Purpose.

[Philosophy exists to defend and disclose the shining of the world, and to help that shine speak to Power]

Philosophy, or something we can call philosophy, is radically distinct from analysis, and that's its ultimate justification. In a critical vein, it reminds us of the limitations of analysis, and the imposition within our analysis of presumptions that separate us from things in themselves. This isn't something that can be truly "corrected" out of importance, it's part of the nature of thought and experience. Thought is directed, intentional, and intentionality, attention moves towards those qualities in beings that it recognizes. Analytic thought attends to given qualities, dissects and organizes them, develops patterns for them, comprehends them as organized systems. Yet because it is drawn to those qualities of being it already recognizes, it does not tend to a full observation.

In truth, "full observation" of a being cannot be an instrumental act, it must begin with an assumption of a thing's indeterminacy and accept the permanence of its own chaos. Chaos in this sense simply means perpetually indeterminate. As critique, philosophy points out the limitations of will and thought for analyzing beings, for getting at the Being[s] of beings I suppose. [I mean that Being is just that quality of a thing, still particular to it, that evades the attention of our will and thought. So Beings for beings, not Being for beings, maybe...] As a constructive project, philosophy opens space for aspects of the world to continually present themselves to and assert themselves into discourse. It does this through the formation of concepts that enable communication between radically distinct beings and states of Being, allowing the presentation of Being through events. The ambiguity of event, the mutual determination of their character by entangled beings, discloses the Being in which these beings participate. [Truth of a thing is revealed in its action and what it produces in concert with other things, other beings, other people, etc...]

The Technical Embrace

I was at a talk tonight by Norman Solomon, on media and the war. I'm not quite sure what I expected but I know it didn't occur. He spoke mostly about the role between technology, education and the normalization of war, of the way that our society is carved as a grand hoax. That the people employed to put society at risk are for some reason trusted to its salvation. And that our fascination with and portrayal of technology in war and technology in general, royal science as some would call it, covers over and obscures the reality of American society, that we are to a large extent a nation of war. Half our taxes go to it, it's the real welfare and jobs training program for most of America, and big science is built and organized around it.

Some of his words reminded me of the absolute horror and frustration I feel about the whole miserable business. For instance, he talked about the Cold War a bit, and living under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. And I am amazed at how easily a reality so obvious that few demand or desire its memory is forgotten, and the administration plays with nuclear toys and bridles that we resist their development and use. For fifty years the whole of humanity lives under the fear of death come screaming out of the sky like demons from the nightmares of insane mystics, and these wretches play with them, for money, for sick pleasure, who knows.

I think American identity has a variety of themes in it, the chief two being the trace of democracy and the trace of Empire. They oppose each other. There's a third trace though, the trace of technophilia, the love of applied reason. I have a deep suspicion that this is where the real ambiguity lies, that the fate of the battle between democracy and Empire rests in the allegiance of this faction, the faction oriented primarily to the world or metal and earth outside the social dynamics of man. Where shall they place their loyalty, to the Empire that offers them capital or the demos that offers them something else? The ambiguity lies in the fact that technophilia or the embrace of the nonhuman world can take two general forms. We can approach it with reverence as a way to learn the truth of the world to better respect and work alongside it. Or we can crave technology as a pure expression of power over the world. One involves understanding, the other simply contrivance and use, isolated interest.

I think the democratic forces of society can only win when this skilled faction works through respect and reverence, when it forsakes the appeal of simple power. We don't often know this, but I think it is necessary.

[or another way of putting things- will the war machine or the smiths turn towards the State or against it?]

Reform or Revolution, rough

The question that often seems to determine where leftists orient themselves in the world of politics is that of reform or revolution. The question more specifically is this: is it possible to make incremental improvements to society without changing its basic mechanisms, and still achieve the vision of a free and classless world? Or is it necessary to cast aside the entire edifice of society, private property, law as we know it, commerce as we know it, and create something entirely new?

The basic problem with reform is that certain properties change for the system of society as a whole, but the basic institutional framework does not change. The anarchist would say that so long as a the structures of power maintain their form, oppression will repeat itself no matter what. Bakunin famously predicted that under state communism, the people would still be beaten down as ferociously as under the czar or worse- only it would be by the "people's" stick.

Closer to home, many have pointed out that we're fighting a rearguard battle when we try and regulate the corruption of big business, and reveal its collusion with government for the benefit of the few over the many. This is only a distraction, because as long as the corporate form exists as it does today, all these reforms will be outweighed by the overwhelming financial and political power of the owning classes. We must abandon the corporate form altogether, or radically transform it.

