exergues

[fyp-philosophy]

Essentialism

[src]

[exoergo]

In a richer and larger cultural life, however, existence rests on a thousand premises which the single individual cannot trace and verify to their roots at all, but must take on faith. Our modern life is based to a much larger extent than is usually realized upon the faith in the honesty of the other. Examples are our economy, which becomes more and more a credit economy, or our science, in which most scholars must use innumerable results of other scientists which they cannot examine. We.base our gravest decisions on a complex system of conceptions, most of which presuppose the confidence that we will not be betrayed. Under modern conditions, the lie, therefore, becomes something much more devastating than it was earlier, something which questions the very foundations of our life. If among ourselves today, the lie were as negligible a sin as it was among the Greek gods, the Jewish patriarchs, or the South Seas islanders; and if we were not deterred from it by the utmost severity of the moral law; then the organization of modern life would be simply impossible; for, modern life is a "credit economy" in a much broader than a strictly economic sense. 313 Georg Simmel

[exoergo]

When In Rome

TSS: That reminds me of another thing I didn’t know until I read your book, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. Another way the Romans were different than us is that originally when the legions were set up, the poorest of the poor didn’t have to serve, whereas in our culture it’s usually the rich who sort of buy or maneuver their way out of service.

MB: Yes. It’s very interesting: the absolute assertion of privilege going with the responsibility to fight for the state. It’s something that modern culture certainly overturned. The whole world of military service and the army within modern culture has, we would say, become professionalized, but I think it’s actually let the rich off the hook, by and large.

TSS: In Rome the rich weren’t trying to avoid it. They were trying to lead armies into battle.

MB: Exactly. And that’s why they’re very different: the privilege went hand-in-hand with military responsibility, rather than went hand-in-hand with the evasion of it. What does a Roman dream of? A rich Roman? Well, he might dream about being consul, he might dream about building a vast villa, but most of all he dreams about military success. So, you find someone like Cicero, who, in all kinds of ways, is the most un-military guy of all — he doesn’t have a clue about anything to do with soldiery — he gets out to his province in Cilicia, he leads his rather small number of troops in some rather minor skirmish against some local bandits, and instantly you find him talking about himself as if he was Alexander the Great. Cicero is a great example, as is the old emperor Claudius, who, for all his old, doddery, very unsexy image, what does he does he do when he becomes emperor? He invades Britain and he has a Triumph.

MB: I think you have to be very careful about lumping these cultures together. The Greeks, very occasionally, did think of themselves as Greeks; similarly the Etruscans. But you have a series of cities who are effectively independent, and I think we shouldn’t make the error of imagining that Athens was somehow typical of the Greek world any more than Tarquinia was typical of Etruria.

That said: Why did the Romans win? Ultimately, it is something to do with their consistent incorporation of their defeated enemies into the Roman project. A crude stereotype, though a not entirely wrong one, of standard inter-state warfare in the ancient world was that City A bashes up City B, takes them prisoners, takes them slaves, demands indemnity, and says goodbye. Now, what Rome does is overturn that sense that the enemy just walks away in the end with its loot. Because what Rome does is walks away with its loot, but it also, in the process, forms a permanent relationship with the people it has defeated, whether one of alliance or one of citizenship. And the obligation that goes with citizenship and alliance is to fight for the state of Rome. What that means is that Rome gets an enormous reserve of manpower — way bigger than any of these others can put on the field. Probably we’re talking about 700,000 men available to Rome, and that’s what gives it victory.

[exoergo]

Agamben

In Western thought, the problem of form-of-life has emerged as an ethical problem (ethos, the mode of life of an individual or group) or as an aesthetic problem (the style by which the author leaves his mark on the work). Only if we restore it to the ontological dimension will the problem of style and mode of life be able to find its just formulation. And this can happen only in the form of something like an “ontology of style” or a doctrine that is in a position to respond to the question: “What does it mean that multiple modes modify or express the one substance?”

