Logothanatos

Temporary holding place for posts.

[kaban-bang]

#remember when people said Flip Flappers wasn't queer/was queerbait bc they didn't kiss I do and I remember being utterly frustrated at how there is literally a scene where a sexy lingerie devil version of her own repressed sexuality lays on a love hotel bed with her and tells her pretty well outright that she's gay and ignoring it

Or the fact that their ultimate transformation was wedding gowns?

but people are too dumb to read and they didn't Kiss so it doesn't count

[ancient-hoe]

Transfiguratio Mortis, by Emil Melmoth.

[logothanatos]

What it feels like to yawn when you’ve just woken up.

[logothanatos]

A Summation of Where We Are in Our Economic Polity

Just to remind people of the interconnected causes of this and why traditional solutions do not work, either long-term or short-term:

(1) Expansion of credit as representative of the problems with Keynesianism, even with the element of fiat currency: just as wages remained stagnant, labor-intensive companies in particular needed a way to maintain sales/purchases, requiring the invention on consumer credit (everybody and their mother having a credit card was the new "financial innovation"). What many on the center-left, or many liberals, do not realize is that this is a form of private Keynesianism. Like State Keynesianism, it tries to solve economic downturns by increasing consumer spending. The main difference is the incentives in chosen tactic: "private Keynesianism" will generally turn to lending. However, public-sector Keynesianism can rely on such private Keynesianism by relying on bonds to cover for deficits. Generally this is not a problem except politically, as, with fiat, the State has special authority to just print money when it needs to spend. This is why a lot of people support public Keynesianism and balk at private Keynesianism. Nonetheless, the problem with that is that its accompanied with an attempt to control interest rates, which can encourage or discourage lending, putting it at a continuum with private Keynesianism. The other problem with that is that the spending still fuels concentration because it doesn't actually address the distribution of the consequent growth, which may force the State to double-down in the next inevitable crises, albeit by moving the stimulus money to pay the wages of expanded public sector employment.

This itself has clear downsides even if its better than being jobless, because as this sector grows the State can increase surveillance and becomes less accountable for rights violations. State and corporate officials become less distinguishable, and their long-term counter-reaction to slow growth from people both spending into and producing in the public sector (wherein no profit is produced) would be a public-private partnership solution where public services are privatized through contracting, allowing an addition to the exchange network that can expand the market for taxation of exchange or at point of distribution (e.g., "income tax"). So the public sector again contracts, while seemingly staying the same size. It's a way to keep spending happening outside the public/State system via the State consuming the services of private companies and without getting rid of public services altogether. This may seem irrational, but the State relies on revenue with which it can promise to do more in the future under condition that the economy grows. But economic growth relevant to any particular State in a capitalist world-system requires competing for human capital that knows how to turn a profit, or competing for blocks of concentrated capital in the form of company financial assets.

Getting out of a downturn through Keynesian stimulus puts the State in a tense position as a collective consumer of private sector production (pro-development) and a middle-man extractive of exchange in the market (pro-growth). The downfalls of private Keynesianism are simply replicated differently in the public sector: rather than a contradiction between cost reduction in labor-power and spending, public Keynesianism involves a contradiction between the State desire for development and infrastructural maintenance, and the conditions of growth necessary to the stable revenue for this development and infrastructural maintenance. To reiterate and make the point clearer: As long as we're in a global capitalist world-system wherein the relative State revenue relies on domestic growth we will have this issue, because competing for national economic growth in the world market means competing for the migration and flow of capital (i.e., attracting the migration or transfer of concentrated blocks of capital, which in capitalism is represented by CEOs and rich guys, not large swaths of workers at those companies who produce the capital in the first place). States do this in order to have revenue to engage in development, but the contradictory nature of this strategy is that growth in a capitalist world-system relies on actively undermining, slowing down, or repurposing development. We need a new economic strategy, which may require reconceptualizing politics entirely as a prerequisite. This point forward should involve institution-building without getting caught in a false public/private dichotomy that only makes sense in liberal capitalism.

Another issue is that, insofar as fiat money has such a negligibly low labor-intensive cost of production that it is essentially valueless relative to other commodities under capitalism (commodities to which it is not anchored in any regulatory fashion as was the case with commodity-money [e.g., gold, silver] and non- fractional reserve banking [wherein the proportion of representations of gold and silver to gold and silver lacked deviation]), the worth of fiat money is disproportionately dependent on largely psychosocial factors, such as: (a) trust, (b) the stability of norms surrounding how exchanges are tracked and notated and social control over this tracking and notation system, (c ) ongoing primitive accumulation and State consumption (as a way to ensure future resources that can back current confidence in the usefulness of the currency). This means governments that rely on Keynesian policy (and the pro-private sector counter-reaction it itself produces), which presupposes pure fiat money, are also more likely to engage in nefarious activity--even if counter-productive--to try and enforce trust in the State, to develop centralized systems that actively presuppose a Too-Big-Too-Fail relationship with banks (and then by extension other companies and financial institutions) during crises periods (undermining free market competition), and to develop a stronger reliance on ongoing, rather than periodic, war-like military campaigns for resource extraction and foreign State destabilization. The latter is somewhat connected with the persistence of the dollar as an international reserve currency, and with anthropogenic climate change. Regarding anthropogenic climate change, one of the resources that become important, for example, is fuel. Herein, capitalism has become as abstract as it possibly can: just as labor-power becomes the object of commodification, and the laborer the subject of exploitation, under capitalism, so the Earth represented abstractly as fuel gains importance as a commodity for capitalism. But this abstraction only becomes concretely clear and realized under a fiat system--no longer anchored on commodities, it tries to anchor itself on energy itself (the possibility or potential of commodities and commodity production) through increasing its usefulness for exchange via increasing commodification of fuel. In this way, an incentive is created by State use of fiat to attack the subsistence, and thereby means of reproduction, of/for labor, whether domestically or abroad.

This is why States are willing to sacrifice the welfare part of the budget to maintain or increase military spending. Indeed, this is so much the case that policing has become necessary to enforce the usefulness of fiat for exchange, even if sometimes indirectly in the form of State protection of fuel extraction (i.e., DAPL). Force, and the fuel used to reinforce the lifestyles of industrial societies that everyone--including workers who depend on employment in the wage-labor system--has invested in (albeit to varying degrees and in different ways), is what (sometimes ironically) inspires confidence in the usefulness of fiat for exchange. Fiat systems prop up our contemporary unsustainable lifestyles by mediating our relationship to the military that sustains this lifestyle, and in doing so allows us to maintain confidence in that fiat via maintaining confidence in that lifestyle. One can object that the State doesn't need to fund the military--it could do something else, and indeed States are meant to do something else. The concern of a State is development, and so it thereby should very well be funding other things. However, this is naive thinking, because growth (an increase in total product, in this case financial as taxation extracts money) is a precondition for reinvestment in development. The only situation in which this is not the case is in an economy that doesn't rely on monetary/financial growth to "function" (i.e., to increase standard or quality of living), even if it uses money, and in a polity that doesn't rely on taxation for funding maintenance and production of infrastructure as well as management of hypothetically publicly accessible goods.

(2) Reversal of bank regulations: Glass-Steagall in particular--this meant bankers and investors could further socialize the risks of their ventures (e.g., displace them onto the average American, which would have been the middle-class teetering on working class). This means that, just as growth is disproportionately distributed in the economy, so are the financial costs or financial risks of that growth more easily distributed disproportionately when you abolish the legal separation of commercial banking operations from investment banking operations. Failed investors become more key players in economic performance given socialized risks, and so they are more likely to get huge bailouts with State as insurer while the involvement of everyday people's funds in this speculation is rendered invisible, such that they do not get similar insurance for risk. People keep saying the justice system doesn't work or that its broken. This is wrong--breaking the law is in some ways fundamental to maintaining the conditions that make the so-called justice system possible and functional. What we need to do is rethink the place law has in society and in what contexts a law-based approach to problem-solving is appropriate. This does not mean simply interrogating the appropriate scope of the law, but what scale is appropriate to it and what states of affairs make it effective or efficacious and whether it is in turn appropriate to universalize those states of affairs that make law possible. In any case, if one wants to get rid of Glass-Steagall, one should at least make a stand against TBTF (Too-Big-To-Fail) policies, whether by opposing bail-outs or universalizing them within jurisdiction. Otherwise, instantiate Glass-Steagall. Since States have little incentive to do the former, the latter should be the default approach even if it's not a fundamental solution. There are likely more foundational ways in which private companies socialize their costs and risks, as is concretely observed in the case of environmental externalities and the outsourcing of defense of property (or one's claimed rights in relation to a resource) to the State rather than negotiating directly with those in dispute who themselves fund the State relied on to defend property. This shows property, in particular its "enforcement," needs to be entirely rethought as well, and that the question of ownership cannot be treated separately from the question of renumeration.

(3) Tax cuts for the bourgeoisie, repressing progressive taxes on things other than income, or changing the extent of the tax progression (whether legally or through private use of loopholes in the tax code): This lead to a contraction in public services or public service workers that would have otherwise compensated for the subsequent loss in real wages in the private sector (though even this is not certain, since politicians who want control over administration are likely to keep more of the revenue--without public unions, all this does is stave off unemployment rather than treat the wage issue). But public sector employment comes at the cost of workers giving up control over their spending and giving it over to governmental officials or majority will. This latter part in particular lead to racialized/ethnicized conflicts amongst different segments of the working and middle class regarding the conditions and criteria of funding, especially given de facto segregation makes the societal benefits of welfare invisible to, or underrepresented for, those segments that pay relatively more into it. It also makes for conflicted and hostile relationships between consumers of public services and the government officials tasked with providing it. This undermines the conditions for quality of service, and can lead to bad living conditions independent of funding. Further, there will always be a cycle of raising and cutting taxes on the rich precisely because of the contradictory goals of the State mentioned in earlier points. We then either need an alternative financing scheme for public employment, or we need to completely rethink ourselves out of the public/private dichotomy, and deal with a more concrete institutional science. Thinking in terms of resource management techniques can in many situations (though not all) be better, and perhaps even a lot clearer than talking about kinds of property while treating property as a monolithic thing (as opposed to a bundle of distinct and merely adjacent rights-claims), or talking about mere allocation of funds.

(4) Globalization: It introduced an international labor glut for concentrated American capital, making companies devalue labor given a higher supply of then highly competitive labor, increasing investment in human capital (which, together with the creation of consumer credit, produced a market for education financing to leverage against other potential competing labor through fluidity of employment), and caused domestic growth in the service sector due to the higher costs the first-world/US standard of living posed for manufacturing and old-school industrial production. Economic nationalism will not solve this because it is not going to increase either spending or investment in a domestic economy. Labor-intensive corporate capitalist companies of scale are not attracted by nationalism unless it allows them to monopolize a chunk of uniquely devalued labor-power by restricting that labor's migration, and if it doesn't affect their own mobility (or the company's CEOs and shareholder's mobility). They might disproportionately export or lend to an economically nationalist country (if allowed), provided high consumption, but that's about it. And high consumption won't exist anyway in an already dwindling economy. Economic nationalism is beneficial only to smaller businesses and startups (the latter of which have an independent high failure rate) as well as politicians (who can expand influence/control over the domestic populace and increase policing of lower class individuals who deviate from work ideology, which includes NEETS, lumpenproles, the disabled, and the very people who use public services). The smaller businesses, however, would not necessarily improve the standard of living of workers unless they are either publicly sanctioned or play an entirely different competitive game than the capitalists are playing, as they support economic nationalism only for the sake of achieving initial scaling more easily--without the competitive pressure of multinationals in the domestic economy. This means, long-term, it would still decrease the real wage, even if there might be a short-term initial pay-off to stricter restriction of migration (that's if such restrictions can even really be enforced given the large volume of immigration consequent of imperial military operations + global warming--so we're not likely to even see the short-term benefit, though some small business peeps might). Another reason small businesses would be interested is that, if they are in charge of a labor-intensive business, some of them may intend to pressure for a jubilee on entrepreneurial debt and this is easier when labor migration (dynamic labor supply) can't be relied on to shoulder or pass on the debt. What we need to do is finally allow creditors to fail, jubilee or otherwise. And what we need to do is change the pace of globalization, in accord with the theoretical developments allowed by global communication and a realistic view to the potential cultural impassès of distinct communities. Economies should be leveraged to promote friendly relations that break through cultural barriers--the initial dream of globalization--but without the imbalances of State created by multinational corporations and their tax obligations and military enforcers.

(5) Automation: Automation provided the conditions for profit-motivated companies to save on the monetary costs of labor-power (reducing or maintaining the nominal wage level, ultimately reducing the real wage level). It also created the conditions to expand the service sector as a reaction to the potential higher standard of living computers and automation could have actualized for laborers. When economists talk about wages and productivity becoming decoupled, and also talk about a slow-down in production as well as productivity increasing, they're not being contradictory: what is meant is that wages and output productivity are decoupled, there is a slow down in monetary productivity (the rate of profit [even if accompanied by an increase in the mass and concentration of capital]), and that there is an increase in output productivity per machinery (i.e., an increase in the contribution of static/fixed capital to the value of goods) but a decrease in human output productivity defined separately from the efficiency gains of machinery (i.e., a decrease in the contribution of variable capital to the value of goods). Output productivity = goods per unit-time. Monetary productivity = $ per unit-time. When translated this way, it becomes clear how automation likely plays a role (esp. if you're a Marxist / Marxian economist). This, together with globalization, are likely the key factors that define our current economic age, and are the main things that must be tackled, without retreat into a past that cannot be returned to without even more significant cost to the economy and economic performance. Sales tax on automative technology can buy us time, but it will do nothing but this, and may actually deteriorate workers' potential standard of living by depriving them of technology that may aid quality of life. And it will do this while likely leaving real wages largely the same or only slightly slowing down their reduction. The nation would also then be in a bad position as other nations employing automation will have an absolute comparative advantage that may lead to a trade imbalance. It will not offset the costs of globalization, but may reinforce them. We should make no appeals to Luddism, and should instead challenge traditional business models.

(6) Dependence of growth of individuals' human capital on lending: the reliance of human capital growth on loans as a financial input leveraged social mobility (the formal ability to move through socioeconomic status as provided by a meritocracy) against itself by incentivizing predatory practices against competing labor among those more successful. Or it leveraged it against itself by making human capital unusually strongly linked to social capital as a condition for mobility. (Human capital = skills, talents, abilities of labor-power that can be transformed into cash payment; social capital = social networks that can likewise be transformed into cash payment.) The latter unusually strong linking of human capital with social capital protects the value of a particular in-group or network of labor (also strengthening media gatekeeping as a result at the same time that symbolic practices of introducing diversity into media have grown). The most concrete manifestation of this is the college loan system (which students do not equally rely on for ability to attend or remain enrolled), but there are plenty of other, less direct manifestations (e.g., people working earlier or pressuring others to get into work earlier, more drawn-out deferral of retirement benefits, the push for Obamacare as opposed to public option, the growth of adjunct work in academia, the increased difficulty in finding a job at the same time that the number of degree-wielding people has increased). Clearly, this undermines the education system, but in a sense the education system undermined itself in the context of globalization and the new financial economy given it has always tried to perform a double-function that isn't always compatible (growth of human/social capital v. promotion of human/social development, creativity, and exploration). Which means, the education system has a serious weakness, and is not a long-term solution to the ossification meritocratic systems tend to periodically undergo. Further, nationalism and traditional education tend to go hand in hand: the aforementioned personal development, creativity, and exploration happens within the context of the reproduction of cultural legacy that promotes historical self-understanding and, thereby, cultural competence and social awareness. But this was restricted to the notion of the national culture, and campuses were comfortable in existing in, and recruiting from, insulated geographies. If we wish to double-down on the demands of culture without falling for reactionary hypernationalist and nativist temptations, we need to completely remodel how education takes place in and outside of classrooms, and part of this requires tackling the incorporation of technology and attempting to eliminate the social isolation labor "fluidity" and self-commodification has produced as well as the cynicism nominally noble institutions reliant on lending socialize their consumers into. Clearly this mixture, together with aforementioned economic factors, has been deadly: there is an increase in social conflict, hostility and violence. But people mistake this as being the problem. This is not the problem. In fact, the incidence in these things has been rather low considering the stakes. It's more likely for people to turn depressive, despairing and suicidal these days, in their passivity, than for them to lash out. We are actually afraid of being destructive--even those that have lashed out have lashed out, out of fear about each other's destructiveness. What we need to do is organize this impulse and identify a clear target--recognizing that this target is probably not any particular individual, but a whole infrastructure and an internalized system of tidiness, neatness and orderliness that has not only regimented our labor but now begins to want to encroach on the use of our leisure, even as we now perhaps have more leisure (as is alleged). Break your office desk.

