Pragmatism is concerned with the unity of practice with philosophy, or more specifically of ascertaining by what one might measure the utility of an idea. We can see, particularly with Rorty’s neopragmatism, that such concerns are not overdetermined or constrained.
Since Marx’s eleventh thesis commanding change, the focus on praxis in critical theory has predominated. No understanding that does not alter, demands Herr Marx.
Pragmatism and marxian praxis are the two varieties that carry currency, perhaps because they have driven prolificity more than results — a criteria which emanates from their own premises.
However, a praxis of a more vulgar variety pervades much of contemporary radical social theory. These might be referred to as the tyrannies of hopefulness and possibility.
The tyranny of hopefulness demands of any theory that it assign considerable agency to a political subject, and fill her with confidence and aspiration.
The tyranny of possibility is related to the former order. Any analysis that posits limitation on individual actors, or suggests they might despair simple change in any given context is rejected out of hand.
These tyrannies dismiss as not only lacking utility but also accuracy any philosophy that does not confer ambition and promise.
These are the politics of faith, of superstition. They enslave thought as well as action, and as such must be rejected and forcefully resisted.
I just completed a fascinating interview with McKenzie Wark about his recent book, The Beach Beneath The Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International. The book profiles the ideas and activities of various characters involved in the preceding and formative years of SI. Part of this interview will be included in an “interactive review” of the text in an upcoming issue of Humanity & Society, and the full content will be submitted elsewhere.
In describing his motivation for writing this book, Wark says:
The book began as preliminary research for writing about the digital avant-garde of the 1990s, which was sort of rhizomatic, dispersed, and transnational. I was struggling for a point of entry, and I thought ‘What was one book that everyone would have read who was on this scene?’ And I thought ‘Society of the Spectacle! We all read that!’ Everyone read that book. So I re-read it and I thought, ‘This is a really amazing book! We thought we’d superseded this or transcended this, but we really haven’t. ‘Everyone reads the first chapter. You know, Debord’s famous account: ‘The world appears as a vast accumulation of spectacles’ and so on… But the meat of the book is in the later chapters. It’s really a book about detournement and the practice of plagiarism, that culture is always a commons, that’s collectively produced and so on. Actually, that’s the central idea of the book. So, I wanted to know the context of that book. What was the movement that produced it? So I read about the Situationist International. And I thought, ‘I want to know more about the context that produced them.’
This led him to the point where The Beach Beneath the Street begins, in post-war France. In this time, a variety of Marxist tendencies were emerging, from the existentialism of Sartre to Leninist and Maoist groups. For Wark, this is a time that continues to inspire intellectuals today, but they are often taking a “wrong turn.” He describes himself “as someone who always identified with a critical, libertarian, Marxist set of intellectual currents.” This turn is toward a popular tendency in cultural criticism and theory among twenty-first century inheritors who are bringing forward hyperacademic and idealist work that emerged in this period, alongside the Situationists.
Reviving Leninism in the twenty-first century, it struck me, seemed like a really terrible idea. Reviving Maoism seemed like an even worse idea. So I wanted to tell a story that would open up some other pathways through a kind of resolutely non-Stalinist, libertarian, nonacademic but very intellectually serious set of avant-garde movements. It struck me that telling the story of the Situationist International was one way to really start that. An alternative to reading Jacque Lacan is to read his exact contemporary, Henri Lefebvre. An alternative to reading Althusser is to read his almost exact contemporary, Asger Jorn. It was just a way to open up these other paths, another way of doing works that, I think, are much more interesting. They [Situationists] are partly about doing intellectual work, but they’re also about practices. They’re about forming collaborative practices with people who work in other forms, in other media, and so on. So I was just trying to make a gesture toward all these things, all these other ways of working that are antecedents to things you could do now, other than things that seem hypertheoretical but in a vacuum and to politically go back to some of the worst choices you could possibly make and bring them into the twenty-first century.
I just heard last night that my dear friend, Joel Olson, died. I’m still very out of sorts with all of this, and I feel much more comfortable writing philosophy and politics than about my personal experiences and feelings. But, reading other people’s stories about Joel has helped me make it through the day and maybe someone can benefit from reading some of mine. I’ll add some pictures as I come across them.
