. It is true that, for the manufacturing industry, a jobs apocalypse has already taken place.

And this process is occurring across the world: according to the UN, the share of all workers employed in manufacturing is falling globally, even as industrial production per person continues to rise. This is the case in wealthy and poor countries. Yet it is hasty to ascribe these trends to accelerating automation.

While machines now make everything from shoes and shirts to cars and computers, there has been no significant uptick in the pace of labor-saving productivity growth in industry in recent decades.

On the contrary, industrial efficiency has been improving at a sluggish pace for decades, leading the Nobel-prize-winning economist Robert Solow to quip, in 1987: “We see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics.”

Our collective sense that the pace of labor-saving technological change is accelerating is an illusion. It’s like the feeling you get when looking out of the window of a train car as it slows down at a station: passing cars on the other side of the tracks appear to speed up. Labor-saving technical change appears to be happening at a faster pace than before only when viewed from across the tracks – that is, from the standpoint of our ever more slow-growing economies.

That is the real problem: a pervasive and increasingly global economic stagnation – affecting industry especially – that is marked by low rates of investment, low rates of economic growth and hence low rates of job creation.

In the context of economic stagnation, even small increases in productivity are enough to destroy more manufacturing jobs than are created.

The best explanation for this worsening economic stagnation is that, since the 1970s, more and more countries adopted export-led growth strategies, built up manufacturing sectors and began to compete in global markets.

That led in turn to heightened competition, making fast-paced industrial expansion – and fast-paced economic growth – much more difficult to achieve.

In this context, countries with high levels of robotization are not necessarily the ones that have lost the most industrial jobs. On the contrary, Germany, Japan and South Korea have some of the highest levels of robots per manufacturing worker but also boast higher manufacturing employment shares.

In Germany and Japan, automation helps firms preserve jobs in manufacturing in the face of intense international competition. Chinese firms have been investing heavily in robotics in the past few years, to preserve jobs as domestic wages rise and competition from even lower-cost countries intensifies.

Meanwhile, no other sector has replaced industry as a major economic growth engine. In country after country, slowing industrial expansion has been accompanied by falling rates of economic growth.

Some services like wholesale trade have seen spurts of rapid productivity growth, but these fail to coalesce into sustained, sector-wide efficiency gains like those endemic to manufacturing over the history of its development.

The wider environment of slowing growth explains the prevailing low labor demand largely by itself.

Once again, the major problem in labor markets is a slowing pace of job creation, associated with this sluggish economic expansion, rather than an accelerating pace of automation-induced job destruction.

From the 1970s, when industrial competition began to heat up and economic growth rates deteriorated, unemployment levels in many countries first rose and then stubbornly refused to fall. Politicians began to push for weakened job protections and scaled-back unemployment benefits.

Workfare came to serve as the main response to job loss. Outside of a few countries that still provide generous benefits to the unemployed, such as France, few workers can afford to remain unemployed for long. Job-losers tend to join young labour-market entrants in part-time, temporary or no-contract work.

In most countries, these “non-standard” workers have few legal protections and are economically precarious. They are forced to moderate their demands in slow-growing economies. Workers who are not protected by powerful unions or labor laws find it difficult to pressure employers to raise their wages or improve working conditions.

As long as underemployment persists, inequality is likely to intensify. An expanding gap between the growth of real wages and productivity levels has contributed to a 9% shift from labor income to capital income in the G20 countries over the past 50 years.

In sluggish economies periodically racked by economic crisis and austerity, it is easier to blame the resulting social deterioration on robots, or on vulnerable sections of the workforce such as immigrants, women, and racial or religious minorities, than to face its true causes.

Given the winding down of the industrial-growth engine – which has accompanied the spread of productive capacities around the world – restoring previously prevailing rates of economic growth will prove difficult if not impossible. Unless we find some way to share the work that remains, beggar-thy-neighbor politics really will tear our societies apart.

Aaron Benanav is a researcher in the social sciences at the University of Chicago. He is writing a book about the global history of unemployment. This is an abridged version of his New Left Review article on automation

Judith Butler

https://www.newstatesman.com/2019/01/judith-butler-backlash-against-gender-ideology-must-stop

The backlash against “gender ideology” must stop

Gender theory is neither destructive nor indoctrinating: it simply seeks a form of political freedom.

By Judith Butler

In the last few years, protests in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere have objected to an “ideology of gender”. Elections in France, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Brazil have pivoted on a candidate’s account of gender roles. In the US, both Catholics and evangelicals have opposed a host of political positions linked elsewhere with “gender theory” or “gender ideology”: the rights of trans people in the military, the rights to abortion, lesbian, gay and trans rights, gay marriage, feminism, and other movements in favor of gender equality and sexual freedom.

Arguably, this backlash against “gender ideology” took shape in 2004 when the Pontifical Council on the Family wrote a letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church signaling the potential of “gender” to destroy feminine values important to the Church; to foster conflict between the sexes; and to contest the natural, hierarchical distinction between male and female upon which family values and social life are based.

