Manifesting Destiny: A note on the temporal nature of Trump's Martian space fantasy

In Trump's Second Inaugural, he had this to say: 

 The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.
And it's the lifeblood of a great nation. And, right now, our nation is more ambitious than any other. There's no nation like our nation. Americans are explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneers. The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls. Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on Earth. No one comes close. Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness. They crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted millions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the heavens and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand. If we work together, there is nothing we cannot do and no dream we cannot achieve.

I am going to focus on this particular part of the speech. In many ways, this will miss "the point"--of the speech, of the executive orders, of Trump. I do hope by the end you will understand I am using this as a way to think very much about these issues, even if I come at them sideways. 

Now, you don't need to know much history, or be particularly astute at rhetorical analysis, to see the metaphors and history of Manifest Destiny, Wild West, Final Frontier, and untamed wilderness, and hear the history of colonialism in it. The role of "settling" Mars in this discourse has been thought longer, harder, and smarter by many others. I suggest reading Mary-Jane Rubunstein's Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race.  For more practical objections, I suggest Kelly and Zach Weinersmith's A City on Mars (or you can just read this article for this purpose). And while not specifically on this issue, you should probably also read Pettman and Thacker's Sad Planets. Instead, I want to focus on something else. I want to look at the temporal promises from Trump's rhetoric. There is at one and the same time a promise of the science fiction future (Mars! Manifest Destiny in the effing stars!), but the future here is in service of the promises of the past. Not just the past of the wild west and the frontier, but also the past that used that same rhetoric. The Boomer nostalgia for JFK and even Nixon. The future comes to support the past (make America great, again), but the past comes to support the future. The promised future is a return to a glorious and made up past, just this time with space ships added. We have an ouroboros of temporal rhetoric--the future becoming past becoming future, all allied to celebrate the present as unalterable and inevitable.

Let's look how the power of the past works. The past is not done, and continues to have virtual powers. What does it mean to say the past is virtual? First, it is important to keep in mind that for Bergson and Deleuze (along with others, seems this distinction might go back to Duns Scotus), the virtual is not in opposition to the real, but to the actual. Both the actual and the virtual are real. As Deleuze said in Difference and Repetition: “The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual. Exactly what Proust said of states of resonance must be said of the virtual: "Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract"; and symbolic without being fictional." The virtual is that which has real effects on the actual, but are not themselves actual things. For Bergson, memory serves an important example of this. As John Ó Maoilearca entertainingly begins his book:

Having rehearsed my clarification of Bergsonism a number of times previously, its dénouement was always at the point when I would explain how, ordinarily, “we think that memory is the mental faculty that allows us to recall the past, whereas, for Bergson . . .” But here, my listener interrupted and finished the sentence for me: “whereas with Bergson, memory is when the past recalls us. Yes, yes.”(p. 1)

So, for example, Bergson writes that "pure memories, as they become actual, tend to bring about, within the body, all the corresponding sensations. But these virtual sensations themselves, in order to become real, must tend to urge the body to action and to impress upon it those movements and attitudes of which they are the habitual antecedent. (Matter and Memory, p.130). What does that mean? Think back to an embarrassing episode (sorry to ask that!). Now how do you feel? Notice how the memory creates actual sensations in your body. Under this view, the past is not inert and over. The past is not actually still doing things, but it is virtually still with us, and it is having real effects. As Faulkner's famous quotation goes, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." 

An interesting intervention about the virtual powers of the past and memory is taken up in Paolo Virno's long reading of Bergson in Dèjà Vu and the End of History. Déjà vu is, of course, the feeling that you have already experienced something before. You feel yourself encoding the world around you as a memory. You turn the present in that moment already into the past, and an uncanny feeling creeps into you. Virno, in his reading of Bergson on this issue, In Virno's trademark verbosity:

In the experience of déjà vu, it is only the fantastical ‘once upon a time’ that holds stage. Those who are sheepishly obsequious to what has been, are in effect obsequious to ‘now’ itself, projected back in time. And in so far as we have a memory of this ‘now’ already as we experience it, it constitutes an illusory and yet overbearing ‘back then’ (indeed, it is overbearing because it is illusory), faced with which we must inevitably behave mimetically. In the epoch in which the perceived present seems to have to retrace the remembered present, with the scruple of the epigone and the destructive melancholy of the late-flowering fruit, people indulge in a resignation-streaked fatalism. (p. 43)

In other words, when we treat the past as a glorious tradition that must be replicated, we shrink the present to non-existence. We make the present as inevitable, as if it has already happened (just as our feeling of déjà vu). We lose any sense of ourselves as agents of history, as beings capable of intervening in the present and creating a different future. Instead, we become a kind of historical re-enactor. While the virtual powers of the past, haunted with injustices that must righted, can serve as ways of scrambling the present and showing its contingent moment (this is the goal of Foucault style genealogy), the virtual power of the past can also be mobilizes to suffocate the present, to glorify power and make the present inevitable. The powers of the past can silence the cries of the ghosts with unfinished business by making us all zombies to replicate the demands of the glorified past. 

But what about the future? In Steven Shaviro's recent magnum opus, Fluid Futures, he reads the situation this way: 

Remarkably, Whitehead (who most likely never read Proust) uses a similar phrase to describe real (as opposed to general) potentiality. He writes that “the future is merely real, without being actual; whereas the past is a nexus of actualities” (Whitehead 1978). There is evidently a philosophical difference here, since Deleuze, following Bergson, associates potentiality (or the virtual) with the past, while Whitehead associates potentiality with the future. [...] Events in the world can call upon potentialities, and in effect strive to embody them; but these potentialities cannot on their own account promote themselves, or influence anything that happens. They have no intrinsic being, and hence no proper force. They need to be invited into actuality. We must imagine them, and then strive to put them into practice. In this way, Whitehead extends the notion of the virtual (though he does not use this word) beyond the limits of Bergson’s (and Deleuze’s) ontological memory. Rather, he envisions a sort of reservoir of potentialities, real without being actual, that call to us more from the future than from the past. (235, 237). 

So, for Shaviro's Whitehead we can see a similar ontology of virtual/actual as with Deleuze (even if Whitehead doesn't use that language). But whereas Deleuze/Bergson sees the power of virtuality in the past and in memory, Whitehead sees it in the potentiality of the future (and the "past is a nexus of actualities"). The power of the future, however, has "no intrinsic being," and must be "invited into actuality." In a way, we summon forth the virtual power of the future be envisioning it, by shaping it, by calling it forth. All of which sounds good, but there is, of course, a catch. 

