Just Art

I actually just wish I could make art at the moment. I wish my life was nothing else. If this moment could be just art and nothing else then I think I might be satisfied.

Lyotard's Naive Game Theory

Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition gives us a kind of naïve game theory about micro-narratives. It is not sufficiently developed in his essay, yet it would not be difficult to reconstruct his ideas using microeconomic theory to talk about micro-narrative “fighting” strategies, i.e. micro-narrative communication.

Postmodernity is characterized by the end of meta-narratives and has a new criterion as to how knowledge is legitimated. Performativity, the “technological criterion”, is the most efficient input/output ratio, and the criterion for legitimating science in this age. This late stage of capitalism has caused the production of knowledge to become easily modeled after technology. Postmodernity has transformed knowledge into the new commanding heights of late-capitalist production. It has been commodified, bought and sold, and if Lyotard is right, in the future wars will be fought over its control.

Paralogy is an alternative to this criterion. Though not a criterion itself, paralogy is the creative resistance to the totality of the meta-narrative, a respect for the paradoxical, and a respect for the incommensurability of language-games, which, since they are not understood, their rights must be respected. An important and crucial aspect of the paralogical is the need for worldwide freedom of information in order to sustain just competitions for power and economic dominance. In order for there to be just paralogical competition, Lyotard alludes to a topic that game theorists have struggled with for decades: perfect information.

The term perfect information describes a state of knowledge in which each player in the game knows everything about the actions of other players, and is instantaneously updated as new information arises. The best example of this is the game of chess, where each player can see the moves of the opponent, and this information is updated with each new move. Game theorists limit the discussion of perfect information to specific areas of knowledge when constructing models. One might speak of “perfect information about prices” which is the most common sense of the term, indicating the full awareness of competitors about all the prices charged in the market. But Lyotard’s notion of perfect information includes much more than prices. It includes the control of information, the movement of information, its availability through telematics, and the contracts—temporary or permanent—between data banks and owners of information.

With Lyotard’s conception of information, there is still more than enough room for a game-theoretic approach to paralogical studies. The idea behind Lyotard’s notion of perfect information is the notion of a kind of perfect competition between micro-narratives. The reason Lyotard gives for perfect information is to have perfect competition. Perfect competition rests on the assumption that the scenario is characterized by perfect information. In the perfect competition model, micro-narratives (which are always “fighting” with each other) will always be in an environment which forces them to maintain their viability, while at the same time not making it too difficult for the micro-narratives to compete, that is to say, not terrorizing each other. Let me explain how this works.

At this point it is worth mentioning that perfect information is a necessary condition for the economic model of production known also as perfect competition. In the economic version of this model, the perfectly competitive market is characterized by four things: (a) perfect information about prices (discussed above), (b) fragmentation (each “move” is so small that it has an imperceptible effect on market prices), (c) undifferentiation (each product is identical no matter who produces it), and (d) no barriers-to-entry (each firm has equal access to the same technology and inputs).

The kind of model that Lyotard expects to yield from paralogy is actually the economic model, perfect competition, between micro-narratives (although we must be careful not to use economics as a totalizing approach to explaining information.) In Lyotard’s version of this model an ideal condition obtains where there are no barriers to enter the databanks of information; where information is free, open, uncontrolled, un-terrorized, and respected; where there is perfect information about data and the history of changes made to the data are public; and where the moves, or “utterances”, of each micro-narrative are small enough to have an imperceptible effect on the moves of others. The best analogy to this model is the open-source wiki, and although wikis can harbor terrorism, the history of changes made to its content is stored in its database.

Perhaps this is the appropriate point to say that this model is an ideal. Perfect competition is the model Lyotard idealizes. In fact, the perfectly competitive model is idealized by modern mainstream economics as well. Mainstream economics teaches that there are such markets in which all four of those conditions obtain and that there are further consequences to be deduced from that model. Yet the “perfectly competitive firm” is an idol for modern economics; it is a falsely simplistic notion of competitive environments. The model itself is a totalizing abstraction from the way realistic competitive behavior plays itself out in the market. There was never a perfectly competitive market in neoclassical economics: the model developed out of a need for mathematical formalism and reductionism only.

It has been argued that the kind of simplicity of “perfect competition” in elementary economics is “autistic”—or narrow-minded—and that we ought to reject the narrow economic world-view and its reliance upon simple models for excessive mathematical formalism. Game-theoretic approaches are in some way a part of the “post-autistic” trend in economics. They “open up” economics to a wider array of possibilities, variations, and paradoxes for model-building.

It has also been argued that, not only is the perfectly competitive market false, but that it is not even desirable. The assumption of perfect competition allows for other arguments to follow. Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter argued on this basis that some degree of monopoly is preferable to perfect competition. Since perfectly competitive markets don’t allow for secrecy, something Lyotard prefers not to allow as well, important research into new areas of technology is lost. If all players in the market have the same access to information, this guarantees the manufacturing of information will be undifferentiated, since all market equilibria are known or easily obtained by all players. The players’ strategies are fixed at a low Nash-equilibrium, and this provides no incentive for players to develop innovative ways of gaining power, or de-fragmenting themselves from the rest of the market, since their knowledge will be open to all other players. When the goal of the game is win—or to speak Lyotard, “gain winning points”—whether that means earn profit or to silence other narratives, competitive environments must exist.

Players in this game want to create secrecy between them and other players. Secrecy creates a barrier-to-entry that other micro-narratives cannot enter. Secret technology, secret information, which will give them greater power, is a mode of operation the realistically-competitive language-game adheres to. There is a greater incentive to keep information secret, to develop technology in secrecy, and to hold back from sharing information with other micro-narratives. This leads to a realistic scenario in which there is no such thing as perfect competition.

The paralogically competitive ideal might be, as I mentioned earlier, the open-source movement in information. The open-source community developed the wiki and other information tools. That this is an example of perfect competition seems true, aside from the fact that there are no prices involved, and therefore not a market in the strict sense. It can be said that micro-narratives are not always markets in the strict sense either. The non-competitive games can, however, at least be modeled using the game-theoretic known as the coordination game whereby the players in the game are said to strategize collusively. The coordination game, however, assumes competition with rival players. This is important to my argument: it assumes competition is elsewhere. If competition is not endogenous to the model, then it is assumed to be exogenous. Thus open-source shifts the realm of competitive behavior outside the enclave in question (though there is a strong incentive to “cheat” with collusive games.) Rivals of open-source see their software as competing with their own, but open-source is not actively competing with its rivals. This sounds like the triumph of the paralogical over the performative. Yet for this reason, the open-source model is actually similar to the cheap-talk game—a kind of pre-competitive game whereby the moves made in the game are not expected to affect the players when they engage in the competitive game. Since open-source does not engage in competitive performance, it can be seen as paralogically innovative, and involved only with pre-competitive types of gaming.

This seems to defy the Schumpeterian notion that only imperfectly competitive environments (monopoly, monopsony, oligopoly, etc.) can become innovative, and I would agree. The paralogy (the flood of good ideas) from open-source avoids terror in efficient and technologically savvy ways, inspired by the agonistics of the software development culture. What I have attempted to show is that the non-competitive games cannot exist without the presence of competitive games. The coordination assumed in the model does not imply coordination everywhere else too. For Lyotard, this implies that, while the paralogical is anomalous, it does not float above the competitive environment detached from the performativity of the market. That is, the legitimization of knowledge through the paralogical is not independent from the performative. This is not to bring the performativity criterion back into the equation’s centerpiece. Rather, it is to show the synthesis of the performative and the paralogical, and to shore up the evidence for paralogy as an emergent principle of legitimation within the social bond.

Economic Freedom and "The State" as a Meta-narrative

Lyotard talks about the ideology of communicational “transparency,” where we are able to see what the economic powers are doing with our information, and which goes hand in hand with the commercialization of knowledge. He argues forcefully that the economic powers will begin to perceive the State as a factor of opacity and “noise.” It is from this point of view that the problem of the relationship between economic and state powers threatens to arise with a new urgency. Lyotard is in favor of the state, but without warrant, without reflection, and without question. He seems to believe that the state is a kind of benevolent host which adjudicates these disputes even-handedly.

He says, "Economic powers have reached the point of imperiling the stability of the state through new forms of the circulation of capital that go by the generic name of multi-national corporations. These new forms of circulation imply that investment decisions have, at least in part, passed beyond the control of the nation-states.”

He asks us to suppose, for example, that a firm such as IBM is authorized to occupy a belt in the earth’s orbital field and launch communications satellites or satellites housing data banks. Who will have access to them? Who will determine which channels or data are forbidden? The State? Lyotard is worrisome that the state should have no voice in determining which channels or data are forbidden, that the state itself will become a micro-narrative silenced by the terror of multi-national corporations. It is important that “the state” is called out as a micro-narrative, since what else can it be for Lyotard? The kind of unwarranted favor Lyotard gives the state likens it to the kind of hierarchical status of the meta-narrative. This is not questioned by Lyotard.

