Judith Butler: A Critique

Judith Butler is one of the most widely-read postmodern theorists today. Her blend of Foucauldian queer theory and deconstructive critique is rightly seen as innovative. However, while Butler remains true to her Foucauldian roots, extending a genealogical approaching into feminism and beyond, unlike Foucault, her critique substitutes culture for nature. For Butler, 'discourse' is seen as all-powerful, and material reality, practice, the unconscious, and even nature are reduced to mere cultural 'constructs' or categories. I see this as problematic, given the growing number of material issues affecting contemporary society.

Over the last one and a half centuries, critical theorizing (with roots in Plato) has attempted to 'denaturalize' the order of things. It has been enough to show that common sense is based on taken-for-granted assumptions in order to question the privileged status of certain dominant modes of thought. The 'operative assumption' of this practice, however, is that certain mentalities are presupposed in 'discourses,' making them ideological. What I want to suggest, however, is that practice (experience) sets limits on what can be thought - certain ideas are necessary in order for institutions to operate, but they are not sufficient by themselves; indeed, the most they can do is reinforce or contest the existing system of practices, but not govern practices. The importance of materiality and nature is both actual and potential. It is actual because our sensuous experience is given to us historically in praxis, we always experience more than mere 'sense-data' and perceptions representing the world. It is potential because we relate to this materiality through singular dispositions, mostly free from pre-determination. As such, more than one future can be 'given,' whether or not it is recognized as such. It therefore makes sense to see nature more in terms of developmental plasticity (as contemporary neuroscience and epigentics does), instead of a closed set of categories which is necessarily static. Hence, deconstructing categories does not prevent us from experiencing nature, because non-categorical experiences exist within practice. At an ontological level, even if different elements enter into something (complicating our perception of it), they do not subvert its own distinct existence, which already consists of multiple relations. For example, human beings interact in symbiosis with nature, but in unique temporal, social, symbolic, and sonorous ways, unlike other living species (see Corey Anton's Selfhood and Authenticity [1999]). There is no 'one' (universal) human characteristic, but through the singular interconnections of these specific elements, we each become what we are. Ultimately, Butler's deconstruction focuses more on critiquing universal categories than on the potential to disrupt oppression from within continuous practices. The material world's 'incompleteness' and 'instability' results more from its finite existence than any discursive 'construction.' Indeed, when Butler argues for the fluidity of relations, she makes the mistake of conceiving of this in spatial rather than temporal terms. As Butler herself relates in the 1999 Preface to Gender Trouble:

In this book, I tend to conceive of the claim of 'universality' in exclusive negative and exclusionary terms. However, I came to see the term as important strategic use precisely as a non-substantial and open-ended category as I worked with an extraordinary group of activists first as a board member and then as a chair of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (1994-7), an organization that represents sexual minorities on a broad range of issues.

(xvii)

This is a concept of universality as a non-given: "I arrived at a second view of universality in which it is defined as a future-oriented labour of cultural translation" (xviii). However, while she supports this in later works such as Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek in 2000), and writings where she began to turn to temporality, her legacy is mostly associated with earlier works such as Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993).

Ironically, unlike one of her main feminist influences, Luce Irigaray (who was sometimes criticized for sexual essentialism), Butler relies on a neo-Gramscian cultural essentialism to challenge what she see as biological determinism. In responding to critics of Irigaray, feminist theorist Helen Fielding stated that opposition to her theory of sexual difference "arises from an inherited cultural understanding [on the part of her critics] that posits nature as either unchanging organism or as matter that can be ordered, manipulated and inscribed upon. Hence the concern over essentialism is itself grounded in the binary thinking that preserves a hierarchy of...culture over nature" (2003: pg. 1). A similar response to Butler's theory is appropriate. Critical of early modern theorists such Rousseau (whose 'state of nature' hypothesis she derides), Butler's thought remains in the modern tradition of reducing nature to a static entity or resource determined by culture. She writes: "the production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender" (1990: pg. 11). This is a very limiting world Butler imagines - perhaps it must be so for someone from a sexual minority in a sexist and homophobic society, but this do not justify a generalization that removes freedom from nature. With no mediating term such as sexuality or the unconscious in between sex and gender, it is easy for her to dismiss the 'dictates' of nature  While Butler admits that her concept of performativity tends to exclude 'internal' psychic considerations (i.e., she has under-theorized this), she remains sceptical of notions of the unconscious, which she links to biological determinism, something very few contemporary biologists and neuroscientists actually subscribe to. Other contemporary theorists are not so reticent. For example, Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus links habits and practices to changing unconscious dispositions, such as the ability to sustain motor memory, body language, and temporality. I feel Butler's theories unfortunately reflect an internet age and information society in which creative expression is overcoded, whether by algorhythmic, financial, representational, genetic, or other signs. What is needed is a more experiential and affective practice of communication, one not so dependent on technological metaphors such as 'construction,' with their separation of techne from poiesis and praxis. 

Butler's theory may have importance for how we think about 'queerness' and the performance of gender, but it does not respond well to the dynamic materiality of nature which has recently asserted itself. The materiality of a mounting environmental crisis, a politics of fear and terror, growing inequality, and precarious labour regimes requires that we see not as a determining system, but as a site of possibility and risk. Cultural constructionism will only get us so far, as I suspect many of our attitudes, such as political apathy and cynicism, stem from frustrations of affect, practice, and mood, which are sensuous and material, yet hardly mechanical in their existence.