[logothanatos]

Is There Really Such a Thing as a "Communist"?

While I still share dank commie memes or I sometimes use the term "communism" with a positive valence, substantively I'm not exactly a communist, at least in no traditional sense. I am only a "communist" in the same sense Zizek speaks of being a communist: our political aspirations involve prioritizing the problems that arise from our relationship to the commons, and involve determining what the commons can have a claim to in the face of a normative dogma of individual exclusivity in appropriation.

I think traditional communist discourse is often stuck in a private v. public property false dichotomy, and also seems to understand "private property" in either vague terms, or in a sort of composite way which conflates various different rights claims, treats the problem of ownership norms primarily in terms of rights, and treats private property's existence as inseparable from the institutional practices around the management of both labor and the means of production (which makes some amount of intuitive sense if ownership is conceived only in the former two ways). This mirrors the same sort of approach to property as pro-capitalists who hole to liberal political philosophy. Even vaguer is perhaps the boundary, institutionally, between public and private property when public property is taken as synonymous to State property with "public" access (which is not at all times strictly enforced)--except perhaps in the method of acquisition (funded by tax, acquired through eminent domain, etc.) and in its societal justification (representation of the people, a proviso logic to seizing perfectly legal property, etc.). In any case it would still seem that the use, acquisition, and proper justification of either of those, by the State, are, under Statist ideology, fully under the prerogative of the State (whether or not it has obligations to the people, such as democratic representation or republican constitutionalism).

That is, after all, what the political notion of sovereignty recognizes abstractly, in which case "public property" simply seems to be a notion of private property proffered as appropriate at the scale or level of the political society, wherein its proper use is defined based on political morality or social purposes. That this property relies on giving legitimacy to the particular notion of political society at hand that places limits on sovereignty (namely territorial limits, which is akin to limits based on property), is a superficial difference insofar as the norms and conception of ownership is the same: the right to some territory, by some peaceful means of acquisition, and with a right to abandonment, and with delegation of some of these rights to others in smaller parcels via title. That States are non-ideal and may violate legitimate acquisition or fail to recognize illegitimate abandonment is a matter of practical history, and has little baring on the theoretical notion of what constitutes a State. If anything, private property as oft understood is also affected by non-ideal histories. So if the only difference between private property and public property is the subject who owns--in this case the political society whose ownership is thereby characterized as jurisdiction over a territory--then the issues and implications surrounding a theory of property are equivalent for both of them.

That there are contradictions herein whereupon homesteading private owners have full rights to their property but, by virtue of the political society, have those rights on offer by the State, is no surprise, as it is the sort of thing one can expect from a labor theory of property that dodges solving the problem of criteria for abandonment and scope of acquisition by positing a largely ad hoc utilitarian proviso. But this is ultimately to cede ground to an ultimate arbiter of what is owned as opposed to building an actual theory of property, as neither abandonment nor acquisition are merely marginal concerns in a theory of property. The supposed utility of this approach, in other words, is a contingency brought about by the weakness of the underlying theory of property. When Locke, for example, like some other political thinkers (e.g. Rousseau), speaks of the gap between rights without societal recognition and rights with societal recognition, he immediately hopes to close the gap through God and, his subsidiary, the State.

But the gap is not really closed in this manner--rather, the State is simply another agency of its own within the particular society, whose interests do not manifestly reflect those of its subjects even under democratic governance. If recognition of one's property cannot be acquired from others in the society, one would expect this to be even less so from those who wish to represent or exceed society. A theory of property must determine both a means of property, and a means to that means--it must determine a "final cause," e.g. that final thing for which acquisition is no longer a question but rather is its basis. For Locke the connection between the self's ownership of land and products and the labor made possible by these and the body was God's grace and dominion over the rewards of self and his original gift to self via endowment of the body, and for most liberals it was the State (through legal title), which merely acted as a subsidiary to God in this respect. The more intelligent anarcho-capitalists recognize the problem with these, at the least, although they pretended to solve the problem with "self-ownership," in which the subject and object of ownership are the same but the scope and criteria of such ownership is still indeterminate given the indeterminacy of the subject-object, and its powers, through which it is thought acquisition and abandonment are initiated. Western thought is thereby stuck within a monotheistic or anthropocentric notion of dominion and stewardship, with a Great Chain of Being that puts humanity closer to the substance of things and thereby to the purely creative power of God. The evidence of this fixation is precisely the way theories of property are provided and structured. It is no wonder that the practical implications have been Western imperialism, whether or not this fixation could be enumerated as any significant or primary cause rather than a rationalization. There is of course something to this idea of purely creative power, but so far it doesn't seem particularly useful on the subject of ownership insofar as it precisely proceeds from something which must already lack creation (in the case of ownership, acquisition), and thereby something which creation cannot affect (in the case of ownership, thereby something that cannot be acquired).

Not to digress, but rather to return to the traditional communist engagement with issues of property, when public (or, in this case, common) property is conceived without the State the notion is inadequate--it gives us scant information on how the negotiation of use among participants take place, let alone what ideal "public" management would look like. And this is crucial from even differentiating it from private property, to the extent that such negotiations are precisely what determines publicly recognized claims individuals have for use (and, thereby in retroactive fashion, "acquisition" and "abandonment") of a certain scope or aspect of the so-called "public property." In such a case it seems that the communist is looking at the State as a model for the practice of ownership (even as it advocates a "stateless society," which would then simply seem to mean a society without State enforcement of, or protection of, a "private sector"), while the anarcho-capitalist is looking at the private sector as a model for the practice of ownership (even as it advocates a "stateless society," which would then simply seem to mean a society of private fiefdoms, rent-based proprietary communities, and more fragmented sovereignties, effective through absolute control over access--not something too different from the State, except ideally constrained in its territory by base rules of acquisition correspondent to its outer interactions [no war of conquest, etc.]).

For, it then becomes clear that it is hierarchy as such--albeit a democratic one (collective over individual) for the communist, and an autocratic/dictatorial one for the anarchocapitalist (individual over collective)--that is given as a basis for the claim a property. This is why, for the communist, the administrative use of a good must be specified prior to the existence of any level of individual ownership, whereas for the anarchocapitalist the right must be specified prior to the use and defended through market services. That is, for the communist, the dominant collective power must decide whether the ownership claim would be justified, and it can do this not through a notion of rights (as rights are precisely distributed by the collective according to its prerogatives), but on the basis of what it sees as a potential valid use for the goods in question. For the anarchocapitalist, no such justification to society is necessary, except insofar as one has a right which pre-exists society and must be fought for and defended against encroachment (through market services), and whose existence must be rationally demonstrated to other individuals. It's no wonder then that while communists were required to be anarchist, their treatment of property and sovereignty fetishized the liberal State to such an extent that it would be seen as a means towards statelessness (the famous "self-abolition" theory). This theory of self-abolition is not entirely absurd, as the proliferation of the State form across society would also be equally experienced as the swallowing up of the State into the private sector as a key actor or asset for the market, precisely in its defense of transaction costs through legal property titles and thereby its indirect enforcement of traditional management through its enforcement of contracts. But it does not guarantee statelessness--rather, it can mean mercenary warlordism, embroiled elites, and extremely unstable and erratic, yet versatile, legal systems. An extensive war economy and commodification of death/outrage, rather than statelessness.

And there is more than one way for the State to expand--the State can expand without the State form expanding. We see inklings of the aforementioned symptoms, for example, in big-C Communist countries, although the hierarchical structure makes sure that this potential is stymied into, precisely, an extensive centralized war economy with versatile legal systems that seem less unstable or erratic due to cultural hegemony expressed in the form of propaganda and political paranoia. While there is no commodification of death or outrage, the ominpresence of propaganda is a redirection of that energy into State-sanctioned messages that at least promise outrage--against Western capitalist imperialists, for example. This is an expansion of the State, though not of the State form. Also notice that the contrast between the communist and anarcho-capitalist has nothing to do with markets. That communists seem vehemently anti-market means nothing, insofar as this anti-market stance is merely a function of this more central valuing of public/common property over private property. But precisely this, practically speaking, fails to preclude the forces of the market, insofar as the notion of "public/common property" is always haunted by that of private property. This is clearly the case in the big-C Communist countries insofar as they had black markets, and it is also visible in the post-Maoist, state capitalist PRC.

This is why my approach is not traditionally "communist"--rather, it involves an intersubjective theory of property which dissolves even the need to solve the problems posed by other sorts of property theories, and consequently is not dogmatically against individuals owning some means of production. In fact, if communists wish to ride the coat tails of automation and post-industrial production, they must recognize that the low costs of both acquiring and producing machinery for mass production of intricate, detail-oriented products means that some forms of production not traditionally done in a decentralized, private or individualized manner, will now be done precisely in this way. This is especially so when the boundary between production and consumption are institutionally blurred by the increased importance of the possession and distribution of information in production--communication itself, in other words, has become a form of production or a power for material production. The means of production is not a monolith, and this is the sort of nuance one must introduce when talking about Marx's notion of collective seizure of the means of production. Marx's blanket call for collectively seizing the means of production also suffered from the same ailments as the notion of "public" or "collective" property aforementioned: Does this mean democratic management of the means of production? Where does one practically draw the line between a means of production and those things which merely produce--is drawing a clear line concretely possible, although some technology or other is seen as key to productivity in relation to key products, to the accumulation of wealth, etc. (as capitalism can make evident)? Does "collective seizure" mean adequate mechanisms of distribution of the means of production to individuals in society (such distribution mechanism collectively managed)? Does it merely mean distribution of the surplus to society as a whole, equally or proportionately (as understood by the Communist economies)? Does it mean central planning by democratic representatives of the people (as it at least nominally meant to the Communist states)? Would some things be outside of democratic management? Etc. Straightforward answers to any of these are likely to be unsatisfactory if they do not sufficiently address the problems which may arise, or diminish the extent of adverse effects which may arise, due to a poverty in property theory, in moral, political and economic terms.

Nonetheless, the blanket call for collective or social seizure of the means of production makes sense historically--in Marx's time, massively productive machinery were almost exclusively huge and highly costly, as well as being less informationally rich in their production process, and less computationally involved. Landlord-merchants could afford to both acquire and store these machines in mass over time as well as patronize their development and had exclusive easy access to infrastructure by which to distribute any resulting surplus so that they may be able to take advantage of the machinery's productivity. And of course, between the landlords and the merchants there was a battle for a beneficial arrangement, leading to the restructuring of land ownership (the English Enclosures). This state of affairs thereby allowed merchants to leverage management power through both contract and initial familiarity with the workings of the machines. They were also machines with highly specialized parts that correlated with different steps in the process of production in a single, unitary product, requiring coordination among the machines that was deliberate, attentive, and careful, or more generally calculated when it came time to exchange any surplus. The landlord-merchants who owned or gave space to these masses of giant and interdependent machinery required manpower for use, surveillance and maintenance. The combined result was the eventual purchasing of labor-power and integration of the peasantry into the market-place, leading to rapid urbanization. Ergo, technology in this form during the process of industrialization was necessary to seize collectively because they could only be used, surveilled and maintained collectively. And in a sense, despite exploitation and employment management hierarchy, they indeed were used, surveilled, and managed collectively (making it ambiguous what is meant by "seize collectively," beyond its reductive negative goals under Marxism [e.g., abolishing wage-labor]). Information and computation-based machinery for production, even the larger, interdependent, costly ones, are much easier to surveil and use, though maintenance is still a huge cost given their need for storage space and the need to navigate that space when dealing with technical trouble-shooting. And these are the sorts of massive machines we are now left to deal with, though their markets have narrowed in tandem with the automation, downscaling and simplification of the production process.

Nonetheless, the nuance needed when understanding what it means to "seize the means of production" is why "communism" actually has some tension with Marxist theory. This tension is between the goal of Marxist communism and the goal's theoretical poverty, the latter of which naturally results from the fact that "communism" wasn't concretely understood in Marxism and also from the fact that Marx's theory of politics, culture, etc., suffered from economic reductionism (which is not the same as historical materialist thought--politics, culture, etc., can still be looked at materially without reducing them to those features salient to the methods of labor and exchange of its products in that society, although they must be looked at as things which are at the very least also produced [even if incidentally] and which may contribute to exchange [even if incidentally]). But perhaps its this fact--communism's theoretical poverty relative to Marxism--that makes communism "the real movement of society," rather than the movement produced by, or constitutive of, the ideology of communism. There is then really no such thing as a communist, except as someone with a series of libidinal historical attachments, who thereby tends towards the rehabilitation and fetishization of the big-c "Communist" countries of the U.S.S.R., Maoist PRC, etc., or otherwise tends towards a largely negative project that makes them indistinguishable from any other anarchist except in their privileging of Marxist critique of capitalism or their rejection of common anarchist principles and praxis. And then there is the bare-bones anarchist who is also a communist, in their sharing of oppositions and in the poverty of that anarchism. And then there is the sense of "communist" mentioned in the opening of this post: characterized by focusing on problems related to the need of, and encroachment on, the commons. And this is the sort that most captures all these other sorts, although it may also include those whose views are not canonically seen as "communist." It is also the sort that seems most relevant today. But to call oneself "communist" under this definition is to enumerate no solution--"communism" is not really a solution, given what has been said and what the psychology seems to involve.

[logothanatos]

Thoughts After Reading an Émile Durkheim Excerpt for a Course

One of the things I enjoy about Durkheim so far is the way he uses notions of both space and time to analyze society. It is rather ingenious. It does seem like the density and number of nodes on a social network have an effect on the way time is socially experienced across the network, as well as other features of society and how individuals experience society. Put in other terms, Durkheim links network topology (looking at a network as a geometrical object that can experience displacement of its components while preserving certain properties) with social ontology (the social being of the individuals that form the nodes of the given social network). I’d like to expand on this insight, since so far at least Durkheim is not incredibly clear about his reasoning process from quantitative population measures and network size to qualitative differences in solidarity. What he does make clear is the relationship between qualitative differences in solidarity and the sophistication of the division of labor. It is this which makes me not fully buy into Durkheim, and, I think, if I go over why this doesn’t make me buy into it in detail, it may reveal this comes from some of my sympathies for Marx.

