On 'On Writing Well'

Stephen Walt comments on the generally terrible quality of academic writing:

... the poor quality of academic writing is both aesthetically offensive and highly inefficient. Academics should strive to write clearly for the obvious reason that it will allow many others to learn more quickly. Think of it this way: If I spend 20 extra hours editing, re-writing, and polishing a piece of research, and if that extra effort enables 500 people to spend a half-hour less apiece figuring out what I am saying, then I have saved humankind a net 230 hours of effort.
... many academics (and especially younger ones) tend to confuse incomprehensibility with profundity. If they write long and ponderous sentences and throw in lots of jargon, they assume that readers will be dazzled by their erudition and more likely to accept whatever it is they are saying uncritically.

And he quotes Strunk and White:

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

I agree with most of this but I think it needs to be said that there's more to 'good writing' than clarity and parsimony. Academic writing should also be interesting and engaging. Clunky, plodding, dull, dry, unimaginative, artless prose can be just as hard to wade through as the meandering, pleonastic, self-important, jargon-stuffed kind. A telephone directory is clear and to-the-point but it isn't good writing.

Making a point in 100 words rather than 500 is certainly to be preferred, all else being equal -- but all else is not equal. It doesn't hurt to explain complex points in a few different ways. Nor are poetic devices or rhetorical or polemical flourishes in the least bit out of place in academic writing so long as they are used to emphasise, complement or punctuate the substance of the argument, rather than replacing or obscuring it.

For good writers clarity, parsimony, compellingness and elegance are not only uncontradictory -- they are concordant.

So, while I completely agree that academic writers should try to avoid wasting their readers' time they should also try to avoid boring their readers to death, if possible.

A paramedic's view of the 'modesty' of bankers

Worlds apart from all the bombastic verbiage of academics and would-be intellectuals, real life experience, when expounded with eloquence, is wont to cut straight to the point:

I am an ambulance medic and part of a two-man crew. We often get up at 4am, check over a 999 frontline ambulance, then drive anything up to two hours to our area of cover, all in our own time. Then follows a 12-hour intensive shift, where we deal with anything from multiple car pile-ups to seriously ill children. We are sometimes abused both verbally and physically. Sometimes we are threatened with sharp implements and have to negotiate or even physically fight for our safety.

Half-hour rest breaks are not always taken due to the demand on services. We then have the drive back, where we have to clean our vehicles before driving home. The stress is monstrous, but we are exempt from any legislation that makes sure we are not worked to death as we are an emergency service. Our average wage is about £15 an hour. We are life savers, counsellors and sometimes just company, as we hold the hand of someone beyond help. We have cultivated a black sense of humour so we do not crumble and, even so, often cry on the way home. I am sure there are many other professions which have their own untold stories of daily physical and mental hardship.

I would like to say to Sir Philip Hampton of RBS that our wages are "modest" for what we do (RBS chief underpaid, says chairman, 12 February). A multimillion-pound pay packet for a banker's success or failure is not "modest". We take home in a gruelling year of real blood, sweat and tears what Stephen Hester earns in six days. I wish that those who earn such sums would realise that their renumeration is not right. Perhaps they should not apply terms to themselves like "I have one of the hardest jobs in the world" (Fred the Shred) until they see what others do on a fraction of their wage. What comes out of their mouths undermines millions of hard working people in this country. If an ambulance turned up to one of their children severely injured on a country road, would we seem only worth £15 an hour? As they watched as we fought for their child's life, far from back up and hospital facilities, would they reconsider the value of jobs that do not make a profit?

Would they consider our wages modest as they apply this term to their own? Modest is a powerful word and has to be earned.

That's an extremely powerful bit of writing.  Angry but not nasty, indignant but not exasperated; 'modest' in all the right ways.  Humility is the word.  And it casts quite a stark and revealing light on the mollycoddled myopia of elites -- how they can, it seems completely earnestly, buy their own hype -- that they're irreplaceable, irrepressable Übermenschen doing what no one else could, benefiting everyone by benefiting themselves.

At least it seems that way.  Is it real or is it just spin?  Do elites really believe that they are hard done by when they are given only 'modest' severance packages or when people say they should be prosecuted for crimes that 'everyone else was doing' (see MP's expenses, LIBOR fixing, all manner of financial crimes perpetrated by those 'too big to jail').  Are they so cut off from the rest of the world, so naive?  Or is that just the face they present, all the while being cruel, devious, backstabbing bastards?

Well, perhaps the two things are not mutually exclusive.  History shows that elites invariably buy into their own propaganda even while they understand that it is propaganda -- cognitive dissonance be damned, Orwell be praised.  If it's true that we judge our social status relative to our immediate peers rather than society as a whole then business and financial elites are under no less pressure than anyone else to climb further up the slagheap of capital -- few ever reach the summit and those who do so do not so much admire the view as worry about those clawing their way up from behind.

An obtuse metaphor, to be sure, but then I'm no paramedic.

Whitehead, Latour, the reality of events, irreduction

Levi is back with some thoughts on realism, flat ontology and so on:

I just can’t agree with Whitehead regarding things like rainbows and the beauty of sunsets.  Oh sure, I think these things are real enough because they involve the properties of light coupled with brains. ... I draw a distinction between “exo-qualities” and “endo-qualities”.  An endo-quality is a quality that resides in the thing itself.  It’s there regardless of whether or not anything relates to it.  An exo-quality, by contrast, is something that only emerges in a relation between two or more entities.

Interesting stuff!  Forgive me my rambling:

Isn't 'light + rain + brain' an object itself?  Sure, they're objects individually and the rainbow qua aesthetic object only exists by their becoming related but, in Whitehead's terms, doesn't this combination of things forms a unique actual occasion?  In your terms doesn't it form an object, emergent from and irreducible to its component parts?  From the perspective of the rain droplets the rainbow may be merely exorelated as it is an event that the rain constitutes by entering into relationships with other things without exhausting the rain's own specificity.  However, from the perspective of the rainbow qua aesthetic event itself the rain droplets are endo-related because they are part of the event.

The fact that this event requires a brain is, therefore, neither here nor there -- it also requires a body, water, air, sun, particular atmospheric conditions, etc.  Rainbows aren't real in the same way that rain drops are real -- this is certainly true.  But this is a perspectival question since you could equally say that, from the perspective of an oxygen atom, the water molecule that it constitutes along with two hydrogen atoms isn't 'real' in the same way as the atoms themselves.  The water molecule isn't 'real, out there' because without the oxygen atoms there would be no molecule.  Similarly, the rainbow isn't 'real, out there' because without the perceiving brain there is no rainbow, only water in air forming a prism that diffracts light.

If there is a difference between these two examples it is because you have introduced a distinction between cognitive apprehension and other kinds of relations -- not an indefensible argument but one that must be made carefully.

