Inventing space, determining location: Accounting as geography; or, Consider the banana …

This post is based on research I did for a paper presented at the Materialism and World Politics conference at the LSE in 2012.

1:

[…] consider the banana. 

Each bunch takes two routes into your fruit bowl.  The first route involves a Honduran worker employed by a multinational who picks the bananas, which are packaged and shipped to Britain.  The multinational sells the fruit to a big supermarket chain, which sells it to you. 

The second route - the accountants' paper trail - is more roundabout.  When a Honduran banana is sold in Britain, where are the profits generated, from a tax point of view?  In Honduras?  In the British supermarket?  In the multinational's head office?  How much do management expertise, the brand name, or insurance contribute to profits and costs?  Nobody can say for sure.  So the accountants can, more or less, make it up. 

Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Tax havens and the men who stole the world (2011), p.11.

Accountancy is a key but almost completely neglected geographical practice.  Accountancy literally geo-graphs because it decides where things happen and what institutions are responsible for what events.  It is also the site of considerable political contestation between activists, journalists, politicians, capitalists and accountants themselves.

I propose to investigate a number of documents produced by or associated with the Tax Justice Network.  The TJN is an independent international advocacy network founded in 2003 that is comprised primarily of accountancy professionals; it is "dedicated to high-level research, analysis and advocacy in the field of international tax and the international aspects of financial regulation."  In the aftermath of the recent financial crises the TJN was highly successful in engaging media, publics and political institutions at a variety of levels.  The TJN also publish their accounts online.

2:

Defining the Secrecy World: Rethinking the language of ‘offshore’, part of the 'Mapping the Faultlines' project.  A paper by chartered accountant and political activist Richard Murphy.  In this paper Murphy attempts to precisely define concepts such as 'offshore,' 'tax haven,' 'secrecy jurisdiction' and 'secrecy world.'  He also examines the peculiar topology of so-called 'offshore' spaces.

Highlights of the paper: the 'secrecy world' or 'offshore' is:

[…] a space that has no specific location. This space is created by tax haven legislation […] the illicit financial flows that are the cause of concern with the secrecy world do not flow through locations as such, but do instead flow through the secrecy space that secrecy jurisdictions create (secrecy jurisdictions being the new term tax havens). As the paper shows, to locate these transactions in a place is not only impossible in many cases, it is also futile: they are not intended to be and cannot be located in that way. They float over and around the locations which are used to facilitate their existence as if in an unregulated ether. This suggests that any attempt to measure or regulate them solely on a national basis will always be problematic. […] Secrecy jurisdictions enable the creation of two distinct places, ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’. The former is a regulated, onshore, domestic space. The latter is the offshore space that is ‘elsewhere’. Elsewhere is deemed by the secrecy jurisdiction to be somewhere distinctly different and outside its own domain.

It is demonstrated that accountancy is geography, that accountants (and lawyers) define both where things happen and which political-legal apparatuses are responsible for the regulation of spatially indeterminate events.  Accountancy is, therefore, intimately related with both [law] and [pol] as well as the economic modes.  I think this also demonstrates that space needs to be thought polymodally - that the modes create space in their own particular ways and any concrete spatial assemblage is a confluential compound of multiple modal factors.

Richard Murphy was a founder of the Tax Justice Network and writes one of the most popular economics blogs in the UK.

3:

The Financial Secrecy Index is a project of the Tax Justice Network.  The FSI project "ranks jurisdictions according to their secrecy and the scale of their activities."  By quantifying secretiveness it is hoped that pressure can be brought on financial jurisdictions to engage in more open and transparent practices.  In other words, the FSI is a metrological device produced by politically activist accountants that makes tax issues public.

4:

Of every three litres of oil sold on open markets, at least one comes from Switzerland. As regards coffee, the proportion is one coffee bean out of two; and with cereals it is one kilo out of three.

Of course, these commodities do not physically pass through Switzerland but rather are traded through the burgeoning Swiss commodities markets.  The Berne Declaration is a Swiss NGO that works "towards equitable North-South relations" by monitoring "the role of Swiss corporations, banks, and government agencies."  The BD's recent publication Commodities - Switzerland's most dangerous business examines what it calls

one of globalisation’s biggest winners, a powerful industry whose dealings often take it into dangerous areas. In the last decade Switzerland has emerged as one of the world’s dominant trading hubs for commodities, handling from 15 to 25 per cent of world trade. All the world’s largest trading houses operate partly or mainly out of this seemingly peaceful and innocent country. But while these powerful companies experience an unprecedented boom, the population of many resource-rich developing countries remain mired in poverty. This book tackles the question of why.

This document demonstrates how the geography of [att] is unthinkable (indeed, unwriteable) without accountancy.  Moreover, accountancy is unthinkable without [pol] and [mor].  Finally, it provides further evidence of the complex topology of trade, tax, and 'offshore.'

5:

Apple iTunes Europe's registered address in Luxembourg.  Allegedly all the company's European correspondence passes [or rather passed; apparently it has been moved] through this one inconspicuous mailbox.  A potent symbol of the spatial complexities (or absurdities, if you prefer) of 'offshore' and of the astonishing feats of accountancy qua geo-graphy.

6:

1209 North Orange Street, Wilmington, Delaware - the legal address of 285,000 separate businesses, including "American Airlines, Apple, Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway, Cargill, Coca-Cola, Ford, General Electric, Google, JP Morgan Chase, and Wal-Mart."

This brings to mind the folds of [tec]:

The hammer that I find on my workbench is not contemporary to my action today: it keeps folded heterogenous temporalities, one of which has the antiquity of the planet, because of the mineral from which it has been moulded, while another has that of the age of the oak which provided the handle, while still another has the age of the 10 years since it came out of the German factory which produced it for the market. When I grab the handle, I insert my gesture in a ‘garland of time’ as Michel Serres has put it, which allows me to insert myself in a variety of temporalities or time differentials, which account for (or rather imply) the relative solidity which is often associated with technical action. What is true of time holds for space as well, for this humble hammer holds in place quite heterogenous spaces that nothing, before the technical action, could gather together: the forests of the Ardennes, the mines of the Ruhr, the German factory, the tool van which offers discounts every Wednesday on Bourbonnais streets, and finally the workshop of a particularly clumsy Sunday bricoleur. 

Bruno Latour, Morality and Technology: The End of the Means (2002), p.249.

The folds of the engineers are impressive, no doubt, but what about the folds of the lawyers and accountants?!  Any more space-time compression and we'd need Dr Who…

'Nature/culture'

To be natural is to be nurtured; to be cultural is to be cultivated.

'Mind'

'Mind' is an artefact of being locked in an oven.

Anti-anthropocentrism: it's not a competition

There's a long history of one-upmanship in leftist academe (and in leftism generally). Whether it's trying to be further 'left,' more 'radical' or more 'critical' than everyone else it seems that there's always a rush to go further, faster, more fastidiously, lest one be accused of being 'conservative,' 'unradical,' 'uncritical' or whatever.

It seems to me that anthropocentrism might be taking on that mantle - that is, there's an ongoing competition to be ever more anti-anthropocentric than everyone else. No narcissistic wound is ever fatal enough; no number of decentrings will ever spin the human subject far enough into oblivion; no amount of uncritically imbibed pop science will ever cement the deep, dark nihilism that is apparently necessary to properly cleanse thought of its subject-centred pretensions.

Now, I'm broadly on board with the notion that anthropocentrism is a supreme vice that philosophy, the humanities, the social sciences and perhaps even the Western world at large have been unpardonably guilty of; I fully accept the need for decentrings, for the need to recognise and cognise our narcisstic wounds, to understand our smallness and insignificance in the cosmic scheme of things, etc.

However, anti-anthropocentrism can't be a competition. An absolutely non- anthropocentric philosophy would be a rather self-indulgently pointless thing, even if it were possible. If thought isn't motivated by worldly concerns from an embodied, socialised, air-conditioned point of view then what can it be motivated by? What animates it? What's its purpose?

There's a degree of anthropocentrism that is not only inevitable, it's also desirable, is it not?

All this stuff about how we have to be able to think the absolutely inhuman in order to properly understand our natural, natal, cosmic predicament - this has some merit. Certainly we have to come to understand that existence is in no way given to us or predisposed towards us; that all we have is this planet, one planet only; that Earth, even in its terrifying fragility, is vastly more powerful and enduring than we are; that it (and life) will comfortably outlive us, and so on.

But even this urge to cut human pretensions down to size, this kind of will-to- diminution is anthropocentric in quite an irreducible, unavoidable sense. Stengers writes: 'Of the Earth, the present subject of our scenarios, we can presuppose a single thing: it doesn’t care about the questions we ask about it.' If we accept this it must also mean that the Earth doesn't care if we think about it in a mathematical, scientific or nihilistic way or in a way that reduces it to images and poetry or spirits and demons. So, who or what are we trying to impress with our absolute, unreserved decentredness?

