etherfires

This is a response to the article by Denise Grollmus entitled The Danger of Making Gods out of Men

In the boring suburb of Charlotte, NC , where I grew up, nothing important ever seemed to happen.  My four street neighborhood opened into a busy sidewalk-less street; you could only connect to the outside world with a car, the Internet, or a phone. Yet even then I never really knew my neighbors.   One might say, as I rode my bicycle around the small, empty cul-de-sac, that I have always yearned for a sense of community.

But not quite like this.

A year ago I came to little old State College, PA for graduate school. When I first visited I was impressed by what was essentially a rural town with a beautiful campus and what, to my suburban-trained eyes, looked like a warm and bustling downtown. Not only was the place gorgeous, but I could walk or take the bus everywhere and the intellectual atmosphere seem warming and supportive. After moving in I felt like this place could be home.

But, then again, football wasn’t on my radar.

Yes, yes, you know the stories of this place. Football weekends turn this place into one of the largest towns in Pennsylvania. There are more stores for Penn State merchandise downtown than coffee shops.  Football is more than just a part of the university here.  It gives one this impression:

At Penn State, I became instantly intrigued with the myth of Joe Paterno, his godlike status, his place as icon. His image sits on the walls and in the windows of many local shops in the same way that Jesus’ image might be the centerpiece of a devoutly Catholic home.

That was my colleague Denise, who in a recent blog post fumed about the treatment of the Sandusky case.   Her veneration of the football culture is couched in a desire for community that I can sympathize with. I want community too. And I was hoping I could find it here. I too “like the ideal of constructing rituals and myths out of men [women too, yes?]. It’s what we do best as human beings – something that makes us so fascinating to me. It’s the one thing that I think binds us all together – our love for magical narratives based in real life.”

But see, that’s the problem. You can’t just like any sort of narrative. You have to pay attention to what the narrative is saying, what it is allowing, what it is covering up, who does what for the sake of a figure like “Joe Paterno and his soldiers.” What sort of community has been built in Happy Valley?

Joe Pa, undoubtedly is a great guy, an excellent coach, a man worthy of veneration. However, once narratives are built around someone they become something more than that man. When they reach the caliber they have at Penn State, they are woven into the very fabric of the culture and institution. It is no longer just Joe Paterno, the individual, the man.  “Joe Pa” becomes the statue of him set like a shrine on the corner, the windblown tents of Paternoville that huddle around the stadium like a medieval entourage, the thousands of PSU sweatshirts that hang in the windows, the endless foods punning on the name, the hundreds of freshman papers written each semester about the glory of Jo Pa, and the entirety of the norms, structure, and expectations that are built around the enterprise.

So then something like Sandusky happens and Jo Pa becomes the target.  What allowed this to happen? Denise expresses how we could react:

I thought that this situation might be an excellent time to consider how we think we’d behave, how we might not behave that way, and what we can do to stop the systemic denial of pedophilia that plagues various institutions in our world – the church, education, athletics, etc. Now was the time to figure out a real course of action – a methodology for dealing with atrocity, if we could do that, even. To consider what was at stake for the psychology of men faced with inhumane atrocity. Would it be possible to act accordingly?

She blames the press for moving in another direction and avoiding the issues at hand. Ok sure, they do this. We all know they’re making a ton of money off of the suffering here. But was it wrong for the board to fire Jo Pa and, let’s not forget, the other figures who failed to report?

I was one of those colleagues Denise refers to as who posted various things on social media that supposedly obscure the conversation. One that I posted was the Daily Show’s mocking of the religious-like culture of football which allowed for this to happen. The most helpful thing about this clip is the way it succinctly demonstrates the distracting nature of rioting over Jo Pa’s firing when what students should be bothered by is that they are in a culture that allows such things to happen.

The image problem hasn’t occluded the real issue. The image is the issue. That is, it is the culture itself which would allow for so many people—the janitor, the grad assistant, Jo Pa, and university officials up to Graham Spanier—to consistently fail to report.

Denise wants us to look at ourselves to see if we would’ve reported the incidents if we had been there. So maybe we wouldn’t. But if there are reasons that anyone wouldn’t, these are reasons not just within his/her psychology or within some sort of human fallibility.  No, it is precisely because there are cultural, social, and political pressures that make it so that people don’t go call the cops.  Those are the things that should be noted, ousted, fixed, and brought to the fore.  Sure there has been a fair share of self-righteous grand standing and far too much schadenfreude (joy at the misery of others) but that doesn’t mean the looking for what allowed this to happen is somehow throwing rocks in our glass cathedrals. Rather we should be looking at the institution and how the cultural practices—that very community which Denise venerates—might allow this to happen.

Together, Jo Pa and Graham Spanier represent that structure and culture. Rioting over the firing of Jo Pa instead of holding the planned vigil for the victims only further reinforces this fact: Penn State as a community has is structured so that it values its football culture over other, more important things, like reporting rape.

What should we be venerating here? Of course, of course, this is not unique—it is the case with so many universities. And, yes, Jo Pa has always been far more favorable to academics than pretty much any other coach. But the fact that Jo Pa is an amazing grandfather figure doesn’t make up for the fact that the culture his figure has come to represent is antithetical not only to the mission and form of a university but has fostered a community that can harbor such violence. Yes, all our structures still do, in some way or another. Yes, the media has focused on it too much. But that doesn’t change that right here, right now, we have this case on our hands. The horrifying thing is that somehow everyone here is part of this when we didn’t know it. What other ways might our community (or other communities) be harboring such things? That is the sort of self-reflection we should be undertaking.