In the history of philosophy, the place where this problem has been posed is Averroism, as a problem of the conjunction (copulatio) between the singular individual and the one intellect. According to Averroës, the mean term that allows this union is the imagination: the singular is joined to the possible or material intellect through the phantasms of its imagination. The conjunction can happen, however, only if the intellect strips the phantasms of their material elements, to the point of produc­ing, in the act of thought, a perfectly bare image, something like an ab­solute imago. This means that the phantasm is what the singular sensible body marks on the intellect to the same extent to which the inverse is true, namely, that it is what the one intellect works and marks in the singular. In the contemplated image, the singular sensible body and the one intellect coincide, which is to say, fall together. The questions “who contemplates the image?” and “what is united to what?” do not have a univocal response. (Averroistic poets, like Cavalcanti and Dante, made love the place of this experience, in which the phantasm contemplated is at once subject and object of love and the intellect knows and loves itself in the image.)

What we call form-of-life corresponds to this ontology of style; it names the mode in which a singularity bears witness to itself in being and being expresses itself in the singular body.

[exoergo]

Of Worldliness and Being Otherwise: A Conversation with Elizabeth Grosz – Heather Davis

Heather Davis: In your recent book Chaos, Territory, Art (2008), you draw upon the works of philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Luce Irigaray, as well as biologist Charles Darwin to offer a reading of art and artistic practices as primarily natural, that is, as deriving from the evolutionary, bifurcating, and differentiating force of the world. I am interested in the way in which your reading of art refuses to mark a clear distinction between people and other animals, the way you refuse the easy division offered by other philosophers who point to the caves of Lascaux (as the first known instance of representational art) as the birth of humanity. What impact does positing all life as generators of art have politically, for both artistic practice and for ourselves, as humans?

Elizabeth Grosz: I am not sure what political effects refusing the distinction between the animal and the human has in the sphere of art. It certainly means that the dating of ‘first forms of art’ is always problematic, and endlessly open to revision, especially dependent on where the arbitrary line between mammalian and human development is drawn. As is true in all anthropological speculations about human origins. Art in its most general sense – the framing of qualities and their use to intensify sensations – has always been a feature of those animals who are sexually differentiated into at least two categories as a mode of attraction. This means that the art undertaken by humans involves the use of the qualities and sensations that also effect various animal species, the reframing of the animal framings of qualities. Qualities, colours, shapes, sounds, rhythms, resonances of all kinds please, intensify, and highlight: they do so for animals as much as for humans. Restoring the human to its place among the worlds of animals is the first step in the transformation of the millennia of human self-representation as above or superior to the worlds of animals. If animals have worlds, and not just a single world, humans no longer have the clear right to the sovereign regulation and management of the natural world.

HD: One of the things I find so refreshing about your recent turn to Darwin in Chaos, Territory, Art, and elaborated upon in Becoming Undone (2011), is your radical insistence on ‘restoring the human to its place among the worlds of animals,’ placing the mammalian beside the human, in the multiple worlds where ours is simply one. In this gesture you begin to undo, as you say, millennia of the naturalization of human domination, but you do so by equally refusing traditional environmentalist discourses. In particular, your insistence on becoming is radically different from the calls for ‘sustainability.’ I wonder if you could comment more on why sustainability doesn’t work for you, and what becoming with the world may offer, as a conceptual apparatus, for what Ricardo Dominguez calls our ‘no-future future’ in the face of multiple ecological crises.

EG: This is a tough and complex question and requires some nuance. We are indeed one species among many millions of species. Mankind has relegated to itself the function of reigning over animals, harnessing them for human purposes, making the animal a different order than itself. I am not sure that the discourses on sustainability or environmentalism are any different. They still assume man as steward of nature, man as the one who both causes and can stop ecological catastrophes, man as both the misery and saviour of animals. Sustainability is surely what is sustainable for human use, human interests, human forms of identification, isn’t it? That is why it is a continuation by other means of the discourses of liberal humanism, but a humanism that doesn’t just represent humankind but all those animals (and plants) that humans find interesting. Which animals are saved (tigers, polar bears, baby seals, whales) and which are to be destroyed in saving other animals (mosquitos, insects of various kinds, sharks) are those, perhaps, that humans find appealing. And this is itself not the overcoming of evolutionary forces but the latest torsion in the forces of natural selection, with human excess being one of the conditions that now make up the natural milieu of most species. The human assumes that it is exempt from the forces of natural selection – forces that are brutal in the extinction of the vast majority of species over time – but what ecological crises show is not only the vulnerability of species to human excess but also the vulnerability of the human to its own excesses. We need to no longer think of ourselves as the masters of nature, the stewards who represent the interests of all other species; the history of humanity in its vast variations has at least this in common – that the rest of the living universe was there for human needs alone. We have not caused a catastrophe for life on earth, for many, many forms of life on earth will long supercede mankind; we have caused a catastrophe for ourselves and the animals we need to perpetuate our existence. Politics everywhere relies on this assumption that even Marx relies on.