References

Anton, C. (1999). Selfhood and Authenticity. New York, USA: SUNY Press.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge.
-----. (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex.' London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge.
Fielding, H. (2003). "Questioning Nature: Irigaray, Heidegger, and the Potentiality of Matter." Continental Philosophy Review. Vol. 36 (1): pg. 1-26.

Visual Power and Recognition

Our eyes are one of the most stimulated of our senses. Living in a media-saturated of world of signs, symbols, and information, we now process more visually than in the past, and have to imagine how our local experiences are connected to global and historical realities. But if the world is becoming more spectacular, it comes with a  lack of sympathy, articulation, and sensitivity in interpersonal situations, especially in our intimate and community life. Maybe we are losing some of the ability to respond attentively without the need for visual code. It is time to scrutinize the visual bias.

Vision, perspective, recognition, and identity are closely linked to power in the symbolic gaze. We are sense-perceiving beings, but perception is further from our experience than sensation is (and sensuality), which has several consequences. First, within visual perception, we tend to represent empirical 'data,' information, or stimuli about the world. We tend to view the world as made up of discrete resources or things, rather than in a process of becoming that we ourselves are woven into. Thus, our minds usually 'process' these things as coherent models, where the dynamics and changes are internal to the system itself, rather than relations shaping and transcending the system. Secondly, according to Lacanian psychoanalysis, the "I" is shaped by identifying with a mirror-image of ourselves at an early age. This reveals that from a visual standpoint, things appear unified and autonomous, while sensually they are multiple and relational. Third, and similar to this, perception creates the belief that self-consciousness and recognition constitute experience, which in sociological terminology is where the idea of the looking-glass self comes from (you are who you imagine you look like). The relations that perception allows, as a visual mediation, are external relationships that seem imposed on us, rather than internal relations sensed from within practice. So applying various 'lenses' to look at the world has the effect of translating our deeply practical stances into perspectives or worldviews. We then seem to be trapped within solipsistic mentalities and attitudes, as our experiential know-how is then devalued. The problem is that these visual metaphors are two-dimensional (because mirrors and images are flat), while lived experience is three-dimensional. Perception allows us to interact with things (which can be useful), but does not allow us to feel and be inside relations as well.

This thinking is also part of the common sense of social movement activism. A common way of understanding struggles is as 'awareness raising' and seeking recognition for rights and citizenship. But the 'cognition' in recognition is not random. Questioning legitimacy often invokes a rational standard by which to include particular identities. For example, the Canadian trade union movement gained union recognition through strikes lead up to the end of WWII, which established a collective bargaining system (PC 1003, the Rand Formula) based on the rule of law. As a result of recognition, working-class experience was identified with wage-labour and full-time employment - legal statuses that may or may not reflect people's actual needs. Workers can't go on strike if they have a collective agreement (no wildcat strikes), can't strike in sympathy (so no general strikes), and must voice class struggle through the formal bureaucratic grievance procedure. This has limited solidarity among working-class people to those who are employed and paying dues. To take another example, the civil rights movement fought for and gained reforms affecting people of colour, women, gays, and many other groups. Yet, like the labour movement, their fight was primarily for recognition as equal members of society. This meant implictly siding against movements like the Black Panthers and an ambivalent stance toward decolonization - after all, wasn't America one of the superpowers from post-WWII onwards? Recognition institutionalizes praxis such that creative ideas are turned into formal and systemic ones - it is a great way to ensure security, but it also produces political paralysis. Maybe, as Salmon Rushdie suggests, creativity can regenerated by fragmentation, since as he writes in Imaginary Homelands: “human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions.” In Rushdie’s metaphor, each shard of a broken mirror gestures toward the imagined whole of which it came from, but this whole will always be non-identical once the parts exist as parts (even if you reconnect them they will show fractures). What this produces is a stereoscopic vision of the world, one more open to the exile than to the citizen. Perhaps the ability to perceive multiple dimensions simultaneously, as Palestinian cultural critical Edward Said suggests (using the term contrapuntal vision), can shape a new politics which is left of centre.

But we are still terrified and intimidated by the gaze, which is part of a system identified by Pierre Bourdieu as 'symbolic violence,' and by Michel Foucault as panoptic surveillance. Bourdieu's argument is that within domination, practical habits become visually represented in various 'official' forms, and that through this misrecognition, the dominant are able to accumulate various forms of 'capital' - economic, cultural, social, emotional, and symbolic. For cultural capital, credentials and art works are only the most visible forms, and these crucially rely on their owners' 'taste' (habitus) for refined expression, even though they seem to possess their own value. Panoptic surveillance (originally developed in 18th century English prisons), meanwhile, involves the mutual self-regulation of bodies through visual technologies (including the extension of discursive and conceptual apparatuses).
'Conduct' becomes normalized according to pre-existing standards which makes people subject to labelling, categorizing, and diagnosis - we all become the judges of ourselves and others. The gaze produces powerful effects, one of which is the transparency of individuals' self-identity. 'Know thyself!' is virtually a given in our society. Speaking from personal experience, it is as if every look is a question, as if it is impossible not to be pierced and feel watched at all times, regardless of if anyone is there to do it. So I feel great sympathy for Foucault when he says that: “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning." As well as when he says that “maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.” There is a need to open up new possibilities, but in representing the world, the gaze keeps things in the present.

