Florida, Man! The War Against Higher Education

 

Alligator has to be the best University Mascot

“What is happening in Florida will not stay in Florida." From the AAUP's Report on Florida

There is no shortage of critical responses to what is happening to higher education in Florida. There is the report from the AAUP cited above, and the podcast I co-host even dedicated an episode to it. In many, but not all of these cases, these responses have dovetailed with DeSantis' political career, focusing on the person, the policy, and the overall strategy. See for the example the great episode of Know Your Enemy. 

Everything is Externality

I have been working through two different problems lately, well longer, for the last few years. The first problem is a critique of neoliberalism, specifically a critical examination of its particular anthropology, its particular understanding of humankind as homo economicus as an isolated, rational, and calculating creature. The second can only be described as an examination of social ontology, specifically Simondon’s concept of transindividuality, Spinoza’s multitude, Tarde’s ideas of imitation and invention, and the revival of these theories in the work of Virno, Balibar, Deleuze, etc. Admittedly this second problem has occupied more of my time as of late, but for the most parts these have been two fairly separate projects, traveling along separate lines, with only the vaguest idea of any possible intersection. It is that vague idea that I would like to explore here.

In some brief remarks about neoliberalism in The Politics of Subversion Negri sketches something like a connection between these two projects. “The only problem is that extreme liberalization of the economy reveals its opposite, namely that the social and productive environment is not made up of atomized individuals…the real environment is made up of collective individuals,” What Negri suggests with this phrase “collective individuals” is that far from being a purely speculative exercise the question of what constitutes social relations is central to the political and economic struggles of the present.

Yann Moulier-Boutang has underscored the importance of grasping the paradoxical logic of externalities in contemporary capitalism. Traditionally defined externalities are the various impacts that a given transaction has on those who are not party to the transaction. Examples of this include such “negative” externalities as pollution and such “positive” externalities as the unintended cultural and social benefits of the formation of cities. In each case there are effects that are not paid for, not a part of anyone’s calculation. As Moulier Boutang presents it, “externalities are the representation of the outside of the economy acting on the economy.” One could push this a bit further to say that externalities are the way in which a neoliberal society imagines its constitutive conditions, they are everything that do not correspond to the strict calculation of cost for benefit. As such they represent the economy’s, or the market’s, attempt to represent its outside.

The problem is that these externalities have become increasingly difficult to ignore. This is especially true with respect to the environment, as a negative externality, and the knowledge involved in the production process, as a positive externality. There is a historical argument here about the transformation of capital, and it should be viewed critically, perhaps even dialectically, to recognize the continuities that underlie the changes, the complex mix of the new and old that constitutes any conjunction. It seems bizarre to say that the “environment” and “intellectual labor” are in any way new, but at the same time there is a certain manner in which they have recently become unavoidable. Capital’s negative effects on the environment go back to the very beginning, but have recently become unavoidable due to the density of population and intensity of accumulation; in other words, there are no new colonies left to exploit. At the same time capital has always put to work the accumulated knowledge of society, but for a long time it was able to work with the knowledge hierarchies that it found ready made, the medieval system of the university, the feudal system of guilds, etc, but now it must rewrite knowledge in its own image.

In an argument that is similar to Moulier Boutang's in many ways, Etienne Balibar underscores that what these “exernalities” call into question is first and foremost the idea of property as something that is absolutely and exclusively owned. As Balibar writes:

This question first arises “negatively,” by way of "ecology" in the broad sense, that is by the recognition of the harms that turn the "productive" balance sheet of human labor into a "destructive" one, and that suddenly make manifest that the use of nature is submitted to practically no law. By "nature" should be understood here precisely all the nonpossessable materials that are nonetheless an indispensable component of all "production," all "consumption," and all "enjoyment:" Their existence is only noticed when they are lacking (by the potential or ongoing exhaustion of certain fundamental "resources"), or when they are transformed into waste that cannot be eliminated, or when they produce effects capable of endangering the life of individuals and of humanity, which can be neither controlled nor repaired by the owners of their "causes," even when these owners are superpowers or multinational conglomerates with a worldwide reach....

