A susceptibility to the appeal of authoritarian irrationalism has become part of what it means to be a modern person.
Paul Gilroy
It is not only rational truth that, in the Hegelian phrase, stands common sense on its head; reality quite frequently offends the soundness of common-sense reasoning no less than it offends profit and pleasure. We must now turn our attention to the relatively recent phenomenon of mass manipulation of fact and opinion as it has become evident in the rewriting of history, in image-making, and in actual government policy.
Hannah Arendt
In a process of enlightenment there can only be participants.
Jurgen Habermas
For Hanna Arendt archetypal 'animal laborans' are, paraphrasing Marlyse Pouchol, individuals whose occupations consist in activities necessary for their personal satisfaction, who are trapped in the privacy of their bodies and who only experience sensation. To define humans, mostly or entirely, as economic or social is to emphasise an amoral absorption in tasks and is to ask the question: how? Is to emphasize necessity - its dominance, is to underscore an ascendant oikos which usurps or merges with the vita contemplativa. And with homo faber, meaning, making aimed at generating discussion and judgment. Meaning, also, asking the question: why? And generating 'permanence, stability, and durability' and worlds in common. Necessity also usurps or merges with that aspect of action, quaintly, defined (via ancient Athens) as the back and forth of participatory assemblies aiming to generate and to address shared generalizable meaning and to figure out how best to carry out what is understood, by way of contemplation, to be just or good and how best to generate individual and collective eudemonia or, in less accurate but more familiar terms, good spirit, welfare, flourishing or wellbeing. Though, for Arendt, participation itself is, or can be, eudemonic; in any case, action is relinquished in favour of behavior - in favour of behavioral sciences, of which economics is the foremost, and in favour of the diffuse normalizing power and quasi-Skinnerian/Pavlovian conditioning entailed. More broadly, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it: 'For Arendt modernity is characterized by the loss of the world, by which she means the restriction or elimination of the public sphere of action and speech in favor of the private world of introspection and the private pursuit of economic interests'. Such remarks are similar to Habermasian framing - Arendt, John Dewey, Noam Chomsky, John Austin, Max Weber, Immanuel Kant, Niklas Luhmann, Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl, George Mead, John Rawls and Theodor Adorno are a few of the thinkers he critiqued and drew on, his syncretic projects, will be addressed, and strayed from, in a fairly add-hock way below.
About the colonization of lifeworlds, and in a less pithy much more unwieldy vein than in the epigram above, Habermas wrote: 'The ambivalence of the last juridification wave can be seen with particular clarity in the paradoxical consequences of the social services offered by the thereuputocracy – from the prison system through the medical treatment of the mentally ill, addicts, and the behaviourally disturbed, from the classical forms of social work through the newer psychotherapeutic and group-dynamic forms of support, pastoral care and the building of religious groups, from youth work, public education, and the health system through general preventative measures of every type. The more the welfare state...spreads a net of client relationships over private spheres of life, the stronger are the anticipated pathological side effects of a juridification that entails both bureaucratization and a monetization of core areas of the life world. The dilemmatic structure of this type of juridification consists in the fact that, while the welfare state guarantees are intended to serve the goal of social integration, they nevertheless promote the disintegration of life relations when these are separated, through legalized social intervention, from the consensual mechanisms that co-ordinate action and are transferred over to media such as power and money.' The embedded liberalism or 'state-managed monopoly capitalism' referenced above has since been largely outmanoeuvred and has shifted to a financialized phase but such metamorphoses are beyond the scope of this barebones essay. Habermas's ‘Theory of Communicative Action’ alone is 1200 pages long and it spans two volumes, it's safe to say that not much justice will be done to his thought. As I understand it, Habermas thought that the kinds of dialogue that could revivify the life-world and serve to thoughtfully mediate between it and the instrumental logic of administration had been systematically distorted (not least by public-relations and by the 'vertical' and unilateral anti-relationship that we tend to have with mass media - much of which consists in noise which sells or stochastic terrorism) and that the kinds of organisation that could encourage it were terribly lacking. Life-worlds - which, as per Wikipedia's reading of Habermas, partly consist in 'socially and culturally sedimented linguistic meanings' and in 'informal, culturally-grounded understandings and mutual accommodations' - have been and are being colonized, steered, diminished, displaced or erased by a formal system of functional subsystems and their accompanying terminologies and we lack the means to translate between the two spheres. In Making Sense of Management: A Critical Introduction Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott write: 'Within the rationality of the system individuals are treated as numbers or categories (e.g. grades of employees determined by qualifications, or types of clients determined by market segments), and more generally as objects whose value lies in reproducing the system'. The non-intentional and amoral systemic mechanisms consistent with state/juridical and market co-ordination and integration are a consequence and a feature of complicated societies (which may be conveniently or brutally simple at 'the point of use') and they are, in short, what is meant by systems. They contribute the cognitive-instrumental rationality essential for the realization of ad rem goals. They dichotomize and grade - they mark subjects and objects indicating their value or lack of value, their origins and authenticity and they mark as in defacement, wounding or insulting.
In Critique of Black Reason, Achille Mbembe wrote: 'The cycle of capital moves from image to image, with the image now serving as an accelerant...' The reduction of reality to commodifiable, consumable and categorical image forms which serve dominant interests and values extends well beyond screens(Guignion) and is a noteworthy accelerant while intersubjective normative reasoning, or thought more generally, slows. And without brakes, without dense thickets, things tend to careen. Henry David Thoreau said that our inventions are improved means to unimproved ends, rationalization and this same problem, the problem of unaimed or ill aimed and overreaching instrumental, 'functionalist' and technological reason, is a central concern.
Stated crudely, during its formation the 'the age of enlightenment' quickly shifted to a, mainly, bourgeois reordering which sought to protect the bourgeoisie from both the damned, the oppressed and the defeated majority and from the arbitrary power of the state. There were attempts, albeit compromised, to shore-up and to affirm individual agency and sovereignty/self-government and to show that the capacity to think was distributed more widely than dominant feudal (and other prior) orders would have us believe. But, despite many important counterexamples, forceful refeudalizing tendencies followed the enlightenments earlier defeudalizing momentum. And, where they gained ground and evolved, these shifts (i.e. the enlightenment) had several, unintended (and intended) undesirable side-effects; as such, for Habermas, adjustments are called for. The stalled unilateralism of Alain Ehrenberg's pathetic and quasi-imperious failed sovereign individual is one such unintended or intended side-effect: sumarizing Ehrenberg's: The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age, Gil Eyal said: society is now '...organized around the sovereign individual, who is free to set her own norms of self-development, who is responsible for her destiny and who therefore finds herself in a void, not knowing how to act, nor even why is it preferable to act'. Disavowing guidance, guiding principles and spokespeople or leadership, even good leadership, may make deadly force relations less visible but it doesn't end them, instead, it contributes to clearing the way for seemingly neutral and, in a sense, imaginary and vain meritocracies which amount to eugenicist practice naturalized to the degree that it becomes legal and cultural commonsense. 'Superior intellects' are rewarded with the right to be oblivious while Ralph Ellison's invisible man can, so to speak, see and be anything but himself because he is unseen and misseen. Because he is an unwilling phantasm, a victim of what Báyò Akómoláfé called invisiblizing strategies. Ethan Mills writes: nothing like the atomic theory of human nature '...would make any sense unless you could think of yourself as untethered to others and fully responsible, both causally and morally, for your own identity. This is an illusion. It is often fostered by privilege, especially if one is in a position of relative social and economic independence'. Low status individuals are expected to implement pre-existing preferences without any need to co-create them - given that values are construed as being the finished article, there is no need for reflection, for affordances, for anything equivalent to course materials or for participation in the authoring of a civitas, a culture, a lifeworld or of forms of life.