The difficulty is that no one in the entire community really is the whole of the community. Saying that the community harbors this kind of violence is not to say that any individual does or would. But that is precisely what we have to become aware of and think through.  How has the community of which we are a part allowed for this? And how can we change it?

After all, this is a university. If you want a community here it should not be one built so heavily around a football culture which distracts from the mission of the institution. The truth is, even if Jo Pa is the most academically oriented football coach, the culture of Penn State has not been. And if anything needs to be changed it is that.

But the reaction to Joe Paterno’s firing says that it probably won’t be. Unfortunately, his career and legacy has gone out not with a scholarly and contemplative reanalysis of what we want this community to be but with a tipped news truck, pepper spray, and fallen light poles.  Perhaps a decade from now what will remain most of his legacy will be the half of the library with his name on it, fostering the growth and intellect of the people that walk its halls. But for now, the football edifice signified by Joe Paterno is still a culture that reacts with rage not to victims of child rape but to the firing of its head coach.

The single individual never exists in isolation. In her singularity, one being never escapes the network of relations. But this is not one world as some kind of homogeneous whole. In their multiplicity, social systems always exist as a conglomerate of singular individuals. We are caught in these systems. Systems like Wall St. Systems like large Corporations. Systems, like the monolithic apparatus’ of the government. But these systems are not in themselves bad, wrong, dehumanizing, destructive. These systems are caught in us, they are us, we are them; this is what this elusive “they”, the many voices of the system, will try to deny.

E pluribus unum, that old phrase imprinted on the seal of the United States represents for us the very symptomatic problem of our country, our world, our multiplicity of systems today. “Out of many, one” as if all these people, with all their individual situations, all their singular knowledge, all of their valuable uniqueness, must homogenize into one system, one unity, one voice. Corporations feed off of this slogan. They provide for us a system that appears as one but which is empty. No one is accountable. No one can find the leader. No one can see who makes the decisions. There are no “people who pull the strings.” Even the president, who is supposed to be our most powerful leader, finds himself flustered before the system.

We all know this. Our jobs drop away. Our houses are being foreclosed. Our stocks plummet on whims. Our money disappears. While somewhere else a few individuals get rich. We cannot understand it. We cannot connect the dots. So we protest. We want to occupy Wall St., to somehow get inside the system, to be part of it again. We want to be democratic, we want the demos, the people, to means something within the system. We are tired of being effaced in the whole that renders us silent.

To truly occupy Wall St. requires more than just people making their presence known in the streets. It requires a fundamental shift in our values, our conception of ourselves in the system.  We seek to re-valuate these concepts that have been hijacked by homogenizing forces that have plagued a system which no longer needs such forces. The present some difficulties without simple solutions:

1.  Our world requires a new theory of value. Value is not solely based on labor but rather on the existence of singular individuals with their own skills, experiences, and understanding.  Labor can no longer be the standard because this world no longer needs all the labor force that exists in it. There are not enough jobs and there will never be. The forces of mechanization, which have made our lives so much better, inevitably take jobs; but we cannot and do not want to undo those processes.  When the system does not need you to contribute, when it demands nothing from you except consumption, how can we base our value on labor?

2. We affirm the fundamental value of human beings. The belief that people are inherently lazy and greedy is largely a product of a system which is blind to the desires inherent in all of us.  We live in a system that seeks to maximize efficiency (less work, more pay) but then demonizes its citizens who internalize this principle (I will work as little as possible).  What is called “redistribution of goods” is nothing more than an acknowledgement that value extends beyond labor and that individuals will continue to make contributions to the system as long as they are given the opportunity to participate, to live, to be. In the end the question is not, what has this man done but what is he worth as a being. The myth of freeloading assumes that those who cannot find a job do not want to work, while those who have jobs somehow earned it. But we know this is not the case.  We cannot continue to deny those who seek to work but cannot the basic necessities of life. We cannot blame them for how they have fallen into the system. We can no longer deny them the support of essential healthcare, housing, food, and education.

3. The process of concentration brought about by corporations that seek to maximize profit and minimize costs will continue to push the processes of mechanization so that less people can do the work for many. Hence, without some correcting mechanisms, those fortunate enough to be left standing after the layoffs will find themselves with a concentration of wealth that far exceeds those who were dropped off in the name of efficiency. We cannot continue to delude ourselves that these people are somehow “better” than those who find themselves condemned by the system into joblessness. The illusion of equality of opportunity cannot be asserted; there are simply too many factors for such a meritocracy to have any reality.

4. We must support our neighbors as individuals. We cannot stand by this idea of patriotism that supports a nation with only abstract citizens. This country has stood too long in a patriotism without dissent. A patriotism that loves the country but hates its neighbors. Get a job, bum. Support your country. Don’t freeload. You’re a burden. The whole, the system, the country is far more important than you. You are a burden.

5. We affirm that there are possibilities between rhetorical extremes—these extremes which exist in “capitalism vs socialism,” which is nothing more than a shameful remnant of the McCarthy era that is no longer relevant. Capitalism in both a theoretically “pure” form and as it stands now inevitably focuses wealth in the few.  Likewise, the concept of a “socialism” equated with “communism,” in which totalitarian regimes excessively control the social structure is not only antiquated but irrelevant. The truth is, we do not need to worry about whether our governmental system is going to attempt to force its citizens into its desired mold; our system already does this quite well.