Many anarchists are far stronger in their criticism than this. They point to rather embarassing history of civilization itself, and note the absence of any real viable democracy in which class society in some form exists, or even when any centralization of economic and cultural power whatsover exists. We can start with Enron and keep swinging back the clock to the early nation states back to Rome and Babylon, and the same basic patterns repeat. As long as there is concentration of wealth and power, and s long as society is organized to support this concentration, we will see corruption, we will find abuse and exploitation rampant. This isn't a mere technical problem or a momentary lapse of integrity. The problems stem from a basic logic of domination and control at the heart of our society, an ascendence of will over and against empathy. So long as this remains, our every liberation will b turned against us and every new freedom will carry with it the same cages, even if the bars be shaped differently.

So this leads us to espouse a revolution, a total rejection of what is and creation of something new. Yet revolutions are strange affairs, and surprisingly few of them ever seem to have "worked" in any sense of the term. I think the problem of revolutions might be equally fundamental as the problems of reforms. When you cast off the mechanisms that govern a society, you have no real way of guaranteeing which mechanisms will replace them, and generally they seem to fall back to the most immediate, unreflective level of power. Instead of revolution, we lose the developed socia structures of class and caste and fall instead into simple association bound by ethnicity or tribe, identification based on the body, and the ordering principle of direct violence.

I was reading about the Guild Socialists earlier this week. They were a remarkable political group in England that flourished briefly in the first half of the century. They wanted society devolved to be run by congresses of guildsmen and consumers, locally based and democratic. Yet even this intelligent and broadly thinking group recommended a militia governed by the the society's political organ as a whole. I was shocked- after pages and pages of discussion of coordination between decentralized craftsmen and consumer associations, they still decided to call for a martial force controlled by a centralized political power.

Political violence stands as a sort of black hole, denying constructive analysis. We condemn and critique the violence of nations often enough, but I think we still preserve a lingering idea of some sort of truth to be found in political force. Ths makes sense really. If we are to destroy the received institutions and mechanisms for the distribution of social power, how are we to establish the legitimacy of whatever is to replace them? Since the dawn of history, violence has established and maintained almost every political system that exists. How are we to break with this and still transform society?

I am no idealistic pacifist. I don't abandon the idea of force entirely, a priori. I don't necessarily condemn groups that use it. Yet we must realize that to deploy it means to suspend all other mechanisms for governing a society, all those reasons we demand change in the first place. ...

Economic models

Let us take two ideal regimes of production and consider them in terms of their conditions of possibility and their effects upon the matrix of the world that sustains them. Let us further try and characterize them initially in terms of their production of surpluses.

One regime of production is based in driving down the cost of labor by either seeking cheaper labor sources or replacing labor with mechanization. The surpluses in this regime occur through increasing the productivity of labor without paying higher costs for that labor. Its tools are fairly simple and straightforward:
*exploitation of labor in a variety of ways, the classic style we have come to know and expect from American industry. speedups, unpaid overtime, outsourcing to lower-wage areas, etc.
*regulation and regularization of labor, controlling working behavior more tightly to insure maximum labor and/or attention from a labor force
*the organization of production towards fixed, controlled commodities, and monopolization of the lifespan of those commodities. This is based, once again, in a regimentation of the labor process and its use of machines above all else.

Because this regime is based upon the regularization and exploitation of labor itself as it relates to the products and services it produces, it is equally hostile to independent production or modification by consumers as it is to independent action by its formal workforce. This is a key concept to explore and describe effectively- that the regime of corporate production is as hostile to a genuinely active consumer as it is to a genuinely active worker. The active consumer is not one who simply offers the seller enthusiasm about a product. The active consumer engages with a product by addressing it as a worker/user, a prosumer if you will, a bricoleur.

If the corporation forms the model for one ideal, the bricoleur forms a model for the other. The limit of the second regime of production is essentially the DIY model of individual or collective self-production without the intervention of commercial exchange. It generates surpluses through "self-exploitation" in Chayanov's sense, meaning the participating individuals create surpluses through their own unpaid labor. This means that the surpluses are essentially formal, useful accounting devices. The "workers" involved agree to pool some of their product for general reinvestment. Ultimately, this is the only value of surpluses. They create a pool of funding free for experimentation. This excess allows a firm to thrive and live.

mimicry of nature, notes

One of the foundational principles of permaculture is to design artificial, human systems using patterns and relationships observed in nature. Ideally, we should try and create a living system as close to a natural ecology as possible.
This raises certain analytic problems, in part because of the very direct, intuitive observation we use to experience some of those natural patterns. What does it mean to be artificial, what does it mean to be natural, and how do we justify any form of intervention whatsoever?