I'm not sure that I can 'think' the absolutely inhuman but I can certainly imagine something like it. It takes very little effort to mentally conjure up an image of a world after humans, all overgrown (or rather regrown) and moved on with its life, all traces of human existence either crumbled or buried. All this I can imagine quite readily, in fact, thanks in no small part to film and literature. But I find it difficult to maintain an entirely disembodied, affectless point of view on the scene (and utterly impossible to imagine the scene with no point of view at all). It provokes feeling; it's melancholy, like walking past a former lover who doesn't recognise you. The viewpoint is inextricably part of that world so long as I inhabit it; it is a precondition of that world's imagining.

So, no, I can't imagine the absolutely inhuman, absent all filterings and formattings. And yet imagining (rather than 'thinking,' whatever that means) the almost-but-not-completely-inhuman doesn't seem to be particularly difficult. And isn't this good enough?

The whole 'thinking the inhuman' thing seems to be a rather bloated, overblown, overstated problem. Representations of the literally post-human are a problem for art and science as much as they are for philosophy, perhaps even more so. If we are able to vividly imagine the world beyond, before and after humans and their attachments it is because of these very same well-nourished, expertly-assembled, diligently-arrayed complexes, networks, assemblages.

And, so, why bemoan the impossibility of thinking the outside in all its purity? The inside is what draws the outside in and paints it in such vivid colours. Shouldn't we spend a little more time mixing our paints and a little less hankering after transcendence?

Something is missing from [pol]itics

I've been meaning to write this up for months.  Finally I have a first draft (which is all it is!).

Reading the Inquiry into Modes of Existence book last time I was struck by a lack, something missing, something implicit in the political mode when it assumes all of the following:

1) No issue, no politics: publics (and hence politics) are provoked into being by problems, issues, things.

2) Politics has no inertia; it "has to constantly start over"; if an issue is truly resolved its public dissolves. A group is always 'on the move,' nomadic.

3) [pol] is not restricted to the domain of politics; [pol] can be found not just in parliaments and embassies but also offices, churches, rotary clubs, family homes… Politics can be found wherever collectives are traced out, whatever their shape, size, form, durability or purpose.

Individually I find these three tenets of AIME to be acceptable. However, I cannot shake a sense of unease when I look at the above… Isn't something missing? Doesn't something just not add up? It's a jarring sensation, a feeling of dislocation, a contrast. Yes, something is certainly amiss.

Politics is provoked by issues; it becomes obvious, explicated at times of strife, tumult, stress - in 'interesting times,' as the proverb has it. And politics, we are told, has always to start from scratch. At the termination of every bout of representation (bout is the right word in so many ways) the clock is reset to zero, the multitude goes back to a several, disloyal plurality. For every issue a new politics; no inertia. Okay, fine. But if we look around ourselves we see nothing that matches this description. All the world is replete with coagulations, clumps, clusters huddled together for warmth, joined together with endlessly variegated bonds, laughing, sharing stories, bartering, fighting. When the clock chimes for midnight do they scatter, disaggregate, deny that they know one another? Of course not. The carriage stays a carriage, the pumpkin a pumpkin, the husband a husband. It is self-evident that human groups stick together through political changes of all sorts, even the breakdown of the greatest, most godly and god-awful institutions, let alone mere political issues.

'Ah, but you've forgotten habit [hab]. Of course groups hang together over time; politics is messy, issues overlap, politics is instituted and habits blur the edges of political occasions. Of course political patterns fall into ruts, patterns, routines; that's inevitable, it comes with the fact of institutions, the fact of complexity.' A fair point but, no, this will not do. The difference is much deeper.

What, then?

It's something that's often said in times of crisis, upheaval, stress, bereavement. 'I'm here for you; I'll always be here for you, no matter what.' What kind of speech act could be more important to us? What intimacy could be more essential to our security, our stability, to our very sense of self? To know that, to hear that promise: 'whatever issues cross our paths we will persist together, our relationship will prevail; no, it will be stronger for all of this; issues, however terrible, will only bring us closer together.'

Politics, habituated or not, cannot possibly absorb these sentiments; they are totally and completely at odds with it - they pass it by at exactly 90 degrees. This other, non-political mode of speech is also issue-based (or at least it is issue-related) but it reacts to issues in another way entirely. When an issue is resolved the political group has no bonds remaining, it scatters; this other kind of group, contrariwise, is left strengthened by the trial; closer, more bonded, more intimate than ever.

'Always, no matter what': this is the root of the contrast; not its only instantiation but the instance we can see it most clearly. I would like to call it kinship [kin].

'That's not how we do things in this family,' 'if you're under my roof you'll abide by my rules,' 'speak for yourself,' 'you're not the boss of me'. What family hasn't experienced moments like these? Yes, family is political, no doubt. But that's not all. How awful it would be if our groups only held together through speech acts like these.

A convenient etymological relation can be drawn here: kinship shares a root with kindness. To be kin is to be there for another ('no matter what'). Of course all we really have is promises. There can be betrayal; therefore, there can be felicity conditions. 'You said you'd be there for me but you left me all alone!' A kin relation is certainly fragile; certainly it needs upkeep, just like anything else.

Another thing should be clear: this is not a metaphysical rationalisation of the nuclear family. Just what form the being-thereness takes is a complex and entirely open (indeed, empirical) question. I am 'there for' all kinds of people (and things) in many different ways. I will happily be-there-for a stranger asking for the time or for directions; I will of course aid some unknown person who is injured or in distress. However, my thereness, my sensitivity, my openness has limits. I am there-for my sisters, friends, grandparents in stronger ways; I am much more sensitive to their needs, much more receptive to their requests. There are varieties and gradations of my being-there-for; as many nuances as there are relations, in fact.

And so it is with scorn that I must regard the Modernist [dc·kin] crossing: 'I am a citizen of the world!' says Socrates (and every self-congratulatory cosmopolitan since).  All merely local ties wash away in the face of the Globe.  But who is this world-citizen of such infinite time, energy and attention? With the best will in the world no one can be-there-for even the tiniest fraction of their worldly cohabitants. We are finite. So, we are reliant, once more, on institutions. And isn't this the chief virtue of the welfare state? (This, the greatest Modern achievement, no? Is that too strong?) I am not there-for a man diagnosed with cancer in Glasgow; how could I be? This is a country of millions and I live nowhere near! And yet do I not play some small part in his treatment, thanks to the institutions of the National Health Service and Inland Revenue? That is what we might call institutionalised collective solidarity; or, to use a vulgar simplification, society.

Does the world-citizen pay taxes? Pah! We have world-citizens, today. They live on yachts and will fly to space to avoid the taxman. Might we call this world-citizen John Galt? I'd prefer Eric Packer (of Don Delillo's novel Cosmopolis and the David Cronenberg film of the same name). He is the world-citizen of cyber-capital - in his armoured limousine, blithely, sleepily consulting his Chief of Theory while the outside tears itself apart. Yes, the 1% read philosophy, too. I am sure that it makes them feel warm inside.

If there is to be anything like a world-citizen worthy of the name it is only through institutions that this can be realised. The most selfless, giving, caring person can, on their own, only be-there-for the tiniest fraction of the cosmopolis. What institutions maximise our sensitivities, our therenesses?

The Family of Man was a work of propaganda. The Family of the Earthbound is a messianic fantasy. Very well…

Latour's Inquiry into Modes of Existence: A second attempt

I'm just starting to re-read Latour's AIME book for an article that I'm writing. When I get to the chapter on technology [tec] I'm going to write up a short post for the AIME Reading Group, which fell into something of a deep freeze at the end of last year. Presumably most of those who were participating have now finished the book; it'd be nice to get that discussion back on the road as we only covered a small part of the text (and it gets more interesting in the later parts).

Initial (second) impressions of the first few chapters: I'm liking the book a lot more the second time around, now that I know where it's all going. I found it to be a very frustrating read last time. It doesn't really show its hand with regard to its purpose and goals until right at the end and many of the modes are described with such circuitous opacity that I felt like giving up once or twice! It's not just a difficult book, at times it's an exhausting one.

However, having finished the book, and having had several months to mull it over, I think the whole apparatus is actually pretty simple. It's broadly continuous with Latour's previous ANT work in two ways. First, ANT is incorporated in the [net] mode. Secondly, AIME is, as Latour himself puts it, the 'colour version' of ANT, which sees the world only in black and white. AIME turns up the contrast. Where ANT simply and freely traces all the heterogeneous relations and transformations that go into or are implicit in any given event or occasion, deliberately disregarding the form, kind, register, resonance of those relations, AIME demands attentiveness (via the [pre] mode) to the particular ways in which things relate, transform, translate, become, etc. Each mode discerns a particular way of becoming; AIME documents these ways, collaboratively.

Many of the modes ([tec] [ref] [pol] [law] [rel] [org] and [mor], at a minimum) are nothing new to readers of Latour's work; AIME simply gives them an explicit, quasi-systematic framework. The political mode [pol], for instance, is expounded at length in Latour's 2003 article 'What if we talked politics a little?' (published in French in 2002); [ref], meanwhile, is worked out in chapter 2 of Pandora's Hope, in the essay on circulating reference (published in French in 1993).