6. We cannot forget that there are multiple channels through which democratic forces may operate. We will not remain silent, nor will we content ourselves with only one outlet for our voice. Capitalism provides only one feedback mechanism through the purchasing of goods. But this is not sufficient—when dealing with a complex system no one solution is ever sufficient. We must not forget that this system we call “government” was also supposed to be connected to the people, to individuals who, while represented by the vote, are more than an anonymous vote of stilted and limited candidates. We are given representatives that do not represent. The many cannot be held in these few, picked out by forces which we can hardly control or comprehend but which we see everywhere. We need new outlets, new in-roads into the democratic process.

We understand that Wall St. is just one symbol of one part of the system. We understand that the individuals who work in there are not the most wealthy of individuals. Each one of them, as individuals, is not responsible for the problems we face. This is precisely why we must occupy Wall St, precisely why we must penetrate the system, precisely why we must reinsert our place as the many small pieces of a larger system. We must treat the system as a system and provide systemic solutions. We must redistribute because the system needs to flow to all channels of society. We must regulate because a system cannot function without limiting feedback controls. We must provide new channels for participation because this is a system of many in which the many cannot be and will not be effaced by the one.

Undoubtedly this will require difficult choices and complex solutions but we affirm that we should face this complexity as complexity, these systems as systems because they are complexities made up of us, of me, of you. We will push for new solutions, old solutions, innovative and daring solutions. We can only go forward if we recognize this fact and allow the whole and its part to again be put into proper relation.  So we will enter Wall St, literally, figuratively, persistently. Because we are already there, already here, already within the system. As part of it, we refuse to be silent, homogenized, simplified, demonized, condemned, neglected, rendered superfluous.

I’ve let this blog sit for about 6 months now because, honestly, I haven’t had anything good to say. Now, however, I’m starting to build a set of ideas and tools to actually comment with some (limited) sophistication on technology, culture, and conceptions of the future. As such, I’ve decided to revamp the site so that in the coming months I can put together blog posts to that effect.

I’ll also reorganize the site to reflect my professional career, including a CV and other materials. Of course it’s early in the game for me to do this but I figure its never really too early to start.

News explosion! Osama is dead! Cheers! But then, of course, come all the critiques, many of which are interesting and probably appropriate. On some level, he is just one guy and we have been trying to kill him for 10 years. Around facebook, this critique at Color Lines has gotten a lot of attention.

I want to pause for a moment and give my own take on the situation. Because I think in a lot of ways these reactions, including Obama’s speech last night, are representative of some uniquely 21st century problems.

What does it mean for us to claim that the killing of Osama is a “testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people”? On some level, this is indeed determination. We did, after all, spend 10 years trying.  This makes one wonder: what does it mean to have greatness today? What can a nation (if we are to retain some nationalism) supposed to be proud of?  This, of course, has been a problem since 9/11 as our fury (how dare they!) turned into confusion (who do we attack?) and then into apathy (oh, we’re still in a war?).  As has been pointed out often, there is no definable enemy, no clear end or victory, no solid sense of retribution.

So is it so surprising that we would react with such excitement to Osama’s death. In some ways Obama’s declaration expresses the tired and worn sense of a nation who would just like to say that, yes, we can and did do something in response to these attacks. We got him! That’s something definable, clear, and easy to point to.

Our outdated conceptions of nationalistic pride require these targets. As individuals are empowered so that small groups can commit large crimes, it is no longer individuals torn up for the sake of defeating countries, but countries torn up for the sake of individuals. As technologies disseminate power and information into the hands of the few, latching on to those evil individuals is the best we can do. From this view, the killing of Osama is not trivial as the Color Lines article suggests; rather it is representative of the immense challenge facing our tiresome nationalistic worldview: to protect ourselves we can’t just storm countries but have to hunt for years and years for individuals. If we are to derive national pride from anything, it has to be from this affirmation that we could finally find this individual. Maybe now we can find all those evil individuals screwing with our systems using their localized power. Maybe we can affirm again our competence in a world that seems out of control.

It seems a fruitless thing to get excited about, for sure. But when we seem increasingly out of control, this killing of one individual marks a point at which we might again feel in control. How can we take on the economy, health care, education, poverty, etc, etc, when we can’t find this one guy?  We found him! So of course now we can affirm that we can do anything.

But of course the systemic problems are not in the realm of individuals. And this is why those problems are treated differently and with frustration. So we see an interesting movement in which globalization and the proliferation of technologies are pulling us in two different directions.  On one hand, the system is getting so complex that individuals find themselves powerless. On some level, no one really seems to know how to fix the economy.  Or education. Or poverty. The political task is just too large. You can’t put that on one individual (Obama) but we’re all so deadlocked to do anything. But on the other hand, we face the threat of the individual: the corrupt CEO, the dirty politician, the small group of terrorists. And we’re having a hell of a time separating out when its someone’s fault or just some systemic problem. It’s all too confusing for the mind of the every day voter.  The hope found in the death of Osama is that, yes, by killing this one individual a lot of our problems will solve themselves (he was behind it all) just as we might hope that we can remove a CEO or a politician and that will fix other problems too.   Pulled both ways, this celebration is the celebration for a breath of simplicity. We know, right now, that we won. Perhaps this means that we can continue to control and direct our society in meaningful ways.

This celebration isn’t a celebration of American exceptionalism but the tired cheers of a country (and world?) trying to come to terms with this new geopolitical landscape.  Political involvement seems meaningless, voices are constantly covered over in the clamor, Glen Beck and Donald Trump (or any other ridiculous figure) are dumping trash into every media, money is being drained away into a few hands, and all worthwhile purposes are shoved aside in the scramble–and in this complexity the hope for a solid, clear goal is inviting, albeit misleading. What this shows, more than anything, is that our 21st century problems require a new outlook that isn’t so reliant on nationalism and simultaneously recognizes the power of individuals and the complexity of the system derived from them.