The need to regulate highly unstable and destabilizing commercial activity disrupted reticular and factored into bolstering vertical ways of organising reminiscent of prior feudal structures. And it would be in keeping with Habermas's work to say that there has been a systematic individualization of systemic and social adversity, as can be seen (to use an elementary example) in the way that (private or public) charity and the like was/is restricted to individual 'case work' - was restricted to forums in which (for example) substantive sociopolitical discussion and praxis was, in effect, proscribed. Or, more broadly, communication which involves voluntarily co-ordinating collective action was, in effect, proscribed, debased or removed from life-worlds, which is to say from public and private spheres. This has the effect of further canalizing an already canalized culture as each person is channeled through furrows which background our sense of the interconnections - the formative latticework - which thoughtful interaction rests on. In other words, forums in which, for example, moral and practical, many-sided communication can take place are, definitionally, networks (or, to borrow Donna Haraway's word, tentacular) and yet each channel, each compartment, is now viewed, de facto, as disconnected from others. This might, in some instances, work out individually but its individual effect is often to, and its wider effect is to, fracture, commodify and to disintegrate interconnectivity and solidarity and to generate anomie.
Life-and-death interpretive resources are diminished for many: Habermas thought that: '...the differentiation of science, morality and art has come to mean the autonomy of the segments treated by the specialist and their separation from the hermeneutics of everyday communication'. This might, nowadays, be viewed as an example of hermeneutic injustice. Something like the silo effect diminishes our ability to understand what or who is in silos that we are not in, the process by which silos are created and the effects that they have and, even, our ability to acknowledge that these silos exist at all. The exterminatory process of exclusion, as Giorgio Agamben defines it, and the more brutal process of frontiérisation, as Achille Mbembe defines it, are closer to the knuckle than siloization in my view but they are less than consistent with this discussion.
In his Second Meditation, after demolishing his own opinions but before rebuilding (from the inside out and from particulars to generalities) his capacity to exist, to know the world and trust his senses, Descartes wrote: 'It feels as if I have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which tumbles me around so that I can neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the top'.
The point made by Alain Ehrenberg is worth revisiting and reinforcing a little; by redefining life or death needs as relatively trivial wants we can sidestep the 'value-laden' question of necessity and of duty and strip others of their rights by stealth, you might want a cupcake but you have no right to it. If you are asked what you want then it's your responsibility to decide (or to make self-interested rational decisions in the marketplace) and if these decisions result in awful outcomes then, again, you are to blame. In her thesis: 'Paying with Dignity: Neoliberalisation and the Human Cost of Food Charity' Katharine Cresswell Riol writes: 'Within the marketplace, even food has been repackaged as a "want" as opposed to a fundamental human need, thereby disregarding human dignity further...Setting aside need and focusing instead on wants allows mainstream economists to sidestep...intellectual biases regarding the use of value-laden concepts such as need, to cast consumer behavior in a value-free analytical mold and to represent economics as an exact, value-free science'. Slavoj Žižek sees Habermas as a state thinker (as a thinker who has, as Cornel West put it, drunk too much rationalist-liberal Kool-Aid) and doesn't forgive democrats for killing Socrates, in any case, he offers a less specific, somewhat polemical, account of much the same phenomena, in: 'Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Humanity' he writes: 'Constantly bombarded by these imposed “free choices,” forced to make decisions for which we are mostly not even properly qualified (or about which we possess inadequate information), our “freedom of choice” increasingly becomes a burden that causes unbearable anxiety...' or, as Ehrenberg has it, a burden that causes depression. A fear of spiders can be, to simplify a great deal, cured through exposure to spiders which is exactly what arachnophobes do not want. And even illness has, in many instances, been repackaged in terms of wants and interests in line with new liberal doctrine, with the 'instrumentalization of the world' and with eugenic modernity. Fear is a fear of specifics, a fear of heights or of spiders for example, anxiety is general. In other words, fear is a fear of things which presage destruction and eternity, a cliff edge, for example, presages a fall into an abyss; anxiety is a fear of Being itself, of all beings, of nothing and of everything. We don't say: 'I am anxious of heights' because anxiety is height itself or being imprisoned in height. In anxiety there are abstract possibilities but there are no actual occasions or vice versa, there is transcendent Being but there are no imminent beings amongst beings or vice versa; anxiety is a coerced deus ex deus view from eternity alone or from the crushing machina ex machina of specificity alone. Žižek offers a familiar prescription which, despite his divergent critique of production and exchange, Habermas might not have quarrelled much with given that he identified as a Marxist, he says that we are also deprived '...of true freedom of choice — the choice (or rather, decision) to move...into the freedom of collectively organizing and regulating the process of production and exchange'. Where illnesses like depression, at its most severe, are concerned the situation is worse, in spite of themselves, the depressed do not want to exist, as Ehrenberg writes: 'The depressed person is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself'. As such, it's not just that the depressed person has to make decisions that he is not qualified to make and about which he lacks knowledge (or other familiar forms of essential social, cultural and economic capital) he also lacks a self which could make decisions in the first place.
The scapegoating mechanism, like much else, became increasingly impersonal as detailed by, for example, Ernest Becker in Escape from Evil. Unwitting and embedded in the doxa and the social order or not, responsibilization (in the form of imposed "free choices" or as Wendy Brown describes it in Undoing the Demos) and the enforcement of neoliberal (market or extant social democratic) discipline, especially on the poor, the injured and the ill, is politics or necropolitics par excellence. It is a variation on the Jakarta method, on the shock doctrine, on what Robert Chapman called neuro-Thatcherism, it is a Sophie's choice.
I wouldn’t want to suggest that the following take on what constitute preconditions for 'ideal' dialogue are definitive (one rule posited by Habermas is that these same preconditions or rules should, themselves, be open to contestation) but it might be useful as a mark against which to measure existing patterns. One of his aims was, as Steven Klein says: '...to draw attention to the stark gap between the ideals of the critical public and the reality of political and social domination'. And to vanished opportunities for analytic or improvisational engagement, knowledge sharing and consequential deliberation. Various facets of history are of interest, for example, elements of a revolutionary and early post revolutionary United States, revolutionary France, upheaval and invention in a liberalizing and industrializing UK and the Golden Age of Athens: Habermas indicates that good communication was, roughly speaking, exemplified by, for example, what went on in (a 'stylized' or, perhaps, a less than realistic version of) pubs in revolutionary Paris and in London coffee houses of the eighteenth century. Parisian salons, cafés and public houses served as hubs for political factions and for discussion, and several pub landlords and landladies were said to possess a degree of political influence. Such things as pamphleteering, public lectures and small-scale presses also undercut communicative monopolies and blackouts in both cities though news media quickly became a commodity and a mass media, in the main, serving state interests and profit, and addressed mainly to, and also serving the interests of, literate bourgeois professionals. London coffee shops were sometimes called 'penny universities' because they democratized learning and because they were forums in which you could, for example, engage in scholarly debate and listen to and talk with notable thinkers; what later became the Baltic Exchange was located, for a time, in coffee shops, while, stock prices were pinned to a noticeboard in a London coffee shop prior to the creation of the stock exchange. During the American revolution Thomas Paine's bestselling pamphlet: Common Sense was read aloud in taverns which were important meeting places in which grievances were shared, resistance strategies planned and propaganda circulated.(Andrewism) The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg is relevant here and Steven Johnson, the author of: How Play Made the Modern World, speaks engagingly enough about the history of coffee houses, about their role in creativity and innovation etc. and about the distrust that they were held in by authorities, who at one point outlawed them as incubators of fecklessness and sedition. Steven Klein notes that although 'Habermas is deeply concerned with protecting our ability to solve problems through the use of reason' or through getting, giving and using knowledge, he also argues that the public sphere should be open, anarchic and conflictual and that it's inherently anti-absolutist in that, as Chad A. Haag put it, it allows 'private people to compel public authority to...legitimate itself before public opinion'.
