Cynical Reason

To me it’s historically unmatched. I’ve never read or heard of a period like this and I’ve read about many historical periods. But not one in which you can talk to young people the way you can at the college level today and find out that they believe nothing, want nothing, hope nothing, expect nothing, dream nothing, desire nothing. Push them far enough and they’ll say “yeah, I’ve got to get a job. I spent a lot of money at Duke”. That’s not what I’m talking about here. They hope nothing. Expect nothing. Dream nothing. Desire nothing. And it is a fair question to ask whether a society that produces this reaction in its young is worthy of existence at all. It really is. It’s worth asking that. Whether it’s worth being here at all

In 1993 Rick Roderick talks about the students he met while teaching at Duke university. As he goes on to say, these are the youth he met at a site of great privilege… what of youth elsewhere? More to the point, what of the society which works to produce the conditions within this (postmodern) reason manifests itself. What I take Roderick to essentially be saying here is that late capitalism has begun to produce the last men of whom Nietzsche wrote a century earlier. Of course this is ultimately an empirical thesis and one that can only be investigated from a standpoint which takes human concerns seriously. Otherwise the possibility of understanding their debasement and loss is foreclosed from the start.

Mobile Addiction?

I saw a film earlier today (the excellent District 9) and I was struck by the frequency with which the 16(ish) year old kid sitting near me checked his mobile. For the entirety of the film (nearly two hours) he checked his mobile every few minutes. I’m fairly certain he didn’t go longer than 6/7 minutes during that film without checking and much of the term it was far more frequent than that. While it’s obviously possible that he may have just been waiting for some life-or-death communication, it was a particular conspicuous example of a much wider phenomena and it left me pondering the growing generational reliance on mobile phones.

I’m not excluding myself from this but at 24, I can remember a point when I had a teenager social life without a mobile phone. I think I was about 14 or 15 when mobile phones began to become the ubiquitous phenomena they are today. Whereas a survey reported in the Telegraph earlier this year suggests that more than a third of children own a mobile by the time they are 8. If children carry a mobile phone from such a young age, is it at all suprising that evidence is starting to come in of tendancies towards mobile phone addiction amongst young people today? The constant connection which mobile phones facilitate, likewise the internet, represents something entirely unprecedented in human existence and teenagers today are the first generation to grow up entirely immersed in this technology.

Obviously I don’t think these compulsive tendencies are limited to the young. It’s just that the extent of their immersion in the technology, as well as their ignorance of a world without it, means that behavioural tendencies which arise when you place human beings within these communicative networks are much more deeply entrenched amongst those who grew up within these networks. Checking your e-mail or mobile phone can be a procrastinatory diversion just as easily as a debilitating compulsion but the line between the two is fuzzy and it becomes fuzzier the more we rely on the technology. Obviously the sheer functionality of these technologies goes a long way to explaining our reliance on them and, on a day to day level, much of how we use them is a function of practicality and needs. Perhaps there’s often a more neurotic dimension lurking below the surface of our use though? A desire to affirm our points of contact with the globe, reassure ourselves of our connectedness and, however fleetingly, transcend our isolation to feel ‘hooked in’. If you grow up with that feeling then it’s absence can feel like an itch but one which can easily be scratched when you have a mobile phone in your pocket. All the more so when you can check your e-mail or check facebook from it as well.

My Research Blog

Well I’ve now setup my research blog. The idea is that it will be an online notebook to replace the countless physical ones littering my room and covered in largely unreadable notes. Hopefully it will also be part of a wider network of Critical Realist blogs.

The truth will set us free?

I’ve been reading this book recently and it has a very interesting discussion about the sheer influence that Alan Greenspan had on markets at his peak and his resulting reluctance to speak in anything other than the most arcane and impenetrable ‘fed-speak’ lest the markets inadvertently seize on what he says and respond in a way that he, at least, would deem undesirable. In a way it’s symptomatic of the media age in which we live where access to information, far from liberating us, threatens to overwhelm us. Too many people seem to imagine that the Internet is inherently democratising – why else would China go to such trouble to restrict access? As a song by one of my favourite punk bands puts it:

At some turning point in history,
some fuckface recognized that knowledge tends to democratize cultures and societies
so the only thing to do was monopolize and confine it to priests,
clerics and elites the rest resigned to serve,
cuz if the rabble heard the truth they'd organize against the power,
privilege and wealth hoarded by the few- for no one else.
And did it occur to you that it's almost exactly the same today?

Yet the historically unprecedented proliferation of information – understanding both terms in the widest sense possible – has a weirdly ambiguous character. It undercuts established authorities, engendering  plural and often cynical resistances to taken for granted truths, yet it also establishes new authorities, as busy people with finite attentional resources look to understand and negotiate a path through ever more complex and opaque systems while they drown under a media torrent that simultaneously makes some working conception of truth more desirable and necessary than ever while systematically stripping away the epistemic markers with and through which we’d reach such an outcome. Thus you have the information cascade as the endemic intellectual (and social) problem of the ‘information age’. Far from setting us free, in the internet age the truth – or at least the search for it – paralyses us.