When I was almost done with my undergraduate studies at Kent State, I decided when I finished that I’d move to Arizona. Friends in Anti-Racist Action and the Anarchist Black Cross Federation put me in touch with a few people in Phoenix. Joel was one of them. We began communicating about our mutual interests in critical race theory and he offered to give feedback on my honor’s thesis. I was linking up theoretical and historic developments in revolutionary anti-racism and critical race theory with feminism and attacks on gender essentialism. He gave me very helpful input.
Not long after submitting my thesis in December of 1999, I traveled to Arizona to find an apartment and meet some folks doing political work there. I met up with Joel, John Quintos and some others who were part of an anarchist study group at Chez Nous, a classic rhythm and blues bar (that was later torn down to make room for a bank). This meeting led to some new friendships; a few of us later wrote the Bring The Ruckus document together. Continue reading →
News is spreading about a protest by leading websites that plan to shut down in response to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Hundreds, maybe thousands are following suit. This will not be one of them.
Many suffer the delusion that the internet is or can be a wonderland for democratic activity.
I say this is delusional because it neglects practical and technical aspects of the internet. In practice, the internet is a source of cognitive strain and disengagement from political life. To punctuate the latter point, consider that adult websites receive 10,000 times the traffic of political websites (see The Myth of Digital Democracy). Technically, the internet depends upon highly centralized protocols that allow for controls like SOPA to function in the first place. I have read expressions of the idea that SOPA is antithetical to the principles embedded in the internet (one of the better examples is from Cory Doctorow) and this legislation will effectively “break the internet.” This is pure fantasy, a fool’s paradise. It might be antithetical to this fool’s paradise, but not to the internet’s technical and socio-political realities. Continue reading →
Take a look at your local Occupy movement. Consider their press releases, statements, declarations, demands, policies, principles and so on. Also look at the events covered in press and quotes from participants.
Take note of the issues and conceptualizations of them. Also, consider the social locations where these issues are most relevant. Continue reading →
A perennial debate in technology studies is over the question of agency and determinism. Does technology drive history? Is technology socially constructed? Who or what exercises agency in sociotechnical development? In this blog, I summarize and analyze the ideas that have emerged from this debate that I find most useful. Specifically, I touch on the work of Jacques Ellul and Langdon Winner.
For Ellul, “when technique enters into every area of life, including the human, it ceases to be external to man and becomes his very substance.”[1] Donna Haraway has taken this point to the extreme, suggesting that humans are cyborgs, inextricably linked to their devices, not only to participate in social life, but in their conceptions of self.[2] “This transformation, so obvious in modern society,” wrote Ellul, “is the result of the fact that technique has become autonomous.”[3] By autonomous, Ellul meant that “technique pursues its own course more and more independently of man.”[4] Humans are directed to technical ends by their reliance upon its means for every aspect of their lives, whereby humans are “reduced to the level of a catalyst…”[5] It is not technology alone that requires this relationship, but the role of technology in society. “When technique enters into the realm of social life, it collides ceaselessly with the human being to the degree that the combination of man and technique is unavoidable, and that technical action necessarily results in a determined result.”[6] This characterization has led some to dismiss Ellul’s philosophy as “technological determinism.” Winner rejects that Ellul commits to determinism, and finds utility in this approach – that of autonomous technology – when he presents Ellul’s vision “that technology is somehow out of control by human agency.”[7] In this view, “far from being controlled by the desired and rational ends of human beings, technology in a real sense now governs its own course, speed, and destination.”[8] Ellul argued that “there can be no human autonomy in the face of technical autonomy.”[9]Continue reading →
“the wealth of networks is just as concentrated as financial wealth.”
Techno-utopianism has a history that extends beyond the widespread use of the personal computer. The champions of the PC itself have a past that extend into the 1960s counterculture. In this blog, I examine the relationship of the Whole Earth Network to the techno-utopianism of today.