The gaze activates a fight-or-flight panic hightened by mimesis. Someone who has learned by imitating others, rather than by trusting and working through their feelings, is vulnerable to fear and uncertainty because their responses depend on outside confirmation. As critical theorists Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in their difficult book Dialectic of Enlightenment: "The reason that represses mimesis is not merely its opposite. It is itself mimesis: of death....Imitation enters the service of power when even the human being becomes an anthropomorphism for human beings." The result is a world of self-preservation or, in the words of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, 'bare life,' where everyone is in fear of what could happen next, rather than excited about future possibilities.

I think it is crucial to challenge the optical illusion of a stable identity (and reference point recognized by the state) and the practical possibilities it conceals. Instead, we will be able to decompress life experience into more meaningful expressions (textual, verbal, and affective) and live ecstatically. Perhaps then all the terrifying gazes will become inviting glances.

Why The Left Should Use Theory Tactically

On the left, some readily embrace theory, while others insist on practice, opinions, and subjectivity. As elitist as theory can be, and as rationalist, I want to present at least four reasons why critical theory is still important before we reject Theory Per Se on our path to liberation.

1. The heart of praxis is the dialectic of theory and practice. Just as direct action is not a stand-alone tactic, practice without theory would mean re-learning everything when you want to do anything, and would be 'impractical.'
2. One way the oppressed can deal with oppression is asking questions. Even if you don't get a full answer, you can still open up new experiences that were hidden or silenced or which you wouldn't have otherwise thought of. But there is a logic of asking questions too, which can be guided by theory. If theory is assisting rather than controlling our thinking, it can be complimentary. Sometimes asking a question is more powerful than denying a dominant authority outright. Make those with power doubtful of the naturalness of their privilege and you will make everyone more confident in resisting them.
3. One of the few remaining activities left to you as a social loser, or an economic loser (unemployed), is reading books by yourself or discussing ideas online on forums. It opens you to a community of people who think like yourself. There is a long tradition of auto-didactic scholars from less privileged backgrounds who find their work rewarding and stimulating, as an alternative to a world where practice is technical and depends on proper specialization and skill-qualifications. There is also something about immersing yourself in ideas (avoiding practice for a moment) that allows you to generate new thoughts without the need to transform or question your own, which practice often demands when oppressive.
4. There are theoretical alternatives to positivism and overly detached science. Not all thinking is necessarily technical, but it can still be rigorous and interdisciplinary. Not all science is mechanistic or rationalistic - science is a method for developing theory out of experience - not just of collecting 'data.' Good science is premised on a humble uncertainty about how systems truly work, and is about projecting possibilities rather than predicting the future. The question of whether science is 'normative' (and hence, informed by the same biases as opinion) or whether it deals with facts is based on a false dichotomy between facts and norms/values. If science deals with facts, hypotheses, explanations, comparative knowledge-claims, there will be lots of points when values enter, but more often they guide, rather than falsifying scientific efforts at validity. I try to cut postmodernists some slack (I tend to be more of a post-structuralist myself, within Marxism), but a discursive reduction of methodolical and ontological questions leads to a premature closure, based on an overly-symbolic vision of practice.

Insofar as part of oppression is not just the system oppressing us but our own inability to get ourselves out of the oppression or to imagine and enact other futures, we need theory to help us get there. But it will have to be dialectical theory which allows for constant change (truth is temporal), the play of differences, and to imagine a world which is inherenly 'open' to transformation by praxis, rather than just an oppressive 'system.' As Michel Foucault argued, the role of the theoretician in social and political struggle has changed - now theorists are more like recollective thinkers, and they give 'tactical pointers' rather than general strategies. This vision of theory is not divorced from or superimposed on practice - but it is necessary for practice, and in that sense, necessary for 'the left.'

We Live in a Post-Identity World

"Wherefrom does the receding characteristic of identity stem? The answer is, from the aporetic constitution of identity."

(Vahabzadeh: 2003, pg. 94).

In the 1960's-70's, the shift in Western political praxis from the totalizing social movements of the modern era to the particularistic New Social Movements of the post/late-modern era involved a shift toward a politics of identity, that is to say, a politics in which difference became more important than similarity, or sameness. For a cadre of activists who believed that the familiar was the source of solidarity and power, this was profoundly distressing. However, are these two experiences really that different? I will argue that, in fact, it is only possible to distinguish the content of particular identies from the prior standpoint of totality (structure), and that in contrast to both, the new forms of distinction or otherness are more futural and indeterminate patterns than present-at-hand differences. That is, identity is the other face of universality, and cannot govern action and change within this dialectic.