So maybe I should think abstractly about social networks for a moment. For example, if you have millions of people you socialize with, each of whom know at least a subset of those who you socialize with, even if its to varying levels, one can say that your social network is “high density.” Perhaps we could measure density in terms of how often network links intersect with each other, and thereby how many times an intersection must happen (wherein the intersection is not yet another individual, and is thus not a node insofar as nodes are specified to be individuals in our analysis here). Or, perhaps, in terms of how many links are likely to radiate from any given node in the network. In any case, a high density network is going to affect each node’s experience of time insofar as each node’s traits remain constant (or, more generally, to the extent that nodes are constrained in their use of resources and their rate of capacity to reproduce themselves before they’re completely spent out of existence). That is to say, a high-density social network would make agents in them experience a higher pace life since it may require them to divide their time, however disproportionately they may do so, and it would also make agents in them experience higher risk in decision-making. Both of these are because:

Each node has to divide their time in a way correlated with the amount of links radiating from them, leading to a loss of integrated social information by which to make decisions, increasing uncertainty about the general reception of their personal/social decisions;

Each given node is more saturated with information that is of personal relevance (whether negative or positive), which means that cultural symbols lose consistency of meaning across groups and the likelihood of miscommunication across social groups is thereby high. Society can here then be said, not only to “speed up” since social formations become more ephemeral/flexible with higher density, but higher density can also put pressure on nodes in the network to the degree that there may be an incentive to meet social status goals more quickly or as quickly as other individuals.

Yet, Durkheim’s interpretation of this breaks down right here. It’s not enough for society to be high-density, in order that it speed up or accelerate. This already presupposes a generalized social status factor that requires a high degree of competition, due to its object being scarce (whether naturally or artificially). This is not a given. An alternate possibility is for high-density networks to incentivize the growth of each individual’s capacity for manipulating abstraction as well as each individual’s capacity for metacognition (or, capacity for entertaining a multiplicity of perspectives/interpretations of behavior).

In the same respect, it could then disincentivize them from relying on fight-or-flight, fear, etc., as sources of problem-solving. This is because the necessity of these skills seem to be latent in the fact that those individuals have to deal with more complex social networking (although, again, this is mediated by status-seeking). Further, Durkheim seems to see this “civilizing” force as, in retrospect, promoting individuation (i.e., increasing the average uniqueness of traits across individuals). But he never asks whether this individuation is on the individual’s own terms; he seems to implicitly think so since his language for describing what happens in this individuation is that society leaves a space open for the development of individual powers. He doesn’t say that society produces that uniqueness. Rather, for Durkheim it seems to be a side-effect of the space left open, to members of society, for independent action. This way of characterizing it may be a bit naive, for if indeed society also tends to speed up or accelerate with this process, it’s not clear where Durkheim’s assumption of agency comes in. Is it not the case that agency may be decreased given a loss of huge amounts of integrated social information available to the individual?

Even Durkheim’s point about specialization and the division of labor may not be straight-forward if its justified only on the basis of properties of the network. To illustrate: The other property of the network we can look at in terms of space is the number of nodes in the network. It seems obvious that, since any given level of density in a social network is also constrained by the quantity of nodes/agents in the network, a high number of nodes/agents in society is necessary but not sufficient for high network density. What, then, is the more direct impact of a high population of societal members on that same society, if it’s not necessarily high network density? Well, with higher population, a higher range of differentiation is possible simply because there is a higher number of possible permutations that may act as variables related to particular traits that may be manifest in individuals, and because there is a higher variability of possible distribution of individuals in that society across a whole geography. Higher population, then, is likely to increase diversity.

However, here’s where Durkheim’s optimism falls apart a bit: Durkheim interprets this diversity to mean specialization. The previous point I mentioned shows this to be a non-sequitor, as the skills that a high-density network can promote may allow for incredible ease at multi-tasking, integrated application of different skills as a single person, and an over-all improvement of performance across various domains. While the level of skill or performance in some things would still be higher than others, other skills and performance can nonetheless be high enough that tasks requiring them do not have to be outsourced to other labor so that the given project undertaken is successful. The relevant variable being what “successful” is, but it will involve an average understanding of success by that society that may not need to absolutely emphasize productivity (output per unit time, in money or product) or efficiency (trimming of labor extraneous to the basic expected average use of the product).

Even if we grant that the domain-general skills a high-density socially networked society demands of individuals need not prevent specialization even if may make it less necessary in more general terms, there’s another issue with Durkheim’s assumption that diversity means specialization: he lumps, or conflates, all division of labor as essentially the same. This makes his parallel between the development of mechanical solidarity into organic solidarity, and the development of low specialization to high specialization, quite suspect, even if we take it to be a logical/ontological claim (a claim about one thing’s logical dependence on another, or one thing’s dependence on another for its existence) rather than a historical claim (a claim about what came first in a temporal order, in actual fact). How is it suspect?

Well, given what has been said so far, it seems reasonable to say that mechanical solidarity can hold, internally, a high degree of specialization if it is extremely strict, as all mechanical solidarity requires is that individuals in the society be highly integrated into performing a single function at the societal scale. We see this in some ants. What it can’t incorporate is a flexible and highly dynamic allocation of individuals into particular divisions of labor. Organic solidarity, on the other hand, could probably internally hold both sorts of division of labor. In fact, we see this in how some societies are constituted by some rather essential social conflict due to the disproportionate significance given to certain divisions of labor, or in how the production of a division of labor may be largely related to culturally specified roles more than they are necessary to the material provision or production of goods in more general terms (this role having material necessity only to the extent such a contingency itself affects the politics of distribution of wealth and of the distribution of the returns on production). On the other hand, if we see history in terms of forces of production, as Marx does, we can see how this “cultural contingency” is not entirely a contingency, but a matter of the relative development of the forces of production from one point in history to another given both scarcity and the inextricability of consumption from the development of unified culture out of inconsistent norms and values.

[logothanatos]

[...] I felt if a man's proposals met with approval, it should encourage him; if they met with opposition, it should make him fight back; but the real tragedy for him was to lift up his voice among the living and meet with no response, neither approval nor opposition, just as if he were left helpless in a boundless desert. So I began to feel lonely. And this feeling of loneliness grew day by day, coiling about my soul like a huge poisonous snake. Yet in spite of my unaccountable sadness, I felt no indignation; for this experience had made me reflect and see that I was definitely not the heroic type who could rally multitudes at his call. However, my loneliness had to be dispelled, for it was causing me agony. So if I used various means to dull my senses, both by conforming to the spirit of the time and turning to the past. Later I experienced or witnessed even greater loneliness and sadness, which I do not like to recall, preferring that it should perish with me. Still my attempt to deaden my senses was not unsuccessful--I had lost the enthusiasm and fervor of my youth.

Lu Xun, Preface to Call to Arms p. 5

[logothanatos]

A Generalized Reaction to the "Science" of the Google Memo

The Conservative Bias of Exclusive Research Interest in Synchronic Rather than Diachronic Group Differences

First of all, why are we still prioritizing the discovery of synchronic gender differences over diachronic gender differences? Even if these differences have an inextricable biological dimension, and this dimension can explain behavioral predilections or preferences (even by significant gaps), it is nonetheless the case that phenotypes themselves are subject to social selection and that social selection mediates access to environmental factors that may prime preferences and predilections. The access to resources for phenotypic expression are both technically and socially mediated. The complexity is such that we can even treat susceptibility to large alterations in outcomes based on the presence or absence of an environmental trigger as itself a trait that can itself be selected for, both in the biological sense of natural selection and in the social sense (that may correlate with traits such as resilience). And in terms of social selection at least, we would imagine that there would be a bias towards selecting those more indifferent to environmental triggers than less in an over-all high-stress, highly-competitive status-seeking social environment.

This means the allocation of individuals to different social spaces is likely to make biology salient in any study where the "environment" is treated as homogeneous. Not because the biology has a generalizable significant contribution to trait differences, particularly in short-term time frames, but instead because, in a sense, we actively albeit unwittingly "choose" to give biological characteristics perceived as discrete and localizable importance, particularly as we use them for proxies of other things or associate them with other things. Note that in the literature, when the relative homogeneity or heterogeneity of "environment" is mentioned, it does not often actually include the social bonds formed amongst the given population but quantitatively common static technical and geoecological background features across individuals in the population. This itself is a philosophically narrow understanding of environment--it never occurs to anyone why such a narrow definition of environment is actually pertinent to the larger nature/nurture debate given it excludes in advance features that may be seen as key parts of environment, or views which argue the term "environment" carries largely contextual meanings that require some sort of synthesis.

The Suspicious Conflation Between Biological Influence and Agential Responsibility

 Biological causes for social phenomena are being mistakenly used to erase agency here. If biology were intractable, neither evolution nor development would be a thing in biology. This is why it tends to be normatively irrelevant. The real question that is far more complicated is whether we are using our agency as, say, "autonomous biological units," in fair ways, and this cannot be settled by merely treating differences in preferences or disposition as localizable and atomized and disconnected from each other, whether biologically or socially. The task of biological science should be limited to telling us what trade-offs we might expect in the short-term v. long-term in the sorts of changes we would like. The only point I agree with throughout this debacle is that expecting perfect gender parity (even gender-proportionate gender parity if across diverse social spaces) is unrealistic, esp. if seen as a permanent goal that has more priority over other issues. Some who support the Google memo have noted that gender discrimination, hostility, or tension can itself be a cause of rather than an effect of disparity. This seems to acknowledge sociological factors, except it doesn't because there seems to be a dichotomy regarding the causal direction. If indeed a lack of parity can cause disproportionate sexism, and disproportionate sexism can, aggregately, contribute to mass exodus from a field, then it is reasonable to assume there is a third variable that is more largely causally relevant. What triggers this seemingly circular causal relation, given its susceptible to infinite regression? What is this third variable? Culture--that is, symbolic-material communication that analogically underpins biology as much as society--and/or political ecology/economy! Culture is not simply the reaction people have to things (such that "culture" on one side here is the internal masculinized culture of the work space that can lead to disproportionate experiences of sexism, and "biology" is the preferences supposedly leading to the gender disparities)--culture is the whole pattern of action-reaction that we abstractly define in terms of norms and values regulating individual's conduct with each other. Now to get to the meat of what I find problematic about the science here.

The Major Flaw in All Scientific Studies Which try to Segregate Biological and Environmental Causes in Order to Make a Significant Claim Regarding the Intrinsic or Extrinsic Nature of a Trait

Perhaps a major flaw in these studies is always going to be the attempt to correct for sociological factors--the simple reason being that measures of sociological factors such as gender equity and gender egalitarianism cannot be operationalized without ignoring controversies surrounding what they effectively behaviorally entail. A lot of people arguing this seem to assume the normative conclusions that can be drawn from the science are straight-forward--this is simply not true given how we categorize social things (say, as gender equity or egalitarianism) in particular is highly dependent in advance on our normative model of society. That is, a study that is trying to draw conclusions about what gender equality ought to look like by having already taken for granted what "gender equality" looks like behaviorally isn't going to get very far. The studies require that we accept, then, this assumption that what is being corrected for unambiguously counts under these categories, so that the more statistical facts count towards a further normative conclusion. This is exactly why this is so controversial, and people keep discussing the data rather than its normative underpinnings. In the spirit of doing precisely otherwise, notice that all these studies rely on a liberal notion of equality that is primarily based on meritocratic juridical-legal interpretations of equal access to opportunity. The notion of "equity" is also fraught in that it assumes fairness and impartiality in the social selection process that is entangled with just-world meritocratic notions as a paradigm of equity (e.g., hence the sense that resoruce distribution is correct because given to the "deserving"), which seems to ignore that an impartial and fair selection process still may reproduce largely unequal starting places (and thus inequality of opportunity). And this is not necessarily always clearly compensated for through the welfare state (and even when it is, this corrective act presupposes precisely a lack of equity and equality in need of continual [even if not escalating] correction). This is literally one of the key arguments against meritocracy--just like capitalism is a system of capital accumulation, meritocracy is a system of "genetic asset" concentration into or by relatively insular social groups which is particularly a problem in a society with high wealth stratification, high status-seeking competition, artificial scarcity, ghettoization, etc.. It is especially a problem most importantly in the presence of power differentials (as the cultural gatekeepers' process of social selection begins to have undue importance to life outcomes across the board, since they stand in the way of not only access to the social group but to the resources necessary to attempt building the traits required by the group in the first place!). What's the relevance?

Well, a study of gender differences may well have accounted for income inequality or wealth stratification, but insofar as lessened income inequality and wealth stratification is because of State redistribution efforts or State employment and not a fundamental cessation of the aforementioned dynamic tendency, it does not cease the feedback loops involved in differing in-group culture between the sexes that affects receptivity to certain activities (as active interests, even for males, have a strong component of social feedback, perceived shared values, and/or openness to different aesthetic and organizational values) and it also also doesn't cease the self-fulfilling prophesy involved in gender polarization. In fact, we would expect the gender differences in "preference" to grow, because the sort of equity or egalitarianism we're talking about may simply protect women from the economic effects of taking lower-status work (e.g., State making up for loss in wages, etc.) without also threatening the male workplace culture that is a gatekeeper to this more high-paying sector of the labor market. Basically, the costs to being an asshole are the same if not lower in male-dominated fields, and women may be less willing to directly contest this given they can switch fields while having a social net to cushion them if the pay is low or working hours long. Indeed, mix this with two other factors, artificial scarcity (no, "equal opportunity" does not fix this problem) & excessive specialization, and the gap in gender differences is even further widened. That liberal egalitarian/equitable policies don't cease these differences--and that they may in fact exacerbate it--need not be explained in biological terms (tho we can draw a biological story). These liberal legal-juridical policies are insufficient to address gender differences even if they are fair, if the system as a whole unfairly incapacitates different groups of people from creating their own effective and sustainable social spaces by which to define the culture characterizing the process of production and management. In this case, there may remain gendered personality differences that may have a partially biological basis, but without any baring on its own on "preferences" in the grand scheme of things (the author of the Google memo is, after all, arguing biological personality and interest differences exist such that they would impede on "preference"). A positive liberty notion of freedom of association is key as something one would want to track in this sort of study in group differences in personality and interests, it would seem to me.

After all, what do you think a "preference" is, and how does one prove the presence of a preference? It can't just be that women choose divergent paths along gender because they have the flexibility or opportunity to do so--how do we know choices ever reflect actual preferences? Are professed preferences more real than acted-on preferences or vice versa? Do individual or discrete preferences have effects on observed or chosen behavior independent of other preferences? Whether or not gender (in its biological or social dimensions) has an effect on preferences, could it be isolated from other identity dimensions' possible effects on preferences such that we can single out gender differences in the field as what mostly accounts for a lack of parity (it seems not--if the effect is compounded by a class difference [female / male pay gap] that gets reproduced and is more environmental than biological, how can we be sure it doesn't swamp the effects of gender differences on parity across the division of labor [after all, a lot of these studies track gender egalitarianism, and not anything else that contribute to differences in the sexes, so it is often in fact not corrected for--even political elitism is not corrected for])? "Preferences" (if defined as any choice or activity given committed priority against some other) are instead determined by a confluence of overlapping selection processes and the clustering of disparate traits that may seem to be largely unrelated but affect the social experience and function of partaking in some activity (in having a preference) in interaction with others of diverse genotype. If we define a preference more specifically as something one chooses under "free" conditions, then, while operationalized, it's not particularly meaningful to debate whether this is a preference or not without a notion of what counts as a "free condition." And in addition, even if that question is settled, its still a mistake to to treat preferences as functionally isolated from each other. If anything, these continual debates just reminds me that we need a biology whose primary unit is the function rather than the genotypes or even the phenotypes.