AIME and ANT aren't really separate projects; ANT is simultaneously prelude, parallel and part with regard to AIME, depending on how you look at it.

I still think that there are a lot of problems with the project but I've warmed to the philosophy and am looking forward to the rest of the re-read.

From the Earth/of the Earth; Earthling/Earthbound

Another really interesting post at knowledge-ecology on Kant, Sloterdijk, Whitehead and geocentrism.

I find 'monogeism' to be one of Sloterdijk's most useful coinages.  I don't think it's overstating the point to say that every philosophy must henceforth recognise the profundity of this condition: we are fundamentally bound to one planet, one earth; we are Earthbound, in Latour's terms.

And that very geocentrism is actually a necessary precondition of recognising the brutal indifference of the rest of the universe to us.  Planet Earth in its Gaian understanding is the only speck of existence that's even partially disposed towards our well-being - and its good favour is not guaranteed, indeed it's precarious.

That's not just an ecological or practical truth; any metaphysics that recognises life as something that figures on its register must now see that even if there is life 'out there,' or if, somewhere in the vastness of the cosmos, there is another celestial object that could possibly support life, it doesn't particularly matter.  Even if there are countless inhabited or potentially inhabitable orbs in existence the distance between them is almost certainly so vast that they effectively inhabit separate universes; and even if we find a planet or moon within a useful distance that has just the right mass, chemical composition, day and nighttime temperature, geological stability, shelteredness with regard to asteroids, etc. etc. Gaia-type theories tell us that even all this won't be enough to recreate another Earth.  And, regardless, we're now pressed into a civilisationary timescale where such fantasies as meeting aliens and colonising other planets seem utterly ludicrous and, worse, beside the point.

I think it says a lot that sci-fi is increasingly turning away from the old-school Star Trek groundplan of a lush, teeming universe towards an empty, impersonal universe, even one where the danger comes from exploration itself.  Gravity is an obvious case that springs to mind but there are more.  There are many, many differences between the original Battlestar Galactica and the remake but perhaps the most significant one cosmographically and dramatically is that the latter inhabited a largely empty universe without alien species, creating a feeling that was simultaneously claustro- and agora-phobic as the survivors cling to the insides of life-support systems that are always on the brink of failure.  Even the very Earth-like planet they colonise midway through the series is a harsh place unfit for much in the way of lifemaking.  Dr Who still operates in a lush, teeming universe but it realises a pure escapism; the TARDIS transcends time and space rather than travelling through it; it opts out of our situation rather than working through it.  Danny Boyle's Sunshine is an interesting one, too.  There's a moment when the crew are about to investigate an abandoned ship and are debating whether to split up or stick together; one of them says to another something along the lines of 'what, are you afraid we'll get picked off one by one by aliens?'  Obviously this sends up an old sci-fi cliche but, more than that, it demonstrates how far this universe is from the imaginaries of yore; the perils on which the drama hinges are technological, astronomical, elemental, psychological (and perhaps supernatural) but they are not alien.  Indeed, further on we learn that the central metaphysical question of the film itself (or at least of one of its characters) is that of human consciousness being universally sui generis and, consequently, imminent human extinction meaning the end of all awareness altogether.

It's a very different space we're in, these days.

I suppose it's the difference between being from the Earth and of the Earth; from being an Earthling and being Earthbound.

Picking apart pluralism; suggestions for living

There's a really excellent new post by Adam Robbert at knowledge-ecology, joining in the pluralism debate.  His musings moved me to fabricate the following:

I don't think that there are X kinds of pluralism; however, the word is clearly being used in a few different ways and this is causing some confusion.  Here's my initial (and rather sleepy, 1 am) attempt at a disentanglement:

(1) Metaphysical pluralism in the sense of Leibniz, Whitehead and von Uexküll (if he's read metaphysically).  That is, there exists a vast plurality of beings; every being has its own perspective on existence; there is no über-being that contains or determines all other beings; i.e. there is no universe but rather a pluriverse.

This basic tenet is common to many of the 'pluralisms' under discussion.  In fact the above is probably unproblematic within this debate; I don't think that this is what anyone's disagreeing with.

(2) Pluralism as it's understood in political philosophy.  This is complicated; to name but a few pluralists in this sense: Harold Laski, Isaiah Berlin, Robert Dahl, William Connolly, Chantal Mouffe...  Many different ideas here.  To some extent political pluralism responds to the basic fact that there are many different identities and ways of living and that these have to co-exist somehow; this problem is particularly acute in heterogeneous, multicultural, modern, liberal democratic societies, etc. etc.  Pluralists embrace this diversity, argue for its virtue and try to think through ways of living together in this pluralistic condition.

(3) Bruno Latour's modal pluralism is a metaphysical pluralism in another sense: he argues not just for a plurality of beings but for the plurality of being itself ‒ that is, there are many ways of being; being is itself pluralistic.  To be is to persist in being somehow but there are many ways of achieving that persistence (these ways are irreducible to the achievements of individual entities) and, so, being is pluralistic.

Bruno is not the first to come up with this basic idea (see Souriau, Simondon, Deleuze, etc.) but his is a striking and unusually sophisticated example of the genre.

(4) The order that I list the three above meanings (or circumstances) of 'pluralism' is not accidental.  Latour's modal, metaphysical pluralism is also a kind of political pluralism; it would be well termed 'value pluralism writ-metaphysical.'  There is his mode of politics [pol], of course, but the entire project is a matter of detecting, evaluating and re-instituting values.  It is as much a political as a metaphysical pluralism in this sense.  And so, at risk of gross oversimplification, we can say that (4) fundamentally differs from (1) because it passes through (2) and (3).  It is a far deeper pluralism that places far greater demands on us, should we follow its lead.

Levi subscribes to (1) ‒ pluralism in the sense of umwelten ‒ but has seemingly little time for the others.  He can thus pursue a scientistic, modernist pluralism (I'm not even sure he'd disagree with those adjectives at this point) that is a metaphysical but not political; a metaphysics that is pluralistic with regard to beings (1) but monistic with regard to being (3) and which endorses a disqualificatory attitude towards ontology and a politics of speaking truth to ignorance and irrationality.

Myself, I disagree with many of Latour's arguments but I follow him all the way to (4).  My preferred understanding of his pluralism (i.e. an interpretation that is creative but, I hope, a fair translation of his texts) is summarised here.  Politically, I understand it to be an agonistic pluralism much like that of Chantal Mouffe but extended to a metaphysical level through the modes philosophy.

My understanding of Isabelle Stengers' philosophy is that it is broadly compatible with the above also, perhaps with some differing nuances and emphases compared to Bruno but mostly on the same page, as they say.

Both, it seems to me, are committed to a pluralism that goes beyond cosmography (1) and enters into cosmopolitics (4).  Their pluralisms are not disinterested or neutral, they are committed and committing ‒ that is, they commit us to certain ways of being with each other.  They offer us not just a 'picture' of existence, framed as a multiplicity, but offer suggestions for living.

Reply to Levi on pluralism, etc.

Levi responds (in the comments) to one of my previous posts on pluralism:

I find this post perplexing. First, it seems to me that this is a wildly implausible interpretation of the modernist. The modernist does not see the critical investigation of idols as a-political, but as a deeply political project. The whole motive behind "smashing idols" is that these idols have very real political effects and a very real impact on people's lives. Given that, there's really no alternative but to engage in that "warfare". Here I wonder whether some of this blase attitude towards these idols doesn't arise from different political circumstances in the US and Britain. I take it, for example, that Britain doesn't have people resisting climate change policy on religious grounds-- they claim to know how the world will end --or pushing Middle Eastern foreign policy based on end times theology; not to mention the issues of abortion, gay marriage, contraceptives, sex education, evolution, attitudes towards capitalism filtered through Calvinism, etc; nothing in American politics can be understood without understanding the role played by these idols and these idols have very real domestic and international effects. 

Second, I just don't think this is an accurate reading of Latour and that this post reflects Deleuze's description of the "beautiful soul" in Difference and Repetition. The beautiful soul holds that there can be a confederation of peaceful differences. I think we hope for this and strive for it as much as possible, but I also think that there are a number of circumstances where there are just irreducible antagonisms. There's really no way to align the interests of the worker and the owner. They'll always be at odds with one another. Similarly, there's no way to align the interests of the fundamentalist and the GLBT person. One really has to choose in these circumstances and unfortunately there's "war"; though hopefully of the peaceful variety (though the bombing of abortion clinics suggests otherwise). The premise here seems to be that the problem lies in people not being politically pluralistic, but it seems to me that antagonisms arise from elsewhere and from very real differences. 