In 2016, Pope Francis escalated the rhetoric: “We are experiencing a moment of the annihilation of man as the image of God.” The Pope included within this defacement “[the ideology of] ‘gender’” and he exclaimed: “Today children – children! – are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex!” Finally, Francis made clear what was theologically at stake: “God created man and woman; God created the world in a certain way… and we are doing the exact opposite.”

The Pope’s point is that gender freedom – the freedom to be, or become, a gender; the idea that gendered life can be an expression of personal or social freedom – falsifies reality, since we are, in his view, neither free to choose the sex with which we are born nor to affirm sexual orientations that depart from those divinely ordained. In fact, the right of people to determine their gender or sexual orientation is seen by anti-gender religious critics as an attempt to usurp God’s power of creation, and defy the divinely imposed limits on human agency. And for the Pope, gender equality and sexual freedom are not only excessive, but destructive – even “diabolical”.

Gender equality is taken as a “diabolical ideology” by these critics precisely because they see gender diversity as a historically contingent “social construction” that is imposed on the divinely mandated natural distinction between the sexes. And while it is true that gender theorists generally reject the idea that gender is determined by the sex assigned at birth, the account of social construction as a willful destruction of a God-given reality misconstrues the field of gender studies and the notion of social construction in inflammatory and consequential ways.

But if one considers gender theory carefully, it is neither destructive nor indoctrinating. In fact, it simply seeks a form of political freedom to live in a more equitable and livable world.

In The Second Sex (1949), the existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote: “One is not born a woman but becomes one.” This claim created space for the idea that sex is not the same as gender. And in the simplest formulation of this notion, sex is seen as a biological given, gender the cultural interpretation of sex. One may be born as female in the biological sense, but then one has to navigate a series of social norms and figure out how to live as a woman – or another gender – in one’s cultural situation.

Crucially for Beauvoir, “sex” is from the very start part of one’s historical situation. “Sex” is not denied, but its meaning is disputed: nothing about being assigned female at birth determines what kind of life a woman will lead and what the meaning of being a woman might be. Indeed, many trans people are assigned one sex at birth, only to claim another one in the course of their lives. And if we build on the logic of Beauvoir’s “existentialist” account of social construction, then one may be born a female, but become a man.

A stronger “institutional” variation of social construction emerged in the 1990s, and it focused on the fact that sex itself is assigned. This means that medical, familial, and legal authorities play a crucial role in deciding what sex an infant will be. Here “sex” is no longer taken as a biological given, although it is partly determined within a framework of biology. But which framework is relevant to that determination?

Take the case of “intersexed” infants who are born with mixed sexual characteristics. Some medical professionals seek recourse to hormones to define their sex, whereas others take chromosomes to be the deciding factor. How that determination is made is consequential: intersexed people have become increasingly critical of the fact that medical authorities have often mis-categorised them and subjected them to cruel forms of “correction”.

Taken together, the existentialist and institutional interpretations of “social construction” show that gender and sex are determined by a complex and interacting set of processes: historical, social, and biological.

And in my view, the institutional forms of power and knowledge we are born into precede, form, and orchestrate whatever existential choices we come to make.

We are assigned a sex, treated in various ways that communicate expectations for living as one gender or another, and we are formed within institutions that reproduce our lives through gender norms. So, we are always “constructed” in ways that we do not choose. And yet we all seek to craft a life in a social world where conventions are changing, and where we struggle to find ourselves within existing and evolving conventions.

This suggests that sex and gender are “constructed” in a way that is neither fully determined nor fully chosen but rather caught up in the recurrent tension between determinism and freedom.

So is gender a field of study that is destructive, diabolical, or indoctrinating? Gender theorists who call for gender equality and sexual freedom are not committed to a hyper-voluntarist view of “social construction” modelled on divine power. Neither do they seek through gender education to impose their views on others. If anything, the idea of gender opens toward a form of political freedom that would allow people to live with their “given” or “chosen” gender without discrimination and fear.

Denying these political freedoms, as the Pope and many Evangelicals are wont to do, leads to dire consequences: those who wish to abort would be prevented from exercising that freedom; gay and lesbian people who would like to marry would be denied the option of realising that desire; and those who wish to take on a gender distinct from the sex assigned to them at birth would be prohibited from doing so.

What is more, schools that seek to teach gender diversity would be constrained, and young people would be denied knowledge about the actual spectrum of gendered lives. Such pedagogy in gender diversity is understood by its critics as a dogmatic exercise that prescribes how students should think or live.

In fact, these critics willfully misconstrue a class in sex education that, say, introduces masturbation or homosexuality as dimensions of sexual life, as a manual that literally instructs students to masturbate or to become homosexuals. However, the opposite is true. Teaching gender equality and sexual diversity calls into question the repressive dogma that has cast so many gender and sexual lives into the shadows, without recognition and deprived of any sense of futurity.

Ultimately, the struggle for gender equality and sexual freedom seeks to alleviate suffering and to recognise the diverse embodied and cultural lives that we live.

