Well burrowed, old mole!

Essays on Philosophy
June 9, 2012

Advice to the Occupy Movement:

1. Occupy is a civil war not a PR war.

The easiest way for the occupy movement to have been a waste of everyone’s time is for us to allow it to become a PR war. What does that mean: a PR war? It means allowing the movement to become a new way of marketing obedience. Public Relations is precisely the antithesis of conflict. It is a way of managing images to ensure that nothing ever happens, and if it does, to ensure that it will remain unknown and isolated.  That the occupy movement is the antithesis of everything that PR represents is the only condition for it to have any meaning whatsoever.

If it falls in with PR, which is of course the path of least resistance presented to it, it will come to nothing; there will be an Occupy-land set up at Disneyworld.  PR-ification is the easy way, it is the response that Empire hopes to divert the Occupiers into in order to restore the equilibrium that the occupation has provisionally disrupted.  We need to take a step back and ask what good can possibly come from this sort of collaborationist stance.  If we have PR on our side, will PR ever want to support actions that seriously challenge misery and starvation? or will PR instead attempt to leverage their support into a means of pacification? If we get involved with PR at this stage it will be the gravest possible mistake. What needs to happen is to bypass the world of PR and challenge its legitimacy as a depiction of reality.  This is not accomplished by conforming to its standards. Instead we need to destroy the world of PR using all available means of violence. This includes the media themselves and the sort of social fabric they create one in which violence against commodities is equated with murder, and even considered a worse crime.

2. Pacifist tactics taint everyone involved evenly – consenting or not. Destroying property destroys moral authority.

Much has been written about the need for a diversity of tactics and the inhibiting effects of dogmatic pacifism. None of this has been a call for blind terroristic violence. Instead, it has been a call for thinking about violence. Instead of starting from a position that cedes violence to the police, and renders all who resist as innocent victims and thus as negligible social force–we can call this pre-defeat–we need to start from a position of actually wanting to triumph and to destroy that which destroys us. Dogmatic nonviolence guarantees that we will lose before the first action is taken.  If the occupation movement is to be a serious force,

The affirmation of pacifism assumes that there is a good will that no longer exists between financial elites and “regular people.” We have all become superfluous and replacable in their eyes. The era of leftist new deals and decolonization movements is now over. It depended on the power of the Soviet Union which no longer exists.  Capital has shown again and again that without that external threat it does not feel compelled to make any concessions.  Soviet military force or the threat thereof was the sole motivator behind the era of concessions following 1917.  Of course, working class militancy within capitalist countries played a role, but the existing figure of revolution triumphant terrified the capitalist and induced it to attempt to buy off workers and colonial subjects through propaganda campaigns which would be severly undermined by brutal self-assertion and imposition of wage-reductions and sweat-shop conditions. Thus, the illusion of democracy. Today, instead the ideal model put forward by capital is the model of authoritarian capitalism that we can see in places like China and Signapore.  To miss this point is to struggle in vain.  Perhaps certain members of the 99 will get elevated to positions of spectacular visibility, but in the end this will depend on their renunciation of the desire of those they are supposed to “represent” by the spectacle that grants them visibility.

Pacifist tactics are complicit with the illusion according to which Capital and life are compatible.  We live in a time in which the slum is the dominant form of social development poushed by global capital.  This is where we are headed if we collaborate…

 

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June 9, 2012

War on/as Education

Problem–The War on/as Education:  

Louis Althusser, in his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, wrote that the school system was the most important institution for the reproduction of capitalism as an economic system and a way of life.  The educational system reproduced the skills needed for the economy and at the same time produced a certain ethos of obedience necessary to keep the other apparatuses functioning. One might be tempted to ask: what about the mass media, the spectacle? What about work? Don’t these condition us to accept things as they are, aren’t they the primary sources of servile consciousness and collaboration? Tempting as these analyses are, it is the educational system that trains children to fit themselves into work and the spectacle. It prepares them bodily and mentally to be capable of tolerating and collaborating with these institutions. Spectacle and work repeat reactivate and maintain certain fundamental behavioral, emotional and intellectual patterns which must be set in place when people are younger and more malleable.