Conclusion

In conclusion, studies that try to disprove social theories of gender difference while simultaneously proving biological theories of gender differences seem to have a tendency to interpret the dichotomy as a theory of the extrinsic nature of the gender differences versus a theory of the intrinsic nature of gender differences. After all, that is why proving their hypothesis forces them to work within a false dichotomy that frames the possible interpretations of the data. The issue of accounting for sociological factors is thereby almost always oversimplified. Just think about the mostly laughable notion that it makes scientific sense to plot gender egalitarianism in linear terms as well as implicitly treat it as necessarily equivalent to gender liberality in all factual circumstances. What people miss is that whether a trait is intrinsic or extrinsic is not even an empirical question and has nothing to do with environment v. genetics, biology v. society, or nature v. nurture. These latter questions are transmutations of the former question that arose with the development of distinct metaphysical schools of natural philosophy into science. Nonetheless whether one holds traits to be intrinsic or extrinsic is likely going to affect one’s perception such that one will favor one narrative mode than the other (i.e., a biological or sociological narrative). This is simply due to the fact that one associates that which is most proximate and embedded within the anatomy and physiology of the body as congruent with the self than things otherwise--an unjustified assumption. Yet most recent science (in developmental biology and in epigenetics) has already shown this dichotomy of gene causality v. environmental causality to be largely silly, and at best only heuristically useful under limited circumstances, such that a reduction of self to the body is suspect.

[logothanatos]

Bataille v. Kant on Universality

This may or may not end up being a sort of preliminary comparative analysis of Bataille and Kant's respective takes on universality, as opposed to something more thorough. After all, it may seem as if Bataille doesn't say too much regarding universality--at least not explicitly. Of course, this is not really true insofar as Bataille develops normativity in terms of universality--namely, at the very beginnings of Erotism: Death and Sensuality Bataille precisely develops the case for the presence of the taboo as culturally universal despite what may be brought to hand as empirical violations of these very taboos.

Bataille and Kant on the Problem of Cultural Universality

The Investigation of Cultural Universals

After all, it would seem that no matter what norms are considered as "culturally universal"--key rites of passage for example--these norms can always turn up an exception. Easiest to observe is the fact that supposed norms against murder and incest nonetheless seem to be asserted as present irrespective of the aggregate level at which these very behaviors are partaken in, in a community. In other words, the sociologist and the anthropologist, when making claims about the presence of cultural universals, immediately confront the difficulty of scientifically bringing into account such universality. The measure of the presence of a norm seems to be impeded by the fact that norms themselves are internally comprised of the contradictories of an idealization of the social functioning of the given society, insofar as the society itself is seen as actually endorsing its own professed aspirations, and of the observed dynamics of behavior in that society in spite of such professions. To be able to measure, then, the presence of norms in a society is at the same time to necessarily presuppose precisely that more hidden relation between what is professed and what is not done, for otherwise there would seem to be an impossibility of the very idea of a cultural universal.

Nonetheless, with the presupposition acquired, the very objectivity of that cultural universality would seem to empty itself into a subjective generalization of the defense of the cohesion necessary to the given norms. Thus, the norms immediately turn into the empty rituals of institutional mechanisms of enforcement at the same time that the norms achieve only a subjective reality. For this very reason, the anthropologist and sociologist who see themselves as reasonable and empirical sacrifice the initial objective search for cultural universals, in order to initiate the objective search of institutional dynamics instead. The institution, in this case, is the universal, or the cultural universal. But this is merely a sly act of moving the goalpost, for the institution is precisely predicated on the lack of universality--that is to say, its internal structure and function leeches off cultural particularities so that it may persist. This temporal persistence evidences a kind of universality, but it's not a universality of culture--it's a universality of both the technical and the social. It is also only a contingent universality, as not all institutions survive the test of time, and not all of them arose in some perennial fashion. In this way, any generalizability of the institution itself already rests in the aforementioned presupposition immanent to the given culture itself.

Kant and Bataille's Respective Solutions

How, then, does one make an objective case for cultural universality? By abandoning this very project of empirical objectivity. Here is where Kant and Bataille seem to have some agreement. When expounding on universality, in this case of culture (or a sort of descriptive ethics), there must be a formalistic approach--it cannot be merely empirical. Where Kant and Bataille would nonetheless disagree is that the former thinks this involves an objective process of extraction from empirical content or a normative process of confirmation built into the relevant propositions about culture (which renders it a priori while nonetheless synthetic), while the latter thinks the investigation of the form of culture or the community involves precisely an investigation into the structures of objective, external facts and observations to see what they say about subjectivity. Kant, in other words, sees the problem in terms of the conditions of possibility for thinking culture and community which one cannot get behind and which transcend all experience of culture and community, while Bataille sees this problem in terms of the conditions of possibility for culture and community as such evident in the structure produced and enacted by cultural and communal participants. In other words, there is a methodical difference. Bataille, then, retreats precisely into the structure of the subjectivity which grounds the relations amongst the objective facts observed in culture, rather than to the objective features necessary to an epistemic access to culture and community (e.g., the properties of thoughts or propositions regarding some object--e.g., culture or community--which render them intelligible and truth-functional). The result of Kant's method would be close to mere definition (whether analytic or synthetic), while the result of Bataille's method would be an exposition of the dynamics inherent to the production of culture. Bataille, in this sense, is more in line with Hegelianism (and Heideggerianism) than Kantianism, although he still breaks from all of these thinkers in that both Hegel and Heidegger still posit their own version of a transcendent (respectively, the teleological terminus or the ontological difference/gap).

To be fair, of course, Heidegger and Hegel's respective "transcendents" are a lot more ambiguous than Kant's insofar as they precisely either violate the dichotomies Kant constructs, or otherwise posit a functional binary that, in being ontological rather than epistemic, obliterates the problem of realism and epistemic access (or at the least, their relevance). Of course, it also may be somewhat unfair to depict Kant as blind to the subjectively enacted structure necessary to community. After all, insofar as his social/political philosophy, Kant seems to have an awareness of the impossibility of perfectly following the categorical imperative--particularly in public life--and seems to understand rather implicitly, as in his philosophy of religion, that there is a sort of assent to the community as such (the commitment to the existence of the community as a prerequisite to its flourishing) which is requisite for being bound to morality. In Kant's case, this community is idealized as religion, and the metaphysical notions within a religion are precisely of a practical import to the creation and sustenance of the community. That is to say, individual caprice can be subject to the ideal of duty-for-its-own-sake most optimally only when a means of rational discourse and deliberation is present, and this is present only when the notion of existent community is assented to without need of proof (when the idea of the most perfect and rational being is assented to as a matter of faith). This is why Kant's concept of faith plays an important part in his epistemology--without it, there would be a disunity between his epistemology and normative ethics. It's also a way of solving the issue of being bound to Kant's notion of proper morality, while the fulfillment of that notion in the aggregate of the public arena is practically impossible.

But this merely brings us back to the original problem. Rather than synthesize it, Kant's approach sustains the contradiction: the community or culture (or God) exists by means of its lack of existence. This may of course not be surprising given Kant thinks there are limits to reason (exemplified in his exposition of the antinomies of pure reason). Nonetheless its worth noting the inadequate attempt at tying the knot back together. The subjective provision for the objective lack of community/culture/God (via faith in the lack of this lack of community/culture/God) is done as a matter of moral necessity. Is it not clear in that case that, in the context of trying to resolve the problem of (descriptive) cultural universals, Kant would merely lapse back into the methodically confused investigation of the sociologists and anthropologists as previously explained? With practical reason, the divisions of a priori, a posteriori, synthetic and analytic judgment break down. Given Kant's approach to morality, this is made invisible by the treatment of ethical claims as a priori synthetic claims insofar as they rely on a metaphysics--but the result of such a notion is precisely that ethical claims fail to fulfill their function, even by Kant's own standards, without faith deployed in metaphysics, which disregards the requirements of a priori synthetic claims.

This outcome, of course, does not so much prove Kant entirely wrong as it much more proves the limitations of his framing--namely, his understanding of universality. Of course, one can argue that Kant's notion of a priori synthetic truth precisely suggests some unity of normativity and evidentiality or justification that may be compatible with his notion of faith, as for such type of truth propositional meaning and method of confirmation are in unity. This is simply not the case, however, as his notion of faith is precisely not about a provision of evidence or justification--it is disconnected from this epistemic concern, precisely so a priori synthetic claims have full force. Notice the structure of what occurs here: practical reason, which relies on a grounding metaphysics, must take an exception to its own grounding so that its aspect of practicality remain intact. In other words, we've landed back to moving the goalpost from the issue of normativity (the existence of descriptive cultural universals) to that of institutional dynamics (the action/reaction patterns of social actors). Indeed, one is also immediately reminded of the structure of Bataille's notion of the taboo.

For Bataille, the universal is not so much found in its global applicability as precisely in its particularity--it has a precise and particular relationship to the possibilities of experience as a whole, and this whole is not exhausted in it but, rather, must always pass through it. Thus, the particular character of the exceptions to an otherwise universal is itself supremely important to whether the universal is indeed actually absent or obliterated. When one mentions the exceptions to a cultural universal it is necessary to look at the character of these exceptions to see if they precisely constitute that universality. In other words, how the purported exceptions are necessary to that universality. How is it possible to distinguish this? Bataille isn't clear, but throughout Erotism: Death & Sensuality there's a sentiment that any exception which finds its necessity in the universal or whose practice must be rationalized through the constraints of the universal is constitutive of that very universal. For example, when Bataille discusses the taboo on violence, this taboo is for him culturally universal, despite that violence nonetheless exists in various cultures. But this violence nonetheless occurs always from the standpoint of this prohibition--either the violence infects those who, in its enthrallment, are both threatened and aroused into their own explosion of violence for the sake of snuffing out the violence confronted and effectively stopping it in its tracks, even if at the danger of succumbing entirely to this very violence, or the violence is given a habitual and regulated procedure of enactment such that it must incorporate an antithetic movement towards the affirmation of the scandal that is that violence. Consequently, cultures are equally fascinated and disturbed by violence precisely because it is universally prohibited. In sum, for Bataille, the universal could be seen as merely a particularity privileged as the frame of reference through which its negated contra-possibility is structured. E.g., "non-violence" is privileged as the frame of reference through which the real and undeniable possibility of violence is engaged and made intelligible. Unexceptional exceptions are what Bataille terms "transgressions."

Universality in the Categorical Imperative

Admittedly, Kant's discussion of universality of normative ethics is being treated as transferable to a discussion of descriptive ethics (or, cultural universals), while Bataille's discussion of descriptive ethics (or, cultural universals) is being treated as transferable to a discussion of normative ethics. But in fact, insofar as the implications of the thesis of universalism is extremely similar whether applied in normative or descriptive ethics, I believe I am justified in making this seemingly asymmetric comparison/contrast. There is nonetheless a difference between normative and descriptive ethics, but this is precisely where the implications of, say, Bataille's views become interesting as they cross-pollinate with concerns in normative ethics, especially in the context of Kant. Famously, Kant's categorical imperative legislates the moral law on the basis of internal conceptual coherence of some verbal phrase in an imperative, provided its own conditions of effective possibility. That is to say, in the example of whether one should  lie when a murderer is asking about the location of his victim, the condition for the effective possibility of telling a lie is that there is some standard of honesty as a frame of reference by which the lie can be made. But if one suppose everybody lied all the time, lying would be inherently impossible. Hence, it fails the test, and lying is no longer a moral option.

Relation between the Categorical and Hypothetical Imperative

While Kant disassociates this categorical imperative from the hypothetical imperative, given that its supposed to be unconditional, it is possible to analyze the categorical imperative in terms of the hypothetical imperative. After all, despite Kant's banishment of the passions as arbitrary sources of moral decision-making, it is necessary that Kant extract his purely rational ethical formalism through abstracting from these desires and passions, thereby entering into the cognitive site of discourse by which rational deliberation is made upon the economy of desire, yet in spite of it. Which is to say, where pain or any other emotion may so be deliberately undertaken for the sake of the rationality of some decision, and no decision made for the sake of the passions and desires. But essentially what this means is simply to isolate reason from the material accidents which spur such passions and desires, and thereby to distill any empirical content (the observation of the fact that we "feel" like doing something or "enjoy" doing it [or otherwise]) as source of justification for our actions from rational deliberation. This is so even if the undertaking of action must, after this, still find itself under the forces of the experiential world and confront them.

Hence, in the context of the hypothetical imperative, what Kant is essentially doing is subtracting the accidental character of the antecedent: "If I want eggnog, then I must go and buy it at the liquor store." While there may be reason, material or otherwise, to mentally associate the given content of the consequent with the antecedent, the antecedent, despite its lack of dependence in this context as the clause that stands as independent variable in the conditional, is largely accidental. For the subject need not want eggnog. It could aim for any sort of thing. So, what Kant is trying to do is make this un-accidental by reducing the antecedent to its formal nature, susceptible to purely rational deliberation: "If I want X, then I must go and buy it at the liquor store." While "want" gives a sense of passion and desire, it could be seen as a trivial expression for "aim": "If I aim for X, then I must go and buy it at the liquor store." The subject here has a variable aim whose value is, if analyzed simply in terms of the possibility of what may be aimed for, rationally discernible in terms of the weighing of logical possibilities. The logical possibilities are already delimited by Kant's own valuation of the subject as, via rationality, a self-controlled and self-legislating, and thereby free, subject. They are also delimited precisely by the distillation given his exposition of the forms of knowledge: this aim must be both a priori and universal. Indeed, also synthetic insofar as this aim is not already thought in any of these particular aims, even in combination. They may or may not be contradictory at any given time, but this would not tell us much about their decidability as this contradiction does not conceptually derive from these aims. Nonetheless, contradiction is another thing to avoid, but what contradictions matter? Those that derive from application. Already, the unity of universality with applicability--the practical expression of universality--arises. The universal applicability of what, then? Of some maxim, as a maxim sums up an aim in its generality. That, in sum, is the categorical imperative.

In this way, the given aim--the categorical imperative, or its allowable maxims--can be inserted for any other aim into the hypothetical imperative, but consequently disbanding a subset of the possible aims by also restricting the consequent. In fact, the consequent is largely irrelevant except in this act of restraint on possible ends. Notice that the consequent takes the nature of a means for achieving the antecedent likewise the nature of the causal/logical outcome of the antecedent. In other words, the means by which one abides by the maxims allowed for by the categorical imperative (as well as more unsurprisingly, the material consequences) are irrelevant. The means, through their irrelevance, are an indirect way through which to restrict achievement of the aims to those means which precisely abide by the aims, for their sake. The relationship between the means and the aim here seem reciprocal, but they are not--the mean is subordinate to the end. They are asymmetric simply because of the very functional difference between the antecedent and consequent clause of a conditional: in completely abstracting and formalizing the antecedent, what is being done is a contradictory movement whereby the consequent, whose conceivable content is dependent on the content of the antecedent, plays no content-based role in relation to the antecedent. That is, it loses its role as means or effect, and so leads to the disconnection of action from both those conditions necessary to act (means) and those effects which may or may not affect the presence of such necessary conditions (of such means). The issue, then, is that the categorical imperative restricts the moral possibilities far more than is rationally necessary (e.g., the categorical imperative would seem to restrict one from killing another relentless person trying to kill oneself [killing is non-universalizable]), but also does the opposite in another respect (e.g., the categorical imperative cannot decide between a maxim of self-defense v. that of pacifism--even as it restricts one from killing another relentless person trying to kill oneself!).