HD: Could you say more about how politics everywhere relies on the assumption of humans as the stewards of other animals and forms of life, including Marx, and your own intervention into this discourse where Darwin figures so prominently?

EG: There is of course a very close connection between Darwin and Marx. Marx saw in Darwin’s work the biological preconditions that explain the explosion of human culture as a struggle for existence. But where they differed – and I am not clear whether they were aware of this difference – is precisely in how each understood nature (and thus the worlds of animals and plants). For Marx, the human can be defined in terms of its ability to work on and transform nature, using nature as raw materials in the production of goods that human labour has created. Human society produces itself through its overcoming and transformation of nature, including animals. Human society is thus fundamentally different from natural societies to the extent that humans annul and rework nature according to their own needs, thus producing new needs. Darwin, whose view of human culture and creativity never removed it from the world of nature, has a more differentiated and less oppositional or dialectical understanding of nature, including all other life forms. Human society is not different in kind to animal societies, which are abundant in the natural world; they too are subjected to the operations of variation, natural selection, and sexual selection. In creating human society, humans do not move beyond nature but always remain a part of it, one variant among many, many others. For Darwin, I believe, the idea that humans must become stewards of a nature that is now in jeopardy must be regarded as ludicrous, and as narcissistic as much of human self-evaluation tends to be: humans are neither the problem nor the solution but a momentarily dominant or privileged species.

HD: You say in your introduction to Becoming Undone that the turn toward materialism in your thought can be understood less as a ‘new materialism’ and more as a “new understanding of the forces, both material and immaterial, that direct us to the future.” I’ve often wondered if the current emphasis on materialism in contemporary philosophical thought is being pushed by the force of the world, as our way of living, our way of conceiving of the world is being increasingly impinged upon by anomalous weather events, massive crop failure, and poorer and poorer air quality. Are these events and forces pushing theorists and philosophers toward questions of material reality?

EG: I am not sure what prompted the so-called ‘new materialism,’ which doesn’t seem to me to be all that new. Feminist theorists, with some notable exceptions, have always claimed to be materialists. A generation ago, the form of materialism was historical materialism of the kind Marx elaborated. And even now, there are many kinds of materialism, most of them claiming some direct connection with the world, whether the world be understood in terms of the most pressing political events of the present (the Arab uprisings, the Occupy movement, the war on terror), or in terms of the most abstract concepts of matter. I don’t think that the ‘new materialism’ that many people are talking about within and outside of feminist theory is directly prompted by political events, for the more urgent and pressing events are, the less theory has much to offer directly. I think that in my own case, this interest in the question of the real is ontological rather than political, conceptual rather than practical. I clearly cannot speak for everyone in this. It came, for me, from an intellectual dead-end, the demise of a certain kind of theory in which the real moved increasingly into the background to be covered over by sovereign or representational norms.

HD: Yes, you say that in order for feminism to break out of its conceptual impasse – that is, a theoretical framework that is overly concerned with questions of the subject, of who the subject is, its experiences and affects – feminism should now be concerned with directing “itself to questions of complexity, emergence, and difference that the study of subjectivity share in common with the study of chemical and biological phenomena.” What does this move toward the biological sciences, an ontological orientation that displaces the human, offer for you conceptually, as a feminist philosopher? You argue that the inclusion of the biological, the physical, offers a future orientation which aids in the creation of new worlds, new possibilities, where “feminist theory has the potential to make us become other than ourselves, to make us unrecognizable.” I wonder if you could say more about this impulse to be rendered ‘unrecognizable’ or imperceptible.

