Working Together: on Fischbach's Faire Ensemble (and the question of solidarity)

Having spent a lot of time thinking about, and thinking with, the concept of "negative solidarity," it sometimes occurs to me that I should think about its opposite, about solidarity, as the necessary condition for collective action. I have read on the topic from time to time, I read Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix's book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World Changing Idea as soon as it came out. However, I struggle to say anything interesting about it for two reasons. First, as I argued in The Double Shift, capitalism has so undermined our imagination that it is difficult to think of any model of action than a purely individualistic one, everyday people deal with poverty, precarity, and insecurity, by endeavoring to work harder, to hustle, to find a side gig or scam. Working with others collectively is unimaginable, especially when that collectivity is mediated not by the wage form. Second, I am not sure if this default in the imagination can be addressed theoretically, or even through a historical recounting of times in which solidarity seemed easier to imagine, it is not a matter of theory, but of practice. Solidarity increasingly seems like something to do rather than ponder. 

The State of Bias: Universality and Particularity in Politics

 

A few weeks ago I was trying to formulate a pithy little formulation for social media. It went something like this, "Political theory is a matter of determining which principle a polity should follow; political practice is a matter of interpreting a principle differently for one's followers." It did not quite work as a post no matter how I reworked it, but what I was trying to get at is the pervasive and unavoidable inconsistency of the relationship between principle and practice in contemporary politics. We have so-called "free speech warriors" who are very worried about  the "chilling effects" on free speech by students who protest speakers, but have nothing at all to say about state governments banning the teaching of Plato, and a federal government that makes education funding contingent on universities promoting their agenda, and, more recently, we have defenders of the right to bear arms arguing that just carrying a gun is enough to justify a summary execution. All of this goes beyond hypocrisy.  Since I could not get it to work in a few characters, I thought that I would reflect on it more here. 

Demarcations and Determinations: on Hijacked by Elizabeth Anderson

 

Elizabeth Anderson is always an interesting author for me to read because as much as we are both concerned with the same issues, namely,  the politics of work, and the domination of the work ethic over our lives, we approach these issues from fundamentally different philosophical perspectives. Anderson is for the most part working on these issues from within the liberal tradition, construed broadly, while my approach is framed in large part by the traditions of Marxism and Marxist Spinozism. Determination is negation, as Marx cited Spinoza as saying, and it is through reading Anderson that I get a deeper sense of my own philosophical commitments and perspective.

Inalienable: Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke on Self-Defense

 

Since I am discussing Dorlin's Self-Defense 

I thought that I would use some pictures from old self defense manuals

including this variation of nikkyo. 

Elsa Dorlin's Self-Defense: A Philosophy of Violence  considers, among many things, the role that self-defense played in social contract theory (and beyond). What follows bellow is a response to that particular provocation and not a review of the whole book, but it is very much worth reading.

Althusser Effects: Philosophical Practices

 

I have more copies of Reading Capital than any other book

One of the most damming things anyone has ever said to me, at least about academic philosophy was something like the following, "philosophy at universities today is to doing philosophy what art history is to making art." The implication being that emphasis in the modern university is on following different philosophers; tracing their influences and transformations the way that a historian my trace the different periods of an artist. It seemed damming, but not inaccurate, especially with respect to the way that there seems to be a trajectory, at least in continental programs of setting oneself up as [blank] guy, following a philosopher, interpreting, commenting and translating. There are a lot of questions that can be posed about this model, especially now, as philosophy continues to be pushed outside of the university, and forced to reinvent itself in new spaces and publications. 

The Means of Individuation: Castel on the Dialectics of Individuality

Images by Jacques Villeglé 

In the essay publishes as the conclusion to La Montée des Incertitudes: Travail, Protections, statut de l'individu Robert Castel gives a genealogy of the contemporary individual. First, in a line of thinking that would seem to parallel Etienne Balibar because it is one of his sources, Castel argues that the modern individual is founded upon property. As Locke argued, Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself." As Castel stresses this connection between property and individuation is not a theoretical assertion but a practice as well. Bourgeois modernity is founded upon the reciprocal connection of the individual and property.