Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

maybe accounts of causality that grow out of a physics of matter or claims about action just aren't helpful if you're going to talk about "responsibility" in an ethical register rather than "causal"?

i think this is key here. a physical model of causality as related to human actions wd be based at a molecular level, i.e. the concept of causality in science is not the same as the concept of causality in ethics even tho they're often used in a fuzzy, interchangeable way. one is part of the debate re. determinism, and yet i don't feel that anybody making the assertion "action Y was caused by situation X" is ever really making the claim that the actors had no choice.

yeah I think that's right. and it's a good thing we don't treat ethics like physics, too.

yeah i dont think its ever intended as a binary proposition but the statement is formed that way - i guess that the question is whether simply stating it that way implies justification in some way? but if the construction was different, ie something value-loaded like "he killed that woman because he was evil" i dont think there would be any idea that somehow the speaker was implying that evil was a justifying stance, so idk

xposts

it's a good thing we don't treat ethics like physics, too

well for one thing that's why utilitarian arguments suck, yes.

like i said upthread, i think some people genuinely want to imply that there is a physics type causation between political action and political reaction but the nicest thing we could say about people making that kind of argument is that they are at best a bit naive and muddled

take them to out behind the shed

utilitarianism is srsly the dumbest of all the ethical philosophical attempts, i got some angry red penning for a paper on utilitarianism basically along the lines of "maybe you should be less sure that you are so much smarter than J.S. Mill." but fuck that, I am.

i can see some value in utilitarianism as a critique of deontology but as an ethical system in its own right it's mostly pitiful

really tho i believe they both prove off the back of each other that ethics is a system for describing what people shd have done after they've done something else

pity that the entire field of economics is underpinned by it

i have issues with economics as a field too

i think the person we really need to talk to is captain lorax

really difficult to say OBL is the final cause of 9/11 when according to the latest smearograms bush brought down the towers

if anyone can explain this to me I would be very interested in understanding it:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/11/conditional-close-election-markets.html

about habermas on eurozone: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=939

Moishe Postone has been blowing my mind lately: http://platypus1917.home.comcast.net/~platypus1917/postonemoishe_historyhelplessness.pdf

The disastrous nature of the war and, more generally, of the Bush administration should not obscure that in both cases progressives found themselves faced with what should have been viewed as a dilemma—a conflict between an aggressive global imperial power and a deeply reactionary counterglobalization movement in one case, and a brutal fas- cistic regime in the other. Yet in neither case were there many attempts to prob- lematize this dilemma or to try to analyze this configuration with an eye toward the possibility of formulating what has become exceedingly difficult in the world today — a critique with emancipatory intent. This would have required developing a form of internationalism that broke with the dualisms of a Cold War framework that all too frequently legitimated (as “anti-imperialist”) states whose structures and policies were no more emancipatory than those of many authoritarian and repressive regimes supported by the American government.

Instead of breaking with such dualisms, however, many who opposed Ameri- can policies have had recourse to precisely such inadequate and anachronistic “anti-imperialist” conceptual frameworks and political stances...

Let me elaborate by first turning briefly to the ways in which many liberals and progressives responded to the attack of September 11. The most general argument made was that the action, as horrible as it may have been, had to be understood as a reaction to American policies, especially in the Middle East.1 While it is the case that terrorist violence should be understood as political (and not simply as an irrational act), the understanding of the politics of violence expressed by such arguments is, nevertheless, utterly inadequate. Such violence is understood as a reaction of the insulted, injured, and downtrodden, not as an action. While the violence itself is not necessarily affirmed, the politics of the specific form of vio- lence committed are rarely interrogated. Instead, the violence is explained (and at times implicitly justified) as a response. Within this schema, there is only one actor in the world: the United States.

Critiquing the left w/ Marxism is like a dream come true.

http://jacobinmag.com/2013/04/how-does-the-subaltern-speak/

long response by marxist/postcolonialist chris taylor http://clrjames.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/not-even-marxist-on-vivek-chibbers.html

counter-response by chris heideman http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1297-not-even-marxist-paul-m-heideman-examines-chris-taylor-s-critique-of-vivek-chibber (complete w/ counter-counter response from taylor in comments)

so i'm no expert on these matters, but Chibber seems a bit vacuous?

I am endorsing the view that there are some common interests and needs that people have across cultures. There are some aspects of our human nature that are not culturally constructed: they are shaped by culture, but not created by it. My view is that even though there are enormous cultural differences between people in the East and the West, there’s also a core set of concerns that people have in common, whether they’re born in Egypt, or India, or Manchester, or New York. These aren’t many, but we can enumerate at least two or three of them: there’s a concern for your physical wellbeing; there’s probably a concern for a degree of autonomy and self-determination; there’s a concern for those practices that directly pertain to your welfare. This isn’t much, but you’d be amazed how far it gets you in explaining really important historical transformations.

why do we have to keep fighting this fight? why does marxism need to be "universal" (or have universal application) to be useful/valid/etc?