As Mark Fisher, following Bifo, has contended, the future as an aesthetic category has ended. As Fisher puts it in Ghosts of My Life, "time keeps moving, but somehow the future never comes" (this was explored in my long post on ghosts and haunting). The future, robbed of its liberatory aesthetic potential, has come to be only a series of catastrophes (a sort of inverted Benjamin Angel). It is easy enough to understand how the idea of future catastrophe has virtual power over the present. We just went through a snow storm here in South Georgia, and before it hits, all the water and bread is sold out at the stores. But it was also predicated to hit two weeks before, and all the water and bread got sold out, even though it never hit that time. It was the prediction that causes the behavior. As Richard Grussin argues, this is not just prediction, but premediation. Premediation is that understanding that media has us experience the future already, training us for the catastrophe coming. We are treated to meditating on the future crisis not to stop it, but to make us feel it it inevitable, and that we have already accepted it. But let's go back to Trump. 
He is not making a prediction of catastrophe. Quite the opposite, Trump is promising a glorious future, a future made possible because the present shall revitalize the glorious past, and sweep aside all who don't belong. It is a future that is really a promise to return to a made up past, but still, a future. Fisher tells us the future never comes, but for the right wing, there is a promise of a future. The hope provided is cynical and cruel, and specifically annihilates the conditions for life for many, but somehow, there is still a promise of hope and future. And all of this built around a present that seems impossible to be otherwise. 

This in many ways is how we often come to think of the present. The present seems in many ways to not be here. No sooner can we say "this is the present" than it has already slipped into the past. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues, we need to expand the present. The current present is contracted and the future is expanded. That sounds in many ways good, the future being open seems solid. But as Santos points out: "The future is as abundant as it is empty; the future only exists, as Marramao says, to become past. A future thus conceived need not be an object of thought, and in this consists the laziness of proleptic reason." (Epistemologies of the South, p. 182). This future orientation of the capitalist and colonialist systems is utopian in the worse sense of the term, a true nowhere. Things will simply get better because the future is wide open. And we ignore the conditions of the present and the histories of the past. As Shaviro puts it, "these are forces that promise us everything and actually give us nothing" (p. 251). The future becomes here a negative force. 

The virtual powers of the past and the future are not inherently liberatory or oppressive. They can come to undue the now in ways that open new possibilities, or they can be utilized to make the present seems inevitable, and the future a pure fiction. What is next, then? There is one of Kafka's parables that Hannah Arendt liked, and she translated it this way:

He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both. To be sure, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment – and this would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet – he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other. (Arendt, Between Past and Future, p.7). 

Here we have a story that is about time, in which the past and the future are both active forces, seeking to fight each other, and in so doing, begin to crush the presence (or present) of the narrator.  Arendt would go on to explain:

The story [...] records a mental phenomenon, something which one may call a thought-event. The scene is a battleground on which the forces of the past and the future clash with each other; between them we find the man whom Kafka calls "he," who, if he wants to stand his ground at all, must give battle to both forces. Hence, there are two or even three fights going on simultaneously: the fight between "his" antagonists and the fight of the man in between with each of them. However, the fact that there is a fight at all seems due exclusively to the presence of the man, without whom the forces of the past and of the future, one suspects, would have neutralized or destroyed each other long ago. (p. 10). 

We are active, historical agents. And the virtual powers of the past and the future can make the present seem an mere epiphenomenon. This is why, following Santos, our task is to expand the present. I understand the world right now seems terrible. We have an administration that is scapegoating and targeting the most vulnerable, while treating the government as one big con to make billionaires even richer. We have a resurgent and overt white supremacy movement and masses that yearn for fascism that seems more mainstream than at any point in my life. All of this is happening on a background of the breakdown of the non-human world. The earth is warming, diseases keep spreading, and our reaction is to build mega-factory farms. Expanding the present means finding all things worth celebrating. It means finding the concrete reasons for hope in the present. We must strive to find the tendencies, the possibilities, and the realities of the present that can actually create a better tomorrow. If all we have now is shit, then there is no promise of a better tomorrow. We can not simply engage in critique and pessimism about the present and then promise a better tomorrow simply because it is tomorrow. That is, again, the worst kind of utopia, a true nowhere. So we must find in the now the elements that allow us to rewire the temporalities that we have been given--something that produces novelty and difference against the idea that the present is inevitable this and the future inevitably thus. 

Shaviro reminds us that in Sun Ra's movie, Space is the Place, he declares early on that "The first thing to do is is to consider time as officially ended. We work on the other side of time." In Shaviro's chapter entitled "The Other Side of Time," he engages Ernst Bloch and Whitehead to make this argument:

One way to attend to Bloch is to keep in mind his warning that “we must of course distinguish between the merely cognitively or objectively Possible and the Real-Possible”; whereas the former “cannot be discounted,” only the latter “has in process-reality a corresponding element: that of the mediated Novum”. [...]Bloch’s Real-Possible is somewhat like Whitehead’s real potentiality; it is a positive tendency that is already implicit in the actual woof and warp of things, even if it has not — or not yet — been made actual. The Real-Possible involves, Bloch says, an active “process-reality, and not a fact-basedness torn out of it which is reified and made absolute." The Real-Possible offers us no guarantees; it is unrealized and devoid of teleological necessity. But if we look at things really carefully, we can discern its incipient emergence, pushing beyond “what is fixedly existing and what has fixedly become”. The Real-Possible might not ever come to pass, but in a certain sense it already trembles on the verge of realization. (251)

This expansion of the present, this real possibility, is what, following William James, I just call meliorism. Meliorism exists between pessimism and optimism. It does not believe salvation is guaranteed. Meliorism is not a promise that the world will be saved, it is a hope that it can be saved and that we are not yet fully damned. I look around us, and I don't know if we will be successful. I certainly don't believe there is an arc of the moral universe or history, no matter how long of an arc. But for all of that, I know tomorrow can be different. I know that because there is so much we can love and celebrate today. There is no force that will save us. There is just us--working, fighting, building, and loving together. And it is from these conditions, these real possibilities, and the histories we bring forward, that we must populate a future with. We must make the image of a future that is real and concrete. The hardest thing is to give up notions that everything is predestined one way or another, and accept that what we do can actually matter. But we have power, and we can make the the world and time otherwise. We must go into what William James calls our "workshop of being" and start building.  

There Must Be Some Way Outta Here: A Note on Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism

Today would have been Deleuze's 100th birthday. So, here is a blog post about Deleuze's concept of transcendental empiricism.