His argument is both empirical and normative, he thinks about such practices in order, in part, to reconstruct and to elicit ideals, principles and rules and to identify and to reverse wrong turns, wrong turns which lead to the distortion of modernity and of the enlightenment itself. More precisely, he thinks about such practices in order to reconstruct, which is to say disassemble and reassemble practices in much the same way that, as Luca Corchia put it, he disassembled and reassembled '...concepts and arguments in a new form with the intention of better achieving the ‘aim’ that – in his opinion – a tradition of thought had set for itself'.
In this view, though 'subjective' or dramatergical or aesthetic-expressive communication may stake claims to validity with respect to specific normative contexts, some forms are prone to devolving into a kind of manipulation, i.e. they can become a conscious production of false impressions aimed at manipulating the reactions of an audience. When such processes are fused with organizations and their demands, we might (I think) enact a manipulative dramaturgy less consciously with the aim of managing a collective image measured against contextual social criteria or we might enact some combination of individual and collective image management. In any case, as I understand it, he saw unconscious 'strategic action' as systematically distorting communication while conscious strategic action can devolve into what can be summarized as manipulation. So strategy may mean, roughly, forgoing the back and forth of negotiation and, instead, achieving an aim through unconscious distortion or conscious deception. More precisely it consists in: '...achieving a particular outcome regardless of whether or not there is any shared understanding about the objective or the means by which it should be achieved'.(Kailash) Habermas connects strategic action with perlocution which, as per Merriam-Webster's definition, means: 'Of or relating to an act (as of persuading, frightening, or annoying) performed by a speaker upon a listener by means of an utterance'. The perlocutionary aspect of an utterance may be intentional and goal orientated and such intentions may be implicit and hidden from a listener. As per John Austin, perlocution has a 'parasitic' relationship with illocution, Habermas associates the latter with ideal communication and, as per Merriam-Webster, it means: 'Relating to or being the communicative effect (such as commanding or requesting) of an utterance'. The dictionary offers the following illustration: "There's a snake under you" may have the illocutionary force of a warning'. For Habermas domination and systematic distortion also cannibalize, or have a parasitic relationship with, undistorted communication.
If the unforced force of a better argument gives way to force then communicative ideals (of, for example, truth) also give way - unequal micro or capillary, meso and macro power relations can systematically distort communication in this view, as can, to reiterate, a focus on actualizing pre-existing agreements arrived at elsewhere. If we focus exclusively on our own aims then critical reasoning is weakened and is, again, distorted through strategizing. And, more significantly, the loss of shared traditions and conventions which facilitated deliberation and enabled the furtherance of the kinds of contextual ethics suited to a co-evolving and varied world led us to hand over the practice of communicative action to law in the absence of any meaningful alterative. The kinds of processes sketched are stumbling blocks to negotiating with a view to reaching common definitions of a subject or of a situation's various facets - to finding definitions which are mutually acceptable in order to co-ordinate (individual and collective) action by way of that agreement. And, therefore, to integration, solidarity and identity formation which all depend on such co-ordination and which are all eroded by the kinds of processes outlined. Generating material, symbolic and affective misery by colonizing and damaging the lifeworld is, even from an economic-administrative perspective, damaging - Alvesson and Willmott explain this self-sabotage as follows: 'The devaluation of lifeworld properties is perverse because the instrumental rationality of the system depends on the communicative rationality of the lifeworld, even though it appears to function independently of lifeworld understandings and competences. At the very least, the system depends upon human beings who are capable of communicating effectively and who are not manipulated and demoralized to the point of being incapable of co-operation and productivity'. Highly intentional, communicative, meaning rich and highly democratic societies are not compatible with modernization. And although Habermas, nevertheless, spoke in favour of integration into systems and noted their pros as well as their cons, they generate pathology at this point, and they become, themselves, pathological.
coined the term epidermalisation to refer to the way in which inferiority and, for example, anxiety are produced by hierarchies and 'moral economies of worthiness' and 'made flesh and lived through the body'.(Mills) The biopolitical gesamtkunstwerk then presents the individual and it presents the individual as self-sufficient, as without a context or history, as a Robinsonade as Karl Marx put it. Causes of subjectification and of disintegration and abasement are recast as entirely internal, apolitical and, finally, as tragic. Achille Mbembe's antipodes of the kinds of friendly 'third places' Habermas, Andrewism and Oldenburg discuss are a result of societies which, through law, produce extralegal third places paralleling the colony and the plantation and geared towards brutality and minimization.
On a shorthand version of Bernard Stiegler's account: 'What we call our mind has been shaped by a history of interacting with the world: from making hammers from stone, to making paint from berries, to making writing in wet clay, or scrolls, to dictionaries, maps, architectural drawings, and philosophical treatises. So the mind is not a special substance in humans, it is a pattern of habits formed by a long history of using tools and technics. Stiegler says that there are not two entities, only one: world'.(Plastic Pills) Skills were increasingly autonomized, which contributed to proletarianization, they migrated to increasingly sophisticated tools which possess a temporality of their own. Tools and technics allow for the reconstruction of 'environments' or umwelten (and of us because tools and surroundings are constitutive of us) and for the preservation of values which run counter to natural selection as it's usually understood. They imposed industrial temporalities on consciousness and memory and pulled time and space out of joint, more precisely, these temporalities increasingly overrun space leading to disorientation. And technê, not just language, is the limit of our world in this view.
Or else, sensory horizons can be augmented, as per my impoverished reading of Segall, with the imaginal (as distinct from both the social imaginary and individual imagination) creating an interplay between the finite and infinities and implying something like transindividuality. See Chiara Bottici's Spinoza influenced account in 'Anarchafeminism: An Introduction and Guide' and Segall's paper: 'Cosmotheanthropic imagination in the post-Kantian process philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead.' As the first word of title of his paper suggests the imaginal, as he sees it, traverses more than just the social and ecological and the individuals that they factor into constituting. Sometimes it is, perhaps, an apophatic question of reading between the clunky lines of signs and objects or 'vorstellung' or, so to speak, thinking with the uncharted territories in which cartographers drew monsters. In which the molecular babble of the 'chaos-cosmos' babbles.
While, for Pills, horizons are an artifact of an over emphasis on sight and light (and former limitations on optic coverage) both of which, contra Plato and his analogy of the sun, he takes a dim and, in a way, a fatalistic view of - after all, the flood will not be talked into not flooding. The sun never sets but where there are God rays there are sunken places, for every 'self-made' master there are more numerous 'natural' slaves and for every self styled very stable genius there are unstable 'idiots'. This emphasis, in this view, evolved into informatics and data points. Regardless of what we may think or what judgments we may make our mutely compelled assent consists in ritual which, of necessity and even in our most insignificant acts, binds us to an all-pervasive social order and to capital, at best we can describe this process. Given epistemes and given modes of production impose unequally distributed stringent limits on knowledge and praxis, vast lakes of digitized capital transform, not without great difficulty, into rockets that can land on a dime or, like Pennywise, into our worst fears and into everything in between. 'Flows of material resources are mediated through what Alf Hornborg called the 'master technology of money'.(Mustafa Ali)
Vaguely in keeping with Marcel Merleau Ponty's phenomenology and with Donna Haraway's practice of world-making (which was Arendt's definition of work) or 'worlding-with' or spider or lichen-like thinking and Andy Clark, David Chalmers and Francisco Varela's theorization of extended, embodied and co-generated 'minds' and knowledge and of panpsychism etc. and with James Gibson's theory of affordances, there are no disembodied or entirely sensorially deprived monadic minds. There are assemblages and our capabilities and states are transformed by and (for better or for worse) mixed up with the tools and with the 'environments' or worlds that are, and have been, afforded or worlded through (pre)historical time.
There can be no noospheres without the biosphere in which they are entangled and there can be no biosphere without the cosmos in which it, in turn, is entangled.