The idea that one narrative—the state—can even-handedly settle disputes in a just and forthright manner before any other narratives is inconsistent with his own thought. The state as a meta-narrative cannot tell the stories of the micro-narratives within its domain; the meta-narrative cannot hold our experiences together. The state, then, is a “god” for Lyotard—when in fact, as Lyotard reminds us, “god is dead”, and all gods have lost credibility in the post-modern condition. “The state” is the grand narrative that we all play but can no longer afford the sensibility for. Lyotard laughably asks us to remain faithful to this one last grand idea—that perhaps we might not notice?—in one last god: “the state”.

Lyotard is also worrisome that the perfomativity of the market will shut down the performance of the state, that the market will shut down the performance of stagnant research programs, the state included, should it become stagnant (to use the Lakatosian idiom.) Lyotard fails to see the equal possibility that the performance of the state will shut down the micro-narrative enclaves of the state and non-state types. For example, China’s 110 million internet-users are managed by over 30,000 internet police patrollers who are aided by sophisticated Western telematics. When searching google.com for pictures of Tienanmen Square, thousands of images are displayed, many of them the famous “tank man”. But when searching from China using cn.yahoo.com or google.cn—which are both specifically “tailor-made for users in China”—we find images of maps, architecture, cooking recipes, and smiling tourists standing in the square, but none of the ‘89 massacre or the tank man.

The meta-narrative of the state is simply one language community among others, yet it is the meta-narrative whose capacity to terrorize communities is greater than the micro-narrative’s. Cisco Networking, Yahoo! and Google have all signed “self-censorship pledges” to tailor their technology to the needs of the Chinese regime’s political censorship needs and Yahoo! specifically actively aids in the arrests of China’s political dissidents. Lyotard is worrisome that the state should have no voice in determining which data is forbidden, yet it is clear that we ought to be more worrisome should the state have a voice in determining which data is forbidden.

The state has lost its credibility and what are we left with?—the freedom of the micro-narratives to bring a reign of terror onto the rest? This aspect of Lyotard’s thought is similar logically to his thoughts about absolute Sartrean freedom. When there are no meta-narratives, there is freedom in their absence, yet the narrative about freedom is also meta-narrated. So the absoluteness of that freedom cannot be talked about seriously. Absolute freedom has lost its credibility just like the meta-narratives it destroyed. When the state is destroyed and replaced by the groundlessness of the micro-narrative, the freedom it leaves in its wake also cannot be talked about seriously. The perfomativity and credibility of the meta-narrative is called into question, but so is the performativity and credibility of its absence.

This is to say, when the state is called into question, so is its absence—absolute market freedom. Like the Lyotardian argument against Sartre, we seem to be free by default, but we cannot talk about that freedom seriously. We have already shattered our belief in gods, leaving us unable to talk about the invisible hand of the market as a legitimate replacement for the benevolent hand of the adjudicator-state. Lyotard outlines the process of legitimization, yet there is no non-question-begging criterion for what, in the end, is legitimate. His own analysis of this process is correct and is not question-begging, yet everything the analysis is able to talk about is question-begging in nature, leaving us in a state of paradox. Yet in the postmodern age we are delighted by paradox.

In responding to Lyotard, we must acknowledge that the state is simply one narrative among others, and that it is not hard to visualize free-narrative performance along the same lines as state-coerced performances. Both have lost any meaning when talking about performance and credibility. Yet we must have free-narratives if we are to have anything. Thus instead of talking about the performative value of the market in the absence of the state, the more relevant area to examine is the paradoxical notion of “freedom” in the absence of all meta-narratives: the non-conceptual, paralogical triumph of the absurd and the sublime over the structured, and performance-evaluated narratives of the past.

Lyotard on Language Games

Lyotard claims that we have now lost the ability to believe in meta-narratives, that the legitimating function that grand quests once played in society has lost all credibility. The question then becomes, what now forms the basis of legitimation in society if there is no overarching meta-narrative? For Lyotard, the answer lies in the philosophy of Wittgenstein, which analyzes the way sub-groups in society regulate their behavior through rules of linguistic conduct.

If we have rejected grand narratives, then what we have fallen back on are micro-narratives. Micro-narratives are essentially Wittgenstein's “language-games”, limited contexts in which there are clear, if not clearly defined, rules for understanding and behavior. We no longer give credence to total philosophical contexts like Marxism which ostensibly would prescribe behavior in all aspects of life, rather, we have lots of smaller contexts which we act within.

Later in Lyotard’s report on knowledge he uses the language-game theory to talk about justice for the various linguistic communities who obey competing forms of logic. All natural language groups are composed of families of language-games. These meanings are not separated from each other by sharp boundaries, but blend into one another. The concept is based on the following analogy: The rules of language (grammar) are analogous to the rules of games; meaning something in language is thus analogous to making a move in a game. The analogy between a language and a game brings out the fact that only in the various and multiform activities of human life do words have meaning. Lyotard says, in an almost Rawlsian fashion, that we need to strive for justice without first deciding what kinds of laws are just. The two “rules” he gives for this are as follows.

A recognition that there are many language games and it will not satisfy us to legitimate one over the other. That would be a politics of terror. That is a politics of forcing others out of the conversation. But for ourselves we will want to rearrange the conversation so that we continue to have a voice. Learning to define rules of language within our local situation. The language game of “resistance” needs to be settled upon and agreed to locally and provisionally with the present situation. Only if we can agree on local and provisional rules will our conversation begin make sense to the postmodern ear. In general, we choose the rules that seems most able to foster our local paralogy, that is, the rules that generate new ideas within the community conversation (or the therapy dialogue).It seems to me that computers will assist us in this paralogical process because they can make more available the information we need to understand each other. Also, the availability of information makes it less tempting to resort to suppressing each other's voice (i.e., terror). Lyotard recommends, therefore, that everyone should have complete access to the data that can be made available to them through telecommunications and informatics. If we can make our conversations more paralogical, more generative of new ideas that we find inspiring or satisfying, then we will never exhaust the fruits of our discussions. Although there will always be a winning and losing of points, the process itself will generate new fruits of understanding forever, and continuously -- and that will be a winning situation for all of us who have become postmodern.

Lyotard wants to call this paralogy a “postmodern justice” because it provides people what they deserve without requiring us all to agree. We do not have to agree before hand what we are striving for. It happens if we do these two things. Think of it like this: Each win or loss occurs within the language game at hand and can be re-evaluated within other language games. That is, there are no overall winners and losers, just won and lost points. Such a practice not only satisfies our desire for justice, but it will help us make inroads into the unknown because the fruits of our paralogical discussion will not be merely a recycling of yesterday's understandings.

The Surrealism of Rene Margritte

A consummate technician, his work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects in an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The representational use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, The Treachery of Images, (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe, This is not a pipe (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. (In his book, This Is Not a Pipe, Foucault discusses the painting and its paradox.)

Magritte pulled the same stunt in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit realistically and then used an internal caption or framing device to deny that the item was an apple. In these Ceci n'est pas works, Magritte seems to suggest that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself, per se, as a Kantian noumenon, but capture only an image on the canvas.

His art shows a more representational style of surrealism compared to the "automatic" style seen in works by artists like Joan Miro. In addition to fantastic elements, his work is often witty and amusing. He also created a number of surrealist versions of other famous paintings.

René Magritte described his paintings by saying,

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?'. It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

The Life of Yelstin and the Rise of Putin

Boris Yelstin died today. For liberating Russians from the troubles of the one-party state and the planned economy, he deserves immense gratitude. Yet his nepotistic and capricious rule spawned colossal lawlessness and corruption, paving the way for the authoritarian successor, Vladimir Putin.

Gorbechev fired Yelstin in '87 for personal reasons, only for him to become president of the Russian Federation in 1990. When Communist party hardliners mounted a coup against the Soviet leadership in 1991, it was Mr Yeltsin, denouncing the putschists while perched on a tank, who symbolized the successful democratic resistance.

As the other 14 Soviet republics became independent, Mr Yeltsin appointed a short-lived government of young reformers, led by Yegor Gaidar, who unleashed breakneck economic reform on the ruined country. It was deeply unpopular: price liberalization made evident the destruction of savings under Soviet inflation. Privatization meant to many Russians a field day for robber barons. The institutions needed for a properly functioning market economy were pitifully lacking, and that was their problem. It was in the Yeltsin era that the world learnt the term “oligarch”, to describe the over-mighty tycoons who fascistly fused political and economic power.

Yet those reforms worked, by many indicators. Russia has a growing consumer-goods market., even if we are ambivalent towards consumer culture. The robber barons were a lot better than the “red directors” they replaced, whose thinking and loyalties were still rooted in the Communist-run planned economy. His economic reforms were for the better. But his political reforms were not.

Shelling Russia’s parliament in 1993, supposedly to dislodge Communist and other hardline deputies who had seized control there, reintroduced the "virus of violence" into Russian political life. So did the shameful Chechen war of 1994-96, which unleashed the might of the Russian war machine on the small breakaway republic. His rigged victory over the Communist Gennady Zyuganov in the 1996 presidential election spawned a habit of official vote-rigging that has largely destroyed the credibility of Russian elections, and everywhere else.

