"Language is not reducible to communication. It is a matter of placemaking, an economy of offering care and responding to flows. To speak anew is to risk being stupid, to be diagonal and oriented. To speak is to be reconstituted. To speak is to fall prostrate. To speak is to be immersed in fluids that exceed the transactionality of meaning: it is to anticipate, co-create, and shape the world together. In the beginning was the Word...There are other languages we are trying to learn these days: the language of the future. The language of justice. Of freedom. Of Ursula le Guin's 'Omelas'. I have a strong suspicion that even if we mastered all the words, we wouldn't be close to 'speaking' - at least not in the performatively sociomaterial ways I reframe 'voice'.

Bayo Akomolafe

Becker

'The massive meetings of the Nazi youth or those of Stalin in Red Square and Mao in Peking literally take our breath away and give us a sense of wonder. But the proof that these celebrations have an underside is in Auschwitz and Siberia: these are the places where the goats are torn apart, where the pathetic cowardliness of what it is all about on its underside is revealed.' Ernest Becker

Apartheid is a spatial temporal arrangement of bodies, a racialized arrangement of bodies that enacts an apartheid structure...it's a weaponized separation, it's the pathologization of difference or thinking of difference as transcendent not imminent. Bodies are continually differencing through ecologies. Our porous boundaries are continually trafficking. Modernity doesn't know how to think in scandalous ways like that so it demarcates bodies and in a very roundabout way. Those who have been demarcated, those who have been set aside and differentiated learn to see that the only way they can flourish is to maintain weaponized demarcations.

Bayo Akomolafe

Mahendren

On Causing Harm 1. How do you experience the statements “I failed” vs. “I caused harm” differently in your body? What distinct thoughts, feelings, and/or sensations do you associate with each statement? 2. What are the barriers, internal or external, you experience to acknowledging that you’ve caused harm? 3. Can you think of instances where experiences you/your organization have labelled as “failures” may have also caused harm to others? How did framing it as a failure rather than as harm serve you or your organization in that moment? What did it cost you? 4. If you were in an interview and someone asked you the following question with respect to your work, how would you answer it earnestly? "In what ways has your work/approach caused harm to the people/communities you've engaged, and what steps have you taken to be accountable, repair, and prevent these harms from reoccurring?"

Mathura Mahendren

"In this very real, material, sense, democracy has always required the provisional supply of prosthetic bodies to nourish and fuel the manufacture of the citizen-subject and the maintenance of the citizen. Without this underbelly, this subterranean supply of bodies, it cannot forge its ethos of belonging/othering.  

This choreography of discardability is written into the cells of more proximate experiments at democratic belonging. When Peniel E. Joseph writes that “America’s ‘democratic experiment’ is inextricably tied to the history of slavery” [11], he means to draw our attention to the slave ship, the cotton plantation, the lynching rope that curls around a tree branch, to Jim Crow laws, and to the crawling bottom layer soil of aerating agents, fertilizing activisms, and invisibilized ‘worm’ bodies lurking in the shadows of the public order. I think he means to suggest that citizenship is expensive; it takes worlds,  human, more-than-human, other-than-human, not-quite-human, and inhuman to create citizenship. Each individual citizen is the majestic product/outcome and yet ongoing exertion of the hidden public. The blood of the vanquished.

To think of democracy, belonging, and the demos through a posthumanist reframe of politics, compelled by the dense and stunning materiality of our days, is to touch the ways they are entangled with loss, with the inappropriate, with the forgotten, with the partial, with the non-legible. If the citizen-subject is perched atop a superstructure of privileges, a heaven of some kind, a perceptual order that tracks along typical lines and tendencies of subject formation, beneath this vast edifice are the relations and the burdens of slave, the fugitive, the vagabond, and the bare. The idealized modern citizen-subject with all his accoutrements – rights, privileges, phones, doughnuts, access, clarity - is entangled with lithium mining in the DRC, the blackening of teeth and dental mottling in Khouribga due to the extraction of phosphate dust, the decimation of Sumatran tigers in Indonesia, or the proliferation of forced labour camps to produce consumer products.

The citizen is a vast ‘colonial’ enterprise that needs maintenance, a sensorium of entrainments that requires the uneven participation of idealized subjects and their prosthetic others. The citizen is a metastable, porous, fragile, and heterogenous assemblage of bodies that has gained resilience through the flattening conditions of the Anthropos/Demos. Again, the citizen is not human. The citizen is a desirous heterogeneous assembly of bodies in emergence, a field, a moral intensity, an arrangement of ethical flows, a reductive focus on ‘behaviour’ in the stead of entrainment, a co-production of the legible citizen subject".

bayo akomolafe

"For the citizen-subject to thrive, to belong, it needs others. There is a complementary exclusion of ontologies built into the dynamics of becoming a citizen-subject. To wit, the citizen-subject needs monsters – but mostly to keep them at an ontological distance, to point to them as justification for its moral rise. It needs to keep the realm of minotaurs at bay. The citizen is in this sense a racialized co-production of the monstrous to serve the needs of the surface".

Bayo Akomolafe

"We must come to consider the complementary pressures and tensions within the landscape of the citizen, which is – to remind us – an uneven territoriality that enlists bodies in different ways. For some, this enlistment might mean living in precarious circumstances, while for others the enlistment with the ‘citizen’ as a globalizing liberalist force means being coddled within the privileges of neurotypical selfhood". 

Bayo Akomolafe

AKOMOLAFE

''It is often said that Cleisthenes (c. 570 – c. 508), of the Alcmaeonid family, founded democracy. Herodotus himself, the acclaimed “Father of History”, refers to the Athenian statesman as “the man who introduced the tribes and the democracy.” At a pivotal moment in Athenian history, Cleisthenes guided the aristocratic metropolis through bone-deep democratic reforms that transformed the citizen-body into new assemblies that prefigured modern, democratically elected, representative bodies.  

But origins are neither neat nor convenient. In a world that spills beyond categorical calculability, there are too many risks involved when we seek to draw neat lines that mark stable beginnings and endings. Cleisthenes’s reforms, though significant, are a partial recuperation of small shifts, anxieties, yearnings, behaviours, epics, and gestures that preceded his glorious emergence in the Aegean sun. As Nancy Evans suggests, “Cleisthenes was not the first democratic reformer; he was building upon foundations laid by generations of Greeks before him” [1]. One such notable Greek contributor to the democratic aspirations of the Aegean-proximate metropolis, shrouded in the mists of legend and history, painted by admirers with often flattering brushstrokes to magnify the tales of his civilizing rampage and mythical status, is Theseus. Great Founder and King of Athens. Contemporary of Hercules. Mythical Upholder of Democracy. Killer of Monsters. Killer of the Minotaur.  

The story of Theseus begins with an anxious Aegeus, King of Athens, who – without heir to his throne – consults the Delphic Oracle for an answer to his predicament. The answer that arrives is ambiguous and unclear, and Aegeus, returning home via Troezen, confides in his friend, the King Pittheus, an enterprising mind, who discerns a plot and urges Aegeus to sleep with his daughter, Aethra. That night, after the deed is done, Princess Aethra of Troezen wanders the beach alone and encounters Poseidon, the great god of the oceans, who also takes the beautiful Aethra to himself and sleeps with her. And so, the duplicitous origin of Theseus is forged: son of the divine and the commonplace, the mythical and the historical, the fleshly and the ethereal.  

Aegeus soon learns of the pregnancy and leaves Troezen with instructions to Aethra: that when the child comes of age, he is to return to Athens bearing the sword, shield, and sandals of the King of Athens – proof of his royal heritage. In time, Theseus, young and adventurous, reclaims his destiny, and makes his way to Athens. As is usually the case with the journeys and choices of iconic heroes, Theseus avoids the easy routes and elects to take the tortuous, anfractuous path to Athens, the way through highway robbers, brigands, and murderers. Skilful and quick with his weapons, the headstrong hero-in-the making quickly annihilates these nuisances, and arrives to his father’s embrace, the new heir to the throne of Athens.