According to Althusser, education has replaced religion as the main ISA.  Education, which was once a part of the church institution, has been taken over by secular authorities. Ironically, it was during revolutionary events like the Paris Commune that the demand for universal secular education was articulated. These demands were used as a starting point for the social contract between capital and labor that domesticated the workers movement. It was said that everyone would be given equal opportunity through equal access to universal public education. This is why Althusser, writing in 1970, could describe the school system as something which operated outside of the sphere of production to reproduce the conditions of production. This equilibrium of forces gave the school a certain freedom, a relative autonomy, from the demands of the market. Teachers, like other “professionals” (doctors lawyers etc.) could comfort themselves with the thought that they were less subject to market forces than other workers.  They enjoyed academic freedom through institutions like tenure, and the sphere of knowledge was respected as something that could not be subjected to market logic. Curriculum did not need to align explicitly with the demands of employers; students should be equipped with the tools that would help them to find employment and participate in democratic politics.

In the past thirty years, we have seen a mutation of the educational institution. Each year the relative autonomy once enjoyed by the school is reduced, and the protections from the market are erased. We can refer to this as the “war on education.”  The education reforms that are currently being enacted are part of a wider shift in governance.  Governance today operates through the paradigm of war. What does this mean? Power acting anarchically. Power has become anarchy in the sense that it operates without reference to any governing principle. It will do anything. The war paradigm allows for the suspension of all social contracts, the open violation of all laws and accountability measures. Power today only recognizes the 11th commandment–thou shalt not get caught. Margret Thatcher articulated the new model in her remark that there is no such thing as society. Unfortunately, the resistance to this new model of governance is not operating on the same terrain.  Parent groups, teachers, and students have not grasped the mutation. They are still holding demonstrations and symbolic protests that presuppose a social good will that no longer exists if it ever did.  Power is no longer listening.  To the anarchy of power, we need to oppose a positive anarchy of ungovernability and uneducability; their calculations all presuppose we will remain beneath that threshold–that we will not “throw away our future.”

 

Solutions: Taking Back the War

How can we respond to this problem? Power is running rampant doing whatever it wants; people can’t seem to get a handle on how to resist and so on. If education is as important as Althusser said it was, this gives people a crucial leverage point in the social war if they want it. All they need to do is to disengage from the mythology of education that power has already discarded. The school is the factory of the 21st century in the sense that it is the leverage point from which the whole social order can be overthrown.  Here we see an opening for a new kind of general strike.

(1)Recognize that what is going on is war, not reform.

First, we need to see this for what it is. The war on education aims to completely subordinate education to the market. The primary goal is to produce an education that is profitable which means, if we can judge from other privatization efforts, worse for everyone involved. Arguments about what actually works in the classroom, and what parents want for their children will be ignored or reduced to what they have in common with the demands of capital. Overall, this is the most important front in the social war. This is where power aims to break the last of the unions, and set in place an educational system that will produce the next generation of docile, post-democratic subjects.

(2)Recognize that it has always been war.

Second, we need to recognize that compulsory public education has always already been a war against our families, our communities and our children. We remain complicit in the torture of young people and remain mendacious insofar as we tell them it is for their own good.  The truth of compulsory public education has always been the reservation school. Adults need to remember their time in school, how it actually felt to be a student, and affirm that as a memory of truth.  Once we reestablish contact with the actual feeling of being-in-school, and accept it as an authentic recognition of social reality, we are in a position to thrown the myth of education in the garbage.

(3) Respond to it as such.

Third, we need to realign our tactics and strategies to fit these recognitions. Instead of symbolic protests, people need to withdraw their participation. Instead of appealing to public officials who are no longer listening, parents need to pull their children from schools. Students need to refuse to attend and hold riots when and if they are forced to attend. Teachers need to sabotage the obedience-training component of the school and overthrow the leadership of their unions through wildcat actions and occupations.

(4)Reappropriate the power of education

Fourth, we need to create. If teachers parents and students come together, if these groups organize themselves to withdraw their complicity, a new space of creative action will emerge. On the local level people can create autonomous groups in order to share knowledge, to read to discuss and to critique.  Overall, it will be found that what the public school took 15 years to teach was obedience to unjust authority and voluntary associations can educate better in less time.

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May 21, 2009

Postmodernity?

     What I want to question are the implications of a commonly asserted periodization; namely, the idea of the postmodern, summed up by Lyotard’s maxim on incredulity toward metanarratives. It seems that this idea of the postmodern may blind us to certain political and cultural realities that merit attention. Lyotard’s theory, like any theory is something of a microscope, allowing for insight while narrowing our focus. It may be the case that Lyotard captured in his theory an important intensity, a specific singularity of the era in which he wrote.  Granting this, we have lived through some decades and many events since that time, and a critical revisitation of the idea of the postmodern is in order.  In this essay, I hope to show that the incredulity that Lyotard made famous was not specific to his era; in fact, it had been at work in history for decades before he encountered it. If we accept such a vision of the postmodern, we may be accepting both more and less than we expect; in an era like our own one that seems to be possessed with a neo-medieval level of fanaticism and millenarianism, we may be sacrificing more insight than we gain.   I will being with a discussion of Lyotard and a discussion of metanarratives and eschatologies; following that I will contextualize Lyotard’s theorization of the postmodern with the Nietzschean and Heideggerian theorizations of nihilism, and finally with contemporary political and cultural events.