All the same, Mr Yeltsin stood for three fundamental principles. He believed in freedom of speech, including freedom of the press, no matter what. He wanted Russia to be friends with the west. And he despised the Communist party and everything it stood for—particularly the KGB.It was a tragedy that he did not dissolve it fully in 1991, when he had the chance. It was an irony that the candidate his family chose as a safe successor, the cautious, little-known ex-KGB man, Mr Putin, should have done so much to reverse his legacy, blaming so many of Russia’s ills on what he calls the “chaos” of the 1990s.

Anecdote about the Politics of my Hair - yes, my Hair

Let me tell a story. I won a leadership award at a 'leadership recognition' ceremony at the University of Puget Sound for, actually, "protesting" I guess (or something like that). I think it's great that protesting has rewards. (Tangible results, too.) Carrying home a plaque with my name on it was pretty amazing. But there was something else too.

Everybody cheered!

...I felt like a hero.

But then some parent ruined it. After the ceremony was over, a parent of a student came up to me and congratulated me for "looking mainstream".

Since a "protester" was being rewarded for "protesting", the parent expected to see a kid (me) with long hair and smelly clothes. To her amazement, she said, a "clean-cut, mainstream-looking" student stood up and walked onto the stage. She said, "I'm glad to see SDS has become more mainstream than what I remember from my youth." I sauntered off wishing I had long hair to strangle her with.

John Lennon, who had long hair and worked hard to make that hair look good, had a word for her hair prejudice. He called it "bagism". I'm not sure how he came up with that word, but bagism is present everywhere. The older generations are inundated with bagism. When they view the youth they look to bagism as an indicator of their credibility, class, and criminality, and pot-smoking status.

Having the right hair is simply another way that the Spectacle has made them believe they must adhere to its "higher" standards of professionalism and obedience.

Maybe I should have protested the award ceremony... for reinforcing bagism.

Psychobabble: The Krishnamurtis

Jiddu Krishnamurti is the optimist, the spiritual guidance counselor, the guru, the lecturer who insists he's a speaker instead. He is the one who washes over your philosophical concerns with spiritual psychobabble, pronouncing simplistic epistemological solutions to impossible problems. His constant pronouncement that the "teacher is unimportant" does little to silence the criticism.

Uppaluri Gopola Krishnamurti is the skeptic, the enlightened iconoclast, antagonist to widely held values of society. People would come to U.G. and ask for "metaphysical guidance" and he would tell them there is no such teaching, and that it would be impossible to transmit such teachings between people even if there is one. He is the teacher who taught the "enlightenment", "spirituality", "charity", and "selflessness" were not important concepts anyway.

I would much rather be drinking tea with Uppaluri Gopola. He is the more realistic of the two teachers, and it is reality that we are after, after all. U.G. will tell you that his teaching is a solution to your own fabricated problems. Jiddu on the other hand is concerned with theosophistic solutions to problems constructed out of psychobabble. Much like my New Age ex-girlfriend, he offers an unsophisticated spiritualism to a list of problems and wants he believes you should have. Psychobabble is the use of meaningless buzzwords that have come into widespread use in stress management and popular psychology. It's a complex, esotetic language that the speaker only has access to, and believes that by using words (perhaps words he doesn't know all the connections to) that this will trigger some positive psychological response in you. It's the new language of candor.

U.G. Krishnamurti knew that Jiddu's seminars were nothing but psychobabble. The teachings so lack precision that it has become pseudoscientific, and yet the speakers somehow expect that you'd be open to it, that you'd accept it, and that it's prescriptive quality will affect you in some way. For example, my ex-girlfriend would say something like this to describer herself. I am "a free spirit, magic my intuition my guide, and paint (thick succelent and erotically moist) my muse." She is a free spirit who likes to paint. The disordered syntax is a source of psychobabble here. Words strewn together in a stream-of-consciousness are often psychobabble. Words like "succulent" which have clear meaning elsewhere, have special and particular meanings in a psychobabble context.

Or one could speak in a kind of quasi-Shakespearean mode, using the phrases incorrectly, and implying a certain attitude in your speech. If your audience does not understand you, at least they understand that you are attempting to sound Shakespearean. And that you are trying to impart on them an attitude which you cannot adequately express yourself. For example, my ex-girlfriend believed in the purity of Shakespearean language, yet failed in her attempts to use it properly. This way, it lacked all of the profundity and understanding of the language, yet still wanted to achieve the same kind of effect. U.G. Krishnamurti said of the Jiddu that he repeated the same phrases and yet he was "so concerned with preserving your teaching for posterity in its pristine purity." When asked to explain in another way, or to answer criticism, he either repeated the teaching or refused to answer.

Their relationship ended with U.G. saying, "If I have no way of knowing [your teaching] and you have no way of communicating it, what the hell have we been doing! I have wasted seven years listening to you. You can give your precious time to somebody else. I am leaving for New York tomorrow." That is to say, U.G. believed there wasn't any teaching of Jiddu Krishnamurti's in the first place, and that it was all psychobabble.

Lyotard's Justice Within Language Games

The term 'language game' is used to refer to:

• Fictional examples of language use that are simpler than our own everyday language.
• Simple uses of language with which children are first taught language (training in language).
• Specific regions of our language with their own grammars and relations to other language-games.
• All of a natural language composed of a family of language-games.

These meanings are not separated from each other by sharp boundaries, but blend into one another. The concept is based on the following analogy: The rules of language (grammar) are analogous to the rules of games; meaning something in language is thus analogous to making a move in a game. The analogy between a language and a game brings out the fact that only in the various and multiform activities of human life do words have meaning. (The concept is not meant to suggest that there is anything trivial about language, or that language is just a game.)

Lyotard uses Wittgenstein's language game concept to talk about justice, and says in a Rawlsian fashion that we need to strive for justice without first deciding what kinds of laws are just. The two "rules" he gives for this are as follows.

1) A recognition that there are many language games and it will not satisfy us to legitimate one over the other. That would be a politics of terror. That is a politics of forcing others out of the conversation. But for ourselves we will want to rearrange the conversation so that we continue to have a voice.

2) Learning to define rules of language within our local situation. The language game of "resistance" needs to be settled upon and agreed to locally and provisionally with the present situation. Only if we can agree on local and provisional rules will our conversation begin make sense to the postmodern ear.

In general, we choose the rules that seems most able to foster our local paralogy, that is, the rules that generate new ideas within the community conversation (or the therapy dialogue).It seems to me that computers will assist us in this paralogical process because they can make more available the information we need to understand each other. Also, the availability of information makes it less tempting to resort to suppressing each other's voice (i.e., terror). Lyotard recommends, therefore, that everyone should have complete access to the data that can be made available to them through computers.

If we can make our conversations more paralogical, more generative of new ideas that we find inspiring or satisfying, then we will never exhaust the fruits of our discussions. Although there will always be a winning and losing of points, the process itself will generate new fruits of understanding forever, and continuously -- and that will be a winning situation for all of us who have become postmodern.

Lyotard wants to call this paralogy a "postmodern justice" because it provides people what they deserve without requiring us all to agree. We don't even have to agree before hand what we are striving for. It just happens if we do these two things. Think of it like this: Each win or loss occurs within the langauge game at hand and can be re-evaluated within other language games. That is, there are no overall winners and losers, just won and lost points. Such a practice not only satisfies our desire for justice, but it will help us make inroads into the unknown because the fruits of our paralogical discussion will not be merely a recycling of yesterday's understandings.

Why Lyotard Rejects Meta-Narratives

Of the three most influential postmodernist philosophers, Lyotard is the least popular. He argued that our age (with its postmodern condition) is marked by an 'incredulity towards meta-narratives'. Some have used the word "sensibility" to refer to the postmodern taste, or distaste for these meta-narratives. Sometimes 'grand narratives'--are grand, large-scale theories and philosophies of the world, such as the progress of history, the knowability of everything by science, religion, and even the possibility of "absolute freedom" (which was a Sartrean idea.) This raises the question of whether the absolute freedom concept is a modernist notion or not. If it is, then Sartre is a modernist.

Lyotard argues that we have ceased to believe that narratives of this kind are adequate to represent and contain us all. We have become alert to difference, diversity, the incompatibility of our aspirations, and the incompatibility of postmodernism itself with many of our deeply held beliefs and desire, and for that reason postmodernity is characterized by an abundance of micronarratives. For this concept Lyotard draws on and strongly reinterprets the notion of 'language games' found in the work of Wittgenstein.

In Lyotard's works, the term 'language games', sometimes also called 'phrase regimens', denotes the multiplicity of communities of meaning, the innumerable and incommensurable separate systems in which meanings are produced and rules for their circulation are created.

Some argue that Lyotard's theories may seem self-contradictory because The Postmodern Condition--the prize-winning essay--seems to offer its own grand narrative in the story of the decline of the metanarrative. It seems to offer a historical argument. On Lyotard's account, it is possible to have compatible micronarratives, but no unifying grand narrativ. Against this it can be argued that Lyotard's narrative in The Postmodern Condition declares the decline of only a few defunct "narratives of legitimation" and not of narrative knowledge itself. But there is a compelling argument against postmodernist knowledge.