I know this sounds kind of vague (and perhaps I wandered a bit) but I’m not proposing answers; rather I’m suggesting that this is a typical moment of the confusion that we’ll see again and again over the coming decades.

The information explosion has been building for all of human history and has no finally erupted. By one account, we officially entered the information age in 2002 since at that point we had produced in that year more than we had in all the rest of human history. So it explodes. And with it, dilemmas which we’ve always struggled with come rushing to the forefront and demand to be handled in ways altogether different than what we’ve dealt with before.  These, I think are the defining problems of our age. Of course none of them are new, they are only exaggerated in the age of ubiquitous computing, connectivity, and globalization. And they will only become more marked as time goes on.  Here they are in brief: (this is by no means an exhaustive list, but are only the major one’s I’ve identified thus far)

The filtration problem: With all this information available to us, how do we filter through it? In a globalized world, how do we filter through people to decide who gets what, gets to go where, and who gets to be what? When your inbox is flooded,  how to we filter through it to the most important info? What is lost in the process? Who or what controls this process?

The attention problem: This is the sister problem of the filtration problem; How do we direct our attention when it is constantly being torn in a million places? I had a great conversation with my students today about texting and it came down to this very problem: how can you get what you need to get from my class if I must fight for your attention? Now with cell phones  computers attached to our hips, how do we remain in control of where our attention goes?

The legitimacy problem: I believe this has been a problem through all of history but now has taken on new forms. Who or what do you believe? On what grounds do you judge? How can you judge? This, I believe, is what motivated much of philosophy and science; the drive for truth always had to address this problem of authority and legitimacy first. Now in a world where it seems like anything can be anything, our conceptions of legitimacy are once again called into question. We are called upon more than ever to constantly decide or intuit what is legitimate. Authority, ethos, knowledge, expertise and trustworthiness are all harder to judge yet ever more important to judge. One could sum up the problem by pointing to a world post-photoshop (or one could go back to Benjamin):  how do we know a picture is real. What does it mean for a picture to be real? How do we judge? What is at stake?

The identity problem: 20th century theory went through a fantastic and rigorous critique of the individual (just go through Postmodern American poetry!) Few in the university argue that identities are fragmented and often incoherent.  But what do we do with identity after postmodernism? What do we do with ourselves in a world of fragmentation? How do we view our identities? After all, no matter how fragmented we may be and how distributed our “identities” are (your surroundings, culture, physicality, history, knowledge, technologies all define you) there is nonetheless this singular experience of consciousness. What is one to do with this?  How does one deal with the singularity of consciousness in relation to the other problems? What do we do in an age where privacy becomes a Facebook setting and not something we can actually hope to maintain?  We all become public individuals, managed, manageable, and profiled (by ourselves). Anyone who has ever used an online dating site will know precisely the full extent of this problem. As you sit there and profile yourself, knowing that millions of people will be able to view it, the process of identity construction, which used to be implicit and messy, becomes painfully explicit and neat.

The credit problem:  To give credit where it is due, this one was inspired by Jason Maxwell (he’s going to write his dissertation on this one). Given the distributed nature of intelligence, who do we give credit to? This goes for anything. Ideas, art, music, laws, events, products, inventions, books. How do we control these things in the constant flow of information? What becomes open and what becomes closed? How is this embedded in and inseparable from our economics? How does this problem get tied up in the others (for example, as your identity becomes tied up in products, who is creating you? Or how do we consider the legitimate person to give credit to?). It seems a fundamental shift in our thinking of laws, politics, and aesthetics may be required. But undoubtedly the one thing we can’t do is not give credit. That would just cause us to burn in the filtration problem.

In addition to those problems there are still what I call the existential and experiential dilemmas. In short: why should we continue to exist and how should we exist (what should we do/be?)?  These all become pronounced and incessantly drawn to our attention in our hypersaturated world. Anyone want to add any others?

Its been an interesting week for me on Facebook. In particular there are two incidents that are just fascinating

The first was when I posted a relatively innocuous article announcing Obama’s initiative to build a high speed rail system. Sounds great, not really too noteworthy. Nonetheless, there was a little eruption and the next thing I know Pat Gehrke (my undergrad advisor) is arguing with my Aunt Lauren about politics. And I must say, the conversation is simply hilarious.  I don’t mean this to make fun of my Aunt (and definitely not Pat) but its hilarious because of the extreme disconnect between two people who were somehow brought together. In a way I’m in the middle of this encounter that could have never occurred except for this mutual connection through me, brought about through Facebook.  I mean, it really demonstrated something quite absurd in one sense. Here is Gehrke making a reasoned argument based on a thorough knowledge of the history of political climate in the united states arguing with a religious tea party conservative.  Even my attempt to go meta on the argument and talk about standards of authority resulted in a lovely response:

I’m not offended and I’m not impressed with your professor’s credentials. Remember, God used a donkey to do his will. God is not impressed with PH.D’s. My final authoritiy rests with God and not man and his puffed up pride and so called intelligence.

What sort of thing is Facebook that it manufactures such encounters? Is there an equivalent from pre-Internet age? I don’t know entirely what to make of it.