EG: This is a difficult question to answer. I think that ontology, how we understand the real, the world and its components, is the basis of not only epistemology, but also politics, ethics, and aesthetics. What we understand the world to be is shaped by how attentive we are not only to the scientific representations of chemistry and biology, but also to the work of those in the humanities who can address what the key questions and methods might be in our understanding of the chemical and biological worlds – worlds in which we are ourselves only a small part that doesn’t adequately understand its place or the nature of chemicals or biological entities. We live in a world that is atomic, sub-atomic, metallic, biological only because, without caring for it much, we are ourselves expressions, partial expressions of this world. How things and processes mix together, what are the conditions for and effects of their possible inter-relations, are also questions about ourselves, not necessarily questions about how we are masters of the world and the agents which regulate it, but questions that remind us of where we come from both personally and as a species. For me, this is a possible new path of feminist (and other forms of minoritarian) philosophy: how to bring about new mixtures, new forms of engagement, not only among ourselves but also with all other living beings, and even the inanimate forces that make animate life possible. In the wake of religion, we have only physics, chemistry, biology – but not as they currently exist, in their generally unselfconsciously patriarchal forms, but as they could exist, a new religion of worldliness, of the complexity of the world, and the conditions for being otherwise that it contains.

[exoergo]

Despite the hive-mind connotations of faceless groups such as Anonymous, the archetype of ‘the hacker’ is essentially that of an individual attempting to live an empowered and unalienated life. It is outsider in spirit, seeking empowerment outside the terms set by the mainstream establishment. Perhaps it’s unwise to essentialise this figure. A range of quite different people can think of themselves in those terms, from the lonely nerd tinkering away on DIY radio in the garage to the investigative journalist immersed in politicised muckraking. It seems safe to say, though, that it’s not very hacker-like to aspire to conventional empowerment, to get a job at a blue-chip company while reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The hacker impulse is critical. It defies, for example, corporate ambitions.

[exoergo]

The hacker hacked

Unlike the open uprising of the liberation leader, the hacker impulse expresses itself via a constellation of minor acts of insurrection, often undertaken by individuals, creatively disguised to deprive authorities of the opportunity to retaliate. Once you’re attuned to this, you see hacks everywhere. I see it in capoeira. What is it? A dance? A fight? It is a hack, one that emerged in colonial Brazil as a way for slaves to practise a martial art under the guise of dance. As an approach to rebellion, this echoes the acts of subtle disobedience described by James Scott in Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance (1986). Hacking, then, looks like a practice with very deep roots – as primally and originally human as disobedience itself. Which makes it all the more disturbing that hacking itself appears to have been hacked.

[exoergo]

Habermas claims that modernity is an unfinished project because the separation and specialization of scientific knowledge has failed to fulfill one of modernity’s major promises, namely, the introduction of scientific knowledge into everyday practices. From an anthropological perspective, Latour proclaims that “we have never been modern”; this is because, although the definitive condition of modernity was the constant mixing of genres, the intellectual basis of modernity was nonetheless constituted on the separation of humans and nonhumans. Without dwelling on this matter, I would like to draw attention to the fact that Latour bases this compelling observation on the theories of anthropologist Philippe Descola, who studied animism and Amerindian cosmologies, in which the separation of nature and society does not exist. These indigenous epistemologies provide us with a platform for questioning the disciplinary boundaries imposed by modern sciences—boundaries that still order our thinking today. In this regard one can understand why many Western thinkers have in recent years turned to the work ofBrazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who has suggested that animism and perspectivism can be decolonizing forces. In his studies of Amerindian perspectivism, Viveiros de Castro explores the social aspect of relationships between humans and nonhumans. According to his perspectivist theory, many Amerindian cosmologies endow objects with a soul because what constitutes them is the relationships that exist among them. Nothing can be left out of relational processes, since these influence what we are and shape subjectivity. In Amerindian perspectivism, if something has a soul—and Amerindians believe that not only nature, but also inanimate objects have a soul—then that something must also be seen as a person.If we accept the animist notion that everything is at the same time a person and a part of nature, we can do away with the division between the natural and social sciences. We can also do away with the notion of human nature, according to de Sousa Santos: “There will be no human nature because all nature is human.”18 From the standpoint of Amazonian perspectivism, and contrary to our sciences, to know is not to objectivize but rather the opposite: it consists of embodying, i.e. subjectivizing, because it implies taking on the point of view of that thing which is it necessary to know. Consequently, the object of study becomes an enunciating subject, which implies granting it the status of interlocutor and therefore giving it agency. Amerindian perspectivism has been seen as a way to destabilize Western frameworks of thought, eliminate the disciplinary boundaries that separate us from “our objects of study,” and open up new frameworks.