It is not logically contradictory to say that a statement about narratives is itself a narrative, just as when Lyotard states that "every utterance [in a language game] should be thought of as a 'move' in a game" his statement is itself a 'move' in a language game.

Notes on the Postmodern Condition

Ideas from Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition.

• "The ideology of communicational 'transparency,' which goes hand in hand with the commercialization of knowledge, will begin to perceive the State as a factor of opacity and 'noise.'" It is from this point of view that the problem of the relationship between economic and State powers threatens to arise with a new urgency (5).
• Lyotard uses pragmatics of Wittgenstein, Austin, and Searle to aid his discussion: denotative utterances, performative utterances, prescriptions, questions, promises, literary descriptions, and, most relevant to this book, narratives" (9-10).
• Lyotard describes a Marxian notion of system performativity: "Even when its rules are in the process of changing and innovations are occurring, even when its dysfunctions (such as strikes, crises, unemployment, or political revolutions) inspire hope and lead to belief in an alternative, even then what is actualy taking place is only an internal readjustment, and its result can be no more than an increase in the system's "viability." The only alternative to this kind of performance improvement is entropy, or decline" (11-12). Speaking specifically of Marxism, ironically "in countries with liberal or advanced liberal management, the struggles and their instruments have been transformed into regulators of the system; in communist countries, the totalizing model and its totalitarian effect have made a comeback in the name of Marxism itself, and the struggles in question have simply been deprived of the right to exist" (13).
• "There is, then, an incommensurability between popular narrative pragmatics, which provides immediate legitimation, and the language game known to the West as the question of legitimacy—or rather, legitimacy as a referent in the game of inquiry" (23).
• Lyotard claims that scientific knowledge is exclusive, while narrative knowledge sees itself as one version among equals. "This unequal relationship [between scientific and narrative knowledge] is an intrinsic effect of the rules specific to each game. We all know its symptoms. It is the entire history of cultural imperialism from the dawn of Western civilization. It is important to recognize its special tenor, which sets it apart from all other forms of imperialism: it is governed by the demand for legitimation" (27).
• Scientific knowledge cannot know and make known that it is the true knowledge without resorting to the other, narrative, kind of knowledge, which from its point of view is no knowledge at all. Without such recourse it woudl be in the position of presupposing its own validity and would be stooping to what it condemns: begging the question, proceeding on prejudice. But does it not fall into the same trap by using narrative as its authority" (29)?
• Scientific knowledge legitimates itself through a consensus of experts, and other subjects in society has followed suit. "The people debate among themselves about what is just or unjust in the same way that the scientific community debates about what is true or false; they accumulate civil laws just as scientists accumulate scientific laws; they perfect their rules of consensus just as the scientists produce new 'paradigms' to revise their rules in light of what they have learned" (30). Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. would surely have agreed.
• "[A]ll formal systems have internal limitations. This applies to logic: the metalanguage it uses to describe an artificial (axiomatic) language is "natural" or "everyday" language; that language is universal, since all other languages can be translated into it, but it is not consistent with respect to negation—it allows the formulation of paradoxes" (43). But is logic limited because its representation has limitations, or does this speak only to the representations?
• Lyotard claims that the grand narratives of legimation formerly used to legitimate knowledge (e.g. "life of the spirit" or "emancipation of humanity" has been replaced with a narration of efficiency. "The question (overt or implied) now asked by the professional student, the State, or institutions of higher education is no longer 'Is it true?' but 'What use is it' (51)?
• "Modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the 'lack of reality' of reality, together with the invention of other realities" (77). "A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant" (79).

Lyotard on Legitimization

The postmodern condition is the fundamentally different outlook on knowledge that has arisen after the Enlightenment, and particularly since World War II in Western post-industrial, information-based society. In the Report, Lyotard makes a variety of claims and recommendations about how knowledge, particularly computerized knowledge, in the postmodern condition must be legitimated and made accessible in a just society.

Lyotard believes that cybernetics (computers, telecommunication systems and the various associated disciplines of language and information processing) has come to dominate society and economics since World War II. He believes that the status of knowledge has changed profoundly in this period. The major question that interests him is how knowledge gets "legitimated" in cybernetic society, and the nature of the legitimation itself. Lyotard maintains that whatever principle society uses to legitimate knowledge must also be the principle that it uses to legitimate decision-making in society, and consequently government, laws, education, and many other basic elements of society. Legitimation in the Enlightenment was tied to what Lyotard calls meta-narratives, or grand narratives. Meta-narratives are total philosophies of history, which make ethical and political prescriptions for society, and generally regulate decision-making and the adjudication of what is considered truth. Meta-narratives roughly equate to the everyday notion of what principles a society is founded on. They form the basis of the "social bond". The meta-narratives of the Enlightenment were about grand quests. The progressive liberation of humanity through the scientific pursuit of truth is a meta-narrative. The quest for a universally valid philosophy for humanity is an example of a meta-narrative. Sartrean absolute freedom is an example of a meta-narrative.

The problem is that when meta-narratives are concretely formulated and implemented, they seem to go disastrously awry. Marxism is the classic case of a meta-narrative based on principles of emancipation and egalitarianism which, when implemented, becomes perverted to totalitarianism under Stalin in the Soviet Union.

Lyotard claims that we have now lost the ability to believe in meta-narratives, that the legitimating function that grand quests once played in society has lost all credibility. The question then becomes, what now forms the basis of legitimation in society if there is no overarching meta-narrative? For Lyotard, the answer lies in the philosophy of Wittgenstein, which analyzes the way sub-groups in society regulate their behavior through rules of linguistic conduct. If we have rejected grand narratives, then what we have fallen back on are micro-narratives. Micro-narratives are essentially Wittgenstein's "language games", limited contexts in which there are clear, if not clearly defined, rules for understanding and behavior. We no longer give credence to total philosophical contexts like Marxism which ostensibly would prescribe behavior in all aspects of life, rather, we have lots of smaller contexts which we act within. We are employees, we are students. These roles legitimate knowledge and courses of action in their limited contexts. By fragmenting life into a thousand localized roles, each with their particular contexts for judging actions and knowledge, we avoid the need for meta-narratives. This is the nature of the modern social bond. Our effectiveness is judged in the context of how well we perform in each of these many limited roles. We may be a good employee but a poor driver, etc.

Therefore, what legitimates knowledge in the postmodern condition is how well it performs, or enables a person to perform, in particular roles. This criterion forms the basis of Lyotard's "performativity" legitimation of knowledge and action. In a cybernetic society, knowledge is legitimated by how performative it is, if it effective minimizes the various required inputs for the task and maximizes the desired outputs. This is an intuitively compelling notion of our current society. Knowledge and decision-making is for the most part no longer based on abstract principles, but on how effective it is at achieving desired outcomes.

This is a troubling state of affairs for Lyotard, because "performativity" pays no heed to any kind of ethics. For the legitimating principle of society to ignore the question of ethics is to verge on the equation of "might makes right." Lyotard is fundamentally pluralistic in his inclinations, and detests any kind of philosophy which leads to uniformity of opinion, enforced or otherwise. Science in the service of performativity is particularly troubling to him, as he sees it leading inevitably to rule by terror, whether this is the great terror of a totalitarian state, or the micro-terror of university research programs being discontinued because they are not sufficiently commercially competitive. Lyotard seeks a form of legitimation that will work in a manner akin to performativity, without recourse to a meta-narrative, but also without the tendency toward a uniform totalization of opinion. He is at pains in particular to combat the continued Marxist tradition of Jürgen Habermas, and his advocacy of a consensus community. As a pluralist, Lyotard does not believe that striving in one way or another to bring every member of community into consensus is healthy. Just as the strength of science rests to a large extent in the continued striving of individuals to competitively voice new views, Lyotard believes that a just system of legitimation must emphasize diversity and the fertile search for new answers to old questions

The Field of Knowledge In Computerized Societies

The postindustrial and postmodern age we now live in is marked by language-enhancing technologies. Scientific knowledge is also a kind of discourse. And it is fair to say that for the last forty years the “leading” sciences and technologies have had to do with language: phonology and theories of linguistics, problems of communication and cybernetics, modern theories of algebra and informatics, computers and their languages, problems of translation and the search for areas of compatibility among computer languages, problems of information storage and data banks, telematics and the perfection of intelligent terminals, to paradoxology.

Learning is translated into quantities, or quanta, of information. We can predict that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be abandoned and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer language. The “producers” and users of knowledge must now, and will have to, possess the means of translating into these languages whatever they want to invent or learn. Research on translating machines is already well advanced.” Along with the hegemony of computers comes a certain logic, and therefore a certain set of prescriptions determining which statements are accepted as “knowledge” statements. The goal of knowledge is its exchange and consumption.