In an opposite way the rise of intellectual production has challenged the particular identity of private property. Although as Balibar points out, this has perhaps always been the case; there has always been tension between the idea of absolute ownership and the production of knowledge and ideas, which in some sense depends on their transmission, their circulation beyond market exchanges. It has always been difficult to separate the work of art from its reproduction, the invention from its copy. Nevertheless there has been a quantitative if not qualitative transformation of this as well. As Balibar writes, “Data and methods are irresistibly "disseminated"; the "paternity" of the results of scientific and technological research can no longer be defined in an exclusive fashion - neither can, as a consequence, the property of objects that incorporate an ever greater amount of crystallized knowledge.” Ecological effects demonstrate that ownership, of land, resources, etc., are never discrete or total, it is impossible to limit the effects of any action to the chunk of the environment that I possess. At the same time the production of knowledge, or production through knowledge, reveals that the excess of effects over ownership are often a necessary condition for accumulation.

The conclusion that Balibar draws from these transformations are as follows:

It then becomes impossible in practice, and more and more difficult even to conceive of in theory, to pose on one side a right of property that would deal only with things, or with the individual concerned with the "administration of things" (with the societas rerum of the jurists of antiquity), and on the other side a sphere of the vita activa (Hannah Arendt) that would be the sphere of "man's power over man" and man's obligations toward man, of the formation of "public opinion," and of the conflict of ideologies. Property (dominium) reenters domination (imperium). The administration of things re-enters the government of men.

Balibar’s political statement reveals an ontological challenge as well. If it is no longer possible to separate the “administraton of things” from the “government of men” then it is equal impossible to rigorously and decisively separate objects form subject, things from agents. Thus we can perhaps locate the faint lines of this political transformation behind the various philosophical projects to recast reality as constituted of assemblages, networks, dispositifs, and so on. (All of which may also in some way be attempts to recapture or reinvigorate what Marx initially meant by a “mode of production,” which was not just a new name for an old thing, the economy, but an attempt to understand the mutually constitutive relations of subjects and objects, commodities and ideas.) Moreover, it is not just a matter of recognizing dense networks of relations that exceed any simple division of subjects and objects, but recognizing the constitutive character of relations. As Balibar argues Marx’s philosophy, like that of Spinoza and others, can be characterized as insisting on the primacy of relations, or, more accurately, the relation of relations. With respect to neoliberalism the externalities of the environment and of the circulation of knowledge underscore how completely impossible it is to understand our world through the category of the individual (object or subject) since everything seems to happen above and below the individual. To use Simondon’s terms, everything happens at the level of “pre-individual singularities,” the affects, habits, and perceptions, or transindividual relations, collectivities etc.

To return to Negri’s quote above, it is possible to understand neoliberalism as an ideology that is wholly out of touch with reality. At the exact moment that the world is made and remade through relations, of the sub and transindividual, it represents the world as made up entirely of individuals. However, such a characterization misses some of the strongest points of the criticism of neoliberalism in the work of Wendy Brown and even Foucault’s recently translated lecture course on “biopolitics.” Writers on neoliberalism have insisted that it is not just an ideology, in the pejorative sense of the term, a set of ideas one may or may not subscribe to, but a fundamental transformation of how we live and perceive the world, a production of subjectivity. As Wendy Brown argues, one can survey the quotidian effects or practices of neoliberalism in the manner in which individualized/market based solutions appear in lieu of collective political solutions: gated communities for concerns about security and safety; bottled water for concerns about water purity; and private schools (or vouchers) for failing public schools, all of which offer the opportunity for individuals to opt out rather than address political problems. Despite our best efforts we are all some sense produced as neoliberal subjects, calculating the maximum benefit for minimum cost with respect to our labors, actions, and desires.