Transcendental Empiricism connects Deleuze's book on Hume through to his last essay, "Immanence: A Life". Deleuze never stops being an empiricist, and one way to understand his project is to stay with his empiricism. This is because, for Deleuze, empiricism is both ontological and methodological. Empiricism is promise for Deleuze, and it is why that even if he is doing political philosophy, aesthetics, or metaphysics, he comes back to transcendental empiricism. Because it promises there must be some way out of here. 

The Thief

Early on, Deleuze establishes that the problem of philosophy is the problem of stupidity. Who can forget his claim in Nietzsche and Philosophy that philosophy is useful for harming stupidity. But this harming stupidity is not whatever is going on in the movie Idiocracy with its obvious eugenicist overtones. Rather, stupidity is closer to Arendt's banality of evil and her charge of Eichmann's unthinking nature. As Deleuze makes clearer in Difference and Repetition, particularly chapter three, stupidity is the condition being unable to think outside of the image of thought. It is not about error, or even wrong answers. But rather, what kinds of questions can we even think of asking and forwarding? The image of thought (of which can be known by many names,  such as doxa,  the problematic, the historical a priori, the transcendental, but also text, desire, signs, even māyā) structures not just what are correct answers, but also what we even consider possible alternatives. And if the image of thought is all there is, then we are done. But, we know that is not all there is. We know there is creativity, novelty, and genuine change. Therefore the image of thought is not everything. There must be something pre-meditative, pre-interpretive, some thought of the outside. This is the promise of transcendental empiricism--experience, no matter how subjectified it might become, brings with the chaotic outside. The outside however is too much, too vast, too contradictory--a plenum. This is why the outside is always depicted by Deleuze as chaos and multiplicity, and drawing ourselves toward the outside is talked about in paradoxes and schizoanalysis. Because in some way the outside does not make sense, cannot make sense, interrupts the very process of sense-making. 

This outside--however chaotic, however fragmentary, however dangerous--is what allows for the resistance to this order of things. One way to read Deleuze is as a long analysis of how we are trapped in a series of pre-given questions and answers (what Deleuze called stupidity), along with some sort of understanding of this outside (what we might think of as an absurd and necessary task of a cartography of chaos and change), and lastly we have the fragments of an user manual for accessing the outside, bringing back something useful, and trying to avoid the dangerous of such an intellectual mission. Deleuze's language for explaining all of this shifts throughout his career, as does his own understanding. Perhaps the most famous example is the difference between Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. In A-O we are told that escaping subjectification is the most important thing, and that one can never go far enough. In ATP, we are famously warned there are worse things that staying subjectified. But this why we have a constant language of becomings, pacts with strange others, dark precursors, Bergsonian intuition, Spinozian conatus. These are all methods for trying to get outside, and bring back something new. That which in What is Philosphy? is called the Chaoids, the three daughters of Chaos, which are philosophy, art and science. In other words, empiricists in their thinking-sensation are exploring the outside in order to bring back new concepts, affects and precepts, and functions. 

The Joker

Micheal Hardt taught, at least briefly, in prisons. He is fond of telling one anecdote, and here is a version of it: 

One semester we had a joint meeting of the Duke [graduate] students and the inmates. They prepared punch and cake for us, and we sat around and had a discussion about Foucault's Discipline and Punish.[...] The inmates would insist, "Look, whatever the prison tries to do to you, whatever the officials try to do, if you're strong, you can always keep the real you hidden inside. You can create this ungraspable core that is you, that they can never touch. Strip-searches, humiliations, anything, they can't touch it." Goffman describes the recreation of an institutional subjectivity, and they say, "No. For weak people that might be true, but not me." They had this resistance to the idea of the production of subjectivity. It seemed to them like a threat, a personal threat. That was their last line of defense. For the Duke students, of course, their interest in Foucault was in the very complete production of subjectivity by the institutions of power.

If one way of escaping the image of thought is to use empiricism to try and chart a way outside, to try and draw up a line of flight into chaos and back, there is another, less talked about, way to escape. Perhaps there is some part of us that remains outside of subjectification. Is there, as the incarcerated students put it, a core that escapes? Somethings that remains opaque from the all-seeing institutions of power? A kind of Glissantian right to opacity? Or, as the Duke students had it, are we just the complete productions of subjectivity by the institutions of power? And to the degree we have a self, it is because there are glitches and gaps in the machinery and technologies of self? Even more than his contradictory understanding of a thought from outside, Deleuze's understanding of if a thought from inside is even possible is all over the place. 

One way to understand a thought from inside is as a kind of Bataillian inner experience. That is to say we in moments of mysticism, madness, ecstasy (but also in purposeful methods of dhyāna) we can still find ways out of the image of thought. That is we go into ourselves to find something outside. This is not a process of reflection, because as Deleuze and Guattari tell us in ATP: "Thought is like the Vampire; it has no image, either to constitute a model of or to copy." These experiences are still pre-interpretative, pre-mediative. The central breakdown of Artaud and the crack-up of F. Scott Fitzgerald are some of the many examples that Deleuze forwards of this kind of inner experience that escapes complete subjectification. But of course, the whole point of this understanding of inner experience is that it complicates the very notions of inside and outside. In the many foldings of Deleuze, the idea that the self is Möbius stripped becomes central. The experience of the inside becomes a way to experience the outside, so that we can get outside of the inside of the image of thought. Got it? 

But that is not really an understanding of a core, is it? Quite the opposite, it is a folding, a shifting. In Deleuze's books on Leibniz and even more so, his book on Foucault, we get some sort of understanding of the self that stands outside. This is particularly clear on Deleuze's reading of volume 2 and 3 of Foucault's History of Sexuality. 

But is there an inside that lies deeper than any internal world, just as the outside is farther away than any external world? The outside is not a fixed limit but amoving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside. The Order of Things developed this theme: if thought comes from outside, and remains attached to the outside, how come the outside does not flood into the inside, as the element that thought does not and cannot think of? The unthought is therefore not external to thought but lies at its very heart, as that impossibility of thinking which doubles or hollows out the outside. (pp. 96-97)

There's too much confusion.