While in Athens, Theseus learns of a social contract between his new home and King Minos of Crete, a terrible arrangement requiring the city to offer up seven boys and seven girls every nine years to a monster that lives in the Cretan domain. The sacrifice was instituted as penance for the murder of the Cretan prince, Androgeus, on Athenian soil. Our young hero would have none of that. He begs his father to appoint him one of the fourteen youths to travel to the island. He vows to kill the monster, the fabled Minotaur, half-man, half-bull, discarded offspring of an illicit affair between King Minos’s wife, Pasiphae, and a white bull. The Minotaur, the object of Theseus’s rage, is so terrifying to look at, so offensive to the senses, that Minos has the inventor Daedalus, father to Icarus, contrive an impenetrably deep labyrinthian maze, where the creature is incarcerated.

It is Theseus’s encounter with the Minotaur that becomes the overwhelmingly defining act of his life. With the aid of a love-smitten Cretan princess and sister to the Minotaur, upon reaching the island, Theseus enters the labyrinth with a ball of string, with which he traces his way through, and manages to kill the Minotaur, re-emerging an intergenerational hero whose name and labours would become the motif by which most other heroic exploits gain relief. After the tragic death of Aegeus, Theseus becomes the last mythical king of Athens, the standard of heroism, and most importantly, the alchemist of Athenian citizenry. Cleisthenes himself deploys the Theseusian myth as the prime motivation for his reforms, embellishing his gestures with stories of the young hero’s labours and memorializing him in public buildings.  

It is a very difficult thing to think of Theseus apart from the emergence of the Athenian demos. John N. Davie writes: “Of all Greek heroes, Theseus . . . has the greatest claim to enshrine all the best qualities of the Athenian citizen, not least in his championship of the demos, celebrated by poets and painters alike of the classical period” [2]. The myth of Theseus is the archetype of the emergence of democracy. Without the exploits of Theseus, the rampaging brutality of his heroic crossing, the swiftness of his sword, the demos couldn’t emerge.  

However, these days, heroes and humans in general can no longer be conceived in the pristine ways we have been used to. The halo is broken. In times when human exploits are being bracketed by the more than-human, in times when the backgrounded elements of the stories we tell are now forcing their way to the forefront, it would seem consistent with these posthumanist, human-decentering reframes to account for the force majeure behind the rise of citizenry by stressing the contributions of Theseus’s victims. That is, the monolith of citizenry is indebted not just to the strength of Theseus’s swing but to the death and blood of the monsters left in the wake of his colonizing passage. If ‘things’ must be accounted for not only by the presences they are constituted of but by the absences, the citizen is not just the isolated human recipient of specific rights and privileges, but the vast ecology of repressions and deaths and flattening logics, the roiling alchemy of myths and archetypes, the fading away of the monstrous to make room for the gentrified image of independent rationality, the disappearing and pathologization of the passions.

The Minotaur’s death and the suppression of the monstrous must be considered part of the assemblage that has forged the phenomenon of democratic citizenry. The myth of the Cretan monster and the blood seeking hero are an archetype for the kinds of historical clearings, civilizing gestures, exploitive tactics, genocidal interventions, colonizing epistemologies, extractivist moralities, and invisibilizing strategies that are imbricated with the appearing of the citizen-subject. A Minosian-Theseusian deal propagates through the fabric of these troubling encounters: a bull-man’s head for the prosperity of the city-state; a Native American tribe’s death for the founding of a Canadian school; eleven million Africans as prosthetic sacrifices for the founding of the industrial world; the explosion of mountains and desacralization of landscapes for the predictability and convenience of parking lots.  

Today, democratic citizenry thrives as the manufacturing of certain kinds of subjectivities, which are in turn contingent upon the suppression of the monstrous. The citizen-subject (unlike the fugitive, carried away by the passions) is the rational outworking of public codes of conduct, the morality of principled settlement. The citizen-subject is a proper self, in control of his emotions, possessing language, the recipient of neurotypical training, a creature of the surface, possessing an interiority of thoughts that mark his essential divinity, and yet renders him available for the surveillance and scrutiny of the public. The citizen-subject is the consumptive core of neoliberal capitalism, the obedient cog in the wheel, the prize for Theseus’s princely labours. The citizen-subject is the individual. The sanity and perpetuity of this individual depends on the ongoing labours of Theseus: if the citizen-subject is to survive, the world and its wilds will need to keep being flattened, keep being arranged into bits of legibility, and brought again and again into the grammar of the public order. In other words, the citizen as a posthumanist politics and ecological project already involving colonial processes beyond human sociality produces the citizen subject, the magisterial human-above-matter. And we must give thanks to Theseus for this state of affairs.

The thesis of this essay is thus strange and contentious, because it is my firm but creaturely belief that the Greek hero Theseus – in his genocidal wiping away of the monstrous to make room for the demos – missed a spot. Or several. A lesser-known story – so unknown in fact that I am likely just making it all up – suggests that the Minotaur wasn’t alone in the labyrinth of Daedalus. Somewhere in the deep blackness of that commodious prison, cut away from the stories of vanquish and valour, were the children of the Minotaur. Little bull-boys and bull-girls. Hidden in the shadows. Missed by Theseus’s eager sword. Crawling out after the text of the story had faded with the materials upon which they were printed. Mourning their father’s carcass with hideous, soul-curdling, braying sounds that rippled through the walls of the labyrinth but didn’t quite make it past the outer boundaries of Daedalus’s genius".  

"Ultimately, a posthumanist reading of democracy resituates it within a vast stream of co-becomings, instead of thinking of it as a uniquely human product. Democracy is not just what happens in legislative chambers and the courts of law, it is immanently connected with the phantom biological modulations of the dinoflagellate pfiesteria piscicida; it relates to the winds that whip up dust from the Bodélé Depression and carry them in dancing processions of diatoms across the Atlantic Ocean; it relates to the geodesic powers that tether cartography to the curvature of the planet. Seeing democracy as what the planet is doing – and what it might now be undoing – forces open new considerations about belonging, othering,  power, and agency in a vitalist, animist world.  

Instead of the language of decline (as in, the reported decline of democracy), which seems to be laden with humanist anxieties associated with technobureaucratic solutions and close-ended logics of repeatability, it is possible to offer a reframe that notices democracy is maturing, yielding to the elements, becoming accountable beyond its own rationalities, and becoming conjugated by syncopating forces. ‘Decline’ gives way to ‘declension’, ushering us to the strange hospitality of post-democratic futures.

By ‘post-democratic’, I do not mean ‘after democracy’, since what is meant by the democratic is only partially disclosed, not fully known, and still yet to come. The ‘post’ in ‘post-democratic’ exists side by side as an inherent tension in the liberalist project. One response to that has been the rush to come up with new systems, to name a new civilizational epoch, to gather academics into a conference room and induce them to craft alternatives to democracy, if only for the fun of it. I would suggest that one theoretically compelling task – given our posthumanist presumptions about the processual nature of reality – is not to articulate the next political epoch...such a task – to know what comes next – is impossible. The future is non-legible, emergent,  and co-produced by a vast array of heterogenous actors – not by resolute, discrete human agents.  

One thing to do then might be to stay in the sensorial vortices of post-democratic tensions, where experience is afoot with other gestures. This post-democratic tension is not an already decided space, but embodied inquiry woven with the sensorial apostasy within cracks, at the peripheral edges of neurotypical perception where reality mutinies, or at the place of autistic perception where the world is still coming together.

The work of tending to cracks, of weaving inquiry at the prolific tips of syncopating flows, of inhabiting the generative incapacitation of losing our way from the nuclear cornucopia of the neurotypical, of  becoming disabled by implication, of seeking out new alliances and hybridities, and opening new grammars of embodiment beyond the carcerality of liberalism and whiteness, is what I might call  “making sanctuary.”