So, beauty isn't a property of the droplets or the lightwaves or even these things together but we can definitely say that it is a property of the rainbow.  Beauty is a property of the rainbow so long as we accept that the rainbow is constituted by perceiving beings as well as rain, light, etc. -- that it is not an object perceived by a subject but an object that includes a subject.  The rainbow is not beautiful unless it includes a mind that perceives it as such but that doesn't mean that beauty is not a property of the rainbow itself, that beauty is confined to the mind.  It just means that it is contingent upon the precise constitution of the aesthetic event.

I'm just thinking 'out loud' now but we could say that two people looking at the 'same' rainbow won't experience beauty in the same way, therefore beauty is only in their minds.  But Whitehead could just say 'well, they're not looking at the same rainbows, then'.  They're looking at the same droplets and light rays, perhaps, but not the same rainbows.  So, rainbows are subjective, as is their beauty, but they are subjective in the sense that they include one and only one perceiving subject.  They are not a subjective apprehension of an external objective reality as this would mean perceiving subjects transcending objective reality, all looking out on the same, singular reality but experiencing it severally.  But they are a singularly subjective apprehension in the sense that these aesthetic events -- the rainbow qua beautiful thing -- can only include one perceiving subject.  When two or more people look at the 'same' rainbow they are experiencing two different events that merely share some constituent parts.

So, it's not a case of several subjects perceiving a singular reality but several aesthetic events involving an overlapping plurality.  This makes sense to me but it clearly requires a category of 'subject' distinct from other kinds of objects because there are many objects within a rainbow -- billions of water droplets, innumerable lightwaves, etc. -- but, for it to be a 'subjective experience' in the manner I described, it can contain only one subject.  Add another subject and you have two aesthetic events.

Although perhaps we are not trapped in our individual subjectivity.  Perhaps if we talk about, write about, paint about our experiences of beauty and if we share the same cognitive and aesthetic preconditions with other subjects then we can share experiences of beauty.  Perhaps through social, artistic processes we can draw our experiences together and perhaps we can meaningfully talk about multi-subject aesthetic events.  But those subjects would have to be drawn together by other conditions beyond the isolated events themselves.  We'd have to be drawing in further mediators, as it were.

Anyway, on Latour's principle of irreduction, people seem to forget what he actually says:

1.1.1 Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything
else.
• I will call this the 'principle of irreducibility', but it is a prince
that does not govern since that would be a self-contradiction

That's his first principle in its entirety and each part of it is significant.  People often fixate on the 'irreducible' part and think that the principle is all about everything being unique and sui generis and nothing being articulable in terms of anything else.  I recall Ray Brassier in his review of Irreductions being most upset at how Latour said, first, that everything was irreducible but then proceeded to reduce everything -- even science, the horror! -- to his own terms.  He didn't realise that this is actually Latour's entire point! -- that the only way of understanding and perhaps even existing in the world is via an infralanguage (or something similar) that articulates other things in its own terms, thus reducing and rendering articulable what may be irreducible in its entirety but is not entirely irreducible.  (But then I don't think Brassier even really tried to understand that book -- his intention was damnation, not fair reading.)  Latour later calls this process 'formatting' and it's really the core of his whole philosophy.

Anyway, I'm all for unflattening the ontology.  Flattening it is just a first, critical step taken to erase all the fallacious distinctions that others have made in error.  Ultimately, having reduced everything to a single type, one must be able to make categorical distinctions within that typology.  Perhaps subjectivity can be suitably rearticulated in the manner I described above, or some other way.

The cult of 'policy relevance'

Duck of Minerva draws attention to yet another know-it-all-know-nothing mouthing off about how political science should be stripped of state funding since it doesn't inform policymakers.  PM excoriates this reasoning, noting that if policymakers fail to heed social or political science this isn't necessarily the fault of scientists -- perhaps it is the policymakers who are at fault.

However, beyond that, isn't the worst part of the 'policy relevance' obsession the notion that social science exists solely to satisfy the epistemic requirements of the state? That academics are really just government think-tankers who do a bit of teaching on the side?

Why is it always just 'policy relevance'? Why not 'activist relevance'? Why not 'public relevance'? For that matter, why not 'student relevance'? One can hardly teach a subject that no one researches. Doing research for the benefit of students or simply for the sake of informing public discourse is at least as honourable, in my view, as producing knowledge for policymakers. Perhaps even more so.

The accusation that social science is policy irrelevant and therefore should be de-funded shouldn't be counter-argued simply by maintaining that it is policy relevant because that response accepts the premise of the accusation: that policy relevance is the only meaningful metric for assessing the value of research.

As the story about Karzai demonstrates, policymakers shouldn't be spoken of in such hushed, cowed, deferential tones. The people with the power are quite often complete cretins -- and nasty, corrupt ones at that. Why should we want to write policy advice for these people? Chances are they'll either misunderstand or just plain ignore it.

Quite simply, academic research can be a public good (and therefore justify receiving state funding) even if it doesn't directly inform policy-making. Having a critically minded, well informed civil society is at least as important for achieving peace and justice as having well-briefed and advised political elites.

The Cancer of 'Values'; Or, you can't hang your 'values' on a peg

Another interesting post at Duck of Minerva, this time on science and 'values' in human rights scholarship:

Questions of personal biases and valid science permeate all facets of science; of course, we as social scientists face these questions all the time in our research.  Do personal biases get in the way of our science?  Is there any way around our personal biases?

I’m a firm believer that the process of science allows us to eliminate many of the potential biases that we carry around with us. ...

My somewhat Latourian take on this issue would be this: Of course science allows people to get around their personal biases; that's the whole point of science as a formal, social, discursive, argumentative, agonistic, critical, collective process.  Without this science has nothing.  However, scientists can only 'get around' their own biases by making their experiments and reasoning public and having others reproduce their experiments and reasoning.

But let's define 'bias' broadly.  Is assay result X the product of a hitherto undiscovered protein or a contaminated batch of enzymes?  Contamination is a 'bias' to the experiment in that it is an unwanted variable intruding upon the artificially purified experimental design.  The scientist can take many steps to check, doublecheck and crosscheck their results but ultimately the only thing that will establish result X as a fact rather than an artifact is the experiment's successful reproduction by other scientists in other labs around the world.  An individual scientist's personal preferences on the outcome of an experiment may prove to be an extraneous variable intruding upon the experimental design, that is to be determined.  However, the way they overcome this is not by being 'value neutral' in their own minds as such, it is by designing their experiment as best they can and then submitting the whole process to critical peer review, which may or may not validate their claims.