Identity as a symbolic referent is backward-looking, and tends to deny its own emergence and affectivity in praxis. "Identity/experience emerges in the configurative moment of identification/articulation - the moment of decision. This implies that the 'original' modes of presence of the discursive terrain are of little significance to the current articulation" (Vahabzadeh 2003: pg. 88). What this means is that identity can never be definitively grounded in a past event or "peril," and always integrates new elements. Identity involves self-knowledge, yet it cannot effect genuinely transformative change, according to Vahabzadeh, because "knowledge of categories of being and of the event of unconcealment can never be attained before the event. Experience, as the summoning of discursive elements, replaces such beforehand, verifiable knowledge" (pg. 94). Rather, "experience, identity, the summoning of discursive elements, destiny, social imaginary, action, and (categories of) being all leap forth at one and the same time in one single event" (ibid).  Vahabzadeh's work thus shows how identity can have significance when situated within action, and the conflict and struggle this entails, but not according to an 'essence' or 'agency' aiming at a pre-defined goal or fulfillment. In a section of his book Articulated Experiences (2003), entitled "The Aporias of Identity," Vahabzadeh states that:

The concept of 'receding signfied' shows that action will never turn into agency. It is obvious that the aporetic character of identity radically challenges all versions of agency in favour of the genuine resuscitation of actor; 'genuine' because it is nontelic action itself that defines actor's being, and not any structurally designated mode of performance."

(pg. 95).

This makes it clear that movement actors must move away from both prospective and retrospective modalities and loci of practice if they are to enact transitional experiences. This can only be achieved, however, once the universal-particular relationship of revolution/citizenship is reversed in the identity politics of new social movements, which now privileges civil society over the state (pg. 156-7). For Vahabzadeh, the particularities that are thence released allude to the inadequacies of party and institutional politics, yet are destined to become singularities through anarchic action. That is, the fragmentation is only temporary and from the perspective of totality, since the actors are in a process of sharing different experiences, i.e., creating a genuine sociality.

While identity and identity politics are often associated with postmodern theory, post-structuralists and post-Marxists have critiqued these terms from a different angle. For post-anarchist Richard Day, identity politics "faces certain impediments that are inherent t:o the politics of demand" (2005: pg. 14). Rather than seeing the new social movements based in particular self-identities, Day writes that "it is difficult to understand how striving to improve the situation of queers, women and people of colour, or working against military and ecological destruction, can be seen as individualistic pursuits" (pg. 69). Rather than achieving private self-interest, "the burnout rate of activists in these movements would also seem to suggest that their struggles are no more pleasurable than those associated with class warfare" (ibid). Day proposes a politics of affinity that challenges many of the hegemonic features of the politics of identity:

A politics of affinity...is not about abandoning identification as such it is about abandoning the fantasty that fixed, stable identities are possible and desirable, that one identity is better than another, that superior than another, that superior identities deserve more of the good and less of the bad that a social order has to offer, and that the state should act as the arbiter of who gets what.

(pg. 188).

Some have gone further into non-identitarian praxis. About the founding affect of social movements (that is, the scream of refusal), John Holloway (2002) writes:

The scream is an expression of the present existence of that which is denied, the present existence of the not-yet, of non-identity. The theoretical force of the scream depends not on the future existence of the not-yet (who knows if there will ever be a society based on the mutual recognition of dignity?) but on its present existence as possibility.

'We scream' does not begin with a unified 'we' prior to the scream. Like Vahabzadeh's radical phenomenology, for Holloway, any identity emerges through 'discourse' despite referring to an originating arche. Holloway thus states that "rather than starting with the multiple identities (women, blacks, gays, Basques, Irish and so on), we need to start from the process of identification that gives rise to those identities." He calls this context of identifiation "the social flow of doing," which expands the Marxist concept of labour to any creative social activity and its alienation or fetishization under domination: "Identity is perhaps the most concentrated (and most challenging) expression of fetishism or reification. The breaking of the flow of doing deprives doing of its movement. Present doing is subordinate to past done. Living labour is subordinated to dead labour. Doing is frozen in mid-flight, transformed into being." Holloway adds that "the rule of identity is the rule of amnesia" - we forget not just the origin of things but the existence of past struggles. "What is important in thought that takes identity as its basis is things as they are, not things as they might be or as we wish they were. There is no room for the subjunctive in the scientific discourse of identitarian thought." Indeed, the closure of different possibilities involves a flattening of temporality into the present, which `particular` identities seek to fulfill.

Mood and Experience: On Escaping the Dismal Science

Opinion and ideology are meaningful on a symbolic level defined by discourse and speech. One represents their thoughts to themselves as ideas and 'conceptions,' and then 'builds' those thoughts until he/she feels 'informed.' Information, however, is embedded meaning, and comes from the moods by which we inhabit and 'know' our environment. In a decontextualized information world, the primary way of thinking and feeling is cynicism, appearing as a mental attitude, but really a bodily disposition - a mood emerging from broken hopes and possibilities lost. The very existence of mass populations involves the separation of (private, personal) 'opinion' and (public, political) ideology, making it so that people can only think autonomously in isolation, and can only relate to others through a separate state-form. This experience involves becoming motionless, or bare life into which various 'properties' are deposited, lacking the relational qualities emerging from proper development. As Bernard Stiegler argues in For a New Critique of Political Economy, the de-skilling of labour within proletarianization was achieved by objectifying the embodied know-how and gestures of craft producers into standard units of time and movement. The 'teeming mass of worms,' as Nietzsche aptly put it, loses its ability to develop its potential - it lacks imagination (the dominance of the unreal and the Other replaces the sense of the yet-to-be-real), and no 'ecstatic' movement toward newness. Unattuned to each others' gestures and affects, which now appear insignificant, the masses cannot 'move' (or be a movement) and must be coerced by forces beyond their control in order to do anything. The long-term need for managers and executive directors giving orders is a symptom of a profound experiential crisis, when our embodied knowledge has been reduced to data and the creativity of actors is no longer socially encouraged. It happens when moods become permanently spoiled (stagnating in lethargic attitudes), when we start doubting everything and breaking everything down (over-analyzing), and when trust and communication disintegrate. Instead, we should look to a more therepeutic praxis, in which hope, imagination, and meaning-making will be encouraged because 'another world is possible' (and only thus, necessary).

