Digressions&Impressions

On Pynchon on 1984

By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined. But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, "The Principles of Newspeak". We remember that at the beginning, we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don't - we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein's book, as a condition of acceptance by the club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, "A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing . . . I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a
certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run." Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?
The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, "The Principles of Newspeak" is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post- 1984 , in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.--Thomas Pynchon (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

We know that Pynchon is not the only major novelist that grappled with Orwell's Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four; at the end The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood, who according to her own testimony about 1984, "read it again and again," pays homage to it in the "Historical Notes" themselves "Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held as part of the International Historical Association Convention held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195." In presenting these historical notes, Atwood, reassures the reader, who may have no taste for (recall) Socratic metaphysics --  "for everything that has come into being destruction is appointed, not even such a fabric as this will abide for all time, but it shall surely be dissolved" (Plato, Republic, 546a)" -- that the "Gilead period," too, will come to an end in some sense. 

Pynchon, who is not exactly known for his optimism, is right to pay attention to the Appendix to 1984, but I am not entirely sure that his hesitant ("perhaps") optimism about what the Appendix signals can withstand scrutiny. His interpretation assumes, first, that the (let's call it) authorial stance of the Appendix has to be taken at face value. That's decidedly odd because 1984 represents us with a world in which just about every text is a forgery of some sorts. (While it would be a mistake to treat them alike, Orwell and Borges were contemporaries, after all.) In fact, much of the action of 1984 consists in the production of forgeries (not just of texts of memories). The production of newspapers by the Ministry of Truth and the torture chambers of Ministry of love have this in common. So, why would the Appendix be any different?

As an aside, the apparent function of the forgeries in Oceania appear to be to produce a totalizing infallibility about everything, not the least the past, of the Party. (No Pope would dream of this!) And what it illustrates is that even if one were to grant (for the sake of amusement) the linguistic idealist, that all is text, what one may call the production values that inform or are exhibited by the production of texts make a huge difference. Linguistic idealism comes in many varieties. If one treats this focus on 'values' as bourgeois, feel free to replace 'production values' with 'means of production' in the previous sentence. In so far as Orwell is a true socialist (and an author), this attention to the conditions of textual production need not surprise. 

But let's stipulate that we need to take the Appendix at face value. You may say, 'What else can we do, after all?' It's true, as Pynchon emphasizes, that the Appendix treats Newspeak as a thing of the past. Given that Pynchon explicitly understands Newspeak as the essence of Oceania, and in his argument tacitly relies on the metaphysical principle, I'll paraphrase Spinoza (E2D2), that when its essence is taken away the entity ceases to be, Pynchon infers from the demise of Newspeak quite reasonably that Oceania must have ended.

Before I get to the merits of Pynchon's argument, a reader may suspect that I will object to Pynchon's metaphysics as an imposition on the world of 1984. Of course, I am assuming you are not the kind of reader who may find my parading of metaphysical jargon quite pedantic. Even so it's worth noting that the core torture scenes in Part III of 1984, emphasize that metaphysics is salient. The torturer, O'Brien, repeatedly, in fact, reminds his victim, Winston Smith, that metaphysics is not his "strong point." So I am not going to object to the form of Pynchon's argument.*

Newspeak is what the philosophers call a final language. In the text -- I have in mind both 1984 and its Appendix -- this is marked by the contrast between the provisional versions (as, I now quote the Appendix, "embodied in the Ninth and Tenth editions of the Newspeak Dictionary") -- and its definitive form "embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary."  As we learn from the Appendix and, earlier in the novel, from Syme, who, before he is presumably vaporized, is one of the developers of Newspeak, Newspeak is supposed to be an austere language: its vocabulary culled down, and, through some semantic tools the expressive power of particular words is greatly enhanced, the language's expressive power is curtailed. It's a final language designed to be spoken and used by the Party.**

Now, Syme indeed suggests that the "Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak." The narrator of 1984 adds that this is expressed with "a sort of mystical satisfaction." And indeed this idea, the perfection of language, is characteristic of what we may call Enlightenment mysticism (and satirized by Swift). Pynchon's interpretation of 1984 is rooted in Syme's understanding of Newspeak.

The Appendix, which follows Syme's interpretation of Newspeak sometimes literally, omits this mystical claim. I'll quote the Appendix (and then suggest an alternative to Pynchon's interpretation):

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

Unlike Syme, the Appendix places greatest emphasis on the fact that the purpose of Newspeak was to make what in 1984 is called 'Thoughtcrime' impossible. Even a Quine-ean couldn't be heretical through indirect methods in Newspeak. We might say, then, that it is regimentation that is the fundamental function of Newspeak as a final language.

Interestingly enough, this is an aside, the author of the Appendix recognizes that once Newspeak is perfected, it would make translation of books and even complex fragments from older languages into Newspeak in a certain way impossible unless they either referred "to some technical processor some very simple everyday actions." (The Appendix offers the Declaration of Independence as an example of how "impossible" would be to render it into Newspeak.) One wishes (recall) our advocates of formal languages would keep this in mind.

Be that as it may, a more natural interpretation of the demise of Newspeak presents itself now.  For, from the point of view of the Party, the elimination of even possible Thoughtcrime would be self-defeating. For Thoughtcrime grounds the repressive apparatus of the Party. The possibility of Thoughtcrimes are -- as much as the conditions of permanent War -- central to the structure of self-discipline of the Party. The elimination of Thoughtcrime as a category would spell doom to the survival of the Party because it would lose its main means of self-control as a ruling, corporate spirit. It would then have to start codifying laws of some sort and bureaucratize, formalize these. This was not a problem in the world of 1984 because the perfection of Newspeak had been projected, as the Appendix notes in its closing sentence, into a more distant future (2050).

So, a more natural political possibility is that the Party abandoned the project of Newspeak because it saw that its perfection would be self-undermining and incompatible with the ideological needs of Ingsoc in power.*** (By contrast, a socialist language planner like Carnap recognizes that Esperanto, for example, is great for a world of public Enlightenment.) And the Appendix reflects the writings of someone who is intimately familiar with the abandonment of Newspeak (not the demise of Oceania).  Admittedly, there are some passages in the Appendix that exhibit a rather free-thinking attitude: the use of the Declaration of Independence as an example, in particular, is rather cheeky. And it forms the best evidence for Pynchon's interpretation. But the more literal reading of the Appendix understands it as a fragment from a reconstruction of the rise and fall of Newspeak as a social enterprise. That is compatible with the survival of Oceania once the Party realized that the mystical attitude toward Newspeak threatened to make it the essence of Oceania.+

 

 

Cosmic Balance and Civic Flourishing in Omelas.