Hannah Arendt on Conspiracies

At a time when full political information, necessarily worldwide ins cope, is available only to the professional, and when statesmen have found no other clue to world politics than the blind alley of imperialism, it is almost a matter of course for the others, who vaguely sense our worldwide interdependence but are unable to penetrate into the actual working of this universal relationship, to turn to the dramatically simple hypothesis of a global conspiracy and a secret worldwide organization.

Arendt wrote this is in 1945 and it seems eerily prescient today. As the degree of interdependence has grown and the administration of the global economy become ever more opaque and depoliticised, the conditions have become even more fruitful for these sorts of simplistic political narratives to proliferate: they do away with the ambiguities and complexities of the economic and political structures of global power and instead present an image of a small group of evil men conspiring together to have their way with a naive world. Sometimes they may have the right targets but in understanding their actions in such a simplistic and easily countered way, it undermines the plausibility of more reasoned critique. Perhaps more worryingly, it comes with the potential for a very undesirable kind of political action. As Arendt writes in her essay on the Seeds of a Fascist International:

If, therefore, they are called upon to align themselves with another, supposedly secret, and in fact semi-conspiratorial, world organization, they are far from being repelled by the idea – or even from seeing anything out of the ordinary in it. They are manifestly of the opinion that this is the only way in which one can become politically active.

Could this happen with the modern 9/11 truth movement and associated groups of conspiracy theorists? You could argue that to some extent this has been happening with the American militia movement and their resistance to the New World Order.

Analysing background understandings…

That post just got me thinking about a form of argument I’ve been making more and more but I’ve never explicitly justified. I’d argue that all our attempts to understand, categorize and interpret the world are framed by a background understanding. This collection of ideas and assumptions -  not immediately susceptible to discursive penetration, although we can bring these ideas into the light and they do change – shapes the way in which we understand the world and seek to act on it.  They allow us to make sense of data, to give our moral claims sense, to construct and apply theoretical concepts: our rational and explicit thought and action always takes place against this sort of tacit background. The analytic categories this background presents us with shapes the direction our inquiry takes. In terms of the contingent reasoning processes of individuals operating with them, they push us in some ways and not others: the sheer attentional limitations of human beings makes certain modes of inference more likely than others, as in any particular process of reasoning, certain pathways of thought are more likely to be pursued by others. So there’s no necessary reason why a New Labour politician who understands his actions and role against a background of  the aforementioned communitarianism won’t start to consider whether their centralising bent fundamentally inhibits what they’re trying to do. It’s very fucking likely they won’t though.

Obviously this

The consequence of hippys

I was watching Adam Curtis’s absurdly brilliant documentary The Century of The Self last night. It gave a fascinating account – which was really strongly supported by all the reading I’ve done on this, perhaps because he’s been reading precisely the same books – of the role that the new left and counter culture’s initially political turn towards self-transformation (out of frustration at the strength of the state,  as well as the somewhat drug addled hope of initiating some quasi-Hegelian dialectic of social and absolute transformation) played in promulgating therapeutic subjectivist categories of self-understanding through the culture but how, somewhat inevitably given the moral inward-turn they were promoting, the categories themselves lost the context of political concern that initially framed their elaboration.  So the overall affect was to leave increasingly large segments of the population feeling a moral push towards self-expression at a time when economic concerns about over-production were finding resolution with new technologies allowing increasingly segmented production: thus giving the growing movement of expressive-individualists a whole cornucopia of consumer products with and through wish to engage in ever more elaborate presentations of self. The whole inward turn (inevitably) raised countless new existential questions and answered few. The moral climate this creates is one in which consumerism will flourish in a self-reinforcing way: the elaboration of individual particularity becomes a normative notion, as at least in private life the self-expressive and self-actualised individual (loosely translatable to cool and confident?) became the norm to which others must inspire. It’s also what gave the cultural – though not theoretical, political or economic – foundations to the emergence of modern homo economicus: the uber-individualised self of expressive individualism but with a narrow self-interested rationality and a arbitray list of preferences where the hippy shit used to be. Is this a lesson that social transformation through self transformation is not a good idea? I really think it is.

Digital narcissism?

There’s an interesting program on radio 4 about a former internet executive who now holds that web 2.0 is undermining intellectual standards, enshrining a cult of the amateur and proliferating a new digital narcissism. Leaving aside his obvious persecution complex and slightly irritating demeanor, I think he makes a very strong case. The sort of cultural democratization the internet enables, as all content-producers compete on an increasingly (though still far from) even footing, inevitably carriers the potential to erode intellectual standards. Along with a multifaceted culture of liberal individualism that, tacitly or otherwise, gives epistemic priority to first person experience, the modern web gives a certain degree of previously lacking authority to people who – for want of a better term – might be talking complete shit. The conspiracy theories and internet rumors that spread under these conditions play themselves in macro-political arenas. The paranoia, cynicism and obscurantism they proliferate – as well as, in the recent US election, the blind optimistic mania that is their recently emerging counterpart – fuel an empowered and skeptical but ultimately atomizing engagement in political life.  Passionate debates play themselves out in hyperbolic bubbles obscuring the real issues at stake and undermine the sort of critical and normative engagement which democracy requires.

