Romanticism: Transgressing the Law of Gender.

This is a fairly rough draft of some plans I had for an essay recently that I thought I would put out regardless – essentially most of it is here, though I would have liked to have explored Godwin’s memoirs more and the critical response following Memoirs, but that will be for another day.

Transgressing the Law of Gender.

Byron’s Don Juan and Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 1792. She argues for a “REVOLUTION in female manners”. She argues that women, lacking the education and liberty to exercise their personhood have become “slavish” and “infantile” in their “gilded cages”. These women, consigned to gendered stereotypes throughout their lives have become “infantile subjects” — “the denial of their education was tantamount to a denial of their personhood”. Rather than essentialist differences of gender of man and woman, Wollstonecraft saw the “greater spirit of liberty, which allowed men to see more of life”. This ennobling of masculinity, associated with liberty and reason, over femininity, which encouraged the “infantile subject”, opened the way for women to take on “masculine” characteristics — “masculine women”. Wollstonecraft notes that “any woman who displays a higher than normal ‘energy’ is called masculine”. Wollstonecraft saw the appropriation of masculinity as a method of gaining greater freedom for women: she “put a female claim on the manly spirit of independence” (Wolfson). This masculine tone pervades the text, with what the Whig Monthly Review heralded as a “great performance” — rhetoric and reason which was hitherto the assigned as the province of men is employed by Wollstonecraft to assert her argument. If women can be deemed criminally and morally accountable for their crimes, then they have souls capable of thinking correctly. If they are capable of rationality, then they should be guided to improve their actions. Therefore, this rational facility should be developed to its greatest ability. This argument, including its rhetoric, displays what Hays noted as a “strong masculine tone”. Wollstonecraft crosses the line of demarcation between the strict couplings of male-masculinity and female-femininity in order to improve the lot of her sex, discarding the “weapons of the weak” (Lynch) of femininity for a striving for the masculine-woman and all it entails — reason, independence, strength and liberty and so on.

Byron’s Don Juan engages with the strong heroin throughout, with these women often exhibiting something akin to Wollstonecraft’s “masculine woman”. If one were to answer the cry of “masculine women — where are they?” one need only look at Cantos II to see the heroin Haidee. She has a “voice that bespoke command” and a “form of the highest female mould”, exhibiting characteristics that are contrary to femininity; instead she portrays traits typically ascribed to masculinity: a dominant tone and a tall frame. Upon finding Juan, unconscious, washed up on the shore she tends to him — hiding him from the patriarch, her father Lambro, in a cave that is reminiscent of a prelapsarian paradise, shielding from culture — Haidee “cast an atmosphere of life about the place”. But from the outset, the exotic Haidee subverts both patriarchal and colonial norms, discovering Juan: she is the discoverer, not the discovered, compounding the dominance of this heroin. “She is an active pursuer” (Chen). She actively engages with Juan, exploring his body, tending to him and initiating encounters with him. “She is an unconventional figure who challenges patriarchal conceptions of women” (Reed). This unconventionality, and an emphasis of masculine-womanhood, is most pronounced when Lambro discovers Juan. She “threw herself her boy before”. “A minute past she had been all tears”, but now faced with the threat of Lambro, becomes one who “stands as stern as her sire”, with a “fix’d eye” gazed upon him. “They are alike…but in years and sex”. Haidee and Lambro are more alike in their characteristics (both exhibiting masculinity) than “the boy” Juan, who, in the passive role, takes a feminine subjectivity. Haider captures the “manly spirit of independence” (VRW). Juan, the emasculated subject can be further emphasised when Haidee and Zoe cover the bed in “her sables”, and gave a “petticoat a piece” to cover Juan. Signifiers of womanhood are used to cover Juan, pacifying him — Byron’s emasculated “Juan faces the threat of other men […] but [Byron] also masculinises women in the process” (Wolfson). The cave is reminiscent of Plato’s, albeit inverted — in the cave the strict demarcations of gender are unfixed, whereas outside in culture (as shall be elaborated on later) the demarcation is re-fixed. Wollstonecraft argues that women have never had the chance to prove their against their subjugation to men, and it is within this cave that these new subjectivities of the masculine-woman and emasculated Juan can be explored, unconstrained by patriarchal rule, represented by the absent Lambro. This natural paradisiacal land with which Haidee cast “an atmosphere of life” again conforms for the opportunity of unconventional gender norms: nature, in contrary to Rousseau’s nature in which he argues that women essentially provoke men, act infantile, love dolls and so on, allows a free expression of the self.