    They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.
    This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

    The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.--- Ursula Le Guin "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"

Omelas has an unusual coming of age ritual: the would be adults are initiated into a horrible truth that is simultaneously the foundation of civic happiness. And they may not alter this state of affairs on pain of losing their prosperity (and other good things). In addition, their subsequent free speech is limited in a crucial way, they may not comfort or express compassion to the child that is sacrificed for their flourishing. This would violate "the terms" of a kind of (social) contract (recall here; and here) that is either the actual root of this commercial republic, or a kind of civic religion that structures its social reality. 

A skeptical reader may well deny that such "terms" could ever express a truth since it is so manifestly unjust. But as I have noted before, if the terms actually constitute (political) justice in the city, then this move is external to the civic consciousness of Omelas. (Of course, a defender of natural right might take that as evidence that forms of legal positivism are pathways to evil.) And moreover sometimes the truth indicates the abominable misery of the status quo.

But my present interest is to note that the ritual expresses the significance of social and political knowledge in Omelas. Because this ritual is initiated in order to convey a key knowledge about social life of Omelas when the would-be-adults are capable of "understanding" the "explanations" of it. The reactions of those exposed to it, suggests that those not yet ready for understanding are carefully guarded from the truth. So, the miserable child is a social taboo from which the young are guarded carefully. That is to say, the not young maintain a culture of silence among those who are not yet initiated.  This suggests that in so far as it is a civic religion it is carefully expressed. It is by no means obvious that the many visitors to Omelas that the proud city receives would know about it since these might well tell the children of Omelas or be tempted to protest the state of affairs. (This suggests that freedom of speech is curtailed even more widely in Omelas.)

I have noted before that despite the fact that the actual religion of Omelas lacks clergy, the miserable and innocent child is a kind of piacular scapegoat. To me this suggests that the state and its civic religion has claimed for itself that which properly belongs to revealed or clerical religion.

One of my students, Robin Kan, pointed out to me that the sacrifice of the innocent child functions like a cosmic balance principle in their civic religion. For, at any given time of the polity's existence, the child's immense suffering balances out the flourishing of the polity ("that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.") Structurally, such a cosmic balance principle is very similar to Christ's redemptive suffering for the sins of humanity (which is sometimes discussed in terms of such a cosmic balance), except that Christ voluntarily takes on this task and the child is forced into it without ever being allowed any understanding of its role. It is not even offered an ideological explanation for its suffering, and thanks to Omelas' social taboo on it, it has literally no chance of anticipating it. Of course, Omelas' balance principle is not cosmic, but local, bounded by the the territory of Omelas; the child does not redeem all of humanity.

It is natural to teach Omelas as a means to discuss the limitations of utilitarianism in an introductory context. This year my own students saw in it a parable of colonial/imperial conquest or capitalist exploitation, and the way the media makes that available to viewers at the center and simultaneously makes us it feel impossible to change. In a future post I want to discuss one such interpretation because it centers on the purported absence of war in Omelas.

But it is worth noting that if one reads the story on its own terms, it depicts the horrors of state power devoted to the "happiness" of its people. And in the story this is a power that rests on the well informed understanding and tacit consent of its adult citizens, and it is presented as the best kind of polity that accepts the legitimacy of state power. That is to say, the implied point of view of the narration is the question whether it is worth paying the price of the benefits of state power.  

Of course, my present interpretation is informed by my recent (recall) reading of Le Guin's "The Day Before the Revolution." This story invites us to see in one of those who walk away from Omelas the revolutionary founders of a form of anarchism (which rejects state power).* That is, if we take Omelas as a best case scenario for statism, then it invites us both to reflect on the price we're willing to pay to accept our complicity in its horrors, and to what degree we're willing to contemplate (and to pursue) serious alternatives.

One final thought: the line of interpretation that I have offered here is not an alternative to, or a refutation of, treating Omelas as a means toward discussing the limitations of utilitarianism. For, as Foucault emphasizes, utilitarianism is not merely an ethical system, it is also a technology of governance. And so it does ask us what price we're willing to pay in pursuing such technologies and if we're willing to contemplate doing without them.

14 March 1979: Foucault's Science Fiction of Neo-Liberal Eugenics (XXX)

[I]n Gary Becker there is a very interesting theory of consumption, in which he says: We should not think at all that consumption simply consists in being someone in a process of exchange who buys and makes a monetary exchange in order to obtain some products. The man of consumption is not one of the terms of exchange. The man of consumption, insofar as he consumes, is a producer. What does he produce? Well, quite simply, he produces his own satisfaction. And we should think of consumption as an enterprise activity by which the individual, precisely on the basis of the capital he has at his disposal, will produce something that will be his own satisfaction. Consequently, the theory, the classical analysis trotted out a hundred times of the person who is a consumer on the one hand, but who is also a producer, and who, because of this, is, as it were, divided in relation to himself, as well as all the sociological analyses—for they have never been economic analyses—of mass consumption, of consumer society, and so forth, do not hold up and have no value in relation to an analysis of consumption in the neo-liberal terms of the activity of production. So, even if there really is a return to the idea of homo oeconomicus as the analytical grid of economic activity, there is a complete change in the conception of this homo oeconomicus.
So, we arrive at this idea that the wage is nothing other than the remuneration, the income allocated to a certain capital, a capital that we will call human capital inasmuch as the ability-machine of which it is the income cannot be separated from the human individual who is its bearer. How is this capital made up? It is at this point that the reintroduction of labor or work into the field of economic analysis will make it possible, through a sort of acceleration or extension, to move on to the economic analysis of elements which had previously totally escaped it. In other words, the neo-liberals say that labor was in principle part of economic analysis, but the way in which classical economic analysis was conducted was incapable of dealing with this element. Good, we do deal with it. And when they make this analysis, and do so in the terms I have just described, they are led to study the way in which human capital is formed and accumulated, and this enables them to apply economic analyses to completely new fields and domains.
How is human capital made up? Well, they say, it is made up of innate elements and other, acquired elements. Let’s talk about the innate elements. There are those we can call hereditary, and others which are just innate; differences which are, of course, self-evident for anyone with the vaguest acquaintance with biology. I do not think that there are as yet any studies on the problem of the hereditary elements of human capital, but it is quite clear what form they could take and, above all, we can see through anxieties, concerns, problems, and so on, the birth of something which, according to your point of view, could be interesting or disturbing. In actual fact, in the—I was going to say, classical—analyses of these neo-liberals, in the analyses of Schultz or Becker, for example, it is indeed said that the formation of human capital only has interest and only becomes relevant for the economists inasmuch as this capital is formed thanks to the use of scarce means, to the alternative use of scarce means for a given end. Now obviously we do not have to pay to have the body we have, or we do not have to pay for our genetic make-up. It costs nothing. Yes, it costs nothing—and yet, we need to see ... , and we can easily imagine something like this occurring (I am just engaging in a bit of science fiction here, it is a kind of problematic which is currently becoming pervasive).
In fact, modern genetics clearly shows that many more elements than was previously thought are conditioned by the genetic make-up we receive from our ancestors. In particular, genetics makes it possible to establish for any given individual the probabilities of their contracting this or that type of disease at a given age, during a given period of life, or in any way at any moment of life. In other words, one of the current interests in the application of genetics to human populations is to make it possible to recognize individuals at risk and the type of risk individuals incur throughout their life. You will say: Here again, there’s nothing we can do; our parents made us like this. Yes, of course, but when we can identify what individuals are at risk, and what the risks are of a union of individuals at risk producing an individual with a particular characteristic that makes him or her the carrier of a risk, then we can perfectly well imagine the following: good genetic make-ups—that is to say, [those] able to produce individuals with low risk or with a level of risk which will not be harmful for themselves, those around them, or society—will certainly become scarce, and insofar as they are scarce they may perfectly well [enter], and this is entirely normal, into economic circuits or calculations, that is to say, alternative choices. Putting it in clear terms, this will mean that given my own genetic make-up, if I wish to have a child whose genetic make-up will be at least as good as mine, or as far as possible better than mine, then I will have to find someone who also has a good genetic make-up. And if you want a child whose human capital, understood simply in terms of innate and hereditary elements, is high, you can see that you will have to make an investment, that is to say, you will have to have worked enough, to have sufficient income, and to have a social status such that it will enable you to take for a spouse or co-producer of this future human capital, someone who has significant human capital themselves. I am not saying this as a joke; it is simply a form of thought or a form of problematic that is currently being elaborated.
What I mean is that if the problem of genetics currently provokes such anxiety, I do not think it is either useful or interesting to translate this anxiety into the traditional terms of racism. If we want to try to grasp the political pertinence of the present development of genetics, we must do so by trying to grasp its implications at the level of actuality itself, with the real problems that it raises. And as soon as a society poses itself the problem of the improvement of its human capital in general, it is inevitable that the problem of the control, screening, and improvement of the human capital of individuals, as a function of unions and consequent reproduction, will become actual, or at any rate, called for. So, the political problem of the use of genetics arises in terms of the formation, growth, accumulation, and improvement of human capital. What we might call the racist effects of genetics is certainly something to be feared, and they are far from being eradicated, but this does not seem to me to be the major political issue at the moment.--Michel Foucault, 14 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 9, The Birth of Biopolitics, 226-229 [emphasis added on 'inevitable'].

