Don't Praise the Machine: AI and the Destruction of Three Ecologies

 

I was asked to speak at an AI and Ethics panel at my university. What follows is the outline that I am using for my talk.

The Miasma of Science and Ideology: A Postscript on the New Episteme

 

Of all of the various regressions under Trump 2.0 the anti-vaxx aspect seems to be the most perplexing. As disturbing as Trump's racism, nationalism, and everything else are, at least you can say that they were there since the beginning. Trump's political career began with calling for the death penalty for the "central park five" and his run for President began with nativist hostility to immigrants. The anti-vaccination stance seems new. The initial COVID vaccines were even developed under Trump, and one can imagine that he could take credit for them, since he loves taking credit for things, even for things that he had nothing to do with, or that have not happened. As Plato noticed, however, demagogues find themselves controlled by the same mob that they seem to control. I have not subjected myself to that much of coverage of Trump's rallies, but the only time I have ever seen Trump's mob ever boo him is when he mentioned vaccines.

Under New Management: Capitalism from Utopia to Dystopia

Inspired by this image, I am going with a giant donut theme for this post.

While I do not use the phrase much myself I have always been intrigued by the phrase "take as read" to refer to something that is assumed or taken as axiomatic rather than established. In academic contexts it can sometimes be useful to assume a particular interpretation rather than establish it, to lay out a baseline of understanding in order to move onto other things. In this particular case I am tempted to say, because I do not want to go into it here, that we can take as read that contemporary democratic society gets its image of the good life and its justification from capitalism. Capitalism provides us our image of "freedom, equality, and Bentham," to use Marx's phrase. Freedom is understood primarily as the freedom to purchase what we want; equality, understood as equality in the face of the same commodities, the McDonalds I eat is the same McDonalds that Donald Trump eats, and Bentham because we are all motivated by self interest. 

Do Your Own Damn Research: The New Episteme of Trump 2.0

I have been thinking a lot about the resonance between the current moment and this book

I am going to state this as clearly and as succinctly as possible. This is my thesis: the administration of Trump 2.0 is attempting to institute a new episteme, a new standard and idea of truth. This can be seen in the assaults on the funding and institution of higher education, on the cuts to funding scientific research through NIH and NSF, and in the undermining of vaccines and public health through RFK jr.'s management of Health and Human Services. All of these actions not only undermine the existing episteme, with its layers of expertise and legitimacy, but effectively enshrine a new one, a new practice of what constitutes truth and how it can be found and established. 

Faking it and Making it: On Leigh Claire La Berge's Fake Work

 

This past week I was fortunate to be on a panel at Red May about Leigh Claire La Berge's book Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke. I have posted my comments, as well as the whole panel (which included Leigh Claire, Sarah Jaffe, and Madeline Lane-McKinley) below. 

Leigh Claire La Berge and I had a somewhat similar trajectory, we both graduate from Hampshire College, we both studied primarily post-structuralist thinkers there, and we both developed an interest in Marx afterwards in graduate school. I wish I could say that my post-college work had something to do with that interest, but I only worked in the mailroom of a law firm in San Francisco for one summer before going straight to graduate school. 

Logic of Alternation: Spinoza’s Prehistory of Ideology (and its Marxist History)

 

Of all of the different trajectories and intersections that frame the relation of Marx to Spinoza, one recurring motif posits Spinoza as a precursor with respect to a specifically Marxist concept, that of ideology. Spinoza’s investigations of the imagination and superstition, the illusions that people are subject to, and their role in sustaining political authority and power, are the precursors if not the preconditions of Marx’s theory of ideology. If Spinoza is considered a precursor it is an odd one, because many of the thinkers who have turned to Spinoza for a theory of ideology have done so on the basis that as much as Spinoza comes before Marx chronologically, his understanding of ideology goes beyond what Marx wrote, in the way that constructs a theory that encompasses not just ideas, but affects, not just the thoughts of the mind but the striving of the body, and not just knowledge but imagination. The extent to which Spinoza goes beyond Marx has to be combined with the extent to which he falls short. There is nothing like a theory of not only the capitalist mode of production in Spinoza, but, aside from a few suggestive remarks the constitution of political bodies through common affects, there is nothing like a materialist theory of social relations in Spinoza. In some respects Spinoza goes beyond Marx, while in others Marx goes beyond Spinoza, this movement is less a back and forth, a vacillation, than it is a circle in motion because in between the proper names of Spinoza and Marx and their respective histories and conjunctures there is the question of the relation between the social order and the order of thoughts and desires, to put it in Spinoza’s terms, or the mode of production and the production of subjectivity to put it in Marxist terms. This is no stationary object of contemplation, but an ongoing transformation. We are perhaps as far from nineteenth century idea of ideology as the ruling ideas of the ruling class as Marx was from the question of superstition in the seventeenth century, but in the relation between the two we can perhaps make better sense of the world that produces us, and how it can be produced differently.