Making sanctuary, an inflection of the medieval practice of “claiming sanctuary” – in which fugitives from the law were granted temporary asylum within the church – is not about humans being safe. The recipients of ‘making sanctuary’ are not minorities or persons in precarious circumstances. The recipients are the tensions, the disabling effects, the blasts of syncopation that we often urge out of our spheres in a bid to return to ‘normal’.  

Making sanctuary is dwelling in post-democratic cracks, post-citizen ecotones, post-humanist tensions – while becoming accountable to new relationalities, new lines of flight, fractal choreographies, and new intensities that refuse to reify the dominant perceptual order, and as such signal potent transformations from regular/familiar subjectivities.

As an artistic vocation – far from being a single methodology – making sanctuary invites us to be hospitable to intensities that constitute a decentering of citizenship and a loss of white stability. The hidden codicil of such a decolonizing gesture is that by coming to those zones of encounter, to those syncopating cracks, we too might be spirited away. We might feel different, sense different, and be enlisted in new entrainments of co-becoming.  

In short, making sanctuary brings us by and by to the children of the Minotaur at our gates, echoes of lingering pasts. What happens when we, children of Theseus, meet the other, the offspring of the  Minotaur?" 

BAYO AKOMOLAFE

"I often speak about falling apart, about disability, about disintegration, about losing our way, about being composted, and about failure. No sooner would I finish writing these words than many immediately seek to resignify these unruly sentiments in positive light. You know, to put an optimistic spin on it. As if the caterpillar's melting into an imaginal goop always carries the promise that it will emerge on the other side of its decomposition, safe and sound and flutteringly butterfly-like. As if darkness were a vassal to light, only there to serve its constant suzerainty. As if the gist of failure is that it ends with popular ideations of success. As if a throughline shoots its imperial way through the flow and tide and tussle and tumble and mumbling messiness of things, a beam-me-up-scotty deus ex machina that always arrives at the full stop of the gilded script. As if the monster - that prop in the vaunted saga of the hero's journey - doesn't have it's own stories to tell.

Disintegration is not 'positive'; "love and light" do not necessarily attend to the occult practices of seeds buried in the earth or the subaltern parties zombie bacteria throw in the heat of the dark. And disability is not a lounge in the terminus of the neurotypical.

In an open-ended world, the anthropocentrism of positivity obscures the pressingly urgent ways things fall apart - not to get back up again, but to be apart. The undulating waves of becoming do not carry any guarantees with them. And "healing" is not the final end of all things or rights we are entitled to. Much in the same way the neologism of "failing forward" has come to concretize corporate commitments to certitude in times of chaos, the expectation that we are entitled to confident futures and convenient closures diminishes our capacities to welcome the strange. The world is too rich, too promiscuous, too generative to host hope and stability alone. Indeed, it would seem that the universe is more prolific at generating loss than it is at keeping things together. In the selfsame moment it manufactures the membrane, it summons the conditions of its decay.

Perhaps, in these posthumanist times, we'd have to meander a little, stray a little more, stutter even more, and cultivate the capacities to relinquish the tyranny of Happily-Ever-After, if only to listen to elsewheres between the lines".

AKÓMOLÁFÉ 

Baldwin

"The machinery of this country operates day in and day out, hour by hour, until this hour, to keep the nigger in his place."

James Baldwin

 These are also times when many are gradually coming to the realization that reason may well have reached its limits. Or, in any case, it is a time when reason is on trial – we are, in other words, in a sort of Dark Enlightenment. Reason is a faculty we used to recognize in humans and in humans alone. In the Western tradition we have all, willingly or not, become the inheritors of reason, always seen as the highest of all human faculties, the one that opened the doors to knowledge, wisdom, virtue and, most importantly, freedom. Although unequally redistributed among them, it was the prerogative of humans alone. It distinguished the latter from other living species. Thanks to their superior capacity to exercise this faculty, humans could claim to be exceptional. Today, reason is on trial in two ways. First, reason is increasingly replaced and subsumed by instrumental rationality, when it is not simply reduced to procedural or algorithmic processing of information. In other words, the logic of reason is morphing from within machines and computers and algorithms. The human brain is no longer the privileged location of reason. The human brain is being “downloaded” into nano-machines. An inordinate amount of power is gradually being ceded to abstractions of all kinds. Old modes of reasoning are being challenged by new ones that originate through and within technology in general and digital technologies in particular, as well as through the top-down models of artificial intelligence. As a result, techne is becoming the quintessential language of reason. Furthermore, instrumental reason, or reason in the guise of techne is increasingly weaponized. Time itself is becoming enveloped in the doing of machines. Machines themselves do not simply execute instructions or programs. They start generating complex behaviour. The computational reproduction of reason has made it such that reason is no longer, or is a bit more than, just the domain of human species. We now share it with various other agents. Reality itself is increasingly construed via statistics, metadata, modelling, mathematics. Second, many are turning their back to reason in favour of other faculties and other modes of expression and cognition. They are calling for a rehabilitation of affect and emotions for instance. In many of the ongoing political struggles of our times, passion is clearly trumping reason. Confronted with complex issues, feeling and acting with one’s guts, viscerally rather than reasoning, is fast becoming the new norm.

Mbembe

Stanford

 

1.1 The power of judgment and the other faculties of cognition

According to Kant, a “judgment” (Urteil) is a specific kind of “cognition” (Erkenntnis)—which he generically defines as any conscious mental representation of an object (A320/B376)—that is the characteristic output of the “power of judgment” (Urteilskraft). The power of judgment, in turn, is a cognitive “capacity” (Fähigkeit) but also specifically a spontaneous and innate cognitive capacity, and in virtue of these it is the “faculty of judging” (Vermögen zu urteilen) (A69/B94), which is also the same as the “faculty of thinking” (Vermögen zu denken) (A81/B106).

For Kant the mind is essentially active and vital—“the mind (Gemüt) for itself is entirely life (the principle of life itself)” (5: 278)—and a cognitive capacity in turn is a determinate conscious propensity of the mind to generate objective representations of certain kinds under certain conditions. What do spontaneity and innateness add to a mere capacity for cognition, so that it becomes a “faculty of cognition” (Erkenntnisvermögen)? A cognitive faculty is spontaneous in that whenever it is externally stimulated by raw unstructured sensory data as inputs, it then automatically organizes or “synthesizes” those data in an unprecedented way relative to those inputs, thereby yielding novel structured cognitions as outputs (B1–2, A50/B74, B132, B152). So cognitive spontaneity is a structural creativity of the mind with respect to its representations. It is a controverted question of recent Kant-interpretation whether cognitive spontaneity derives exclusively from the conceptual or discursive capacity of the rational human mind (B152) (Longuenesse 1998, chs. 1–3, 5, 8), or can also derive independently from the intuitional, non-conceptual, or sensible capacity of the rational human mind, shared with minded non-rational human or non-human animals (B151) (Hanna 2006b, ch. 1, McLear 2011). Correspondingly, it is also a controverted question whether according to Kant there is only one basic kind of synthesis, i.e., conceptual/discursive synthesis, or two basic kinds, i.e., conceptual/discursive synthesis and intuitional/non-conceptual/sensible synthesis. These controverted questions, in turn, are closely connected with the recent vigorous debate about Kant’s conceptualism vs. Kant’s non-conceptualism in relation to his theory of judgment, and the implications of this for interpreting and critically evaluating Kant’s transcendental idealism and the Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding, a.k.a. “the Categories” (see the supplementary document The Togetherness Principle, Kant’s Conceptualism, and Kant’s Non-Conceptualism and Sections 4.1 to 4.2 below).