Teaching gender is not indoctrination: it does not tell a person how to live; it opens up the possibility for young people to find their own way in a world that often confronts them with narrow and cruel social norms. To affirm gender diversity is therefore not destructive: it affirms human complexity and creates a space for people to find their own way within this complexity.

The world of gender diversity and sexual complexity is not going away. It will only demand greater recognition for all those who seek to live out their gender or sexuality without stigma or the threat of violence. Those who fall outside the norm deserve to live in this world without fear, to love and to exist, and to seek to create a world more equitable and free of violence.

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Gender Trouble and Undoing Gender.

Social Innovation Labs

Social Innovation Labs: A Neoliberal Austerity Driven Process or Democratic Intervention?
http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar

Meghan Joy, John Shields, Siu Mee Cheng
“We contend that the SIL trend speaks to a dual and contradictory desire on the part of governments for more participatory policymaking and cost saving. Thus, while SILs may create opportunities for the democratization of social policy, they are also motivated by efforts to do more with less in an environment shaped by austerity and neoliberalism.

The question is whether the use of entrepreneurship and markets in practice can in fact be value neutral or if they are embedded within logics that compromise social justice goals and democratic processes (Roy & Hackett, 2016).

Roy, M.J. and Hackett, M.T. (2016). Polanyi’s ‘Substantive Approach’ to the Economy in Action? Conceptualising Social Enterprise as a Public
Health ‘Intervention’. Review of Social Economy, 75(2): 1-23.

Johnston critique of Pippin

At the biggest of big-picture levels, Pippin needs to be able to narrate the genesis of the Ideal (as Spirit, subjectivity, thinking, mind, reasons, senses, etc.) out of the Real (as Nature, objectivity, being, world, causes, references, etc.). But, Pippin’s static dualism of reasons-versus-causes makes it such that he does not, will not, and cannot deliver such a narrative. Without it, Pippin remains a non-Hegelian subjective idealist at least by omission.

Hegel’s Realphilosophie delineates the real genesis of the spiritual out of the natural as a really knowable genesis with sharp, discernible moments and components.

At this point, Pippin can be seen to oscillate between two positions. I am inclined to designate these as weak mysterianism and strong mysterianism. Sometimes, he indicates that Spirit is known to emerge from Nature, albeit with the precise details of this emergence stubbornly remaining shrouded in mystery. This would be Pippin’s weak mysterianism. At other times, he simply denies that Geist arises from Natur, leaving the question of Spirit’s genetic origins unasked and unanswered. This would be Pippin’s strong mysterianism. If either form of mysterianism somehow still qualifies as compatibilism, they both nonetheless remain incompatible with Hegel. In Less Than Nothing, Žižek responds to this same material from the second chapter of Hegel’s Practical Philosophy. Although Pippin reviewed Žižek’s book, he still has not responded to some of Žižek’s critiques of him in Less Than Nothing. And, I am convinced Pippin cannot adequately respond unless and until the quite unlikely occurrence of him breaking with the position he has defended from 1989 onwards. That said, Žižek, at one point in his 2012 tome, observes:

If… in ontological terms, spirit naturally evolves as a capacity of natural beings, why not simply endorse materialist evolutionism? That is to say, if—to quote Pippin—‘at a certain level of complexity and organization, natural organisms come to be occupied with themselves and eventually to understand themselves,’ does this not mean that, precisely, in a certain sense nature itself does ‘develop into spirit?’ What one should render problematic is precisely Pippin’s fragile balance between ontological materialism and epistemological transcendental idealism: he rejects the direct idealist ontologization of the transcendental account of intelligibility, but he also rejects the epistemological consequences of the ontological evolutionary materialism. (In other words, he does not accept that the self-reflection of knowledge should construct a kind of bridge to materialist ontology, accounting for how the normative attitude of ‘accounting for’ itself could have emerged out of nature.)

What Žižek identifies as “Pippin’s fragile balance between ontological materialism and epistemological transcendental idealism” is reflected in Pippin’s symptomatic stigmatization of Schelling in relation to the tradition of German idealism. Both Schelling and Hegel—Hegel remained throughout his intellectual itinerary marked by Schelling’s philosophies of Identity and Nature—continually sought, in Žižek’s words, to “construct a kind of bridge to materialist ontology, accounting for how the normative attitude of ‘accounting for’ itself could have emerged out of nature.”170

I would suggest that both Pippin and Brandom need such a bridge. Yet, this Chicago-Pittsburgh pair have invested in stances that prevent them from building a structure that would span the gap they themselves sustain between the normative and the natural.

But, contra Pippin, Hegel’s Logic intends to demonstrate, among many
other things, that pure thinking de-purifies itself, driving itself outside itself into an extra-ideational Real. The initial incarnation of this Real is spatio-temporal nature, which is what the category of Being at the beginning of Logic turns out to be when seen with the benefit of the
hindsight built into Hegel’s circularly structured System.