The Whole Earth Network emerged not only out of 1960s counterculture, but also out of new modes of work and organization that emerged during and after WWII. These modes stressed collaboration, flexibility, and, at times, decentralization. “[M]embers of the Whole Earth network helped reverse the political valence of information and information technology and turn computes into emblems of countercultural revolution,” writes Turner. “At the same time, however, they legitimated a metamorphosis within – and a widespread diffusion of – the core cultural styles of military-industrial-academic technocracy that their generation had sought to undermine” (2006, p. 238). This network, which Turner refers to as the New Communalists,” began with “the bohemian artists of cold war Manhattan and San Francisco, and later the hippies of Haight-Ashbury and the youthful back-to-the-landers,” which later in the 1980s and 1990s became the pioneers of internet culture. Contrary to the New Left, the New Communalists “in fact embraced technocentric optimism, the information theories, and the collaborative work style of the research world” (p. 240). Continue reading →
Questioning Technology by Andrew Feenberg is both deeply important and fundamentally flawed. It would take me a couple hundred pages to appropriately respond to this text, and such a response would be worthwhile. As such, these reactions are intended to provoke more than to explain. In this brief review, I will touch on three aspects that I find troubling in this text.
Democracy as process in confronting “the field”…
Feenberg confronts a problem many proponents of egalitarianism and democracy before him have: the existing technical infrastructures have been developed through a repressive process and reproduce domination, and “the field is taken.” Like most others before him, he constructs a philosophy and politics of technology that demand an evaluative and practical response. And like most of them, he considers the field before him, taken by so many systems that are integrated with daily life, and caters the politics to the maintenance of the degree of technical development to which Western industrial societies have become accustomed. In doing so, he has softened the requirements for egalitarianism and democracy to a degree to which they are weakened or contradictory forms. Direct, localized democracy is indeed incompatible with many – indeed most – existing technologies. He is correct to consider the field as taken by so many technologies that prohibit popular engagement, and perceive Sclove’s requirements for a democratic assessment to negate most of them. So, Feenberg abandons the prospect for direct, local democracy in favor of a representative and guild system. I find this choice to be fatal to Feenberg’s own politics of technology. Continue reading →
On Friday, 26 members of Occupy Albany were arrested, and another 13 on Saturday. Eight of those arrested were members of the Radical Caucus.
The following “Statement by the Members of Occupy Albany’s Radical Caucus Arrested Saturday and Sunday Evenings in Lafayette Park” was released today:
On Saturday evening 26 people were arrested and on Sunday evening 13 were arrested for remaining in Lafayette Park past a curfew. This curfew did not exist until days before the first General Assembly in Lafayette Park. Among each night’s arrestees were 8 members of the Occupy Albany Radical Caucus. While we took part in this action, we would like to make it known we are not of the view that occupying public spaces and appealing to the Bill of Rights is sufficient action for the creation of a just society. No government can grant us rights; they can merely take away our autonomy. This was demonstrated last night when we were arrested.
The privatization of public space and resources must be thoughtfully and effectively resisted. We feel it is essential to defend against this offensive by the 1% and their lapdogs such as Andrew Cuomo. But we also recognize that it will be necessary to challenge the property rights system which forms the legal basis for many of the material injustices done upon the 99%. Eviction of persons from their homes by banks and landlords, the idling and off-shoring of our productive capacity, falling wages for those who remain employed, and the elimination of an already miserly social safety net are all methods by which the wealth of our nation is being consolidated to the richest 1%. This extraction can only be ended by moving beyond a system which affirms the property rights of owners to act with profit driven self-interest and towards a system that holds people accountable for the shared costs they impose on society.
A colleague of mine, David Banks, pointed out an article written by Naomi Klein called “Capitalism vs. The Climate”. “Naomi Klein keeps doing our job and I don’t appreciate it,” he complained. By “our,” he means those of us in the field of science and technology studies. And by “our job,” I’m presuming he means usefully articulating deep structural problems combined with a meaningful call to action. But, of course, we might be skeptical of terms like “economic Armageddon,” and we certainly wouldn’t end an article, writing “a very different worldview can be our salvation.” How silly and sophomoric! How moralistic!
I pointed to a similar article published by al-Jazeera. By similar, I mean that it points to deep structural problems that must be changed in order to significantly impact climate change. This article, “Nature is the 99%, too” wouldn’t make it past the cursory glance of the average STSer: don’t they know that ‘nature’ doesn’t exist! It’s a mere social construction!
I decided to do a quick search on Google to see if I could identify a ripe area for career-building as a smug academic who prefers semantic games rather than civic engagement. I stumbled upon an opportunity!
Take a look at your local Occupy movement. Consider their press releases, statements, declarations, demands, policies, principles and so on. Also look at the events covered in press and quotes from participants.