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work – the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside – the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within – that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick – the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed. (From the opening to F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up")

The outside can intensely become the inside, and we can go deep enough inside we can find the outside. We cartographers of chaos and chance, we explorers of the alien and the aleatory, we seekers amidst repetition and difference have two paths we can take. The first is take to the outside. To experience the plenum of pre-subjective existence. To drink at the well of William James' flux of pure experience. The other way is to find a way inside so that the senses of self, stratification, and reflection all fall away. Either way, these are processes of transcendental empiricism. We use tricks and tips of experience to find a way out of subjectivity. Not freedom, but the way out as Kafka's Red Peter reports to the academy. "Only a way out—to the right or left or anywhere at all. I made no other demands, even if the way out should be only an illusion. The demand was small; the disappointment would not be any greater—to move on further, to move on further! Only not to stand still with arms raised, pressed again a crate wall." But we do not stay away. We flee, looking for weapons. We come back, on our witch's broom, with our war machine, with our "new weapons" to fight control. Lines of flight=Lines of fight. And our Möbius stripped inside out and outside in, our vectors and lines, our becomings and alliances, is needed for such a simple and revolutionary thing. As Deleuze the empiricist tells us, it is needed to actually believe in the world. We need a way out so that we can finally see the world, and not have "the world which looks to us like a bad film." 

What is Pragmatism? For James and Against Peirce

I'm not that interested in pragmatism per se. My interest in William James is because of his radical empiricism, not really his pragmatism. But I do want to clarify some things here. I want to explain what pragmatism is (namely a method), and show how even though James and Peirce agree about the method of pragmatism, the understanding diverges significantly. 

***

Few things were as bad of an idea as naming your philosophical movement pragmatism. I wonder how many objections and misunderstandings can be traced to how terrible of a name it is. According to EtymologyOnline the world pragmatic in the 1600s meant "meddlesome, impertinently busy," in other words, a busy body. Yeesh. More recently, of course, it doesn't get much better. A "pragmatist" is one who faces so-called hard truths, and doesn't let things like principles, ideals, or ethics get in the way. The vision and imagination of a pragmatist is taken to be quite small. That William James called himself a pragmatist, and an empiricist, that he described judging truth based on its "cash-value," and discussed how a "will to believe" could shape and change the truth--well, it's no surprise that many take James to be a figure like Dale Carnegie, or whomever wrote The Secret. Indeed, Max Horkheimer, in Eclipse of Reason, famously attacks pragmatism.  He knows it is bad, but he can’t figure out if it’s bad because it’s too objective, trying to reduce all knowledge to laboratory experiments. Or is it bad because it’s too subjective, and can’t resist ideology on the basis of reality. When I posted this comment about Horkheimer on Facebook, many responded that the correct answer was both/and. Of course that is a great response, but I believe the only way to make it both is through a pragmatic understanding. So, let's talk briefly about what pragmatism is, and how it is a method or a tool. 

***

The pragmatic maxim, as it is often called, is usually traced to C.S. Peirce's essay, "How to Make our Ideas Clear." There he states, "Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object." Now Peirce is said to have regretted this exact formulation, and if you are interested, you should check on the discussion from Cheryl Misak The American Pragmatists, pp. 29-32. But for our purposes, this is good enough. Pragmatism is a method, by which we ask what are the practical consequences of any philosophical problem. If there are none, we are free to ignore the issue as a pseudo-problem. 

Here is William James, in chapter 2 of his book Pragmatism, where he famously gives an example of how pragmatism works. In it, he presents a story of professors arguing over, what else, words. Here is the full, long example:

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel—a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: DOES THE MAN GO ROUND THE SQUIRREL OR NOT? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Everyone had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: "Which party is right," I said, "depends on what you PRACTICALLY MEAN by 'going round' the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb 'to go round' in one practical fashion or the other."
Altho one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a shuffling evasion, saying they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair-splitting, but meant just plain honest English 'round,' the majority seemed to think that the distinction had assuaged the dispute.
I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a peculiarly simple example of what I wish now to speak of as THE PRAGMATIC METHOD. The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many?—fated or free?—material or spiritual?—here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other's being right.

And as he will add just a little further down in the chapter, "No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts."

The passage seems both obvious and banal at first glance. It simply seems to say that language's meaning is simply useful, rather than somehow the truth being inhered in the words themselves. There is no fundamental truth of a word's meaning outside of us. So, "around" can mean multiple things. 

This might be obvious, but the implications are actually very controversial. Because James is not actually trying to say anything in particular about language. He is trying to to say something about truth, of which the use of words is but an example. So, what is James saying about truth? 

He is saying the way to determine truth is it's usefulness in specific ways. This is the claim of pragmatism. Therefore, pragmatism becomes a system of verification. How do we decide what are the practical consequences? This issue of verification is where the whole system falls apart between James and Peirce.
 

***

For those of you who know the work of the logical empiricists (also known as the positivists or the Vienna Circle). Verification is at the center of their work. As Misak describes them, "Their positions were crisp and clear; their knowledge of logic and science was unassailable; they were driven by a sense of purpose and a mission to clean up the metaphysical squalor in which they thought philosophy lived; and they thought that progress is possible only if all inquiry is scientific." (p. 157) And they therefore believed that the "meaning of a concept lies in the operations of its verification." (p. 159). Now, I don't know the logical empiricists that well, and honestly share the biases against them articulated so well in Barry Allen's Empiricisms, chapter 7.  But I think I am being accurate to say that Peircian pragmatism and the logical empiricists, despite their differences, lay down a series of tools that will inform American analytic philosophy, particularly in the work of Lewis, Sellars, and to a lesser degree, Quine. And the upshot of this strand of philosophy is to be metaphysically deflationary. To what degree changes from thinker to thinker, but the world shrinks. Verification means some combination of scientific experiment or formal logical verification. And anything that cannot be verified as such, is not in the domain of philosophy. The world, very much  in the singular, is made safe for a scientific and materialist monism. This is about as far from James as one could get, so how does his verification change things? 

***

Before going further, I want to push against how we group thinkers together. I was very convinced by Misak about the story she tells of Peirce, and his linage. If you are interested in this story of a kind of pragmatism playing a role in the foundation of analytic philosophy, I suggest reading Section III of her book. But I am not convinced by her story of James and his lineage. Misak essentially reads Rorty as being an extension of Jamesian pragmatism. And it is true that Rorty didn't much care for Peirce, and saw himself as being a Deweyian and to a lesser degree, a Jamesian. But I follow Alexis Dianda's excellent book, The Varieties of Experience here. Particularly in chapter one, she shows how the linguistic turn in philosophy, which includes both Sellars and Rorty here, displaces the centrality of experience. And in seeking to displace experience for, as Rorty wants, discourse, we make James' position on verification and pragmatism completely incoherent. Let's look at James' famous lines on verification from chapter 6 of Pragmatism:

Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"
The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as.
This thesis is what I have to defend. The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.

