The Question and the Arrow

Speaking of Occupation. We are witness today, directly and actually, to an unprecedented global occupation movement.  The motion of this movement is putting the question to the dominant forms of political organization characterizing our historical present.

In speaking of this movement, I would not propose to speak to the movement and most certainly not for the movement.  Rather I would like to position myself today as someone who speaks with the movement from a position that is alongside the movement parallel to it.  I shall not presume to state what the movement is about (speaking for) nor what the movement should be about (speaking to), but only about some of the things that this occupation is directly and actually doing, as seen from a space that is parallel to and adjacent with occupation (speaking with).

The parallel and adjacent position from which I shall be speaking is that of political philosophy.  You might think of we political philosophers as those of your friends (and frienemies) who get paid to be obsessive over contemporary politics, and especially the conditions thereof.  In speaking of the mobilization that is taking place with the occupations, the role of the political philosopher is that of helping to make sense of this mobilization by articulating some of the concepts that would be adequate to its conditions.  It is in this sense that I write from a position that is right up next to (adjacent) and tracking along with (parallel) the occupations.  What I would like to say, then, are only a few things about what the occupation provokes and excites, but also disturbs and afflicts, in a space adjacent and parallel to it.

Two Simple Ideas. I will attempt to speak today to only two ideas.  The first is this: the occupation provokes us to think about politics as a practice of problematization, or what might more simply be described in terms of the idea of politics as questioning.  The second idea is this: the occupation provokes us to think about politics as a practice that is procedural as much as it is substantive, or what I might more simply describe in terms of the idea of politics as involving processes that concern how we do what we do.

Dewey’s Problems of Publics (1927)

“There are too many publics and too much of public concern for our existing resources to cope with” (Dewey 1927, 126).

The starting point of Dewey’s argument in The Public and Its Problems is Walter Lippmann’s thesis, expounded in his 1922 Public Opinion and 1925 The Phantom Public, that the public is today, in Dewey’s phrase, “lost” and “bewildered” (116).  The public finds itself midst multiple gluts of misinformation.  It cannot cope.  Inquiry and deliberation are hardly capable of being intelligent.  This can be seen as a serious insult to democracy.

Dewey on Method in Political Theory (1927)

In his Public and Its Problems (1927) John Dewey adopts a four-component methodological strategy that is more or less implicit in his earlier broadly philosophical contributions, such as Reconstruction In Philosophy (1920) and Experience and Nature (1925).  Dewey often referred to this method as “instrumentalism” and as “historical-empiricism” but it’s probably best known these days as “pragmatism”.  The method, in short, involves four methodological distinctions, which Dewey lays out in Chapter One.  A proper understanding of his methodological apparatus prepares us to understand the way in which Dewey addresses himself to the pressing problem of pluralism that was his lifelong obsession with respect to liberal democratic theory (as argued in posts from the last two weeks here and here).  Herein a brief review of these four methodological decisions, followed by commentary.

Dewey on Society (from 1888 to 1916)

Contemporary political theory is haunted by a pair of interwoven ambiguities between pluralism and monism on the one hand and proceduralism and moralism on the other.  I find a valuable early example of these ambiguities in the work of democratic theorist and pragmatist philosopher John Dewey.  What follows is a historical redescription of this ambiguity in Dewey as we chart the chronology of his democratic theory from his early Hegelian phase (in 1888) to his later explicitly pragmatist (but still ambiguous) philosophy (in 1916).

Dewey on Publics and States (in 1920)

One of John Dewey’s lifelong obsessions with respect to political theory concerned issues of the democratic qualities in virtue of which some publics become capable of self-regulation or, to put it differently, become capable of growth (which for Dewey is always a self-directed process).  This theme emerges most clearly in his 1927 The Public and Its Problems, a text that has obsessed many commentators.  Another location where we find anticipations of that discussion is in chapter 8 of his 1920 Reconstruction In Philosophy.  One can follow the thread of that text through three themes in order to shed some light on Dewey’s conception of the democratic organization of publics, a conception which arguably is the very center of his entire philosophic vision.