In the end, and by way of a conclusion, the challenge would seem to be to retain these two ideas at once. To both recognize the constitutive nature of relations, relations which exceed the categories of subjects and objects, and to recognize that one of the things those relations constitute is the image of a world made up of isolated competitive individuals (an image which has very real effects).

Nightmares of the Present (to be followed shortly with a post on dreams)

Wendy Brown’s “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization” (Political Theory 34/6) is a great article, part of a growing literature of critical philosophical responses to Neoliberalism. (Well, that sentence is a wee-bit hyperbolic, since I am primarily thinking of two other things: Brown’s essay in Edgework and Foucault’s Naissance de la Biopolitique, the latter of which is technically almost thirty years old). It is primary strength is that it takes as a philosophical problem the articulation of neoliberalism and neoconservatism.

It has been commonplace on the center-left to dismiss the relationship between these two political “rationalities” (to use Brown’s term) as one that is purely strategic: some dark cabal between Dick Cheney and James Dobson. Or, to cite the argument of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas, to see the neoconservatism of the right as simply the sheep’s clothing of values (technically a lamb) worn by the wolf of privatization. Brown, however, argues for a more intimate, even essential, connection, based upon their shared anti-democratic tendencies. Neoliberalism’s tendency to privatize social issues (to depoliticize them), not just in the literal sense of turning public spaces to private profit, but in the sense that every social problem becomes a private matter, addressed by commodities, crime by gated communities, pollution by bottled water, etc., paves the way for neoconservatism.

At first it would seem that these two rationalities are linked by more of what they oppose than what they have in common. What they oppose are first and foremost equality, which neoliberalism can only see as an authoritarian imposition on the “natural” competition and hierarchies of the market and neoconservatism sees as a violation of the authority of church and family. But they are also opposed to freedom and democracy defined in anything other than individualistic terms. However, the two rationalities do not just share the same enemy, which would have to be called democracy, or democratization. They also work on the same terrain or conditions, reinforcing each other as they oppose each other. As Brown writes: “What this suggests is that the moralism, statism, and authoritarianism of neoconservatism are profoundly enabled by neoliberal rationality, even as neoconservatism aims to limit and supplement some of neoliberalism’s effects, and even as the two rationalities are not concordant. Neoliberalism does not simply produce a set of problems that neoconservatism addresses or, as critics claim, operate as neoconservatisms’s corporate economic plank. Rather, neoliberal political rationality…has inadvertently prepared the ground for profoundly antidemocratic ideas and practices to take root in the culture and subject.” Thus it is possible to see both as privatizations, as reductions of the social to the individual. Neoliberalism reduces the social to the individual of the market, defined by calculations of cost and profit. Neoconservatism reduces society to the individual of morality, defined by faith and sin.

What strikes me about the general problem of neoliberalism and neoconservatism is that the very problem appears in fundamental points in the history of philosophy, albeit modified. From a particular perspective one could read Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, specifically the dialectic of “civil society” and the state, as a contradictory logic which demonstrates how the possessive individualism of the market is reinforced by the authoritarian tendencies of the state. As is so often the case, Hegel is most revealing about this in a remark prior to the section on ethical life where he discusses Protestantism (a conceptual stand in for subjectivity) and Catholicism (a conceptual stand in for the objectivity of institutions). “A longing may therefore arise for an objective condition, a condition in which the human being gladly debases himself to servitude and total subjection simply in order to escape the torment of vacuity and negativity. If many Protestants have recently gone over to the Catholic Church, they have done so because they found that their inner life was impoverished, and they reached out for a fixed point, a support, and an authority, even if what was gained was not the stability of thought.” Unlike the latter discussions of civil society and the state, which focus on the structural conditions of competition and overproduction, this remark, which completes part two of The Philosophy of Right, offers an existential understanding of the dialectic.