[for intro: the chief question is this, what understanding of nature is necessary such that human intervention can be "natural," with the practical application of discerning the nature of environmental interventions.]

Notes for Deleuze and Permaculture

intro: setting up the problem- human identity and human agency, what is the proper relationship between the human and the natural
chapter 1: the mimicry of natural systems; bergsonian intuition, deleuze and becoming-other

The matter of thought, brief note.

We might orient philosophy as a whole along this fairly simple question: from whence come the contents that provoke thought? Do they come from the outside (empiricism) or from within (idealism) or both, and if both in what manner are they joined?

Think of Kant for instance, and his development of the transcendental deduction. He developed a sort of idealism as the precondition for empirical knowledge. For true thought to be possible, certain conditions are necessary, namely time and space.

Analytics have chosen to develop this question by analyzing the tool of thought. Rather than supposing an outside or an inside as prior source, they ignore the origin of contents and focus entirely on the mechanics of producing thought. A bridge is presumed, and that bridge becomes the object of technical fascination.

A position such as Bergson's or Deleuze's is dependent upon a sort of empiricism, an outside event that creates the conditions of possibility for thought, that molds the milieu and structure in which thought is to occur. It is sort of an inversion of Kant- rather than structures of thought conditioning the possibility of true knowledge in the world, structures of the world condition the possibility of thought and provide its virtual milieu.

This approach is not irreconcilable with analytic approaches- in fact it is quite amenable to many of them. In the end it is a weightier empiricism, an empiricism in which the structures of the world condition the mechanisms of thought itself. Though this diverges sharply from some analytic schools (say, cognitivism tied to Chomsky or Fodor) it can be argued cogently enough from neurobiology or connectionist approaches, or the metaphorical systems of Lakoff (especially through this scheme). Assuming neurons form pathways that become at least semi-stable through habit; and assuming again that these pathways fall into steady patterns because the same contents of the world are being addressed, then we have the core of a sufficient argument for the radical empiricism of Deleuze or Bergson. This is a simple enough proposition to make and defend. It's so simple that it seems specious, but it is the same argument I've seen developed by practicing neurobiologists (whose word I am more inclined to consider than a philosopher commenting upon their work, if only because of my syndicalism).

The question then is, once we've developed some very basic grounding with respect to the actual formation of the nervous system, how much should philosophy actually dwell on it? Maybe it's of some use to the neurobiologists, I don't know. So far this technical fascination among nonpractitioners seems to just lead to arrogant attempts at mimicry, siphoned mostly into war industries.

Once we have a solid physiological footing for a thorough empiricism, the question then becomes, what does this imply? What does this imply for thought and the general structure of thought? What does it imply for identity, for organization, for our basic manner of relating self to world? What does this radical empiricism based on the interpenetration of thought and world imply for ethics, politics, metaphysics and aesthetics? What does it imply for agency (the real qustion of politics)? What does it imply for existence, for or orientation towards Being, towards stasis and change? And by implication, I mean what does this ground and insight allow us to do, what capacities and what events does it render possible?

This is the weakness of analytic philosophy so concerned with developing itself as a technical apparatus. It doesn't speak to these questions, it has no real language for them, and generally little respect for them. Because of this, it often remains mired in technical fetishism that is not philosophically justifiable. It presumes the necessity of a simple realism to operate- yet this simple realism limits its operations to technical enhancement and intensification. Because it refuses to ground itself in an actual philosophical tension or question, and simply pastes over that ambiguity without coming to some resolution, it cannot build upon that very tension, the very question of the contents of thought, in order to address those implications that actually concern a society, or individuals in it. It can respond only with a technologism as often as not divorced from actual work on neurology. Without considering the question of how thought is created, we can't build upon a model of this to address humanistic questions. The best we can do is respond with more facts about the mind as precision tool. We can't connect that tool to the overall system in which it operates, and so we can't actually build anything with it.

Four elements.

Four elements to a store capable of beating out Wal-marts.
*Thrift store.
*Consignment goods from local repairmen and small craftspeople.
*Desktop manufacturing/On-demand batch manufacturing.
*Community-supported manufacturing service, with store as retail anchor.

These can be introduced sequentially- meaning, you can begin with a thrift store, introduce shelf space for consignment goods, introduce a workshop space with a desktop manufacturing unit for single on-demand production, and finish out facilitating batch manufacturing (both for customers and among consignment vendors).