Finally, it's important to recall the relationship between "trials of strength" and truth in Latour. Latour argues that every "truth" is produced through trials of strength that determine its capacity to stand or not (note his warlike language here). You seem to say that religion and science are on equal grounds with their fragility. Perhaps, perhaps not. Many religions have undergone trials of strength through the formation of collectives, institutions, and rituals that make them incredibly sturdy. Here I think of Dennett's version of meme theory where religions, for example, create memes such as "you will go to hell if you question doctrine" creating for themselves an "autoimmune system" that's extremely effective in producing endurance of these collectives. And, of course, religion engages in all the sorts of anti-pluralistic warfare you decry in this post. Science has also gone through its trials of strength through the experiment, the creation of instruments, the invention of "speaking objects" (the events that take place in experiments and that are observed by a variety of people), journals, institutions, etc. I don't think either of these things are particularly fragile. Both have aligned all sorts of actants to sustain their existence. As Latour says, those black boxes can always be opened and questioned anew, but in the case of science-- and depending on what scientific claim we're talking about --the bar is pretty high for justifying the opening of those boxes, e.g., there's not much reason to question the black box of vaccination at this point.

I don't doubt that there are differences in experience between where you are, Levi, and over on this side of the pond; in fact I know that there are and I appreciate how that creates a difference in perspective.  However, if anything that fact strengthens my argument.  I couldn't have been any more explicit in saying that sometimes idols need to be smashed, could I?  If they are destructive and deleterious to collective life then smash away!  You have not only a right to do so but a duty.  But do they all need to be smashed?  Really?

My whole point is that idol-smashing is an act that requires a decision, that it can't be auto-justified by appeal to a higher order of Nature or Rationality.  And I really do think that this is one of the central pillars of Modernism - that any action is justified if it's enforcing more Rationalism upon the world, if it's extending the light-curtain of Enlightenment that extra inch; that violence isn't really violence if it's in service of Rationalisation.

If you don't recognise the whole 'I am merely tearing the veil from your eyes; pain is character building, thank me' thing in Modernism then I'm not sure what to say.  Pretty much the entire discourse of European colonialism was built on this kind of thinking.  And it's not gone anywhere.  'Oh, you think this forest is sacred?  Adorable.  Bring in the bulldozers.  You'll thank us when your economy is rationalised.'

But the most important thing politically (or diplomatically) is that the world will never be Enlightened, Reason will never reign - so, we have to find ways of living together in spite of all that.

Which brings me to the second point.  'Living together' doesn't mean all holding hands in a circle and singing Kumbaya.  It might merely mean not kicking the shit out of each other.  Peace doesn't mean harmony and I don't think anything I've written can be taken to mean that.  My interpretation of Latour's whole cosmopolitical thing is that it's basically a more metaphysically ambitious version of Chantal Mouffe's agonistic pluralism.  Both are based on Carl Schmitt, for goodness sake (I almost wrote 'for heaven's sake...!').

The thing with Latour in his political writings (his later ones at least, e.g. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods) is that his tone often suggests the perspective of a middle-of-the-road bourgeois liberal imploring us along the lines of 'aw shucks, can't we all just get along?'; but if you look at the philosophical resources he's drawing on he's always gone for the political realists.  In the '80s it was Spinoza, Hobbes, Machiavelli.  Today it's Schmitt.  Nothing cuddly about these folks, nothing beautiful about their souls.  The utopia of liberal consensualism is precisely what this whole political philosophy is working against.

Perhaps my tone has taken too much of Latour's along with it.  But there's agonism in that there pluralism, make no mistake.  And, if anything, I am going more towards the political realist side of things than Latour.  So, with respect, I think my reading of Latour is accurate and that, if anything, I am more cognisant of outright conflict than he is!*

Lastly, whether or not religions in the US are strong and sturdy (clearly they are) is beside the point.  It's a matter of decision and responsibility.  I'm not saying 'oh leave the poor old religious lot alone, you big bully.'  I don't dispute for a moment that there are many instances where there's a zero-sum game in terms of engaging with others: 'it's either you or me.'  E.g. when a child is ill, needs a blood transfusion and its parents won't allow it because they're Jehovah's Witnesses (this kind of story crops up with sad regularity).  Religious freedom and the right of the child to get medical treatment - there's a zero-sum game there, a decision must be made.  Neither Reason not Science can answer that question, it's always a political decision.  Likewise, in the UK recently there's been a lot of debate over female genital mutilation.  It's been made illegal but is still practiced.  Here, too, there's no middle ground.  It'll never be okay to say 'oh, only mutilate them a bit' or 'only mutilate young girls' genitals on a Sunday' - it's a fundamental disagreement.  And it's an abomination that must be eliminated.

I see no contradiction in this and anything of what I said in the last post.  Differences in emphasis, that's all.

It's easy to justify your attacks when your opponent is more powerful (i.e. when taking on the religious in the US).  But that isn't always the case and a political philosophy must be able to at least comprehend situations in which one's other is weaker, when speaking from higher status to lower - how does one then act?  And how does one act when one finds that an other's ways are ridiculous but in a manner that is inconsequential to oneself?  How does one act towards things that might be perceived as absurd but are of no real consequence or might even make the world a slightly better place?  Modernism, as I see it, can at best snigger behind its hand rather than with bared teeth in these situations.  That's scarcely pluralism.  It's not political pluralism, anyway.  There are deeper (and better) varieties of pluralism than this, that's all I'm really arguing for.



* An aside: Latour has long since moved on from Irreductions.  As important as that text clearly was for him it's been grossly overestimated as being programatically foundational in the past few years (blaming no names *cough* Harman).  The strict, reductive ontology of trials of strength hasn't been a major part of his work since the early 1990s, as I see it.  For example, his essay on circulating reference (the one in Pandora's Hope) was first published in 1993.  That produces rather a different theory of science to the trials of strength period in the 1980s.  He's a very different thinker to the one he was thirty years ago - although there are obvious continuities between then and now, too.

Morton's Hyperobjects and Pluralism

It occurred to me yesterday after reading Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects just what a postmodernist text it is in terms of style and construction.  It's really no different in how it's put together from the old 'all the world's a text' school of culture studies bricolage.  Bits and pieces of pop science mixed with every kind of cultural artefact (and, in all fairness, some genuinely earnest political musings) all jumbled together and loosely assembled with the help of some all too chunkily chopped and, for my tastes, rather undercooked object-oriented philosophy (garnished with wilted affectations of scientific realism...).  A thought salad, if you will.

It's a writing style that presupposes a flat ontology – i.e. a monism – i.e. a situation where a single vocabulary, a single style of speech, a single mode of assembly suffices to address any kind of thing wheresoever, whensoever, howsoever, whatsoever.  Heterogeneity without plurality.

It matters little in practice whether this monistic plane is discourse, object, language, network...  The world becomes a frozen lake across which the bricoleur glides, slides or tumbles, depending on his skill.  The relational labour required to forge any particular connection seems minimal, almost inconsequential – it is enough that the words are on the same page, conjoined by puns.

This can be a very exciting way of moving around, no doubt, but, read in book-length, it strikes me as shallow, superficial and reductive.  To address climate change, Dr Who, early 1990s British indie bands, aboriginal art, nuclear waste, Aristotle and so on all in the same mode of address, all in the same tone of voice, the same frenzied, impatient blur of the hyperactive scholar-magpie – it makes for an interesting read but ultimately an unrewarding one.  And it's difficult to swallow the dogmatically asserted 'realism' (proclaimed, never argued) when there is so little attentiveness to the specificities of all these things, when their bumps, grooves and all manner of details are smoothed over in such dramatic fashion.

It is as though the materials themselves offered no resistance, objection or direction to how they are spoken, stretched, compressed, displayed; they impose no obligation on the articulator as to the way in which they must be articulated.

This, it seems to me, is the importance of the pluralist project, philosophically (and realistically) speaking: to compel attention to the specific ways in which different things must be addressed in order to be properly articulated in their own terms.  This is what OOO, etc. can never do because it is essentially monist: there is one way of being and all further distinctions are subcategories of that one mode.

In establishing a 'universal equivalence' between all things (everything equally an object) it makes everything articulable all-together with a minimum of complication.  And this is not without value but nor is it innocent.

One interesting thing with Latour's modes project is that [net] permits this scholar-magpie approach since it self-consciously disregards the nuances of individual forms of being in order to string together as many relations (and thus to forge the thickest of descriptions) as quickly, easily and simplistically as possible.  So, the fast, loose thrill-ride of the monist is seemingly permitted but it is relativised, deprived of its innocence – it compels a choice, a decision to be made: why this mode, why this movement, why not another?  In other words, the very partiality of the pluralised network mode demands passing by the way of another mode [pre] (and from there to any number of others); plurality demands decision and hence responsibility.

And this, I think, leads to a more convincing 'realism' than that of Morton et al., for whom this becomes little more than a badge to pin to one's lapel and strut around, chest puffed out – proud.  That is a good name for it: proud realism, a realism of pride.  Science, in this 'realism,' becomes not so much a process that is implicated in any event of thinking the worlds around us in particularly productive ways but simply an honoured and honorific background process that gifts us lists of objects that we are entitled, since they are scientifically certified, to assert as 'out there, whether you like it or not.'  Science is a research and certification process: if it's on the list we can let it into our ontologies without another thought.  ('And if you're not on the list you're not coming in!' – for doormen-realists this is the main point: the authority to refuse entry.)