The information paradigm is fundamentally flawed. Not only are we not informed enough to make rational choices in our best interests, we rarely explicitly think or premeditate our actions as the model assumes. We come with unconscious background experience revealed to us through practice, and this knowledge 'works' for us on the condition that we let it be in our unconscious (e.g., bodily posture that is linked to motor memory in carrying out a task). This relates to the distinction between savoir (know-how), and connaitre (truth/discourse) as kinds of knowledge. For example, when your computer doesn't do what it is supposed) to do, you may start asking questions about why this happened, and how it could work normally again, but otherwise, you are immersed in relation to it which are largely implicit. Our psychological preferences primarily exist in terms of dispositions and inclinations which can be activated via sense-experience. Much 'knowledge' is conveyed through feelings, moods, glances, gestures, and movements that reveal the situation at hand in terms of how it affects well-being. Therefore, it is impossible to calculate the transmission of information - or better, meaning - involved in split-second decision-making. And so, it is impossible to assume rational choice, whether on economics or in politics.

We should abandon the fundamental principles of a discipline - economics - which is based on the reduction of human beings to bare life (masses), i.e., to the desparate struggle for existence amid long-term scarcity. Only once this fear-inducing standardization is assumed can 'marginal utility' (self-interest) be imputed in these models. A seemingly humanitarian recognition of the need for self-preservation is used to support the very system which necessitates it, by means of profit-seeking. We need joyful wisdom, in all senses meant by Nietzsche and not more of the 'dismal science' of economic self-interest disguised as survival necessity. This is also part of a praxis in which knowledge and affectivity are able to work together, and in which the moods that practically serve us every day are trusted to guide action.

Couple Thoughts

Trying to give someone a voice and release their human potential from its current realization means not just defending (advocating for) this person against structures of oppression, but encouraging them to become a new person, i.e., realizing hidden aspects of life-experience. How we do this without giving ammunition to their (our) oppressors is a real problem. Acknowledging personal weaknesses can create vulnerability in the context of interpersonal interaction, which may make vulnerability worse. Dealing with my own challenges, I would rather fully admit to being pathetic (that I have had my potential limited) and reveal room for development than to affirm my present wounded self as being of equal value to everyone. Shaming the world for this tragedy is one tactic, but it`s not very strategic (especially in the long-term, acknowledging backlash), and it only addresses negative affects usually provoking further unequal confrontations. We need to ask: how can people actually develop in such a way that they avoid falling into these marginal traps over and over again? How can we heal the wounds oppression has left without returning to their marks and licking our wounds? How can we enable meaning-making practices once again, where our interactions have been compressed reduced to grunts and blunt gestures. What good does complaining about the system have when you are afraid to break out of your terrifying condition, which prevents you from embodying the change you admit needs to happen.

Our communication is so weak and ineffective (stilted) at times, not because we need to make it more rational (effective?), but because it`s not firmly grounded in dispositions. Dispositions are the unconscious inclinations that guide people toward certain habits and associations, such as aesthetic ways of perceiving and greeting a familiar person, and then inserting them in the social flow of conversation. There is no formal rule that tells you that you must act as such, but the urge or tendency can still be overwhelming. You may not even notice the non-verbal meaning being communicated. However, I think that people are used to picturing each other as fetishized characters, and that social media further compresses many social interactions to textual info-data, separating people even more from their experience. One the one hand, there is inhibition to speak in social settings, while on the other hand, some unaware people speak completely out of place, ignoring the sense of timing and contextual cues that provide meaning. I notice for the former mass of people, most later talk internally with their clique of friends or acquaintances, while for the latter, the awkwardly social people (socially awkward but not shy) apparently have little depth of thought which they can articulate. Meanwhile, we allow advertising and mass culture to appropriate our popular sayings, gestures, even emotions. Can we have a confident interaction that is not overbearing or instantly spotlighted by mechanisms trying to appropriate it (subordinate it to power), or that must mean something after? The rejection of this ordinary sense (and sensuality) stems from the strained repetitions forced by a state of panic - as well as the larger mood of fear characterizing being hustled and oppressed. We have got to think about our emotional well-being a bit more, if we want to improve the quality of our interactions. But all we think about is our survival, and then we universalize this until it becomes self-interest.

Exteriority, or, Living on the Threshold

Much criticism resembles censorship, a form of repressive power working negatively against freedom or desire, i.e., against negative liberty. It cannot establish or understand the way 'positive liberty' works, as it is reactive toward a problem that has already occurred. But notions of breakdown or fragmentation can only ever allow an image of a cracked whole to emerge - the lines that appear are irreversible and inseparable from the critique, like with a shattered mirror. As such, the critical procedure can aid, but can never substitute for praxis.