The second incident was more positive but just as interesting. Today I was in the office and overhead Eric talking with one of his students about technology and he said something off-handish that sounded like “I think technology will be the ruin of….”  So I wrote this somewhat sarcastic note about how much people in the office talk about technology and how often it is disparaging. Next thing I knew Justin comes around the cubicle (he’s behind mine) and asks if he said something that would inspire that. Nope. But then it was the greatest when Eric’s student leaves and he immediately glances at Facebook. Which is hilarious because of course he’s knows its about him. Next thing I know everyone in the office is commenting on it and laughing. The greatest part: it was the first moment since I got here last August that we’d had a moment where the whole office got in on something and started joking with each other. It’s kind of a big office and its usually quiet in there. It was nice to have a moment where we all connected. And oddly enough, it was through facebook.

Reading through some Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Agamben there seems to be a curious tension going on between the idea of will and the idea of control. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this but I just wanted to make note of it here.

This seems to be at play in Agamben’s discussion of Bartleby in Potentialities. He is essentially drawing an argument about the power of will to sit between potentiality and actuality (in that Bartleby simply prefers not to do things and thus keep himself suspended between the two). At the same time there is a tension here with this idea of control, which of course is directly lamented in both Nietzsche and Heidegger (so, for instance, in “On Truth and Lies” he talks about how both the man of reason and man of intuition both “desire to rule over life” (towards the end of section 2). It is hard to tell here if he is suggesting that this is something lamentable, particularly since he implies that this sort of control is largely what humans do.)

So take for instance, this fairy-tale mentioned by Agamben:

The mundus fabulosus at issue here is that of the absurd fairy tale told by old women and that, in our vernacular, is called Schlarrafenland, the Land of Plenty. . . . You would like a cherry–and, at your command, there appears a cherry tree full of ripe fruit. According to your wish, the fruit flies toward your mouth and, if you so will it, divides in half in mid air, letting the pit and the bad parts fall to the ground so that you do not have to spit them out. Pigeons roasted on a spit fall from the sky and spontaneously enter the mouths of whoever is hungry.

The fairy tale is essentially talking about what sci-fi writer Charles Stross describes as cornucopia machines.  It’s not altogether impossible using nanotechnology that we could make such a thing.  Maybe not “fall from the sky” but something incredibly similar.

But Agamben continues:

What is truly disgusting to the philosopher’s eyes, however, is not that will and caprice take the place of reason in the domain of things but that ratio is thus also extinguished in the domain of will and potentiality. “Not only are there now no principles of  possibility and no principles of actuality external to man; what is more, not even the will has a principle for its willing, but instead indifferently wills anything. Hence it does not even want what it desires [ideo nimirum vult, quia libet]; there is no reason for it to want one thing rather than another.”

This quote, of course, clarifies what is at stake here. And the point really comes down to something simple: you have too many choices! You don’t really know what you want!  This idea of indifferently willing everything is, at least on initial impression, a somewhat absurd statement. After all, to some extent we always had  the ability to will many kinds of things. It wasn’t just with Sartre that we realized that we could do anything.

But I should try to make a more subtle reading here and not be so quick to leap on to conclusions.  The truth is, I think Agamben is getting at something quite important here. This is what I call the problem of “limitations” (in my really untechnical language).  Will requires resistance. It requires the “No” in order to say “Yes.” This is what Agamben refers to as “ratio.”  What technology brings about is a delimitation. That is, it opens you up to an abundance of possibility that perhaps was not there before.

Two problems with this though. First, is the question of potentiality and appearance. That is, potentials always rely on a certain awareness of one’s own potentiality.  This is the point I was hinting at above.  One can phrase this differently: what about the externalization of control relates to will? Does will presuppose an external? Is control not, in some way, the fulfillment of will? But haven’t we always exerted such control? This seems, at least on some level, Nietzsche’s point about the origin of Truth.  (But I’ll leave this point be for now…)

Second, what is being covered up here? That is, technology may appear to open up potentiality so that it allows the will to exert full control.  One might say that the switch here seems to be, more than anything, a switch from externally derived limitations to internally derived ones. The will and control become simultaneous. At least this is how it appears. But this, we are increasingly finding, is not the case. After all, is it not clear that social systems still exert enormous power? The internet itself, despite my great love for it, is also embedded with values and limitations.  The truth is, on some level, there will always be limitations.

There is something curious contained in Agambens quote above (he’s actually quoting Christian Wolff): Why would the ability for your will to equal control lead to absolute indifference? I am specifically referring to this quote: “Not only are there now no principles of  possibility and no principles of actuality external to man; what is more, not even the will has a principle for its willing, but instead indifferently wills anything.” I mean, undoubtedly on some level this is true. But I think we can put some pressure here. Where does potentiality come from?  The suggestion in Agamben is that it comes from negation, from denial, from limitations.

What reason does anyone need to choose one thing over another? What reason have we ever had except for matters of preference? Why would absolute control negate this? Its not as if preference disappears. It seems to simple to suggest that in such a state there would be no more ability for potentiality nor for will. Rather, I want to (somewhat mystically at this point, perhaps) suggest that what this suggests is simply a need for a more active sense of will.

That is, if you are able to do anything, what to do becomes the biggest question of all.  Or to put it another way, absolute control makes the necessity of will all the more important. I think Agamben misjudges something here. The extra control brought by science and technology is not unequivocal control bequeathed on us as individuals. These views of technology seem to suppose technology as nothing more than a passive agent, a tool without structure in itself.  The truth is, technology contains within it its own set of expectations and demands. It is demands on your consciousness for attention, time, and effort. Even the cornucopia machine would have its own set of demands. Because technology is non-neutral. The desire to enhance control does not inevitably decrease the access to will. In fact, it demands that we, essentially, pay attention to will. That is, the abundance of choices and the competition for our attention demand that we take an active role in managing our own lives.