I foreground this existential, or subjective dimension, in part because of Brown’s remark about the “culture and the subject,” but also because I would like to drawn a point of comparison between dialectics as a logic of the conjuncture and Deleuze and Guattari’s logic of deterritorialization. To quote the famous passage from Anti-Oedipus:

“Civilized modern societies are defined by processes of decoding and deterritorialization. But what they deterritorialize with one hand, they reterritorialize with the other. These neoterritorialities are often artificial, residual, archaic; but they are archaisms having a perfectly current function, our modern way of ‘imbricating,’ of sectioning off, of reintroducing code fragments, resuscitating old codes inventing pseudo codes or jargons…These modern archaisms are extremely complex and varied. Some are mainly folkloric, but they nonetheless represent social and potentially political forces…. Others are enclaves whose archaism is just as capable of nourishing a modern fascism as of freeing a revolutionary charge…Some of these archaisms take form as if spontaneously in the current of the movement of deterritorialization…Others are organized and promoted by the state, even though the might turn against the state and cause it serious problems (regionalism, nationalism).”

Two things about this passage: First, It is hard not to read this as a version of the relation of neoliberalism and neoconservatism; and, second, it is equally difficult not to read this passage existentially.

By way of a conclusion: I take Brown’s essay to be something of a provocation, an attempt to grasp the logic of the current conjuncture, the intersection of the seemingly opposed rationalities of capital and the state, freedom and authority. To which I would add, or have attempted by way of Hegel, Deleuze, and Guattari, that philosophy is not free of this logic, that perhaps in some form or another all thought of society has tried to grasp the problem of capital and the state, under various names, dialectics, desiring-production, etc.



Finally, I just want to add a note about The Host. A film that could take the mantle of the most biopolitical film of the year. Now it is commonplace to understand horror films as the projection of some cultural anxiety (Godzilla and the Atom Bomb, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and communism), however, I do not think that would apply here. The monster in this film does not stand for anything, if only because the film spends so much time on the “real” threats that it would represent, pollution, disease, chemical weapons, all of these things are given full reign within the plot of the film. These things all appear as “conditions” within the film, in that there is a pretty standard monster movie narrative (tampering with nature creates monster which harms humans and must be destroyed), which is refracted through the lens of biopolitical panic and authority. It gives a vision of a state which pollutes and contaminates the environment while simultaneously offering itself as the only possible protection of this environment.

As Fragile as Glass

My goal of writing a post-SPEP post has been stalled for two reasons: One, I could not find a picture of the Jellybean Children, and Two, nothing really substantial (or even clever) to say. Well since the latter goes without saying, especially for anyone who has ever read this blog before, I will explain the former. SPEP was held in Philadelphia, specifically in the "old city" (or "old town" or "ye olde city" or something like that) which is full of tourist attractions, just like in days of old. One of these tourist attractions is the National Liberty Museum. Now, I can imagine what you are thinking, there is nothing exceptional about that name, however, did you know that the museum is "The only Museum in the world featuring contemporary glass art to represent the fragile qualities of freedom?" I kid you not. And that it features "Jellybean Children" in celebration in diversity? Now, I did not go into the museum, but I did look at it, and read its brochure and very much enjoyed the picture of the Jellybean Children and wanted to post it here, but could not find such a picture.

As for the second reason, the conference was fun, which surprised me a bit. I heard a few interesting papers, mostly by friends or at least acquaintances, which raises the question (discussed at the conference, but not officially) do we like the papers of our friends, or are we friends of the people whose papers we like? I can tell you that my favorite one liner of the conference was: "In America even the Marxist are liberals." Not the sort of thing that one would expect to hear at SPEP, but that is part of what made this conference enjoyable, plenty of papers off of the beaten Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas path. Badiou was oddly disappointing, references to Spinoza notwithstanding. This might have something to do with the way in which Badiou decided to address "existence" and "phenomena," perhaps he was not informed that SPEP is just a name, a relic even, and not a program. Or maybe he is just not good live. Wendy Brown, however, was very impressive.