Kant also uses the term ‘spontaneity’ in a somewhat different sense in a metaphysical context, to refer to a mental cause that can sufficiently determine an effect in time while also lacking any temporally prior sufficient cause of itself (A445/B473). Call this practical spontaneity. What is shared between the two senses of spontaneity, practical and cognitive, is the unprecedented, creative character of the mind’s operations. But in the cognitive sense of spontaneity, what is crucial is that the sensory data manifest “poverty of the stimulus” (Cook & Newson 1996, 81–85)—significant underdetermination of the outputs of an embodied cognitive capacity by the relevant inputs to that capacity, plus previous experiences or habituation—although the faculty’s spontaneity must also always be minimally conditioned by external sensory triggering (B1–2). Correspondingly, a Kantian cognitive faculty is innate in the threefold sense that (i) it is intrinsic to the mind, hence a necessary part of the nature of the rational animal possessing that faculty, (ii) it contains internal structures that are necessarily or strictly underdetermined by any and all sensory impressions and/or empirical facts—which is the same as their being a priori (B2), and (iii) it automatically systematically synthesizes those sensory inputs according to special normative rules that directly reflect the internal structures of the faculty, thereby generating its correlatively-structured outputs. So Kantian innateness is essentially a procedure-based innateness, consisting in an a priori active readiness of the mind for implementing normative rules of synthesis, as opposed to the content-based innateness of Cartesian and Leibnizian innate ideas, according to which an infinitely large supply of complete (e.g., mathematical) beliefs, propositions, or concepts themselves are either occurrently or dispositionally intrinsic to the mind. But as Locke pointed out, this implausibly overloads the human mind’s limited storage capacities.

In contrast to both Rationalists and Empiricists, who hold that the human mind has only one basic cognitive faculty—reason or sense perception, respectively—Kant is a cognitive-faculty dualist who holds that the human mind has two basic cognitive faculties: (i) the “understanding” (Verstand), the faculty of concepts, thought, and discursivity, and (ii) the “sensibility” (Sinnlichkeit), the faculty of intuitions/non-conceptual cognitions, sense perception, and mental imagery (A51/B75). The essential difference between the faculties of understanding and sensibility, and correspondingly the essential difference between concepts and intuitions (A50–52/B74–76), as distinct kinds of cognition, is a fundamental commitment of Kant’s theory of cognition generally and of his theory of judgment more specifically. Concepts are at once (a) general representations having the logical form of universality (9: 91), (b) discursive representations expressing pure logical forms and falling under pure logical laws (A68–70/B92–94, A239/B298), (c) complex intensions ranging over “comprehensions” (Umfangen) that contain all actual and possible objects falling under those intensions, as well as other narrower comprehensions (9: 95–96), (d) mediate or indirect (i.e., attributive or descriptive) representations of individual objects (A320/B376–377), (e) rules for classifying and organizing perceptions of objects (A106), and (f) “reflected” representations expressing the higher-order unity of rational self-consciousness, a.k.a. “apperception” (B133 and 133n.). Intuitions by contrast are conscious object-directed representations that are (1) singular (A320/B377) (9: 91), (2) sense-related (A19/B33, A51/B75), (3) object-dependent (B72) (4: 281), (4) immediate, or directly referential (A90–91/B122–123, B132, B145), and, above all, (5) non-conceptual (A284/B340) (9: 99) (Hanna 2001, ch. 4).

Understanding and sensibility are both subserved by the faculty of “imagination” (Einbildungskraft), which when taken generically is the source or engine of all sorts of synthesis, but which when taken as a “dedicated” or task-sensitive cognitive faculty, construed as either “productive” or “reproductive,” more specifically generates (α) the spatial and temporal forms of intuition, (β) novel mental imagery in conscious sensory states, (γ) reproductive imagery or memories, and (δ) “schemata,” which are supplementary rules for interpreting general conceptual rules in terms of more specific figural (spatiotemporal) forms and sensory images (A78/B103, B151, A100–102, A137–142/B176–181) (7: 167). At least in principle, then, the imagination mediates between the understanding and the sensibility by virtue of being an autonomous third basic cognitive capacity containing elements of each of the basic dual capacities (see,e.g., A115–119 and A139–142/B178–181)—which would, in effect, make Kant a cognitive-capacity trinitarian. But sometimes, contrariwise and somewhat incoherently, Kant seems instead to say that the imagination at once (i) belongs to sensibility and yet also (ii) is caused by the action of the understanding on sensibility. This deep unclarity about the nature of the imagination, in addition to being a flashpoint for important longstanding disagreements in Kant-scholarship on his theory of judgment (see, e.g., Heidegger 1990, Waxman 1991, Longuenesse 1998), also has some serious implications for Kant’s theory of judgment itself (again, see the supplementary document The Togetherness Principle, Kant’s Conceptualism, and Kant’s Non-Conceptualism and Sections 4.1 to 4.2 below).

Just as understanding and sensibility are subserved by the bottom-up cognitive processing of the imagination, so in turn they are also superserved by the top-down cognitive processing of the faculty of “reason” (Vernunft), which produces logical inferences, carries out pragmatic or moral choices and decisions, a.k.a. “practical judgments”), imposes coherence and consistency on all sorts of cognitions, and above all recognizes and implements strongly modal and categorically normative concepts such as necessary truth and unconditional obligation, in the form of lawlike “principles” (Principien, Grundsätze) (A299–304/B355–361, A800–804/B828–832).

Finally, the objective unity of any judgment whatsoever is guaranteed by the faculty of apperception or rational self-consciousness, which plays the “executive” role in the corporate organization of the mind by introducing a single higher-order unity into all of its lower-order representations, via judgment, and whose characteristic output is the cogito-like self-directed judgment-forming representation “I think” (Ich denke): as in “I think about X” (where X is some concept, say the concept of being a philosopher) or “I think that P” (where that-P is some proposition, say the proposition that Kant is a philosopher) (B131–132). The I think according to Kant is “the vehicle of all concepts and judgments whatever” (A341/B399), because it is both a necessary condition of the objective unity of every judgment and also automatically implements one or another of a set of primitive pure a priori logical forms or functions of unity in judgments or thoughts—“the pure concepts of the understanding” or “categories” (A66–83/B91–116)—in the several semantic constituents of that judgment.

The power of judgment, while a non-basic faculty, is nevertheless the central cognitive faculty of the human mind. This is because judging brings together all the otherwise uncoordinated sub-acts and sub-contents of intuition, conceptualization, imagination, and reason, via apperception or rational self-consciousness, for the purpose of generating a single cognitive product, the judgment, under the overarching pure concepts of the understanding or categories, thereby fully integrating the several distinct cognitive faculties and their several distinct sorts of representational information, and thereby also constituting a single rational human animal. For Kant then, rational humans are judging animals.

SEoP

Estes

"Indigenous people are post-apocalyptic. In some cases, we have undergone several apocalypses. For my community alone, it was the destruction of the buffalo herds, the destruction of our animal relatives on the land, the destruction of our animal nations in the nineteenth century, of our river homelands in the twentieth century. I don’t want to universalize that experience; it was very unique to us as nations. But if there is something you can learn from Indigenous people, it’s what it’s like to live in a post-apocalyptic society.

One of the positive meanings of the title of the book, Our History Is the Future, is that in times of great turmoil and destruction, people didn’t just stop being humans. They didn’t just give up. And while we think of resistance in many ways as a kind of act of defiance that’s spectacular and militant, it also happens in everyday realities, in how we keep alive these stories. People still had children in times of destruction. People still raised families. They did their best to keep alive the nation through genocide.

The passage you read is a critique of a trend in Indigenous studies and Indigenous organizing circles to focus on trauma and healing at the individual level. It’s not that people shouldn’t focus on trauma and healing, but that it’s been mobilized in this neoliberal moment to say that, once the individual heals, they’ll be able to go out and be a productive person in society. That becomes the horizon of struggle: healing at the site of the individual. The horizon of struggle is no longer liberation. I think it’s telling in this particular moment that healing and trauma discourse becomes almost an obstacle we have to overcome. It’s a tool of governance in many ways.

Just look at what’s happening in Canada with the reconciliation process. 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.

That’s reflected in the climate justice movement. We see the future in very bleak and pessimistic terms—that there is no future. That’s the perfect articulation of capitalism. Fredric Jameson, wrote that “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” That’s very much our moment right now.

