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Essays on Philosophy

Category: Economics

April 10, 2016

Laclau Notes Session 4: Contingency in Theory

1. Back to the Ancients

     The most ferocious attack on Rhetorical Theory came from Plato.  He claimed that rhetoric had no epistemological value at all. Rhetoric is concerned with the discursive movement of deliberation and not the question answer and two term choices which dialectic employs. In the Gorgias, Platon condemns rhetoric because it offers no coherent account of its own status as a form of knowledge, and because it is not possible to delineate a class of objects with which rhetoric is concerned.  Rhetoric is nomadic; it has no specificity and no domicile.  It is to be considered defective and incomplete by a Platonist because it offers a false ontology; it deals with the appearance of truth and good not the definition of the truth or the good.  It offers no epistemological certainty or foundation.  Above all, Plato judged rhetoric to be an amoral instrument of practical politics, unlike ontology and epistemology of course.  A paradox emerges from this account: though rhetoric is tangible and deals with the tangible its arguments cannot stand up to critical scrutiny. 

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April 6, 2016

Laclau Notes Session 3

Review of the History of Rhetoric in Relation to Philosophy

1. The Ancients-Form and Matter     

     For the Greeks, what is sayable of an object is universal, but we must ask, what is the “it” which receives the predications?  For the Greeks all predicables are universals; they make up the form or the rational and knowable part of the entity of the object.  The “it,” the irrational and unknowable individuation that remains when you take away all predicables, is called matter. The Greek thought of the universe as a scale.  At the bottom was the unnameable primary matter hyle.  The first principle of organization was the mineral world where form was imprinted on this primary matter.  The mineral world was as matter to the vegetable world, the vegetable to the animal, the animal world to man, and on top the Gods were pure form and stood as matter in relation to nothing.  

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March 19, 2016

Critical Notes on Ernesto Laclau’s Seminar on Rhetoric and Hegemony

Session 1: Introduction to Laclau’s Theory of Hegemony

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1. Illusions of Modern Bourgeois Philosophy

     At the beginning of the 20th century three new developments in philosophy were taking place.  Each was based on a strategy which its proponents felt could grant immediate access to the thing in itself. The three strategies were analytic philosophy, phenomenology and structuralism.   All of their key words (referent, phenomenon and sign) played the role of what Levinas called a “neutralizing third term” they appeared to efface themselves in the process of bringing forth the unmediated truth of the world.  As time passed, these third terms became increasingly visible to practitioners of the strategies which they founded.  In the work of the late Wittgenstein and Richard Rorty, Martin Heidegger, Roland Barthes Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida we see a realization that the founding notions of 20th century philosophy did not grant the immediacy that they had promised.

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March 12, 2016

Occupy Wallstreet

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Written shortly after attending the events described below.

On September 17th 2011 it became apparent that something had changed in the United States. On that date, about 1,000 people arrived at the Bowling Green in lower Manhattan under the slogan “Occupy Wall Street.”  The call had been put out months before by Adbusters magazine, and had called forth an action that defied the logic of the typical permitted, pre-contained march.  In the park one could hear an open economics forum featuring speakers advocating the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, denouncing the second law of thermodynamics as a fabrication of British Imperialism, calling for the global forgiveness of all debts, among other things.  Alongside the forum one could hear calls to shut down the Stock Exchange, to abolish debt-money and so on.  Here debates were reopened that had been shut down for a century at least.  A depoliticized society began to stir…

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March 9, 2016

Violence and History

Do we as a species have a compulsion to destroy our own history? No, not as a species. It is only a few of the pseudo-species that we call nations who do.

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Consider what the United States did and is doing to Iraq. Is it jealousy for their lack of history that motivates them? Perhaps, but it is possible to have a short and glorious history. In the case of the American oligarchy, it is the content of their history that motivates them. To them, history is something they have to run from, escape from, eradicate and so on. It counts as evidence against them. They bulldoze the libraries and monuments to build shopping malls. Beasts.

     Let’s think of this more concretely.  Imagine the United States are a person. He is born vulnerable and charming, but as he grows he becomes quite the troublemaker. In his youth and adolescence he murders one continent and enslaves a second. Coming to maturity, he builds the most destructive weapon of war in human history, uses it, and then proceeds to hold the entire world in subjugation. Now where do we find Mr. America?

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March 6, 2016

Plato and Ideology

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The most significant lesson that I draw from The Republic is that so long as there is luxury–i.e. class rule–there will be deception and tyranny.  The ‘city of pigs’ that Plato rejects is the crucial point in the story for me. I read Plato’s utopian writing as more of an exercise in following ideas to their conclusions than as manual for statesmen. What Plato does in this work is he attempts to rationalize privilege and he fails at it.  The book demonstrates the fact that privilege cannot be justified without using mass deception combined with censorship and the state sanctioned indoctrination of children.  The friends assembled to discuss justice do not reject the ‘city of pigs’ because it cannot be the just city, but because they (being from the privileged class in Greek society) were accustomed to a standard of living that involved luxury goods.  If they are privileged and they are the only ones in their society who have access to luxury goods, then to say that the city must have luxury goods is as much as to say that the city must have privilege. 

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March 3, 2016

My “Cosmopolitanism”

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It is becoming increasingly difficult to find any work that is not collaboration with evil.  Workfare and food insecurity, the threat of becoming “surplus humanity,” of slums, work camps and prisons, battlefields; these things try to intimidate us into a collaboration with evil, but they can never succeed. It can never be said that we had to–there’s always that moment of heightened contradiction, of a decision for or against open collaboration. In that moment, it is equally possible to recognize the contradiction and repudiate all collaboration. Evil can never enjoy full and total monopoly because the earth itself defies it.

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February 29, 2016

On Work

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Serving the bosses is going out of style. The bosses, o the bosses, those bosses. The ‘boss’ mentality is an evolutionary atavism: in a sane society, what we call a boss, a general, a banker, economist etc. would be referred to as a sociopath. The bigger the boss, the more monstrous the deformity.  Serving these bosses is going out of style.

They have robbed the country in broad daylight. They are snatching the bread from our mouths with their austerities and budget hoaxes. Under the Ancien Regime, the bosses were exempt from all taxation and we see the return of this now.  The bosses are demanding a total reduction of the social wage under the guise of budget cuts. Who has stepped forward to denounce this and call for action? This is a declaration of total war. 

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February 23, 2016

Thoughts on the Disaster

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“It’s hard to resist the temptation to hope for disaster, for systemic collapse…an event that will destroy the whole thing….but who is it that suffers, that dies in those events? It’s not the well-heeled  banker…a die-off can’t be a political program…”

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February 23, 2016

Economy and Taboo

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A society’s most potent taboos are shadows of its highest values. 

Consider prostitution in relation to the historical institution of marriage; both involve an intimate exchange: the former producing money, the latter producing capital. Taboos are ontologically necessary preconditions of the “sacred.”  In order for the sacred to be, it needs to enjoy something we can call a ‘semiotic monopoly.’ Its signs must remain pure; irony is to be avoided at all costs.  In other words, the sacred gestures and ritual attitudes must not be appropriated without warrant: there must be strict and pitiless felicity conditions imposed.  Violations of these conditions of felicity are called taboos, and they carry strong punishments, not the least of which is the imputation of insanity, being declared mad.      

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