No individual scientist can or should ever be 'value neutral' -- if they didn't care about the outcome of the experiment why would they bother doing it?  The only 'neutrality' science can have emerges in its sociality, in its practices of argumentation -- in being validated by numerous different values.  It isn't about 'checking your biases at the door' so much a not letting them intrude into your experimental design.  'Values' are not an item of clothing that you can arbitrarily hang up on a clothes peg -- that's a very poor metaphor, albeit a common one.  Being 'scientific' is better described, I think as an ongoing process of drafting, redrafting and self-critique prior to the social critique of peer review.  If your conclusions are based on nothing more than your own wishes and wants then your arguments will be undone as easily as pointing out a batch of contaminated enzymes.  If the argument draws upon no more support than empty rhetoric then it'll be quickly exposed as hot air.  A strong argument requires more evidential and rational support than a statement of desires.  Scientists needn't transcend their values, they need only produce an argument that is stronger than the values that inspired it.

Human rights research has precious little in common with molecular biology and it can never follow the same scientific practices or adhere to the same standards (nor should it want to) but it can follow a similar process: produce arguments that are stronger than the values they are inspired by; produce arguments that can be validated by a wide range of value orientations.

So, no, a cancer researcher needn't have any specific value orientation in the sense of being 'pro-' or 'anti-' cancer (though one would hope that it is not the former!) but nor can or should any researcher be 'value neutral' -- our values get us out of bed in the morning.  Wanting to produce objective knowledge about cancer: that's a value in and of itself.

US/UK 'Special Relationship', Britain's financial empire

An interesting post at Duck of Minerva on Britain's relations with the US.

It has long been noted that the UK's national interest foreign policy-wise is halfway between the US and the EU. Yet what Brits fail to realise is that our value to the US very much depends on being part of the EU. Actually, I think a lot of the political elites do understand this but the nationalist (or perhaps a better word would be 'sovereigntist') lobby is still very powerful and a lot of parliamentary political fates depend on it, especially for the Tories.

The one major thing that's missing from Stacey's analysis is the UK's financial sector, which has the British political system in its pocket, even now. The Conservative government seem to see Britain's future in its economic and financial empire, connected through its former colonies in the British Virgin Islands, Gibraltar, etc. (Britain's "Second Empire", as Ronen Palan calls it.) The overriding national interest, as the right-wing elites see it (though not so much the right-wing electorate -- that's the schism), is to maintain Britain's position within the world's financial networks and to dig in deeper if possible. Hence the austerity agenda isn't just neoliberal ideological madness (though it is that) -- they also intend to strip away as much regulation as possible while choking off the last remnants of social democracy so as to give Britain an edge in the 'race to the bottom' of the barrel of global finance. David Cameron's recent rhetoric on tax avoidance, etc. would suggest the contrary to this but his words are hollow and in no way represent his government's actions or intentions. Because this path is a road to economic -- and consequently political -- ruin for most of the country the real question is whether they can achieve all their goals before the next election, which they look rather likely to lose at this rate.

I don't know as much as I should about Britain's military capabilities but it is remarkable that our government continues to insist (as did the Labour govt. before it) that we still need a so-called independent nuclear deterrent but we can do without the kind of resources that would actually be of use in the 21st century neo-colonial, interventionist style of warfare that seems to be the new norm. Maybe Britain needs to get it's priorities straight. I won't hold my breath.

Anyway, when push comes to shove on the EU I expect Britain's relationship to remain largely unaltered. If renegotiation happens it'll involve getting out of whatever taxes or regulations the EU wants to put on the City of London. Leaving the EU would be generally popular with the public but business has no desire for it and that, as I have mentioned, is where Britain's national interest is seen to reside.

David Campbell on 'the retreat from reality' / The need for political epistemology

David Campbell has very nice, thought provoking piece on the right-wing disregard for science and evidence generally, particularly in the cases of climate change and gun violence.  He concludes with the following:

Of course, there is – especially for those of us with post-structuralist philosophical commitments – no easily discernible, singular, uncontested reality. There are no facts beyond dispute or arguments immune from contestation. No group has privileged access to the truth. Reality has to be narrated and narratives are inherently constructed. But some stories have more support than others, and the “concordance of evidence” favours some positions over others. When anyone flies in the face of such evidence it’s time to get angry and insist that we won’t stand for such BS.

I have a few comments as I think this raises a whole load of really interesting questions:

While it's true that a nuanced, epistemologically relativist social theory of knowledge does not preclude the kind of hearty, thorough evidentialism that we so desperately need -- no part of scepticism or constructivism necessitates cynicism or nihilism -- I don't see much in the poststructuralist canon (as I understand it) that provides the theoretical resources for such a discussion.  The very notion of evidential 'support' is not a positive concept that I've encountered in poststructuralist writing.  Indeed, the very notion implies the kind of epistemological commitments that such writings go out of their way to avoid.  That isn't to say that poststructuralist writings do not deploy evidence; of course they do, your own work included.  But the theory with which this evidence is articulated tends to be stuck in a critical, narrowly relativist register of admitting that its own account is one theory among many and that it is just 'keeping the discussion going' in Rortyean fashion.  Consequently, such accounts generally claim no greater epistemic authority than being one legitimate voice within the discussion.

In my view, saying that "some stories have more support than others, and the 'concordance of evidence' favours some positions over others" goes beyond merely 'keeping the conversation going' -- it takes us into the realm of epistemology proper and a step or two outside the comfort zone of any acknowledged 'poststructuralist' theory that I've ever read.  This argument does not, of course, invalidate anything but, if it is correct, it imparts a theoretical burden -- it demands that we acknowledge the inadequacy of what we had previously relied upon and endeavour to go beyond it.

Essentially what you seem to be calling for is what Latour (who isn't generally understood to be a 'poststructuralist', although his thought is certainly related) calls 'political epistemology.'  All epistemology, for Latour, is political because epistemology isn't just about how or why we believe what we do -- it's not a neutral theory about the basic mechanics of knowledge; rather, it's about what we should believe and how we can make others believe what we think is right (in every sense of the word).  The most obvious kind of political epistemology is the 'demarcation criteria' of scientistic philosophers of science -- of what gets to count as science (and thus be valid) and what doesn't (and what is consequently invalid).  But it runs far deeper than that.

As I see it, you can't have 'evidentialism' without a discussion of what does and (importantly) does not count as evidence and this requires active endorsement of particular standards -- a political epistemology or 'political metrology,' if you will.  It requires the progressive institution of a collective epistemological reality.  This reality is inevitably contested -- indeed, scepticism and contestation are its very conditions of possibility -- but it must also be built up, endorsed, promoted, reinforced, rationalised, validated -- not just cut down, scrutinised, picked apart and deconstructed.  It must be active -- in that it creates, circulates and promotes new ideas and instruments -- and not just reactive -- in the sense of picking up on existing discourses and subjecting them to scrutiny.  And this brings us to perhaps the biggest challenge for poststructuralism: the need to interrogate the purposes and the limitations of 'critique' and 'critical theory' in general -- of the need for something besides and beyond (or in addition to) these practices.