It’s important to be able to recognize these dangers without lurching into a reactionary condemnation of the web on behalf of a class of cultural producers who feel their status threatened. In reality they’re merely being widened and dispersed away from the old centers of economics and politics to include the ranks of esteemed bloggers. This is not necessarily a bad thing. What’s crucial though is that a commitment to intellectual standards doesn’t get swept away in the wave of voices that the modern web is unleashing.

The Cockerel and Liberal Individualism

About an hour ago I was walking around the area near my house at early morning (5:30ish) and I was shocked to find that the cockerel that ruined my sleep for over a year can still make itself known to me, even though I’m now 10 minutes away from where I used to live.  That bird is a little bastard and has always left me wondering what sort of twat buys a cockerel when they live in a densely populated suburb of Coventry. For exactly a year it lived literally in my back garden and left me very close, animal rights or no animal rights, to killing the fucking thing. Originally it only started crowing at dawn which, at the height of summer when I moved in, was rather irritating. All the more so given the fact that I had no idea it was there until the first morning I woke up in my new flat. As the winter progressed it started crowing throughout the night. I could actually see it from my bedroom window a lot of the time, strutting around the garden in a manner more irritating than I ever thought an animal could be. The only neighbours I knew told me I’d get used to it and the council noise complaints process was sufficiently onerous that I was both too lazy and aware it would disrupt my life even more than the cockerel (as it necessitated council officers coming to visit multiple times in the middle of the night in the vain hope of catching one of the demon bird’s intervals of crowing) with a lack of any guaranteed success. I thought about writing a letter to the local paper or the community magazine, asking if anyone else hated the bird as much as I did but, perhaps predictably, I never got around to it. How long do cockerels live for? That bird is potentially disturbing a lot of people for a long time.

It underscores the extend to which the abstract edifices of liberal individualism are undercut by the messy trivialities of day to day life. Within an atomistic social theory, understanding society as made of the aggregate needs and wants of individuals, the only recompense necessary for those disturbed by the cockerel is a formal complaints procedure: a mechanism by which other individuals can assert their right to not be disturbed against their neighbours right to own the animal of their choosing. It’s tacitly reduced to individual vs individual in a way that obscures the intricate dependencies that pervade social life and the extent to which the exercises of individual liberties are intrinsically conflictual, rather than simply contingently so in a way that may occasionally require outside regulatory intervention. Any social theory we propose must capture this dimension of social life, framing individualism within the collective space in which individualism(s) prosper, if it is to capture the messy realities of social life or provide a proper normative basis for political action. Liberal individualism fails to do either and often serves as little more than an ideological justification for the status quo, inhibiting critiques of social structures possessed of an objectivity that transcends the aggregation of individual preferences, as well as providing a cultural underpinning to modern consumer capitalism. To reject it doesn’t entail we fall into some collectivist morass but rather that we try and recover the ethical impulse of liberal individualism from the utterly false social ontology within which it resides and resituate it within an understanding of the mutual interdependency of individuals within society and the ontological independence of the intersubjective spaces that emerges as a result of this interdependency.

The Individualistic Ethos of the 19th Century

I just came across an extremely interesting passage in Richard Sennett’s book Authority,

The panoptican, New Lanark, the Waltham Mills, the Saint-Simonian workshops were all conceived against the grain of the individualistic economic ethos of the 19th century. All these paternal experiments attempted to create a community. In the case of the industrial experiments, these versions of in loco parentis attempted to protect the conditions of work from the dominating influence of the market rate for wages, an influence which woujld determine, if left to itself, who would belong to the workshop, how decisions would be made, and the like. The criticism which hardheaded people, therefore, made of these early versions of paternalism was that they were costly, idealistic frills.

This points to the great paradox of the VIctorian era, the moral idealism that pervades Victorian society yet lay behind some of its worst Dickensian excesses, as well as the way that liberal individualism came to legitimate and entrench the individualistic economic ethos Sennett talks about, ultimately transforming it into modern liberal capitalism: a strange ethical beast which decries as inimical to human freedom those things its predecessors condemned solely as “costly, idealistic frills”. It is certainly correct in its opposition to the Victorian workhouses (etc) but underlying it is a critique of moralised institutions in principle rather than the horrific excesses of particular institutions. This bifurcation of social life into the public realm of procedural rules governing the private pursuit of individual moral goods leaves critical engagements with institutions morally toothless, as appeals to what are seen (tacitly or otherwise) as ultimately private and arbitrary moral concerns are dismissed as irrelevant – as opposed to necessarily wrong or unjust – to the management of modern institutions; leaving a normative space for the sort of cold instrumental economic logic that led to the condemnation of moralising Victorian institutions as costly frills and underlies the excesses of modern capitalism.