It is widely accepted that knowledge has become the principle force of production over the last few decades. In the postindustrial and postmodern age, science will maintain and no doubt strengthen its preeminence in the arsenal of productive capacities of the nation-states. Lyotard argues that this situation is one of the reasons leading to the conclusion that the gap between developed and developing countries will grow ever wider in the future. However, the opposite has occurred: developed countries have economic reasons to spill their scientific knowledge onto developing country scientists because their labor is cheaper.

Lyotard argues that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor. A new field is opened for industrial and commercial strategies on the one hand, and political and military strategies on the other.

The ideology of communicational “transparency,” where we are able to see what the corporation are doing with our information, and which goes hand in hand with the commercialization of knowledge, will begin to perceive the State as a factor of opacity and “noise.” It is from this point of view that the problem of the relationship between economic and State powers threatens to arise with a new urgency. Lyotard is in favor of the state, but without warrant. He seems to believe that the state is the omni-benevolent force that can adjudicate these disputes even-handedly. He says,

"Economic powers have reached the point of imperiling the stability of the state through new forms of the circulation of capital that go by the generic name of multi-national corporations. These new forms of circulation imply that investment decisions have, at least in part, passed beyond the control of the nation-states.”

He asks us to suppose, for example, that a firm such as IBM is authorized to occupy a belt in the earth’s orbital field and launch communications satellites or satellites housing data banks. Who will have access to them? We should respond that IBM has access to them, since they developed them freely, and offer that service to anyone willing to exchange money for. Who will determine which channels or data are forbidden? The State? The state shouldn't decide this. In fact, this situation has already occurred with China's internet-nanny programs. ISP Corporations and browsers like Yahoo have helped China find people who are doing illegal searches on the net. But this is freedom of information, and the interests of the state should have no power over that. In the even that corporations decide which channels are forbidden, this would imply that corporations would rule over people just as a state. The state is already a corporate parasite, however. So I fail to see what the difference is.

Will the State simply be one user among others? Yes, if there is a state. New legal issues will be raised, and with them the question: “who will know?” It is not hard to visualize learning circulating along the same lines as money, instead of for its “educational” value or political (administrative, diplomatic, military) importance; the pertinent distinction would no longer be between knowledge and ignorance, but rather, as is the case with money, between “payment knowledge” and “investment knowledge” – in other words, between units of knowledge exchanged in a daily maintenance framework (the reconstitution of the work force, “survival”) versus funds of knowledge dedicated to optimizing the performance of a project. This is undoubtedly true today. Someone who has knowledge and can be used for labor is human capital. But what is human capital but knowledge packets enclosed by a locomotive vessel?

If this were the case, communicational transparency would be similar to liberalism. Liberalism does not preclude an organization of the flow of money in which some channels are used in decision making while others are only good for the payment of debts. One could similarly imagine flows of knowledge traveling along identical channels of identical nature, some of which would be reserved for the “decision makers,” while the others would be used to repay each person’s perpetual debt with respect to the social bond. This is also true. But Lyotard fails to see that this is not a problem. Information should be kept private through communication technologies. He seems to imply that everyone ought to have equal access to information that one party has reserved for another party in a free transaction. Why should we limit those transactions?

Real Science Fiction: "eXistenZ", 1999

Everybody seems to compare this to The Matrix and The 13th Floor, and when I first saw it I too expected something like the Matrix. This film was so different from the Matrix, which I would consider a great action movie with a few allusions to Descartes and Robert Nozick thrown in. The 13th Floor is a passable action movie with some slightly more interesting philosophy thrown in. Existenz is not an action movie at all, but is about the human tendency to intentionally replace "reality" with virtual reality. I will write more extensively on this later.

But the most piquant moments (or the moment when I realized something deep about the film) is when Allegra Geller repeats her "scripted" line. It's at that point you realize that the people in the game have voluntarily surrendered their free will in order to participate in a story--a scripted story. This is made even more frightening at the end when D'Arcy Nader (or rather his player) comments on the possibility of spending one's life in the game. I sympathize don't actually agree with the "realist" philosophy of the director, Cronenberg. He seems to take a stance that is luddist in nature, implying that providing interesting worlds in which people simply located in a virtual world like eXistenZ or TranscendenZ is a recipe for a negative living experience. Living "in the game" is supposed to be considered by most people to be not really living at all, but is a tempting way to spend one's time on earth.

As Allegra comments about the real world, "there's nothing going on here." But in her game nothing is going on either--and it's a scripted game, so there is no free will. (Although I have to ask whether Cronenberg considers this a self-indictment, considering that he himself offers up deterministic worlds to be experienced in 90 minute snippets.)

After first watching this movie, I thought it was one of those movies that was watchable only to see how it ended. But I imagine it can be watched even more to see how much deeper it goes.

Tactics: SDS vs. Dow Chemical

The largest anti-war march in 1967 had avoided the arguments about communism and mounted a successful, peaceful demonstration in San Fransisco. A coalition of old and new pacifists, leftists and civil rights workers had created the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the MOB). Hundreds of thousands rallied behind Martin Luther King Jr. to march from Central Park to the United Nations.

In the Fall of that year, just before the annual draft, ten thousand SDSers participated in a street fight with the Oakland, California police. The anti-war movement was breaking away from King's pacifism. They didn't allow themselves to be dragged into police wagons. They charged police lines and retreated behind makeshift barricades in the street. Students at the University of Wisconsin tried the tactic of sitting in at a university building to protest the presence of Dow Chemical recruitment. They didn't drag the protesters away, but used mace and clubs, that so outraged the public that soon the police were fighting several thousand. Dow produced the napalm used against soldiers, civilians, and landscapes of Vietnam. It was first developed during WWII by scientists at Harvard, and was a perfect example the military using educational institutions to develop military weaponry. Originally, napalm was the name for a thickener that could be mixed with gasoline and other incendiary material. In Vietnam, the mixture itself was called "napalm". It turns the flame into a jelly-like substance that allows it to be shot at a considerable distance when under pressure, and sticks to the target, whether human or vegetal. Of the 71 demonstrations mounted on college campuses, 27 were directed against Dow Chemical.

People have been commenting that our generation needs new tactics. They say that our generation has been using the same tactics that the 60s generation has used, and that we need to get past that. I'm not exactly sure why. They claim their tactics haven't worked. However, their tactics helped bring the end of the war. Likewise, our tactics should be modeled closely to the SDS tactics of the 60s, but less militant. We should use their framework, which we have. But we also have new technologies, and I think we should develop those. We ought to use our technological capabilities to reach newer audiences, to break through the ideological barriers.

As far as I'm concerned, this means creating counter-hegemonic films, creating anti-war media spectacles, counter-hegemonic spectacles, projecting media alongside highways, and counter-recruiting in public places.

Death and the Maid Haikus

Dead on arrival
Hours and hours must have gone by
So sick of tofu.

Abhorrent little mess!
Monochromatically she stares
"Now step in, raise the axe"

My crayon box, all reds
Help me draw pictures
Of my dead nanny.

I give very good advice
But I very seldom follow it
What a mess I've maid!

An homage to Basho:
An old tub of blood,
A body jumps in. Look out,
She's right behind you!

Narcissism and the Pathologies of Civilization

Echoing the sentiments of the philosopher Aristotle, Freud says that it is impossible to reach a state of complete happiness. One would have to be a god, Aristotle said, to live a fully contemplative and thus happy life. Happiness, in the Freudian/hedonist sense of maximizing pleasure and minimizing displeasure, is the ultimate goal—“that towards which every good aims,” we could say. Yet this principle is at “loggerheads” with the whole world. The individual’s subconscious strategy is to believe that he is happy, and in the potentialities—or expectations (p.34)—of his happiness, while in fact his belief in the attainability of happiness is futile. There is no possibility that this should be carried through except for the occasional, “episodic” paroxysms of something best understood in terms of psychoanalysis.

Throughout Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud offers us several possibilities as to the problem of happiness, that is, the problem of its unattainability. If we are to be good hedonists, as Freud assumes us to be, we should consider this problem as having something to do with the “economics of the individual’s libido”. To say that this is an economic problem is to say there are “opportunity costs” involved, and that put simply, we have to choose among various competing uses of our time and energy. Freud clearly outlines the sources of the pleasures, and contrasts them with the displeasures and its mitigating factors. Such clear choices should make it fairly easy to choose among competing uses, and yet Freud does not carry his own argument to a logical end. We must choose that which maximizes pleasures and mitigates displeasures, which according to Freud’s program, the unexpected answer is the life of the narcissist.

One of the central theses of Freud’s book is that what we call civilization is in fact “the greatest source of our miseries.” It appears that at this point in the argument the most rational hedonistic activities would include giving up the program of civilization and returning to more primitive conditions. “I call this astonishing,” Freud says, “because in whatever way we may define the concept of civilization, it is a certain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization.”

What are the sources of suffering? Freud outlines three directions from which we are under attack: bodily decay, natural evil, and “our relations to other men.” Although most assume that relations with other people is in fact a great boon to the problem of their loneliness, much like a Robinson Crusoe character Freud says this is the greatest source of displeasure and pain. It is very important that the entire book Civilizations and Its Discontents is devoted to the category of “relations with other people” alone, because Freud wants to reconcile the happy man in an unhappy society. We should keep Crusoean attitude in mind for what Freud tells us next about the strategies of pursuing happiness.