Philosophical Divides: a little story

Picture the following.  Camps of philosophers cordon themselves off from one another by drawing lines in the still sands of a breezeless desert.  There they entrench, staring each other down from opposite sides of the line for a decade or two.  Eventually they tire of looking across the divide, and so begin to fraternize with only those philosophers in their proximity.  Later they forget about the philosophers on the other side of the line, and when the occasional hawkeyed upstart or pesky defector announces the existence of a whole country of philosophers not too far away, they retort that those on the other side of the line are not ‘real’ philosophers.  They are, the upstart and the defector are told, philosophical poseurs at best, or philosophical perverts at worst.  The language that is used, in fact, is exactly that contemptuous and contentious.

Assange’s Secrets and Ours

The British courts are holding WikiLeaks maestro Julian Assange on charges related to sexual misconduct, or sexual molestation, or sexual something-or-other.  The confusion over just what Assange did wrong when he had sex with two Swedish women is, or perhaps should be, an object of concern.  The charges in Sweden were filed, dropped, then filed again.

The WikiLeaks example is growing richer every minute.  It is a perfect little capsule of contemporary culture, in its obsessions with truthfulness, both at the political level of international diplomacy (where we have for so long demanded state secrecy) and at the personal level of the sexual confessional (where we so fervently demand of ourselves, and especially of those ‘in power’ in some form, that they give up all their secrets).

Assange told our secrets and now we are forcing him to tell his.

Our secrets reveal acts of violence, hatred, intrigue, and all the other harsh realities one might expect from the diplomacy of the hegemon.  Assange’s secrets, for which he is now being held in a jail cell in Britain without bail, have it that, at least according to the charges, he would not consent to using a condom when he had sex.  Interestingly the coverage of just what the charges of ‘sexual misconduct’ amount to is all over the map.  The coverage on NPR this morning made no mention of the nature of the charges and only used vague terms that suggested, to me, nonconcensual sex, perhaps sexual assault or rape (definitely gaspable material, that).  The coverage in the Times buries the nature of the charge, saying that the sexual acts “became nonconsensual after he was no longer using a condom” (this sounds problematic but is very unclear to my untrained non-lawyer ears).  The coverage in the Sydney Morning Herald is fuller.  But things are all over the map.

All this suggests that it is, once again, these mega-states that are dirty, not Assange.  (Correction: it just may be that Assange is dirty, too, at least in one way.) It is one of the oldest plays in the book to make life a living hell for those who challenge the state by trotting out charges of sexual misconduct.  There is a sad and long history of this in the United States.  Martin Luther King, Jr. is just one of the favorite examples.  Assange is no King.  King was a hero.  Assange is a humble technician of a new way of ideas.  Both challenged prevailing wisdom.  And both were sent to the sexual slammer.

Update (756pm PST): Thanks to Jeremy for the comments.  You are right that the language above is too brash and vague. It is not my aim to trivialize the content of the allegations, but only to encourage reflectiveness about the procedure.

Our New Age of Information Transparency: The WikiLeaks Cables

So here we are: CableGate, WikiLeaks, etc., and whatever else it will come to be called.  I propose that we hyperbolically refer to all this as the First Major Event in the New Epoch of Information Transparency.  The story over at the Times offers pretty good reporting (says this amateur reader): http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/29cables.html?hp.

But there are (at least) two stories here.  There is the ‘regular’ story about diplomacy, espionage, and political intrigue.  Exciting!  But there is another story, one composed of more humble and quotidian details, which is much harder to tell, but which in this instance is painfully bright for all to see.  This is a story about information transparency, and how the internet is, once again, changing everything.

Participation and Collaboration

I recently attended a talk at UO by Gardner Campbell, who works on New Media, Lit, & Pedagogy (and more) at Baylor U..  The focus of the talk was why we as educators should take new media, digital technologies, and networking quite seriously.  I am sold, but of course I already bought in some time ago (to the extent that I, then a mere post-doc, and now a mere newly-minted t-t asst. has any purchasing power).