I had a professor at NYU explain in class once that we can't judge or condemn cultures that practice clitoridectomies bc eurocentrism.

i say go ahead and judge but it's that prof's need to claim some "universal" ground (even if it be relativism) that leads him to say such absurd things. judge and be judged!

idk what to tell u. i don't think he's vacuous and i think this is an important debate to have (esp bc, as he notes at the end of the interview, post-colonialism isn't going away anytime soon). it's partially about staking out the meaning of liberalism in 2013, and the parameters of what it is trying to do. i think they're trying to do very different things, and mai nafka minnah? lead to numerous different results -- cf adbusters thread for some examples?

I had a professor at NYU explain in class once that we can't judge or condemn cultures that practice clitoridectomies bc eurocentrism.

― Mordy, Monday, May 6, 2013 11:01 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk, i mean, you can still believe in the post-colonist project and also be like, this professor at nyu is wrong and stupid

to some extent tho isn't that the disagreement? can we judge other cultures based on these ideas of universal ethics + morality or is that eurocentric/etc?

no, i dont think so. i mean maybe for some people. i think the whole framing of that question is one that most academics would object to (i hope! maybe not!)--of course you can judge! but what does it mean to judge, how is it related to networks of power, where are your universal ethics grounded? idk im making this up obviously. ive never thought of post-colonialism as being about setting limits like so much as demanding a deeper and more rigorous analysis than orthodox marxism might offer (though not one that is necessarily opposed to marxism, by any means, and probably is grounded in post-marx marxist thought)

full disclosure i havent read chibbers intvw, and i dont know anything about post colonialism, or marxism

Taking the example of cliterectomies. If they can be linked to some socially useful function, then I could see at least some validity to the idea that another culture could value that useful function more highly than retaining non-mutilated clitorises on their females. However, if the only defense of clitorectomies is "it is something we do and we have always done this, so butt out of our affairs and get lost", then the same justification can be used for slavery, human sacrifice, cannibalism, or wearing white before Easter. iow, it can justify any action whatsoever. Such a dismissive justification basically sifts down to: whoever has the power gets to do as they please.

or to put it another way mordy i think that post-colonial analysis and "orthodox marxism" are both insufficient and both necessary to understanding politics & relationship of power? two legs of a stool, or whatever the metaphor is. they keep each other honest.

otm

sorry about "vacuous"--that's the equivalent of making fart noises in response.

the point, I like to think, is that you're always gonna be accountable for the theory you bring to bear.

Which also means you can be held accountable to Marxism!

Add: To say something is wrong because it is eurocentric is no more illuminating than to say something is wrong because it is wrong. No one has, to my knowlege, proved that a eurocentric idea must necessarily be wrong. A European may sometimes have a correct idea, value or judgement in the same way that a blind squirrel sometimes finds a nut.

I think you guys (xp) are speaking to something he notes in the original interview:

JB: What made you decide to focus on subaltern studies as a way of critiquing postcolonial theory more generally?

VC: Postcolonial theory is a very diffuse body of ideas. It really comes out of literary and cultural studies, and had its initial influence there. It then spread out through area studies, history, and anthropology. It spread into those fields because of the influence of culture and cultural theory from the 1980s onwards. So, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, disciplines such as history, anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, and South Asian studies were infused with a heavy turn toward what we now know as postcolonial theory.

To engage the theory, you run up against a basic problem: because it’s so diffuse, it’s hard to pin down what its core propositions are, so first of all, it’s hard to know exactly what to criticize. Also, its defenders are able to easily rebut any criticisms by pointing to other aspects that you might have missed in the theory, saying that you’ve honed in on the wrong aspects. Because of this, I had to find some core components of the theory — some stream of theorizing inside postcolonial studies — that is consistent, coherent, and highly influential.

I also wanted to focus on those dimensions of the theory centered on history, historical development, and social structures, and not the literary criticism. Subaltern studies fits all of these molds: it’s been extremely influential in area studies; it’s fairly internally consistent, and it focuses on history and social structure. As a strand of theorizing, it’s been highly influential partly because of this internal consistency, but also partly because its main proponents come out of a Marxist background and they were all based in India or parts of the Third World. This gave them a great deal of legitimacy and credibility, both as critics of Marxism and as exponents of a new way of understanding the Global South. It’s through the work of the Subalternists that these notions about capital’s failed universalization and the need for indigenous categories have become respectable.

aka it's very easy to deflect critiques of post-colonialism.