I. Background

 

    A metanarrative is a story that would give universal meaning to history.  There have been many metanarratives, and two of the most common are Christianity and Marxism, though there are many others.  The Christian and Marxist metanarratives can also be called eschatologies, this word comes from the Greek for “last” (eschatos) and “study of” (-ology), and an eschatology is a story that is concerned with the ultimate destiny and meaning of the world, and of life.  Both of these ways of thinking see history as a plane of unhappiness and alienation.  The Christian eschatology culminates with a transcendent agency annihilating history for the sake of a higher realm, while the Marxist narrative ends with people within history bringing it to a close by ending alienation and exploitation through political and economic action. So, we can see that both of these eschatologies include much discussion of history, but culminate in something other than history.  As a sort of midpoint between these two, we have the meta-narrative of Enlightenment modernity; according to this narrative, history is the story of the bold fight of an enlightened elite struggling to protect accumulated scientific knowledge and principle of the application of Reason to public institutions from superstition and authority; protecting the idea that public life should be based on freedom and equal rights and the idea that through change and action we can make life better.

   According to Lyotard, people are increasingly skeptical toward this type of story. Something seems to have changed in the relation between the people and certain metanarratives. It seems that the once liberatory narrative of Enlightenment and modernity has lost its street credibility in the wake of a number of developments in the world including the betrayal of the revolution by Stalin, the abandonment of the revolution of ’68, capitalist incorporation of trade unions and workers’ parties, and so on.  It has become increasingly apparent that the metanarratives of opposition and liberation, in order to remain metanarratives, needed to be complicit with the very power structures they would liberate people from. It can also be thought of as the autocannibalism of Reason, which neglected to neglect itself in the work of demystification.

II. Lyotard, Nietzsche, Heidegger

 

      How does Lyotard’s postmodern condition look when we bring it into relation with Nietzsche’s “Death of God”?   In the wake of this death, any transcendent value system, any beyond, becomes unbelievable; this includes knowledge, truth, reason, good, evil, and the other members of the secular pantheon. The rug is pulled out from under all symbolic values, especially those that propped themselves up against religion. In order to explain modernity and the transition from modernity to whatever follows, we should refer to two quotes from Nietzsche, first his statement that “God is dead; but given the ways of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.[1]”and second “The event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude’s capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet.[2]”

     Thus, we can understand ‘modernity’ as a bubble that opened up, wherein God had died or was dying, yet the residue of theology was left behind and adapted to ‘worldly ends.’ It seems that Lyotard is heralding the arrival of that death on a scale larger than was to be seen in Nietzsche’s day. However, this death is a process underway since long before the postmodern era; looking to Nietzsche, we see it underway in the late nineteenth century. Nietzsche’s thought on the matter of nihilism had a disciple of sorts in Martin Heidegger.  Heidegger’s essay, “On the Question of Technology” is highly relevant for understanding the arrival of the death of God in contemporary society, and the technological nihilism that comes with it.  First, we see the prevalence of one-dimensional technological rationality on an unprecedented scale. With this, we also face the increasing identification of being as a standing reserve, this includes knowing and thinking.  Second, and inseparable from the first, we can see the revival of the Platonic doctrine of the noble lie by the neo-conservative movement; we can call this irony or cynicism, depending on our point of view, but it is a gesture of bold and daring nihilism.  Between these two thinkers, we can see the ‘postmodern’ theorized under another name, namely nihilism, and it is my interpretation that Lyotard is recognizing a moment in the history of nihilism when he speaks of the postmodern. It seems that Lyotard attributed to the postmodern an unwarranted singularity as if some kind of rupture had occurred, when it is best viewed as a moment in the history of technihilism