Thus, with Morton, we can stand there in the rain, feeling it falling on our head and imagine the vast, sublime, oceanic climate system whirring and whooshing over our head and think 'climate change is raining on my head' (he actually writes this) and think that this is a meaningful sentence, in all disconnection and transcendence from the scientific institutions that stabilise climate and climate change as objects of cognition.  And then we can denounce those who would insist that dynamic, ongoing scientific processes are essentially implicated in this event, in this actual occasion as lava lampy relationalists.

There's nothing more lava lampy than the manic postmodern stylings of cultural studies bricolage – and this is a style that Morton excels at.

To move with [net] is to move laterally; that is, across the frozen lake, traversing the flat ontology.  And we don't need to watch the Winter Olympics to know what stunningly graceful high-velocity ballets this freedom of movement can sometimes produce.  But this is not the only way of moving.  To pretend otherwise is irresponsible.

Pluralism is not an alternative to realism.  It is simply realism without its chest puffed out, showing off.  Pluralism is realism that recognises the multiple paths that any trajectory can follow and the beautiful plumage that can grace any mode of existence.

In that sense there is nothing much to it; it might be counter-intuitive but it's not especially complicated.  Perhaps one day it'll even be common sense.

Noisy neighbours: a remedy

My downstairs neighbours seem (from the sounds of it) to be having a party.  I don't begrudge them it because it's Saturday night and they're normally fairly quiet (if anything we're the noisy neighbours!) but I'm really not in the mood for the shitty techno-ish thud, thud, boom, boom music that's vibrating through the floor so I've responded by playing the following album quite loud:



As most people who know me are aware, Sigur Rós are pretty much my favourite band ‒ nay, my favourite artists ‒ of all time.  This album is by the singer/guitarist, Jonsi, and his partner (who isn't in the band), Alex.  I think the rest of them probably helped record it but it's Jonsi and Alex's composition.  Anyway, it's the perfect remedy for the aforementioned predicament ‒ etherial, magisterial soundscapes that hazily, droningly fill up up the whole sound spectrum and lay out a world that you can get lost in.  Just wonderful.  Breathtaking.

RGS-IBG 2014: 'Technology as a mode of existence, geopolitics as composition: Assessing Bruno Latour’s post-ANT political philosophy'

As part of my ongoing assimilation into geography I'll be presenting the following paper at the RGS-IBG (Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers) conference in London in August:

Technology as a mode of existence, geopolitics as composition: Assessing Bruno Latour’s post-ANT political philosophy

The abbreviation [tec] for technology designates not technical objects or the material world, not even networks or socio-technical networks, but that which we emphasize whenever we pay attention to the unexpected detours by which existents have to pass in order to subsist. (Latour, 2013a) 

[…] geopolitics is not about human politics overlaid on the static frame of the Earth, but politics about contradictory portions, visions, aspects of the Earth and its contending humans. (Latour, 2013b)

This paper addresses two highly pertinent recent developments in the work of Bruno Latour: first, his conceptualisation of technology as a ‘mode of existence’; second, his redefinition of geopolitics as the politics of the Earth or ‘Gaia-politics.’ Latour’s recent (2013c) An Inquiry into Modes of Existence represents a substantial development in his thinking that builds on but also goes way beyond his actor-network theory (ANT). As one of fifteen modes, ‘technology’ does not refer to a distinct ‘realm’ or a kind of thing but rather to a specific form of relation or translation, a distinctively technical form of becoming. In his Gifford Lectures (2013d) Latour drew on both James Lovelock’s Gaia theory and, significantly for students of geopolitics, Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth in order to redefine geopolitics as the politics of Gaia/the Earth. This paper will: first, introduce Latour’s modal philosophy; second, outline his re-definition of geopolitics; third, draw out the possibilities and problems, pros and cons of the aforementioned and, fourth, compare and contrast these ideas with the ‘state of the art’ in studies of technology and geopolitics. I find that while Latour's recent work can and will be of great utility to political geographers (just as his earlier work has been) it is also flawed and in need of thorough constructive criticism. This paper derives from my ongoing (and, at the time of writing, unpublished) efforts towards that end.

Kaplan's "The Coming Anarchy" at twenty

Journalist, travel writer and war enthusiast Robert D. Kaplan's infamous and expansively titled article The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet turned twenty on the first of this month.

Kaplan, writing in his role as Chief Geopolitical Analyst at the 'intelligence provider' Stratfor (they of got-hacked-by-Anonymous fame), reflects on his piece two decades on. He commends his prior foresight, concedes some errors in hindsight and offers some fresh insights into the causes of the "season of anarchy" that we are (allegedly) experiencing at present.

First, and seemingly foremost, "The End of Imperialism":

That's right [yeah, you heard me, liberals! ed.]. Imperialism provided much of Africa, Asia and Latin America with security and administrative order. The Europeans divided the planet into a gridwork of entities -- both artificial and not -- and governed. It may not have been fair, and it may not have been altogether civil, but it provided order. Imperialism, the mainstay of stability for human populations for thousands of years, is now gone.

'And they made the trains run on time,' he doesn't add. (There is an unmistakeable air of disappointment here. It wasn't so long ago that Kaplan was heralding the US Empire as the rightful heir to Rome via Britain, given no choice but to rule the world for the good of all mankind. Kaplan roped in his imperial adventurism a matter of weeks before the election of Barack Obama, acknowledging Iraq as folly and offering an apology of sorts. Wiley pundits anticipate the shifting of the wind...)

The other causes include the weak institutions, "feeble identities" and the demise of post-colonial strongmen. (This last point is deeply ironic given Kaplan's evangelical cheerleading for the Iraq War.)

He also finds much cause for fear in battles over religious doctrine within Islam:

Religion occupies a place in daily life in the Islamic world that the West has not known since the days -- a millennium ago -- when the West was called "Christendom."

('Christendom' as "lands where Christianity is the dominant religion" is only evident from the late 14th century but who's counting?)

It's wrapped up with the obligatory references to Twitter, etc. and a call for greater focus on building strong institutions:

The future of world politics will be about which societies can develop responsive institutions to govern vast geographical space and which cannot. That is the question toward which the present season of anarchy leads.

The apolitical governmentalism evidenced here that is so typical of Kaplan's writing is obnoxious but his call to give more attention to institutions is, I think, valid.

Kaplan may have vigorously propagandised for the Iraq War (and, indeed, been consulted directly by the Bush White House about it) but he never believed that Western-style liberal democracy could be simply parachuted in à la Peter Sloterdijk's deliciously ironic pneumatic parliament. In Iraq Kaplan wanted "a transitional secular dictatorship that unites the merchant classes across sectarian lines and may in time, after the rebuilding of institutions and the economy, lead to a democratic alternative." His wilful ignorance of all history aside (i.e. where does he think Saddam came from? do we need to have The Talk that explains how the US has been installing secular dictators for decades?), he is at least aware that democracy depends upon conditions much deeper and broader than any intrinsic aspiration innate in human nature that only needs to be uncapped by bomb or bullet in order to bloom.

What's the difference between a conservative realist and a neoconservative idealist? Little in practice ‒ they gush, fawn and spite just the same ‒ but it's easy to forget (as a European) how powerful liberal and neoconservative idealisms are in US foreign policy discourse. Realpolitik may have been in the ascendancy under Obama but it is generally seen as being the weaker school of thought in US political circles (though not so amongst military-types). It is against idealism, in the International Relations sense, that Kaplan is often (implicitly) railing.

[...] what is not in dispute is that significant portions of the earth, rather than follow the dictates of Progress and Rationalism, are simply harder and harder to govern, even as there is insufficient evidence of an emerging and widespread civil society.

Indeed. But one must really wonder if there isn't at least the tiniest little gap between the idealism of universalist "Progress and Rationalism" on the one hand and late Victorian geopolitics on the other.  Mightn't there be a meliorist middle sandwiched somewhere between the hateful pessimism of realpolitik and the naïf optimism of idealpolitik?

'If you can't say anything nice then don't say anything at all' ‒ sound advice for much of life but not so much for blogging about neo-imperialist war-mongers like Kaplan. The man is awful, just awful. But, having said that, it's important to see Kaplan as embedded in a political discourse that is by no means dominated by political realists. At least he recognises some of the complexities of the world and his urge to focus on building institutions rather than fixating on abstract, universal ideals is valid.

But small mercies are no saving grace. Kaplan is alternately a nasty, hateful purveyor of geopolitical bile and a clownish pseudo-scholar who isn't sure if Poland is in the EU or not. There's little to recommend him as a human being or as an analyst but he is an unavoidable case study in the power/knowledge economy of US geopolitical discourse over the past quarter of a century.