Following Schelling, Segall posits a critique of pure feeling, and of viscera - cause and effect becomes cause and affect, reconnecting 'the human mind and its scientific knowledge with the physical world it desires to know'. In keeping with Stiegler: aesthetics (or aisthēsis) is like sympathy in that both consist in feeling with others, in the first instance as - at least potentially - a mediated and a communal set of sensibilities, in the second, in short, as a capacity; aesthetics, then, has the dormant or symbolically immiserated (in so far as symbols have been captured, in Stiegler's view, by industries engaged in economic warfare) potential to feed into the generation of realisable visions or senses of better worlds and into a sense of why they are necessary. As such, aesthetics and the technê in which it is enmeshed have sociopolitical and ethical implications; a minority - a 'lucky' few - engaged in aesthetic inquiry have abandoned multitudes to the thraldom of symbolic war: stereotypes, stigmas, presentism, obliviousness, myopic individualism, lethal Machiavellian swindles, cruel false hopes and confident moral confusion and inversion, for example, are ammunition fashioned then traded amongst or handed to organisations and to lifeworlds such that they may be deployed in implicit, slowly violent and hyper-extractive shock and awe campaigns.
Technics, specifically, the inscription it involves, constitutes human time an stabilises and externalizes memory giving it a sticking power that allows for a corresponding amplification of (and capacity to destroy former forms of) know-how and knowledge, in any case, pluralizing or mutualizing human subjects or minds might be insufficient and language is both non-local and one of many patterns - language is, for Báyò Akómoláfé, speciated within the world as an aspect of its collective creativity. But then, for example, dramaturgy can be non-linguistic and gestural, conative and so on, and action (tied to or co-generated with communication) is also a central focus and it can involve any number of patterns.
Ideally communicative action involves allowing for reference to, and embodies, the objective, social and subjective - this, fundamentally inter-subjective, rationality relies on taking all of the facets of language equally into consideration (including its interpretive, contextual/rule bound and performative aspects) and aims for truth, rightness and truthfulness while being open to contestation. A subjective truth may become true when it is truthfully, as in honestly, communicated and accepted as true, or, at least, it may become pragmatically true - these teloi are not absolute. And the unfolding of enlightenment is participatory and presupposes that all actors in the process participate in fundamentally the same way (i.e. that we voluntarily abide by the same basic discursive values or rules) and have fundamentally the same status in that status is to be disregarded or suspended consonant with the ancient Athenian notion of isegoria which is, as Yanis Varoufakis put it, '...the idea that one’s views ought to be heard and judged independently of who expresses them...' Though isegoria makes a stronger claim, namely that one’s views ought to be heard and judged, as Varoufakis says, '...independently of one’s rhetorical skills since there is no reason why such skills should correlate well with the soundness of the argument'. Habermasian ideals are close to this latter principle in that they posit situations '...in which everyone would have an equal chance to argue and question, without those who are more powerful, confident, or prestigious having an unequal say'.(Ruth A. Wallace and Alison Wolf) But what about those who cannot say or argue regardless of whether they have or do not have the opportunity to say? Sunaura Taylor suggests that equal consideration based on sentience would be better, less murderously anthropocentric, ableist and epistemocratic than basing consideration on communicative or cognitive competence and the like. In keeping with Habermas and drawing on Levinas, Judith Butler asserts radical interdependencies grounded in the 'unfounded foundation' of universal vulnerability and precarity both of which are, in a sense, personal absences or deficits which are an inevitable result of the fact of interdependence. Butler notes that '...one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other'. And that we are always dependent on and exposed to those '...we know, or barely know, or know not at all'.
For Will Conway horrors arise when we attempt to untangle mobiles, in that, to dehumanize is to orthopedically exterminate the erring that is human. Pervasive hair trigger biopolitical circuitries create, find and eliminate error and those who err. They seek to eliminate the novelty that is error and to attack its unpredictability, variation and multiplicity. Pointing a gun at the worlds head and demanding that it must speak and speak well in order to avoid a lethal disregard is difficult to justify; see, for example, Conway's paper: 'The Prudence of Polity: City and Sanity' and the writers Conway draws on, mainly, Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. For Conway, gatherings based on practical reason and its moralisms are also founded, and continuously re-founded, on the violent exclusion of anyone and anything understood (through a kind of quasi-clinical 'biopolitical' practice) to be incapable of practical reason, this move is generative, it creates stupidity, the hoi polloi or the masses and it creates unreason and anomie, all of which are precisely what judicious assemblies are not. In order to set the scene for 'sensible' dialogue and practice hindrances to them must first be swept aside (though not completely because they must still fulfil their foundational role) by the self-styled arbiters of good sense, who are often, all to conveniently, ourselves and our accomplices (so long as we have accumulated or inherited sufficient authority or social power to participate in authoring civilized limits and dividing lines). On a charitable reading, before condemning the atrocities committed by King Leopold II in the Congo, Arendt takes on the perspective of colonizers and says that to them 'native savages...were as incomprehensible as the inmates of a madhouse'. The customary phrase we are reasonable people silently circumscribes, circles the wagons and outcastes but there is a sense in which 'we' are, nevertheless, formed by whoever we vanquish, as Bayo Akomolafe says: 'Each individual citizen is the majestic product/outcome and yet ongoing exertion of the hidden public. The blood of the vanquished'. The establishment of value laden nomoi necessitates the simultaneous creation of zones of indistinction between bios and zoē, which is to say, of unmediated life stripped of all rights and subject to the unalloyed and direct force of both a stage-managed state and of nature; stated very crudely, civilization needs to create and to exterminate brutes or savages or impurities and citizenship is constituted and sustained through the well hidden thraldom of its 'useful' estranged and subaltern alter-egos and through the abandonment and murder of its 'useless' alter-egos. Moreover, if eudemonia is achieved through leading a virtuous life in accordance with moral law then it follows that the failure to achieve it might signify sin or a lack of individual virtue as well as a failure of individual practical reason. In his essay The Echoes of Utility Conway quotes Book III of Plato's Republic, depending on your interpretation of the Republic, for Plato, in a just society: "Those who are diseased in their bodies they will leave to die, and the corrupt and incurable souls they will put an end to themselves". And he notes Plato's '...passive, almost completely fluid, shift from the pathological to the moral'. Illness seamlessly becomes corruption, and calling for the social murder by deliberate omission of vast numbers of naturally unhappy or terrorized or naturally (physically or mentally) defective hoi polloi becomes a seemingly noble and reasonable calling. In binarized social orders, suffering sometimes performs the unsensed sacrificial labour of constituting the eudemonic and hedonic subjectivity of others. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, said that his garden adjacent to the death camp '...was a paradise of flowers.' Ernest Becker said that it is in the places where 'the goats are torn apart' that the 'pathetic cowardliness' of it all is revealed.
Once the consciences of recruits are sufficiently bloodied, they are viscerally bonded to organizations, societies and to an ethic and their loyalty and compliance is cemented. The pathetic cowardliness of it all and the tearing apart of goats become unknown knowns, they are forever hidden in plain sight.
In his lecture: "The New Global Mobility Regime" Mbembe says: 'According to the new and old security rationale, although everybody is potentially dangerous until proven otherwise, some categories of bodies and persons carry, almost by definition, more risks than others. Even in their most vulnerable state, they fundamentally endanger our lives. As such they must be the object of renewed profiling, classification and isolation. Or even eliminated in line with a long history in modernity that ties together the targeting, quarantining, restriction and even extermination of populations that have been marked as abnormal or have been profoundly dishonored'. The most effective way to reduce risk is to render alleged risk carrying persons docile, if necessary by destroying their minds and bodies. According to John Rawls the natural distribution of talents '...is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. They are natural facts'. But both historical injustices (which play out in the present) and dumb luck exist and Rawls downplays the former. If you punch someone in the face and then give them a band-aid for their busted lip then it would be offensive to expect them to be thankful or to suggest that their busted lip is a result of bad luck and therefore not a sign of a prior injustice. If we follow Rawls' appeal to nature and his uncharacteristically faulty reasoning then, to simplify, giving back some of what was stolen and enclosed and the right to restoration and reparations are off the table. Discussing the reconciliation process between indigenous people and 'settlers' in Canada Nick Estes said: "How messed up is it that the very perpetrators of that violence are now the ones who are going to remediate that violence, provide the care for those victims of violence? Hey, I’m sorry we kidnapped all of your children, sent them to residential schools, killed a lot of them, raped a lot of them, abused a lot of them. Now we’re going to say sorry, but instead of actually giving back land or giving back the resources for you to build yourselves as nations, we’re just going to provide the social services for you to get the help that you need from us. It’s this mentality of crying on the shoulder of the man who stole your land". At least in this instance there is a nominal recognition, all be it inadequate, of past and present injustices. It is, without a doubt, often extremely unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position, and not all talents are acquired 'naturally'. No talents could conceivably be acquired entirely outside of present and past human and non-human societies and ecologies. "Agency is always co-agency, it's always discovered with those adjacent to you...You enter into symbiosis with those fellow agents and realize purposes beyond what any independent individual can even fathom".(Segall) Restoration and justice are called for rather than the moral sleight of hand that is (state, private or personal) chartable help which the injured are often in too weak a position not to grudgingly accept on pain of death.
