Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Chirruping Bird of Prey


I want to follow through on this not exactly heartwarming little train of thought I’ve stumbled into here by reconnecting it with what I was originally interested in exploring: pluralism and the power flows of pluralism and whether these can ever be effective enough to make a historical impact when faced with the more concentrated power flows of “oppositional”, antagonistic politics.

I don’t have any great confidence in pluralism as a political pragmatism, but without it I have no hope, either. It is very easy for me to understand why the Left would squander so much effort and energy on what looks like the lost cause of pluralism: what else is there for the Left to do? The only other course for it to pursue is to in some obscure manner to influence State power (centralized authority, centralized repression,) so that it be more rational, more “fair”, less “dominating”….This influence is exerted through a force which comes in on the centralized power from various marginal positions which are almost by definition much weaker than the centralized power…The centralized power is free to disregard these weaker forces, and except for some managerial or administrative problems occasionally perceivable, that is exactly what it does…

…Some crushing juggernaut of history sweeps down over the human particles of which it is composed, grinding them into even more minute particles, then imparting a form to this granulated particulate mass which is a form somehow simultaneously rigid and diffuse – a form which combines the worst characteristics of “form” as this concept applies to human life – the chafing, unbreathing, and the unrelentingly compressing nature of an externally-applied shape – with the worst characteristics of the opposite of “form” as the concept of the opposite of form applies to human life—without name or code, a mute “human” scream which is nothing but a scream screams into an amorphous nothing which is also nothing but this scream-- for a name or a code, a friendship or a warmth, which aren’t there and can’t be there because they are different from the scream, and the scream is all there is.

Domination—nothing else counts. The deed—the deed is everything. I’ve combined these ideas, but so far I’ve done so as if each of these positions is monolithic and even their combination yields something monolithic. I don’t think that’s the case, though. I think that the major error of Adorno and Horkheimer was to reach their conception of domination as the only contemporary actual or conceptual power relation while still trying to hang onto their dialectical visioning of history – postulating a kind of totalizing domination, they look around for some other dialectical force to oppose and sublate with domination, but are unable to find anything which could fit this bill. I think that the major success of Nietzsche, (and Deleuze and Guattari,) on the other hand, is to have realized the monism of “ the deed is everything” as the material basis for a pluralism which doesn’t shirk from its own power… Which doesn’t need to fear that its own totalizing (but totalizing has a different valuation and effect here,) force and power will do nothing more than betray it back into the form from which it hoped to distinguish itself by creating better, more progressive forms. I want to see if this reading works. I want to see how it works, if it does.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

A Brief Clarification

I topped the last post with these two quotations,

“What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts.” – Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments,(DoE).

“For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.”- Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, (GoM).
I accept the insights from both sources as true and I'm combining them to see what I can do.

In the first quotation, Adorno and Horkheimer make an evaluation of what human beings seek. They claim that the only thing that human beings value in their natural science is a knowledge of how to dominate nature. They say nothing else counts.

In the second quotation, Nietzsche makes an evaluation of what human beings are. He claims human beings are what they do – that the deed is everything. To be is to do. There is no substratum – certainly no neutral substratum—free to be and yet not to do. Human beings are not separated from what they can do – they are what they do. Human beings who dominate nature and other human beings are this domination….There is no neutral substratum beneath this domination which holds in reserve an unrealized or diverted (or separated) power to be free.

To dominate is to exercise a kind of power…It is this power. The question then becomes, I think, of what value this power has for us, and who are we to value this power, who are we when we be this power?

Following Nietzsche, I am trying to block the impulse to think that we are something other than what we do, (something other than the power we express, than our will to power.) I am excluding the possibility that we are somehow at our core loftier than our actions reveal, that we were pursuing freedom and autonomy and mysteriously became diverted, alienated, and self-estranged through extrinsic factors ( and from what mysterious source would such extrinsic factors come from in this case?) acting on this core, this neutral substratum subsisting beneath our action.