We all should know this but some of us know this more than others. For instance, those with an app-enabled phone (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc) find ourselves with constant access to all our online information. And it can be incredibly invasive. Having the ability to control our lives presents us with the equal opportunity of being controlled. And thus, it demands that we express our will. That is, at some point you have to shut it off. Or better yet, you have to take an active role in managing what your technology will do and when. If you don’t then it will invade your life. It will distract you and constantly pester you.  Surely everyone today must recognize the great extent to which technology demands.

The truth is, will and control coexist and feed from each other. The drive for control in technoscience is, yes, misguided because it is not any individual from which control emanates.  Rather, the more control we have the more we have the potential to be controlled. This is, essentially, a kind of tyranny of potentialities that Agamben seems to be suggesting. But these potentialities are not unlimited and not without imposition. Instead our mechanisms for control insist on us controlling them. In this sense, albeit unintentionally, we find in our technology at the crux of the necessity of will otherwise, yes, we face its destruction.

But at this point I feel like I need a better understanding of what is meant by these terms, specifically “Potentiality” and “actuality.” Anyone have recommendations?

There are at least three different paradigms of “life” that I am working with this semester and it is already getting really difficult to separate them out. I think eventually I’ll posit four (as represented by Aristotle, Descartes, the Hegel-Marx-Darwin-20th century theory, and the Margulis/Sagan new paradigm) but the Aristotle one I don’t really have time to work through right now. Instead it looks like each of my seminars is working through a separate view of the human.

It is amazing how much relates to this question of “life.” It seems like these terms all congeal around this position. Humanity, life, human, animal, plant, living, consciousness, man, language, thought, culture, even politics (bio-politics).

Right now I’m mostly working from Margulis and Sagan’s perspective laid out in What is Life? which was published in 1995 and takes into account really cutting-edge scientific knowledge. Margulis is a known scientific paradigm shifter, having been one of the first to push for a conception of evolution that appropriately took symbiosis and cooperation into account as much as competition. Unfortunately the radical implications of her and Sagan’s reworking of evolution, life, and humanness has yet to penetrate very far.

The main thing that really does a number on your concepts is the complete decentralization of the human away from its privileged status but in a way that is, in one sense, the opposite of the post-Darwin paradigm. These post-Darwin thinkers, in fitting spirit with the rest of philosophy at the time, essentially took away the wonder out of life. By removing humanity from its privileged position they actually made all of life less significant. As Margulis and Sagan put it, they “took the life out of biology.” So you get this sense that things that were considered special about humanity are taken away and we are made no different from animals–but the animals themselves aren’t anything special either. What Margulis and Sagan do is the opposite in the sense that all the things that were once considered special about humanity–language, choice, consciousness, forms of culture, etc–are extended down from humanity down to the simplest bacteria.  That is, even bacteria choose, have consciousness, have a kind of language, and form of culture in their way of being. Just because homo sapiens are not special in comparison with the rest of life (except perhaps by a matter of degree), doesn’t mean that all of life is special.

The difference is absolutely essential and changes the entire way that one views not only humanity but all of life.  The solution presented here turns so much on its head.

(For one thing, it reinserts meaning and significance where it was supposedly destroyed over the last century and a half. That is, it seems like the misinterpretation and extension of Darwinian evolution mirrors the extensions of Nietzsche found in the existentialist philosophers, various Frankfurt school thinkers, and follows into postmodernism. That is, this nihilism associated with a host of philosophical conclusions–particularly the denial of a priori truths–seems to me to be a similar mistake.)

So what I’m seeing right now are these three paradigms:

1) Cartesian: Mind/body split, animals are just machines, human is privileged

2) Darwinian: Humans are just animals distinguished by arbitrary characteristics (such as language), things like consciousness, choice, and purpose are all nonexistent in life.

3) Margulis/Sagan: All of life contains choice, purpose, and consciousness, which extends all the way from the microbe to the biosphere (beyond the human). The human is not in a privileged position but instead life itself is privileged over nonlife; life is primarily distinguished by autopoiesis which contains a necessary element of choice and consciousness for all life.

So it seems really odd to read a book like Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal because it is functioning deeply in the second paradigm. Of course, a lot of what he is reporting on is the way various Darwinian thinkers considered life but he seems to buy into this himself.  For instance, this quote really threw me off: “The two perceptual worlds of the fly and the spider are absolutely uncommunicating” (42); he is speaking here about the way that the spider web is formed perfectly to catch the fly even though the spider does not know the fly and does not see the same world it does. This is crazy. Why wouldn’t this be a sort of communication, one that has been passed in exchanges over thousands of generations? That is, the evolutionary process itself, by the Margulis/Sagan paradigm, is itself a communicative process.

I’ll have to write more about this with time but I’m going to leave it here for now.

The article that spawned these thoughts: “The Science Wars Redux” by Berube

I realize reading through this article two very important things:

1) I haven’t realized the extent of the work that has been done in Science Studies and how much of it resembles all of the things that I’ve been thinking about and wanting to work on. Not to say that there isn’t plenty of stuff left to work on. In fact, there is more than ever.

2) I have been taken into a stereotypical form of thinking that asserts a level of relativism that I don’t need. The “everything is socially constructed” is a nice idea at first–kind of like when I went through an Ayn Rand kick my senior year of high school (which, I am somewhat ashamed to say lasted through the middle of college and ended with an interest in Ron Paul).  It’s not to say there aren’t valuable things there, only that you reach a time when you have to move on and learn a more suitable position.