Issues with the Categorical Imperative

First, in applying a criterion of coherently, logically possible universal applicability to the aim or end alone, it assumes that the resultant incoherence of a universal case is somehow transferable to the actual case such that a value judgment can follow directly from it. There is simply no reason to assume this even with Kant's rationalist approach. Even if we treat autonomous actors as ends-in-themselves, this does not mean non-universalizeable actions violate this treatment given that non-universalizeable actions can in fact protect the necessary conditions for other people's exercise of their autonomy, or may involve a dilemma in which two actor's autonomies' are mutually exclusive (the perfect [Kantian] example of the latter is whether one should lie to a killer about the whereabouts of his victim, while an example of the former would be something like homosexuality). In addition, even if we take that autonomous activity which is an end-in-itself to be precisely characterized by abiding to the categorical imperative rather than the possibility of doing so, it would then not be autonomy in Kant's sense. If non-universalizeable actions or maxims a priori negate the presence of autonomy then Kant has betrayed his own notion of autonomy by which freedom is expressed in terms of self-legislation. If it is required that one decide not to kill oneself, for example, so that autonomy is to have been exercised, then it would seem respect of the moral law supersedes the mere possibility (thus freedom) of respecting it when it comes to the presence or lack thereof of autonomy. Again, this would be bizarre, even if it would be consistent with his condemnations of suicide, given another of Kant's objections to lying is that it withdraws others' ability to exercise autonomy in their decisions (suggesting that it is the possibility to act out of duty that makes autonomy what it is, rather than conformism to the moral law).

Further, even if we take that, while non-universalizable action does not necessarily violate treating autonomous actors as ends-in-themselves, it is still immoral based on the categorical imperative, the fact that that which is tested for universal applicability is one's aim (whether understood as action or translated as maxim) is actually entirely arbitrary on the part of Kant. Testing one's aim for coherently, logically possible universal applicability is testing just one aspect of action--thinking actions can be morally valuated in a way intrinsic to that action, which is also to say in terms of good will, does not necessitate they be evaluated only as (logically possible) ends. Even further, it seems this cognitive universalizing of a maxim or action is largely merely a heuristic and not strictly a rational affair: for example, that effective lying universalized is in tension with its presupposition of a frame of reference of expected honesty and the presence of truth, does not make the scenario presented incoherent. It is enough for there to be a possibility of truth for lying to likewise be logically possible, and so a case of universal effective lying has nothing incoherent about it. It is not even a performative contradiction. It would be like saying that universal darkness is impossible because darkness assumes a frame of reference where one could conceive of the presence of light. The fallacy is just less obvious because we're dealing in the "ought" realm.

A Bataillian Take on Universal Imperatives

The real concern here, again, would have to do with the conditions of possibility for lying. Once that is realized, however, the categorical imperative ceases to make much sense--the test of universal applicability doesn't really tell us about the conditions of possibility for lying, besides that condition in which honesty must be a logical possibility as well, at the very least. What's of real relevance, then, are the material conditions under which lying could obtain, but even more the conditions, rational or otherwise, where it would or should obtain--simply thinking of the conditions under which it could not logically obtain leaves us empty-handed as to its value in any possible conditions. If indeed it could not obtain without a frame of reference of actually expected honesty and actually-occurring frequent honesty, as well as the existence of truth, then this is merely a factual case of implausibility (or in the case of an absence of truth, impossibility), wherein the implausibility or impossibility is through some sort of moral alchemy transformed into a value judgment that transfers over cases where it is in fact plausible or possible.

First of all, why is universalized lying's implausibility or impossibility married to lying being bad? If its to do with the notion of a rational ethics (e.g., lack of contradictions are the criterion rather than the limitation of ethical judgment), then it is the resultant irrationality of the universalized act that is immoral, and not the act itself. Bringing up respect for autonomy here as a defense doesn't exactly help as it merely raises objections already made previously. Especially given the autonomy nonetheless assumes a capacity for rational, and thereby universal, moral judgment (predicated on this very logic!)--and it is this capacity which requires we treat others as equally capable legislators of morality (i.e., that we respect their autonomy!). Would not a universal morality require that the goodness or badness of an act obtain regardless of whether everyone was or was not doing it? In which case, what relevance would its badness in a scenario of the act's own implausibility/impossibility have in demonstrating the possibility of the universality of morality as opposed to the morality of something universalized? If rationality were what were key it would seem that an autonomous agent would have to admit to being lost precisely in the seeming accident of aims. There is no need to be a consequentialist to see that our ends only gain any discreteness as a result of the properties of the very objects of our aims--their bounds, their relations, their structure (topology), their causality, their contingency. Hence, our aims are never isolated, but collide and intercourse with each other, in ways not merely accidentally related to the aforementioned external factors. If true moral claims must be synthetic, it would be a testament to this fact.

Kant here is simply performing the move of the exception yet again to get out of this rut, as this is precisely what gives the enactment of his morality an aura of impossibility, and thus of absurd harshness of moral judgment--that  is why Kant's political-juridical notions seem at times far removed from his normative ethics. Bataille allows us, with his own notion of universality, to think this very exception Kant performs back into Kant, as woven more directly into a synthesis of his philosophy. Not only does a universal ethic allow for lower-order precepts, actions, or granular moral valuations which cannot be universalized in the way Kant wishes but may still hold correct in lieu of the highest-order universal precept, action, or value--and thus already accounts for exceptions to ethical judgment that apply universally--but the universality of one's aim is largely irrelevant the possibility of universal morality. The universal ethic is not universal because it is applied to an object thought of, or which actually is, universal--this is Kant's mistake--but because the object of the universal ethic is irrelevant.

It may seem as if Kant agrees with this, but he doesn't--he rails against any particular, empirically filthy aims determining the moral law, but only to take the rational form of the aim as such and extrapolate an aim from it, however abstract (e.g., the "maxim"), which all are subject to. This is precisely why for Kant it is not enough to simply conform to the maxim--it must have been one's deliberate aim, e.g. it must be that one acted out of duty. So, he still technically holds to the relevance of the aim, and thus of the universality of the object of moral judgment, as relevant to the establishment or demonstration of a universal normative ethics. In other words, contrary to Kant, the universality of a moral "law"--under a universality holding a similar structure to Bataille's taboo--holds by virtue of a particular relation this law has to "the whole." That is, a relation such that any action, maxim, etc., passes through it even if it is not exhausted by it. Hence, under a Bataillian normative ethics, exceptions do not count against the universality of the moral law insofar as they precisely constitute the conditions of possibility for the binding nature of the moral law. This take, therefore, sees the universal moral law as, while applied by individuals, only rendered possible at the societal systemic level, via institutions insofar as institutions provide the medium through which exceptions to the moral law are incorporated or taken into account at this societal-systemic level. Thus, in this case the individual subject's ethical position on what comprises this moral law also immediately forces always a confrontation with the whole of society, requiring the enactment of that moral law's ownmost exception insofar as a reflection of its impossibility within that society. That is, the moral law, whatever it may be, even if it should be followed by everyone at all times, is nonetheless regrettably capable of challenge if done as a testimony to the societal impossibility of this moral law and done in the spirit of this law.

[logothanatos]

The Insufferably Simplistic Scientistic Harris v. The Philosophically Clueless and Politically Confused Peterson

Introductory Evaluation of Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson as People

After my New Atheist days, I pretty much saw Sam Harris as largely, intellectually irrelevant. On the other hand, I have a rather more complicated opinion on Jordan Peterson because he sometimes seems well-meaning but at the same time philosophically and politically naive. That being said, the Zeitgeist seems to be signaling that Peterson has acquired a relevance, even if in a small cadre, and that some people still take Sam Harris seriously (which seems to in turn indicate that mass deconversion is still an ongoing process). I can only imagine Harris still being relevant to budding atheists who still hold on to aspects of conservative thinking and libidinal attachment as well as the Christian rights' historically muddled and confused political categories. Or alternatively to insecure right-wing evangelicals fearful of the recent church exodus of a good number of Americans (whether due to being SBNR or atheists), and thereby politically emboldened into repackaging purely intellectual issues of Christianity into a secular moral quest of maintaining the hegemony or integrity of white identity (white folks as "meritous" representatives of Western civilization and values and tasked with "saving" it). Admittedly that's about the same demographic I could imagine Jordan Peterson appealing to.

Granted that would make sense, as the atheist budding out of theism, especially if having a background in Southern U.S. culture and white, is likely to implicitly run with this politics of identity that incorporates an apocalyptic or "rapture" vision of the clash with Islam as a greater evil than Christianity. In addition they are likely stuck, within their performance of Americanism, in the historical mangle of highly simplified Cold War political categories, just like these evangelicals, leading to politically confused criticisms (it's no wonder many of them get confused when a Facebook meme page that frequently criticizes liberals and has some critical takes on identity politics turns out to be highly left-wing). In fact, there is a temptation amongst some of these atheists, I suspect, to reaffirm the social function of religion as a strategy in this perceived cosmic struggle, hence why some of them side with Peterson and betray the anti-theistic sentiments of the majority of the New Atheist crowd (especially those influenced by Dawkins in particular). It's a Hitchens-esque move.

In sum, both Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris are cheap supermarket preprepared packaged ramen noodles for evangelicals or atheists who just discovered philosophy as politics. As you can tell, these sociological aspects are a lot more interesting than the debate itself--I am not here using them as a counter-argument contra Harris and Peterson (that would be an ad hominem), but it is certainly something to consider given my assessment of them as persons already suggests a larger normative framework that potentially does clash with both Harris' and Peterson's assumptions. In other words, this can function as entry point. In any case, it at least justifies, sociologically, why I'd be wasting any time on these two people, although especially on Sam Harris at this point in my life (at least Peterson is a newcomer into the public intellectual scene).

Onto the Meat and Bones of this Lame Debate

But here's what I think of the (insufferable) debate here, which assesses both Harris and Peterson as debaters as well as philosophers, in addition to both their rhetoric and argument--keep in mind this is an original Youtube comment I made on the video, but all redacted and divided into sections:

Basically this video could've been renamed to "largely unworkable implicit logical positivism / pure correspondence theory of truth v. poorly argued and inconsistent pragmatism from philosophical novice," the former being Harris and the latter being Peterson.

On Peterson's Egregious Failings

A lot of pro-Peterson Youtube commenters seem to agree with Peterson's conclusion and are reconstructing Peterson's argument to sound better than it is. Guess what--even if Peterson's main claim and conclusion were right, it doesn't mean he argued it well. He did not. Sam Harris made some PHIL101 points that made Peterson look out of his element due to Peterson's elementary missteps in building a conceptually precise and consistent argument (whether or not Harris' conclusion is wrong). Peterson instead made a suggestive, appeal to intuition, which is not the same thing (which is fine if this were merely a discussion, and not a debate, and if Peterson had admitted as much). Saying that, given Darwinism, it may be expedient to treat truth in terms of usefulness, and this seems to be what conceptions of truth would be selected for, goes against the very rules of rationality intuited by people which makes Darwinism conceivable as demonstrable--Sam Harris makes this same point. Consequently, while Peterson shows its a suggestive possibility, an obvious flaw is there that Jordan Peterson does not address, instead wasting time on clarifying what he is trying to get at as if the issue were Harris not understanding what he quite literally said rather than his weak argument. To be clear, Peterson does have a problem with clarity or at least transparency of purpose in the rest of the debate, but on this particular point I'd say that was not at issue.

I also think it would've been more helpful if Peterson had just accepted Harris' definitions of truth, but tried to demonstrate how truth and usefulness are nonetheless related in the way he thinks they are as opposed to how Harris thinks they are. (This can be done through internal critique, or simply convincingly pointing out that there is a non-accidental correlation between truth, whatever it might separately or differently mean, and usefulness, whatever it might separately or differently mean.) This would've lead to some clarity or, if not clarity, some nonetheless straight-forward argumentation on Peterson's part. Instead he fumbles around trying to avoid using the word 'truth' inconsistently given he conflated another idea with it that isn't always interchangeable. It's like Peterson can't tell the difference between a definition (that meaning of a term according to its general usage) and a meaning (the many associations and possible directions the term can take) as well as the difference between an abstraction ('truth' emptied of any of the different meanings or uses the term might have, and just in its general potential for use or signification, or 'truth' in all its possible senses) and a concept ('truth' understood through a synthetic, consistent system of relations amongst ideas or propositions). This is why he unproductively, and, in fact, counter-productively resists Harris' initial, basic point. In fact, out of desperation, Peterson shifts the goalpost to showing that truth and the good are the same. This is an age-old position that Peterson could've drawn on for his arguments, but he can't manage to even at least problematize the is/ought dichotomy Harris is drawing. Peterson just reiterates his intuition that there is some special relationship between truth and the good not found between the good and anything else without really defending why the relationships he sees between the good and the true are suggestively special compared to the relationship between the good and other things.

On Harris' Rhetorical Banality and Lack of Nuance as well as the Laughable Accusations Harris, but especially Peterson, throw at Each Other

On the other hand, Harris' responses were uninspired and extremely limited, failing to provide nuance where opportunities were available (not surprising, since Harris sucks at that). His own position is also, while common-sensical, philosophically uninteresting, insufficiently systematic and too scientistic. In addition, Peterson's ignorance is on full display when he accuses Harris of postmodernism--Harris may or may not be wrong, but a lot of what Harris says would be heavily criticized by the archetypal postmodernists if there ever were any (e.g., Lyotard & Baudrillard). 

What is Postmodernism? Neither Sam Harris nor Jordan Peterson Really Seem to Know

One of the major points of the archetypal postmodernists is that the very fragmentation and isolation of identities and disciplines create contradictory normative contexts that constrict rationality in such a way that rational discussion cannot fully penetrate or resolve disagreements. Basically, for a lot of postmodernists, intellectual disagreement are often expressions of social power struggle, desire, etc., that are not rationally resolvable. (Notice that rationality here is just constricted; this means its still conceivable some truths are still objectively decidable, even if largely context-sensitive. The rules of logic still apply.) There are some postmodernists one can argue go the full length into pure relativism (i.e., the position that, not only is nothing or most nothing rationally resolvable and fully accountable, but nothing is rationally decidable), but this is over-all a strawman. One can also argue this particular [aforementioned point] leads to relativism, but that's not the same as to say that postmodernists deliberately endorse relativism. Not to mention that requires more leg work from Peterson, for example, beyond using "postmodern" as a pejorative stand-in for relativism (which he never conclusively demonstrates to be present in the argument being made).

Situating Sam Harris in Relation to Actual Postmodernism

In any case, the point is Sam Harris seems to be committed to an entirely opposite claim than the postmodernists, since he basically puts a lot of stock on conversation, on language, for finding the truth. I feel his inability to take critiques of this position to be his most serious flaw, and it bleeds into his more minor flaws (its his prerogative to try and naturalize morality, but he fumbles in his attempts because of this invulnerable epistemological approach he takes). This is why Harris might seem "close minded" to people--it has nothing to do with his argument itself being somehow unwilling to entertain possibilities. Harris actually entertains possibilities all the time (just witness his unbound use of hypotheticals in the debate!)--the problem is that he is unimaginative when he tries to do it.

Situating Jordan Peterson in Relation to Actual Postmodernism

In addition, its ironic for Peterson to accuse Harris of being postmodernist because the pragmatist epistemologists (e.g., Richard Rorty) were the philosophers most famously and controversially heavily influenced by writers I'd think Peterson would often consider (albeit sometimes incorrectly) postmodernists or proto-postmodernists (e.g., Heidegger [more of a phenomenologist that was a precursor to post-structuralism as well as postmodernism] & Derrida [actually more of a post-structuralist than a postmodernist]). In fact, Nietzsche's Darwinian critique of rationality looks like an early version of aspects of the postmodernist critique of rationality. Yes, Nietzsche was critiquing rationality, not creating a theory of truth. The only thing close to a theory of truth given his critique of rationality was his concept of Will to Power, which is a concept Nietzsche created as an alternative to Darwin's idea of survival instinct/drive. The fact that Peterson endorses Nietzsche but subscribes to conventional Darwinism while applying this to the topic of truth is a sophomoric mistake. Indeed, Peterson is so ignorant that he frequently pairs Marxism with postmodernism as if there aren't disagreements or potentially conflicting implications in the positions and critiques of the two traditions (for example, postmodernism tends to challenge the Marxist notion of historical determinism and the proletariat as universalizing [therefore revolutionary] subject).