Latour on why international negotiations on the environment fail; redefining territory for Gaia-politics

The audio quality is not great (don't just film that microphone, use it!) but here's an interesting little bit from Latour giving three reasons why international negotiations, such as the Copenhagen Summit of 2009, fail.



First, because of the separation of science and politics; second, because the issues involved don't exist at a single spatial scale; third, mountains, glaciers, rivers, etc. have no real political standing in negotiations. The basic point seems to be that traditional representational political regimes can no longer deal with the issues that concern them, that twenty-first century politics are radically different to those of the past century and need an altogether different political theory.

The solution (or part of a solution), as detailed elsewhere (in French), is to redefine territory not as a bounded plot of the Earth's surface that's calculated, owned and guarded by a state but conceived in network-terms as all those attachments that are necessary for any entity to exist. These tangles of attachments are the proper referents of geo-politics qua Gaia-politics, Latour claims, and a new representational regime is required in order to deal with these issues that lack simple location (to borrow Whitehead's term).

While I think that this is all very interesting and provocative I have numerous problems with these ideas, not least the reduction of political questions to finding the correct design for the representational apparatus.  If only we could figure out the right forum, the argument seems to go, then all these problems could be settled.  But the most beautifully crafted platform in the world is for naught if we don't look at why some agents have such loud voices and others are silent, why some are so strident and others so stifled. Secondly, while territorial, state-based political apparatuses are easy to criticise and find inadequate they're much more difficult to think around or beyond. Indeed, Latour's own work presupposes the state as a political backdrop/guarantor/calculative-mechanism-among-others.

It all comes back, I think, to questions of force. Even if the proper institutions can be designed and their means of representation (in all senses of the word) invented what will give them the capacity to decide? And in asking that question we're drawn straight back from geo-politics qua Gaia-politics to geopolitics as it has been more traditionally understood ‒ questions of power, authority, sovereignty and violence raise their ugly heads again.

Latour has spent his whole career trying to ignore these kinds of questions but the deeper he delves into the political the less justifiable this aversion becomes. Now he is talking of geopolitics and territory (even if these terms are defined somewhat idiosyncratically) I think these issues have become truly unavoidable.

Marx, Weber, Schmitt, Foucault and all those theorists of the 'old' politics (as Latour would have it) are beating at the door of cosmopolitics! Perhaps it is time to let them in.

Pluralism and ontology: a second attempt

So, pluralism. Realism too.

It all kicked off on the blogosphere a couple of weeks ago! I dropped out of the conversation as I was first ill and then very busy. I’m only catching up on what other people wrote now, apologies to all wherever they're due. I’ll try to respond to some specific points later but here’s a general clarification:

I think my original statement about ‘granting all entities an ontology’ has been broadly misunderstood (probably my own fault). To grant a god, for example, an ontology is not to admit that everyone's gods exist in the way that their followers describe them – that is the wrong register to even think about it. All that is required is to grant that a god is more than the electrical ripples in someone’s brain, more than abstract, vaporous ideas transcendently opposed to an earthy, material reality. All that is required is that when someone says that their god is something beyond them, external to them, greater than them, that it imposes duties on them, has effects on them that they do not themselves will – we accept this. In short all that we need to accept is that gods are irreducible to any subjective, isolated instantiation, any floaty, ethereal ideality or any sociolinguistically sanitised intersubjectivity. We don’t have to agree that there’s really a big bearded old man sat up on a cloud, a mysterious force that watches everything we do or whatever. That’s irrelevant. Belief per se is irrelevant. The point is that the god is an entity that exceeds its believers, that circulates among them, that is brought into presence through the heterogeneous and, yes, material practices of worship. Nothing more than this. Everything else follows from this, I think.

It’s in making this distinction (between chasmic dualism and joined-up pluralism, essentially) that we see what Stengers means by ‘this is war’ and what Latour means by ‘iconoclasm.’ The hammer-happy modernist going around wantonly smashing the idols of the poor, stupid, ignorant believers believes that he is scything the scales from their eyes, revealing the truth behind the illusion, tearing the curtain to the ground and showing them how things really are, rescuing the poor saps from their false consciousness. But what he is really doing is a violence to their practices, to the ways in which they bring into presence the beings that make these people who and what they are. This iconoclasm is a violence perpetrated upon these people and their cherished entities at their very core. That’s the point. It’s not that we should all be obsequiously polite or just not say mean things about other people’s beliefs, nor is it necessarily to deny that some idols are bad idols and so deserve to get smashed – it’s that to go around smashing idols is not a pure, innocent activity, it’s not a matter of revealing the reality behind mere appearances, it can’t be neutralised and made apolitical by appeal to Reason, Nature or Science. It’s political. It’s about making and unmaking worlds. At best it’s creative destruction, at worst it’s cosmopolitical imperialism. It’s not a cosy fireside chat between friends who happen to have some divergent beliefs. It’s a very much more serious matter of engagement with profound estrangement, with others who neither desire nor welcome your input, with others who encounter your unprompted proclamations as to their lives and worlds not as an amusing conversation starter but as an imposition. When I say ‘violence’ I do not necessarily mean it literally but nor should the seriousness of the signifier be understated.

To tear down a god is to destroy an entity – this is all I mean by granting all things an ontology, I mean that we must recognise this fact. In no way, shape or form do we need to agree what mode of existence that entity enjoys, what capacities it has, what demands it can make on us. We needn’t agree about any of that. But in order to be meaningfully pluralist we need to recognise that going around smashing idols – figuratively or literally – is an act of violence, an act of destruction not of revelation. This is why we need to be diplomatic; this is what makes that whole ethos necessary. This is why political engagement with others cannot be secondary to or derivative from belief; belief is not the foundation upon which we act politically; politics is a whole other mode of action from believing and knowing. This is why it’s wrong to see ‘being nice about others beliefs’ as being a matter of mere politeness, or of tolerance – ‘tolerance’ is a vacuity.

The point can be driven home by the recognition that 'our' cherished practices are not immune to iconoclasm either; we do not occupy a privileged position outside, above and beyond the melee; we are all vulnerable. Science, too, can be smashed. Behind the modernist’s reckless, vicious abandon is the belief that his idols are made from the purest adamantium – indestructible. But this is not true. Science, too, is a fragile institution of world-making that institutes beings that can be destroyed by unbound, marauding iconoclasm. Capitalism is the iconoclast-in-chief. The ideal of science as a community of researchers openly and publicly pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake is becoming more and more brittle, friable, frail by the day. More and more research is conducted behind closed doors, more and more knowledge is patented and closed off from public consumption, more and more science is owned by the capitalists who fund the research rather than the scientists who perform it, less and less are scientists the agents of science as an exercise in exploring the world and discovering its secrets, more and more are they simply employees of whatever arms firm or shampoo manufacturer their fragile employment conditions and limited epistemic horizons have forced them to work for. (And that’s not even getting into issues such as climate cynicism and the Science Wars of the 1990s.) Science, too, is vulnerable.

And it cannot be otherwise. Without the practices, networks, assemblages, rhizomes, systems that bring into presence the entities that make us who and what we are then we are marooned in nothingness. So, do not give up an attachment lightly – this is the fundamental insight, I think. The diplomatic pluralist ethos stems from this. The smashing of an idol is not a mere riffing on ideas, utterly removed from material reality, it is an act of destruction. (If I can communicate only one thing please understand this: it is an act.)

Latour writes in his Inquiry:

Yes, there are beings that do not deserve to exist. Yes, some constructions are badly made. Yes, we have to judge and decide. (142)

Sometimes idols do need to be smashed. What I take from his arguments on this is that such acts of cosmopolitical violence need to be seen very clearly and understood for what they are. The decision to act against an idol or a cherished entity of any kind must be a responsible one – that is, those taking the decision must bear responsibility for it. And so we need to be able to distinguish between good and bad idols, good and bad iconoclasms (and necessary and unnecessary smashings) rather than simply swinging our hammers around recklessly, wantonly, freely – endowed with the right to do so as if by divine fiat.

We must resist the modernist philosophies that permit the destruction of world-making practices in complete innocence. For the modernists there is no violence in ideality and so nothing to think about. Tearing away the misty veil of illusions – what’s violent about that? What could be less violent? It requires no justification, no thought, no debate, no consideration, no politics. In the modernist schema iconoclasm is legitimate in and of itself, pretty much by definition, because to refuse iconoclasm is to accept living in a world of illusions – horror of all horrors. But if we reject the bifurcation of nature then we have to also reject the freedom of auto-justified iconoclasm. Without the appeal to a world of illusions that is of no intrinsic value in itself how can the modernist iconoclast claim such perfect innocence in his actions? How can he look himself in the eye if he is not revealing realities but rather destroying worlds? Depriving modernists of their dogmas, of their dualisms, of their innocence – that is the trick.