This is very different from the conception of verification as scientific experiment or formal logic. Indeed, that becomes but one process of verification and validation, rather than the process. Truth becomes something existential in James' formulation. When James argues that truth must make a difference, he means in our lives. But also his pragmatic method is not deflationary, but rather pluralistic. 

James' system of verification and validation allows for a multiple ways of verifying something. If there are many processes that can arrive at different answers about if something is true, and there is no way to put these processes in some sort of hierarchy, we have utterly exploded the metaphysical possibilities of the world. We have therefore a multiverse, a pluriverse, a pluralistic universe (to use some of James' terms). The world is, as James puts it, "ultra-Gothic." 

So, the scientific methods are all fine systems of verification. But there are others! For example, in Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art he gives us this system of verification if art is good or bad. 

In a mysterious, puzzling, and mystical way, the true work of art arises "from out of the artist." Once released from him, it assumes its own independent life, takes on a personality, and becomes a self-sufficient, spiritually breathing subject that also leads a real material life: it is a being. It is not, therefore an indifferent phenomenon arising from chance, living out an indifferent spiritual life, but rather possesses-- like every living being-- further creative, active forces. It lives and acts and plays a part in the creation of the spiritual atmosphere that we have discussed. It is also exclusively from this inner standpoint that one must answer the question whether the work is good or bad. If it is "bad" formally, or too weak, then this form is unsuitable or too weak to produce any kind of pure, spiritual vibration within the soul.

Kandinsky's truth is every bit as true as any logical inquiry. 

In Patricia Lockwood's recent review of Simon Critchley's book on mysticism, she has this to say about William James:

To read The Varieties of Religious Experience is to believe not only that God might exist but that men might be good – and more, that they may be taken at their word. He simply (it is so radical) presents us with their paragraphs. It is in every way the opposite of those pretensions we gather to ourselves as protection against irony. It is not in wordplay, in hazelnuts and hazelnots, though theology has tangled itself so much in those things. The wound of experience is presented, open; it does not need to be probed, it is believed. [...] In James there is a sense of many doors opening on dimensions; he goes between them with his lively and solemn gift, his curiosity. And what I think of as his characteristic nouns: lustre and reality. The corrugated rays coming off the first, and the second almost seeming to have human eyes.

Against Peirce's metaphsical deflation, James gives us a metaphysical plenum. Pragmatism, for James, means living in a world that is disenchanted, re-enchanted, never disenchanted, never enchanted all at once. It means living in a world of scientific rationality and base materialism alongside the energies of God, all the Gods, things older than Gods, and beings that are yet-to-come. Horkheimer's critique turns out to have some weight, James' pragmatism makes the world both too subjective and too objective, both too rational and too mystical. 

As James puts it in The Varieties of Religious Experience: “Like the single drops which sparkle in the sun as they are flung far ahead of the advancing edge of a wave-crest or a flood, they show the way and are forerunners. The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world’s affairs to be preposterous. Yet they are impregnators of the world, vivifiers and animators of potentialities of goodness which but for them would lie forever dormant.”

"You see castration everywhere you look": Some unbecoming thoughts about Wicked

(This is a surprisingly spoiler free discussion of the novel Wicked, with some comparisons to the movie and musical. I don't believe I give away any particular plot points, though). 

Recently I went to see the movie Wicked, based on the first half of the Broadway play. I've never seen the play, however I read the novel over a decade ago. Upon watching the movie, I immediately reread the novel, and then went and watched the movie again. Outside of sharing character names, they have little to do with each other. Indeed, I bet there are many people who would hate the movie and musical, but would enjoy the moody, often slow pace, frankly weird novel. 

A major part of the contrast for me is that novel pretty much seeks to undermine, sidestep, invert, or call out virtually all the tropes of the movie. (Before we go further I should say I enjoyed the movie. It was visually compelling, the songs are catchy, and the lead actress was quite good. But I enjoy a nice piece of mass entertainment). But the book is strange, the pacing odd. It is quite slow in places, and defies normal fantasy storytelling. Elphaba tells us a few times that she "never believed in child saviors." There is no chosen one in the novel, no one born with fantastical but wild powers. Indeed, the novel itself is a long form critique of the notion of innocence. There is, of course, the obvious targets of the those who believe God is on their side and justify anything, there are those politicians and leaders of state who drap themselves in a mantle of innocence and purity. We are told, “It’s people who claim that they’re good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of." But if it was just this, Wicked would be telling us nothing different than any number of YA dystopian novels. What makes the novel interesting is that those who are outcaste or rendered monstrous by the righteous are not immediately somehow innocent because of these conditions. There is a sort of Adornian pessimism throughout the whole thing, a kind of "Wrong life cannot be lived rightly" as Adorno famously puts it. (the novel's echo here, saying something similar yet so different asks, "Is life worth living in the wrong form?"). 

In one of the several discussions that are overt meditations of evil, we are told:“You old fools, the Oziad is just a frilly, romantic poem of older, harsher legends. What lives in folk memory is truer than how some artsy poet says it. In folk memory evil always predates good.” Now I think it would be wrong to say this was the argument of the novel, the novel is far too ambiguous to have clear arguments and moralizing messages, but the novel very much wants to hold open the possibility that this true of existence. We are asked to explore what it would mean for evil to be ontologically prior to good. Not to see evil as some sort of deprivation of the good, and not to see evil as some sort of dark side to a light side, but to see evil as foundational. 

In the first few pages, the Wicked Witch of the West spies on Dorothy and her companions. The witch was surprised to hear a discussion of her genitals. There are rumors that she is intersexed or trans (those words are not used). And we are told later: "Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents." But back at the beginning of the novel, the Tin Man tells us that the Witch was castrated at birth, to which the Lion responds: “Oh you, you see castration everywhere you look.” What the novel purposes is a non-castrated evil, but rather that evil is part of what Bill Haver always called your "fundamental existential comportment." In other words, what if innocence is foreclosed to all of us? What if we by existing, we become part of some sort of unforgiveable wrong? What if we are all wicked? 

***
I was trying to find how the movie in the second part would diverage from the novel, and I came across this article about TikTokers discussing the differences between the novel and the musical. In particular, I was caught by this discussion:

Among “Wicked” fans, the book’s content is divisive. Kieffer, on her end, said that the sexual content “muddles the plot.”
Ribeiro says she loves the “shock value” in the books and that the unexpected parts were her favorite to read — but ultimately took away from what she considered the “point” of the book.
“I think I was so distracted by all of the weird stuff that was going on that the political aspect of it was overshadowed,” she says.