Evidently, Byron empowers Haidee, attributing to her masculine characteristics (as well as his other heroines in Don Juan). Husika sees this as evidence that Byron was one who sought to allow women to “shape their own destinies” (Husika). However, this misses the full story. Byron “senses fatal consequences when the laws of gender are transgressed” (Wolfson). Haidee is associated with images of death throughout — within her dream her “black eyes gazed upon the dead”, with waves rising and rising, threatening her life. “Juan nearly died” from his encounter with Lambro and his love for Haidee. Haider, as well as inviting, displays threats of death, too: she is called a “lioness” and is “also one who could avenge”; a clear threat of death to Lambro the father and the patriarch. Wolfson notes that Byron invokes Deuteronomy which stated that any man or woman who transgressed their gender conventions were “an abomination unto the LORD”. Similar “fatal consequences” of gender norms can be seen after the death of Wollstonecraft. Godwin, well intentioned and adhering to his discipline of strict reason and truth, issued his Memoirs that revealed the unsavoury (to contemporary audiences) life of his lover: companionships with women, suicide attempts, fits of “sensibility” that defied her masculine woman status, and the account of her agonising death in child birth. The Rev. Polwhele in The Unsex’d Female saw women of her type as a “female band that despis’d NATURE’s law”. The Memoir, as well as those like Polwhele saw to it that Wollstonecraft’s transgressions were corrected in society, with fellow female writers such as Edgeworth and Hays (who tended to her as she died) using Wollstonecraft as a template for contemptuous characters in their novels, as a “moral lesson” to their readership. Polwhele suggests that it is the hand of God which issued the correction of the “abomination unto the LORD” (Deuteronomy). Wollstonecraft is re-written: the masculine woman is corrected by divine will for her transgressions of gender conventions. “She died a death that strongly mark’d the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny and diseases which they are liable”. In deviating, Haidee also feels the correcting hand, but of the author, who “issues plots of correction and restoration to contain threats to male privilege” (Wolfson). Though lacking scholarly intellect, Haidee employed rhetoric and argument against her father, “dominating the speech of the episode” (Reed). Lambro, eventually, seizes her, and after the perceived death of Juan at Lambro’s order, she falls in to coma and dies a passive death. The threat to male privilege is corrected and restored.

Bibliography

Byron, George G. B. Don Juan. Raleigh, N.C: Alex Catalogue, 1990. Print.

Godwin, William, Pamela Clemit, and Gina L. Walker. Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman.                     Peterborough, Ont: Broadview Press, 2001. Print.

Husika, Esma. “Genre and Gender as Byronic Subversions in Don Juan”. 1st International Conference on Foreign Language           Teaching and Applied Linguistics (FLTAL’11), 5-7 May 2011, Sarajevo. Web. 28 Aug. 2015.

Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism & Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.

Reed, Toni. The Foreign Woman In British Literature. N. p., 2015. Web. 23 Aug. 2015.

Polwhele, Richard. Mary A. Radcliffe. The Unsex’d Females: A Poem. New York: Garland Pub, 1974. Web. 23 Aug. 2015.

Tilottama Rajan, “Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the secrets of the Political Novel” Studies in Romanticism 27.2, 1988:         221-51. Web. 23. Aug. 2015.

Wolfson, Susan. “Their She Condition: Cross-Dressing And The Politics Of Gender In Don Juan”. ELH                                                Vol. 54, No. 3 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 585-617 2015. JSTOR. Web. 23 Aug. 2015.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Boston, Thomas and Andrews, Faust’s statue, no. 45, 1792. Print

Mental Causation and the Excluded Causal Exclusion Argument

Mental Causation

I’ve been reading around Non-Reductive Physicalism and Supervenient in relation to mental causation recently, having came across (or well, being forced to stumble across consider the man’s notoriety) Kim’s Causal Exclusion Argument. Below I give an outline of Kim’s argument which endorses a claim for epiphenomenalism or reductionism (Kim favours the latter in most papers I have read, as opposed to Baker who seems to adhere to the former more favourably). I then give a summary of one of the arguments against Exclusion by Corry, who gives an example of nomological co-existent sufficient causes for one event existing in fundamental physics. How Corry thought up some of the brilliant ideas in his paper is somewhat beyond me — excess mental phenomena, perhaps.

Non-Reductive Physicalism is based on three general premises. Firstly, supervenience: that higher-level properties supervene on lower level properties; without B (base) there would be no A (high-level property). So the higher-level property can be said to be fixed by the physical base (fundamental physics or something akin). Secondly, Irreducibility higher-level properties are irreducible to supervenient-base lower properties, having their own novel properties. Thirdly, higher-level properties have causal efficacy, they can instantiate a change in another property. With regards to mental phenomena, the argument in support of the claim of NRP is as follows (draw a figure). Firstly, however, I use Kim’s, Fodor’s and Corry’s usage of ‘nomological sufficiency’ in order to describe the relations between lower and higher level properties, as well as use nomological sufficiency to describe causation (this shall be elaborated on later — but it is consistent with an interoperation of Kim’s ‘thicker notion’ of causation which he leaves somewhat ambiguous). Nomological sufficiency means that, with the fundamental laws of nature being as they are, it would be impossible to have supervenient-base level property B and not have higher property A.