None of the above is to say that Habermas endorsed or even condoned ancient Athens or any other society referenced; citizenship and democracy, participatory or otherwise, for some and not for others is a caricature of democracy and, for Hannah Arendt: '...tyranny over "laborers,"...as for instance the rule over slaves in antiquity, would automatically be a rule over lonely, not only isolated, men and tend to be totalitarian'. The polis and the koine or common were not exactly 'public spheres' given that only about ten percent of Athenians could, as citizens, participate in them. For Habermas the life-world, in both its public and private instantiations, should be (and is the only sphere which can be) a locus of communicative action and rationality rather than just of affect, entertainment and so on, where the latter are, and are constructed as, less than. As per Arendt, economic-administrative spheres often involve rote motion and function rather than human action in that, for example, decisions are made elsewhere by a small minority and we are tools for their implementation.
And as Ellie Anderson said in a lecture on Arendt, modern liberal democratic states function '...according to rules that are actively recognized only by a minority. So majority rule is often not the actual case...but democratic society pretends that it is'. Many have no idea what their rights are or how to realize them and few have access to levers of power, such as they are. While fully totalitarian societies are, at least, more honest about the disenfranchisement of an even more numerous many.
This fictionalization turns Others into a variety of typical or type-images - stereotypes which correspond to the debris of their real biographies.(Mbembe)
Many are, as the saying goes, treated like mushrooms: kept in the dark and fed shit. In the age of Kali Yuga there's a sucker born every minute and you can fool most people most of the time. While the 'wretched' Calibans of the earth are devastated, degraded and mocked. Paraphrasing Achille Mbembe: complicated strangulation tactics have been put in place with a view to intensifying the suffocating conditions to which various injured populations have been subjected. Civilization as grift - a shell game played with reality, a genocidal and geocidal modality, as Fred Moten put it, '...within which the world is being liquidated, in which earthly life is placed under the severest possible...duress'. If there is no such thing as society then, at best, we are cornered into admonishing or praising individualized performances. The switch is to magic away material conditions and the mode of production or the socio-economic order in order to defend them and petty performance is the bait.
If awful states are understood to be innate and dispositional through and through then they have no external causes and no-one bares any responsibility for them. Injurious sets of ideas, manageable categories and graspable qualities are reassuring, in part, because they essentialize and if, for example, the inhumanity of a categorized subject is understood to be an innate quality then no-one has been injured, instead, the dehumanized are in fact inhuman. Stereotyping and power tend to reinforce one another because, as S.T. Fiske has it: 'stereotyping itself exerts control, maintaining and justifying the status quo'. In Public Opinion Walter Lippmann makes a similar point: 'systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society'. Stereotyping maintains the Pax Romana, it maintains the kind of peace which Martin Luther King called obnoxious. It tells the relatively secure and relatively socially powerful that everything, in particular that which is most troubling to them, is in its proper place and that everything is as it should be and if it isn't, that they played no part in generating what they claim to discover or observe. It maintains a false or negative peace that consists, King said, in the mere absence of war, tension and confusion.
Returning to Habermas's own words goes at least some way to redressing my lack of focus, simplification, confusion and consequent unintended misrepresentation: 'Some meanings are a priori universal in as much as they establish the conditions of potential communication and general schemes of interpretation; others are a posteriori universal, in the sense that they represent invariant features of contingent scopes of experience which, however, are common to all cultures. For that reason we differentiate between semantic universals which process experiences and semantic universals which make this processing possible in the first place (a posteriori/a priori)'. The emphasis is on contingent scopes, general schemes and the like rather than copy-book epistemological questions concerning subjects and objects, insides and outsides or things-in-themselves and appearances. More precisely: 'Habermas eschews the attempt to explicate the relationship between proposition and world metaphysically...Rather, he explicates the meaning of accurate representation pragmatically, in terms of its implications for everyday practice...'(SEoP) Much of Habermas's thought is methodical and some of the ideas sketched here would be, and are, clearer when tabulated and diagrammed rather than incompletely itemized. In any case, we can view the prescriptions (or the universal or formal pragmatics) indicated as ingredients of ideal speech situations which may, in fact, exist only to degrees. Either way they are at least, from a limited sociological perspective, '...a useful analytical tool for considering how social interaction...takes place.'(URDSS) For Habermas they are more than an analytical tool in that they have an 'operative effect' on communication.
A widespread distortion of communication can lead, as per Habermas' questionable list of disastrous consequences, to a descent into irrationality, mythology, terror and barbarity and so, if he is to be believed, much is at stake. We shouldn't take issue with the bedrock of reason, normative inquiry or dispute so much as question whether their appearance is a façade - our aim might be true but we might have hit a mirage and missed the target by a mile. That unreasonable or terrible things have been done in the name of reason is no reason to indict it, rather, it's a call to reformat rationalities or to further hone them or to reduce their importance. That it has, as Robert Fine said (following Foucault), been (mis)used, for example, in the formation of unjustifiable portrayals of others as unreasonable, of the other as an ‘...object to be stared at, with no intrinsic relation to the eye of reason that was looking at it except as a spectacle of what lies on the other side of reason if we let down our guard...’ and of the non-rational or arational as always awful and inadmissible does not damage rationalities as such, or else, it doesn't damage them regardless of their type or framing.
The philosophy of the subject was emphasized for a while but never resolved and it became an aporia within production when attention shifted to productivism. Various 'enlightenment' principles were countered and criticised as soon as they appeared and they still are, on the grounds that, put simply, they are, for example, founded on this unresolved philosophy of the subject, that they are blind to, or naïve about, class, force relations, power structures and historical determinacy and contingency. Or else they are now taken to be irredeemable phantoms overrun by techno-capitalism and by the bread, circuses and executions that accompany it. To some degree, Habermas conceded some of these points and as far as I can tell, instead, focused on immanent critique, re-formation and redirection and leaned towards an acceptance, all be it reluctant, of modernity. Critiquing cognitive forms, in other words, a critique of reason which conditions our perception of things and ideas such that reasons, perceptions, things and ideas are no longer taken for granted, that is, asking the question: under what conditions do questioning and thinking operate, retains a dormant emancipatory potential, as do many Kantian (and other enlightenment) principles. The unfinished, perhaps unfinishable, stalled or failed and now mostly hypothetical 'enlightenment project' liberated some from the dark ages, as it turns out, it also generated novel forms of domination and violence. If, as just one of the items on Habermas's list of communicative ideals has it, roles are to be as interchangeable as possible then there would be strong incentives to reduce harm in that we would be subject to it if we subjected others to it. Stronger if we routinely questioned exclusion, coercion, the suppression of arguments, manipulation, self-deception and the like.
In his later writings he veered away from delineating ideal types, from the use of phrases like: ideal speech situations and the like because they tend to pre-empt, concretize and standardize, instead, he began using more open-ended less strict terms like: pragmatic presuppositions.
Some/thing escapes in or through the object's vestibule; the object vibrates against its frame like a resonator, and troubled air gets out. The air of the thing that escapes enframing is what I'm interested in—an often unattended movement that accompanies largely unthought positions and appositions.