On page 27 Freud categorizes strategies about the negative programs of the pleasure principle, that of avoiding displeasures. Some, he says, are extreme and some are more moderate. At this point he has no Aristotelian basis for choosing moderate forms over extreme forms, but he nonetheless continues: the readiest safeguard, we are told, is voluntary isolation. This is the path of turning away from the world and human communities in order to seek the “happiness of quietness.” We were told earlier that human relations are the greatest source of unhappiness, to which Freud replies that isolating oneself from human relations is not best answer. In fact, he says that a “better path” is that of becoming a member of the human community. The reasons Freud gives us are because of its progress with regards to science and art. The next line reads strikingly, “Then one is working with all and for the good of all,” to which our hedonists friend might reply that Freud is prescribing to us something paradoxical. Freud appears to be contradicting the hedonist’s pleasure principle calculus.

I want to dwell for a moment on this notion of paradoxical narcissism. According to Freud, narcissism is a pathological condition which occurs when the libido withdraws from objects outside of the self. Freud regarded all libidinous drives as fundamentally sexual and suggested that ego libido (libido directed inwards to the self) cannot always be clearly distinguished from object-libido (libido directed to persons or objects outside of ourselves). Freud further claimed that it is an extreme form of the narcissism that is part of all of us.

An individual’s internal struggles first result from the opposition between the unifying force of love, Eros, and the impulse to find release from the troubles of life through death, the Death-Instinct. Freud’s overarching vision of humankind is bleak: we are bound up in civilization, which is necessary for the survival and happiness of our species, but that same civilization appears to undermine our survival and happiness as individuals.

Each individual must identity the type of happiness most important to him as well as the capacity of his own mental constitution to experience happiness. Freud identifies three common types of men who have particular dominating dispositions and drives. This may be thought of as an objection to our narcissistically-bent hedonist friend. The erotic man, for example, finds his pleasures in the emotional interactions with other people. However, our hedonist responds, he is doomed to unhappiness because his interactions with other people will be the greatest source of his unhappiness. As Freud tells us, “It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly happy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.”

Another man, the man of action, will never give up the external world because he finds his pleasures in acting upon and expressing his talents within the world. However, our hedonist friend responds by saying the same thing he said to the erotic man. These are nothing but distractions, he says. Happiness, and its maximization, is in fact the purpose of life. By engaging in the world, your greatest source of unhappiness, the hedonist says, you are making yourself less happy than you would if you were inclined to be “self-sufficient” and seek your satisfaction in your “internal mental processes.” Adaptation to the external environment, Freud echoes Darwin, is a key part of maximizing pleasure. Perhaps if you are not naturally disposed to being internally and mentally self-sufficient, then you might adapt.

What gives the narcissistic man the advantage over the others? That the narcissistic man is by nature disposed towards avoiding the greatest source of unhappiness in man makes him better able to cope with the harshness of the world, and to avoid its greatest pains and sorrows. Freud devotes much of this work to elucidating that which only the narcissistic man is psychologically capable of doing. He contends that although the narcissist is better suited to his environment, his condition is nonetheless pathological. That Freud tells us that there are merely unfavorable constitutions that cannot be helped by individuals is not an objection to the superiority of our hedonist friend’s claim. One may not have the choice as to whether one is a man of action or a man of eroticism. Freud agrees that these dispositions are deterministic, and so, more happily at least, does our hedonist friend.

Narcissism and the Pathologies of Civilization (part 1)

Echoing the sentiments of The Philosopher, Aristotle, Freud says that it is impossible to reach a state of complete happiness. One would have to be a god, Aristotle said, to live a fully contemplative and thus happy life. Happiness, in the Freudian/hedonist sense of maximizing pleasure and minimizing displeasure, is the ultimate goal—“that towards which every good aims,” we could say. Yet this principle is at “loggerheads” with the whole world. The individual’s subconscious strategy is to believe that he is happy, and in the potentialities—or expectations (p.34)—of his happiness, while in fact his belief in the attainability of happiness is futile. There is no possibility that this should be carried through except for the occasional, “episodic” paroxysms of something best understood in terms of psychoanalysis.

Throughout Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud offers us several possibilities as to the problem of happiness, that is, the problem of its unattainability. If we are to be good hedonists, as Freud assumes us to be, we should consider this problem as having something to do with the “economics of the individual’s libido”. To say that this is an economic problem is to say there are “opportunity costs” involved, and that put simply, we have to choose among various competing uses of our time and energy. Freud clearly outlines the sources of the pleasures, and contrasts them with the displeasures and its mitigating factors. Such clear choices should make it fairly easy to choose among competing uses, and yet Freud does not carry his own argument to a logical end. We must choose that which maximizes pleasures and mitigates displeasures, which according to Freud’s program, the unexpected answer is the life of the narcissist.

One of the central theses of Freud’s book is that what we call civilization is in fact “the greatest source of our miseries.” It appears that at this point in the argument the most rational hedonistic activities would include giving up the program of civilization and returning to more primitive conditions. “I call this astonishing,” Freud says, “because in whatever way we may define the concept of civilization, it is a certain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization.”

What are the sources of suffering? Freud outlines three directions from which we are under attack: bodily decay, natural evil, and “our relations to other men.” Although most assume that relations with other people is in fact a great boon to the problem of their loneliness, much like a Robinson Crusoe character Freud says this is the greatest source of displeasure and pain. It is very important that the entire book Civilizations and Its Discontents is devoted to the category of “relations with other people” alone, because Freud wants to reconcile the happy man in an unhappy society. We should keep Crusoean attitude in mind for what Freud tells us next about the strategies of pursuing happiness.

On page 27 Freud categorizes strategies about the negative programs of the pleasure principle, that of avoiding displeasures. Some, he says, are extreme and some are more moderate. At this point he has no Aristotelian basis for choosing moderate forms over extreme forms, but he nonetheless continues: the readiest safeguard, we are told, is voluntary isolation. This is the path of turning away from the world and human communities in order to seek the “happiness of quietness.” We were told earlier that human relations are the greatest source of unhappiness, to which Freud replies that isolating oneself from human relations is not best answer. In fact, he says that a “better path” is that of becoming a member of the human community. The reasons Freud gives us are because of its progress with regards to science and art. The next line reads strikingly, “Then one is working with all and for the good of all,” to which our hedonists friend might reply that Freud is prescribing to us something paradoxical. Freud appears to be contradicting the hedonist’s pleasure principle calculus.

On Chaplin's "Hope" and Political Sociopathology

Hi Shane,

Thanks for your message and your diagnosis. I'll look into those studies more. But I don't think there's really something missing about this puzzle. You said I was "infected" by the ideas of sociopaths. But am I just infected because I'm not optimistic like Chaplin? Humanity is hopeless. Our hopes are false, and we're in despair without our hopes.

I object to Chaplin's optimistic view of "human nature", and that we love each other. I don't think we do. I think that's the sort of folk-psychology we've been telling ourselves for centuries and it simply isn't true. We're deeply hopeless, and without these ideas the masses hold about religion and happy-faced political ideologies, it would be the death of the species. We're not strong enough to free ourselves from false optimism, from false hope. No one is really that serious about our condition in this way, and so when I say we're hopeless in that sense, then I'm seen as infected by the pessimists.

A lot of what Chaplin says is falsely optimistic. It's a dream and a lie at the same time. On some level, I wish it would be true. But I can't. I can only hope for a free society without a state. No state will give us what Charlie wants. As long as men are not yet free to choose and live as they please, without the coercion of the state, we will be enslaved by dictators, wherever they are.

I'm not made politically apathetic by what I see and hear from the media and the rhetoric of our political system. But I cannot "fight to fulfill that promise"--because it's a false promise, beginning with a false metaphysics and a false ethics. Still, I can fight against national barriers, against hate and intolerance.

Thanks,
Joe

SHANE WROTE:

Hi Joe,

Thank you for posting Chaplin's speech, it was the first I heard it. I didn't see your understanding of it until I read the description after I watched the video. I long held the view that humanity must be innately evil; what else could provide why we 'live' the way we do? I've shared you're hopelessness. You're interpretation and hopelessness reaches to the core of humanity's value. So your take wasn't merely a broken view of man but to me shows your own broken spirit. I think you're missing a vital piece of the puzzle.

In my search to understand 'why' I'm grateful to have come across studies of psychopathy, and importantly one called 'Political Ponerology' by Andrew Lobaczewski. It's the clinical study of evil on a macro-social scale. It shows how psychopaths in positions of influence use language to twist normal people's morality and thinking. Here 'normal' has a specific context meaning those who have the ability for conscience. These psychopaths are Chaplin's 'Machine men with machine minds'. They are the essence of inhumanity and I do not consider them to be human at all. In certain periods they infect whole nations with their thinking. They wear a 'mask of sanity' that is reflected at a greater scale in their political ideologies. I think we all suffer from being infected with their disease to different degrees. We have an inapt immune system to defend ourselves, largely because the study is so little well known. It was written in Communist Poland and the manuscript was destroyed several times. The third edition has only in the past year or so been publicly available.

