Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

I had a professor at NYU explain in class once that we can't judge or condemn cultures that practice clitoridectomies bc eurocentrism.

― Mordy, Monday, May 6, 2013 11:01 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk, i mean, you can still believe in the post-colonist project and also be like, this professor at nyu is wrong and stupid

to some extent tho isn't that the disagreement? can we judge other cultures based on these ideas of universal ethics + morality or is that eurocentric/etc?

no, i dont think so. i mean maybe for some people. i think the whole framing of that question is one that most academics would object to (i hope! maybe not!)--of course you can judge! but what does it mean to judge, how is it related to networks of power, where are your universal ethics grounded? idk im making this up obviously. ive never thought of post-colonialism as being about setting limits like so much as demanding a deeper and more rigorous analysis than orthodox marxism might offer (though not one that is necessarily opposed to marxism, by any means, and probably is grounded in post-marx marxist thought)

full disclosure i havent read chibbers intvw, and i dont know anything about post colonialism, or marxism

Taking the example of cliterectomies. If they can be linked to some socially useful function, then I could see at least some validity to the idea that another culture could value that useful function more highly than retaining non-mutilated clitorises on their females. However, if the only defense of clitorectomies is "it is something we do and we have always done this, so butt out of our affairs and get lost", then the same justification can be used for slavery, human sacrifice, cannibalism, or wearing white before Easter. iow, it can justify any action whatsoever. Such a dismissive justification basically sifts down to: whoever has the power gets to do as they please.

or to put it another way mordy i think that post-colonial analysis and "orthodox marxism" are both insufficient and both necessary to understanding politics & relationship of power? two legs of a stool, or whatever the metaphor is. they keep each other honest.

otm

sorry about "vacuous"--that's the equivalent of making fart noises in response.

the point, I like to think, is that you're always gonna be accountable for the theory you bring to bear.

Which also means you can be held accountable to Marxism!

Add: To say something is wrong because it is eurocentric is no more illuminating than to say something is wrong because it is wrong. No one has, to my knowlege, proved that a eurocentric idea must necessarily be wrong. A European may sometimes have a correct idea, value or judgement in the same way that a blind squirrel sometimes finds a nut.

I think you guys (xp) are speaking to something he notes in the original interview:

JB: What made you decide to focus on subaltern studies as a way of critiquing postcolonial theory more generally?

VC: Postcolonial theory is a very diffuse body of ideas. It really comes out of literary and cultural studies, and had its initial influence there. It then spread out through area studies, history, and anthropology. It spread into those fields because of the influence of culture and cultural theory from the 1980s onwards. So, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, disciplines such as history, anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, and South Asian studies were infused with a heavy turn toward what we now know as postcolonial theory.

To engage the theory, you run up against a basic problem: because it’s so diffuse, it’s hard to pin down what its core propositions are, so first of all, it’s hard to know exactly what to criticize. Also, its defenders are able to easily rebut any criticisms by pointing to other aspects that you might have missed in the theory, saying that you’ve honed in on the wrong aspects. Because of this, I had to find some core components of the theory — some stream of theorizing inside postcolonial studies — that is consistent, coherent, and highly influential.

I also wanted to focus on those dimensions of the theory centered on history, historical development, and social structures, and not the literary criticism. Subaltern studies fits all of these molds: it’s been extremely influential in area studies; it’s fairly internally consistent, and it focuses on history and social structure. As a strand of theorizing, it’s been highly influential partly because of this internal consistency, but also partly because its main proponents come out of a Marxist background and they were all based in India or parts of the Third World. This gave them a great deal of legitimacy and credibility, both as critics of Marxism and as exponents of a new way of understanding the Global South. It’s through the work of the Subalternists that these notions about capital’s failed universalization and the need for indigenous categories have become respectable.

aka it's very easy to deflect critiques of post-colonialism.