[exoergo]

Modernity vs. Epistemodiversity

María Iñigo Clavo

In her classic book Hegel and Haiti, Susan Buck-Morss argues that Hegel’s interest in the Haitian Revolution inspired his early masterpiece The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).5 However, although Hegel was a contemporary of the Haitian declaration of independence from France, there is little evidence that the master-slave dialectic was understood in colonial terms. Like the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution was based on the tenets of equality, liberty, and fraternity—only it extended these rights to slaves.

In the years following Haiti’s independence in 1804, European governments began to undermine the political agency of former slaves by refusing to recognize the sovereignty of the new nation. Before long, Hegel had discarded his admiration for the Haitian general Toussaint Louverture, and by 1820 the philosopher considered Haiti to be in a state that Kant termed “guilty immaturity.”6 Hegel advocated the recolonization of former colonies: “Against the absolute right of that dominant people who are the present carriers of the degree of development of the world Spirit … the spirit of other peoples has no right.”7

This was consistent with Hegel’s affection for Napoleon, whom he understood to be a “world-historical” personage. It was Napoleon who turned against Louverture, forcing the latter’s resignation, deportation, and the imprisonment which led to his death. Hegel’s version of modernity bears, in this respect, the scars of its German origins, a heritage marked, in the words of Rebecca Comay, by a kind of “mourning sickness” regarding the legacy of the French Revolution. Which is more “modern,” the French Revolution or the reaction that brought Napoleon to power? In the conflict between Napoleon and Louverture—contrary to Hegel’s understanding—it is Napoleon, and the Europe that empowered him, that would seem to be the representatives of the “antimodern,” insofar as we allow “modern” to signify what the revolutionaries of France and Haiti thought it did.

But of course this is not how the French empire saw things. The newly created Haitian Republic became the most delegitimized state in Latin America, and Napoleon presented Haiti with a bill for its own freedom, in the amount of 150 million francs. Haiti only finished paying it in 1947. Such was the price for Haiti daring to self-abolish slavery and declare itself an agent of its own history.

-----

In his “Cannibal Manifesto” of 1928, Oswald de Andrade explains how the Latin American “swallowing” of intellectual theories from Europe is an example of cannibalism, the ritual that frightened Europeans the most. 

[theparisreview]

We do compose a soul for ourselves, an inner biography that has this grace of selection.

Les Murray, The Art of Poetry No. 89 (via theparisreview)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Anything that pushes us into the depths of our being is very hard to bear. I find it hard to bear. Sometimes I open a book that’s so beautiful I have to shut it because it hurts me. I can’t stand it. It’s like, Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! This is going to drive me into my own heart. A day or two days later I’m saying, All right, and I just surrender to it: Do it to me. Go ahead. I want it. I don’t want it. I want it. I don’t want it.

Marie Howe, from an interview taken by David Elliott (via violentwavesofemotion)

[exoergo]

Timbuktu's 'Badass Librarians': Checking Out Books Under Al-Qaida's Nose

Why it’s important

One of the things that I think is important to draw from it is to realize that there is this whole strain of Islam that is moderate, that celebrates intellectuality, that celebrates culture, that celebrates diversity, secular ideas, poetry, love, human beauty. I think that is lost in this debate that’s going on. We tend to really kind of turn against Islam because of the actions of this particularly violent group.