So, what of realism? If ‘realism’ means retaining this institutionalised thoughtlessness (in whatever derivative form) then I am happy to kick it to the curb. If ‘idealism’ means recognising that our worlds are fragile and that there is no bedrock beneath the beach then I’m an idealist. So be it. That said I think that an ‘idealism’ that so enthusiastically throws itself into the materiality of the world, into truths of science, into the concreteness of earthly being and which rejects any kind of ideality abstracted from the substance of the world is not an idealism worthy of the name. I’d prefer to call that realism but it’s not about who gets to appropriate which tag. It’s about finding ways of living in a world in which all are vulnerable, all can be lost; in which no entity that populates our world is so safe and secure that it does not require any kind of maintenance. It’s about forcing careful, considered thought to occur in the right places and at the right times. It’s against thoughtlessness, not reality.

So, the sun will keep burning if we all die. Sure, great. But without the practices that tie us to its fusion, its gravity, its flares then it’s just a hot, bright thing in the sky to us. Without our bodies and our thoughts it isn’t even that. Sun spots are only part of our world in any meaningful way given the institutions that allow us to dissociate and discern them from the general blazing hotness of the celestial sky-lump. I see nothing idealist in this – on the contrary, is it not the height of realism?

We cannot speak of a thing to which we are not tied, so why do we persist in trying? Why do we wrestle with our own finitude with such sage, serious, solemn and earnest and yet frenzied devotion? Why not throw our energies into studying the threads and knots of our world, our pluriverse and accept that when we abstract from these things and speak of things ‘out there, besides us’ we are doing so because our entanglements all sufficiently well-coiffed to permit us these inferences. We know the sun in all its glory because we have built these institutions that bring it more intimately into our world. Can we speak of the sun ‘in itself’? I don’t see how. But I also don’t see why anyone should care. It is surely impossible to speak of things in themselves in any absolute way but it is perfectly possible to infer how things would be without our networks from within our networks – indeed, because of our networks. Such a fiction is always speculative, constructive, contingent – and so?...

The point is that we should be happy to be swamped in our atmospheres, bound up in our networks, channelling the whisperings of our idols. These attachments are what make us strong – they are what make us. And if we accept this, if we accept our unavoidably swamped, bounded, entangled predicament, then I think this has real consequences for our political lives, too.

The pluralism of ‘that’s your opinion, dude’ isn’t much help if it’s based upon an ethos of mere politeness, of sniggering in private rather than public. A more diplomatic pluralism, as I have tried to articulate it at least, finds plurality at a deeper register; a pluralism of modes of action as well as a pluralism of umwelten. It’s my belief that these things, in fact, go together.

A true pluralism would not only accept the basic reality of others' idols, it would rush to support them if they were demonstrated to be of value to the world.

A true pluralist might recognise something of herself in the anguished cries of an other watching his world being torn apart.

Cosmopolitics and blasphemy

Levi has a reply to my musing on cosmopolitics, itself a reply to his thoughts on pluralism and realism.

One thing I didn't mention in my previous post (though I think I hinted at it) is that I am ambivalent about this diplomacy/cosmopolitics pluralist thing.  I'm probably more in favour than against on balance but I wrote that post more as a proposition than a thoroughgoing endorsement.  I share some of Levi's reservations and criticisms and have others besides.  Having said that, however, really I don't agree that it's idealism (if it's idealism where are the ideas? what's an idealism that accepts stars, bacteria and rocks as real?).  In fact I think some of the criticisms Levi gives bear little relation to what I wrote (I'm not offended or picking a fight or anything, just saying it as I see it!).

I get the feeling that realism that dares to say that a particular world-picture is mistaken is seen as somehow being intolerant or totalitarian or oppressive.

I get where Levi's coming from with that.  It's definitely something that Latour insinuates often enough but that's not how my preferred interpretation of his argument goes.

The cosmopolitician doesn't deny the possibility or occasional necessity of a 'war footing,' so to speak (I actually don't like this martial terminology but I'll stick with it for now).  If we look at Latour's reading of Carl Schmitt (key to his political writings since Politics of Nature) then it is the omnipresent possibility of 'war' that makes the political friend/enemy decision necessary and renders politics possible in the first place.  'War' is always a possibility and so this is not a lovey-dovey, liberal, 'aw shucks can't we all just get along' kind of pluralism.  It simply asks the questions: Can we get along or not?  Need we come to rhetorical or critical blows over this or can we just let it be?  What forces are at play?  What battles must we fight?  It forces decisions to be made rather than simply being in a perpetual battle with everyone around you by default.

As I understand it Latour and Stengers are not arguing for a wishy-washy pluralism but an agonistic pluralism à la Chantal Mouffe - a political philosophy explicitly based upon a deep critique of the very conflict-averse liberalism that Levi is suggesting cosmopolitics reproduces.  A pluralism that accepts the inevitability of conflict, which requires a friend/enemy decision to be made and that strives for an adversarial rather than antagonistic relationship (but accepts the possibility of either).  So, the claim that cosmopolitics would deny the possibility of justifiably agonistic or antagonistic debate is simply untrue, at least in my understanding.

In arguing that everything is a social construction, the pluralist undermines the possibility of public deliberation about truth.

This is also, in my opinion, simply false.  The claim seems to rest on a couple of premises: first, that all the cosmopolitics/instauration stuff is just a fancy new vocabulary for the same old social construction (debatable); second, that any meaningful concept of truth requires transcendence - either things are real or not, existent or non-existent, a social construction or a real reality and we must decide, definitively, on which category all things belong to or our mouths are somehow sewn shut or our words have no purpose.

And this strikes me as really odd.  I can't see how Levi's philosophy can allow for unmediated access to reality à la the view-from-nowhere - to be candid: it can't.  And yet such hard-boiled realism seems, to me, to necessitate such a thing.  So, if he can't hold that then he can only demand transcendent truth as a regulative ideal, something to strive for but which is by definition unachievable - in short as a practice.  And if he's conceded that then he's conceded the inevitability of mediation and, therefore, the inescapability of 'social construction.'  (I don't want to do the lame Kantian/correlationist 'gotcha' thing, even if I were capable of such, but I can't see a way around this.)  I don't deny (nor, I'm sure, would Stengers or Latour) that bifurcated reasoning can be very productive (indeed, one could valuably argue that it is a 'noble lie' that is necessary for some forms of discourse, especially scientific, despite being strictly impossible) but to separate the socially, practically constructed from the non-socially constructed (if we must persist in using these terms) in a fundamental, transcendent way requires unmediated access to something that transcends the practices that bear the enquiry, doesn't it?  Otherwise we simply have constructivism with added self-denial.  (I presume Levi would refer to critical realism on this point but I don't think their arguments work, personally.  In short: ontological realism and epistemological relativism can only be rounded off by judgemental rationalism given an essentialist view of the human subject.)

In disagreeing with an-other do we not, in fact, recognize their dignity as subject by attributing to them the capacity to both decide their own being and act according to reasons?  Isn’t there a sort of denigration of otherness in pluralism insofar as it thinks of people as mere products of their cultural horizon or world-picture?

Yes and no.  There's definitely something to this and under some circumstances I'd agree entirely.  I think that Latour and Stengers overgeneralise and fail to cast their ideas with anything like adequate clarity.  Quite often a friendly debate ending in 'agree to disagree' is perfectly adequate.  But then that's hardly a political discussion.  Where's the conflict?  Where's the friend/enemy declaration?  Having a friendly debate with a Bishop over dinner and drinks is an easy case, all too easy - roughly equal power relations (if anything the philosophy prof. holds a lower social status!), a social setting explicitly open to such debate and (I would presume to guess) many shared values besides the theological disagreements.  For an agonistic pluralist there's no politics here, just a bit of fun.

But debates over deities and idols aren't always conducted on such cosy, well-fed, egalitarian grounds.  Sometimes there's real conflict, real ant/agonism.  The much more difficult (and interesting) cases are ones where power relations are unequal.  The phrase Latour always comes back to is 'the modernising front.'  Stengers talks about capitalism and the way it destroys practices (including those of science).  I think they overstate their case, in a way.  Not every political situation is conquistadors facing off against Amazonians or colonialists lecturing natives (as important as these cases are).  Latour and Stengers sometimes act as though these were all the cases that mattered and clearly they're not.

So, sometimes, in some situations if one were to apply the 'I'll grant your deity an ontology for the sake of peace' thing it would be just a load of over-intellectualised hot air - yes, I'd grant that.  But then sometimes it's not.  And how can one make the distinction if one is committed to perpetual critique of the perceived irrationalities of others?  Cosmopolitics allows the distinction - brutish, dualist realism doesn't.

I don't think I've got any way of wrapping all this up in a neat little bow - I'm still unsure of all this myself.  Clearly this is an ongoing debate both between and within ourselves.  I'll conclude by saying that although the tension between pluralism and realism isn't zero-sum clearly a choice needs to be made.  The gruff, gravel-voiced realism that mutters under its breath about 'bloody idealists' and 'religious loons' is compatible with a pluralism of 'it's a free country - if you wanna believe in fairies, be my guest' but little else.  Maybe that kind of arrangement is the right one - I have some sympathies in that direction, I'll admit - but I don't think it's obviously right.  Not at all.