Actually, this has been an undercurrent for me from the beginning. It has hammered at the back of my mind for a while. I call this the “question of legitimacy.” This, I believe, is where I can begin to reconcile my own convictions for the social construction of reality. Certainly there is a world independent of us that exists here in some way or another. Sure the Matrix-like argument that “it is all a dream or a simulation” is a cute one but, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant–after all we function in a world that appears to be relatively static. Even if we had a different one with different rules it would still be the one in which we function. And from here we get some notion of truth.  I suppose this is what I meant by actuality. “Truth” as a term bothers me because it implies universals that may extend into social reality. Actuality, on the other hand, insists on what is actually there. It references reality itself while “Truth” can be applied liberally to all sorts of things (like, for instance, the purpose of life, morality, correct politics, etc) that naturalizes things which are social.

Regardless, legitimacy is the place where it all comes together. What we consider legitimate is both social and connected to actualities.  Science is the process of establishing legitimate representations of actualities. Technology proves them by building from the knowledge of science actual actualities. Things that really exist and function and work. Hard to be more legit than that.

To some extent it is helpful to make a division like Berube does–a division which mirrors, oddly enough, Aristotle’s division between endoxa and episteme as two modes of truth (something which is often less talked about but which exists when one reads the Rhetoric against his other works. This came out in my paper this semester for the Aristotle seminar in which I attempted to uncover the ontological models that various Greek figures functioned within).  In Aristotle’s corpus these are nicely mirrored throughout: rhetoric and dialectic, enthymeme and syllogism, phronesis (practical wisdom) and sophia (intellectual wisdom).   It could also be noted that Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance also makes the same division. Seems like a common move.

Basically, one side is devoted to viewing the world in relation to its actuality. It attempts to find how things actually work, how they function, and how one can manipulate these functions to certain ends. The other side is devoted to a social reality.  What do we want? How do we divide up the world? What values are at play in these divisions? It is an artistic understanding of the world that doesn’t care so much about what is actually there as much as things like affect or desire.

The division is helpful. Its also not very neat. Nor does Aristotle, Persig, or Berube probably intend it to be. At least Pirsig and Berube only really make the distinction to see where it breaks down and point to that as the most important point of focus. I’m probably saying the same thing here. That point I want to say is legitimacy. It happens in science and it happens in social reality. What is legitimate is at once a social thing and a matter of actuality. Everything functions based on what we consider to be legitimate. Science, as a process and method, was all about creating a system that could provide the strongest argument for legitimacy possible.

What I mean by legitimacy is just as it sounds. Thinker X says one thing about why the sky is blue. Thinker Y says another. Which one do we believe? Yes, its actually a belief. We’ve noticed this from climate change: Do you believe in climate change? I’m sure you’ve heard that question before. Isn’t it odd that we consider it a matter of belief? But thats because it is. However what is not recognized is that science is a process built to mitigate on this question of legitimacy. Thinker X has all sorts of experiments, data, and well established theories to suppose his explanation. Thinker Y is a school teacher from Arkansas. Which one will you believe?

This is a question coming up again and again in all the studies I’ve done so far and its starting to become such a pervasive theme I think it may become the central question for my work for a while to come. I saw it first in looking at risk assessment of nanotechnology. I realized that ultimately the debate about who and what to include (public, experts, statistics, values, etc, etc) was all really a debate about legitimacy. This included questions of authority, trust, accuracy, reality, etc, etc. What it boiled down to was ultimately a public trust in science as a legitimate and trustworthy method of achieving proper risk assessment as well as the concurrent trust (with others) that this would translate into proper politics. It was only when the practice of science becomes delegitimized through its connections to business or politics that it truly starts to fall apart. Once trust in science as a legit exercise erodes then we’re left with an explosion of values. No one knows what to consider legit.

Likewise, my studies of futurism has turned into a question of legitimacy. How can they make predictions in a way that can convince many intelligent people that they are legitimate? Might they actually be (that is, should I consider them to be)?

Then my project on Aristotle and the Greeks got me thinking about it again. Tracing the separation of rhetoric and philosophy grounded by Parmenides then continued, in response, by Gorgias, Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle, I began to see that what they were debating about was the question of legitimacy. Plato developed a method of philosophy aimed precisely at obtaining the legitimate. For this reason he wanted to step outside of rhetoric, where legitimacy was up in the air. For Gorgias, legitimacy is in the one who won. For Isocrates it is in the mutually decided. For Plato, in the logically valid. And then Aristotle…he combines both Isocrates and Plato through the division I mention above. Social reality is mutually decided. Physical reality is Platonic. In this way, it only makes sense to suggest that those who are grounded in physical reality also ought to use this to inform their interaction with social reality.

On one level one wants to make them very separate. For instance, I don’t want to make any morality a physical reality while others do. Actually, in this case I don’t think this is something that I choose as much as something that simply is. Morals exist without any physical referent beyond evolutionarily or biochemically programmed ones–and do we really want some old instincts developed for a world long gone telling us what we should believe is moral? In this case, I find it a great comfort to put morality in the social reality category, since here we can determine what is legitimate and not hold to the past beliefs (otherwise we’d still have slavery).

So I think that the separation isn’t so much a matter of personal belief but a matter of what it is actually dealing with: physical reality or social reality. Morality is a social reality. All things have components of each, like I just mentioned with a potential physical basis for morality. There is more there too–say what actually happened becomes important in a judicial trial. The facts. (See, there is another question of legitimacy). Likewise, all science has some measure of social reality. And its where the two meet that is interesting.