But I think in fact that the Islam represented by those in Timbuktu and the badass librarians is in fact more representative of what Islam is. And these people [who] were the real victims of extremism in this part of the world are fellow Muslims. They were the ones who really suffered. They were the ones who had their hands and feet chopped off, who had to live through the horror of daily occupation.

For the most part, we see this from afar, but these people are on the front lines and they are living through the horror of radicalism every day and every minute.

[exoergo]

:) More surprisingly, Bown detects the ideological version of enjoyment in the supposedly more dignified activity of reading radical critical theory. When critiques of capitalism, such as those of Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, even Zizek, are enjoyed for their prosecutorial tone, they become part of the very system of lack-producing desire that they are conceived against. Between the critical text and the reader's enjoyment of it, the capitalist subject is constructed as much as it is while spending six hours playing Football Manager. http://review31.co.uk/article/view/398/the-politics-of-fun

[exoergo]

Future Games

  By Alfie Bown

Stardew Valley provides the missing piece in a linear account of human history that traces our decline from pastoral paradise to the sterile postcapitalist desert

FROM The Walking Dead to Fallout, the gaming industry is currently obsessed with apocalypse. Long a staple of TV and cinema screens, the zombie has become even more prominent on PlayStations and computers. Added to zombie games are reams of other dystopias, from indie games like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and the already-cult classic Soma to big-budget productions like the BioShock series. As critics like Frederic Jameson, Slavoj Žižek, and Mark Fisher have all variously pointed out, such images of dystopian futures promote the dangerous idea that only capitalism separates us from a barren wasteland.

But these aren’t quite the only gaming options available to us. Visit the game-downloading site Steam today and among the top sellers you’ll find a game that bucks the trend. Rather than future dystopia, it offers the opposite: a return to the pastoral past. Stardew Valley, an indie-produced farming simulator, or “country-life simulator” as it’s even been called, has racked up a half million sales since February and has overtaken high-profile titles such as Grand Theft Auto 5 and Counter Strike. It might be easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but easier still, it seems, is imagining the resumption of pastoral serenity.

At first glance, one might see Stardew Valley as a reincarnation of Zynga’s FarmVille, the Facebook sensation of 2010 that has now, thankfully, largely left our screens. That game offered the chance to nostalgically harvest crops from our computers, but as with other games made by Zynga, such as Words With Friends and Mafia Wars, the real product being harvested is our Facebook friends, whom we put to use to increase our in-game scores (and then to seek approval for those scores). These so-called social games show us a pretty dystopian present in which (as Heidegger suggested) people themselves are as much our raw materials as crops are.

But Stardew Valley is quite different and has much more in common with Harvest Moon, first released on Super Nintendo in 1996. Like its forerunner this game is individual, practically impossible to share or even discuss with friends, and has no multiplayer feature. Far from connecting us to social and technological media, it’s an offer to escape from the modern computer society — one we can indulge in from in front of our computer screen.

So how has Stardew Valley, ostensibly the opposite of current trends, achieved its rise to the top? Though it seems to have little in common with gaming’s apocalyptic portraits of the future, it and other bucolic farming simulators actually provide a necessary counterpart. The gameplay in farming simulators involves organizing people, animals, and the natural environment, planting crops in systematic patterns and experiencing a routine life while playing a key role in a small community. Their picture of a lost era of tightly knit villages where humans lived in organic harmony with nature complements prophesies of a dystopic future in which humans are regimented components of a remorseless capitalistic machine. Farming simulators placate a need for a collective and organized past as an alternative to contemporary chaos.

This may make Stardew Valley seem like a criticism of modern capitalism, but in fact it does little to critique the supposed inevitability of capitalism. Instead it provides the missing piece in a linear account of human history that traces our decline from pastoral paradise to the sterile postcapitalist desert. The best we can do is take comfort in memories and in the fact that we are not further along the inescapable path of destruction.

Stardew Valley offers only the consolations of nostalgia, described by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia as “the search for collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world.” In the past of Stardew Valley we can escape to a world where we are once again “free” to be “human.”