Latour's new book, coming out in English soon, on 'modes of existence' talks about the need to rediscover trust in institutions, such as science.  That is basically the issue: evidentialism requires a kind of epistemic institutionalism, a collective epistemological project based not just on scepticism but also on trust, on belief.  This institution needn't be 'scientific' but it needs to be definite and exclusive.  It needn't dispense with 'anything goes' as such but it needs to recognise that such epistemic anarchism is but an initial step, logically prior to a more formal sorting process that includes and excludes, legitimating some knowledge claims and delegitimating others.  It can no longer be enough to just 'keep the conversation going' by adding one more voice to the mix.  That plays straight into the hands of the climate denialists and the gun fetishists, etc. who relish, embelish, exaggerate and exploit epistemic division and uncertainty so as to extract political advantages.  Unvarnished epistemological relativism -- in the sense of rendering all knowledge claims formally equal -- is incapable of issuing the necessary clarion call for 'evidence' because what evidence is requires a definite idea of what it is not, which implies an exclusionary distinction.

So, perhaps it's time to reconsider those fusty old epistemology-obsessed modernists who undoubtedly gave us the wrong answers but were nevertheless asking the right questions...  They were wrong in arguing that epistemological validity -- i.e. 'Truth' -- was singular, universal and transcendent but they were right in understanding the political need for socially validating some knowledge claims over others.  They were wrong in making the validation criteria -- 'Reason, Science,' etc. -- abstract and accessible only to the elites but they were right in understanding that such epistemological criteria are politically indispensible.

We live in an age of 'cynical reason,' as Sloterdijk put it; or, in Latour's words, we live in an age where critique has been 'miniaturised' -- that is, perfected, instrumentalised and woven into the fabric of everyday life such that we scarcely even notice it.  The tools and techniques that were constructed for the struggle against power have been internalised by the powerful and turned against resistance itself, hitting it square in its very conditions of possibility.  For both these guys this political fact indicates the inadequacy of poststructuralist theory, as received.  I tend to agree.

I know that David has been over similar ground in his arguments in print with Colin Wight et al.  As I recall he argued then that epistemic validation should be found in ethics rather than epistemology, strictly speaking.  I'll shut up now since this is already more essay than comment, but I think it suffices to say that I don't think that 'ethics' alone does the job.  The concept of political epistemology seems to me to be a more fruitful avenue, precisely because neither half of the phrase is reducible to the other -- it must be both political and epistemology.  If 'evidence' is to have meaningful, positive political force within a poststructuralist understanding of the world, something like Latour's 'institutions' (or perhaps Badiou's 'Truths') are called for.  I see room for them within poststructuralism in general but it is just that -- room, empty space yet to be filled.

More on Agency, Millennium Conference

A bit of background might help elucidate how and why I arrived at my last post on things and agency.  I was suddenly compelled to write about it by Jeremy's post but I'd been thinking about it for a while.

Until quite recently I too was quite happy to use 'agency' in the more-or-less Latourian fashion (as a catchall term for 'causal efficacy' of any sort) and considered any objection to it to be simply reactionary.  It was attending the Millennium journal's conference on 'Materialism in World Politics' a few months ago that changed my mind.  The conference itself seemed to be split down the middle to some degree in terms of the theoretical persuasion of the attendees: half were dyed-in-the-wool historical materialists of one sort or another; the other half were acolytes of materialism after the fashion of Latour, Connolly, Bennett, Haraway, etc.  I found it interesting that the to-and-fro of the argumentation between the two camps eventually ended up orbiting around one issue in particular: that of the 'agency' of things.

Some, Colin Wight and David Chandler for two, argued strongly against the attribution of agency to things.  Another person even called it 'fascist' since it 'eliminated the difference between people and things.'  This objection is, of course, totally reactionary.  Granting 'agency' to things doesn't destroy the difference between humans and other kinds of things; it makes the difference one within a plurality rather than across a duality and ontologically secondary rather than primary.  However, some objections were more nuanced.  The argument that really persuaded me was that the concept of political agency is a hard-won spoil of ideological conflict and that it mustn't be taken for granted because many political ideologies deny the notion of human beings in general having the capacity for reflexivity, self-consciousness and intentional, purposive, intelligent action.  We see this today with the creeping technocratisation of governance in Europe, disguised and rationalised by economics and the cult of There Is No Alternative, for example.  Such ideologies are real today and they were even more so in the past.

This made me realise that agency in science and in politics are quite different things.  In science human agency, conventionally defined, has been granted far too much but in politics this is not the case; in politics the very capacities that were so overstated in scientists need to be cultivated, nurtured and promoted.  What in one instance was so hyper-abundant as to be a pest in the other is, if not endangered, not in overwhelmingly good health.

We certainly need to understand the impurity and complexity of politics in terms of the massive proliferation of things qua 'issues' (as in 'dingpolitik') and we need to be rid of the myth of naked humans talking amongst themselves but we also need to recognise that there is an enduring truth in the various theoretico-political myths of 'humans amongst themselves' -- that there are specificities to human being that require special theoretical terms.  Human being may not be unique in type but it is singular in importance and so we need to be careful when we are taking apart the concepts with which its specificity has hitherto been captured, even if we are justified in performing such disassembly work in general.

So, I don't pretend to have any answers here.  I'm not saying that the old humanist version of agency must necessarily be preserved.  I'm largely won over by Levi's articulation of agency as gradational and to be attributed in its varying forms on the basis of empirical evidence rather than a priori.  Jeremy's splitting of the term into three works well too.

I suppose what I'm trying to say programmatically is that a lot of work has been done un-bifurcating nature, flattening ontology, pluralising duality, post-ing humanism and so on and a large part of this has involved dethroning the naked human Subject.  However, that, for any social or human science, can only be an initial, critical move; an earth-clearing exercise.  The attribution of 'agency' to things worked well at that stage but it has become dehistoricised and ANT has become known as 'the theory that things have agency' -- as ANT quietly steamrollers its way through the human sciences this claim becomes gradually indissociable from everything else anyone has ever said about it.  A far greater degree of nuance than this is now required

It seems that Levi and Jeremy are both well ahead of me on this but I met numerous people at the Millennium conference who were still very much stuck with the impression that the claim that 'things have agency' is very much the insight of Latour, ANT, etc.  I now think that this is not the important insight so much as it was one way of articulating a broader point in a way that worked analytically, polemically and philosophically in that particular context (science studies in the 1980s) but that is less than adequate now.

I suppose this is ultimately just a 'baby and bathwater' argument: I think that 'agency' as traditionally defined has some conceptual and political importance, despite its flaws, so we should be careful when redefining it, though redefine it we must.

A Defence of 'Agency' and Human Specificity

A nice post at Struggle Forever got me thinking.  Some of the below is directly related to it and then I go off into some general wanderings:

If agency is intentionality and efficacy, then structure can be seen as a kind of agency itself rather than merely the opposition to agency or a kind of determinancy.

There's another way of looking at this which is to say that, yes, structure and agency are two different kinds of causal efficacy - so in that they are of the same kind.  Their opposition is only a division within a unity.  But the point is that they still delineate a difference.  Now, I have no particular fondness for the agency/structure opposition.  I think it's a tired abstraction that is actually quite useless.  But nevertheless I'm resistant to this continual immolation of 'agency' in the name of 'flat ontology' or whatever you want to call it.