It is difficult to write this blog post because I am so in awe of Foucault's analysis. For, in these pages, and the ones that follow and precede it, Foucault basically articulates the whole paradigm in which economic analysis becomes incapable of self-limiting and, thus, totalitarian. The question becomes not just how the genetic endowment, but the "child’s family life will produce human capital?" (229) And as Foucault notes this means that everything that can be measured in this environment must be measured to uncover its effect on human capital formation. Deep learning was made, we might say, for human capital theory.

And this human capital will not just be the principle that generates (possible) income into the future, but also the skill to consume it. Foucault's analysis of Becker's treatment that consumption isn't merely a passive doing, a mere hedonic receptacle, but an effect of human capital is masterly. We must not merely acquire taste but must gain the skill to enjoy our acquired commodities. We might say, as a serious joke, that Becker and Mincer (and Schultz, etc.) re-discover Rousseau and Kames in the vernacular. Foucault alerts us to his own interest in this merging of the philosophy of culture and education with the logical of capital/computing by calling it 'very interesting' (226) which is a stark contrast to the 'banalities' when he discusses political history (216/218). 

As an aside, I noted last week the brilliant almost counterfactual history of economics inscribed in this ninth lecture. But it is also worth noting a bizarre lacuna. For in Foucault's hands it is immediately obvious that this strain of Chicago economics -- the human capital, economic imperialism one -- rediscovers and revives the eugenic features of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century economics most associated with names like Galton and Pearson, but visible and significant in wide variety of American and British progressives, such that it infected the foundation of the welfare state nearly everywhere.* 

That is to say, what Foucault misses, and with him many other well-meaning intellectual commentators, is that part of the neo-liberal reaction against "Keynesian policy, social pacts of war, and the growth of the federal administration through economic and social programs" which "formed the adversary and target of neoliberal thought, that which it was constructed against or which it opposed in order to form itself and develop" (217) had a further moral underpinning (other than the anti-war, anti-collectivism already explicit in Foucault's analysis) one that had high salience after the Nazi-era is that of human moral equality. And this fits even Becker and his Chicago allies/teachers because in their version of human capital theory, after the Robbins redefinition of the nature of economics, the individual agency of each (recall last week) of us matters.  

My language of 'misses' in the previous paragraph is misleading. Given Foucault's knowledge of the study of deviance, it is unlikely he is not aware of this. And, in fact, he clearly signals he is aware of it: "call the racist effects of genetics is certainly something to be feared, and they are far from being eradicated," but he tells us why he does not alert us to this in his treatment: it "does not seem to me to be the major political issue at the moment." This comment raises tough questions about the hermeneutics of Foucault. 

The whole lecture series is (recall) oriented around the liberal art of government. And foucault makes clear that in one sense his is descriptive treatment of praxis and theory, and in other sense he is constructing what we may call the optimal art of liberal government. Now, it comes as no surprise that Foucault is aware of his situatedness in a particular political context; I have tried to be alert in where he hints at this. But here he alerts us to the fact that his decisions about what to highlight are themselves a function of his judgment of what he takes to be a major political issue at that moment. But he does not tell us what -- to be reflexive for a moment -- what enters into the formation of, and what secures the ''output'' of this judgment, and what counts as political for him.

Okay, let's close with a final observation. Above I noted that Foucault rightly discerns a kind of totalitarian element in the neo-liberal turn of Becker, Mincer, Schultz because as a domain of enquiry it is incapable of self-limitation. What he discerns is that (nearly) everything that can become data or a data-set connected to human activity is, in principle, possible evidence (about genes, environment, learning, production, risk, etc.) in this theory. (The remainder of the lecture Foucault spells this out nicely and ambitiously--very much worth re-reading for its significance to theories of capitalism, imperialism, and development.) In so far as there are constraints these are determined more by search costs than by the nature of the paradigm. This is really a contrast to how many other forms of enquiry function, where the paradigm limits severely what may count as possible evidence. 

But, of course, one may object that the totalitarian tendency in enquiry is not sufficient to count something as totalitarian in political praxis. The objection misses the point here. For Foucault is clearly committed to the idea once certain questions become intellectually pertinent -- not to an individual but (notice the bourgeois or at least Weberian terminology of Gesellschaft) "society"* -- then they become also necessarily ("inevitable") pertinent to, and actionable for, political practice ("control, screening, and improvement of the human capital of individuals.") He does not explain why he believes in this kind of weirdly friction-free market in ideas such that the social problem must generate its own social praxis. It is notable that he does not offer a mechanism for why this is inevitably so, and a critique of the present must originate here. But that's for another time.  