Agamben writes: "Be your own face. Go to the threshold. Do not remain the subjects of your properties or faculties, do not stay beneath them: rather, go with them, in them, beyond them." This is placed at the end of a short essay, "The Face" (1995), which begins with the premise that "the face is the only location of community, the only possible city." Bravo, Agamben, for pointing beyond the subjective-objective murkiness of 'self-reflection' and 'identity,' with all the implicit inner-outer assumptions. When I am just my own exteriority, when I am just my own exposure or relation to the world, I am not alienated, I am reunited with an 'essential' correlate of myself, which is precisely my other-than-self, a self-in-becoming. This is both spatial and temporal, and the two can be linked. When I become the way my body 'faces' the world, and not how it re-presents itself via conscious recognition (which, as the inverted mirror-image attests, is truly impossible), my potential 'appears' concretely in practice - my 'self' becomes unpredictable and uncapturable to those who would control me, while I retain a corporeal know-how which allows me to act in both self-defense and self-expression (which I cannot 'grasp' to represent, however). Exteriority allows ecstatic self-expropriation, and is opposed to all notions of appropriation or self-identity based on prior 'sense-certainty.' Instead, 'one' emerges as a singularity beyond both particularity and universality.

What I feel like I need is support or aid without creating chains of dependency. It is a lie, and an expression of extreme alienation, to say that the dominated want to rely on the dominant, or on an overarching system, for survival. This hurts our development and maintains the status quo. What we have to do is dissociate practices of mutual aid from the neglect of human needs which accompanies anti-welfare ideologies and discourses. There are forms of self-protection that enable new social needs and possibilities, as long as these are not totalizing. If needs develop at the dispositional level of habitus, and are never fully visible or representable as such, then we must question public recognition as an a priori criterion for aid. Too often, this externalizing and overbearing relation suffocates the very human potential it is supposed to foster. There is no such thing as equality of opportunity, since some come better equipped to 'run the race' on their home ground, but systemic imbalances need to be addressed in a way that doesn't overcode the relation between the dominated person and system of domination into a hard association, that leaves room for people to grow in relation to others, but not to a generalized Other. We need support and healing so that we can develop new experiences, but not a system to fall back on or 'fix' us. We need a non- "possessive individualist" autonomy.

The Difference Between Creative Self-Transformation and Self-Mutilation

Arguably, creative expression is necessary to personal development. But as modernist artists understood, expression actively creates new aspects of the self, rather than just representing a person's ideas. The act of communicating or expressing meaning is enough to transform personal experience by creating different ways of relating. Creativity does involve the self, but is based on self-formation, rather than self-protection or self-interest. It involves risk-taking and a degree of unpredictability. It is the difference between becoming who one 'is' and static being, if you remember that 'to be' is a verb.

Unlike the tortured soul image of creativity (the self-mutilating artiste), self-transformation involves healing and developing the potential to be different which was already there but unrealized/unnoticed. It does not mean alienating oneself or becoming overly mediated by the 'external' world, because an intrinsic part of ourselves is always how we relate to the world. It means living on a threshold (i.e., 'limit-experience') in which it is impossible not to face the world, and respond to different potential future as they emerge. Self-mutilation confirms the wounded self even as it denies the possibility of self-transformation, of actually dealing with the causes of suffering. It is a masochistic way of being, which leads to only seeing negative emotions as 'authentic' and valid. Joy, care, affective feelings are denied because the mutilated self cannot experience them without an overload of sensation. But sensation and 'pleasure' are not accurate ways to describe affect; they must exist for a self who perceives and judges them. The reason for emphasizing feelings of ecstasy is because they are fundamentally linked to our relationship to otherness, both the world and our own becoming-different. According to Martin Heidegger, "ek-stasis" - standing outside one's self excentrically - was the meaning of existence, but some point, this translation was forgotten. It is exciting to develop your potential and needs both in space/place and time, at the same time as it is scary. However, to think that uncertainty and risk can be represented as an object of horror would be to misunderstand how and why affect exists. Self-mutilation is a moment of creative self-transformation, but by itself should only be used as a means of self-defense in extreme circumstances. We need to help people heal so that they don't have to live in this agonizing, chronically stressed mode that relates to social domination.

What do people mean when they talk about 'socialism'?

It is very difficult to say exactly what socialism is. It has a long and checkered history in the practices and imagination of 'left' activists since the early 19th century. Now, it is even clearer that there is no single, unified socialist project. But neither is there any unified capitalist system. Capitalism is still recovering from a world-historical crisis - the 2008-9 recession - that has exposed its fragility. Although it has deeply penetrated into our everyday lives and relations to the world and other people, it has still left room alternatives. The alternatives would start small, develop into a network, and expand inside and outside institutions. There is no need to change society from the inside-out, top-down, in order to show some goddamn solidarity or sympathy with oppressed people.

When we say, "another world is possible," we mean that human beings have the capacity, under the right conditions, to live differently. There are glimpses of socialism in the way people act in ordinary situations, when they don't consciously recognize, but unconsciously sympathize or support people around them. That sincerity and affectivity is common to most human interactions. I don't need to go into a full list of examples to simply argue that a lot of peoples' needs tend to thrive in situations where mutual growth and learning happens, and that without a shared culture, our experience as people would be blunted. Is blunted.