     Based on this context, there is much to be commended in Lyotard’s reading of the postmodern, but it seems that he was blind to the continuity involved.  His summary definition of postmodernism can be assimilated to a preexisting explanation as put forward by Nietzsche and Heidegger.  One can even be so bold as to claim that the era of technihilism began definitively with the industrial revolution.  It is during this so-called revolution that God was displaced by economics, by economy or efficiency in the more precise formulation.  At the time they occurred, one could easily have defined the enlightenment or romanticism as an increased credulity toward metanarratives, the metanarratives of Christianity and Reason specifically.  However, the watershed event was the displacement of the meaning of the term primum mobile from God to the engine.  Lyotard was somewhat correct because technology has become more powerful, technihilism more triumphant in recent history, but it was a quantitative change, not a qualitative one. We are still living in the age when nothing is true and everything is permitted. The age feared and touched only in nightmares by all previous civilizations.  We are still tinkering with the same bourgeois values of science, efficiency in production and so on that inaugurated the bourgeois epoch. We are now feeling the implications of discoveries and changes made in the past, the present will only catch up to us in the future.

     A proper theorization of postmodernism, if it is to be asserted that we live in such a time right now,  would be content to accept the death of God and the rise of technological nihilism as background.  It is a very good basis, a good context into which to place a theorization of the postmodern, as we have seen that postmodernity is a moment in the history of nihilism.  What a good theory of the postmodern needs to do is to find the particularity of the postmodern as it stands over against the other moments in the history of technological nihilism.  Lyotard’s formulation can only leave us hungry in that respect as it draws attention to the nihilism and the technologism without looking for the concrete instantiations the details of how that is playing out in the current day.  If we place such a theory as I think it should be placed, different things, different features of the current time become salient to the investigator, become theoretically interesting.  Lyotard, thoughtful though he is, may not prepare us for what we are dealing with today; his theorization does not provide us with tools for handling the change in the means of relating to metanarrativity which I feel characterizes the current era, the shift from modernist perspectives that deal in necessity to perspectives that embody a consciousness of radical contingency.

III. Strauss, Detournement, Populism

 

     There are a few metanarratives that are flourishing right now.  One of them, and the most farcical of all, is the neo-conservative oligarcho-imperialist populism metanarrative. As Thomas Frank once said, neoconservative propaganda in the United States is a recycled version of the socialist/populist rhetoric of the 1930’s shorn of its economic content [3].  This makes sense considering where the neoconservative movement comes from; many of the first members of this movement were disaffected liberals and socialists  who turned to the right during the Nixon administration. Thus, a conservative politician will tell us how the little man needs to be protected from excessive taxation of big business. This sort of farcical adaptation is closer to the heart of the postmodern than public skepticism regarding metanarratives; the public is eager for the populist narrative, in the face of the absurdity of the narrative one is almost led to posit an overcredulity rather than an incredulity.  This operates in conjunction with a second metanarrative; the metanarrative of market-driven globalization which one can say, without much hyperbole, is the apotheosis of technological reason.  Another flourishing metanarrative is the war on terror/west vs. the rest metanarrative, the one that currently motivates the practice of many of the nations of Western Europe and the United States of America. Finally, we have the triumphalist “we beat the Russians” metanarrative; which has been discredited in part (‘the end of history’) but retains the power to overwhelm any contestation regarding the truth of justice, in a way similar to the war against the Persians worked to justify the Athenian empire during the Peloponnesian war.

     If we want to understand what we are living, we need to revisit Lyotard’s formulation and contextualize it within contemporary political events. While we can say that Karl Marx was the most influential political philosopher for most of the twentieth century, we may have to concede that thus far in the twenty first it has been Leo Strauss, the contemporary of Heidegger, and the patron philosopher of the neo-conservative movement. The Rudolph Giulianis, neo-conservatives, the Nixonians, the Reganites, the Thatcherites, these are postmoderns, these and the broader movement they are a part of are emblems of the era in which we are living; an era that has more in common with a Christian Fundamentalist punk band than it does with The Velvet Underground. We are now living in the age of the conservative revolution, the bizarre and monstrous inversion of the traditional distribution of ideas. We must recognize that the conservative revolution and all that comes with it are as essentially postmodern as the drive to local struggles in progressive politics.  It is the other face of postmodernism that Lyotard’s theorization may shift our attention away from.