To put the more arresting point of the previous paragraph as a serious joke, if one raises the question of what Plato [Republic 546d] calls the marriage number (viz. "the human capital of individuals, as a function of unions and consequent reproduction"), then even in a liberal society (focused on "individuals") there is, contra the hopes of Bacon no self-restraint on its pursuit.* That is to say, Foucault accepts the kind of Heideggerian/Thomistic critique of modernity without their moralism or, despite his latent political "fears," existential angst. 

 

 

On Adam Tooze, Ideology and Liberal Historiography

If Jamie Dimon quipped that to make sense of Dodd-Frank one needed the services of a lawyer and a psychiatrist, the same is no doubt true of the business of deciphering Donald Trump. But historians can contribute too.¹⁸ Trump offered to a bewildered present a throwback to an earlier era. Born in 1946, the same year as Bill Clinton, Trump would take office at seventy years of age, recycling a rancid version of the baby boomer narrative, which in the 1990s had still seemed fresh. Trump’s racial attitudes reflected the animosities of the era of civil rights, desegregation and New York in the 1970s. His boorish manners and sexism echoed the Manhattan party scene of the 1980s, when bond traders toasted one another as “big swinging dicks.” The sense of national crisis that drove his campaign was a reflux not so much of the recent past as of the first moment when modern Americans felt the world changing around them—the late 1970s and early 1980s. The trauma of defeat in Vietnam, America’s urban crisis and angry Japan bashing—thirty years on Trump was still harping on those fears, but now transposed onto new enemies: China, Islam and undocumented Latino immigrants.--Adam Tooze (2018) Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, 569.

One of the non-trivial sub-texts of Tooze's argument is the complacency of the Democrats and even the whole 'political class' in the face of the rise (and eventual) triumph of Trump. I don't want to claim that Tooze always or even often treats his targets as complacent, but it is a recurring theme in the book.* Now, interestingly, on Tooze's presentation, the complacent uniformly believe not just in technocratic skill, but also that by and large the present system is unavoidable (interestingly this flattens any difference between "the determinism of Thatcher and Merkel,"  and that this system is in some world-historical sense progressive ('progress' is repeated frequently in the book).

Tooze is very critical of the political class. Even so, as Perry Anderson notes (83ff.) in his by now (justly) famous review essay, Tooze also admires the complacents's skill which consist in, in part, in managing, so it seems, the irrationality that democracies naturally generate without undoing the liberal status quo (free trade, markets, glocal integragration, etc.) My interest in mentioning this is not Anderson's who is engaged in a polemic from the Marxist left against Tooze's self-proclaimed left-liberalism (p. 21 Crashed; p. 53 in Anderson).+

In fact, I quote the passage at the top of the post  because it is a place where Tooze alerts the reader to his own intellectual perspective (qua historian). And the way I read him, Tooze treats Trump as a kind of expression of atavistic sentiments and outlooks (e.g., 'throwback;' 'recycling;' 'reflux.' etc.) That is to say, just like the complacents, Tooze embraces, despite his sense of contingency, a notion of progress (in his terms an arc of  history) in which some ideas are modern and modernizing and others are old-fashioned or outright primitive. (Because of his progressive Marxism, Anderson can't really object to Tooze's stance here.)

To be sure, Tooze is doing multiple things in the quoted passage: first he explains, briefly, where Trump's ideas come from given Trump's social milieu and personal trajectory.  Second, he is conveying the sense of bewilderment of an establishment of having to confront these ideas and the manner in which they are performed anew. Third, he himself is judging these ideas/performance ("boorish," etc.) I don't think any of these three features are objectionable, and Tooze is transparent about them.

But, fourth, because Tooze treats these ideas as atavistic, he can't quite explain their nature (or their appeal) qua historian (or engaged citizen). So, while throughout the book, Tooze understands the grounds of popular dissatisfaction would with the status quo (the complacents), we're now left with a mystery why the progressive left could rarely capitalize on this dissatisfaction. For, and again Anderson is good on this, why did not ordinary citizens embrace the progressive Keynesian solutions Tooze advocates at the ballot box?

And, in my view, part of the problem for Tooze -- and this emblematic for much liberal thought in the broad sense -- is that he views the fears and desires Trump represents so well as atavistic to be overcome rather than as permanent possibilities of the human condition.** Now the moment one says this one draws the suspicion one is willing to slide into a normative defense of Trump and author authoritarian tendencies. (I have learned that to cast even minimum doubt on the reality of say, moral progress of humanity, is to invite opprobrium.)

But  the fact that those whose business is not to be bewildered were, as Tooze correctly notes, "bewildered" by Trump's rise (and Brexit, etc.) shows that there is a defect in the self-conception of contemporary liberalism. That's different from suggesting that there is a defect in contemporary liberalism that causes the rise of Trump and other authoritarian tendencies (that may be true, too). Since I care about liberalism's survival I think this is a defect in our self-conception worth addressing. The moment one respects what is taken as atavistic as a permanent possibility, one might govern and campaign (and communicate, and theorize, etc.) in a different fashion. For, even recognizing a possibility as a possibility allows one to better prevent it from happening and not treat it as mystery. It is also a start of a better explanation of why it did happen.

That is to say, I think one of the problems in contemporary liberalism is the unstated assumption that certain forms of progress are permanent and that once achieved no back-sliding is genuinely possible. But an ideology that takes its own victories for granted (in being justified and secure), after the fact, really is an ideology.*** What I admire in liberalism is a willingness to learn from experience and self-correct; it strikes me this is a feature within liberalism we need to change, or, better yet, revert back to the wisdom of Judith Shklar and Karl Popper (here; here; here) and be willing to expect the worst.

 

7 February 1979: Foucault on The Road to Serfdom and the image of science (XV)

To summarize all this, the decisive point of the Nazi experience for the Freiburg liberals—and this was their choice of adversary, if you like, the way in which they set up the field of adversity necessary for the definition of their strategy—was that, first, they thought they could establish that Nazism was the product of an economic invariant which is indifferent and as it were impervious to the capitalism/socialism opposition and to the constitutional organization of states; second, they thought they could establish National Socialism as an invariant which, as both cause and effect, was absolutely bound up with the unlimited growth of state power; and third, that the first major and visible effect of this invariant linked to the growth of the state was a destruction of the network, the tissue of the social community, a destruction which, through a sort of chain reaction, a loop, calls precisely for protectionism, a centrally planned economy, and an increase in the power of the state.