I am striking upon a certain existential strain within Nietzsche which seems remarkable to me to be hitting upon now, because I have been calling upon Nietzsche more from the direction of what I thought was a Marxist orientation…I wanted to show that an inability to realize power represents some sort of barrier within materialist thinking which refracts it back into idealist thinking.

I think that our unreflective impulse is equate domination with power, to assume that to dominate is to be powerful. We would be hard-pressed to imagine some other action as powerful which was not a dominating action; we would also assume that the only way to not dominate, in other words to avoid domination, would be to not be powerful—to renounce power.

However, I think that we need to consider that domination is only one form of power, and perhaps a weaker one…One valued by a weaker form of life. Who has the power to LIVE as if domination is the value of a weaker form of life? Anyone who doesn’t, IS this weaker form of life…

Monday, July 16, 2007

Bird of Prey Akrasia


“What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts.” – Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments,(DoE).


“For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.”- Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals.

The great Enlightenment thinkers set forth to emancipate and embolden men – to encourage them to find release from their self-incurred tutelage, their inability to make use of their own understanding without direction from another.

“Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters.”(DoE)

…This concise statement of the great Enlightenment "principles and ideals" is followed by the alarming conclusion,

“Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.” (DoE)

Enlightenment did not liberate human beings from fear – “Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized.” (DoE)
Enlightenment did not install human beings as masters – “The more heavily the process of self-preservation is based on the bourgeois division of labor, the more it enforces the self-alienation of individuals, who must mold themselves to the technical apparatus body and soul. Enlightened thinking has no answer for this, too: finally, the transcendental subject of knowledge, as the last reminder of subjectivity, is itself seemingly abolished and replaced by the operations of the automatic mechanisms of order, which therefore run all the more smoothly.”(DoE)

Human beings, ( but here it is inappropriate to use the broader designation – I really should say “men” –men only—women were excluded from this process, as Kant said, the entire “fair sex” does not make the “step to competence”,) set out on a path which they have determined to be best, actively pursue this course of action, and even succeed in reaching it… However this path leads in the end to, “a triumphant calamity.”

"Contemporary moral experience as a consequence has a paradoxical character. For each of us is taught to see himself or herself as an autonomous moral agent; but each of us also becomes engaged by modes of practice, aesthetic or bureaucratic, which involve us in manipulative relationships with others. Seeing to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our own principles and stand-point in the world of practice, we find no other way to do so expect by directing towards others those very manipulative modes of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case" Alastair MacIntyre, After Virtue, p68, quoted by Carl Sachs.
How did this come to be the case?

The Socratic answer for this, that such an outcome is the result of being ignorant of facts or knowledge of what is best or good does not ring true to me – surely we remain ignorant of facts or knowledge of what is best or good, and yet our knowledge in general has never been better, while it also seems that the more knowledge and facts we accumulate, the more triumphant calamity we experience, rather than the less. The Aristotelian answer, that the diverting of a course of action occurs when ill-founded “opinion” holds sway makes “opinion” the villain, but attributes to “reason” curative and redeeming powers. But as we are examining the outcomes of the actions of the very “Age of Reason,” this solution seems to have lost credibility.

Did the “Age of Reason” and reason itself become “separated from what it could do?”
I have rejected as absurdity this idea of something becoming separated from what it could do. ( But if I have implied that this absurdity be attributed this to Nietzsche, I have been in error…It is precisely Nietzsche’s point that forces do not and cannot separate from what they can do.) A bird of prey which no longer attacks and eats tender lambs is no longer a bird of prey. Reason which can no longer reason, cannot gain a “reasonable” outcome, is not reason…Perhaps it wasn’t ever. Then what the heck is it? And who uses it? And why? And why is it impossible to pry ourselves away from it when it doesn’t give us what we set out to get? Why do we persist in radicalizing mythical fear – when the goal of our pursuit was so otherwise?
What DEED is it that we ARE?

The image at the top of this post is from Flashvera.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Bird of Prey Factotum


In his inaugural February 16th 2006 post, Carl Sachs asked,
“Why did the Left abandon its traditional defense of Enlightenment principles and ideals?”