The premise is not a perfectly functioning, equal system, where everyone is happy, content, and lazy. That classist stereotype gets us nowhere in discussing socialism. The first premise has to be: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme). Our current system - advanced capitalism - hijacks human potential, reserving it for those who've adjusted their needs to its interests and desires. There is no question that those at the top are currently more skilled and hence more able to earn the rewards of doing better. But they have received advantages that others have not. These aren't simply arbitrary privileges or entitlements (though inherited wealth does matter). Due to the inherent logic of profit-driven competition, only certain individuals and business who make it to the top can succeed and develop their abilities to the fullest, while many people waste their efforts. We all complain about this because it increases the amount of work we have to do, the difficulty in finding and keeping a stable job, and the chronic stress of living precariously. The development of some leads to the underdevelopment of others, not simply to an unequal distributions. We would fight against this if we could, i.e., if we had the voice and means to. Unfortunately, there have been certain ways of officially representing personal experiences, i.e., as fixed identities, and of airing 'grievances,' i.e., in public discourse and state politics, which are limited and unappealing for most people. Having no outlet, we invest the energy of the other world we feel is possible in popular culture and things that don't really develop our capacities as people. The only real 'necessity' or moral obligation is considering human needs.

Unless we are hopelessly confused, needs will always come before wants and desires: this is my second premise. As Marx wrote in The German Ideology, there is obviously a natural basis for human history: "life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life." The unintended consequences of this process lead to changes in humans' relationship to the natural world, and to themselves. Nature changes over time. Thus, "the second point is that the satisfaction of the first need (the action of satisfying, and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired) leads to new needs; and this production of new needs is the first historical act." Emerging needs would include practical know-how, affective intelligence, knowledge-sharing, and the material transformation of the human body and psyche through activity, e.g., having your body, gestures, habitual energy, and so on shaped by doing manual labour. These are the most vital experiences which are foregrounded in peoples' life-worlds, and this is the only basis for abstract debates about justice. Beneath all the so-called competition (and much monopoly), class struggle is going on, but in the words of Warren Buffet, "it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." Enough said?

"Another world is possible" means that socialism comes from the imaginations, experiences and life-worlds of ordinary people. It doesn't have to come from the minds of elite university-educated revolutionaries, or be top-down. Arguably, it is not a 'system' at all, and should not be evaluated as such. It is a project that we are building, whether we know it or not, and thought about socialism should merely generalize or extend the needs people themselves express in their everyday experiences.

When do you really care about someone?

When do you really care about someone? There are numerous formal ways to express caring, like romance or public displays of affection, or other rituals. But I think the only one that really shows it means something is being willing to spend intimate time with another person. To check your ego, to check cynicism for a bit, and feel the other person's presence. To mutually grow as people, to let deep affects resonate between you and letting that fill your life with energy. We are stuck in an exhausted, cynical, egoistic paradigm, and don't realize that our energy comes from our relationships to the world and to other people. We do not possess this energy, any more than we possess the time that we live our lives in. That tempo and rhythm is something that exists between people, not something that is just abstract or purely individual.

The time 'invested' in our relationships on caring for another person is regained with a 'surplus,' but it's hard to measure exactly how much. But rest assured, if you feel better and do things faster, and with more energy, it should make up for itself in the end. If you care. That's what makes relationships and love so uncertain and risky, but also meaningful. You will feel how intimacy and love affect other areas of your life positively, but will rarely be able to calculate exactly how this related to an initial effort. Without taking a chance, though, you may not realize important aspects of your potential self, such as improving emotional memory and the ability to resist stressers. A relationship can be part of your broader support network, and many people in relationships do share friends. If either person doesn't want to public displays of affection or bourgeois romance, that is fine; it's unnecessary, since the only 'duty' or 'commitment' should be to respond to the other person when you are able to.

If someone says they don't have enough time for a relationship, I think it has more to do with trust, like not feeling comfortable to be intimate, or not wanting to expose yourself beyond a certain comfort zone. I get that everyone feels vulnerable, and some more than others, but I also think it's a bad idea to only think about self-preservation. Constructive self-criticism can help in development, and relationships can definitely reveal areas we need to improve, as well as reveal surprising things about how we are developing.

You really care about someone when you are willing (and ready) to spend the qualitative time to feel intimate with them. It is not a contract or an investment. You can set limits, but you can't exactly define where it will go. However, there are real advantages to seeing risks as chances.

On 'The Masses'

One of the classical debates in social theory hinges, it seems, on the concept of mass population and its connection to the concept of peoplehood as opposed to unbounded relations between actors. I would argue that, besides their engagement with capitalism and the relation between material reality and ideas, Max Weber and Karl Marx's biggest disagreements came from the transformation of actors into masses atomized in civil society. In fact, without the masses' presence, it is hardly conceivable that capitalism and class could be reduced to market position or bargaining power, and the corresponding life chances that result from it. It would hardly be possible to model class oppression as a stratified system of income distribution, with individual needs amenable to welfare state policy/programs, if the 'individuals' were not already separated as agents. 'Inequality' can only be understood, and formally measured, if there is a fundamental reference point, and with 'massification,' inequality becomes relative to the public sphere of 'national society,' and a determinate, calculable 'social product.' The emphasis on equality/inequality covers over issues of oppression and conceives power as a sovereign (possessed by the nation or People) and repressive structure of domination - a model of negative liberty for Weber - rather than as productive potential for social needs and action. It consolidates control over the population because they lack the ability to relate outside their demographic and constituent location or identity; they are known by 'discursive' gazes from above. This is the background against which rational 'interests' are articulated in 'civil society' and the marketplace, and in which party politics atomizes different constituencies of people. In fact, if we look at different 'spheres' of social life - such as labour and collective bargaining, voluntary associations, juridical disputes, sexuality, and even when people get together with the conscious aim of enjoying themselves - actors are positioned as discrete parties with the separate and opposed self-interest of each constituting the sovereign power to govern them. Notions of interest predicated on desire assume an homogenous form of action articulated around subjectivity (subect-positions) and agency. Action here is dependent on consciousness (the rational calculation of self-interest), otherwise it falls back into the bare life of thinghood, i.e.,  being 'in-itself.'