The climate justice movement is very diverse, and it’s all over the place. If there’s one thing I can offer, it’s to say: we know what it’s like to undergo apocalypse. Our worlds have been destroyed in many ways, and we’re trying to rebuild them, reclaim them, and reestablish correct relations. The severity of the situation shouldn’t undermine the willingness to act. Not to act, to succumb to a kind of paralysis, of inaction, is itself an action. Not doing anything is doing something. Howard Zinn said it best: you can’t be neutral on a moving train.

The second question that you have was about the left. To be honest, the left has failed to take seriously settler colonialism, and not just Indigenous decolonization but decolonization in general as a platform. I’ve had a lot of discussions with leftists, socialists, progressive trade unions. People are genuinely interested; they’re not hostile to it automatically. I think it’s just that how we define class in this country, by traditional or historical elements of the left, essentially erases Indigenous people because it prioritizes the needs of settler society over Indigenous nationhood. They’re often framed as competing systems. We’ve seen a lot of socialists and leftists asking about Indigenous reparations, which is funny because there’s never been an overarching demand by Indigenous people for reparations. [The demand is for] land return. Anishinaabe scholar and intellectual Leanne Simpson said it best (I’m going to paraphrase her): settler society always asks us for solutions to these problems, but they don’t like our answers, because they’re really hard. It gets to the root of this society. It would be like going back to the nineteenth century and advocating for class struggle without talking about the abolition of slavery. It would be absurd!"

Nick Estes

"But there is another, early 21st -century example, which consists in waging new forms of wars, which can be called wars on speed and mobility. Wars on mobility are wars whose aim is to turn into dust the means of existence and survival of vulnerable people taken as enemies. These kinds of wars of attrition, methodically calculated and programmed, and implemented with new methods, are wars against the very ideas of mobility, circulation, and speed, whilst the age we live in is precisely one of velocity, acceleration, and increasing abstraction and algorithms. Moreover, the targets of this kind of warfare are not by any means singular bodies, but rather great swathes of humanity judged worthless and superfluous. All of the above belongs to the current practice of remote borderization, carried out from afar, in the name of freedom and security. This battle, waged against certain undesirables and reducing them to mounds of human flesh, is rolled out on a global scale. It is on the verge of defining the times in which we live. Wars on mobility are peculiar wars on bodies. They have to do with two broad questions that confront us today and will haunt us for most of this century: on the one hand the question of life futures, that is, of the self-organization of being and matter; on the other hand, that of the future of reason".

Mbembe

Parenti

 “The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.”

Michael Parenti

"But I think that (and I mean this without irony) is the literal stated goal of the capital-holding class: to keep their workforce just barely productive enough to function for twenty-to-forty years, but weakened and preoccupied enough to be in too precarious a position to ever make trouble…although this is stated in more “benevolent” terms, from the 19th century claim that educating the congenitally incapable (i.e. the workforce) and giving us free time could cause insanity, to the present ideas that book-larnin’ and free time distracts women from motherhood, puts ideas in Black people’s heads, turns children trans, turns college kids communist, and just generally tricks people, and the perpetual idea that healthcare is wasted on people so dissolute and prone to vice as we are; the idea always is that we naturally yearn to nobly labor for minimum wage and otherwise numb ourselves with beer and the tee-vee and then die young but happy in our simplicity … but then health and education and free time lead us simpletons to get into trouble instead — in way over our heads, trying to take on the tasks (and wealth) our tireless (and wealthy) rulers so selflessly take on. So by keeping us always slightly ill and preoccupied and saddled with debt and overworked and at one another’s throats and mentally checked-out, our wealthy benefactors are doing us a favor, see? I mean, that’s how it’s framed in those circles. But the end result is the same: we’re kept rested and fed and schooled just enough to keep us working, but ideally never so peppy that we might make trouble".

Solomon

"Recent research linking depression to other illnesses is beginning to carry weight with lawmakers and even with HMOs. If untreated depression does makes you more prone to infection, cancer, and heart disease, then it’s an expensive illness to ignore...John Wilson, a onetime candidate for mayor of Washington, D.C., who committed suicide, once said, “I believe that more people are dying of depression than are dying of AIDS, heart trouble, high blood pressure, anything else, simply because I believe depression brings on all these diseases.”

"I went to Capitol Hill to share the experiences related in the last chapter. I was there in a strange capacity, an accidental activist as well as a journalist. I wanted to know what was being done, but I also wanted to persuade the American government to press forward with reforms that would serve the interests of the nation and of the people by whose stories I had been so deeply moved. I wanted to share my insider’s knowledge. Senator Reid had a real grasp of the situation: “A few years ago, I dressed myself up in disguise, like I was homeless, baseball hat and old bum clothes, and I spent an afternoon and a night in a homeless shelter in Las Vegas and then the next day did the same in Reno. You can write all the articles you want about Prozac and about all the modern miracle drugs that stop depression. That doesn’t help this group of people.” Reid himself grew up in poverty and his father killed himself. “I have learned that had my dad had someone to talk to, and some medication, he probably wouldn’t have killed himself. But we’re not legislating for that at present.”

"When I met with Senator Domenici, joint sponsor of the Mental Health Parity Act, I laid out for him the anecdotal and statistical information I had collated, and then I proposed fully documenting the tendencies that seemed so obviously implied by these stories. “Suppose,” I said, “that we could put together incontrovertible data, and that the questions of bias, inadequate information, and partisanship could all be fully resolved. Suppose we could say that sound mental health treatment for the severely depressed poor population served the advantage of the U.S. economy, of the bureau of Veterans Affairs, of the social good—of the taxpayers who now pay cripplingly high prices for the consequences of untreated depression, and of the recipients of that investment, who live at the brink of despair. What, then, would be the path to reform?” “If you’re asking whether we can expect much change simply because that change would serve everyone’s advantage in both economic and human terms,” said Domenici, “I regret to tell you that the answer is no.”

"Most of the people who battle for the mentally ill in Congress have stories of their own that have brought them to this arena. Senator Reid’s father killed himself; Senator Domenici has a schizophrenic daughter who is very ill; Senator Wellstone has a schizophrenic brother; Representative Rivers has a severe bipolar disorder; Representative Roukema has been married now for almost fifty years to a psychiatrist...“It shouldn’t be this way,” Wellstone said. “I wish I’d gained my understanding of this subject solely through research and ethical inquiry. But for many people, the problems of mental illness are still utterly abstract, and their urgency becomes apparent only through intense involuntary immersion in them. We need an education initiative to pave the way for a legislative one.”

"We have now overhauled welfare with the cheery thought that if we don’t support the poor, they’ll work harder...and the terrible, wasteful, lonely suffering goes on and on and on".

"Part of the difficulty in getting better services to these people is the blockade of disbelief. I wrote an early version of this chapter as a feature for a wide-circulation newsmagazine, and they told me that I had to rewrite it for two reasons. First, the lives I described were implausibly horrendous. “It becomes comical,” one editor said to me. “I mean, no one can have all this stuff happening to them, and if they do, it’s no surprise they’re depressed.” The other problem was that the recovery was too quick and too dramatic".

"Politics plays as big a role as science in current descriptions of depression. Who researches depression; what is done about it; who is treated; who is not; who is blamed; who is coddled; what is paid for; what is ignored: all these questions are determined in the sancta of power".

Andrew Solomon

"I understand that you have an economic system in America known as Capitalism. Through this economic system you have been able to do wonders. You have become the richest nation in the world, and you have built up the greatest system of production that history has ever known. All of this is marvelous. But Americans, there is the danger that you will misuse your Capitalism. I still contend that money can be the root of all evil.4 It can cause one to live a life of gross materialism. I am afraid that many among you are more concerned about making a living than making a life. You are prone to judge the success of your profession by the index of your salary and the size of the wheel base on your automobile, rather than the quality of your service to humanity.

The misuse of Capitalism can also lead to tragic exploitation. This has so often happened in your nation. They tell me that one tenth of one percent of the population controls more than forty percent of the wealth. Oh America, how often have you taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. If you are to be a truly Christian nation you must solve this problem. You cannot solve the problem by turning to communism, for communism is based on an ethical relativism and a metaphysical materialism that no Christian can accept. You can work within the framework of democracy to bring about a better distribution of wealth. You can use your powerful economic resources to wipe poverty from the face of the earth. God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty".