The World is a Vampire: On Sinners

I am going to get to Sinners but before I get there I need to say a little about my own particular history with the music known as the blues. 

The Spectacle Goes to the Movies: The Pop Life of Debord

 

As someone who teaches philosophy at a regional public university, which is to say a school without a lot of students who could ever imagine majoring in philosophy, I have never found a pop culture reference to philosophy I did not like. I have talked about Breaking Bad and work, Fight Club and alienation, and Get Out and W.E.B. Dubois to name a few. I have never done anything with The Matrix though. I have never shown it or screened it. 

Workers of the World, Divide! Work and the Constitution of the People

 

Pictures from Princeton (where this paper was presented)

This might be the worst place to begin, but in February Marjorie Taylor-Greene stated the following about the Department of Government Efficiency's cuts of the jobs of government workers across a broad swath of office and programs, from USAID to the NOAA, “Those are not real jobs producing federal revenue, by the way. They're consuming taxpayer dollars. Those jobs are paid for by the American tax people, who work real jobs, earn real income, pay federal taxes and then pay these federal employees." This is a terrible place to begin, because as is often case during the Trump years, we have a statement which seems so outlandish, so beyond the pale of what generally counts as political discourse, that it is tempting to discount it entirely as hyperbole if not insanity. However, I would like to argue that this extreme point can be situated in a broader logic that is at the core of right wing populism, both here in the US, and elsewhere. This core is what I would call “right workerism,” a claim for the virtues of work, for both the individual, people are worthwhile because of their ability to work, and as the constitution of the people, the people, the nation, is defined as a nation of workers. I am calling this right workerism, to contrast it , in the sharpest terms possible with left workerism, in which work, labor, functions as a point of antagonism between workers and capitalists. Work no longer functions as a point of division, between capitalists and workers, exploiter and exploited, but draws new lines of demarcation between “true” and “false” workers. I will return to this point, but first I would like to situate Representative Greene’s statement within this a larger logic, offering both a historical genesis and a conceptual genesis of right workerism.

The Work of Philosophy: Spinoza, Hegel, and Macherey on Theoretical Practice

 

I wanted to illustrate this post with images of simple machines,

but couldn't find any I liked. I then remembered the great collection of records 

that Simple Machines put out. 

Althusser and the students and collaborators who made up his circle have perhaps never been forgiven for developing the concept of “theoretical practice.” Their critics have argued that the concept attempted to grant an importance to philosophy, seeing it as immediately practical and effective, without the need of organization or materiality. Thus reversing Marx’s famous dictum, that “philosophers have only interpreted the world.” Philosophy became a practical act in itself. To dismiss such a concept is to not only misread what is at stake in Althusser’s attempt to the think philosophy as a particular practice, as something which is both limited, as all practices are, but as something which has effects, even if these effects are only on philosophy. One of the central threads running through Pierre Macherey’s thought is an attempt to think through both the implications and conditions of theoretical practice. The problem of theoretical practice, of what philosophy is and does, runs through all of Macherey’s research from his writing on Spinoza, to the question of literature, and the history of philosophy. It also defines his particular practice, his teaching through the seminars on Philosophie au sense large, and the books on utopia, everyday life, the university, and the essay, all of which are defined by an attempt to think the conditions and limitations of philosophy as a practice. Furthermore, this reflection on philosophy as a transformative activity can be found in one of Macherey’s earliest philosophical works, Hegel or Spinoza. Read through Macherey’s later work it is possible to see Hegel and Spinoza as two different ideas of theoretical practice, of what it means to do philosophy.

It's the Economy (of) Stupid: Or, Destroying the Economy to Save its Image

 

Cops in Chicago, defending private property while devaluing the brand. 