I mean, the weird sex and gender stuff is very much a part of the "political" message of the book. I was reminded here of necessity for projects like Christopher Breu's recent book In Defense of Sex. In the novel, they do not have the OzDust Ballroom, but instead the Philosophy Club. The Philosophy Club is some kind of psychedelic sex club, that seems to explore the limits of selfhood through extreme acts. While some people visit and leave unscathed, other leave, unable to come back to their old ways of being. Indeed, if I told someone who had read the book that it was published in the mid-1990s by a gay, Catholic, professor of children's literature, I believe universally people would respond with, "Yeah, that makes sense." 

So yeah, perhaps there is a bit of stereotypical  Catholic guilt running throughout the book, but the book pushes against that reductive reading, as well. It asks the same kinds of question about forgiveness that Derrida does in his essay on it, what does forgiveness mean when confronted with the unforgivable? But where Derrida uses this as a way of thinking about forgiveness, in Wicked we are confronted with what does it mean to live in such a way that some things we do cannot be forgiven? Elphaba's father sought forgiveness and was denied it (as Elphaba does, and Dorothy does for killing Elphaba's sister). "I see him shocked: It doesn’t occur in his conception of moral life that some sins are unforgivable." And, a little further on in the book,

Elphaba the girl does not know how to see her father as a broken man. All she knows is that he passes his brokenness on to her. Daily his habits of loathing and self-loathing cripple her. Daily she loves him back because she knows no other way.
I see myself there: the girl witness, wide-eyed as Dorothy. Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing—by dint of ignorance and innocence—that beneath this unbreakable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way. A more ancient precedent of ransom, that we may not always be tormented by our shame.

Even without forgiveness, is there a way to live? I said the book had an Adornian pessimism, and I meant it. Because like Adorno, the novel seeks to still find some way out. Not hope, per se, but something outside of the the dialectics of the "Marriage of the Sacred and the Wicked." Because, we are reminded, "there was much to hate in this world, and too much to love." 

But while there is a desire for a way out, nothing is promised, no maps are given. The Witch, as we know, still dies at the end, killed by water and fear (both her own, and fear of her). She is unmade. Perhaps we are all unmaking. 

“It’s unbecoming,” she agreed. “A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un." 

The Purpose of Rhetoric is to Harm Idiocy

 (This post is inspired by teaching Classical Rhetoric this semester, particularly the kinds of questions that were brought up reading and discussing Robin Reames' The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself. My students really brought it this semester in that class, and I got a lot out of thinking alongside them).

Deleuze famously proclaims, in Nietzsche and Philosophy, that the purpose of philosophy is to harm stupidity. But, of course, this is Deleuze, so stupidity has a technical definition that he works out in several places, but mostly chapter three of Difference and Repetition, "The Image of Thought." Stupidity has nothing to do with error, or IQ, or nonsense. Rather, stupidity comes from a kind of cliched, unthinking. The sorts of "thought" that goes along with "as everybody knows," and "it goes without saying." While there are important differences, this certainly rhymes with Arendt's criticism of Eichmann as unthinking. The purpose of philosophy, then, is to produce concepts that manage to exist outside of the dominate image of thought, and create something new. Deleuze's understanding of stupidity is strange, because it assumes that thinking, rather than being something given and commonplace, must be made. And further, it is uncommon. Most of us are not thinking most of the time.

The idiot, briefly referenced in D&R, and made a full conceptual persona in What is Philosophy?. Etymologically the idiot is the private thinker, rather than one taking part of public affairs. As Wikipedia explains:

The word "idiot" ultimately comes from the Greek noun ἰδιώτης idiōtēs 'a private person, individual' (as opposed to the state), 'a private citizen' (as opposed to someone with a political office), 'a common man', 'a person lacking professional skill, layman', later 'unskilled', 'ignorant', derived from the adjective ἴδιος idios 'personal' (not public, not shared). In Latin, idiota was borrowed in the meaning 'uneducated', 'ignorant', 'common', and in Late Latin came to mean 'crude, illiterate, ignorant'. In French, it kept the meaning of 'illiterate', 'ignorant', and added the meaning 'stupid' in the 13th century. In English, it added the meaning 'mentally deficient' in the 14th century.

 It shares the obvious cognates of idiom, idiosyncratic, idiopathic While it might seem that the idiot escapes stupidity because they avoid the public doxa of the image of thought, Deleuze is more ambiguous. Deleuze ties Descartes to the idiot, but sees him working within and replicating the image of thought. He opposed this to Dostoevsky's idiot. Some thinkers, particularly Stengers, has created even more positive models of the idiot against stupidity.  But while Deleuze leaves open the possibility that stupidity can infect (for lack of a better verb) the idiot, he doesn't really explore how the opposite can be true. In other words, he doesn't explore how I kind of idiocy can produce stupidity. 

For this, we need to perhaps broaden our definition of idiocy from a personal and private relationship to any kind of closed off conceptual group. Idiocy, in this sense, comes from an inability to share or understand the image of thought of another group. Rather than ever being one image of thought, we belong to many images at once. Because, as Deleuze well knows, each of us are many, so we belong to many images of thoughts at once. Many worlds, many places, many tropes. Idiocy comes from the inability to think and understand others, who have different values, terms, and goals than our own. Idiocy further implies an inability (perhaps even and unwillingness or a lack of realization) to communicate to people in these other worlds. So, just as stupidity can infect idiocy, idiocy can cause and create stupidity. That is, many cases of stupidity comes from people being unable to understand there are other ways of thinking, being, and valuing in this world.  Indeed, if part of stupidity is the inability to have a thought from the outside, that outside must include other groups' thinking. 

Deleuze, of course, famously hates communication. He tells us again and again some version that if anyone comes to the philosopher asking to debate, or have a conversation, the real philosopher runs away. He sees communication as as a kind of Universal set to build consensus, and thus, along with contemplation and reflection, are often confused with philosophy, but are the opposites or enemies of philosophical thinking (this is in lots of places, but mostly What is Philosophy?). This is understandable from the standpoint in which Deleuze was working, and that his real targets were of course the New Philosophers, and the particularly French obsession of putting philosophers (especially New Philosophers) on Television. But while I am sympathetic, he has this wrong. 