Broadly speaking, everything which opposes liberalism and proposes state management of the economy thus constitutes an invariant whose history can be seen throughout the development of European societies since the end of the nineteenth century and, more precisely, from the start of the twentieth century, that is to say, when the liberal art of government became, so to speak, intimidated by its own consequences and tried to limit the consequences that it ought to have drawn itself from its own development. How did it try to limit them? Well, by a technique of intervention which consisted in applying to society and the economy a type of rationality considered valid within the natural sciences. In short, what we can broadly call technology. Technicization of state management, of control of the economy, and also in the analysis of economic phenomena, is what the ordoliberals call “eternal Saint-Simonism,” and they identify Saint-Simon with the birth of that vertigo which takes hold of the liberal art of government and leads it to seek a principle of limitation, a principle of organization in the application to society of a schema of rationality specific to nature, a principle which ultimately leads to Nazism. So, from Saint-Simon to Nazism there is a cycle of rationality entailing interventions which entail the growth of the state, which entails setting up an administration that itself functions according to technical types of rationality, and this constitutes precisely the genesis of Nazism over two centuries, or at any rate a century and a half, of the history of capitalism....

The essential thing is the conclusion the ordoliberals drew from this series of analyses, namely: since Nazism shows that the defects and destructive effects traditionally attributed to the market economy should instead be attributed to the state and its intrinsic defects and specific rationality, then the analyses must be completely overturned. Our question should not be: Given a relatively free market economy, how should the state limit it so as to minimize its harmful effects? We should reason completely differently and say: Nothing proves that the market economy is intrinsically defective since everything attributed to it as a defect and as the effect of its defectiveness should really be attributed to the state. So, let’s do the opposite and demand even more from the market economy than was demanded from it in the eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century the market was called upon to say to the state: Beyond such and such a limit, regarding such and such a question, and starting at the borders of such and such a domain, you will no longer intervene. This is not enough, the ordoliberals say. Since it turns out that the state is the bearer of intrinsic defects, and there is no proof that the market economy has these defects, let’s ask the market economy itself to be the principle, not of the state’s limitation, but of its internal regulation from start to finish of its existence and action. In other words, instead of accepting a free market defined by the state and kept as it were under state supervision—which was, in a way, the initial formula of liberalism: let us establish a space of economic freedom and let us circumscribe it by a state that will supervise it—the ordoliberals say we should completely turn the formula around and adopt the free market as organizing and regulating principle of the state, from the start of its existence up to the last form of its interventions. In other words: a state under the supervision of the market rather than a market supervised by the state.

I think this kind of reversal, which the ordoliberals were only able to carry out on the basis of their analysis of Nazism, enabled them in 1948 to try to resolve the problem they faced of finding a way of giving legitimacy to a state that did not yet exist and that had to be made acceptable to those who most mistrusted it. Well, let’s adopt the free market and we will have a mechanism that will found the state and at the same time, by controlling it, will provide the guarantees demanded by those who have grounds for mistrusting it. This, I think, was the reversal they carried out. --Michel Foucault, 7 February 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 5, The Birth of Biopolitics. 114-117

The philosophically inclined reader may wish to go straight to either the drama of the Ordos vs Frankfurt School as competing, fraternal twins; heirs of Max Weber or to Foucault's analysis of the Ordos as applied Husserlian phenomenologists. And I won't leave lecture 5 until I have done so. But much of lecture 5 is devoted to analyzing the function and functionality of what is now known as the Road to Serfdom thesis. And he does so without actually naming the title of the famous book, although Hayek (who did not (recall this post on Lippmann and Mises) originate the thesis) is mentioned in the lecture (104) as a definer of neoliberalism.

And what Foucault shows is that the Road to Serfdom is not a prediction, but an analytic tool. It is not a prediction because it cannot be, say, falsified; rather it is not a prediction because it has already happened. As an analytic tool, really -- and this, in part, the point of the nod to Weber -- an ideal type, it helps explain and characterize an invariant political economy and processes.

The cold war, with its opposition between capitalism and socialism has occluded the very nature of the Road to Serfdom. For it was received, even launched, in the Anglo world as a sally in a manichean fight with communism (as a kind of capstone to the socialist calculation debate). And while Foucault is not a Skinnerian-contextualist, he restores the Road to Serfdom to its original meaning. That is quite striking because in 1979 there is little reason to think the manichean fight is not eternal.

A further point Foucault is making, and this is in the first quoted paragraph, is that alongside the liberal art of government, there is a genuine theoretical innovation in history of political philosophy. That in addition to the traditional typology of constitutions (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy and the variants), there is also another form of statism that is, in a way, without a constitution altogether, "unlimited growth of state power," that is, totalitarianism (a word he used the week before but only starts exploring a month later).* And again, this is not a prediction but lived reality for the ORDOs. 

As Foucault sees clearly, once one adopts this ideal type framework, "(a) everything which opposes liberalism and (b) proposes state management of the economy" (emphasis added) is part of the Road to Serfdom. Of course, one can embrace (a) without (b) and vice versa, although often they entail each other. But as Foucault shows, for the ORDOs, the embrace of (b), associated with Keynesianism (which understands itself as saving liberalism, after all), often produces (a). 

The Road to Serfdom thesis in Foucault's rendering also has an arresting analysis of the failure of the earlier "liberal art of government" which can be traced back (recall here; here; and here) to Locke. Such an analysis is needed genealogically because Nazism seems to follow liberalism (as Karl Polanyi argued). Superficially the claim is that it involved a failure of nerve ("intimidated by its own consequences and tried to limit the consequences that it ought to have drawn itself from its own development.") The more fundamental version of this failure is that the liberal art of government became enchanted by an image of science that allowed technological interventions on society as a kind of inert subject.

That is to say, the Road to Serfdom thesis presupposes, and here is one version of the  manifestation of Weberianism, a distinction between the human and natural sciences and with it a distinction between the kind of rationality or management apt for it. This distinction, in Hayek's hands, received a withering (1952) review by Ernest Nagel (which I think accounts for the very delayed interest in Hayek in analytic philosophy). The key point can be stated without such a distinction; Saint-Simonism presupposes one understands the machinery of society and so one can calibrate and engineer its working parts for improvement whereas Hayek is aware that one lacks the synoptic vision to grasp all the working parts in real time.

There is also a moral criticism lurking here. The failure of nerve that results in Saint-Simonism, entails that the liberal art of government cannot treat humans as autonomous ends who have the dignity to make their own errors and to refuse participation in experiments with their lives. 

So, the echt liberal art of government requires an analysis of the image of science, which contains (a) a list of characteristics that function as short-hand for representing science when (b) these characteristics are used in debates where one side (or more) appeals to the (epistemic) authority of science to settle debate, and (c) such an image is often accompanied by privileged list of scientific virtues, and (d) a kind of cost-benefit analysis of these characteristics and virtues when science wishes to be policy-apt.

And so, the Road to Serfdom thesis entails a constitution of science that can serve the needs of liberal art of government. Unusually for Foucault, he does not stop to pause what this entails for scientific enquiry or the art of government.  Or to put the point in terms of the main point of this lecture. A regress looms once one recognizes that the government most constitute the free-market and, in turn, be modeled on the market. But one of the partial players in this regress is science, and it has a position necessarily orthogonal to the market-state dichotomy that defines it.