      In this era the political ground has shifted under our feet revealing a radical contingency, we come to see that there is no necessary connection between forms (artistic or social) and positions within the class struggle, that all of these correlations come about through contingent historical articulation. We are living in a time characterized by a bizarre detournement in which conservative cultural revolution has become a serious force in political life. An excellent example of this is Bob Roberts; a film written and directed in 1992 by the American actor Tim Robbins.  In this film, Roberts, a conservative folk singer and businessman, runs for a seat in the senate, all the while recording albums that contort the music of Woodie Guthrie and Bob Dylan into the shape of the resurgent right. It is very much as Marx said in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Naploeon, “ Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.[4] ”

     As any person who knows a young republican/born again Christian/or jihadist can tell you, in this period there is no shortage of zealots of every kind; true believers swarm us from every direction, parties, religions, cults and so on have no shortage of followers. If we stick with a definition of the postmodern condition as skepticism, we render ourselves blind to the culture of farcical detournement, as well as the fact that our world is characterized by an almost medieval zealotry for metanarrative; it is best to view Lyotard’s pronouncement as an aspect of a moment in the development of nihilism, not as a new epoch in human history.  If we must advance a definition of postmodernity our focus must be on radical contingency and reversal not on skepticism, it must be on appropriation not on contemplation.

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science,  Tr. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974, pg. 167, #108.

[2] Ibid, pg. 279, #343.

[3] Something like this claim can be found in his What’s Wrong with Kansas? Though I paraphrase from memory.

[4] Karl Marx. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.  http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

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January 11, 2009

Literary Encyclopedia

     I just subscribed to this interesting resource after reading one of the entries.  It is an encyclopedia addressing writing and the study thereof.  The entries are all professionally written, and are certainly worth the $.o5 per day that a subscription costs.  

     The idea of subjecting this sort of information to the whims of the market seems somewhat brutal,  and indeed it is.  In principle it is possible that another kind of reference can come into being through the work and desire of all of those who believe that knowledge should not be private property, should never be subjected to the tyranny of the market, and should be freely distributed to any and all.

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January 9, 2009

Philosophical Education

I tell you this long story, friend Theaetetus, because I suspect, as indeed you seem to think yourself, that you are in labour-great with some conception. Come then to me, who am a midwife’s son and myself a midwife, and do your best to answer the questions which I will ask you. And if I abstract and expose your first-born, because I discover upon inspection that the conception which you have formed is a vain shadow, do not quarrel with me on that account, as the manner of women is when their first children are taken from them. For I have actually known some who were ready to bite me when I deprived them of a darling folly; they did not perceive that I acted from good will, not knowing that no god is the enemy of man-that was not within the range of their ideas; neither am I their enemy in all this, but it would be wrong for me to admit falsehood, or to stifle the truth.

—Socrates in Plato’s Theaetetus

socrates_and_plato

           When we think about philosophical education, I shall argue, we also need to think about thinking. Thinking is the power whose exercise causes philosophy to exist, and thus must be taken into consideration when we ask about philosophical pedagogy.  Philosophers think, but thinking also takes place in life more generally: a novel or a painting, a film, a meeting, a relationship, a task or a night at a club all involve the exercise of thought: these also are stimulants to thought. Though thinking happens whether we teach it or not, pedagogical interventions can have an effect.  This intervention from philosophy is necessary because thinking is shaped by a general pedagogy of social exposure which involves powerful targeted interventions from other institutions.  Depending on which school of philosophy one affiliates oneself with, one will offer a formulation of this pedagogical exigency in different terms, but it will always be necessitated by these institutional pressures. It is the job of philosophical education to be a midwife to thought: to watch over and attend to the dangers that threaten the precarious moments of its birth.

1. What experiences are formative for the human person?

           There are two certainties in life: we think and we die. This brings about a tension which is important for people: thinking is infinite and inexhaustible, we, on the other hand, are finite. When we think, we participate in something whose full dimensions we can never fathom as individuals.  It can be imagined along the lines of what has been called infinite semiosis.  Augusto Ponzio explains infinite semiosis as the “unending chain of deferrals from one interpretant to another.” (Ponzio 2) Thus, it would be impossible for me, as for any other individual, to follow out the infinite chain of semiotic deferrals: I would die before coming to the end. This excess of semiosis over the individual leads him or her to refer to the community for the meaning of the series, but all that he or she can find there are “namings” based on arbitrary arrests of the process. Though infinite semiosis is a good clarifying analogy for the infinite process of thought, thinking is not semiosis—it is not just the action of signs and meaning.