Conclusion

Harris is an absolutely terrible philosopher, but Peterson gives the impression of a fucking novice that can't grasp basic distinctions and is mired in the scientific world where data precision and gathering as well as inductive reasoning tends to matter a bit more than argumentative competence and deductive reasoning (scientists distribute this last task into a division of labor, whereas a philosopher is at least supposed to be competent in a holistic way when it comes to argumentation). It is embarrassing Harris sweeps the floor with him when his credentials as a scientist give him an initial advantage in terms of public perception and when Harris himself doesn't hold significant status within the larger philosophical community. It's interesting to point out (and I'm saying this as someone interested in sociology, a socially exemplar soft science for a lot of people), that his area of science isn't even as quantitatively heavy as physics and other sciences. In fact, the replication crises in science seems to be most glaring in psychology. The reason these observations are interesting is that Peterson likes to present himself as having a hard-on for science while making incompetent but confident forays into philosophy, the latter likely for the sake of validating his religious longing. This doesn't put him that far away from Harris' more secular philosophically boring scientism, and also may suggest insecurities about his own field. At the same time, he lampoons and tries to discredit the field closest to his own by psychologizing them in unwarranted ways as a replacement for actually criticizing and engaging sociological methodology. Here I'm psychologizing Jordan Peterson, but only after I've already assessed his debate performance.

The fact that anybody finds either of these two people in the context of this debate worth their while is laughable considering how fucking limited not only the positions presented here are, but how fucking limited either of their arguments for their positions were. The mistakes I pointed out here are the most egregious and most frequent, but there are others such as their oversimplification of the issue of identity politics. I suggest budding atheists and self-doubting evangelicals actually read books, and I mean primary source accounts about a representative array of a tradition or world-view rather than relying on secondary source discussion as if they were unbiased simply because they conform to popular folk notions of things and present and argue against positions within the narrow political spectrum that has prominent mainstream representation. In other words, I hope these sincere Christians leave the bad Biblical hermeneutics and deferral to a messianic figure behind for once for fuck's sake. Their concerns about religion are legitimate, but they'd get much more out of directly, critically reading Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, etc., as well as the philosophers of modernity (both French and English) without force-fitting them into their monolithic and hegemonic preconceived boxes.

[logothanatos]

A Note on CRISPR, IQ & Genetics

So I gave this article on some more recent discoveries in IQ and genetics a read.

Some of those genes which correlate not only with IQ but social success at the same time, may not actually be contributing directly to IQ but to capacity for acquiring or building those environments relevant to IQ gains (which can involve environmental factors as an individual’s traits can affect society’s receptivity and vice versa). Note, by directly contribute I mean that it enhances the phenotype, all other conditions at the genetic level being equal, and by indirectly I mean that it enhances the phenotype based on its ability to precisely break or leverage initial environmental conditions (and thus irrespective of heterogeneities of environment or other genes). In any case, genes that contribute directly can get muddled up with traits that contribute indirectly, which is where the danger comes as the latter type of trait’s contribution is mediated by social status.

Uncritically negatively selecting adverse genes might in the long-term further entrench social, and thereby ecological, ills the more fit the aggregate of the populace is in its own unecological & antisocial social structures and institutions. People who lack evolutionary fitness perform a positive long-term function by supplying short-term potential negative feedback to social institutions, incentivizing the society as a whole to develop either more efficient or more rewarding forms of social life. That is, any “hard scientist” in these areas should be looking into sociological theory (functionalism/conflict-theory/symbolic-interactionism) and the following sociological subdisciplines: sociology of knowledge, sociology of deviance, social epistemology. This is why science these days requires a greater synthesis across disciplines, not snide interdepartmental condescension.

Here’s a key and interesting quote from the article, which to me resonates with the idea that we need a functional biology and more biosemiotics/bioinformatics (as the function is the basic unit that exists between the social and the biological, and the selection of such functions involve the processing of information or the interpretation of signs throughout a short-term trajectory):

[…] Stanford University geneticist Jonathan Pritchard and his colleagues argue that complex traits aren’t polygenic, or influenced by multiple genes, as geneticists have long assumed. No, Pritchard argues: They’re omnigenic, or influenced by every gene.

In essence, the omnigenic hypothesis posits that the networks regulating genes are so interconnected that any gene expressed in a given tissue is going to have some impact, no matter how infinitesimal, on the function of that tissue. What’s more, the genes likely aren’t neatly arranged in discrete clusters, as behavioral geneticists have hoped.

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Continuity v. Discontinuity in Bataille

The previous Bataille post gave a preliminary definition of continuity, and thereby discontinuity, thusly: that which is united with or towards the start of a continuum with nature or inanimate matter, and discontinuity that which is disunited with or at the tail end of a continuum with nature or inanimate matter. Dictionary-wise, continuity is said to refer to a continuous and intra-connected whole, or otherwise an immediate connection or spatial/temporal relationship. Discontinuity would reasonably be the negation of all of these. Both of these notions seem consistent with Bataille's own use. The latter more dictionary-based definitions are certainly fundamental to what Bataille may mean, as he speaks of course of the internal withdrawal of the organism "into itself" in such a way as to have a sense of breaking away from the environment (Bataille 1986, 99-100).

In other words, of assuming a degree of independence from the environment, insofar as, even if its initial environment sets the conditions for its own survival, its activity and behavior can extract itself from the context and consideration of environment. In extreme cases this would be observed in the autocidal acts of animals (I say "autocidal" so as to differentiate it from "suicidal," the latter of which seems to require a deeper existential awareness found in consciousness), but milder cases simply involve the movement of animals into habitats which promote the precarity and struggle of the given animal, voluntary or otherwise. This is clearly visible in the urban environment, though over time inevitably promoting adaptation. Put simply, the organism has an agency insofar as it can disregard its initial environmental conditions of existence or causes of birth by virtue of its fuel (internal energic dynamic). Consequently, the sense of continuity v. discontinuity here seems to be predicated on an understanding of space and time as environments rather than mere physical aspects of existence. This means there can be a variation of habitat, regardless of "natural" habitat, for an organism.

The habitat, in this case, is the entire system of materials and their interrelated processes useful to the production/reproduction of an organism's state. By an organism's state is meant any particular internal configuration of materials at any given moment in time, or any fixed rate or frequency of some internal process. Thus, an independence from environment refers not to the ability to act and move with no environment whatsoever, but the undermining of a habitat's own self-selection for the organism--the organism can now select its own habitat and is not bound to it, even as this habitat precisely determines the organism's state. The degree, then, to which an organism has the intelligence to organize and adapt its own habitat correlates with the degree to which the organism is "discontinuous."

Given that Bataille also speaks of humanity's particular degree of environmental independence as the "self-negation of animality," or the negation of nature, continuity and discontinuity, as stated before, refers to the degree of separateness from "nature" in Bataille's own philosophy. But Bataille never really cares to give his readers a fixed notion of nature--in fact, the point of the dialectical language of negation Bataille uses is that nature is only determinate in relation to something else which posits itself as external to it. In this way its inaccurate to say that the discontinuous organism is discontinuous in light of its independence from nature, or its unnatural autonomy, as its autonomy precisely arises in and is constitutive of nature in one sense. For purposes of clarity, the aforementioned notion of "independence from environment" or degree of possible variability in habitat makes much more sense.

Another possibility is to, of course, semantically inflate what Bataille means by continuity v. discontinuity. For example, given that Bataille ascribes "inner experience" to particles, it is reasonable to suspect that Bataille's notions of continuity and discontinuity refer to the relative distance an entity has from some sort of monistic, unconscious whole with no self, or sense of self (Ibid). This whole, not having self, and seeming to also precisely consists in this surplus of individualities--in multiplicity--would seem also to have a superficial similarity to the Deleuzian-Spinozan univocity of Being. Nonetheless, it is safer here to be minimalist than presumptuous--it will be asserted, as cautionary tale, that Bataille may not assent to this interpretation even if readers may want to do so.

Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death & Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986. Print.

[logothanatos]

From "An Introduction to Modern Japanese" by Richard Bowring. If I take his word for it, that's a rather interesting state of affairs.

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Bataille's Synthesis of Animality & Humanity, Orgasm & Death

So as to remember key points made in previous posts so that there may be a logical train of thought:

Technosociality as the constitution of taboo: The tool is the mutual origin of society and taboo, contra Bataille's idea that taboo is the cause of society.

The concept coined "etalon" (for ease) and the displacement of stability. Given Bataille, one could nonetheless consider the concept of "excess" as on the one hand referring to the left-over possibilities arming no effective resistance to their ownmost impossibility (thereby codetermining the "actual" [the most resistant possibility]) and on the other hand referring to the interlocked yet agonistic relationships amongst that in the spectrum of the actual--consequent of the former--which produce the continual displacement of stability in the system under consideration. More generally, even if neither of these ideas were valid, its helpful to at least note that Bataille isn't ever explicit about what the frame of reference for disequilibrium is, or what the excess/surplus is of. All that's known is that, for Bataille, this excess/surplus is understood immanently (Bataille always seems to suggest a chained set of surpluses, whether interminable or circular/cyclical), and thus does not refer to a transcendental in the traditional sense.

Keeping these in mind, Bataille's own dialectical hermeneutic of ritual/ceremony & cultural gesture through the taboo is quite interesting. Bataille notes (Bataille 1986, 84):

As soon as human beings give rein to animal nature in some way we enter the world of transgression forming the synthesis between animal nature and humanity through the persistence of the taboo; we enter a sacred world, a world of holy things.

Preceding this passage is of course a discussion of the apotheosis of animality as a function of the self-negation of the human. One would take to task the notion that hominization can be described in terms of a process of immanent negativity, in particular if this notion of "negativity" has a rationalistic kernel. Luckily, however, Bataille is being a good phenomenologist, and is merely being descriptive--the thesis here isn't so much about the ontological status of dialectics as it is whether at some point and at some level the act under consideration can be at least analogically seen in terms of a process of immanent negativity. The notion of technosociality should already clarify that the worldhood of the organism does not require negation, let alone initial consciousness, to arise given the Heideggerian bimodality of Being. What's to be said then is that what Bataille describes here is a contingency of evolution--or a necessity of history (linguistic & visual documentation of time) only retroactively given that very possibility of rational necessity through which temporality is brought into notional identity (giving rise to a notion of "causation"). That is, a necessity only at a higher level of abstraction. Bataille may in fact be consistent with these ideas, since he earlier at least spoke of the taboo being the condition for the possibility of rationality and being non-rational itself (Bataille 1986, 63).

Escaping Bataille's Anthropocentric Conception of Hominization

That being said, Bataille's description is rather anthropocentric given the talk of self-negation. If the taboo sincerely arises with society from the tool, then, again, it is perhaps only fair to think that the difference between humans and other animals is primarily a matter of the scope of the tool (hence a spectrum of animality). In which case, a lot of what Bataille initially described as the difference between alter-animal and human sexuality is really a neurophysiological distinction between a neural system with complex modulation and a neural system with less complex modulation. For example, the possession of a neocortex already allows for rather sophisticated modulation of neural signals, manifested in higher capacity for inhibition (a distance/disconnect between a neural impulse and its behavioral "command"). Another accompanying characteristic is then the degree of functional integration of ganglia. More abstractly, the difference between the alter-animal and the human is really just the difference between any organism and general basic animality as such. The functional specification of animality on basis of morphology & anatomy in the animal organism produces its technical scope and thereby its societal possibilities.

As a side-note, Bataille himself does not wish to be anthropocentric, it seems, as he thinks that "the transition from existence in-itself to existence for-itself cannot be assigned exclusively to complex creatures or mankind" and that "even an inert particle, [...], seem to have this existence for-itself, though I prefer the words inside or inner experience" (Bataille 1986, 99). Bataille attempts to disassociate himself from panpsychism by posing a distinction between feeling of self and consciousness of self, wherein the former involves a necessary spectrum of variation by which the self concerned is an immediate sensuous experience of withdrawal from continuity and into discontinuity relative to environment, "greater or less according to the facilities available for objective discontinuity in inverse ratio to those available for continuity" (Bataille 1986, 99-100). Nonetheless, given technosociality, it doesn't make sense in that case to limit both society and taboo to the human as self-conscious being, as if the self, conscious or not, were possible without some degree of "transcendent" prohibition arising from worldhood & withdrawal into discontinuity originating in and reaffirming the tool. And it is in this respect that Bataille is still too anthropocentric. On the other hand, it may be appropriate to be wary of a misguided cosmism and panpsychism, as it's not clear where the spectrum ends, and whether this spectrum may merely hide diverse intersections of heterogeneous elements or qualities of "inner experiences" that allow us to talk about qualitative breaks between the inner experience of different sorts of organisms let alone things (if we were to even qualitatively include them). For now this is nonetheless fine.

To get back on track, this "synthesis" of animality and humanity is said to not be a return to animality--for good reason because, especially in light of what has been noted about the gap between alter-animality & humanity, this gap now precisely constitutes the initial conditions of engagement. As Bataille puts it, "the human world, shaped by a denial of animality or nature, denying itself, [reaches] beyond itself in this second denial [the denial of the sort of humanity produced by the denial of nature], though not returning to what it had rejected in the first place [not returning to nature or animality simpliciter but to animality or nature as mediated by divinity or the apotheosis or sanctity of nature and the animal]" (Bataille 1986, 85). Put in analogue terms, there is no symmetrical reversal to the arrival of the neocortex, though there is the possibility of relative disinhibition of the cerebellum once the neocortex is there. The qualitative difference is then that, with the default suppression of the impulses (analogous to the taboo), the return to animality--as exception--must be understood predominantly from the default position, through which its initiation is pre-empted and its performance is retroactively subsumed (e.g., contra "law"). That is why the taboo can persist even in its trespass in the form of the transgression, and it is this which turns sexuality into eroticism. Similarly, one may speculate that it is this which also turns hostility into cruelty (Bataille 1986, 79-80). One begins to understand by now the unified nature of Bataille's Erotism: Death & Sensuality.

Excess as Uniting Life & Death in Reproduction, and the Ontogeny of Desire in the Organism

Further testament to the unity of Bataille's ideas here is chapter nine of Erotism: Death & Sensuality, wherein he elaborates on two main ideas in previous chapters: violence as the excess of urge or impulse [possibility?] (more generally as that excess conceptualized as the displacement of stability) indigenous to both death--by way of the unleashing of the explosive forces contained within the organism that give way to a total war of sustenance (and thereby of reproduction of the organism, i.e. the recycling/reuse of organic chemistry [a.k.a., nutrition])--and life--by way of this same thing yet expressed in the process of the instinct of survival which knows no temporal limit to survival but which evermore invites this limit as it outspends its defenses or is offensively out-spended. Also that same thing expressed in the expansion & continual development of this life through the full appropriation of the environment which also evermore invites a transcendence of the very metabolism which fundamentally determines the possibility of living. The organism, so to speak, experiences violence from below (the threat of outspending itself in its own immanent struggle against dead matter) as from above (predators and pathogens).