Martin Luther King

Ostrom

hps://web.pdx.edu/~nwallace/EHP/OstromPolyGov.pdftt

Campbell

Shortly after the discovery of oil in Norway, a strong consensus emerged among the political parties and across Norwegian society about how to manage oil wealth. This consensus was embodied in its “Ten Oil Commandments.” Based on the view that multinational oil companies needed to be controlled, the Norwegian state took on the central role as both regulator and producer. It brought in active industrial policies to create upstream and downstream industries related to petroleum. There was also consensus that its petroleum wealth should be appropriated by the state and distributed equitably within Norwegian society. In Norway, the state has always been in the driver’s seat in determining petroleum development, owning 80% of oil and gas production and controlling the transportation infrastructure. In Canada, private interests—foreign and domestic—have dominated Alberta’s petroleum sector. For the most part, Alberta governments favoured a laissez faire approach, with subsidies and tax/royalty breaks to encourage rapid petroleum exploitation, and an open-door policy to the oil multinationals. For a brief period, the government of Peter Lougheed adopted a more active approach: creation of a mixed petroleum enterprise with government and private sector equity participation, policies to develop upstream and downstream industries, and the creation of the Alberta Heritage Savings Fund to save a portion of its petro-revenues. These policies, however, were abandoned by subsequent Alberta governments. The federal government, in the wake of the 1970s oil price shocks, adopted a similar approach to that of the Norwegian government. It created Petro-Canada and the National Energy Program (NEP) to increase Canadian ownership and the development of petroleum-related industries, and to appropriate a greater share of the petroleum wealth. The Alberta government, however, backed by the oil companies, strongly opposed this federal intervention into what it saw as its exclusive jurisdiction. There was constant tension about how best to develop the resource, about the relationship between the state and the oil multinationals, and about the sharing of petroleum revenues between the two levels of government and the companies. The Mulroney Conservative government scrapped the National Energy Program in the mid-1980s, and subsequent federal governments, apart from providing billion of dollars in tax breaks, have played a passive role in shaping the petroleum sector ever since. To this day, they have refused to articulate a national energy policy. The Norwegian state has maintained policy levers essential to managing its petroleum and other natural resources while Canada surrendered such key resource management levers under NAFTA.

Norway is not a full member of the EU, but has associate status as a member of the European Economic Association. Norway’s entry into the EU was defeated in two national referendums—in 1972 and 1994. A major reason for Norway staying out of the EU was that its national regime for managing its offshore resources—notably petroleum and fish, is inconsistent with EU rules on competition. 14 Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Canada, as a member of NAFTA, has accepted crucial limitations on its ability to manage its petroleum resources in a deregulated continental market. Under NAFTA, it also gave up policy tools to encourage upstream and downstream development of petroleum-related activities. Norway is a rare exception, having largely escaped the resource curse that has afflicted so many petro-states. Norway stands on top of the latest United Nations Human Development index, which brings together economic indicators, level of education, and life expectancy. Canada, once ranked number one, now ranks number 6.4 When adjusted for inequality, however, Norway remains number one, but Canada slips further to 12th position. The UK Economist’s Intelligence Unit ranked Norway number one in 2011 on its democracy index, based on a number of criteria: election freedom and fairness, security of voters, influence of foreign powers on government, capability of civil servants to implement policies. Canada was ranked number 8. Norway ranked 3rd on Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index, which ranks countries based on a range of policy areas, from water and air pollution, to biodiversity and climate change. Canada was ranked 37th.

There is nothing inherently good or bad in having access to petroleum, or any other resource. It is what nations do with it that matters. The challenge for petro-states is to overcome, mitigate, or convert their wealth’s potentially distorting social, political, economic, and environmental effects. Their success in this regard will determine whether and to what extent oil is more a blessing than a curse.

Key to Norway’s success in managing oil wealth were a number of pre-existing conditions: a stable and deeply-rooted democracy with well-developed political institutions, a technically competent and honest bureaucracy, a deeply egalitarian culture, and a highly engaged citizenry. Prior to the discovery of oil, Norway had an advanced and diversified economy based mainly on agriculture, forestry, fishing, shipping, and manufacturing. Unemployment was low. One of the most equitable societies in the world, it had a generous welfare system supported by a large and diversified tax base. Norwegians have traditionally had high levels of trust in government, combined with an underlying distrust of foreign corporations. Norway has had a long political tradition of dealing with large foreign companies and a legal framework in place dating back to its experience in earlier times with hydropower. Ownership of Norway’s petroleum resources resides with the Norwegian state to manage on behalf of its citizens. Following the discovery of the giant Ekofisk field in 1969, there was extensive public debate to determine how best to manage its newfound oil wealth. Underlying the debate was a concern with avoiding the negative effects of oil development. Norway had a highly effective system of consensus The Petro-Path Not Taken 17 building in which labour, business, farmers, fishers, and environmentalists engaged with the government and each other on oil development priorities. Coming out of this debate, the parliamentary industry committee produced a seminal report in 1971, broadly supported by the public, which laid down the guiding principles for managing its petroleum resources. Adopted unanimously by the Norwegian parliament, they became known as the Ten Oil Commandments, whose overriding purpose was to ensure that oil would be developed for the benefit of the entire Norwegian society. A 1974 Ministry of Finance white paper concluded that control over the pace of oil development was essential to ensure that impacts didn’t outstrip Norway’s adjustment capacity. And getting control required the development of Norwegian technological expertise to ensure that elected politicians had an independent information source on which to base management of the industry. The white paper specified that the state would seek to secure the greatest possible share of the oil rent for the state, which would then be distributed in an egalitarian way across Norwegian society and for future generations. It also stated that control of the oil industry was as important as, and inseparable from, maximizing its share of the oil rent. The newly created The Ten Oil Commandments 1. There should be national governance and control of all petroleum operations. 2. Norway should become self-sufficient in oil. 3. New industrial sectors should be developed based on petroleum. 4. Petroleum development must take existing industries and environmental protection into consideration. 5. Usable gas should not be burnt off. 6. Petroleum from the offshore should as a general rule be landed in Norway. 7. The state should be involved at all levels in the coordination of Norwegian interests, including an integrated oil industry. 8. A state oil company should be established. 9. Production activities in the North should take account of its special conditions. 10. Close attention should be paid to the foreign policy implications of oil discoveries. 18 Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives state oil company, Statoil, would become not only an operator, but also involved in all stages of oil production, from upstream exploration, to refining, to petrochemicals, and to retail. A key component of Norway’s success in managing its petroleum has been the clear separation of powers between parliament (legislative), the Ministry of Petroleum and its Petroleum Directorate (regulatory), and Statoil (operational). The Ministry of Petroleum has overall responsibility for managing petroleum resources in accordance with the mandate established by the Parliament.8 A highly skilled and honest state bureaucracy was able to bargain effectively with the oil industry.9 In the early days, the goal was to get the multinational oil companies to commit themselves to as much exploration as possible. Conditions were made very favourable for the oil multinationals. The legal framework was sufficiently flexible that it could be adapted to changing conditions. After the Ekofisk discovery, the government toughened its bargaining position. Officials understood that the only way Statoil could stand up to the power of the multinational oil companies was by building an independent technological capacity. They knew that it would not be possible to secure a high share of the economic rent if it did not have a technologically skilled Statoil in reserve, which could take over if the multinationals were to leave. Statoil was given privileged access to the oil fields in a way that concentrated initial investment and risk with the multinational oil companies while giving a large share of the benefit to Statoil. It was partnered with the oil companies in almost all licence groups, which provided the opportunity to accelerate its technical competence. Statoil played a key role in developing the Norwegian industry. Its investments in technology accelerated the development of the Norwegian supply industry. It prioritised technology and innovation over short-term profit maximization, which contributed significantly to the development of a high value-added domestic industry in oil services.