 

Elster's Criticism of Foucault (and Conceptual art)

It is puzzling and thought-provoking that certain paradoxical instruction appear both on the road to wisdom and as the agency of madness.--Elster, Sour Grapes (66)

Conceptual art may impress as a freak of nature can, or a woman preaching according to Dr. Johnson.--Elster, Sour Grapes (82)

There are some vocal philosophy professors that express contempt for English literature professors (hereafter: ELPs). I have never understood this contempt (and not just because my interest in philosophy was nurtured by a wonderful Miltonist--Michael Fixler [recall]).  Perhaps it's envy because ELPs get to read much better prose on an average work-day. More likely it's professional philosophers's abhorrence of multiplicity of meaning (which we understand as equivocation) (PPAMOM) which makes too many of us recoil from the ELPs's craft.  Anyway, I am always astounded by ELPs's ability to discern meaningful structural features in a text, and especially the telling trope or set of metaphors that help disclose a text's significance or conceptual commitments. One good trick that I apply in my own scholarship I learned from ELPs: it is important to pay attention to the minor seeming discordant words/concepts/paragraphs/chapters that do not seem necessary to the main argument in a text. This is especially useful in influential works that have already accumulated commentary/scholarship. (It's also a survival trick: all the low-hanging scholarly fruit tends to picked already.)

Elster's (1983) Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality is deservedly a recent classic.* (As I write this it has over 2000 citations.) It is very much a cold-war product and it brilliantly exploits evidence of behavior from differing institutional contexts (culturally and temporally apart) : Imperial Rome (by way of Veyne's Le Pain et le Cirque) and Soviet Russia (by way of Zinoviev's The Yawning Heights, which I have ordered). Its main claim is that "preferences underlying a choice may be shaped by the [given] constraints" (vii). The book elegantly weaves conceptual analysis, decision theory, and political theory; it subtly draws on literature, social psychology, and history in ways that are far too uncommon within analytical philosophy. At its best it reminds me of its great historical contemporary, Dennett's Elbow Room (recall). It also represents an important episode in the history of philosophical Marxism: Elster embraces "methodological individualism" in order to combat the "stagnant state" of "Marxist theory." (142) Elster also non-subtly rejects the marriage of Marxism and Freudianism that was (is?) common. In fact, its rejection of Freudian unconscious as a "theoretical entity" ("a highly desirable goal" (152)) is so dogmatic that Elster ties himself in knots over the phenomenon of self-deception, which he takes to be incoherent (despite "massive clinical, fictional and everyday experience attesting to the reality of the phenomenon." (149)) This aim also helps him produce some of his best insights on wishful thinking.

The discordant section in Sour Grapes is Elster's long paragraph on art with its jeremiad against conceptual art. Now in part because of PPAMOM and a moralizing impulse, most philosophers look foolish when we talk about art or novels. Elster, by contrast, makes very good use of novels to illustrate many of his best points. Yet, as the second epigraph to this post reveals, when it comes to conceptual art Elster recycles, in passing, Johnson's misogyny--the most embarrassing moment in the book.+ Elster's theory of artistic creation "involves maximazation under constraints, and that good works of art are local maxima of whatever it is that artists are maximizing." (78) For, an artist's activity "can be understood only on the assumption that there is something which they are trying to maximize, by 'getting it right' (78; emphasis added--ES). Perhaps this is true of Leibniz's Divine Artist (and on some readings Goethe), but it is peculiar understanding of much other art (although I grant that it gives Elster a means toward explaining the nature of a 'minor masterpiece' (81)). Given his theory it is no surprise that Elster has no conceptual room for conceptual art.

Elster's official theory of rejecting conceptual art is, however, instructive: it "certainly violates the principle that the aesthetic value of the work of art should not depend on the time at which is offered to the public." (82; emphasis added) This is a manifestly silly claim because it cannot even begin to do justice to the difference in aesthetic value between an original (prior in time) and a copy (subsequently),--a difference which even the most metaphysically robust account of aesthetic value ought to embrace. As Hume notes, knowledge of the context of production and the intended ways of experiencing a work of art, contributes to aesthetic appreciation and is a condition for the possibility of aesthetic value (Of the Standard Taste).

What can account for the oddity of Elster's position? The problem is that his account of aesthetic value is (subtly) modelled on a certain semantics (which is appropriate for eternal nature of truth in, say, mathematics). And it turns out that commitments similar to this semantics operate in the background in his very polemical remarks of Foucault's Discipline and Punish.

Elster (pp. 104ff) dislikes a number of things about Foucault's approach: first, he cannot stand Foucault's rhetoric and "eloquence" (including the use of rhetorical questions, the cascade of verbs, etc.); second he dislikes (without explanation) privileging the question Cui bono? (that is "to whose benefit?"--It is ironic to see a Marxist reject such privilege.) More important, he treats Foucault as offering a consequence-explanation. In fact, Elster treats Foucault (and Bourdieu) as offering especially bad consequence explanations--ones that lack a mechanism, a feedback mechanism, and even an intentional agent. Now, indeed, on a certain conception of social science such oversights may well be devestating. (To be sure, Elster refuses even to interpret Foucault more charitably as sketching the constraints/outlines of an explanation that can subsequent guide a seach for mechanism (etc.) by lesser, worker-bee social scientists. In fact, Foucault offers many how-possible mechanisms throughout his book, so Elster is cherry-picking his evidence.)  

But even Elster explicitly notes that in the passage he focuses on, Foucault does not state a consequence-explanation (or says he wishes to offer one). It is more sensible (and charitable) to interpret Foucault as primarily offering an analysis of the (possible) meaning of certain (historically contingent, but) enduring social phenomena in terms of their functions and benefits (that is also compatible with the explanation-sketch that can guide further research). After all, one key (transcendental) claim that Foucault makes about punishment (prison, etc.) is that it is taxonomic--it makes a certain form of knowledge possible. 

Now, while Elster is not really attentive to the transcendental (in the Kantian sense) dimension of Foucault, he, too, recognizes that Foucault is interested in meaning (106).  Yet, because the "search for meaning" (on Elster's account) "dispenses with mechanisms" it "fails dishonourably." Now, it's true that if Foucault were exclusively in the business of offering causal explanations then indeed the absence of mechanism would be pretty serious charge. But, Elster rejects the search for meaning (both in terms of finding of creating meaning); he thinks it is a moral and intellectual fallacy (101ff). It is sort of clear why Elster thinks that a lack of interest in a mechanism is an intellectual fallacy. Why he thinks it is a moral fallacy is less obvious, although he seems to think it (and the embrace of social by-products more generally) instantiates a "misplaced or self-defeating form of instrumental rationality. It is the fallacy of striving, seeking and searching for the things that recede before the hand that reaches out for them. In many cases it takes the form of trying to get something for nothing." (107)** 

In fact, while Elster has quite a bit to say about the moral problems with by-products, we are never really told what's wrong with either the search for meaning as such (so without the aim of offering explanation) or viewing social analysis as an expression or the creation of meaning. That is, if we understand Foucault as understanding himself as part of the world he describes and, in fact, aiming to destabilize it, in part, with the narratives he offers there is nothing mysterious about what's going on. Elster repeatedly insists not just that Foucault's practice and the search for meaning is immoral but also that is dangerous (44). But unless one embraces a very strong status quo bias or has very high risk aversion, that immorality and danger can only be established if we are willing to evaluate Foucault's aims and means on their (foreseeable, consequentialist?) merits (case by case, as it were). 