In chapter nine, the implications of the cosmos, or even just some total quantity of possible edible nutrition, containing more energy than can be fully used to maintain or sustain a particular, homogeneous, static organism composed of particular metabolic materials and still in contact with that full energic environment (which leads to the organism deciding how to spend this extra energy) are followed through; they are also combined with the previously noted elaborations. Such implications are:

That reproduction is merely another form of biological growth. The very persistence of a multicellular, sexually reproductive organism is the result of the scissiparity of its unicellular units, in which the growth of a single cell anticipates its own cessation into two distinct cells as well as the cessation of other cells by means other than asexual reproduction (e.g., the replacement of dead upper epidermal cells with new cells consequent of asexual reproduction [due to growth of other cells]). Note that division, if leading to relatively successful life, generally occurs when the initial cell subject to reproduction already has an excess of materials (an excess in that it does not need it for basic function). But this excess is precisely a consequence of an excess ingestion and/or production of cell material--it no longer is useful to proper functioning of the single cell as the rate of ingestion diverges from the cellular metabolic rate, or it may be harmful to proper functioning of the cell as cellular metabolic rate diverges from the rate of ingestion (there are too many organelles, &c, relative to what the cell can actually get from its local environment). The solution is to adjust these rates--various methods abound for doing this, such as directly re-adjusting catabolism or anabolism through alteration of gene expression, but for the most part apoptosis, cell death from toxicity, or asexual reproduction.

That, as another form of biological growth, reproduction occurs at a cleavage point between death and birth. For example, reproduction occurs at the cleavage point between the death of the previous cell as its singular self and the birth of the plurality of cells consequent of this death, especially given that the daughter cells have a relative independence from each other, such that their conditions of activity are not exactly the same as the parent cell.

That the parent cells die and the daughter cells are born in asexual reproduction. Given the new cells can be regarded as their own distinct agents relative to the parent cell, there is no longer any unitary agency synonymous with that of the initial parent cell after the process of asexual reproduction. It is no exaggeration, then, to say that the parent cell goes through death in this process in that it ceases to exist as an agent. Bataille speaks of it in terms of the growth phases of the cell: "The violence of agitation which at first takes place within the being's [cell's] continuity calls forth a violence of separation from which discontinuity proceeds" (Bataille 1986, 96). It is the same as if you had successfully cloned and fully replaced your hand--the hand left-over, dead or otherwise, is not "your" hand any longer, as it has a relative dependency from the hegemonic sense of agency characterizing the body as a whole. There is in asexual reproduction then both the disappearance of the individual, the multiplicity of individualities, and the persistence of the whole as the dynamic and movement of growth. "Immortality is wrongly ascribed to dividing cells" (Bataille 1986, 97). Growth can eventually mean creative self-death once it is unsustainable.

That death is fatal to individual discontinuity and only that which is discontinuous dies, revealing a "deeper" continuity, while birth is the arrival of discontinuity, concealing "deeper" continuity, and only that which is continuous is born. This is roughly self-explanatory, though there is much interpretation that can be made regarding what Bataille means by "discontinuity" and "continuity." In a preliminary fashion its best to take these to mean, respectively, separateness from the rest of non-living nature and unity with the rest of non-living nature (with all the previous caveats to protect against anthropocentrism, of course).

That all the aforementioned is true of sexual reproduction, or reproduction at the organismal rather than cellular scale, as well, the difference being that reproduction at the organismal scale does not imply a sudden and radical break from discontinuity. As Bataille notes, multicellular organisms stay alive for a further extended period of time contemporaneous with the birthed organisms consequent of their sexual reproduction, and otherwise at death nonetheless leave traces of life (either dead matter with the morphology or anatomy of its living version or the dispersal and functional separation of unicellular and tissue life) (Ibid). "Death follows reproduction with sexual beings too, at a distance if not immediately" (Bataillw 1986, 101). Bataille treats this as a necessity, as "only stagnation ensures that creatures shall preserve their discontinuity, their isolation, that is" (Ibid).

That another relevant difference between sexual & asexual reproduction is that sexual reproduction is precipitated by unification of the living beings. The gametes first unite as a whole prior to division. As Bataille puts it, "lost continuity can be found again" before it is again torn asunder (Bataille 1986, 98). This intermingling of distinct meiotic processes mirrors the intermingling of sexual difference at the organismal scale, which "[stimulates] this undefined sense of continuity due to similarity of race while at the same time betraying it [i.e., betraying this similarity of race] and making it hurtful" (Bataille 1986, 99). The sexual difference, in other words, both establishes the hope for the possibility of continuity in a way that maintains life and, in that very role, reveals the sense of discontinuity native to life itself. This unification of the living beings symbolized in the penetrative act is a rendezvous of interpersonal violences--an explosion of impulsive energy and vital abundance internal to each sexual participant that threatens each sexual participant be torn asunder into continuity by the infectious violence of the other (Bataille 1986, 102-103). This opens all involved creatures to the precipice of continuity, but exhausts itself short of death in the orgasm, the little death.

That the chasm between continuity & discontinuity is the mainspring of pleasure (Bataille 1986, 105). For Bataille, this tug of war between continuity and discontinuity is the fountain of desire, and thereby the condition of possibility for pleasure. At the same time, the violence necessary within this tug of war is itself interpreted as a threat or as a hostile element arousing disgust, fear, panic, etc., at the receiving end, or hostility, guilt, shame, etc. at the perpetrating end, consequent of this violence being unleashed under a deliberate recognition, directly or indirectly conscious, of the general taboo against violence, in this case against sex. Bataille continually analogizes the physiological, gross reactions to death, mutilation, & decomposition with those physiological, gross reactions to sexual stimulation, in order to demonstrate an objective unity that also conditions the possibilities (namely the possible objects) of both pleasure and pain. That is, in order to show the shared objective constitution of sex and death for the sensuous body, whose corresponding shared inner experience is violent (bodily convulsions, gagging, black-outs and faintness or mental fog, nervous hyperactivity, loss of self, state of heightened physiological arousal).

One could of course go on to discuss the problematic, vague and unclear concepts of continuity v. discontinuity in Bataille, especially in light of Bataille's claim that, not only is continuity deeper than discontinuity, but discontinuity itself is illusory (a far more daring ontological claim). For the time being, since its been a while since posting and a lot of material was read in the mean-time, its sufficient to leave this here as a summation of what Bataille has said so far. Subsequent posts may tackle this issue of continuity v. discontinuity in much more detail.

Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death & Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986. Print.

[logothanatos]

A Note on Joules and Utils

Joule was faced with the dichotomy: heat is either a substance or a kind of motion. From the experiments which were performed with the magneto-electric machine, he inferred that heat must be a kind of motion, since it could be created or destroyed through motion. Since heat is motion, the experiments were interpreted as conversion from mechanical motion into another kind of motion or vice versa. The conversion factor is called mechanical equivalent of heat. The interpretation of the paddle-wheel experiments is analogous. He defended that friction consisted in the conversion of mechanical power into heat. This statement was not published in accordance with the wish of the Committee to whom the paper was referred (Joule 1884, p. 328).

[...]

Energy is usually presented in the following way: ‘energy can neither be created nor destroyed but only transformed’. If  energy  cannot  be   destroyed,  it  must  be  a  real  existing  thing.  If  its  form   changes,  it  must  be  something  real  as  well. Thus, that statement can easily lead to the concept of energy as something material. The German physician Robert Mayer did not find, however, anything like a substance but rather a methodology for dealing with phenomena. Using observable or  measurable  elements,  he  established equivalences between  different  domains,  such  as  those  which  concern  heat, motion,  position  or  electricity.  Let  us  suppose  that  we  use     Mayer ́s  methodology  for  dealing  with  phenomena. In  this case, we know in advance that an equivalence is established by us between certain quantities. Hence, we do not need the  ‘indestructibility’  of  an   entity  to  express  that  the quantity  does  not  change.  As  we   also  know  that  we establish equivalences between mechanical, thermal, electrical quantities, we do not need to suppose the ‘transformability’ of the same entity.

The above excerpt about energy sounds a lot like Marx's concept of value to me, especially since he analogizes it to weight in Capital, vol. I. After all, value also acts almost as a mere conserved quantity in the context of exchange--the main difference being that value can be “created” and “destroyed” because its also tied to an exclusive domain of activity, i.e. some "transformations" are either irrelevant to the particular world in question in which entities act--due to differentiated fitness landscapes or the presupposition of a given, particular input--or act to antagonize that particularistic world--e.g., waste, death (violence more generally according to Bataille). This also makes it easy to incorporate Bataille's insights on the connection between life and death through his scheme of continuity v. discontinuity (synthesizing Bataille's concept of excess with Marxian economics’ concept of surplus).

In addition, this may have connections to the concept of abstraction as understood in software engineering and programming language development since exchange-value does not just refer to exchanges in the sense of transformations, but exchanges as a consequence of a sort of particularized abstraction (represented by Marx's theory of commodity-money). If it were just a matter of exchanges in general, then treating the economy (understood in terms of value) separately from the ecosystem (understood in terms of energy) to any degree would be a mistake (I don't think it is though, despite obvious continuities between value and energy). That it isn’t a mistake to do so is especially so when one considers that information conservation is at odds with the thermodynamic tendencies of closed systems (more generally, at odds with highly efficient thermic systems), as well as when one considers how economies are in some ways cognitive systems (an insight we get from Hayek), as are the living actors or agents particular economies depend on. Here becomes visible a potential notion of teleology that is already mired with conflict from the start--a sort of conflict involving possibilities.

Needless to be said that conceptualizing energy in terms of motion rather than as substance also means one can't just treat all energy uses as equivalent in that they refer to the "same sort of thing," as if there were no opportunity costs for specific “effects” of "motion" (thereby as if "energy harnessing" involves the containment and local conservation of some specific scarce "stuff," and as if energy is indifferent to the type of "harnessing" it undergoes). This take also creates a distinction between matter and energy. This distinction doesn't necessarily contradict Einsteinian equivalencies, but just implies that this equivalency need not suggest identity (am reminded of Heidegger's critique of reducing identity to a mathematical discourse of equality). This distinction also allows us to think energy outside of the properties established by substance theories. Energy seems precisely to be about the relationship between a whole and its parts (e.g., the conserved quantity being the speculative whole that acts as the denominator to plural entities), and formal/structural possibility sets. This may present some issues for strict mechanism, and would also then possibly link the problematic notion of energy to the problem of non-locality in quantum physics.

Coelho, Ricardo Lopes. "On the concept of energy: History and philosophy for science teaching." Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 1, no. 1 (2009):2648-2652. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042809004704

[logothanatos]

On Orders of Desire and Value Pluralism

In reaction to the following question posed:

Suppose I have a 1st order desire A; a 2nd order desire B which is to not have desire A; and a desire C which is to not have conflicting desires. Is C a 1st order, 2nd order or 3rd order desire?

It can be achieved by changing desire A to conform with B (and if I wanted exactly that then it would have been a 2nd order desire) or by changing desire B to conform with A (and if I wanted exactly that then it would have been a 3rd order desire), but what if I don't have any preference as to how to achieve C?

When we speak of "orders" of desire, it is likely one is looking at the issue propositionally, as the idea of "orders" is a logical one, hence on that applies to propositions. Namely: (1) "I desire X," (2) "I desire that it not be the case [I desire X]," etc. In which case, if there is some desire for the consistency amongst desires, such that one can conceive of the desire as higher-order, such that it becomes "I desire that it not be the case that [I desire that it not be the case [I desire X]]," what occurs is merely further inconsistency--and if one were intent on further solving that inconsistency, one gets into an infinite regress. One can of course arbitrarily limit the regress. Yet if the arbitrary limit is not reflective of the nature of the desire as such, such that the limit is actually a priori given as "I desire or do not desire X" (as opposed to being an arbitrary limit), it is possible that the arbitrary limit is itself still just the consequence of at least some second-order desire, such that desires are at least limited up to the second order. But in that case one assumes a contingent decision has to have already been made, and insofar as the possible choices are constrained in their occurrence according to at least the factor of desire (the factor we are isolating here), that means the arbitrary limit can only be “justified” (or perhaps more accurately, caused) precisely if a regress was presupposed. This means the regress problem applies not only in the case of negative desires that are more than or equal to the 2nd order, but to positive desires at any order as well. This inconsistency in either direction mirrors the more general epistemic problems of infinite regress or unjustified foundationalism, except in this case impinging on propositions of erotic or desirous content. Given that, it is conceivable a coherentism could be imported into our theory of desire, but one would have to be conscious that the same objections of circularity (and thus inconsistency with the demands of logic and formal argumentation) given to epistemic coherentism would be given to erotic/desirous coherentism.

All these objections in this context would ultimately come down to the desire for consistency or inconsistency being located outside of the given orders, in the same sense that in a formal system there will ultimately be a presented undecidability between consistency and inconsistency when striving for soundness. Yet it's not even all that clear there really is a consistency problem in this case despite the analogical structure between orders of desire and orders of justification--the referent/object of the proposition "I desire that it not be the case that [I desire X]" and "I desire X," or "I desire that it be the case that [I desire X]" and "I desire not-X," are different--only one of the orders in the 2nd order-1st order pairs provided here is about X. The idea that there is an inconsistency presupposes that desiring that it not be the case one desire X entails something about what happens to X as much as the desire for X does. To the contrary--the former 2nd-order desire regards a desire and not the object of that same desire. In other words, one is presupposing a set of conditionals of the sort: (1.a.) "If there is an nth-order positive desire regarding X, then X will/shall be the case," (1.b.) "If there is an nth-order negative desire regarding X, then not-X will/shall be the case." If these conditionals are rejected, there is no inconsistency to solve, and so there is no desire for consistency or inconsistency of desires possibly implicated. The problem across the orders of desire isn't so much one of inconsistency as of practical action, given its indeterminate what will be the case--it is here that the conflict plays out, insofar as the subject either attempts to replace/displace their first-order desire, or the subject tries to put either one of them into practice. This is why desires are nonetheless experienced as conflicting.

And in some sense, they do not just appear to conflict, but desires actually do conflict--just not in a logical sense. This is because of several practical dilemmas: scale and span of decisions (long-term v. short-term, local v. global effects), as well as directionally oppositional movements internal to action itself (anticipation v. production of effect) that produces imperfect information for actors. So the real question is how one's desire or lack of desire for X relates to both X’s and the desire’s own conditions of possibility, and how that affects how the relationships amongst (positive) desires are to be evaluated or how the relationship between a (positive) desire and itself is to be evaluated insofar as it would lead to a network of negatively desired cases given the latent potentials of the object of (positive) desire. So the relevant desire is not of consistency, but of the practiced integrity of desire. The "orders of desire" are really a helpful but limited gimmick when it comes to describing this--the "orders" really just have different objects of desire that reflect a dialectical movement in the development of desire. Going back to our conditionals, they would more accurately be: (2.a.) "if there is an nth-order positive desire regarding X, then n-1 order positive desire regarding X will be the case and n-1 order negative desire regarding not-X will/shall be the case" which is practically the same as to say "if there is a positive desire regarding X, then X will/shall be the case"; and (2.b.), being an inversion of the former as far as the positivity/negativity of X and of the nth- or n-1 order desires.