I think that’s a great question, an important question, and I want to begin work on it now…

I believe the answer has to do with the way that Enlightenment “principles and ideals” surreptitiously embody conceptions of power which set the “principles and ideals” working against themselves—grinding against themselves-- so that such Enlightenment ideals as autonomy and bold individuality change over time into something much different than intended.

Conceptions of power, inextricably embedded in Enlightenment principles and ideals, cause a contradiction within these very Enlightenment principles and ideals. Power somehow comes to contradict power – something which seems impossible. Power becomes problematical for the Left and forces the Left to abandon its traditional defense of Enlightenment principles and ideals. Abandoning power, the Left abandons the political. Abandoning its traditional defense of Enlightenment principles and ideals, the Left abandons itself.

Adorno and Horkheimer say this,


“The ‘happy match’[citing Francis Bacon, “the father of experimental philosophy”] between human understanding and the nature of things that he envisaged is a patriarchal one: the mind, conquering superstition, is to rule over disenchanted nature. Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters. Just as it serves all the purposes of the bourgeois economy both in factories and on the battlefield, it is at the disposal of entrepreneurs regardless of their origins. Kings control technology no more directly than do merchants: it is as democratic as the economic system with which it evolved. Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others, capital. The ‘many things’ which, according to Bacon, knowledge still held in store are themselves mere instruments: the radio as a sublimated printing press, the dive bomber as a more effective form of artillery, remote control as a more reliable compass. What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts.” – Adorno and Horkheimer,
The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, from the first two pages of the first chapter, “The Concept of Enlightenment.”


The Left cannot defend this patriarchal vision of an enslaved creation or deference to worldly masters, this singular aim of a domination of human beings and nature, when the conscious objective of the Left since the Enlightenment had been an overthrow of worldly masters and a liberation and emancipation of human beings from all domination.

Nor can the Left abandon this patriarchal vision.

Adorno and Horkheimer also say this,

“The absurdity of a state of affairs in which the power of the system over human beings increases with every step they take away from the power of nature denounces the reason of the reasonable society as obsolete. That reason’s necessity is illusion, no less than the freedom of the industrialists, which reveals its ultimately compulsive nature in their inescapable struggles and pacts. This illusion, in which utterly enlightened humanity is losing itself, cannot be dispelled by a thinking which, as an instrument of power, has to choose between command and obedience. Although unable to escape the entanglement in which it was trapped in prehistory, that thinking is nevertheless capable of recognizing the logic of either/or, of consequence and antinomy, by means of which it emancipated itself radically from nature, as that same nature, unreconciled and self-estranged. Precisely by virtue of its irresistible logic, thought, in whose compulsive mechanism nature is reflected and perpetuated, also reflects itself as a nature oblivious of itself, as a mechanism of compulsion. Of course, mental representation is only an instrument. In thought, human beings distance themselves from nature in order to arrange it in such a way that it can be mastered. Like the material tool which, as a thing, is held fast as that
thing in different situations and thereby separates the world, as something chaotic, multiple, and disparate, from that which is known, single, and identical, so the concept is the idea-tool which fits into things at the very point from which one can take hold of them. Thought thus becomes illusory whenever it seeks to deny its function of separating, distancing, and objectifying. All mystical union remains a deception, the impotently inward trace of the forfeited revolution. But while enlightenment is right in opposing any hypostatization of utopia and in dispassionately denouncing power as division, the split between subject and object, which it will not allow to be bridged, becomes the index of the untruth both of itself and of truth. The proscribing of superstition has always signified not only the progress of domination but its exposure. Enlightenment is more than enlightenment, it is nature made audible in its estrangement.”- IBID, p. 31.

Abandonment of Enlightenment principles and ideals by the Left has included abandonment to adherence of these as functions of thinking: separating, distancing, and objectifying.

Separating, distancing, and objectifying – the horrible coldness of these powerful functions rings out in their very naming. Is it true that these are essential features of thinking and that thought becomes “illusory” without them? Can the Left return to an affirmation of such functions of thinking without, however, returning to the power structures of domination of which they seem such an integral part?

The image at the top of this post is from Flashvera.