Fred Moten
Amongst other things, what Schelling called negative philosophy 'explains the logic of change, once there is a world to be explained' as Andrew Bowie put it, and it can be reversed; such a descendental reversal calls for both and rather than either or heuristics - both transcend and descend. And reconnect the conscious mind to natures creative process, to 'its roots in a living ground'.(Matthew Segall) To the creativity which we perceive in concert with rather than perceive, to what Schelling called natura naturans, meaning nature naturing, and not just outwards to the created - to objects or appearances and controlling I-It interactions. Descend into the cosmography of the microcosm or human and hypo human scale. Rejection is, in practice, much less viable and so disavowing an increasingly inescapable cursed civilization tends to pretence and denial - to an escape from evil which leads into evil; at the end of western spiritual or 'philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler'.(Aime Cesaire) The rejection of contextual or colloquial concrete humanity in favour of a deceitful, distant and false respect for it and in favour of the merely formalistic effigy of its universal variant lead and leads to Nazism and colonialism in Cesaire's view. The world maximizes harm and we are in it and of it; born in medias res; for Hannah Arendt (and in his own way for Cornel West) that we can break with automaticity and act in unexpected ways, that there are interruptions or intervals, is related to the fact of natality (which is the etymological root of the word: nature) and involves self disclosure and a capacity for novel and improbable beginnings within a plurality. With reference to Arendt, Linda Zerilli writes: 'What makes one occurrence count as an event that calls for our response is how citizens take it up. Beginning, as a feature of all events, must be actualized, and this turns on whether others take up any particular event as an occasion for response'. Routines can be interrupted in ways which, though conditioned, no one can determine.
Or descend as in katabasis 'to the level of furniture and bacteria and microbes'.(Bayo Akomolafe) To the compromised and mumbling, often not very enlightened and sometimes horrific such that we can sense the periodically uncovered and long silenced devastation, the pain and the Gods in the underworld and make sanctuary by the fissures that lead to it.(Akomolafe)
Or into space and time not just as, respectively, external and internal conditions of possibility. Not just as forms of our own intuition without which the directly sensed appearance or representation of external objects and the inner representations contiguous with them could not appear to us. Into space and time not just as derived through inference as Kant sometimes had it but also as "...a field of possibility which is achieved by a society or an ecology of organisms stretching back billions of years in this cosmic process that we are part of."(Matthew Segall) Though not entirely antithetical to Kantian 'transcendental idealism' (a less confusing name for which might be mind-dependent mind-independence or indirect realism) and bedingungen der möglichkeitan/conditions of possibility an aim is (not to overturn them but) to reverse them and to think and feel and to will beyond them; one obvious difference is, to reiterate, that Segall's take isn't subject centered - he doesn't take a given human subject or assembly as the only starting point, if we do then, as Karen Barad said, we are already to late but if we erase knowers entirely then we are pretending to take a view from nowhere. On George Santayana's uncharitable reading, Kant posits a 'void outside' and an 'absolute oracle within' and this formulation is, for Santayana, a source of virulent egotism. In any case, the sciences, for Segall, may be understood to be practiced from within and as an aspect of what is studied, as in endo-physics and endo-biology etc. Endo-everything, perhaps, in that the outside is a euphemism for alienation and in that this school of thought is, in a metaphysical/scale-free sense, personal; however, in this view the outside refers to that which does not yet, but which might, exist and the inner is, in a sense, that which has existed. We can know the human and more than human world because it grew into us, so to speak, as we and our distant predecessors co-evolved with it, without the 'structural coupling' of lifeforms and environments (embodied) cognition would not be possible. And each participant, to paraphrase Adam Robbert, contributes to the generation of space-time and enfolds itself and space-time into a complex ecology that flows from the actions of each. This later way of thinking draws more on notions like umwelten and overlapping, discontinuous, heterogeneous and homogeneous semiospheres etc. Umwelten can be, at a push, defined as a synthesis of surroundings and subjectivity - what surrounds a lifeform is, for that lifeform, reduced, not least, by the limited senses with which it picks out and focuses on whichever aspects of its habitat are meaningful to it. It extends into and co-makes the surroundings it experiences through interacting with those aspects of its world which it can sense and which are meaningful for it but, as Tim Feiten says following Jakob von Uexküll: once a lifeform '...perceives meaningful affordances, indeed as soon as it experiences any environment at all, we are already in medias res, and much of what Uexküll describes has to have taken place already as the condition of the possibility of this experience'. For Uexküll meaning hinges on a version of Kantian representationalism which 'enntails the creation of duplicates or copies' while for several later thinkers inspired by his ideas (Martin Fultot and M. T. Turvey for example) meaning hinges on duality not representation and 'duality works on the basis of correspondences, such as the peg of a cogwheel fitting into the socket of another'.(Feiten) The two cogwheels affect one another while a copy doesn't directly contact or necessarily affect whatever it is a copy of. In this view, meaning is not just constructed indirectly through subjective acts or mental models it is 'directly available in the world as opportunities for action, namely, affordances'. Without the right affordances meaning breaks down.
Segall would question cogwheel metaphors and prefers polarities to dualities, in any case, for him perception and the imaginal, as he understands them, are aspects of a wider process of cosmogenisis and figuring out, from within, how they came to be diminished, devalued, construed as a solipsistic sky castle, quarantined, destroyed or observed through a one way mirror is an aim - philosophy is, sometimes, a murder mystery. The diminishment of the imaginal is related to the diminishment of practical ritual and mythopoeia. Reality, as it relates to us, tends to be horrific not bleak - to resemble Doctor Moreau's island more than a wasteland. If we play Cluedo with reality then we find that the culprits project and impose a wasteland or tabula rasa in a vacuum domicilium onto a reality which is, otherwise, teeming - we find an eternity which we have, because of 'our' fear of it and our greed, fashioned into a sword and turned against itself. Bernardo Kastrup calls this fear 'the vertigo of eternity'. For Kastrup physis is a phenomenal representation of universal mental noumena. The biologist Michael Levin said that we need not ask: "Is something physics and chemistry, or is it cognitive?" He said that the question is: "What kind of cognition, and how much?". The wall which separates human culture from, and which protects cultures from, the rest of (the artifice that is) nature should have a few physical and metaphysical holes punched, typed, felt, grown and thought through it; e.g. if we accept that reality consists in occasions, in forms/processes of life and in subjectivities and prehensions all the way down then the human/non-human boundary is softened. And the subject/object binary is annulled in favour of something akin to a phase transition; a transition from occasions which are, in this view, experiential and onto-aesthetic, to a diachronic infinity of potential or objective datum and back again as the latter enters (or 'ingresses') into the former leading to conceptual exploration and material reiteration. In Whitehead's jargon, already actualized 'eternal objects' are, I think, roughly analogous to natura naturata, they are passive and the potential (or potential for) which they are also analogous to exists only in relation to the still actualizing occasions, including those occasions colloquially called objects, into which they ingress. In this way, new values and perspectives are generated at all scales and in much the same way, universals and 'platonic forms' would also be understood to be dependent on specifics and specific perspectives. That said, to do anything like justice to this way of thinking and acting would require introducing another set of writers and a glossary of terms which are best left to the likes of Catherine Keller, John Cobb, Isabelle Stengers and Segall to articulate.