Establishing a common vocabulary for human and non-human things and holding them to common metaphysical standards instead of having one rule for one and another for the other is a worthy goal.  I fully accept that the difference between humans and rocks is no more ontologically profound than the difference between rocks and clouds and that all things have their own emergent, irreducible and end-oriented but nevertheless speculative, risky telos.  Man is not made in God's image.  We are wholly natural beings, just like everything else.

But still, using the term 'agency' to apply to any and all kinds of causal efficacy does violence to what that word has traditionally meant - and that meaning still means something.  What Latour, Callon et al. did in the early 1980s was to bracket any and all forms of causal efficacy under the title 'agency'.  They did this for analytical reasons, because differences in causal efficacy weren't interesting to them; they did this for polemical reasons, because it pissed people off and got them noticed; and they did it for philosophical reasons, because it allowed them to get away from the bifurcation of nature.  However, there is nothing utterly essential about 'agency' in all of this.  The redefinition of agency was one way that they could do these things but it's perfectly possible to retain their insights and follow their lead without turning all forms of causal efficacy into 'agency'.

And that is what I think we should do: retain a concept of consciousness, retain a concept of intentionality as it pertains to animals with highly complex nervous systems.  I suggest this not because I think that reality is made up of humans on the one hand and things on the other but because talking about a pluriverse still requires the ability to distinguish between things and to attend to very important things in their specificity.  Just because the difference between humans and other things is one difference among many, not a primordial ontological transcendence, doesn't mean that we can slash and burn all the vocabulary we have for talking about the particularities of human existence - and there are such things.  While I agree that we do need to transform our conceptual vocabularies in order to avoid bifurcating nature we still need our conceptual vocabularies to be able to make meaningful distinctions between different sorts of things and to discuss the particularities of those things - humans included.  More and more I'm convinced that 'agency' is too fundamental a concept to give away.  We can retain the insights of Latour et al. without trashing the concepts that they do.  We can trash other concepts by over-generalising them, but agency is too important.

The thing that people forget about 'agency' is that Latour, etc. were originally taking on the ideologies of science, which were flawed because they granted scientists far too *much* agency.  There was no real danger that scientists would forget that they had agency, intentionality and all these things just because a few French academics wrote some books bracketing that concept out of the equation.  However, since ANT, etc. is no longer confined to science we have to be careful because the political arena, in particular, is utterly unlike the scientific one.  In politics human agency is *not* assured.  People are *not* universally acknowledged to be capable of intentional political action.  In fact, half of political struggle is just convincing people that another world is possible, that they don't have to just go along with things as they are.

We need to be aware that agency in politics has a very different status compared to agency in science and we shouldn't assume that what worked well in the latter is necessarily right for the former.  What was good for sociologists of science in Paris thirty years ago isn't necessarily good for us now.

This is in no way a defence of dualism.  We can retain ontological pluralism, flat ontology and so on without eliminating the specificities of human existence.  That is the proper task, in my view.  There is nothing especially profound in wondering whether or not non-human things have agency or intentionality.  You're really just expanding these terms to encompass more and more kinds of causal efficacy - abstracting the abstraction.  A thoroughly dualist, scientific realist biologist could wander through the woods and wonder much the same as you in terms of the evolution of all the things in there without transforming 'agency' or 'intentionality' in the way that you have (following Latour, etc.).

Such transformation isn't necessary and, in my view, it isn't even desirable.  Not any more.  Other conceptual vocabularies are possible.

Monbiot's Dilemma

George Monbiot: The day my inner anarchist lost out to the bourgeois me

A very enjoyable and well written story, however it seems to me that George and his friends were never anarchists in anything more than name to begin with.  George's anarchism didn't 'give way' to his bourgeois liberalism.  To be an anarchist means to take responsibility for oneself all the duties and otherwise performed by the state -- to stop recognising such authority but also to stop relying on such authorities.  These so called anarchists didn't do these things.  They were actually pacifist liberals; they thought they could do away with violence (or even confrontation) and simply reason with whoever they came into conflict with.  Turns out that doesn't work, so they needed the police to step in.

There can be no such thing as a pacifist anarchist.  Or, rather, a pacifist anarchist probably isn't going to live very long.  Or, a pacifist anarchist can only survive in a world of pacifists.  You can be a pacifist if you get other people to protect you (if you accept statist liberalism -- free of violence or the threat of violence because you get others to do it for you).  But without that 'outsourcing' you either have to grow a spine and do it yourself or pretend that good intentions and reason can overcome all divisions and obstacles (quite a delusion).

The moral of the story, I think, is that you can recognise that people such as this traveller have been abused, excluded, disenfranchised and still be faced with a very real problem with regard to how to deal with them.  Explaining how they are the way they are (by social factors not genetic predisposition or theological 'evil') tells us nothing about how to deal with them as they are.  They are no less a problem, despite all the explanation.  The old hippyish liberalism which would have everyone just being a bit nicer to each other comes crashing down the moment such bourgeois pretensions actually meet anyone genuinely downtrodden and disenfranchised and realises that some of these people would rather kick you in the head and steal your phone than listen to your self-involved bourgeois psycho-babble, which is literally meaningless to them.

Recognising that there are bad, broken people in the world who no amount of care or reasoning can reach doesn't mean that 'there are just evil people in the world who were born evil and that's that'.  That's a totally false deduction.  It means that, despite having a clear idea of how and why people turn out like this, we have no magic wand to wave to make people nice and friendly and non-violent.  Only a totally different upbringing is likely to do that.  And it's a bit late for grown men, who know only bitterness and violence and whose very personality is built from that world.

Nobody is 'born evil'.  Criminals are made, not born.  But that doesn't help us much when confronted with real, non-abstract, criminals, right there, in our faces, stealing our stuff and threatening to break our bodies.  It's not that the abstract ideas about what causes criminality are wrong or that they're not 'real', it's that they don't help us much in immediate situations.  In fact these ideas about criminality in the abstract are real and are important but they do not in themselves give us a course of action.  Why?  Well, because they won't stop people who don't share our ideas stealing from and attacking us.  If we are pacifist liberals we can pretend that we do no violence (because we've outsourced our violence to others).  But 'anarchists' very quickly realise that violence can't be so easily set aside -- that if it isn't outsourced it can't just be ignored, not without disregarding one's own safety and well-being.

It's all very well to have grown up avoiding confrontation and abhorring violence (I know I have) but that world can only exist because it is protected from the less fortunate, more violent worlds of others.  That's George's dilemma -- how to step outside the protections that liberal society have granted, given that one of these is protection from the violence of criminals.  (And, of course, quite often that very apparatus of 'protection' is the source of violence, but that doesn't change the fact that most of us rely on it for protection most of the time.)