The game’s 16-bit pixilation doubles up this nostalgia, evoking a lost age from the more recent past as well, when video games themselves weren’t as complicit and prefigurative of our coming doom — at least in people’s memory of them. It incorporates elements of Zelda, Pokémon, and other ’90s games that are evocative of a gentler past when games, we imagine, were more “pure,” “organic,” and uncorrupted. It was a time when games really were seen as an escape from the political and social world — an argument that seems defunct today, when games seem to more overtly reflect or distill sociopolitical conflicts.

This ambiance of escape sets Stardew Valley’s in contrast with FarmVille. Whereas FarmVille was fully symbiotic with Facebook, seizing on Facebook’s technological affordances to propagate itself even as it seemed to soften the social network’s neoliberal edges, Stardew Valley is more ambivalent about its medium. Its opening scene, a 16-bit reworking of the opening of Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), presents a bird’s-eye view of a regimented contemporary office space, a cubicle farm in which workers are conjoined to computers that are presumably in the process of supplanting them.

Trapped in gray walls beneath remorseless fluorescent lighting, these workers are cut off from nature and “real” life, but the game offers us a way out via a faux old-timey letter (obviously not an email) inviting us to return to more authentic work tilling the soil.

Of course, this pastoral escape itself demands immersion in a computer simulation.

Stardew Valley addresses this apparent conundrum differently than FarmVille. While FarmVille is nothing more than a masked version of social-capital building, Stardew Valley seems to want to ironize and distance itself from its simulator nature, using retroness as an alibi to make it seem something other than another contemporary extension of computerization deeper into our lives. In presenting itself as a kind of meta-game, Stardew Valley confronts players with the bizarre paradox that a return to the past is at once imaginable and impossible. Ultimately, the game’s demonstrative awareness of its paradoxical position instantiates Octave Mannoni’s idea of Freudian fetishist disavowal: “I know very well, but even so…” Stardew Valley knows very well that it is impossible, but let’s dream of pastoral serenity anyway.

***

While Mark Fisher might be right when he recently pointed out that dismissing things as “nostalgic” can be a pretty useless gesture, what we need is further analysis of the peculiar kinds of nostalgia specific to our particular moment. In the case of Stardew Valley, its romanticization of the past serves only to solidify our fear of the future. It teaches us to deal with contemporary alienation through wistful backward glances at an irretrievable past. Though it seems innocuous enough, it resonates with Donald Trump’s calls to “make America great again,” as well as with various European dreams of exiting the E.U. to return to some prelapsarian national serenity in isolation.

As the game’s Joja Corporation — a blend of Wal-mart, Coca-Cola, and Google — starts its inevitable takeover of your peaceful village economy, Stardew Valley‘s nationalistic indictment of internationalism becomes unmistakable. This is no left critique of corporate globalization but a call for isolationist retreat. Stardew Valley’s image of small-scale self-sufficiency draws from the same impulse to erect walls at borders and seek local salvation through exporting immiseration. Tellingly, the village in Stardew Valley has a bus stop but the bus has broken down, severing the connection between it and the rest of the world.

Stardew Valley’s popularity reflects the difficult political position of the left today. The fact that internationalism is understood as synonymous with the iniquitous capitalist disaster of globalization is preventing the development of solutions on a broad enough scale to address global crises. The task for future games is to posit genuine alternatives and succeed at doing what conservative artifacts like Stardew Valley fail to do. In the new Existential Gamer magazine, a publication that asks gamers to “review themselves” in order to explore the connection between gaming and subjectivity, I argued that Supergiant’s latest game Transistor might offer something like a tech-positive way to revolt, inviting us to embrace ourselves as technological beings.

Such ideas may be comparable with ideas of those such as Erik Olin Wright, whose Envisioning Real Utopias pointed out that it was not so long ago that both the left and the right could easily imagine alternatives to capitalism. Like Varoufakis and Srećko Horvat, whose new project DiEM25 is at least a concrete example of internationalist alternative organization, video games could do something other than dream of national serenity through isolation.