An apparently but not really passive principle, without which the active principle could not exist, is enslaved and ignored. At some point we decided that it's less risky to paint the sky an impenetrably utilitarian drab colour and to stay in the Cartesian high noon of clear and distinct ideas. To conceive of the world as designed ex-nihilo and from the outside not recreated with what came before from the inside. The devil is in the detail minus the whole or vice versa. Feelings, moods and emotions should rebel against any concepts which they makeup and which they are neglected and hated by. If prima materia is an aspect of ordering and order then their estrangement is a civil war - matter versus mind, or a war against primordial matter or mater or against the face of the deep. Systematized exhibition disconnects. 'When religion pretends to "systematized exhibition," it removes us both from the streets and from the deep'.(Keller)
Or else, as West said: 'To be human in space and time is to be in the mess'. But, to reiterate, modernity is characterized by the loss of the world and of worldliness, a net of client relationships, as Habermas and West see it, has long since spread over personal spheres of life reducing the catastrophic to the problematic and handing it to the 'professional managerial complex' in the form of problems to be managed, as such, radically democratic forms of life or, for that matter, the existence of accomplices grounded in a sense of general precarity are brutally hypothetical. To paraphrase Agamben, practice remains 'imprisoned and immobile' while the eudaimonia and hedonia of eunomia can be gained only through citizenship (through claiming formal legal rights and through inclusion in markets) at the expense of creating then condemning homo sacer to 'blood and death' or to 'the perfect senselessness of the society of the spectacle'. In the same vein, Achille Mbembe says that, in early and late modernity: 'The calculus of life passes through the death of the Other'. In divergent ways, common critiques of modernity implicitly acknowledge the reality of its exercise of necropower and dispute the necessity of its exercise but even in Habermas' best case scenario, social orders might continue to be, in this view, founded on exclusion or, in Agamben's jargon, on the exceptio of bare life. And language and law might continue to be passwords or branding irons that sort the saved from the damned. If they cannot become 'us' then the vulnerable must be utilized, destroyed or separated so that 'we' thrive, so that 'our' utility and enjoyment is maximized as biopolitcs and capillary panoptic surveillance demand, as Mbembe writes: 'all kinds of killing projects are tried out on the most vulnerable classes of the world's population'. What Agamben called a scientific and philosophical 'anthropological machine' is the source of the polis and of politics and it has two modes: it anthropomorphizes animals and it animalizes or dehumanizes humans. In late modernity it tends to take the latter form or, more precisely, it generates and isolates the non-human within humans. And various states of exception are, likewise, isolated within the polis but they are also necessary for and intrinsic to it. Kelly Oliver summarizes: 'Who is included in human society and who is not is a consequence of the politics of "humanity," which engenders the polis itself'. First and foremost, humans are not alalus, in other words, as per the workings of the anthropological machine they are not without speech - to be without speech is to be 'not yet human'.
The machine and the biopolitical apparatus thwart the formation of new worlds and new forms-of-life.(Conway) It can be deactivated, according to Agamben, through a kind of Shabbat, which is to say, through resting the machine and rendering it inoperable, through a hazardous emptiness which suspends the suspension of the non-human within, through small-time festivals or truces held together by non-legalistic axioms in which science, philosophy and law no longer primordially define humans and define them as what animals are not. And in which participation and nonparticipation in a civitas can no longer humanize some and, at the same time, dehumanize and banish others leading to their vulnerability to injury or murder and to the slow liquidation of unoptimized life.(Conway) Constituent power and operativity (and, perhaps, the naturalized ideology that is agentic capacity) turns human beings into zones of exception, it impels us into states of (potential or actual) absolute physical and psychological exhaustion.
Like snowflakes 'we' probably won't feel that we are responsible for the avalanches that we are a part of. The more the fly struggles and suffers, the more the spiders, in their guilt, are inclined to close each of their eight eyes and chew faster. The guilt washing machine keeps the hedonic treadmill spinning unimpeded.
For West, mess or funk is related to natality and zum tode and it means: "...wrestling with the wounds, the scars, the bruises, as well as the creative responses to wounds, scars, and bruises — some of them inflicted because of structures and institutions, some...tied to our existential condition". We are hardwired to affirm life and we want, instinctively, to survive, consume (and therefore kill) and, often, to expand as much as possible, societies reflect this gross wiring but, according to Ernest Becker and many others, it doesn't hold up to much scrutiny and there can be little dignity in being mortal stomachs on stilts no matter what our convoluted cultural conceits tell us, though some ways of ameliorating the horror of our 'existential condition' are worse than others. If the metaphors we live by are too thin, if the ice of benevolent meaning (in particular that which is constitutive of identity) is too thin then it will crack and send us plummeting into a senseless reality. If it's too thick then there will be a blind and lethal, open or covert, conflict or crusade over exaggerated importance, over an importance which becomes shallower the more significance it assigns to itself. What Lewis Mumford called megamachines will be made and fealty will be paid and sacrifices will be offered to them. In the final analysis a sufficient sense of significance is a pragmatic or practical defensive measure, a more or less insatiable bullfrog puffing out its chest at a predatory world which it does not understand. If its chest puffing fails it's killed, or worse, and if it succeeds it kills; culture in general is a reality defying defensive measure.
Hence, as Robert Sapolsky put it, despite the loss of cognitive capacity: '...considerable research has shown that individuals suffering from depression are often more accurate in their assessment of the world than are healthy control subjects. "Sadder but wiser," as the jargon goes. Depression might also be seen, then, as a failure of the human capacity for denial and self-deception. It is the healthy who are neuropsychologically distortive in this realm'. Suffering is excessive and inexcusable. The depressed and the anxious have fallen through, or have been pushed through, the ice of denial and self-deception and plummeted to the bottom of the Kola Superdeep Borehole. Without biochemical shock absorbers reality is felt directly. Reality is, for Becker, inexplicable and inherently unbearable.
There is also a tendency to emphasise filtrated lifeworlds and to ignore, disavow, wish away or naturalize the imposition of death-worlds, which is to say, as Achille Mbembe put it, of forms of '...social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead'. There is an, all to successful, attempt to separate lifeworlds from deathworlds once the later have been, and while they are being, painstakingly imposed. In the same way, from a certain perspective, it is often through the painstaking and sporadically violent social separation of good and bad moods that a limit point of suffering, namely depression, is reached as bad moods land - in throw away societies - in human bins or else, to use Zygmunt Bauman's phrase, as waste humans are thrown into them and into states of suspended extinction. That said, both Habermas and Mbembe call for the qualified rehabilitation of reason (which for Mbembe requires a critique of techne, algorithmic reason and cold-blooded calculation) in order to, in part, challenge a community '...which has has embarked upon organized lying on principle, and not only with respect to particulars' as Arendt put it.
With specific presuppositions in place, it's possible for those affected by specific injustices to reach a consensus on what would be just given their, to a degree, shared injuries. These definitions can then be, to some degree, generalized while maintaining their ethical validity. And a plurality of truths can be figured out and generalized in much the same way, including (the truth of) our distance from 'ideal speech situations' on which the aforementioned linearly depend.
As per the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: 'Habermas summarizes his idealized conception of practical discourse in the “discourse principle” (D), which we might state as follows: A rule of action or choice is justified, and thus valid, only if all those affected by the rule or choice could accept it in a reasonable discourse.' When D is applied to, what Habermas calls, the form of law to distinguish it from the rule of law, it (the form of law) becomes a more meaningful, though insufficient, compensation for lost conventions and traditions. This is the case, in part, because it would mean that specific rights would 'have to “be interpreted and given concrete shape” by actual citizens in response to determinate historical conditions'.(SEoP) John Rawls' principle of legitimacy as described in: 'Political Liberalism' justifies, in Habermas' view, designing full fledged 'basic norms of a well-ordered society on the drafting table' without much ongoing input from citizens and without much respect for contexts - unsaturated rights and forms of law, in his view, should be, to reiterate, saturated by actual citizens in response to determinate historical conditions. Hence he delineates and makes a case for the normative content of procedures but not for arguments in general and, while he views law as a de-moralized autonomous subsystem, rights and popular sovereignty can move between it and the lifeworld. See the Rawls Habermas debate and the book: 'Between Facts and Norms'.