In Martha Stout's book 'The Sociopath Next Door' she describes how a psychopath isn't at all as they've been depicted in media. They're much more prevalent and fit into many categories and are often non-physically violent. She describes personal and more intimate encounters with 'run-of-the-mill' psychopaths. Just as they can infect thinking on mass levels given the right circumstance, they will do the same in smaller groups. One of the great lessons I learned with the help of her book was a technique of dominance they use: they make people think humanity is a failure. When people do so they lose hope and any real resistance. We are not a failure. We're able to love; they are not. I hope you might eventually see how your own thinking has been infected. There is much valuable material out there on psychopathy that I cannot relay to you. I hope and encourage you to study these things: for your own sake and for the reason that you have a voice and are using it. Much of the real damage is spread through normal people who are infected. The SS had it's greatest influence by using German citizens as their 'eye's and ears.' I'm sure many of them were even 'well intentioned.' But to act without knowledge and understanding is, in my opinion, at the human root of atrocity.

You can read some excerpts and a more thorough description of political ponerology here if you wish:
http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/political_ponerology_lobaczewski.htm

Take care,
Shane

Death and the Maid

That is the title of a short film I wrote, directed and filmed for a film festival, and which was voted 1st place.

The maid in the film tells us about her duties and her thoughts on how people are inherently messy. It is her duty to clean up messes other people create, including the mess of their own deaths. Like Sisyphus, who has to push a rock up a hill for eternity, she must clean other peoples' lives for what seems an eternity. Her role in society is to hide death from the living. No one is allowed to see death because she is the social force which hides it from them. She tries desperately to cover the death up, to make sure no one has to imagine what it's like for them to die. There is no subjective experience of death as far as they are concerned, until they experience it ourselves. We wonder what it's like. And in so doing this, we wonder whether the maid is somehow to blame for these deaths. We're all complicit in hiding deaths from ourselves, we're all guilty. Even at funeral festivities we're more concerned with trivialities like heat and flowers and family than we are concerned about death.

The maid realizes her inauthenticity (like the inauthenticity of Sartre's waitress) about asking questions about herself and her death. She embraces her mortality, and thinks about understanding and empathizing about her fellowship with these other people who die too. She begins to think as opposed to calculate. She leaves a stage of pre-ontological reflection to a stage of ontological reflection. She begins to live as if close to death, 'being unto death'. She embraces the death instinct, the enchantment of death, she lives with it, lives beside it.

Death is no longer abstract, it's no longer a syllogism: All mortals die, I am a mortal, therefore I will die. Real death shakes her out of this. It is something concrete and individual. It is death which makes her into an individual--just as herself, separate--in the face of the possibility that she might not be there when she dies.

Writing about James Joyce's Realism or Anti-Realism

Penelope is the last chapter of Joyce's Ulysses. That's why we're reading it in my class on modernism. I'm not sure why we're reading the ending, but I suppose I would find out.

In writing to a friend, Joyce once wrote that he put so many enigma's in Ulysses that he would keep professors arguing about what it mean for a long time. That's only way to ensure that your work will be immortal, it seems. It's no wonder the Joyce industry has become so popular. This novel seems to concern Joyce's contradictory attitude toward realism. What's its place in the larger history of the novel.

Most of Joyce's patrons were women. It took some daring to get involved with publishing Ulysses. Many of them risked arrest--and in fact the book was banned in many places. Publishers were fined for publishing Joyce's work. Ulysses was eight years in the making, and first sold by prescription. Among the first subscribers were Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill. The year, 1922, both featured the first modernist poem by Eliot, the Wasteland, and also DH Lawrence's novel "Women in Love".

Although this work is titled Ulysses, it doesn't use that name anywhere in the book. Ulysses is the epic hero in Homer's Oddyssey and the King of Ithaca, the smartest and shrewdest of all the Greek Generals. The Trojan Horse was his idea. Odysseus's goal is to come home to Ithaca, where his son Telemachus and wife Penelope are waiting for him. Odysseus has no way to know it, but his home has been taken over by a number of other men, always described as suitors to Penelope, but she never takes interest in them. The ending is where Odysseus defeats the suitors and resumes the thrown of Ithaca, after 10 years. A comedic ending of sorts, then, with poetic justice being served, and social rebirth being forecast.

Odysseus is not only to be found in Homer, but also in Dante's 8th Circle of Hell, and subject and speaker featured in the poem "Ulysses" by Alfred Tennison where he convinces the mariners to take on one last adventure--legend has it that he succeeded in doing so, ending in death for Odysseus and the other mariners. That's why he's found in Dante's 8th circle, reserved for false counselors.

Odysseus is a false counselor, definitely worth noting for Odysseus's many-sidedness and wrecklessness but he's also resourceful and smart. By the time Joyce was working on Ulysses, he was familiar with Odysseus's exploits. Joyce described Ulysses as his favorite hero, and the most human figure in Homer.

Leopold Bloom is the central figure in Joyce's Ulysses. Bloom, like Ulysses, is many-sided, a father and a son, a lover and a husband, a comrade and a king, kinky, smart, resourceful, possessed of genuine courage. He's an advertising salesmen however. He's also Jewish, letting him stay above the fray by not getting involved in the Catholic-Protestant conflict or Irish and British. Molly Bloom can be likened to Homer's Penelope. She is the counterpart to Penelope.

She waits while her husband proceeds into dangerous territory. Molly is also pursued by suitors, except that her faith is not always trusted. Penelope is absolutely faithful. Ulysses has a son, and Stephen Dedalus is like the son. We know, even though that the Bloom's do not, that they've lost a son. The Blooms also have a daughter, but she is off studying photography in another town. Joyce seems to think fatherhood is a necessary evil, even though he pursues it as some kind of answer.

Joyce needed a structure to his novel. But did he choose Ulysses randomly? Was that structure just some structure that Joyce needed? But, the choice of Homer has to have held precedent over others, Faust, say, or the book of Job.

Perhaps Joyce is saying there were real heros back then, whereas now we just have salesmen and students. Modern men choose to stay away from conflict. Or is he saying that his characters are real heros, just like the old one? But whereas the epic hero comes home to slay the enemies and replenish his youth with his wife, the modern hero, Bloom, avoids conflict--choosing to be away from home when suitors may be at home with his wife. But although Joyce points out discrepancies, he doesn't make it out to be cause for alarm. He sometimes uses it as the base for ironic humor even. The important thing about Ulysses is not his physical strength, but his many-sidedness, which he passes on to Bloom. Instead of going home and beating up Molly's lover, he possesses random qualities it seems.

June 16th, the day the novel takes place, is not arbitrary because Joyce fell in love with a certain woman, Nora, and had his first date with her. It's funny to think of this avant-garde artist being so sentimental.

Because the opening chapters focus on Stephen, I thought the book would have been about Stephen. However, it appears to be about Bloom. Stephen is coming to grips with the death of his mother. He refused to pray with his mother when she died. The focus shifts to Bloom. Stephen is brittle, anxious and unforgiving. Bloom is tender, comfortable and generous. We see Bloom first in his kitchen, following him upstairs for a brief conversation. Then he goes into the butcher shop and asks for a kidney.

Stephen and Bloom don't meet for a long time. This seems to be most of the plot. Then they finally meet after a scene where Stephen gets into a fight in a brothel. A drunken Stephen starts a fight with a British soldier. Bloom offers Stephen a place to stay for the night. Stephen declines, and the two part.

But Ulysses ends with Molly, not Stephen or Bloom. Molly recalls their first love-making. "Yes I said Yes,"drowsily, "I will, Yes. Our unmistakably affirmative." Joyce seems to fill all the familiar novelistic chords, where there's resolution and reunion, acceptance and understanding. It's Joyce's highly qualified, assuredly idiosyncratic version of the comedic ending conventional.

Reading this, I was blown away by its intricacy and complexity. I was surprised that some other human being had gone through the complexity and details and take the time to put together all the parallels. The most fascinating thing about Ulysses is the paradoxical attitude towards realism.

What do I mean by this? Joyce's realism includes the mind, the city, sexual and reproductive cycles like menstruation. Instead of presenting Bloom's thought in complete sentences, Joyce presents them in brief, staccato bursts. Bloom notices that the butcher has only one kidney left, and he speculates that she will buy it before he can. He says quick thoughts, and short descriptions and ideas. Molly's thoughts are longer, but they're more like run-on sentences.

Sometimes the styles of the chapters--which seem to have different style for each chapter--don't add anything new to the understanding of the characters themselves. But the pleasure seems to come from Joyce's complete mastery of the older forms of the novel: the catechismic form. Just think about this sequence of words, "promptly, inexplicably, with amicability, gratefully..." it seems like it could go on forever. In developing and disregarding so many styles, Joyce undermines the authority of representation itself. In reading a novel, Joyce reminds us, our relationship to reality is never immediate or direct.