That is to say, if one is in the grip of a certain positivist understanding of social science and a kind of verificationist theory of meaning, a search for and the creation of meaning is very misguided. It is also misguided if one has a semantics in which social facts are univocal truthmakers of (social) meaning simply waiting out there to be discovered. But if we overcome PPAMOM we can learn from ELPs that often social meaning is, in part, constituted and reconstituted by our utterances and other practices.

That is to say, if we want to understand, say, ideology (including our own) -- one of Elster's main aims, and presumably one of the sources of his book's popularity --, we can't just rely on the reality/fiction distinction alongside a set of psychological mechanisms, we also have to make ourselves feel (by way of sympathetic imagination) the significance of a certain set of commitments and, while this should not be opposed to truth it is, in a way, orthogonal to truth.++ After all, even true statements of present social reality can be instances of ideology ((recall) because of status quo bias or unwillingness to question existing background institutions and norms). 

Freud and the Social Contract and Religion

It is a reasonable surmise that after the killing of the father a time followed when the brothers quarreled among themselves for the succession, which each of them wanted to obtain for himself alone. They came to see that these fights were as dangerous as they were futile. This hard-won understanding as well as the memory of the deed of liberation they had achieved together and the attachment that had grown up among them during the time of their exile led at last to a union among them, a sort of social contract. Thus there came into being the first form of a social organization accompanied by a renunciation of instinctual gratification; recognition of mutual obligations; institutions declared sacred, which could not be broken in short the beginnings of morality and law. Each renounced the ideal of gaining for himself the position of father, of possessing his mother or sister. With this the taboo of incest and the law of exogamy came into being. A good part of the power which had become vacant through the father's death passed to the women; the time of the matriarchate followed….The relationship to the totem animal retained the original ambivalency of feeling towards the father. The totem was, on the one hand, the corporeal ancestor and protecting spirit of the clan; he was to be revered and protected. On the other hand, a festival was instituted on which day the same fate was meted out to him as the primeval father had encountered. He was killed and eaten by all the brothers together…This great day was in reality a feast of triumph to celebrate the victory of the united sons over the father.

Where, in this connection, does religion come in? Totemism, with its worship of a father substitute, the ambivalency towards the father which is evidenced by the totem feast, the institution of remembrance festivals and of laws the breaking of which is punished by death--this totemism, I conclude, may be regarded as the earliest appearance of religion in the history of mankind, and it illustrates the close connection existing from the very beginning of time between social institutions and moral obligations. S. Freud MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

There is a lot going in the passage quoted from Freud (and even more with what he wishes to do with it in in the book's overall argument), and I focus on a partial aspect of it here. I propose to read him not as an anthropologist or a social psychologist here (or Biblical exegete), but as a social theorist.

Not unlike others in the pre-Rawlsian social contract tradition, he posits a kind of patriarchal state of nature that precedes the social contract. (The patriarchal rule is reminiscent of the darkest fears that folk project onto Hobbes's or Spinoza's Sovereign.) In the state of nature parricide is followed by civil (family) war—crucially an even worse state of nature. The contract is not a consequence of fear, accumulation, or reason, but a sense of futility. That is to say, on this account, the social contract becomes possible when open-ended civil war exacts high enough costs, but cannot be won. That is, in fact, a very optimistic thought.

On Freud's account, the contract consists, in large part of the development of norms about what counts as reasonable expectation and aspiration (and what is off-limits/taboo). What is notable about Freud's analysis is that he does not share the social contract tradition's obsession with property; he is more focused on the way the contract governs 'real' and symbolic relations among humans, not the things they possess.

Concern with (symbolic) things is left for religion. Regardless of the empirical status of Freud's account of totemism, what I find striking is that the birth of religion is a necessary consequence of the contract (it's what I would call a 'conceptual-necessitation-relation' or a forced move). Not so much (i) as an means of control of the folk that participate in the 'union,' (although its status as a civic religion ensures it is that, too), but as (ii) a way to recognize (in a side-glance-kind-of-way) the inherent instability of the contract, as well as (iii) a means to re-enact in a domesticated way the process that led to the social contract in order to secure the contract and thereby (by reenacting, that is (iii)), ensuring (iv) ongoing recognition of the most important political facts of society. Religion, then, conveys political truth not so much in its cosmology or cosmogony (or metaphysics), but in the practices it instantiates (and re-enacts). Note that on this view religion is not merely functional, but in the practices it cultivates the symbolic source of political wisdom. So, while it may seem that Freud is debunking religion in the book (and throughout the book he calls attention to this possible reading), and I understand the temptation to put him in the company of Marx and Nietzsche, it is, in fact, possible to read Moses and Monotheism as a defense of the idea that philosophy is entirely dispensable in the political life of the community if there is a kind of 'original' religion. (Of course, Freud allows that the religion can be corrupted as much as developed.)

The contract is very gendered in Freud, but despite the fact that it involves only boys as agents, the consequence is the matriarchate. On re-reading, Freud loves this kind of ironic unintended consequence explanation.

How to Kill the Golden Goose of American Higher Education

Late Friday afternoon (August 22), the University of Illinois broke its three-week long silence on the controversy regarding the Chancellor's revocation of a tenured offer to Steven Salaita, who had accepted a faculty position in the American Indian Studies Program at the flagship campus at Urbana-Champaign. Chancellor Phyllis Wise and Board of Trustees Chairman Christopher Kennedy both issued statements explaining the revocation, but in terms far more alarming than the original decision itself. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees have now declared that the First Amendment does not apply to any tenured faculty at the University of Illinois.--Brian Leiter, Huffington Post.

I kept quiet on the Salaita affair because while I felt that Prof. Salaita was treated unjustly and I recognized that this was a genuine academic freedom issue, I was not especially eager to strengthen the U.S. Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel (see this petition [about that some other time more]). So, forced to choose between two bad choices, I was happy to have others do the legitimate protesting. But I have asked John Protevi to include me in the philosopers's boycott of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Right now my participation is largely symbolic -- I have not been invited to the UIUC --, but to be frank: Brian Leiter, who is not known for mincing his words, understates the significance of the situation. To be clear: Leiter is absolutely right that this is a classic first amendment case.