        Every ‘semiotic process’ is a sort of tracing of an exercise of thought. This tracing is the best that people can do because pure thought is inexpressible. This tracing is accomplished through the imposition of what one might call a ‘logic’ or a ‘semiotic.’ When I say that a semiotic process traces an exercise of thought, this is not to be confused with a philosophy, if by philosophy we mean an explicit metaphysical system.  From this perspective, ‘philosophy’ is what happens when thinking stops–when there is an arrest and solidification of thought (Kuhn’s normal science is the result of a slowing down of thought). Thinking is formative for the human person, if that human person is so fortunate as to exercise thought and recognize its powers. Though it is tempting to claim that thought is the essence of the human person, or of philosophy, thought cannot be the essence of anything because thought itself is constitutively impure. If it should appear, it would always bring a necessary entourage of incompatible powers. Books are an exercise of thought, a situational/evential unity in a sense similar to Austin’s in his HTDTWW.

              Each exercise of thought reveals new abilities, in this sense, we can affirm that each act strengthens the power of thought.  In addition, through the constitutive impurity of thought, we can infer that the scope and power of the human body is generally augmented by each ‘exercise of thought.’ It is in this sense that thinking is formative for a human person.  It seems to follow that thought, as it grows more powerful, causes changes in relationships and emotions, broader changes in the style of a person’s life, and their social life more generally. Thought is impure, it always appears in relation to these ‘outside’ factors: whether it is dominated by them or dominates them is a historical question, a matter of chance.

1.1 Can those be taught? 

             Thinking is the social practice that individuates us. Much is made of the role of education in socialization, but not as much ink is spent on the role of education in the process of individuation. Thinking stands at the interface of the individual and the social, each act of thinking is uniformly perfect and singular. Thinking is never entirely conscious for the individual because it is social, it is never entirely conscious from a historical perspective because it is singular. Thinking is at the interface of the individual and the social, it is a power, it occurs whether it is explicitly instructed or not.  However, we can also say that thinking must be ‘taught’ if we regard social exposure as a pedagogy. Insofar as institutionalized instruction of various kinds participates in a general pedagogy of social exposure, it can exert force over thought, and participate in or appropriate it. This can also be said of books, political events, walks taken in mountains or cities, conversations and so on: without these different forces, thinking would not occur—thinking needs these external elements of its essence. Philosophical problems are examples of concentrated long term thinking, they reveal much about the true power of thought and can be a great stimulant to thought in its development. Philosophy is not unique in this distinction, but it consciously advances a noology, and compares images of thought. Philosophy has also developed models of the role that the structure of our thinking plays in constituting our experience of reality, it can teach us to recognize the needs of the understanding as they attempt to impose themselves on our experiences of reality.

2. What is the proper method and goal of a philosophical education?

            We can say that the goal of philosophy is thinking, if by goal we mean a qualitative transformation that something strives toward which gives life to it. In this sense, the goal of sport and war is victory—playing and fighting are aimed toward a future event of becoming victorious.  When the game ends or the battle subsides, the successful fighters or players become victors. When philosophical education ends, we hope that students will become thinkers. Philosophy and thinking are related yet opposed: because we are finite and we develop our symbolic systems as part of our political life, the infinite potentialities of thinking are named using philosophical concepts which are finite. If philosophy participates in thinking in the sense that it is a partial crystallization of an exercise of thought, philosophical education must address this history of thinking.  This is nothing very new, the history of philosophy has been a sort of longitudinal study of thinking through its exercise.  Philosophical education should prepare a person to study thought in this sense; however, ‘philosophical’ education would not be the whole story, as thought is necessarily impure in its exercise, a comprehensive method would also need to prepare a person to address this impurity in the exercise of thought. A proper philosophical education would be as Socrates was to thought: it would be a midwife. It would not be a healer, restoring normalcy to thought, but would aide thought in coming to birth.

           The distinction between thinking and philosophy is especially important when we discuss pedagogical method.  Thinking without the influence of some sort of ‘cultivation’ or ‘pedagogy’ is impossible due to the existence of an inescapable general exposure, and in this general exposure, philosophy has many formidable competitors for the attention of the public.  Advertising, medicine, ritualized time keeping and holidays, in addition to myriad other discourses and practices begin to influence the child from its first breath, and the earlier philosophical education intervenes the greater its chances to establish itself, and hence the greater its opportunity to achieve its goal.  Philosophy, as embodied in the writings of Schopenhauer or Spinoza, would be unintelligible to a four year old; however, thinking itself is something familiar for that child, it is a game that he or she is constantly playing.  If the proper goal of philosophical education is to cultivate thinking, this education should start as early as possible. It should likewise be adjusted to fit and challenge the developmental needs and potentialities of this wide range of students.