Pro-scientism or Anti-scientism? Yes!

Adam Kotsko has an interesting post on the "hottest new trend in continental philosophy", namely "scientism."

The question of scientism is an interesting one and it's not an easy question to resolve, despite the 'with us or against us' way that most people deal with it.  There are two things I have to say about it:

Firstly, I am a fully subscribed Latourian insofar as I see science as one kind of knowledge practice among others, albeit one that is tied into very peculiar and massively powerful networks and perhaps one that has its own modes of reference and so on.  So, I don't accept that on the one hand we have science and the other we have all other kinds of knowledge or that scientific knowledge is necessarily better in any given instance.  Science is itself a plurality and while it is quite different to other practices (politics, religion, pseudo-science etc.) these are differences within a plurality, not a duality.  So I'm rather anti-scientistic in how I specifically and explicitly cognise scientific practice -- I'm anti-scientistic, intellectually speaking.

But, then, secondly, am I not quite naively scientistic in my everyday practices?  Do I believe in evolution, global warming, atoms?  Of course I do.  When I get sick do I follow medical science or voodoo?  The former, of course.  Do I accept the claims of geocentrism just because it's just one cosmology among others?  Of course not, I accept whatever I understand of the prevailing scientific consensus is, however complex and processual I understand such consensus to be.  Insofar as science has a widely accepted answer for a question of fact I basically accept it (this probably isn't absolutely true but it's true enough).

So, I actually feel slightly dishonest when I repeat the Latourian/Foucauldian, etc. slogans about science .  I preach these lessons and I hold them to be true but don't I practice a whole different kind of truth, generally?

Of course the Latourian pluralism with respect to scientific knowledge qua practice that I describe above isn't actually *incompatible* with this kind of naive, 'grade school' scientism that I otherwise assume but nor are the two things really harmonious.  They're not irreconcilable but nor do they sit easily together.  I do experience some cognitive dissonance between the two -- why is this?  I don't know.

Science is one kind of knowledge among others, yes.  But am I prepared to give other kinds of knowledge an equal hearing on questions of fact?  Hardly.  Am I anti-scientism or pro-scientism?  Both!

Just a thought rather than an argument but hopefully people can see where I'm coming from.  For the time being I think that scientism makes for a more interesting open question than it is a debating topic with sides pre-decided, as if anyone has all the answers.  We should take its contradictions as indication that no one has adequate answers yet.

Nature and Influence

To my last comment Levi replies:

"Given that naturalism and materialism have historically been the underdog positions, it’s difficult to see how they have been guilty of self-righteous entitlement. It’s hard to see how anything could be more self-righteous than Heidegger’s talk of enframing and the destining of being, or Derrida’s bombast about metaphysics. I also have a difficult time seeing naturalism and materialism as responsible for historical atrocities. Aren’t these more accurately laid at the feet of religion, fascisms, and totalitarianisms?"

I should have been more specific: within the Continental arena, yes, it's historically been an underdog.  But that's hardly true outside that specific arena, is it?  If we look at most other Western discursive traditions -- in science, technology, politics, even Anglophone philosophy -- naturalism and materialism have hardly been the sickly, downtrodden relatives, quite the contrary.  And which has had more ideological influence over the years, Continental philosophy or natural science?  Hegel or Darwin?  Heidegger or Spencer?  Zizek or Dawkins?  I'd bet on the latter each time, particularly in the first case!

The picture is complicated, of course, and idealism has its tendrils everywhere but you can hardly ignore the centrality of naturalism to the entire modernist mindset -- a mindset hardly troubled, in terms of its practical preponderance, by anything post- or anti-.  I definitely know far more hardcore naturalists than I do even mildly militant anti-naturalists (if I know any at all) and the vast majority of people who have no particular interest in one side or the other tend to accept 'grade school' naturalism as a given -- at least where I'm from.  Britain is rather more secular and science-friendly than other parts of the world, of course.  I was taught evolution and climate change as facts strictly separate from religious education and the difference was never an issue.  Your mileage may vary, as they say.

Anyway, the basic point is that while naturalism/materialism might be all shiny and new in Continental climes they have been the default setting elsewhere in the West.  The fact that it's new and exciting for Continental philosophers says more about that tradition than anything else.

With regard to the politics of it, weren't the colonial administrators who turned up to rationalise and administer the 'inferior races' doing so in the name of naturalism, materialism and science?  Okay, they were doing so in the name of 'Empire' too but not only that.  What gave them their 'white man's burden' in the first place?  The ideological basis of their venture was that, as Latour put it, they had access to 'Nature' while everyone else merely had culture.  Of course their 'Nature' is rather unlike yours but if you want the good of naturalism you have to at least acknowledge its baggage too -- and this it has in abundance.  Nothing that's been so powerful for so long can pretend to be innocent.  Making a bonfire from your enemies' beliefs makes for powerful polemic but you have to stop and consider that some people have put this into practice -- and it's not usually the fallacies and nonsense of the rich and powerful that get consigned to the flames.  Are you prepared to look someone who believes that the spirits of their ancestors watch over and protect them in the eye and tell them that their cherished beliefs are worthless and should be immolated?  That's what it takes -- and that's the been the political programme of naturalism over the years.

If you have the stomach for that kind of missionary work, fair enough.  Personally, I'd rather turn my scrutiny towards the phonies and cynics who mouth anti-naturalisms but don't really believe them at all -- the people who laugh off the naive realisms of scientists but still pop whatever pill their doctor tells them; those who decry all semantic closure as 'violence' but still believe that global warming is a fact that should be acted on; those who endlessly 'problematise' everything except their own problematique.  These are far more numerous in academic (and blog) circles than true believers, I'm quite sure.  A bonfire of their half-thought, myopic intellectual balsa wood would be a spectacle that I could enjoy, especially given the season!  (It's Guy Fawkes Night on Monday -- we're all about communal pyromania, us Brits.)

Do Anti-Naturalists Really Exist?

Levi has more on naturalism, its opposite and the sociology of intellectual cohorts:

It is not unusual for people to respond to claims I make such as the thesis that Continental thought has tended to systematically ignore naturalistic and materialist orientations with rebuttals to the effect that “thinker x is a naturalist and materialist and works in the Continental tradition!”  In other words, the idea seems to be that a few counter-examples are sufficient to rebut claims about what is dominant in a population.

I think that part of the general disagreements with regard to whether or not the Continental tradition is 'anti-naturalist' or 'anti-materialist' may have to do with the difference between rejection and ignorance.  Does Derrida, for example, reject naturalism/materialism or does he simply ignore the issues that these -isms are concerned with and focus on something else?  As I understand it, Levi generally argues that Derrida rejected them but others seem to assume that he simply ignored them and, consequently, that his thought is, in principle, compatible with them in some way shape or form.  Of course the problem with Derrida et al. is that they never really rejected much of anything.  To reject something is an affirmation in reverse, after all.