I also applaud Campbell for the way he brings new media tools and projects into his classes.  We are at the stage of initial inquiry with all this stuff.  This means that nobody knows and that it is time for experimentation.  So that’s great.  We need to learn from each other and, as Campbell points out, from our students, too.

Campbell really emphasized the ‘publish it to the web’ approach for harnessing the internet in his classes.  Students, I guess, publish their work to the web, even if just on a blog, etc..  This seems to me useful, but just the beginning.  The talk got me to thinking about what the specific diacritic of emerging internet technopractices might be.  Of course, that’s something I (like to) think about anyway.

But here is one thought.

The internet facilitates new forms of social interaction whereby political, educational, and otherwise social processes work well.  The forms that tend to work well in internetworking are not well-facilitated by traditional models of publication (the coffeehouse, newspaper, and broadcast models).

There is a broader context here in political theory.  At its best, a focus on publicness in terms of ‘publication’ (rather than ‘internetworking’) has historically tended to assume two valences in political theory.  One of those is participation (the ideal dream of democratic theory across the twentieth-century — be it deliberative participation or some other form), and the other is representation (which is a second-best when participation is not possible, or not desired).

My view (for today at least) is that democracy (et. al.) is now best facilitated not by forms of publication, but rather by way of forms of collaboration.  This is not a critique of participation or representation (and it need not be), but rather a claim on behalf of collaboration.

Collaboration may sound strange as a new procedural ideal for, say, democracy, but I believe we are in a position now to see its increasing importance.  Here is my (experimental) claim for today: Collaboration may lead us from the participatory-representative model to an innovative-connective model of politics, society, culture, &c..

Participation is the model of the citizen joining in the efforts of the public sphere.  But there is no public sphere, indeed no public, in internetworked contexts.  The public is no longer given.  Not in advance.  There is, rather, a plurality of publics.  Publics are made.  How to engage?  Not by ‘participating’ in something that is already there.  But rather by ‘innovation‘, which in a collaborative model sometimes (indeed often) means forming new publics.

Representation is what happens when interests need to be made public, yet there is no will (or practical means) to do so via participation.  So then our interests are represented, e.g. by our representatives.  This has long been a subject of severe critique in political theory.  I will not rehearse those critiques here (but nor do I presume them).  What’s new in the internetworked context?  Representation is more difficult than ever, and perhaps more useless.  Here again collaboration supplies a better conceptual model than publication, because the latter presumes a public up-and-running into which one’s interests are translated by a representative medium.  What form does collaboration take instead?  It takes the form of connection.  Interests are connected, not represented.  Mine and yours, and those as yet undreamt of, are woven together not only by us (which involves collaboration), but also by the technology itself and the entire knowledge ecology it sustains (which helps us in those instances where we have no will or means to collaborate).

So. To summarize….

From publication to collaboration.

From participation to innovation.

From representation to connection.

Therein you have a tidy little manifesto of sorts.  I undoubtedly will abandon the manifesto before you have read this.  I am just experimenting.  And where is the harm in that?  If you disagree, please do disagree out loud.  That is just what this medium is good for: collaborative disagreements in virtue of which we connect and may even together innovate.

Williams on Internal and External Reasons

I’m not sure I entirely understand Bernard Williams’s views on internal and external reasons.  Fortunately, I’m not sure that most people who read his work (even publish on it) understand those views either.  (Maybe that’s just further blindness on my part but I think his work is rather more complex than is usually admitted.)  I do think that what I understand of his account usefully connects to some of his thoughts about history and how we can best make sense of ourselves and others.  (I proceed with the caveat that what follows is just notes and ramblings and may well be misguided [but I am committed to using this blog to just experiment more rather than to 'be right' or 'show off'].)

Williams’s views are about reasons for actions and when we take reasons for actions to be explanatory of actions.  Here is a key claim in his 1979 piece on the matter: “nothing can explain an agent’s (intentional) actions except something that motivates him to act” (107).  This is reasons internalism, the idea that reasons for actions are internally related to being motivated to act.  The contrast view is reasons externalism, which suggests that sometimes there are reasons for actions which are normatively binding but which have no internal relations to agents’ motivations.