In some of the most rhetorically dense passages of Capital, passages that I have cited again and again, Marx puts forward the idea that the economy, or at least market relations produce their own image, their own spontaneous ideology. As Marx writes,

Post-Orwellian: From 1984 to Project 2025

 

Apple's famous 1984 ad

Etienne Balibar titled one of his first essays on Spinoza to appear in English, "Spinoza, The Anti-Orwell." George Orwell is not really discussed in the essay, and the title is only referenced once in the final paragraphs. Balibar writes, 

Living in a Mythocracy: Projecting 2025

From the comic Undiscovered Country

If one looks at the Executive Orders passed by Trump in the first week of his second presidency, and manages to look past the horror, one can see their utter consistency in terms of their vision of government, history, and society. This consistency makes up a universe, what could be called the Fox News Extended Universe. In this universe undocumented immigrants, or "illegals" as they are called, are illegal through and through, the laws they broke to get or stay in this country puts them outside of any law. They can only be harbingers of crime. In this universe DEI, or really any attempt to address this country's history of racism since the civil rights act, can only be understood as racism. To mention race is to divide by race, and the true victims of this racism are the white men and women who have lost jobs, or at least social standing, by having to treat others as equals. In this universe, public health can only be a secret grab for power, and the CDC, WHO, etc., are nefarious tools of domination. In this universe the federal government spends too much money on foreign countries, pointless research, and, as The Simpsons put it the "perverted arts."

The Death of Cool: Silicon Valley and Cultural Capital

 

There is no small irony in the fact that the Communist Manifesto, a text that, as the title suggests, is meant as a political progra, is read more for its description of the cultural logic of capitalism than for its program for a communist revolution. "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned," is a line that is remembered and cited, made the title of books, essays, and panels, long after everyone forgot Marx and Engel's policy on the nationalization of industry. The flowing prose of the first section will always outlast the programatic statements of the latter section (and to be fair even Marx thought that they were dated by 1871, after the Paris Commune).

Nothing Less: On Death, Knowledge, and Affects

 

We all know Spinoza's famous line, "A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death." (EIVP67) I have turned to the line again and again, in graduate school it draw a line of demarcation if not a line in the sand between Heideggerians and neo-Spinozists, and, as I have argued, made possible different ways of thinking of finitude.  It makes for a great slogan, but, as they say in graduate school, let's unpack that.

A Blessing and a Curse: In Memory of my Mom

In loving memory of Debbie Arntz

April 6, 1945-December 21, 2024

The two phrases you hear when you lose someone, at least in the US, are "Sorry for your loss" and "May their memory be a blessing." The two phrases are diametrically and not dialectically opposed. The first emphasizes absence, the living person that is gone, while the second emphasizes presence, the memories that remain. The first of these phrases are more common, more generic, while the second is more often heard from Jewish friends, at least in my experience, and is a translation of the Hebrew "zichrona livricha." The second has begun to be used more widely, either in act of cultural appropriation or cultural tribute.  I have always thought it to be the better of the two phrases.

An (Éminence) Gris Area: Thinking and Acting in Miller's Crossing

 

The one two punch of Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink are probably peak Coen brothers for me. They have other films that are considered classics (No Country for Old Men, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, etc.), but they are two films that typify everything that comes to mind when one thinks of the Coen Brothers, the obsessions with classic Hollywood films and the culture that produced them; the attention to dialogue that turns every line into both an archive and a poem; and a dark sense of humor. A few years ago, thanks to the Maine International Film Festival I got to see the film with Gabriel Byrne speaking afterwards. One of my best movie going experiences.

Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men...? On Richard Seymour's Disaster Nationalism

Every election generates its questions. Generally these questions are an attempt to answer the question, what happened? The way this question is asked and then answered is often not very helpful. The pundit class have a predilection for framing electoral results as symbols in a broad search for meaning. Such explanations tend towards expressive causality as the entire election expresses a historical moment, and the soul of a nation. Thus we are told that Obama's election was the beginning of a new post-racial America, that Harris' lost is the end of identity politics, and that we are all in Trumpland now. A difference of a few million votes in a few different key states is translated into the expression of a new zeitgeist. Such expressive explanations are generally not very useful, especially when we are talking about voting which is actually the actions of millions of different people across different classes states, classes, races, and so on. If anything is overdetermined (and I would argue that everything is, but that is a different, and more speculative point), then elections definitely are overdetermined. My response to all of the various answers to why Trump beat Harris, everything from Harris' failure to distance herself from Biden's support for genocide in Gaza to Trump's appeal to racism and misogyny is to say "yes" to all of them. They are all factors, and all played a role in different degrees and different places. 

Working Politics: The Divisions and Unity of Labor

Machiavelli argued that a prince must appear to be of the people, must seem to have the same values and morals that they do. For him, writing in the sixteenth century, the most important way to appear to be of the people was to be religious. Christianity as set of ideals is certain doom for any ruler, but a necessary appearance for every ruler. As Louis Althusser sums up this general demand. “The prince must take the reality of popular ideology into account, and inscribe therein his own representation, which is the public face of the state.”

Why We Write: Or, Blogging as a Philosophical Practice

A collection of posts from this blog will be published as a book soon from Mayfly books. 

I am posting the introduction as well as the table of contents below.