        If we assume that it is politically possible to establish philosophical education across this age range, how do we deal with the varied powers and abilities of our students? Developmentally, there are significant differences between a graduate student and a kindergartner that must be factored into a theory of philosophical education.  In my thought on this matter, I have come up with a pair of gradient scales that illustrate the progression from K-PhD for our purposes.  These should not be taken as dogmatic, but instead they should be read as a useful shorthand. They are called ‘gradient scales’ because there is significant overlap: the consumed media can be varied at each level, as can the produced media. However, the chart does serve as a shorthand for the limits that developmental progression places on philosophical education.  The top gradient describes the age of the students, the second describes the appropriate media for student consumption in the classroom, and the bottom describes the appropriate media for production.

Elementary     Middle School                        High School                             University

Games        Tht. experiments/Scenarios      Mediated text      Primary/Secondary Sources

Art/Game/Discuss  Art/Discuss/Short Write    Art/Discuss/Writing     Art/Write/Discuss

          As we can see, the production of art should always be an important component of philosophical education.  It is the activity that links philosophical education across age and developmental levels.  This chart basically shows two progressions: first, the student progresses from smaller to longer textual productions, and second, he or she begins to engage with full, unmediated, primary texts. These progressions follow the expansion of thought and of the power of assembling stimulated thought in order to present it. Art is a powerful tool in the development of the latter capacity: it allows people to engage with and share thought that it is difficult for them to put into language.

3. Should such an education shape our political and social life? Or does it serve
other ends?

      The introduction of comprehensive philosophical education in the sense I have described above, can come to be an event, in Alain Badiou’s sense of that word, only if there are “militants” who recognize the event as event (citation Ethics) as there were for Socrates at Athens.  Otherwise, this happening will remain an unnamed non-event, and be assimilated into the order of things, or the “situation” as Badiou calls it.  Whether it finds its militants or not, philosophy as a social institution needs to distinguish itself from some social institutions that are related to thought, and it needs to align itself with others. Thinking and philosophy have different social agendas: while philosophy seeks alliances and enmities, thinking is an orphan, or to borrow a turn of phrase from Aristotle, ‘[it] is like the “Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,’ whom Homer denounces (Politics, 7).”  Philosophy is a social institution, thinking is a power.  A ‘Socratic’ education that nurtured new thinking as it emerged by exposing it to thinking shaped by the history of philosophy would be a stimulant to thought. However, this same history can also be used to humiliate and depress thought, as Deleuze puts it:

The history of philosophy always been the agent of power in philosophy, and even in thought It has played the represser’s role: how can you think without having read Descartes, Kant and Heideggerand so-and-so’s book about them? A formidable school of intimidation which manufactures specialists in thought—but which makes those who stay outside conform all the more to this specialism which they despise. An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking…thought borrows its properly philosophical image from the state… (Dialogues, 12)

In other words, this change in philosophical education will inevitably have political and social consequences, whose value cannot be determined a priori.  It is just as ‘natural’ for philosophy to kill thought as it is for philosophy to nurture it: which of these roles philosophy plays depends on how philosophy is appropriated, not necessarily on its history or its essence. We can have Socrates thinking fearlessly and encouraging the same in others, or the Pythagoreans murdering a man for discovering an unsolvable mathematical puzzle.

       If we concretize this problem a bit, and look at it in the context of contemporary education and political life in the United States, we can make an estimation of several courses that this process could take, given the ascendency of different forces in its implementation.  In the broadest sense, we will have forces contending for maintenance of the status quo and forces contending for its alteration or abolition. These forces will have different models of thought, which outline what it is, and what it can and should do.  These models would become explicit in the various approaches to philosophical education that would be implemented should these forces gain power.  Their models would focus on different aspects of thought, and background others: this direction of attention can be called a politics of thought. This politics of thought would me most visible in assessment targets and assessment methods.

       This direction would have two aspects: internal emphasis of components of philosophy to privileged positions, and external emphasis on the models and concepts in other fields. These two usually work in tandem, with certain disciplines having greater or lesser affinity with different elements of philosophy: mathematics and logic, art and aesthetics, and so on. Badiou has also offered us a schema for analyzing this situation in his concept of the suture.  He would have us believe that philosophy should not rely too much on any one external discourse, or ‘truth process’ as he calls it; philosophy should keep its distance from the particular arts and sciences even as it engages with them.  If it does draw too close to any particular discourse, it enters into a ‘suture’ which is philosophical disaster, and leads to totalitarian delusions of grandeur and errors.  For example…(phil as art, as science, as politics etc etc) Thus, we could assert that the militant of thought would have allegiance to thought as separate from the other disciplines, including philosophy and its components, and would need to implement a philosophical education that placed philosophy alongside the other fields without assimilating it to them.  This would be in contrast to the other forces which would instrumentalize thought through an assimilation mediated by philosophy in the “represser’s role.” This can involve any of the sutures that Badiou discusses, and has been put forward in greatest relief by two movements, scholasticism and positivism; in the one philosophy was the handmaiden of feudalism and theology, in the other of capitalism and natural science.