All four stages ultimately exist at the same time, each fulfilling a different niche.

The scale must always stay relatively small. Think in terms of Starbucks, not Wal-mart. One on every corner as the market rises.

The thrift store component is meant to displace low quality consumer goods. Can be argued as a "green" focus, recycling and repair of goods. Ultimately, as small vendors are introduced into the thing, you start to win out on new goods as well- direct consumer/producer communication combined with very low batch manufacturing allow for constantly guaranteed sales.

Rough draft for a post elsewhere

Anarchism and the World of Things.

I've written a few posts describing the meaning of anarchism, some of its assumptions and implications, and pointed to a few instances when it lurched into the pages of written history.

In my next post, I'm going to describe some organizations in the current world that embody anarchistic principles and have some self-conscious affinity to anarchism.

But first I want to explain some of the appeal this mode of thinking and being has for me, why I am drawn to it. I think I need to mix this discussion in with more objective exegesis out of sheer honesty.

I am drawn to anarchism because it presupposes and cultivates a relationship to the world that is often palpably different from the dull habituation we are pushed towards in life.

I'll explain with an example. I've worked in several bookstores. I've worked at Monkeywrench, and I've also been employed at a corporate retail bookstore that will remain nameless. The corporate retail job paid $7.50/hr, which is exactly $7.50/hr more than I make working at Monkeywrench. Clearly, I am willing to work at Monkeywrench for nothing yet was ultimately worn down by working at a corporate bookstore for (relatively) much more. Why?

It wasn't the managers, I'll say that much. My bosses in the corporate stores were great. Never any problems, always friendly. I did my job adequately, they were clear, helpful, responsive and flexible. I have a leftist's automatic contempt for bosses, but mine have always been perfectly acceptable.

It wasn't the work itself, the toil of it. Working retail in a bookstore is undoubtedly one of the more pleasant examples of wage slavery one can live through. The work is light, the people are generally friendly and unrushed, the staff are intelligent and a bit eccentric, and often enough you can read at the register while business is slow (the more you know your product, after all, the better a salesperson you can be). I have no complaints about the job.

So what's the difference? To be perfectly honest, it was the way the job made me start feeling about books.

I've been a bookworm since I could first crawl to a shelf, and to me the well-written word is damn close to holy. I don't want to simply read books, I want to venerate them. And that ultimately made working a corporate bookstore job wretched for me. The stores were always clean and tidy, with that fake plastic wood everywhere, that office building carpet, that soft consumer-oriented music playing overhead. The books became tedious, piles of bound paper covered in irrelevant colors to stack in their appropriate places. They started to become meaningless to me. No longer were they packets of treasure, the voice of the Divine rendered in small digestible doses. Instead they were piles of commodities, as dead to me as a toaster oven or bottle of coke.

And so I got a different job, because I'd rather starve in the street than let books turn into ash on my lips.

When I sell books at Monkeywrench, they don't feel like commodities. I don't see the store as a retail establishment so much as a bank of tools. And therein lies the difference, the perspective that for me opens up through anarchism. The things in the world aren't dead, they aren't cut off from me or my friends and neighbors by lines of property or the habits of consumption, by the regulation of production and consumption. They are constellations of meaning and potential use, open to anyone, restricted only by the imperative to create. Their meaning isn't determined by a professional department four states away, it is open-ended.

I can walk into our store and think, today I might give someone a tool for constructing something new in the world. It might be something directly instructional, so they can learn how to grow their own food or make biodiesel or fix a bike. It might more social, teaching them to start a co-op or a union, or an independent business. It might be a tool for self-transformation via art or poetry or literature. It might be a tool for understanding the chaos of the social world, the many moments of desolation and redemption that characterize our society. But it will be a tool, not a trinket, not a commodity. It will be used to build, to change, to fight. As such these things I sell aren't alien, dead things to me, I care about them, their potential and possibilities, I care about what ideas and actions they will provoke in their readers. I see my own actions and ideas as they might relate to the texts and their future use, and feel connected to them and their readers through a web of potential use, of possible creation and co-creation.

I think most people have a sensation like this sometimes, a connection to a practice or a thing that opens up the world for them a little bit, that makes them feel free, human. If we're lucky that can become a calling, and we can make a career out of it.

For me, anarchism is less an ideology than a set of broad principles to live by and to use in forming relationships, associations, and organizations; principles that serve as the conditions of possibility for seeing the world in this free and open light, in seeing things in terms of their possible connections instead of their limitations. So I will always be drawn to it, because for me anarchism is simply the way to think and act that allows for a joyful life.