But the problem is not that we have only dystopia and no utopian alternatives. Rather Stardew Valley’s popularity suggests that both dystopia and utopia have been appropriated by the right to make capitalism appear the only alternative. We can dream only of tempering its destructiveness. We are still waiting for the video game that offers real hope rather than a nostalgic return to the past.

[lifeinpoetry]

Naming, however kind, is always an act of estrangement. (To put         into language that which can’t be put.)

— Aracelis Girmay, from “The Black Maria,” The Black Maria

[exoergo]

Left-Keynesian economist John Galbraith: before a trip to USSR in the late 1950s, he wrote to his anti-Communist friend Sidney Hook: “Don’t worry, I will not be seduced by the Soviets and return home claiming they have Socialism!” Hook answered him promptly: “But that’s what worries me—that you will return claiming the USSR is NOT socialist!” What worried Hook was the naïve defense of the purity of the concept: if things go wrong with building a Socialist society, this does not invalidate the idea itself, it just means we didn’t implement it properly. Do we not detect the same naivety in today’s market fundamentalists?

When, during a TV debate in France a couple of years ago, the French intellectual Guy Sorman claimed that democracy and capitalism necessarily go together, I couldn’t resist asking him the obvious question: “But what about China today?” Sorman snapped back: “In China there is no capitalism!” For the fanatically pro-capitalist Sorman, if a country is non-democratic, it simply means it is not truly capitalist, but practices its disfigured version, in exactly the same way that for a democratic Communist Stalinism was simply not an authentic form of Communism.

[exoergo]

‘Imbeciles’ and ‘Illiberal Reformers’

Progressivism was always more than a single cause, however. Attracting reformers of all stripes, it aimed to fix the ills of society through increased government action — the “administrative state.” Progressives pushed measures ranging from immigration restriction to eugenics in a grotesque attempt to protect the nation’s gene pool by keeping the “lesser classes” from reproducing. If one part of progressivism emphasized fairness and compassion, the other reeked of bigotry and coercion. “Imbeciles,” by Adam Cohen, the author of “Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America,” examines one of the darkest chapters of progressive reform: the case of Buck v. Bell. It’s the story of an assault upon thousands of defenseless people seen through the lens of a young woman, Carrie Buck, locked away in a Virginia state asylum. In meticulously tracing her ordeal, Cohen provides a superb history of eugenics in America, from its beginnings as an offshoot of social Darwinism — human survival of the fittest — to its rise as a popular movement, advocating the state-sponsored sterilization of “feeble­minded, insane, epileptic, inebriate, criminalistic and other degenerate persons.” According to the New York attorney Madison Grant, whose immensely influential 1916 tract, “The Passing of the Great Race,” became standard reading for eugenicists — Hitler himself is said to have called it “my bible” — about 10 percent of Americans produced unworthy offspring and had to be stopped Holmes’s opinion was no isolated misstep. He would later describe Buck v. Bell as an assignment that “gave me pleasure.” As Cohen says, “eugenics was a movement of people who believed themselves to be inherently superior, and in Holmes it found a fitting judicial standard-bearer.” Holmes never questioned the version of Carrie Buck’s life provided by Virginia authorities because it was exactly what he wanted to hear. In fact, almost every part of that narrative was untrue. There was no evidence that Emma or Carrie or Vivian was feebleminded. That judgment was first made by local officials who viewed the Bucks as shiftless, immoral women — and Vivian as someone likely to grow up the same way. In ranking Carrie as a “middle-grade moron” — a category somewhat higher than “imbecile” — ­authorities relied on the notoriously flawed Binet-Simon Intelligence Test, which, when administered to more than a million mostly white recruits during World War I, showed 47 percent of them to be ­feebleminded. Bell performed Carrie’s sterilization himself, vowing “to apply the pruning knife with vigor and without fear or favor.” The logic was simple: Sterilization not only protected the public but also benefited people like Carrie by allowing them to quickly rejoin society instead of spending their reproductive years in an institution. At the colony, the operation became a regular part of daily life — “men on Tuesdays, women on Thursday.”