In addition, The Chancellor and the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois are changing the nature of academic employment in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and -- in the process -- redefining the nature of tenure.* If you read the statements by Chancellor Phyllis Wise and Board of Trustees Chairman Christopher Kennedy, it is no less an attempt to intimidate and regulate faculty so as to tame them thoroughly and bring faculty into the orbit of the surveillance state. For if some polemical tweets can cost a professor his job in the name of a non-existing and non-desirable "civility," (see here for analysis), then basically it says, we're watching you and we can strike at you whenever we choose (see here). In effect, Salaita has been made an exemplar; and because he defends an unpopular cause -- and it is not my cause at all -- he is an easy target to send a wider message to the rest of us. If this decision is allowed to stand, then the privileged few tenured (I return to this below) are at-will employees, subservient to the whims of technocratic, university management and its ability to monitor approved behavior.

UIUC is one of the world's great research universities. It represents what's finest of the American heartland. (I lived in the Midwest for nine years, seven of which in Illinois.) It, and its sister institutions (the land grant universities and, especially, the "Big Ten"), are engines of upward mobility, the backbone of lots of research and development, job creation centers, and -- to be romantic for a second -- a glorious symbol of civilization that nurtures the arts and sciences (for example, read Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers, who spent a good chunk of his writing life at UIUC). They are also the acknowledged havens for the talented and hardworking misfits (the eclectic, the original, the idiosyncratic, the unpopular, etc.) in society. These institutions are, due to their size and flag-ship status, a key part of the enduring social compact between society, citizens, and academics. But all humane institutions decay if not nourished and cultivated with spirit of generosity.

I know that a lot of folk who are not tenured think of the tenured as spoiled brats and privileged parasites. But if you want to destroy what is arguably one of the ongoing success stories of the American economy and higher education -- and the best kept secret in higher education is that the humanities/social sciences are also extremely profitable at a lot of universities+ -- this decision, if emulated by other institutions of higher educations, is the way to go. In the long run it will reduce innovation and academic talent will be lured abroad (helped by a low dollar and growing demand for higher education in the growing and young economies of Asia, and Brazil). It will also increase the cost of recruiting and hiring academics that are in demand; these will demand better pay and more secure contracts.

Now, I recognize that in many places the privileges of tenure are grounded in the cheap and relatively unprotected labor of adjuncts, graduate students, and temporary faculty. But such systemic problems are not resolved by a further leveling down of working conditions. Finally a skeptic might think that I am just engaged in special pleading to protect my own supposedly outdated, labor market privileges. But while I have deep roots in American higher education, I am not employed Stateside. Rather, I worry that if even America's institutions of higher learning voluntarily turn their backs on the inquisitive spirit of freedom, the American century will shade into every gloomier forms of darkness.

 

 

*I am deliberately excluding the so-called STEM disciplines; for there 'tenure' tends to mean you are as privileged as your last grant.

+Humanities and social science professors tend to have low overheads and relatively low salaries.

On Sincerity

If Plato, having set out to write about the theology of the Athenians, had felt disgusted at it and started to criticize it for containing internal dissent and parents having sex with their children or eating them, and for praising the punishments in revenge for these acts, exercised on their parents by children and by brothers on brothers and other such things; if Plato thus, having taken on such stories, had criticized them in  public, he would, it seems to me, have given the Athenians a reason to show themselves evil again and kill him too as they did Socrates. Because he would not have chosen to live rather than to speak the truth, and because he saw that he could safely reconcile living and speaking the truth, he put Euthyphro forward as the personification of the Athenians, a pretentious man and an idiot, who thinks wrongly about the gods as nobody else, and confronted him with Socrares himself in his usual way of acting in which he used to question everybody with whom he was discussing.--Numenius, On the Secret Doctrines of Plato (fragment 23), translated by Peter Van Nuffelen in Rethinking the Gods (74).

With the revival of fortunes of murderous religions and the accompanying rise of the data-mining, national security state I expect that interest in esoteric doctrines and dummy doctrines to rise as well. For, the art of reconciling truth-speaking with living is in high demand when one can be killed for one's views* or receive a one way, lifetime ticket to one's local Guantanamo Bay based on secret intelligence. Some such deeds -- e.g., Socrates's death -- are legally sanctioned.

In the quoted passage, Numenius treats Plato's Euthyphro as a "theological treatise" (Van Nuffelen, 74) in which Athenian popular theology is criticized indirectly. It is endemic of the disdain for Straussianism and anything having to do with esotericism in professional philosophy (recall and here) that the Stanford Encyclopedia article devoted to Numenius, treats the fragment (one of the few surviving ones!) in a single, passing sentence. The Euthyphro is traditionally "classified as Plato's first work....Numenius' interpretation of it, as a hidden refutation of Athenian religion, implies that Plato, from the outset, chose to conceal his true doctrines, or at leas those that would seem offensive to the Athenians." (Van Nuffelen, 77) Given that many of Plato's dialogues contain doctrines that are critical of the Athenians, one wonders how on Numenius's account, the distinction between, say, mildly annoying to and dangerously offensive to Athenians was drawn by Plato. Perhaps, Numenius thought that when Plato felt "disgusted" by popular opinion (note the relish with which Numenius describes incest and cannibalism), he had to be careful to state his own opposing views. (Numenius may have been guided by reflection on Leontius's reaction upon seeing "the corpses that lay at the place of public execution" in Republic 439e?)  

Danto, Totalitarianism and the Is of artistic identification

May we not conceive each of us living beings to be a puppet of the Gods, either their playthings only, or created with a purpose-which of the two we cannot certainly know?--Plato Laws.

It is the role of artistic theories, these days, as always, to make the artworld, and art, possible. The Artworld, A. Danto (581)

The artworld stands to the real world in something like the relationship in which the City of God stands to the Earthly City. The Artworld, A Danto (582)

My knowledge of Danto is thin. So, I was surprised by the Kantianism in the first quote from his Artworld above.  Danto's approach to art clearly resonates with Kuhn's analysis of science (and, indeed, Structure is alluded to on the first pages of the article).  

I like the bold, temporal invariance of Danto's understanding of the role of artistic theory. It's compatible, of course, with his position that artistic theory has (possible varying) secondary roles to play. Moreover, while it goes against the spirit of his remarks, he doesn't say that art is impossible without artistic theory. But the "is" of artistic identification requires it. So only art that does not presuppose artistic identification can be ungrounded by artistic theory.* So far, so good.

But I hesitate over the second passage from his (1964) article quoted above. It flirts with theological concepts. Now, for Danto the contrast (or "opposition") between the artworld and real world is not one of contraries, but it is a contrast nevertheless. It's as if he is not allowing consideration of the possibility that some artistic identification could efface the opposition between art/real & Heaven/Earth that Danto is presupposing; it's a tacit denial that somebody could decree the establishment of the City of God here on Earth. To reject this option as a category mistake, can't be right because theologically such a decree is always, alas, a live option; Danto has no right to such a rejection because on his account some (future) artistic-theoretical revolution could generate a new world.