'keeping each other honest' is important. this meera nanda book i skimmed was looking at the way the bjp & other indian conservatives have used various bits of theory as a conversation stopper, seemed pretty interesting even tho she was mean about my sweetheart thomas kuhn:

http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1356465101l/1068966.jpg

http://www.thenation.com/article/174219/nietzsches-marginal-children-friedrich-hayek

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/05/beware-extended-family.html

I know I use the term wrongly, but if I refer to 'extended family' I tend to mean non-blood family i.e. community, friends etc.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/24/2013_failed_states_interactive_map

Guardian op-ed says failed state concept is bullshit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/28/failed-states-western-myth-us-interests
Abu Muqawama disagrees: http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2013/06/if-skills-sold-failed-states-edition.html

(I should clarify, Muqawama agrees it's not the greatest prism, but he certainly doesn't buy the Guardian's conspiratorial explanation for it.)

so i'm reading this book by tiqqun, 'introduction to civil war', and i find it really charming, and beautiful in places.

i'm not well read in french philosophy after deleuze (read some deleuze, some foucault), but from the use of a few deleuzeianisms in the book, and i think what i recognize as some agamben references, i get the impression that one of this book's main virtues is the clarity of its synthesis of all the stuff, basic-concept-wise, in anarchist-leaning european political philosophy from like the 60s to the 00s.

so does anyone know a few of the key books i could look at to situate this one? it kind of suppresses its references to its contemporaries, which i assume are mostly tacit. i kind of don't want to read hardt & negri, tried that a bit several years ago and it was boring.

bump because i'd be curious about this myself.

i'd say for "introduction to civil war" some models / texts / antecedents lurking in the background that are zippy, short, and influential might include

walter benjamin "critique of violence"
guy debord "society of the spectacle"
carl schmitt "political theology"
giorgio agamben "homo sacer"

I haven't looked at that tiqqun text in a while but I seem to recall that it keeps deploying "form of life", so to grasp that in its original formulation you should look at wittgenstein's "philosophical investigations"

(sorry if this is all sorta obvious and broad)

thanks! really is about time i read debord finally.

i was hoping for a bit more / tighter specificity before, but now i see that it's just not that kind of book. those do seem like they're probably apt recommendations unless there happen to be one or two super-specific books post-dating, say, the agamben that are important for 'civil war'.

knowing the wittgenstein, i would say that wouldn't help much (even if the prospect is exciting). they seem to use the idea (against agamben? or maybe he uses it too in connection with 'bare life') as a way of registering individuals' particularity (and particular potentials for community with particular others), in a spinozist/nietzschean spirit (esp. potentials for growth of power).

the idea of 'hostis' is pretty important for them in that first part too, i gather because they're using it as a third term in the group friend/enemy/hostile to leave room for a lack of relations. i assume the schmitt is huge there. and since 'hostis' is apparently connected historically with the idea (not one they take up) of the homo sacer, maybe this amounts to a point of difference with agamben, who knows.

i think the rehearsal of the modern state --> empire story in the second and third parts confers a lot of lucidity on what i recognize as foucaultish and deleuzean ideas about subject-formation as it's tangled up in state-formation. in particular, they work pretty elegant variations on the pair 'police, publicity' in the second part that is transformed into 'biopower, spectacle' in the third part. i like the discussion of biopower in terms of empire's role in maintaining/extending the operation of norms (as the imperial successor to the modern state's 'law'). the sharp lines drawn make the story's implications for modern/cartesian subjectivities pretty strong, too.

they have a bit to say in the discussion of biopower of how norms operate via apparatuses, so i take it that the various authors writing about that (foucault a lot in the later lectures on biopower/governmentality, deleuze in something i haven't read, agamben in a later trifle that seems not too helpful), and relatedly deleuze/guattari and their machines (a term tiqqun select sometimes) are also meant to be a point of contact. but the virtue here seems to be that those contacts are registered and not allowed to muddle things by being pursued more extensively.

as it turns out, they think negri sux so no need to read that book!

though it's partly set up by the way individuals are pictured in the first part, situationist antecedents seem strongest in the last part ('an ethic of civil war'), since the picture is basically, empire has mutilated life and deprived us of experience, if you are like us you should pursue more affectvely intense experiences as suit your individuality, but there's not much to be said about that since it's an experimental thing. (then there are some snipes at bad revolutionaries.) experiment/experience how? through realization in/of practice.

(epigraph to concluding essay: 'don't know what i want / but i know how to get it'...)

this is good -

http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2010/05/from-restricted-to-general-antagonism.html

but he uses a phrase i've seen around (i think nina power uses it in her review of the later 'young-girl' book?) and find irritating, 'so-and-so ontologizes x'.

http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2013/08/blinded-political-science-egypt.html

hey mordy (or anyone else)

do u happen to know what the (caricature) vampire castle response is to the line against it that k-punk takes here?

http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11299

See the Russell Brad thread from here j.
russell brand - C or D?

dur, i was looking for some marxism thread, couldn't find, ended up here - thx

all political philosophy must now be discussed with reference to R Brand these days!

Reading Ernesto Laclau's "New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time" and it's pretty great. Perhaps old hat for people better versed in this stuff than I am.

does socialism represent an eusocial impulse in the otherwise presocial human species?