When the Ministry of Finance moved to increase taxes in the wake of the OPEC oil price hike, the companies protested. “The [companies] were furious when they heard about the new taxation law. And then they started a media campaign saying that they would leave Norway and that it was impossible to work in a socialist country like this that does not understand the rules of international capitalism.”10 Despite company threats, the Ministry held firm, judging that, as long as they were securing profits at least The Petro-Path Not Taken 19 as high as other industries, they would not leave. And in case they did, Statoil would be available to take over. The rapid growth of Statoil in the 1970s and 1980s raised concerns that it was becoming a “state within a state.” Parliament established an independent Petroleum Directorate, reporting to the Ministry of Petroleum, as a counterweight to Statoil: to administer the resource, regulate the work environment and safety issues; support the development of a national supply industry; and provide independent technological expertise.11 The most important limitation on Statoil’s dominance was the creation in 1985 of a government entity called the State’s Direct Financial Interest (SDFI), which divided the government stake in petroleum production into two parts. More than half of Statoil’s interests in oil and gas fields, pipelines, and other facilities were transferred to SDFI. Revenues from SDFI shares were channeled to the state (since 1990 to its sovereign wealth fund), thereby limiting Statoil’s cash flow

Bruce Campbell 

Halton

 Structuralism denies meaning to "surface" phenomena, such as parole or speech, because it views meaning as a "faculty" of langue or deep structure not susceptible to modification through experience.  From a structuralist perspective, myth is only interesting as a manifestation of the underlying logic of the system, not as a voicing and bodying forth of the inner life of humanity, of its achievements and tragedies, of recurrent experiences with wondrous and terrifying forces and movements of nature, and least of all, of the drama inherent in human communication.

     Structuralism denies meaning to praxis, and hence it is rather odd, to say the least, for someone like Habermas concerned with a broad-based theory of "communicative action" as means to a free social life, to limit himself "for the sake of simplicity" to structuralist technicians who deny meaning at the level of action and who represent perhaps the most intellectualistic and abstracted approach to myth within the much broader spectrum of schools of thought.  Strange also is his reliance on what I will call a totalitarian way of thinking: structuralism denies that flesh and blood human beings embody and body forth meaning and can criticize and revise the "code" of meaning, because it holds meaning and structure to be purely "skeletal," merely the property of a single underlying universal and unchanging code of binary opposition, to be found in all human endeavor regardless of time, place, or circumstance.  There is a myth to be found here, but it is the myth of twentieth-century binary thinking, itself the legacy of cultural nominalism.
     Structuralism reproduces the nominalist tendency to begin with a false dichotomy requiring synthesis.  It projects this view on to the world as an "objective" theory:  nature and culture are clear and distinct categories, surface phenomena and deep structure are clear and distinct categories, individual versus social are clear and distinct categories, logic is a rational, binary system.
     One gets the impression in Habermas's discussion of myth that those who live within mythic belief are extremely limited by our standards, that myth is a fuzzy and backward form of thought.  Habermas uses the dichotomous premisses of modern thought as found in structuralism and semantics to criticize myth as merely vague, as having "a deficient differentiation between language and world."
     That the primary purpose of myths might be precisely to express intensely felt relationships to the world--meaning "felt relationship" as that quality that literally lives in the transaction between person and world and not in system or logic or brain--escapes Habermas's single-visioned view.  The entire discussion of myth can be read as an example of how rationalism denigrates those "divine deep waters," as the Babylonians said, in which living myth swims: modalities of intelligence not reducible to the thin filmy surface of rationality. Habermas's two primary criticisms of mythical worldviews are that they are marked by: "insufficient differentiation among fundamental attitudes to the objective, social, and subjective worlds; and the lack of reflexivity in worldviews that cannot be identified as worldviews, as cultural traditions.  Mythical worldviews are not understood by members as interpretive systems that are attached to cultural traditions, constituted by internal interrelations of meaning, symbolically related to reality, and connected with validity claims--and thus exposed to criticism and open to revision."
     Both of these criticisms reveal a shallow ethnocentrism which disallows the voice of mythical worldviews as dialogical "other" in communicative debate.  But even if one were to concede Habermas's criticisms, they still reveal the superiority of mythic to rational "communicative" thought.  Mythic "thought" indeed does not view objective, social, and subjective worlds as autonomous in Habermas's sense, but rather as fluid and continuous.  And there is no reason why mythic thought should radically differentiate these three spheres, because these spheres, as I will argue later, have their existence within the cultural nominalism of modernity, and are mere distortions, mentally skewed forms of communicative action rather than constituent features of it or the world.
     Habermas's second criticism is that mythical understanding acts as a form of reification, and one not subject to criticism:  How can one criticize the myth one believes in when one believes in it as reality itself?  Although the possibility of critical perspective and of criticism itself is undeniably an important consideration in modern society, Habermas neglects the ways in which even a single mythic world-view allows for critical conflict and ambiguity of interpretation, as almost any of the Greek myths attest and as a close look at traditional village life will reveal.  More fundamentally, he neglects the facts that belief comes first and doubt comes after belief, and that myth and ritual involve more than just belief.
     We should remember that myth and ritual are living forms which transformed us into humans, a fundamental fact which never penetrates Habermas's rationalistic armor.  In Habermas's evolutionary perspective, earlier embodiments of human communication are absolutely "aufgehoben," that is, overcome or superseded by a seemingly ever-expanding rationality.  Ritually-based societies did and do place severe limitations on personal autonomy, but ritual, contra Habermas, was perhaps the original means of "reflexivity."  This was not the dispassionate reflexivity of rational communicators who know what their validity claims are about, but the humble reflexivity of humans confronted with a baffling world and a deeply-felt need to give it voice.  By their very restricted and repetitive natures ritual action and myth gradually peeled emergent humankind from pure participation and impelled us toward belief, toward the good and bad aspects of human belief. This process brought about the enlargement of imagination, but also the encasing of human perception within new webs constructed by these imaginings.
     If emerging humankind had only possessed Habermas's communicative action instead of ritual and mythic action, it could never have coped with the enormous anxieties produced by its surplus brain energy, it could never have unself-consciously formed the artistic expressions of the human psyche, the utterances of speech, the structures of language:  it could never have become human.  Rather than characterizing mythic-bound cultures as having "deficient differentiation," Habermas should have considered how they could have been so extraordinarily efficient, creating vital societies that often endured for millenia, creating art and language in paleolithic culture, developing the basis of virtually all modern grains in the neolithic age, inventing mathematics and astronomy in Babylonian civilization, giving birth to philosophy in ancient Greece.  The real question Habermas never asks is whether and in what ways myth might enhance rather than hinder communicative reason.
     Habermas does not allow the possibility of a non-critical yet perceptive and self-illuminating narrative...