Probably nothing new here except perhaps framing the connecting point as legitimacy. I’m not sure what else has been done but I’m going to keep probing this split. Glad to have found that article by Berube. Thanks Michael Faris for sharing it on Facebook.

On the first day of this contemporary poetry seminar I was talking to Jeff Nealon after class. I was already really thrown off since I knew nothing about poetry and things seemed to be really far from my normal area of interest. However, I was insistent I was going to connect. So I mention to Prof Nealon that I am interested in technology. What does he bring up? Typewriters.

This happened a couple times through the course. In fact, it happened in almost the same exact way just yesterday when I mentioned that I’m having a hard time coming up with my paper topic (even though the semesters almost over). I was talking to Kris and mentioned that I vaguely had some ideas related to technology and poetry. Typewriters, he says. Like how did Olson use a typewriter.

My God, that has got to be one of the most boring topics in the world. Ok, there are more boring ones and studying typewriters in relation to writers seems like at least marginally important work. But it’s not what I’m referring to when I say I’m interested in technology. And I think I realize the problem now.

When I mentioned this to Rich a few months ago he said, “Oh, well thats just because most neomarxists view technology in terms of modes of production.”

And that makes sense. I think almost everyone, when they are dealing with technology in an academic sense, are thinking of it in terms of modes of production. How does technology allow us to produce other things. They are tools. Hence new media–which means new tools we use a media for our fantastic human selves.

However, I think that this is an entirely problematic and even dangerous way to approach technology–at least given the way that technology has saturated our world. We have to start thinking of technology not just as tools but as ways of living. You get this to some extent while thinking of it as “modes of production” but not nearly to the extent I am suggesting. Technology is no longer just about how we produce but is also an essential component of how we live.

Now that I think about it, the focus on production seems oddly antiquated. Do we really think that there is a stable subject for us to just produce things using technology without it becoming a way of living?  Given the critique of the subject–one of the major movements of 20th century academia–how can we still think of technology as just some sort of media through which we produce?

What is also relevant here is the movement from a largely production based experience of the economy to one that is largely consumer based. I think this may be the crux of the whole problem I have with the neomarxism I’ve encountered thus far (although I think they are aware of it, maybe just not articulating it).  Experiencing the world from a consumer perspective requires a different framework than is provided by “modes of production.” That is, it requires one to think about how technology is creating new ways of living and to realize that that intimate relationship between who we are and what is around us is now within the bounds of technological development. So when thinkers Thomas Frank talk about the inability to rebel, they are not looking in the right places. Because they aren’t used to looking, as far as I can tell, at technology as a mode of living. If it is, then how one chooses to live in a technological world is itself a kind of rebellion. That is, if you don’t just buy into and live the way that our technology dictates but take active part in shaping what technologies you’ll use, how you’ll use them, and when. So what becomes the most powerful sign of resistance in the 21st century is turning off your cell phone on occasion (of course its not just turning it off but taking control of how you’ll use it as much as possible, which is the whole principle of a web 2.0 and like-minded products. Yes, companies provide you with these means (technologies) but you are free to mix and match them how you like).

Poets have encountered this error first-hand with flarf poetry. For most of the 20th century they operated on this assumption of a semi-inertness of technologies because they viewed them as modes of production. So they developed methods–technologies–for writing poems that was an attempt to bring the poems outside the subject. So we have Borroughs cut-up method, Jack Spicer receiving it from martians, and Duncan thinking of people as just a machine processing the world into poetry. All of these are relatively accepting of these outside methods–they really are “modes of production” of poetry. I’m not sure what they actually thought–and I’m not sure exactly where to read for this–but it doesn’t seem to me that what they were doing was reflecting something about the values by which those productions operate.  In fact, what they were really aware of was language and the way that it operated as a mode of production. Hence they critiqued language, played with it, and made it reveal itself as a non-neutral mode of production (the Language poets were great at this).

Then you hit the 21st Century and poets find themselves with new ways to do this. Here is a computer and this big thing called the Internet. If is a machine. And its smart enough to pump out poetry of sorts. So they start doing this and its perhaps a lot of fun. Except that things are different. Because these technologies are not neutral. More importantly, they are not just modes of production anymore. That is, they contain within them the ways of thinking about and living in the world. They are embedded with values. Now technology has actually always been this way to a large extent. The difference now is that, in a primarily consumer society, what are we producing? The only clear answer seems to be: ourselves. Given this, does it make sense to continue to think of technology as a mode of production in the classic sense? What this “mode of production” becomes is “modes of living.”  That is, there are no modes of production outside of our modes of living now. And so for poets who think they are somehow getting outside of that by using poetry is to just give over to the the mode of living of another. It is to deny the largest form of resistance we still have.

Incredibly, this returns to Heidegger’s notion of the tool. I’ll have to read this section again, but it seems that his analogy of the hammer–where the hammer becomes more real when it breaks–is both really relevant here and not so much. For one thing, Google isn’t going to break and reveal itself. And I’m not sure that Heidegger was actually talking about values being in the hammer like we have to when talking about Google’s search algorithms. However, I think it is relevant in that this idea was taken up by the poets in the 20th century and used to critique language as a tool. So to some extent Heidegger recognized this point–hence he says that technology is not technological but rather poetic in that it relies on multiplicity. I’m not sure if I fully understand this yet but it seems that he might actually be getting at technology as embedded with values. In which case he is very helpful here.

I plan on developing these ideas into a full paper focused around flarf poetry. I’ll probably contrast that some with the post-language poets like Kevin Davies, Joshua Clover, and Juliana Spahr. Sounds like a possibility…