But since there is no underlying structure/form that is not at some level a product of past struggles, projects, campaigns, and formations, political action is not confined to the agency of the party representing social interests which presumably have an independence "as such" from it. The very founding of a "society" is and will always be "political," and may or may not rely on the state. Consequently, Weber's separation of the political from the economic and the cultural (social status) is based on a sleight of hand, but one which will continue to be possible so long as we reduce people or actors to mass populations of atomized individuals.

Moreover, in this context, any time a notion of public or interest-group in "civil society" is articulated, it is always as the converse of the State. The state can tolerate the existence of certain institutionalized or recognized forms of opposition if they remain constituencies subordinate to its constituted power. That is, while they are not identical to the state, their very "difference" is not genuinely "other" to the state, but is rather an internal difference defining the distinct pattern of a basically unified identity.

In this sense, the notion that publics can be emergent (as Ian Angus conceives in Emergent Publics, 2001) is a reified conception: emergent actors, practical assemblages, and institutions may generalize themselves beyond their immediate context, and affect the public sphere, but it does not follow that the concept of "public" can be applied to understanding them. When it is, it very quickly falls back into the idea that social movements serve a universal function for the nation-state (civil society aggregating population demographics) through diagnosing "social problems" internally dividing society. That "society" itself may be a convenient abstraction from social relations is not a question; rather, civil society theory and public discourse aims to ensure that this society remains operative, that causes/inputs align with effects/outputs, and so on. The affective dimension of the "imagined community" of nationalism is denied in the standardized formulas of rights and citizenship. Citizenship is a form of dignity based on guarantees of rights for individual agents who are re-constituted (reborn) in society according to the management of their standard of living. This abstracts from the specificities of class-formation: revolutionary activity now requires direction from the state/party and civil society's (intellectual) leadership. Given this, we must critique vanguardist and hegemonic praxis, since it is based on idea of mass population of separate individuals (bare life or physical bodies) integrated into an overarching body forcing unification, and it constrains actors to a dialectic of structure and localized agency.

What if if were the case that no mass population (being-in-itself) can exist in this kind of aggregated self-identical  form, adding separate individuals/parties into a bounded whole? What is there is no being-in-itself that is not already a being-for-others, or better, the the with-others? With that premise in mind, before trying to overcome the indignity of being-in-itself, there has to be a focus on the inter-subjective basis of action before either the subjective or objective, and moreover, a project/praxis that actively estranges our being-with-others from alienation in being-for-others, along the lines of what Franco 'Bifo' Berardi has suggested in The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (2009) in light of the Italian autonomist experience. By rejecting notions of recognition and identity as the basis of social life, we free the "agency" of dispositions from the constraining structure of subject-positions, while avoiding making dispositions a matter of free-floating individualized existence. Rather, it is that dis-positions and affects are patterned in certain meaningful ways in the social world such that they open up certain possible actions beyond conceptual articulation or public "discourse," and project actors ecstatically (ek-sistence means to stand outside as what Heidegger calls ek-stasis) to transform and become-other in the world without becoming another as they are threatened with in mass society.

Relevant Insights of the Day

From Friedrich Nietzsche:

1. "Consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication"
- The Gay Science (1974; New York: Vintage Books, pg. 171)
2. "Whenever I climb, I am followed by a dog called 'Ego.'"

From Ian H. Angus:

3. "The main point of Marcuse’s account of Plato is that dialectic was not primarily a method of knowledge, but a process of the becoming of being in which the unifying and separating of being occurs through motility, which is the passing of every being into nonbeing or otherness...dialectic thus refers to the motility of being."
- "Review Essay of Herbert Marcuse's Heideggerian Marxism." Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy (2005).
4. "Since humanity appears as both the subject and object of social representations, the reflexive capacity of language demands a theory of social praxis as a complex of expressive forms."
 "Language as metaphor has turned philosophy and the human sciences away from this subject-object posing toward a conception of culture as its primary realm of investigation. But culture must be understood on this basis not as a merely external activity but as the process of formation of individual, group, and inter-group life. This process of formation of identities is expressive, albeit one shorn of inner-outer assumptions, in the sense of a sociocultural praxis as the shaping of a distinct way of life. Such a self-shaping, or instituting, of a way of life requires a notion of expression, even if we must abandon the notion of an already existing subjectivity hiding behind the forms of expression. Expression can thus be understood as a primal scene of self-shaping through culture, indeed as the active component of the instituting of a social order."
- "The Materiality of Expression: Harold Innis' Communication Theory and the Discursive Turn in the Human Sciences." Canadian Journal of Communications 9 (Winter 1998).