Anyway, whether it's rejection or ignorance it surely must be one of the two -- and, whichever it is, this is a problem for these thinkers.  In fact I think ignorance may even be more of a problem than rejection.  If one genuinely believes that the things and forces of naturalism are fallacious bunk then I can see how language- or phenomena-centered philosophies can be justified.  However, if you secretly believe in these things but nevertheless place them beyond your philosophical purview and limit yourself, your peers and your students to just a small corner of the wider natural reality then, far worse than rejection or ignorance, this constitutes abandonment -- abdication, indeed.

I might disagree with an anti-naturalist who genuinely believes that speaking of anything beyond the socio-linguistic is absurd and nonsensical but I would respect their opinion far more than someone who readily accepts the existence of things and forces other than the human but who has given up on them, refused to speak of them and done their best to prohibit anyone else from doing so.  The former might be silly but the latter is intellectually unjustifiable, politically malfeasant and morally reprehensible.

If there are 'true believers' in anti-naturalism or anti-materialism out there (and I have my doubts about this) then their cherished beliefs should not be so hastily 'consigned to the fire' as Levi put it.  We must avoid the very worst historical tendencies of Naturalism towards self-righteousness and automatic entitlement in defining what is -- at gunpoint if necessary.  Let's not paper over how cruelly this has worked out in the past or how necessary the philosophical reactions -- even overreactions -- to this history were.

However, let us also call out the phonies for what they are.  If you find a place for nature, science, medicine, technology and so on in every part of your life except your philosophising then there is something seriously amiss.  The real enemy is not idealism or correlationism but ontological double standards and the philosophical ignorance that they breed.

EU: Champion of Peace and Democracy?

I can only agree with Richard Murphy's assessment of the Nobel committee's decision to award the peace prize to the EU as "utterly bizarre".   It's not so much the attribution as the timing.  Ten years ago when Europe was enjoying relative prosperity and democracy with the Cold War a faded memory and peace the likes of which the continent had never seen perhaps you could see the point.  But at this time when the EU has effectively removed democratically elected leaders and installed a technocracies as well as decimating the social and economic fabric of half of Europe, leading to a resurgence of the far right not seen in seventy years...

Well, it's almost as laughable as the 2009 award to Barack Obama -- he who subsequently became the King of Drones and failed in almost all his headline foreign policy pledges (close Gitmo, negotiate an Israel/Palestine settlement).

All Grand Prizes are farcical, but this one more than most.

Materialism and World Politics Conference: ANT and IR, Offshore

I finished my paper for the upcoming Materialism and World Politics conference hosted by the Millennium journal at the LSE over the weekend. Apparently papers are going to be posted on the conference website but I've posted mine below anyway (also available here). My paper is for the Theory Talks panel on 'Accounting for Symmetries in the International.'

The paper explores the benefits of Actor-Network Theory for International Relations by taking up the case of 'offshore' in general and offshore financial markets in particular.  I take ANT to be a social ontology (that makes things themselves social) and a spatial topology (that defines space by connection between elements, not in terms of an abstract container).  I find that what I call 'absolute' conceptions of space are intimately bound up with social/material dualism and that offshore can only be consistently, symmetrically and materially understood through ANT's 'network' space.  I conclude that ANT has great potential for IR but we need to avoid, as John Law argues, naturalising any one spatial topology.  My case study indicates a strong future for ANT in IR but, moreover, I suggest that IR could benefit ANT insofar as, in many ways, it does not fit its ontological and methodological presuppositions (and therefore it challenges them).

Relata, relations, independence, externalism

Levi Bryant critiques Karen Barad's statement that "relata do not precede relations."

I find this whole question very difficult to grapple with because, it seems to me, we are lumping together far too many things.

Am I independent of the glasses on my nose?

Yes, I think that I am.  I can't see a damn thing without them but I won't perish if they are misplaced.  Equally, the glasses won't necessarily shatter or disintegrate if they are estranged from my needy fizzog.  I'm happy to say that the relation between my body and my glasses is one of independence.

Am I independent of the cold I had last month?

Yes, I am.  The remnants of that virus may leave traces in my body and, were I immunologically weak somehow, the virus could have killed me but it didn't, I persisted, I moved on.  My relation to the virus (whatever traces it leaves within my body) is clearly logically external.

However, both the glasses and the cold virus make me different to how I would be without them.  Therefore, it is incorrect to say that the specific form I take at present is independent of my history.  Counterfactually, I would probably have persisted had I never gotten that virus and I'd probably survive without my glasses but the absence of these things would make me different to how I am with them.

If I am made what I am by my history -- my past relations -- is it still accurate to say that I am 'independent' of my relations?  Clearly we are running up against different meanings of the word 'independent.'  I would still BE without these relations but I wouldn't be what I am without them.

And could I be without any relations?  Of course I could get by without my glasses and I wouldn't be at all upset if I never got a cold virus again but I would surely perish rather swiftly if the air got sucked out of the room.  Am I independent of all relations?  Again, this begs the question of what we mean, precisely, by 'independent.'

Well, according to etymonline.com, 'depend' derives from the Latin dependere "to hang from, hang down; be dependent on, be derived."  I thing that last word is the most telling: derive.  Could I exist without a great many of my relations?  Sure.  But do I derive nothing from them?  Hardly.  Could I exist without deriving anything from any of them?  I can't see how.

If every thing is a trajectory then everything is a derivation, everything hangs down from or latches onto its history.  Of course 'derivation' sounds a lot like 'translation' and we can think of it in similar terms: just because A derives from B doesn't mean that B determines A but it does mean that A wouldn't be A without B.  Like translation, every derivation is a transformation -- if you're 'hanging down' from something you can always 'hang down' from something else but you can't float away as if by magic.

Long story short: these questions would make a lot more sense to me if we didn't take words like 'relation' and 'independent' as if they name undifferentiated phenomena or as if their meaning is obvious.

If all relations are of the same sort then it does seem as if we must either be internalist or externalist.  However, if we pick that term apart a bit we can see that both internalists and externalists have a point.  Similarly, one thing's independence from another thing is as much a question of the meaning of 'independent' as it is a question of the metaphysics of relations.

I should add of course that Levi does make a distinction between different kinds of relations (endo and exo).  But I still feel that terms such as relation and, particularly, 'independence' can mean a number of different things and, as such, often cause antagonism when people mean different things by them.

Busy Weekend

This technique is turning out to be pretty labour intensive in terms of sanding, cleaning and getting it all evened out (although the initial wood treatment is very quick) but the results are really beautiful.  Absolutely worth the effort.  I did the whole guitar, back and front, yesterday:

You can't see it in the picture but to the naked eye the colour after several treatments (and after 5 or 6 hours drying time) isn't black, it's a very, very, very dark purple.  I think it'll be close to jet black once it's got the Tru Oil on it though as that seems to make it darker.