'keeping each other honest' is important. this meera nanda book i skimmed was looking at the way the bjp & other indian conservatives have used various bits of theory as a conversation stopper, seemed pretty interesting even tho she was mean about my sweetheart thomas kuhn:

http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1356465101l/1068966.jpg

http://www.thenation.com/article/174219/nietzsches-marginal-children-friedrich-hayek

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/05/beware-extended-family.html

I know I use the term wrongly, but if I refer to 'extended family' I tend to mean non-blood family i.e. community, friends etc.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/24/2013_failed_states_interactive_map

Guardian op-ed says failed state concept is bullshit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/28/failed-states-western-myth-us-interests
Abu Muqawama disagrees: http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2013/06/if-skills-sold-failed-states-edition.html

(I should clarify, Muqawama agrees it's not the greatest prism, but he certainly doesn't buy the Guardian's conspiratorial explanation for it.)

so i'm reading this book by tiqqun, 'introduction to civil war', and i find it really charming, and beautiful in places.

i'm not well read in french philosophy after deleuze (read some deleuze, some foucault), but from the use of a few deleuzeianisms in the book, and i think what i recognize as some agamben references, i get the impression that one of this book's main virtues is the clarity of its synthesis of all the stuff, basic-concept-wise, in anarchist-leaning european political philosophy from like the 60s to the 00s.

so does anyone know a few of the key books i could look at to situate this one? it kind of suppresses its references to its contemporaries, which i assume are mostly tacit. i kind of don't want to read hardt & negri, tried that a bit several years ago and it was boring.

bump because i'd be curious about this myself.

i'd say for "introduction to civil war" some models / texts / antecedents lurking in the background that are zippy, short, and influential might include

walter benjamin "critique of violence"
guy debord "society of the spectacle"
carl schmitt "political theology"
giorgio agamben "homo sacer"

I haven't looked at that tiqqun text in a while but I seem to recall that it keeps deploying "form of life", so to grasp that in its original formulation you should look at wittgenstein's "philosophical investigations"

(sorry if this is all sorta obvious and broad)

thanks! really is about time i read debord finally.

i was hoping for a bit more / tighter specificity before, but now i see that it's just not that kind of book. those do seem like they're probably apt recommendations unless there happen to be one or two super-specific books post-dating, say, the agamben that are important for 'civil war'.

knowing the wittgenstein, i would say that wouldn't help much (even if the prospect is exciting). they seem to use the idea (against agamben? or maybe he uses it too in connection with 'bare life') as a way of registering individuals' particularity (and particular potentials for community with particular others), in a spinozist/nietzschean spirit (esp. potentials for growth of power).

the idea of 'hostis' is pretty important for them in that first part too, i gather because they're using it as a third term in the group friend/enemy/hostile to leave room for a lack of relations. i assume the schmitt is huge there. and since 'hostis' is apparently connected historically with the idea (not one they take up) of the homo sacer, maybe this amounts to a point of difference with agamben, who knows.

i think the rehearsal of the modern state --> empire story in the second and third parts confers a lot of lucidity on what i recognize as foucaultish and deleuzean ideas about subject-formation as it's tangled up in state-formation. in particular, they work pretty elegant variations on the pair 'police, publicity' in the second part that is transformed into 'biopower, spectacle' in the third part. i like the discussion of biopower in terms of empire's role in maintaining/extending the operation of norms (as the imperial successor to the modern state's 'law'). the sharp lines drawn make the story's implications for modern/cartesian subjectivities pretty strong, too.

they have a bit to say in the discussion of biopower of how norms operate via apparatuses, so i take it that the various authors writing about that (foucault a lot in the later lectures on biopower/governmentality, deleuze in something i haven't read, agamben in a later trifle that seems not too helpful), and relatedly deleuze/guattari and their machines (a term tiqqun select sometimes) are also meant to be a point of contact. but the virtue here seems to be that those contacts are registered and not allowed to muddle things by being pursued more extensively.

as it turns out, they think negri sux so no need to read that book!

though it's partly set up by the way individuals are pictured in the first part, situationist antecedents seem strongest in the last part ('an ethic of civil war'), since the picture is basically, empire has mutilated life and deprived us of experience, if you are like us you should pursue more affectvely intense experiences as suit your individuality, but there's not much to be said about that since it's an experimental thing. (then there are some snipes at bad revolutionaries.) experiment/experience how? through realization in/of practice.

(epigraph to concluding essay: 'don't know what i want / but i know how to get it'...)

this is good -

http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2010/05/from-restricted-to-general-antagonism.html

but he uses a phrase i've seen around (i think nina power uses it in her review of the later 'young-girl' book?) and find irritating, 'so-and-so ontologizes x'.

http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2013/08/blinded-political-science-egypt.html

hey mordy (or anyone else)

do u happen to know what the (caricature) vampire castle response is to the line against it that k-punk takes here?

http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11299

See the Russell Brad thread from here j.
russell brand - C or D?

dur, i was looking for some marxism thread, couldn't find, ended up here - thx

all political philosophy must now be discussed with reference to R Brand these days!