While some communication scholars have posited that one can not *not* communicate, they seem to mean something like we are constantly putting out information into the world. That is not the same as communicating. Just as Deleuze understood that thinking was something that perhaps happened rarely, and that needed conditions for its happening, the same can be understood with communication. Communication, that is, the creating of a common, happens rarely, and it is something that must be actively made. The problem of idiocy is a problem of communication, and depends upon our inability to actually communicate. We think we are communicating with other people, but we truly understand only our own in-group. Those that understand the world definitely are not simply mistaken, but evil, alien, and barbarian. They are not understandable to us, and we are not understandable to them (in the US today, this can be most easily seen in our hyper political polarization). 

In Aristotle's On Rhetoric (I, 2, 1358a), he tells us that rhetorical enthymemes (the kind of logical arguments particular to rhetoric, as opposed to the more formal syllogism of the dialectic) come from two different kinds of places. There are the topoi koinoi (common places, common topics) and the topoi idioi (the particular, or special, or private places and topics). So, the common place might be the ability to distinguish between the bigger and the smaller. The special places are the kinds of arguments that might make sense in physics or the law court, but not outside of them. Virno has a very interesting reading of Aristotle here (Grammar of the Multitude, 3.2). While I am mostly in agreement with Virno here, his reading here is incomplete. He sees the power of the special places, understood as a kind of expertise, as fading away. What remains is just the commonplaces, which form both a kind of danger and hope in Virno's analysis of the general intellect. But everywhere around is the particular places and topics are taking over. This is not the particular place of the law court of the physic's laboratory, but rather the particular places we get our news from, the topics we think of as important and valuable, and our ability to understand what is at stake in our decisions about the world. The topoi idioi are taking over the topoi koinoi. 

Now, there are plenty of people (in all sorts of political orientations), who don't see any problems here. The diminishing power of rhetoric, argumentation, and persuasion is only finally revealing what they have long known to be true--politics is about power, especially power over one's enemies. Any appeal to civic virtues or common places has always been a lie by liberalism to hide the fundamental truth of political power, and using it. I want to be clear, this is a profoundly stupid position, and one that demands the stupid loyalty of others. This is why Ranciere tells us in Disagreement that "politics is not made up of power relationships; it is made up of relationships between worlds" (p. 42). Rather what we need now more than ever is rhetoric, argumentation, and persuasion (one might say simply communication). These fields are made for the creation of the common, with their attempts as audience analysis, stasis theory, identification, and other tools that are made to create, however temporarily, a common. Theses commons are not the grounds of consensus, but the ground necessary for disagreement, debate, agonism, and dissensus to take place. It is an alternative to power, and one that is sorely needed. Philsophy and rhetoric are not the same things, but they are here allied forces. If the purpose of philosophy is to harm stupidity, than the purpose of rhetoric is to harm idiocy.  

The non-distinction of ethics and morals

 I am about to teach a chapter on Ethics in Public Speaking in my public speaking class. The chapter is fine for what I want it to do (mostly cover research and citational practices for public speaking), but there is brief aside where the chapter distinguishes between ethics and morality, and it drives me nuts. Often when I complain about this to others, I get some version of this seems like special pleading from a philosopher. Which, sure, point well taken. But I want to spend a little time here explaining why I think this distinction is not incoherent, but actively harmful. 

Ethics, as you know, comes from the Greek ethos, meaning custom, character, habit, habitat. It's what you do in the place you live. Cicero, seeking to translate ethos, coins moralis, taken from the Latin mos. So, when I used to teaching a lot of moral philosophy and ethics courses, if students asked me the difference between ethics and morality, I would say for the purpose of my course, ethics comes from the Greek, and morality from the Latin. Now, thinkers have created distinctions between morality and ethics for a long time, and if clearly explained, I in principle do not object to those distinctions. But something happens in a lot of professional ethics that seek a distinction. Here, let's look at a pretty typical distinction from NASBA Center for the Public Trust (which is what google highlights for me if I search "ethics vs. morality"). 

Both ethics and morals refer to “right” and “wrong” behaviors and conduct. While they are sometimes used interchangeably, these words are different: ethics refer to rules provided by an external source, such as a code of conduct in the workplace. Morals refer to an individual’s principles regarding right and wrong.

From the standpoint of wanting to quickly teach professional "ethics," I can understand the appeal of this distinction. Students come with a variety of beliefs about right and wrong, and you want them to shelf them. You don't want to get into fundamental questions that invite discussions of religion, culture, etc. So, you call all of these things morals, basically gesture to a kind of relativism about them. But you also need your students to adhere to certain rules, behaviors, and norms. You call these ethics, and say they don't have anything to do with your morality. Now you can say that it doesn't matter about what you morally feel is important about what is right and wrong, a lawyer has an ethical duty not the pierce confidentiality. It doesn't matter if you ethically disagree with the lifestyle or health decisions of your patient, a nurse has an ethical duty to provide the best treatment possible. We could go on, but you get the drift. This makes the life of the professional "ethics" instructor easier. Especially if they understand their job as teaching you how to not get sued, or bother HR. Essentially, the solution of the public and private sphere has been imported into the realm of ethics and moral philosophy. 

But there are serious problems with this stance. The first is that it essentially affirms some sort of principle of moral relativism. While I am a moral pluralist (as I am a pluralist in most things), it is not a moral relativism. Indeed, most of the thinkers that create the schools of ethics and morality are not relativists. But this might not even be the worse. The real problem is the way this version of professional ethics dodges the real issues of ethical reasoning. You have private morals, and you have public ethical standards. By asking the students, or really future and current practitioners, to simply follow pre-given rules, behaviors, and norms, we are asking them not to think, not to reason, not struggle. The part about ethics that is compelling is how it addresses us existentially. Life demands of us to make decisions that are fundamentally undecidable, and yet we must still make decisions. Ethics and morality are not, therefore, principally concerned with "the good," but asking questions about what sort of being do you need to be to care about the good, to do the good, to even understand the good. To engage with ethical reasoning is resist turning ourselves into some sort of calculator (this is even true of the calculative ethical systems such as utilitarianism). It requires us to think and act, as Arendt might say, without bannisters. One cannot simply memorize a bunch of rules and norms and be ethical. To be ethical often requires of us to know exactly what rules and norms need to be challenged or broken. The idea of a private morals and a public ethics brings us into an Orwellian reversal of language, in which people are told to be ethical is to follow this or that code of conduct, to make sure you follow the law, etc. And this is against the very reality of the ethical, which demands us to be able to think when rules, laws, and norms breakdown. Actual professional ethics are essential and important. Ethical philosophy confronts us with profound questions of what it means to be, think, and act. And so often we fail to be ethical by going along with what we have been told, by following our received standards.   