I've spent the last couple of hours wiping it down with a damp cloth then some dry paper towels, lightly sanding the raised grained and repeating.  I'm still working out the technique but it actually looks quite nice when it's lightly sanded as it emphases the grain patterns a bit more.

Had a quick gander at how the final product should look too:

Unfortunately, the phone camera pictures look even worse in artificial light than it does in daylight.  I'll have to see if I can borrow a better camera to photograph the final results because the beauty really is in the fine details.

Anyway, I'm pretty pleased with how it's going considering I've not done anything like this before.  It's very therapeutic, in fact.

And now for something completely different: Ebonising Alder, Luthiery

Endless rambling on about politics and philosophy is fun and all but I think this blog could do with a bit more variation.  Fortunately it turns out that I have other hobbies too.

I'm currently building a guitar from parts and I finally have all the pieces together:

I've not done this before so it's all very exciting (for me if not for anyone else!).  I'm having a local luthier do some of the more tricky jobs (installing the bridge and the nut, dressing the frets) but I'm going to stain, finish and bolt everything together myself.  The guitar is going to be black from tail to toe, apart from a bit of chrome here and there.  Very rock 'n' roll.

Being the adventurous and slightly obsessive soul that I am, however, instead of using paint, polyurethane or woodstain I've decided to colour the wood using a kind of chemical ebonising treatment that involves rusty iron dissolved in vinegar.

This is a fairly well known technique and lots of information can be found online about it.  The iron/rust + the acetic acid in the vinegar (roughly 5%) = iron acetate and this reacts with the tannins in the wood, changing the colour of the wood fibres themselves.  On darker woods such as mahogany the wood can go completely black.  However, lighter woods turn a greyish-blue colour, which can look very nice but isn't what I'm after.

One method for strengthening the chemical reaction is to treat the wood with tea, which increases the tannin content of the wood and, consequently, makes the wood much darker when the iron acetate is added.  However, I wanted to see how far I could take the process so I bought 100g of pure (minimum 96.5%), powdered tannic acid for £7.79 plus shipping from an online chemicals shop.

The tea method works well but the pure method is astonishing.

But let's back up: there are several how-to guides online but here's what I did:

To make the iron acetate:

1. Take some 0000 grade, oil-free (wash if necessary) steel wool, fray it (i.e. pull it apart a bit), get it damp and leave it out for a few days, until it turns rusty.

2. Put the resulting rusty mess into a jar and add just enough vinegar (I used normal, clear pickling vinegar) to submerge the wool.

3. Cover it up but be sure to leave some way for gas (mostly oxygen) to escape as the jar might burst otherwise.

4. Leave the concoction for a few days until the wool has mostly dissolved.

5. Strain your solution through a coffee filter into a fresh container to remove all remaining bits and lumps.

6. Let the solution settle and you should have a clear-ish layer on top and a load of reddish-orange gunk underneath.

The clear-ish stuff is your iron acetate.  Apply this to the bare wood and you'll see the reaction in a few minutes.  To strengthen the reaction using tea just brew a small amount as strong as you can and apply it to the wood, letting it soak in a bit before adding the iron acetate.  This works well enough.  With the powdered tannic acid I took just half a teaspoon (a tiny, tiny amount) dissolved that with just enough water to dissolve the powder and applied it to the wood in the same manner as the tea.

Here I've added a stripe of tea (on the right) and tannic acid (on the left).  I let it all dry before adding the iron acetate:

Immediately (approx. 10 seconds) after adding the iron acetate (left=tannic acid+iron acetate, middle=tea+iron acetate, right=iron acetate on its own):

And after letting everything dry (took about 10 minutes):

Up close with tannic acid:

Up close with tea:

Up close with just iron acetate:

As you can see the reaction with the tannic acid is spectacular.  The colour changes instantly (it's like adding milk to coffee -- it's that quick) and it dries with a really nice, solid black result.  The tea-treated and un-treated stripes look about the same in these pictures.  In reality the tea-treated one is a slightly darker.  Regardless, between the tea and the tannic acid there's no comparison.

I'm still experimenting with the technique (as you can see!):

One treatment is enough to turn the wood black but I think several treatments with a light sanding inbetween works better as it smooths out any raised grain, removes any excess residue and gets the colouring a little bit more even and consistent.

This is a very, very cheap and really satisfying way of colouring any kind of wood.  I reckon I could colour hundreds of guitars with that 100g bag of tannic acid and if it works on something as pale as alder it should work on anything.  The best thing with this technique (and this is exactly what I was hoping for) is that because you're actually changing the colour of the wood fibres themselves in accordance with their own chemistry you keep the detail of the grain visible up close instead of just piling layers of pigment on top of it.  You get a nice, dark finish but the natural variation in the wood's texture, grain structure and chemical composition still leaves a little variation in the end product.

What a way to spend your weekend.

Einstein and Hayek, On Planning

Dark Chemistry posts a nice Einstein quote (I won't re-post the whole thing -- that's thunder-stealing):

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. ...

Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. ... How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?

Very interesting.  As it happens I'm just reading Hayek's essay 'The Use of Knowledge in Society,' which serves as a useful counterpoint to this.

The question of economic planning as both a problem in the sociology of knowledge and political theory (not to mention economics) doesn't get anywhere near enough attention from leftists.  The right-wing polarisation of the debate between totally 'free' decentralisation on the one hand and, monolithic Big Brother-esque central bureaucracy on the other is incredibly important but isn't widely challenged.  What we've tended to end up with in policy terms is a Third Way mishmash of centralisation and decentralisation -- a mix that, in some ways, might be the worst of both worlds.

Hayek's discussion of these issues (in the aforementioned essay at least) is actually rather more sophisticated than the manner in which his acolytes have appropriated his ideas.  While I find his solutions absurd he raises some very serious problems for socialism, problems that I'm not sure have ever found a decent answer -- something that Einstein himself seems to hint at.

Michael Meacher, Tax Avoidance Bill

Mr Meacher seems to be fighting an uphill battle to get his General Anti-Tax Avoidance Bill the time of day in Parliament.  He was restricted to just 11 minutes to introduce the bill because of Tories deliberately delaying previous business.  It's par for the course for the Tories, but some Lib Dems fare little better -- in particular my local MP, Stephen Williams.  While numerous Labourites have backed the bill it doesn't seem to have gotten much traction with the front benches.

Tax avoiders have many friends in very high places.  Still, I think it's very interesting how this issue has gained so much ground in just a few years.  It wasn't even remotely on the agenda in 2008 but now even the right-wing papers routinely criticise the practice.

It's also an interesting fissure between the neoliberalism present in all three parties (to a greater or lesser extent) that wishes to hack back the state and see tax avoidance as justified because it does just that and the state-based nationalism of the general public who find tax avoidance abhorrent.  It's given politicians some serious headaches on both sides of the Atlantic, having to reassure their backers that they won't expect them to play by the same rules as everyone else while duping the public into believing that the contrary is true.