Eugene Halton

Mbembe

"The perception of the existence of the Other as an attempt on my life, as a mortal threat or absolute danger whose biophysical elimination would strengthen my potential to life and security—this, I suggest, is one of the many imaginaries of sovereignty characteristic of both early and late modernity itself. Recognition of this perception to a large extent underpins most traditional critiques of modernity, whether they are dealing with nihilism and its proclamation of the will for power as the essence of the being; with reification understood as the becoming-object of the human being; or the subordination of everything to impersonal logic and to the reign of calculability and instrumental rationality.22 Indeed, from an anthropological perspective, what these critiques implicitly contest is a definition of politics as the warlike relation par excellence. They also challenge the idea that, of necessity, the calculus of life passes through the death of the Other; or that sovereignty consists of the will and the capacity to kill in order to live. Taking a historical perspective, a number of analysts have argued that the material premises of Nazi extermination are to be found in colonial imperialism on the one hand and, on the other, in the serialization of technical mechanisms for putting people to death—mechanisms developed between the Industrial Revolution and the First World War. According to Enzo Traverso, the gas chambers and the ovens were the culmination of a long process of dehumanizing and industrializing death, one of the original features of which was to integrate instrumental rationality with the productive and administrative rationality of the modern Western world (the factory, the bureaucracy, the prison, the army). Having become mechanized, serialized execution was transformed into a purely technical, impersonal, silent, and rapid procedure. This development was aided in part by racist stereotypes and the flourishing of a class-based racism that, in translating the social conflicts of the industrial world in racial terms, ended up comparing the working classes and “stateless people” of the industrial world to the “savages” of the colonial world.23 In reality, the links between modernity and terror spring from multiple sources. Some are to be found in the political practices of the ancien régime. From this perspective, the tension between the public’s passion for blood and notions of justice and revenge is critical. Foucault shows in Discipline and Punish how the execution of the would-be regicide Damiens went on for hours, much to the satisfaction of the crowd.24 Well known is the long procession of the condemned through the streets prior to execution, the parade of body parts—a ritual that became a standard feature of popular violence—and the final display of a severed head mounted on a pike. In France, the advent of the guillotine marks a new phase in the “democratization” of the means of disposing of the enemies of the state. Indeed, this form of execution that had once been the prerogative of the nobility is extended to all citizens. In a context in which decapitation is viewed as less demeaning than hanging, innovations in the technologies of murder aim not only at “civilizing” the ways of killing. They also aim at disposing of a large number of victims in a relatively short span of time. At the same time, a new cultural sensibility emerges in which killing the enemy of the state is an extension of play. More intimate, lurid, and leisurely forms of cruelty appear. But nowhere is the conflation of reason and terror so manifest as during the French Revolution.25 During the French Revolution, terror is construed as an almost necessary part of politics. An absolute transparency is claimed to exist between the state and the people. As a political category, “the people” is gradually displaced from concrete reality to rhetorical figure. As David Bates has shown, the theorists of terror believe it possible to distinguish between authentic expressions of sovereignty and the actions of the enemy. They also believe it possible to distinguish between the “error” of the citizen and the “crime” of the counterrevolutionary in the political sphere. Terror thus becomes a way of marking aberration in the body politic, and politics is read both as the mobile force of reason and as the errant attempt at creating a space where “error” would be reduced, truth enhanced, and the enemy disposed of.26 Finally, terror is not linked solely to the utopian belief in the unfettered power of human reason. It is also clearly related to various narratives of mastery and emancipation, most of which are underpinned by Enlightenment understandings of truth and error, the “real” and the symbolic. Marx, for example, conflates labor (the endless cycle of production and consumption required for the maintenance of human life) with work (the creation of lasting artifacts that add to the world of things). Labor is viewed as the vehicle for the historical self-creation of humankind.  The historical self-creation of humankind is itself a life-and-death conflict, that is, a conflict over what paths should lead to the truth of history: the overcoming of capitalism and the commodity form and the contradictions associated with both. According to Marx, with the advent of communism and the abolition of exchange relations, things will appear as they really are; the “real” will present itself as it actually is, and the distinction between subject and object or being and consciousness will be transcended.27 But by making human emancipation dependent upon the abolition of commodity production, Marx blurs the all-important divisions among the man-made realm of freedom, the nature-determined realm of necessity, and the contingent in history. The commitment to the abolition of commodity production and the dream of direct and unmediated access to the “real” make these processes—the fulfillment of the so-called logic of history and the fabrication of humankind—almost necessarily violent processes. As shown by Stephen Louw, the central tenets of classical Marxism leave no choice but to “try to introduce communism by administrative fiat, which, in practice, means that social relations must be decommodified forcefully.”28 Historically, these attempts have taken such forms as labor militarization, the collapse of the distinction between state and society, and revolutionary terror.29 It may be argued that they aimed at the eradication of the basic human condition of plurality. Indeed, the overcoming of class divisions, the withering away of the state, the flowering of a truly general will presuppose a view of human plurality as the chief obstacle to the eventual realization of a predetermined telos of history. In other words, the subject of Marxian modernity is, fundamentally, a subject who is intent on proving his or her sovereignty through the staging of a fight to the death. Just as with Hegel, the narrative of mastery and emancipation here is clearly linked to a narrative of truth and death. Terror and killing become the means of realizing the already known telos of history".

Achille Mbembe

"On one side, therefore, is me – the basic nexus and source of orientation in the world – while, on the other, are the others with whom, however, I can never completely fuse – others with whom I may relate, yet never genuinely engage in relations of reciprocity or mutual implication".

"The apartheid system in South Africa and the destruction of Jews in Europe – the latter, though, in an extreme fashion and within a quite different setting – constituted two emblematic manifestations of this phantasy of separation. Apartheid in particular openly challenged the possibility of a single body comprehending more than one individual. It presupposed the existence of originary and distinct (already constituted) subjects, each made of a ‘raceflesh’ or ‘race-blood’ able to evolve according to its own rhythm. It was believed that assigning them to specific territorial spaces would be enough to neutralize the otherness of one with respect to the others. These originary, distinct, subjects were called upon to act as if their past had never been a past of ‘prostitution’, of paradoxical dependencies and all manner of intrigues. Such was the phantasy of purity underpinning their existence".

Achille Mbembe

Glazer

“I'd seen some photos of Höss and his family splashing around in the pool and having nice afternoons in the garden - and that's what the prisoners would have heard, the joy of children swimming on a summer's day.'

“For me, this is not a film about the past. It’s trying to be about now, and about us and our similarity to the perpetrators, not our similarity to the victims.”

Jonathan Glazer



"The home of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, was referred to as a 'paradise' by his wife Hedwig. It was a villa surrounded by a walled garden and high trees which sat on the corner of the death camp''.

SEITEL

 Traditional Knowledge

 In this conceptual system, traditional knowledge is the knowledge (composed, like culture, of categories and manipulations of them) that both underlies and is increased by traditional processes. Traditional knowledge informs traditional practices by guiding their practitioners. By enacting these processes, the practitioners also elaborate and augment traditional knowledge. The products of traditional procedures are not only the material and spiritual cultural artifacts needed by a particular group of people. The procedures also produce new knowledge. Traditions are valuable both because they enact knowledge that can meet current community needs and because they develop new knowledge that can adapt to changing conditions and/or refine a practice to better serve the community. In this conceptual system, traditional knowledge and traditional culture are both composed of categories and manipulations, but they differ in their distribution within a particular 6 society. Traditional knowledge is shared and developed among practitioners of particular traditions, whereas traditional cultures are more widely shared. One might divide traditional knowledge into categories of instrumental knowledge and ethical knowledge. The former is composed of knowledge of how to do various things, while the latter is composed of ethical and spiritual values that inform social action. The two are not always easy to separate, but both are sustained, increased, elaborated and adapted in the exercise of traditional processes. The products of traditional processes are useful to the communities defined by traditional cultures, but they may have utility for people outside those traditional cultures. Healing drugs - products of traditional medical practices - may be taken into a globalized pharmaceutical industry. Designs that are the products of traditional artistic or religious practices may be useful for a globalized textile industry. Music and song that are products of traditional performance practices may be absorbed into the aesthetic mix of a global entertainment industry. This use of the products or expressions of traditional processes by a larger, often international, commercial system can be called commodification, in which products or expressions developed in a local cultural system of exchange are used by a wider commercial system of exchange. Legally, this process involves intellectual property rights, and, thankfully, \VIPO seems to have become more active in developing an international system to defend them. The products and expressions of traditional processes are unfortunately subject to another kind of use that usually happens on a national scale. Often the appearance and behavior of members of traditional cultures are exoticized -- selected and transformed so as to appear very different, without a rational meaning, and above all aimed at creating the sensual-intellectual attraction of being intriguing. Another form of this kind of distortion of the products of traditional processes is "folklorization" - the re-stylization of traditional expressions so that they become less complex aesthetically and semantically. They thus reify the notion of a dominant culture (the one whose knowledge informs and is developed by official administrative and educational institutions) that folklore is not as complex or meaningful as the products of high, elite, or official cultural processes. Legally, I believe, this kind of distortion involves moral rights in artistic production, and WIPO should be encouraged to protect these as well.

Peter SEITEL