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A Hegelian Perspective on Perspectivalism
November 4, 2021Some follow up thoughts to an objection to perspectivalism I raised in Against Metamodernism. What I’d like to do here is consider how a core theme in Hegelian dialectics—namely the experience of error—can inform this discussion, as it has taken shape in metamodernism and adjacent spaces.
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Power and Common Knowledge
October 27, 2021In this post I want to unravel some thoughts I’ve been mulling over for some time, concerning the relationship between critical approaches to power and the decision theoretic concept of ‘common knowledge.’ I’ve touched on this before in relation to advertising, and was delighted to hear it brought up by Evan McMullen on the Meta-Ideological podcast. This relationship seems to me to provide the key to understanding the deep sense of political and cultural inertia that is so characteristic of the present moment. One approach to this inertia is to consider it as a deterioration of collective agency, or a kind of generalised coordination failure. This deterioration can in turn be made precise by analysing it as a failure of common knowledge production. In this way, deep questions about political horizons can be linked to the kind of media theoretic concerns that impinge on common knowledge. (I won’t rehash any of this here, but a detailed account of the relationship between common knowledge and coordination can be found in this LessWrong post.)
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Lyotard: The Postmodern Condition
October 18, 2021Some annotated extracts from Jean-François Lyotard’s often cited (though perhaps less often read) monograph The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Lyotard, 1986).
Several things jumped out for me while reading this. First, the figure that looms largest over these pages is the later Wittgenstein—rather than leaning on structuralist frameworks, as one might naively expect, Lyotard mostly mobilises conceptual tools from analytic philosophy, notably ‘language games’ and speech act theory.
Second, Lyotard uses these tools to approach the question of knowledge in a unique way: by foregrounding the pragmatics of legitimacy. This makes Lyotard’s analysis feel contemporary and relevant. As with others from this period, it almost feels as if he is talking about Twitter.
Third, Lyotard’s own position is ultimately both positive and optimistic: his vision of ‘postmodern knowledge’ is not merely what knowledge becomes once assimilated by the market, but something that stands in opposition to it. In this respect, the Lyotard of this moment is one of a handful of people who has actually treated the term ‘postmodernism’ as something to be affirmed.
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Note on Bad Incentives
October 9, 2021A while back I wrote a post about structuralist and humanist approaches to social theory and political thought, how each looks cynical from the point of view of the other, and the impasse this can lead to. An example of this tension then came up a few days ago in a discussion I was having about the role played by bad incentives in creating pathological discourse. The point of contention was whether such pathologies are typically necessitated by the incentive structure of a space, or whether they are the fault of bad actors within the space. This question has clear strategic significance: if the latter is true, then the discourse could in principle be de-pathologised by piling good actors into the space; but if it’s the former, then this cannot work because it fails to address the root cause of the pathology, and those good actors will likely become complicit in sustaining it.
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Ethics and Capitalism
September 28, 2021Here I want to outline an argument for the claim that ethical action is impossible under capitalism. This is the kind of claim that is liable to get one labelled as a hopeless cynic—unfortunately for me I happen to believe it, so the aim here is really to clarify the claim and its rationale in a manner which opens as many doors as it closes. There are two main components. One is the argument that act utilitarianism is self-defeating, because a community of act utilitarians will be unable to solve moral coordination problems (a criticism which has historically served as a motivation for rule utilitarianism). The other is a claim to the effect that when our ethical life is expressed through market activities, this makes us de facto act utilitarians, regardless of our de jure stance on normative ethics. Roughly, then, the argument is that the mediation of ethical life by the market systematically undermines our capacity for moral coordination. The final premise is that morality is essentially a matter of coordination—that without moral coordination there is no morality at all.
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Note on Fetishism
September 8, 2021A thought that’s been bugging me from one of the Žižek posts:
‘Being-a-king’ is an effect of the network of social relations between a ‘king’ and his ‘subjects’; but—and here is the fetishistic misrecognition—to the participants of this social bond, the relationship appears necessarily in an inverse form: they think that they are subjects giving the king royal treatment because the king is already in himself, outside the relationship to his subjects, a king: as if the determination of ‘being-a-king’ were a ‘natural’ property of the person of a king. (Žižek, 2008, p. 20)
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Žižek on Retroactivity
September 4, 2021This post touches on a paradox of temporality at the centre of Žižek’s thinking. In fact this is an idea which crops up in many places—Hegel’s conception of history and historicity, Thomas Kuhn’s conception of scientific revolution and paradigm shift, and Baudrillard’s conception of the fatal, to name just a few.
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Žižek on Marx's Symptoms
August 29, 2021A few extracts from the first chapter of The Sublime Object of Ideology (Žižek, 2008), entitled ‘How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?’
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Žižek's Critique of Poststructuralism
August 23, 2021Žižek is someone I’ve come to appreciate more lately, and The Sublime Object of Ideology (Žižek, 2008) had been on my list for some time before I finally got round to reading it over the last few weeks. There’s a lot going on in this book, but here I’ll focus on a criticism of post-structuralism made in a later chapter titled ‘Which Subject of the Real?’ One of Žižek’s main aims in the book is to articulate a theory of subjectivity which avoids the horns of a familiar dilemma, concerning the relationship between the individual subject and the social-symbolic field it is immersed in. One horn is occupied by essentialism, which construes the subject as given ontologically prior to the symbolic field (e.g. the Marcuse of Eros and Civilisation). The other horn is occupied by post-structuralism, which construes the subject as nothing more than a position on the symbolic grid.
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Marcuse: Eros and Civilisation
August 10, 2021Another research post—basically just loads of excerpts from Herbert Marcuse’s 1956 text Eros and Civilization, plus comments. This was an interesting read, and easily one of the most explicit and lucid example of what I was arguing against in Towards Antivitalism that I’ve encountered. I’ve pulled out so many passages because I think the line of argument Marcuse develops here is a looming presence in the background of the present political imagination, and it will be useful to have a big stash of quotes to refer back to.
There’s no particular organisation to this—excerpts appear in the order they do in Marcuse’s text, grouped by section and chapter.
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