Why Metaphysics? Some Thoughts on Weird Empiricism and Animal Studies

 Those who know me, or even just looking at my recent blog posts, know I have been doing a lot of work on metaphysics. Particularly on the work of William James, and the trajectory of thinkers that could be called radical empiricists (Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, Stengers, Massumi, etc.). I often get some sort of question from people who know my work on animal studies why I have started studying metaphysics so seriously. The point of this post is to briefly explain some of my metaphysical commitments, and why I think they matter (especially for animal scholars all who are concerned with the more than human world). 

***

I have been working on what I call weird empiricism. Weird empiricism is a subset of radical empiricism. Radical empiricism, for James, differed from the classical empiricists (you know, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, & co.) in a few ways. First, the classical empiricists saw empiricism as essentially passive (one received experiences), whereas for James empiricism is both passive and active (one wills the world and self). Second, the classical empiricists separated the objects we experienced from our own experiences. That is, they jettisoned the relationship of experience as not real. Radical empiricism affirms the realness of relations. 
Weird empiricism sees how these principles opens up a strange, bizarre, yes weird, pluriverse. One that can bring in the more than human world. Weird empiricism both sees the reality of our relationship to the more than human world (our relationship to other animals, but also ghosts, the sacred, imagined geographies, the dead and the undying). But also weird empiricism takes seriously the experience of the more than human world. That is, we can understand that other animals have a stake in claims of the truth because they can experience just as well as human. Though their truths may be alter than ours--weird truths from weird worlds.
Okay, so weird empiricism has something to do with the more than human world. Cool. But that doesn't answer why I think animal studies needs a metaphysics. And I do think it needs a metaphysics. I'm going to give three main reasons. 

***

To the degree that animal studies has an avowed metaphysics, it is a rejection of anthropocentrism. That is, of course, simply a negative commitment. We know what we are against, but it doesn't produce the kind of answers I think we have assumed that it will. First, any number of people have tried to critique animal activism, and the commitments of many animal scholars, as being insufficiently anti-anthropocentric. As if the point of what we are engaged in is trying to simply reduce anthropocentrism, rather than trying to create a more just and livable world. And there is no guarantee that only overcoming anthropocentrism will lead to that more just and livable world. As Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa argues in his recent book The Celluloid Specimen, B. F. Skinner and other behaviorists were dedicated to overcoming anthropocentrism, and not for any sort of liberation. 

Crucially, this shift did not lead to any programmatic improvement in the lives of animals. As Haraway and, more recently, the animal studies scholar Nicole Shukin have argued, one of the strongest catalysts for a posthuman worldview has been global capitalism, which often actively encourages the blurring of boundaries between human and animal. Yet animals are still cruelly tortured, killed, and driven to extinction at rates far exceeding any previous historical period. More than the centuries-old philosophies of Cartesian dualism, this late twentieth-century social formation remains far-and-away the largest threat to both animal and human life in our current milieu. (pp. 14-15). 

So, while I think it is still important to resist anthropocentrism (see Fiona Probyn-Rapsey's chapter in Critical Terms for Animal Studies, and Matthew Calarco's Beyond the Anthropological Difference) , it is far from sufficient as a ground for our metaphysical commitments. Weird empiricism's emphasis on relationships allows it to honor the specific forms of entanglements that we are involved with in the more than human world. As Lori Gruen points out in Entangled Empathy, "recognize life and its various entangled processes doesn't necessarily help us to respond to differences among kinds of fellow creatues" (p. 69). It is not enough to avow we are entangled, we must pay attention to the specific needs and relationships of those beings we are entangled with (see also my chapter on "Matter," also in Critical Terms for Animal Studies). Such a move allows us to have different conversations, such as engaging Eva Haifa Giraud's claim that we need an ethics of exclusion, and not one of entanglement. 

***

So, we need an weird empiricism because we need more than simply a negative metaphysic against anthropocentrism. But we also need weird empiricism to help explore one of the central tensions in animal studies. Are animals fundamentally similar to humans, just another creature on evolutionary distribution that refuses any kind of human exceptionalism, or are other animals fundamentally other, alter, different? The answer seems to be yes, and rather than either/or. Matthew Calarco provides an excellent overview of this tension, as well as his own third term, indistinction, in Thinking Through Animals. Weird empiricism's emphasis on experience as the unit of truth, and the plurality of worlds, allow us to gesture to way to keep the relationship we have to other animals, while also demanding that attention be paid to the radical alterity of the worlds of other animals. 

***

Lastly, for me at least, I have turned toward radical empiricism as a way of answering questions about how novelty and change come about. There are those who can only imagine our relationship towards other animals as fundamentally broken and in need of repair and restoration. They understand the factory farm and many invasive experiments are wrong, but they fundamentally cannot imagine a world of co-existing in a just way. Some wish to return to a model of dominion, and they simply reject the cruel excesses of the current order. Others, including many who see themselves of animal abolitionists, still do not see a possible world of co-existence. The problem for them is that all human relationship with other animals would be exploitive, and the goal is to create a human world for humans, and a non-human world for the non-humans. And on this, I can at least agree with both groups, what I dream of has not yet existed. What I want is something different, something new. And weird empiricism grants us the possibility of demanding the new, of having a metaphysics that depends upon novelty, change, creativity. I have tried to get at that here, here, and here.  As Alexis Dianda argues in Varieties of Experience: 

We must organize if we are to survive; yet, James cautions that we must not forget the subjective character of the world we take for granted. Such forgetfulness would likely increase the danger that we will not take responsibility for re-creating the world in new and better ways. This forgetfulness comes hand in hand with blindness to the ways in which other people value and make their world, and blindness to the power held to the power held by those in a position to enforce their views of reality under the auspices of objective, preexistent state of affairs. (p. 113)

In other words, we have made the world as it is. Our empiricism is not just passive, but  also active. Our wills and desires and actions make and remake the world. But we also often depend upon a metaphysics that tells us to forget the ways we have made the world--a metaphysics that limits our creative forces. Instead, we need a metaphysics that understands the productive power of belief, will, and action. 

***

In a 1903 letter to the philosopher Francois Pillon, William James described his "humble view of the world" as "pluralistic, tychistic, empiricist, pragmatic, and ultra gothic, i.e. non classic in form." The weird empiricist would say yes to all of this. And simply add, "and more than human."