Perhaps the problem then is that we are assuming a propositional nature for desires, and thus that desires about desires are at least "second order" in a propositional sense. Instead, it may well be that desires have a metaphysical contingency to them, but nonetheless a sort of subsequent logic (dialectical rather than propositional) that makes desire look like a pseudo-coherentist affair. Yet, supposing we wish to maintain the propositional form, perhaps modal propositions need to be introduced. Suppose that propositions about desire equal to or beyond the second order are actually different in form in a sort of patterned way: e.g., rather than a second-order desire taking the form, "I desire that it not be the case that [I desire X]," it would be more-so "I desire that it be possible that [I desire X]" or "I desire that it necessarily be the case that [I desire X]." In this case the situation becomes far more interesting--arguably it doesn't avoid the previously noted epistemic problems given its still-propositional nature, but one could argue that the language of necessity or possibility also renders inconsistency a non-problem and thus erases it as a possible erotic/desirous concern. Either of the solutions presented here would render locating a "desire for consistency or inconsistency" a non-problem. The result, of course (if we're using "desire" as the basis of, or a significant complicating factor in, our ethics or axiology), is a sort of value pluralism--but the role of practical and material conditions (and their various levels/scales) can constrain or expand its scope, such that some value dilemmas indeed are rationally decidable and are thus non-arbitrary despite the intrinsic contingency of desire. Preference of how to achieve C (as specified in the question) may be a matter of indifference to subjects, but what was just explained suggests that the preservation, expansion, degradation or constraining of possibility is itself going to have ethical/axiological implications that slips past any sort of consequentialism. In this regard, there may then also be a sort of structuralism involved in ethical evaluation and decision-making insofar as possibility is an object of concern for all desires and all action, even if the connection is not immediately apparent for subjects (hence the possible indifference to the means of achieving C).

[logothanatos]

Note on the Relation Between Energic Systems and LTV in Political Economy (or, Suggestions Towards an Anti-Humanist Humanism)

Only a proportion of inputs actually stays in a system, and a local/particularized system can't accept just any input if that system is to exhibit any level of resistance to change. This means the waste in a (local/particularized) system, or a surplus produced in a (local/particualrized) system, can never directly re-enter that system. This means there is an asymmetry between the conditions of production and consumption: while consumption for a local/particularized system is also local/particularized (so that it can only apply over a limited portion/ratio of the global system), production for a local/particularized system is indiscriminately global/universalized or local/particularized. Put in other terms, consumption is discriminate about the concrete instantiation of energy, while production is not. This means that different energy-systems are not primarily compatible or overlapping except as a function of this difference.

If this difference is essential, then the tendencies of different local and particular energy systems should be seen as divergent, not convergent, which means these different systems can be at least provisionally understood as approximating distinct ends. Their apparent harmony is just a result of the fact that this divergence of ends is already internal to the tendency of all systems (if production is indiscriminate in regards to the way energy is harnessed, then production must already act as or within a tapestry of possibilities [production is universal, in the sense that anything could be anything, but at a price--i.e., a chicken can be a human, but at a huge price], yet this means production must admit some impossibility [i.e., production is particular, in the sense that its undertaking fails to express all such possibilities--it must find itself in particular and competing activities, i.e. a chicken can't simultaneously be a human]). The latter fact is more fundamental, though. Without this, there's no reason for the competition amongst possible activities to result in a diverse tapestry of ecology (interrelated activities).

That's why humanity (or, an anthropic local/particularized system) cannot avoid catastrophe by identifying with or seeing its identity in microbes or trees, such that its preservation is the same as the preservation of other things or distinctive activities, especially when the global/universalized system has self-destruction latent in it. But also doesn't just mean catastrophe is avoided by sweeping the Earth in fire. There are trends worth preserving, and others not. But this is relative to the local/particularized system, that may exhibit more or less a resistance to change the same time as it has a growth imperative. So which does humanity want to produce: its self-destruction (by proxy), or its perpetuation? Either way, the response comes from a position of self-concern, and thus a self-positing within a background condition of relative possibility. That's what value is--a self-positing, or put another way, the penetration of waste into some other field of production (the divergent ejection of some possible end). That's what value is--a self-positing, or put another way, the penetration of waste into some sort of production as an input (put yet another way, the divergent ejection of some possible end [e.g., in simultaneity, a human cannot be a car, but a human can make a car]).

[logothanatos]

Comments on Bataille’s “Disequilibrium“

Summation of the Bataillian Notion of “Disequilibrium”

Bataille’s notion of disequilibrium seems to involve, subordinately, the notion of excess. To begin with, it is in the notion of excess that Bataille equally locates both death and reproduction (Bataille 1986, 42). Bataille later on also notes, as if regarding life itself as a kind of material excess (Bataille 1986, 59):

[...] we refuse to see that only death guarantees the fresh upsurging without which life would be blind. We refuse to see that life is the trap set for the balanced order, that life is nothing but instability and disequilibrium. Life is a swelling tumult continuously at the verge of explosion.

While Bataille’s idea of disequilibrium has up to this point yet to be spelled out--although variously exemplified--these exemplifications provide a clue for what this notion implicates in Bataille’s system of thought. To say that life is always at “the verge of explosion” is to say, not only that life seems to have as its object more energy than its own materiality can contain (e.g., it cannot swallow up the entirety of available energy without its own internal destruction), but also that life is always at the verge of decomposition. To start with the latter in order that the former become more intelligible, the processes of life, insofar as it is a physical process like any other, is subject to the principle of maximum entropy, which is to say simply that it submits to a tendency towards maximal energy spread, or towards thermal equilibrium. In this way, the body stands as, not just congealed energy (e.g., matter), but as an internal energy motor, specifically of the organic, metabolic sort. The body is energy both inert and in motion: “the mammalian organism is a gulf that swallows vast quantities of energy” (Bataille 1986, 60).

In this way, life stands at the precipice of death and races against it. However, this superfluous energy which becomes the object of life as such, so as to avoid the installment of death--that is, so as to deal with the reality of mortality (the contradictory presence of death in life)--must strike a bargain between the expenditure of that energy for internal or external purposes. That is, for growth or for waste. As Bataille notes in his other book, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. I (Bataille 1988, 21):

The living organism, in a situa­tion determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintain­ing life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, will­ingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.

This is in its most primitive form observable precisely in, not just the possibility, but the necessity of excretory and defecative mechanisms within the body of the multicellular organism, or, not just the possibility, but the necessity of selective or semi- permeability within the unicellular organism. But death is defecation taken to its logical extreme, while sickness is excretion taken to its logical extreme, and both may paradoxically result from an overconsumption by the organism, or from a wallowing in the organism’s own surrounding and self-produced putrefaction: “the horror we feel at the thought of a corpse is akin to the feeling we have at human excreta” (Bataille 1986, 57).

This, of course, has something to do with the nascent violence of nervous impulse, or more generally of organic motion, for in that case the act of life and of the reproduction of life both disrupt, albeit at a local level, the tendency towards thermal/”energic” equilibrium, and for this reason living is a precarious condition. Being precarious, multicellular life must be willing to consume itself, and mutually so. Yet at the same time it must profess a refusal to do so in some frenzy, so that mutually assured destruction is counter-acted. “There is no reason to look at a man’s corpse otherwise than an animal’s,” but it must be, for the human animal, looked upon in such a way so that it may preserve itself well enough (Bataille 1986, 57). In conclusion, a “disequilibrium” for Bataille is, broadly speaking, something which attempts to maximally capture the possibilities of a system such that it usurps the tendential distribution of those possibilities and internalizes the threat of the cessation its own possibility of being. This “possibility” Bataille is concerned with in this case is, of course, not merely possibility proper, but possibility treated as the minimal potentiality of work (e.g., the minimal capacity to do work). That is, energy.

To the extent the previously expounded notion of technology as preceding both the taboo and work (thus preceding the existence of society in some sense) is true, then it seems necessary that technology be conceived of as the potential external expression of the disequilibrium of life--potential in that, besides a tool being something that is produced, it must also be something produced under a mode of representational thought (so the product can function as symbol for the organism). That is, a tool is both a useful or effective product and a conveyor of information. However, with the sophistication of technology consequent of the discovery of fuel (starting with humanity’s discovery of fire), the distinction between technology and life had been set into a path of increasing blurriness, presenting itself now in the problem of hard AI. But in fact, the problem of blurriness was already there in the start as long as the arrival of life itself--especially that of the rich mental life humanity has access to--remained mysterious, as there is then no clear designating line for the beginning of representational thought (again, this is not a general representationalist model of mind--it says that the mind is necessary for representation, and not that representation is necessary for mind). Nonetheless, without digression into any attempts at solving such a problem, the point is that it would seem society is a surplus or excess of environment as it is a disequilibrium that expands the harnessing of energy further afield. At least according to this treatment of equilibrium.

What is the Relationship Between Equilibrium and Systemic Instability (or “Time”)?

But there is something amiss here, for it is common knowledge in biology that living bodies are characterized by processes of homeostasis. Now, someone may likely wring their hands and point out that homeostasis is about stability while equilibrium is about balance of competition, homogeneity of force/concentration. This is true--there is a difference between them. This is not in dispute. The question instead regards yet another chicken-or-egg question (it should be apparent by now I fancy these): does equilibrium produce homeostasis, or does homeostasis produce equilibrium? Put in other terms, is there some prior stability of a system that dictates its point of equilibrium, or is it systemic equilibrium that sets the conditions for stability in a system? To warn, I will be proceeding from a perspective of some ignorance regarding the mathematical intricacies of physics in addressing this question, so most of what follows will likely be entirely sloppy.

Notwithstanding, it would seem that notions of equilibrium are related conceptually, at the very least, with the notion of geometric symmetries or conservation laws in modern physics when considering classical mechanics. The introduction of symmetry in physics as a way to speak of conserved quantities would seem to act as an a priori reformulation of the Humean “uniformity of nature” hypothesis. The reason it works better than a mere hypothesis is because such symmetries have been understood as homogeneities of structure--this is clear from the basic principle of translation (or spatial) symmetry and temporal symmetry, both of which assume “behavioral” physical system neutrality both in respect of place and of time. Further, these principles of symmetry have their expression in the behavior of physical objects to the extent that the motion of physical objects are really just symmetry-preserving, local deformations of the occupying space or duration of mass-energy. These are not experienced as deformations, of course, because different collections of mass and energy are perceived as qualitatively different, and so their motion is perceived in terms of discrete reference-points or their creation or destruction into each other. One does not perceive these movements as deformations in a continuum of mass-energy.

There is something strange, of course, in the fact that this reformulation of the uniformity of nature seems rationalist or idealist in character; nonetheless, equilibrium seems to be, or seems to be modeled in, a function of symmetry, and notions of physical equilibrium have much of their basis in statistical probability. In sum, symmetry seems specifically to regard the homogeneity of possibilities across space and time as well as the structural relation between them, whereas actualities are treated as either final or initial conditions of those possibilities. Looked at in this way, it is not strange for the “uniformity of nature” hypothesis to be reformulated mathematically in an empirical science, if it is reformulated in terms of possibility, as empirical science is concerned precisely with contingency even as it seeks predictive power (that is, this “strangeness” is already inscribed within the practice of empirical science, in terms of the inconsistency between its backward-looking and forward-looking methodological aspects--the hermeneutic commitment to causal determinism undertaken by scientists in virtue of science’s focus on predictability is always a latent metaphysical commitment).

However, if this is so, it would seem that stability--the resistance to change--exhibited either within or by a physical system is actually not something which results from equilibrium as long as resistance to change is also resistance to alternate possibility. Yet, stability also does not ground equilibrium, in that a resistance to alternate possibility is not a resistance to possibility simpliciter. Rather, the resistance itself is already inscribed within each of the given possibilities. Thereby, the trajectory of a physical system or object is actualized precisely as a function of the mutual resistance between possibilities, originating in the internal resistance of possibility as such to its own impossibility. E.g., the resistance of possibility qua possibility, or the resistance of the possibility of possibility, to the possibility of impossibility. In this way, a physical system is actually an instability in a larger context of possibility. Nonetheless it stands as a stability within its own sphere of action (possibility for it takes the restricted range of that which “works,” and so is characterized by energy). In fact, energy merely being a special case of potentiality is something already implied within these latent metaphysical commitments of modern physics by virtue of its predictive stance, when the predictive stance is applied in retrospect (i.e., retrodiction); this comes to a head in quantum mechanics, as Žižek himself noted (Žižek 2012, 920):

[...] possibility as such possesses an actuality of its own; that is, it produces real effects-for example, the father's authority is fundamentally virtual, a threat of violence. In a similar way, in the quantum universe, the actual trajectory of a particle can only be explained if one takes into account all of its possible trajectories within its wave function. In both cases, the actualization does not simply abolish the previous panoply of possibilities: what might have happened continues to echo in what actually happens as its virtual background.

And this “echo” is possibility as probability. Ultimately, what can be said about the relationship between equilibrium and stability, then, is that stability--resistance to change--is relative, while instability is absolute. For example, resistance to changing a domestic policy, itself a possibility, is in its actuality relative to the whole field of interlocking possibilities that manifest as a deadlock for it as a possibility. However, a lack of resistance to the same does not have anything to do with the actualization or lack of actualization of some possibility by virtue of the full network of possibilities--rather, it is an expression of the whole interplay of possibility precisely as it expresses itself in or through any given actuality. The internal resistance (to impossibility) in a possibility is thus retroactive, while the lack of that resistance (to impossibility) is proactive. Within the organism, this is precisely what unifies birth and death--death is the possibility of impossibility, while birth the possibility of possibility, but birth, a resistance to death, is sustained only on condition that impossibility remain as amongst one of the possibilities of Dasein.

Etalon and Equilibria

This means, however, that equilibrium can be interpreted as a continual displacement of stability. This is because symmetries are actually just products of a displacement of stability. A structurally related homogeneity of possibility already stands as an instance of a larger heterogeneous space of possibility, and it is actualized at the same moment some possibility is. The frame of reference cannot precede the actualization of possibility, except after some possibility has already been actualized (space-time follows existence, not the other way around). In fact, the strange quantum phenomena of wave-particle duality mediated by measurement can be spoken of in exactly this way. This is why the etalon, while not the same as equilibrium, is the basis of equilibrium: the “etalon” is the limit or impossibility of the resistance uniquely characterizing some possibility/actuality. In this sense, the homeostasis of biological systems have their own equilibrium (and disequilibrium) insofar as they (albeit contingently) produce their own etalon. Everything is its own measure.

The assertion by Bataille, then, that life is disequilibrium seems to depend on either some underlying metaphysical assumptions, or otherwise the hermeneutic or provisional privileging of some perspective (as, of course, constrained by some metaphysical system). What is the etalon Bataille is using for this proclamation, and does it correspond with some arche he holds to? It is true in some sense that disequilibrium is fundamental, but that is because without it there would be no such thing as an equilibrium of any type or form. For example, a true vacuum, involving a state of asymmetry and responsible for mass, is the state requiring less energy input--it requires no energy at all. Meanwhile, a false vacuum with symmetry, thereby no produced mass but with a possibility of equilibrium,  requires too much energy. This means that the symmetry or equilibrium of a physical system is always a consequence of deferred stability. The existence of mass is the expression of an instability in the vacuum, as an ejection of its own stability. But this does not mean the true vacuum lacks stability--it just means this stability of the vacuum is not expressed in the vacuum as such. That is, after all, the difference between the “true” and “false” vacuum. The “false” vacuum is able to continue, or to be, only by way of becoming a “true” vacuum. The unity of both types of vacuums expresses itself in the fact that stability of the vacuum relies on its destabilization.

To add, QFT and the Higgs field, a result of empirical investigation in physics, seems non-coincidental from a metaphysical point of view--the same sort of relationship between the true and false vacuum holds for the relative Nothing (the Nothing which exists) and the absolute Nothing (the Nothing which does not exist) that are merely two hierarchical aspects of Nothing as a whole (i.e., of impossibility as such) within my own more philosophical studies into Nothingness. In addition, the notion of virtual particles corresponds to that of existence always being virtual, and thus entities always landing between Being and Nothing. In sum, the existence of excess does not contradict the existence of equilibrium--the equilibrium is contingent on etalon. One could then even say then that there are competing equilibriums (which is to say competing chains of cooperation).

Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death & Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986. Print.

Žižek, Slavoj. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso, 2012. Print.