Reading Ernesto Laclau's "New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time" and it's pretty great. Perhaps old hat for people better versed in this stuff than I am.

does socialism represent an eusocial impulse in the otherwise presocial human species?

i thought this was a pretty good read:
http://mccaine.org/2014/05/24/no-blood-for-oil/

what was it about WW2 that the allies could collapse the German government and not get bogged down in insurgency + some kind of WW2 version of ISIS? is it bc Germany had some experience w/ democracy prior to the Nazi takeover that they could fall back on? is it bc the US and USSR were able to keep a larger force there longer? is it bc europe didn't have the same kind of radical religious insurgency ready to step into a power vacuum? putting aside all ethics - how come we could destroy the german government and not create a huge pocket of instability + violence?

loads of bourgeois private citizens and developed local and national and international industries to reinforce an atmosphere of compliance?

Splitting the country into two ideologically distinct halves must be a factor? With a sustained occupying force in each, and 'friendly' neighbouring states.

i'm not sure what thread is best for this:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/08/01/attention_deficit_disorder_economy_nigeria_gaza_caring

interesting article i thought

I believe Bernard Stielger's recent stuff has been about something similar.

i'd like to see that - got a link?

I haven't read much of it, but this seems to be a central part of what he's doing:
http://arsindustrialis.org/disaffected-individual-process-psychic-and-collective-disindividuation

Dominic Pettman has also written on Stiegler's notion of "peak libido" in an accessible way. That's how I know about it.

q:

is 'confusion' / 'wavering' / possibly 'hovering' between something like abstractions and reality, empty metaphysical ideas and concrete life, etc etc, a pretty standard marxian complaint / point of critique?

do you mean this in the "thesis 11" sense or a Marxist complaint about competing theories not drawing that distinction clearly enough?

whew that's over my head holmes, i just mean as something marxians would generally be fond of targeting ppl / thinkers / societies with

ah, well it's an interesting question! I can't answer very well since my reading in that stuff isn't all that wide--at least in regard to those specific terms you mention.

i seem to recall the latter two terms showing up a lot in the älteste systemprogramm generation / athenaeum folx, but i think the bit about confusion might be more proper to marx? for all i know that could mean an ancestry in hegel.

you know, my guess would be that your intuition re: hegel is right. prob something in the phenomenology.

Anderson's The Imperative of Integration looks extremely good. Anyone read it?

I've been reading the Invisible Committee/Tiqqun lately with some ambivalence (and extreme skepticism about their rhetorical strategies in Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl), but I was impressed with Alberto Toscano's lengthy response to their latest book, To Our Friends: http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/burning-dwelling-thinking

(I was thinking of posting this to HOOS's organizing thread, but IC/T isn't exactly intersectional in their approach.)

I just noticed Mordy's question from last year:

how come we could destroy the german government and not create a huge pocket of instability + violence?

In the case of WW2 it was not only the German government which had been destroyed, but the entire infrastructure of Germany. Their military defeat was rigorous and complete. The German people were refugees within their own country, unable to feed themselves, clothe themselves or house themselves, or transport people or products without assistance from their conquerors. Cooperation was essential to survival.

Further, the allied armies of occupation were on a massive scale, numbering in the millions and able to dominate the entire country. Under the circumstances, the allies had an extremely effective monopoly on force. And don't overlook the fact that those occupation forces stayed on for decades afterward.

The last factor I'd cite in the post-WW2 era was that both Germany and Japan had a well-established culture of obedience and deference to authority which could be used to advantage during their transitions to new governmental structures.

say what you will about moldbug, he's a bright, provocative guy w/ many interests historically, geopolitically, etc, which is a preamble to saying that i was reading this series this afternoon and found it very interesting (w/ the ilx-necessary caveat that i don't agree w/ much of what he says but i still feel richer for having examined it):
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/04/open-letter-to-open-minded-progressives.html

There is one difference, though. To be a Catholic, you have to have faith, because no one has ever seen the Holy Ghost. To be a progressive, you have to have trust, because you believe that your worldview accurately reflects the real world - as experienced not just by your own small eyes, but by humanity as a whole.

i can imagine there are Catholics for whom the truths behind their beliefs are less important than their belief that Catholicism = morality. prove that God does not exist and they would still adhere to Catholicism because they believe it is the best way to be in the world.

i can extend the same idea to "progressives" - some of them may well believe not that their political opinions are true but that they are moral.

i'm not convinced by any arguments that morality is a product of rationality.

and inasmuch as political beliefs are moral beliefs, the attempt to rationalize them is at best disingenuous imo