In my last post I linked to a stand-up routine on 'political correctness' by a British comedian called Stewart Lee.  He is probably best known internationally for co-writing Jerry Springer: The Opera (if you've not seen it do!).  It was a massive critical and popular success.  It was due to be aired on the BBC when an evangelical organisation orchestrated a campaign to stop it being broadcast, to close the show down and to prosecute the writers for blasphemy.  They objected to the portrayal of Jesus during a fantasy sequence (actually internal to Jerry Springer's twisted imagination).  There were also threats of violence and so on as you'd expect.  It was broadcast and no prosecutions were made, in part because the government didn't pass a blasphemy law that it was debating at the time.  (In the US you suffer from far greater evangelism but also enjoy far greater freedom of speech, which is in no way formally enshrined in law in this country.)   The evangelicals did succeed in preventing the show from touring provincial theatres, however, and so they ensured that the creators made little or no money from several years of work.

After the dust had settled Lee got back on the standup circuit he had given up pre-Springer.  He wrote a routine called Stewart Lee, '90s Comedian, which concluded the most intensely, scatalogically blasphemous story one could possibly imagine.  It has to be seen to be understood - he did it in such a way that the story seems real, almost moving.  It was, in short, a giant 'fuck you' to those who had hounded him and stressed him to the point of illness.  But, and this part has to be seen to be believed, he did all this with a sensitivity and intelligence that made a mockery of the blunt-headed stupidity of his haters.  He wasn't attacking Christianity as such, despite the monumental blasphemousness of his routine.  It was a squarely, forcefully, artfully directed blow straight onto the collective chin of those who had wronged him - directed at them in particular.

This was an 'act of war,' no doubt.  But it wasn't total war.  It wasn't perpetrated in the name of any absolute, it was strategic.  This is Carl Schmitt's realpolitik critique of liberalism: it leads to worse wars because they are wars fought in pursuit of absolutes rather than limited objectives.  Wars fought for 'freedom' or 'to end all wars' are, ultimately, wars of extermination.  I don't like building a political philosophy on the basis of war-talk (and basing it on Schmitt is, shall we say, problematic) but in this case it makes a point.  As soon as your introduce absolutes into the equation the ground shifts.

I realise that this is an inadequate explication of the point but it is all my brain seems capable of at present!  I suppose all I really mean is this: have friendly debates over dinner, sure; say 'fuck you' to evangelicals who want to impress their fundamentalisms on you, of course; but hold out the possibility that peaceable relations are also possible besides simply saying 'I think you're an idiot but each to their own.'  The value of the diplomatic attitude, I think, is that it broadens the range of attitudes possible towards others and it permits this at an ontological level.  It closes off nothing - it's openness that's the point.

London Underground's Victoria Line suspended due to control room being flooded with quick setting concrete

Actor-network theorise that!

The irruptions of infrastructure!

Ontological conflicts, political pluralism

Levi Bryant has a new post up (responding to Jeremy Trombley) on the difficulties of being both pluralist and realist:

We need a pluralistic– a pluralism that also recognizes different animal worlds as phenomenologically described by Uexkull –to cultivate compassion and proper ethical regard for others; a big part of which involves recognizing the limitations of ones own conceptual schemes, attempting to understand others, or at least recognize that they might inhabit worlds of meaning (in Heidegger’s sense) that differ substantially from our own. However, we need a realism because there are facts of the matter pertaining to what causes psychic maladies, climate change, how economy functions, etc., and when we get these things wrong we generate horrific practices. How, then, can these things be thought together? I don’t know. It seems I’m continuously trying to square circles.

(Well, let me try to circle that square! ... sorry.)

Ontologically and metaphysically the idea of realist pluralism is no longer an issue.  There are (appropriately) numerous variants but the basic idea that reality is itself pluralistic is well established.  The question is political-discursive.  It's what Stengers and Latour are getting at with their concepts of diplomacy and cosmopolitics.

They grant, first, that all entities exist and, second, that to say that someone's cherished idol (or whatever disputed entity they hold dear) is non-existent is a 'declaration of war' - 'this means war,' as Stengers often says.  They thus shunt onto-political discourse off of the terrain of knowledge/belief in the sense of existence/non-existence.  Their basic claim seems to be that 'respect for otherness,' i.e. political pluralism, can only come from granting the entities that others hold dear an ontology, even if you don't 'believe' in them.  You are thus permitted to say 'I do not follow that god, he has no hold over me' but you are not permitted to say 'your god is an inane, infantile, non-existent fantasy, grow up.'  And it's not just a question of politeness (although there's that too).  The point is to grant others' idols and deities an existence - one needn't agree over what that existence entails, over what capacities that entity has or what obligations it impresses upon you as someone in its partial presence but to deny it existence entirely is to 'declare war' - to deny the possibility of civil discourse, of pluralistic co-existence.

I think it's important to add that they do not deny the possibility of legitimate 'war talk' - perhaps there are circumstances where that is entirely justified, in fact it's inevitable - but the properly political question should be 'how can we live together?'  That is not a utopian political programme but a pragmatic one.  And that's also the root of the notion of the composition of a common world through diplomacy.

I found (and still find) this a difficult notion to get my head around.  The notion of 'speaking your mind,' of 'saying what you really mean' is so engrained in many ways that to temper that seems dishonest.  But we do it all the time, in practice.  That's 'political correctness' (which, contrary to reputation, has not actually 'gone mad').



Interestingly, although Stengers and Latour base this political philosophy upon their interpretation of anthropological praxis (combined with that of diplomacy), this kind of mutually accepting ontology is not entirely de rigeur within anthropology.  Mario Blaser is developing basically the same set of ideas within anthropology itself, talking about ontological conflicts and political ontology.

Schooltime biopolitics (beware: may cause psychosomatic itching)

John Protevi re-posts a post by Eric Schliesser on lice and biopolitics in his son's school.  Protevi writes:

Schliesser thought he could escape the Borg, but a senior philosopher elsewhere has tracked him down for us here. In this very interesting reflection, he writes about the head-lice inspection all Dutch kids undergo at school, and connnects it to Foucaultian analyses of biopolitics (or, with less fancy terms, that government rationality that licences, among other things, involvement in public health). But, as Schliesser recognizes, it's hard to be simply "against" public health -- what, you *want* your kids and other kids to have lice?

It's an interesting microcosm of a case but this kind of thing flies dangerously close to petty, bourgeois, liberalist whinging - am I alone in feeling this?

Maybe this inspection regime is handled in an unduly authoritarian and sexist manner - that's an issue, clearly - but Eric seems to be taking exception not only with the way this is handled but also with the mere fact of the examination as though it were something quite sinister.

I think the term biopolitics is actually a very poorly one.  It should really be called biogovernance.  Politics implies popular deliberation (if etymology means anything) - biopolitics usually implies something imposed from above/outside (i.e. something more like governance).  Drawing a distinction between these two things allows us to say, provisionally, that biogovernance that precludes biopolitics (i.e. popular contestation) is wrong but biogovernance is not, in itself, a bad thing.  Who doesn't want schools to look after their children's health?  Why shouldn't the state do postnatal checkups?  The real questions are how difficult it is to subject these procedures to contestation and how resistant the mechanisms are to adaptation in light of the participation of those they affect.  (Been reading a lot of Dewey recently, I apologise.)

I don't want to sound belligerent because it's an interestingly mundane case of everyday biopolitics/biogovernance but there is a part of me that's tempted to just snort and ask: first world problems much?

Compare this lice thing to something far more serious like the MMR/autism issue.  That isn't something superficial but a matter of life and death, potentially.  What right does the state have to force people to immunise their kids or nit-comb their hair?  It's very easy to just say 'hands off, you dirty State!' but that is, in my opinion, a reactionary and vulgar liberalism that doesn't recognise the profundity of the political entanglements that the health sciences put us in.  If some parents free ride either in terms of nit-combing or MMR jabs then the health of the whole population may suffer.  So whose liberty trumps whose?  Freedom from state interference or freedom from nits and measles, mumps and rubella?  We don't even need to get past negative liberty to see the conundrum.

Of course these things are often handled badly and any kind of state official with a small amount of power can become an unpleasant fascist - complaining about that is all perfectly valid - so I don't want to detract from the frustration that this kind of thing can create but then again ... come on.  Head-lice are unpleasant things to be afflicted with and they can spread through a school like wildfire, even with intensive combing regimes.  Smothering the issue in a dose of Foucault doesn't, ultimately, cover up the fact that this is a bit of comfortable, middle-class, weekday, school-gate griping.

At the level of political philosophy there's not much more than a cigarette paper's width between this kind of thing and parents taking their kids out of biology class because they don't want them being indoctrinated about that there evolution gubbins.  It speaks, to my ears, not so much to a love of liberty as to a hatred of politics and communal life in general.

I'm probably being completely unfair to Eric about this but it's written and I'm tired so there's no going back now.