      Overall, philosophical education must encourage the fearless exercise of thought.  The history of philosophy offers many examples of this, as do the histories of the arts, the sciences, and the other disciplines and fields of activity.  Thought has too often been plagued by taboos, as many of which have been imposed as removed by philosophers.  If philosophical education is to be significant in human life it needs to help liberate people from their fear of thought, as Kant put it so many years ago:

 Having first infatuated their domesticated animals, and carefully prevented the docile creatures from daring to take a single step without the leading-strings to which they are tied, they next show them the danger which threatens them if they try to walk unaided. Now this danger is not in fact so very great, for they would certainly learn to walk eventually after a few falls. But an example of this kind is intimidating, and usually frightens them off from further attempts. (What is Enlightenment)

Philosophical education should provide all the support it can in these initial shaky moments of thinking.  This brings forward the most difficult problem of philosophical education, namely the problem brought to our attention by Heidegger, when he said that the goal of teaching was to ‘let  learn’ (What is Thinking).  Our greatest challenge can perhaps be met by a commitment to thinking over and above all other fields, even philosophy itself, in philosophical education: if we choose to think of philosophical education this way, we will maintain our vigilance against the sutures that Badiou brings to our attention, as well as this historical straight-jacketing criticized by Deleuze.  By focusing on thinking, something non-finite, something constantly changing and growing, we can also engage in the sort of pedagogy that does not have allegiance to any particular field, but lets thinking emerge free from taboos and become more powerful in an autonomous way.  If this sort of education begins early enough in a person’s life, and continues, it will become a significant part of their way of life.  If autonomous, fearless thinking was made generally available, the forms of political and social relations that depend on ‘voluntary servitude’ in Boetie’s sense would be more frequently challenged and overthrown. The fear of thinking is the fear of committing to the demands of lucidity.

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January 6, 2009

Max Stirner——-Musings on Community I

We need to move away from the idea of commun-ity: sameness and blending into the larger whole are signs of a most oppressive nihilism.  The nostalgia for that “oceanic feeling” of communal fusion is the lust after a ruturn to the womb, a return to infancy.

The commun-ity sublimates our desires in an imaginary construct, one which we are supposed to see as the ultimate reality–realer than the world over which it presides.  In this aspect, it is another of Stirner’s “spooks“–a dangerous ruse by which we are induced to affirm our own slavery.

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January 6, 2009

The State

The structure  of the state is the impossible promise.  It puts itself forward as though it could represent everyone under its sway.  The state would implement the interests of the social body; the social body is the desire of the people–every person.

The sheer impossibility of this promise leads to the development and proliferation of binary thought as an ad hoc/ideological mechanism.  Most importantly, we see the emergence of a binary distinction between appearance and reality and the elaboration of a ‘real world’ beyond all possible experience.  The impossibility of the promise requires this falsification….

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January 6, 2009

Marx

     What drives production? Why production? Once it has started, all else falls into line; history is only intelligible by its light.  This means that whatever brought production into being must be invisible, or at least minimally visible.  In order to address this problem, we consider two options:

  1.  Production precedes itself.
  2. Production comes to be through the action of precedent forces. 

The first option leads to a Spinozism with production as Nature: Nature is productive of new forms.  Production–taken as the principle that renders human history intelligible–is part of a larger world of which production is also the fundamental logos.  To claim that production is preceded only by production is the same as saying that nothing precedes it, it has only changed and this change has been misrecognized.  First of all, if nothing precedes production, then all of being is the production of being–production is the fundamental mode of presence.  

Is this perspective the true materialism? As a materialist, one can claim that the universe is made up of matter and energy.  If one is not to neglect energy for matter, or vice versa, one needs to focus on a third term that describes their interaction.  From this perspective, it is possible to accord both terms a fundamental place, with production as the non-dualistic name for what matter and energy constitute in concrete situations.  This can also be said as follows: matter and energy are moments abstracted from a the process of production, this follows from the primacy of production: it is before all else, as being it is as close to eternity as we will get, it constitutes and it reality for us.

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