Comrade Zhao, Who came too late

I'm reading a bit of Chinese history on the Tienanmen Square Massacre. When the students went on a hunger strike that lasted 7 days, the Communist Party Leader, Zhao Ziyang, came and told the students that,

Students, we came too late. We are sorry. You talk about us, criticize us, it is all necessary. The reason that I came here is not to ask you to forgive us. All I want to say is that students are getting very weak, it is the seventh day since you went on hunger strike, you can't continue like this. As the time goes on, it will damage your body in an unrepairable way, it could be very dangerous to your life. Now the most important thing is to end this strike. I know, your hunger strike is to hope that the Party and the government will give you a satisfying answer. I feel that our communication is open. Some of the problem can only be solved by certain procedures. For example, you have mentioned about the nature of the incident, the question of responsibility, I feel that those problems can be solved eventually, we can reach a mutual agreement in the end. However, you should also know that the situation is very complicated, it needs a procedure. You can't continue the hunger strike for the seventh day, and still insist for a satisfying answer before ending the hunger strike.

You are still young, there are still many days yet to come, you must live healthy, and see the day when China accomplishes the four modernizations. You are not like us, we are already old, it doesn't matter any more. It is not easy that this nation and your parents support you to study in colleges. Now you are all about early 20s, and want to sacrifice lives so easily, students, can't you think logically? Now the situation is very serious, you all know, the Party and the nation is very antsy, the whole society is very worried. Besides, Beijing is the capital, the situation is getting worse and worse from everywhere, this can not be continued. Students all have good will, and are for the good of our nation, but if this situation continues, loses control, it will cause serious consequences at many places.

In conclusion, I have only one wish. If you stop hunger strike, the government won't close the door for dialogue, never! The questions that you have raised, we can continue to discuss. Although it is a little slow, we are reaching some agreement on some problems. Today I just want to see the students, and express our feelings. Hopefully students will think about this question calmly. This thing can not be sorted out clearly under illogical situations. You all have that strength, you are young after all. We were also young before, we protested, laid our bodies on the rail tracks, we never thought about what will happen in the future at that time. Finally, I beg the students once again, think about the future calmly. There are many things that can be solved. I hope that you will all end the hunger strike soon, thank you.

"We are already old, it doesn't matter to us any more" became a famous quote after that. Zhao's visit to the Square was his last public appearance. Ziyang was seen as being even too sympathetic towards the students and was placed on house arrest, never to be seen again in public. He died in 2004.

Had he not been deposed and made a “non-person”, Mr Zhao might have transformed China into a country very different from the one it is today, politically if not economically. The party prefers to believe that the course China took then was right: brutal repression followed by an explosion of capitalist energy that has propelled it into the front ranks of the world’s economic powers. Mr Zhao, by contrast, believed that capitalism was possible without terrifying the party’s critics into silence.

That said, his behavior during Tienanmen was never that of a hero. Students in the square did not especially admire him, and his appearance there may have been designed to further his own political ambitions. He showed no sign either before or after Tienanmen of opposing one-party rule. But in a political environment that brooked no dissent, he was undoubtedly a reformer.

After his downfall, Mr Zhao never resigned from the party. He did not court the media. Yet, to many, his nuanced non-conformism with the post-Tiananmen order was an inspiration. He could have salvaged something of his political career by publicly acknowledging his “errors”, but refused to. In his guarded compound in a quiet alley close to Beijing’s main commercial district, he lived out his last years without openly challenging the party. Foreign leaders politely avoided mentioning him when visiting Beijing. Yet the party remained in fear of Mr Zhao until his dying breath.

The "Service Sector" According to Marx

In Marx’s day there was no such thing really as a capitalist service sector. Service workers were invariably people who offered their services directly on the market, not as the employees of capitalists who profited from provision of their service. Consequently, Marx writes about the “service sector” in this sense:

"The pay of the common soldier is also reduced to a minimum — determined purely by the production costs necessary to procure him. But he exchanges the performance of his services not for capital, but for the revenue of the state"

...

"In bourgeois society itself, all exchange of personal services for revenue — including labour for personal consumption, cooking, sewing etc., garden work etc., up to and including all of the unproductive classes, civil servants, physicians, lawyers, scholars etc. — belongs under this rubric, within this category. All menial servants etc. By means of their services — often coerced — all these workers, from the least to the highest, obtain for themselves a share of the surplus product, of the capitalist’s revenue.

...

"But it does not occur to anyone to think that by means of the exchange of his revenue for such services, i.e. through private consumption, the capitalist posits himself as capitalist. Rather, he thereby spends the fruits of his capital. It does not change the nature of the relation that the proportions in which revenue is exchanged for this kind of living labour are themselves determined by the general laws of production."

Grundrisse, part 9. Original accumulation of capital]

Things like the service sector are important to Baudrillard, who wants to talk about how the new service, the new simulation has taken over and completely replaced production. The service sector is the new economy and there is no more production. The purchasing of these services doesn't make one a capitalist, Marx says. But this just means he's spending his money, the fruits of his capital, on services.

However, Marx doesn't seem to consider the possibility that one such capitalist will make the services offered into a business, and invest in the capital and labor necessary to commodify, socialize, professionalize, those services.

Marx only considers the service industry with respect to the exchange of goods for labor. But there is a whole industry to develop from this idea, whereby labor is exchanged for labor, and enormous profits to be gained.

Julian of Norwich: The Womyn Insyde the Hole

A monk lives in a community of monks. A hermit lives alone but may still make contact and be of influence on his society. But women lived as anchoresses, whose only contact with the outside world was through a small hole.

Lady Julian was an anchoress, one of many medieval women who enclosed themselves from the outside world, locked in small editions to local churches called "anchor holds". There was only one window through which people could ask for advice or tell news, pass waste and food in and out, and another hole that the anchoress could observe the priest performing the eucharist ritual. It was here in this anchor hold that the anchoress was betrothed not to a human husband, but to her Lord. Julian would have read a Guide for Anchoresses, published in the twelfth century to instruct anchoresses in their new lives, which reads:

"When the priest has consecrated the host, forget all the world. Be out of your body. Embrace, in shining love, your lover, who has lighted into the bower of your heart from heaven, and hold him tight until he has gratified all you have ever asked."

Julian recounts:

"But what place is there in me that my God may dwell? Who will grant that you will come into my heart and make it drunk, That I may embrace you? The house of my soul is too narrow for you. So that you may enter it, let it be made large by you. It is rude, repair it, it contains what offense in your eyes, I know and confess, but who will cleanse it? Or to who else but you should we cry?"

Julian would have meditated on her role as the bride of Christ as described in the prayer book The Wooing of Our Lord:

"Jesus, sweet Jesus, my beloved darling, my Lord, my savior, my drop of honey, my balm. Sweeter is the memory of you than honey in the mouth. Your lovely face, you're all shiny and moist. To look into your face is life itself to the angels."

The Wife of Bath and the Holy Maidenhood is a treatise against marriage written by women. This is also something quite interesting. It doesn't outright say that women should be wed to God, not a man. It seems concerned only with marriage as a social institution, and it even analyzes religious authorities in a negative light. Amid much of the anti-marriage treatises from men at the time, we find this treatise which is from a woman's perspective. Perhaps writings like this could have influenced women like Julian to live alone, away from the world and away from husbands. But this would not have been enough. The sexual impulse seems subservient to the spiritual impulse driving her thoughts.

Why did women like Julian wish to be outside of the world, and wished to be outside of their bodies? There is certainly a part of myself that would like to live away from communities, away from society, in a small place just for myself. I believe this instinct is shared by many other people. Something about other people disgusts us. But I feel that to genuinely do this, one must have some sort of faith, because living alone without a God would be perhaps too disturbing. But if one is truly religious, man is already alone when he is without God, so what makes the difference if he has no other men around him? It seems easier to live alone with God, than live alone without. For an atheist like myself, being without other men is the closest to solitude one can find. One is still bombarded with images of the world, yet this is the place where man and the universe must reconcile. The universe, however, is a cold, unloving place.

Julian's anchoritic cell is enclosed from her own will. She must have felt this impulse because of her God. And she began, defying prayer books like the ones she was given, talking about Jesus as the "mother". Of course, she spoke of this in the context of talking about the Church as mother. But it was a big step nonetheless.

Julian's theology about sin is that there's a part of the soul that would never knowingly consent to sin. Jesus, if he came back to save us from our sins, would not have thrown anyone into hell since there is that part of us that does not want to sin knowingly.

Julian's theology is certainly interesting, solving problems like the one about evil. Or at least it solves half of the problem. The most interesting thing about Julian is her solitude. Like Nietzsche I yearn for that, my creativity comes from that. We're not away from the world and on our own all that often, it seems. Whether we're talked to by other people, or bombarded with signs of the economy and the media, we're never really left in solitude. This is something I have longed for. And yet I receive my inspiration and ideas from films, it appears. To think of a space like Virginia Wolf's A Room of One's Own where your thoughts are your own, and your space is your own, is very attractive.