In sum, colonization compromises the lifeworld's capacity to reproduce itself. See, for example, Robert Putman's well known writings on the destruction of substantive civic, social, associational and political networks and Arendt's warnings about the same or similar: this destruction leads to terror, the terror of not belonging to the world at all. Light breezes are enough to send grains of sand this way or that and sandstorms of demagoguery and of various other kinds are, all too easily, whipped up in political deserts; the political and human action, for Arendt, and communicative action, for Habermas, all have a similar meaning. Deserts for Arendt are akin to masses, and masses, as Ellie Anderson says, might actually have common interests and goals, but they don't recognize that they do, just as terror is shared but we, as masses, do not know it and we cannot say it and so we are covertly driven by it. Worldlessness is imposed from without, it is generated and then, often implicitly, blamed on individuals and, more intensively, on out-grouped individuals: "The inwardly turned, narcissistic ego with purely subjective access to the world is not the cause of social disintegration but the result of a fateful process at the objective level".(Byung-Chul Han) If the world becomes a Teflon slide-show from which we are meant to select what we like and forget all else and if 'negativity' and Kristevian horror have, by design, been driven underground in favour of an obligatory self-referential sameness and positivity then culturally mediated narcissism, as a kind of palmed off grief and rage, would be a likely result. Akomolafe asks: What if politics means grieving together? For Han, we are not entirely self-made, we are given and constituted, always, by others and for Han, freedom means something like friendliness, a stimmung - a mood and an atmosphere - which rests on profound boredom and, more so, on Eros and the unexpected. 'Freedom...comes from the same root as friend, an Indo-European word that meant "dear" or "beloved." It meant a connection to other free people by bonds of kinship or affection, also unlike a slave. Liberty and freedom both meant "unlike a slave." But liberty meant privileges of independence; freedom referred to rights of belonging'.(Hackett Fischer) Liberal liberty protects the demos from its own arbitrary power over, terms and conditions may apply.
Though Arendt was often very strongly critical of (actually existing professional) politics, to simplify, a certain kind of shame, for her, is, to use an ironically behaviorist metaphor, sheepdog-like in that it may bring us back into a radically or deeply political fold (or, for Mbembe, into alignment with a democracy yet to come) it's bark reprimanding us for our quietism as we quit and fall silent whenever confronted with the brutality, oppression and terror in which we are complicit. Technological and scientific progress is accompanied by minimization, dehumanization and violence.(SRH) For example, according to Arendt, by offloading necessity onto science and technology and onto labourers we lose touch with what it means to be human. Dehumanization is at the axis of genocide - our thoughts and feelings are infinitely complicated and valuable while the thoughts and feelings of others, if they exist at all, are simple, as Robert Sapolsky says, although outgroups often have a heightened sensitivity to pain they are '...frequently viewed as simpler and more homogeneous than Us, with simpler emotions and less sensitivity to pain'. Though, to attempt to eliminate violence completely is also dehumanizing because, for Arendt, it is a prototypical human quality.
Without the dimension of necessity (and of work as in world-building) the vita-contemplativa and human action can't exist but without the latter dimensions the dimension of necessity lacks worth and sufficient reason to exist. Giorgio Agamben writes: '...politics has been reduced...to the disordered and tautological administration of a social and economic order that has emptied itself of any positive reason for being, yet which continues anarchically to persist, "without why". Crudely stated, the state's theoretical support is, in in this view, provisioned by polizeiwissenschaft meaning both police science and policy or political science. In a paper titled: Sensitive to Shame: Hannah Arendt on Becoming Worldly Manu Samnotra writes: 'The central concern shaping Arendt’s arguments is man’s alienation from the world. Although she provides powerful distinctions between the various modes of vita activa as antidotes to the decay of the public world, to the degree that the recovery of the public/political space can help us ward off the anti-political temptations of modernity – that is, overcome the hubris of modern society – a relationship to shame as a guarantee against hubris would certainly have to be part of any solution...Politics – that is, the fact of plurality – deprives the actions of an actor of their sovereign intentions by refracting them from a multiplicity of interpretive perspectives. Arendt highlights this transformation of sovereign design into non-sovereign action by referring to action as both doing and suffering'. The solution does not involve being shamed (or reprimanded) so much as developing a certain relationship to shame.
Politics of this kind involves collective self-governance through participation, it involves mediated perspective making and taking and it involves conscience in action or action answerable to thought, to an inner dialogue, it involves thinking about what we are, in fact, doing. Evil, for Arendt, consists in acting without thinking and in a failure of perspective taking. And the capacity to take perspectives rests, in part, on social norms, affordances, socio-material practices and structures which hardly exist. As George Kateb wrote, following Arendt, political action also '...takes place only where there is a common commitment to the reality, beauty, and sufficiency of the world - of the world "out there." And it '...looks to the creation or conservation or augmentation of a suitable world for itself.'(Kateb)
For the most part, no such transformation of sovereign design has occurred and few are conscience-stricken, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, the author of Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, writes: 'Before she went to Jerusalem, Arendt...feared that thoughtlessness – "the headless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of ‘truths’ which have become trivial and empty", as she described it in The Human Condition – had become "among the outstanding characteristics of our time". For the most part, there is nothing in peoples minds except meaningless knowledge, mountains or mole-hills of factoids and words which we use but can't define.
Thought (vernunft or reason) is concerned with meaning, in other words it consists in a higher-order desire for understanding the deeper meaning behind sense perception on Maria Popova's reading, it is concerned with sophia, while, in this view, verstand, by which she means something like intellect or honed common-sense, is concerned with knowledge and truth - with removing cognitive biases and knowing what is perceived. As Arendt put it: 'The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning'.
But the category of intersubjectivity tends to be (in Liberal and in other versions of modernity) subordinated to the generalized category of labour within an overall paradigm of production. Man the machine or else you will be fed to it. According to Achille Mbembe capitalism brings all taboos to an end, including prohibitions against turning persons into objects or waste, market mechanisms, he says, 'sort between productive and unproductive lives' and they 'target such presumably unproductive lives as objects of abjection or as killable objects'.
Or else, as Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant put it: '...the surplus population has become an essential component of capitalist society, with many industries built on the maintenance, supervision, surveillance, policing, data extraction, study, measurement, extermination, housing...and care of the surplus. In this way, those discarded as non-valuable life are maintained as a source of extraction and profit for capital'. Though it's worth noting that US Democrats, UK democratic socialists, Nordic social democrats and the like were quick to adopt and to promote eugenics and a few conservatives like G.K. Chesterton were quick to analyze it and to condemn it. For Adler-Bolton, Vierkant and Lauren Berlant alike: designated, 'biocertified' or discarded populations are defined by a 'slow death' which recursively marks them 'out for wearing out'(Berlant) Square pegs are maimed as they are hammered into the round holes of an omnipresent nine to five, into Adolphe Quetelet's l'homme moyen, into what Robert Chapman called the empire of normality.
Much of what we take to be communicative competence is nothing of the sort but is, rather, an astonishing display of incompetence - if it exists at all, our ethical reasoning is often, so to speak, upside down. Achille Mbembe said: 'The history of modernity is not so much about the progress of reason as it is about the history of reason’s unreason' and about the conflation of reason and terror or, as Habermas has it, of the distortion of communication leading to terror. If we respect language then we should be sickened by the way in which, what Habermas calls, systems occupy our ontological homes and ruin them with obnoxious, manipulative and saccharine rhetoric and managerial sanctimony. The liberal handbook instructs us not to care and to make it seem like we care and to view all who demur and everyone it has maimed and everyone we have maimed to be deplorable, resentful or to be zealots. The fusion of aisthēsis, sympathy, care, friendship and support, etc. with state and capitalist bureaucracy tends to make a grotesque petrochemical Frankenstein's monster out of what should be amongst the most valued values. In The Right to Maim Jasbir Puar writes: 'Maiming is a source of value extraction from populations that would otherwise be disposable'. Maiming marks people out as inferior. Maiming and the maimed, and the subsequent or concomitant, stigmatization, organized abandonment and subordination of the maimed, also serve as a warning: mind your p's and q's or this could happen to you to. It's customary to follow up an accusation with the question: how do you plead? But, of course, right, as the world goes, is only in question amongst equals in power.
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