  If mental phenomena (M) supervenes on physical base (P), then P is nomologically sufficient for M. M causes property P* (a physical state). M is therefore nomologically sufficient for P*. But if M is nomologically sufficient for P*, and M supervenes on P, this means that P is also nomologically sufficient for M, and if causation is nomological sufficiency, then P also causes P*. Kim argues that we have an issue here. First, there cannot be a causal chain from P—>M—>P*, as M has a nomological supervenient relation with P, not a causative one. Thus, this means we have two sufficient explanations for the cause of P* (as M & P are both sufficient conditions on their own for causing P*). Hence, M & P are two independent sufficient causes of P*. But this would violate Exclusion which is essentially that, if there are two independent and nomologically sufficient causes, then they cannot co-exist — one must be excluded — otherwise it is a case of overdetermination, which Kim considers absurd, since conceivably not every single mental to physical event could be a case of overdetermination. Since Kim’s Closure states that the universe is physically closed (everything is physical) and that every independent physical event has one independent sufficient physical cause then M appears to be superfluous in an explanation of causation. Rather than appealing to epiphenomenalism, Kim argues that we should reject M and see it as either impotent or required to be reduced down to P. This is the Causal Exclusion Argument.

I will argue against Kim’s Exclusion, specifically, showing how two nomologically sufficient causes need not exclude oneanother through Corry’s critique. This will then lead to an objection which I shall argue founders the Causal Exclusion Argument as a whole, as the independency of the relationship between M and P is questioned: there is empirical evidence of two nomologically sufficient properties co-existing as sufficient causes for instantiating a third property. Corry notes that there is evidence at the very fundamental levels of the coexistence of two nomologically sufficient properties being the cause of an event. In the Stern-Gerlach experiment, the spin of particles is measured. So, for electrons, protons and other particles of that ‘class’, they have a spin 1/2. When a beam of these particles is fired into an unhomogenous magnetic field, the beam can go one of two ways: the beam splits in two. Therefore it is nomologically sufficient for a particle with property spin 1/2 for a beam of this property to be split in two. However, electrons and positrons are the only particles with a resting mass of 0.511MeV. They also have a spin 1/2. Therefore it is nomologically sufficient that a particle with 0.511MeV to split a beam in two. We have a case, then, where there are two nomologically sufficient properties to instantiate the beam being split in two, in violation of Exclusion, where two or more nomologically sufficient independent properties cannot co-exist as a sufficient cause. One could argue, however, that as a particle of rest mass 0.511MeV is nomologically sufficient for a spin 1/2, these two properties are not actually independent, and are therefore immune to the Exclusion principle. However, Corry argues, with some sense of the Admiral Akbar to it, that this is his trap. If two nomologically sufficient properties are immune to Kim’s Exclusion, then higher-level and supervenient-base-level properties are also immune to the Exclusion principle, as they also have a nomologically-sufficient relation to one another. P is nomologically sufficient for the supervening mental property M. I make no claim to refute Kim’s entire critique in an hour long essay on a man who appears to have published more articles than the Mail on immigration, but the issue raised with Exclusion appears to be irreconcilable with nomological sufficiency, and as shown by Wake, Corry, Block and others, a counterfactual dependency does not seem to hold, either.

Corry, Richard. “Emerging from the causal drain”. Philosophical Studies 165 (1):29-47. Web. 19th May 2015.

Kim, Jaegwon. “Mechanism, purpose, and explanatory exclusion”. Philosophical Perspectives 3:77-108. Web. 19th May 2015.

Posthumanism: Generative Selves

This is a paper that I wrote this year for the ‘Cyborg Studies’ module under Professor Andrew Pickering, whose papers (a few cited below) I highly recommend reading for a good grounding in posthumanism and his ontology in general. I did appear to be waxing rather lyrical in this essay, but I found the subject especially compelling so perhaps got somewhat carried away.

How does Bergson’s critique of representationalism and Eno and Reich’s art open up the possibility of experiencing other selves outside of representation?

The predominantly Western ontology of humanism and representationalism . “There persists,” says Whitehead, “a fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being” (22). This is a key argument of post humanists and philosophers such as Henri Bergson. Representationalism, which purports to explain everything, is actually valueless. The question that needs to be explored, then, is: what is the alternative? We “enframe” (Heidegger, 296) the world, turning something into a static resource, denying its heterogeneity “the earth reveals itself as a coal mining district, soil as a mineral deposit” (296) . But in enframing the world we also enframe ourselves, “Ontology makes a difference. Ontology and action hang together. How we understand the world and how we go on in it reinforce one another” (Pickering, “Sigma” 11). In enframing the world, representing it as a homogenised unit, we also participate in an ontology that seeks to define human selves versus other human selves. This results in the “the modern self” being in “need of policing and enframing 􏰀’subjectivisation’ (Pickering, “PoT” 16). People are seen under a representationalist idiom as “merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other” (Watts, Taboo 103). We deny ourselves of agency just as much as we deny the rest of the world’s.

But, if we realise representationalism’s failures, we can explore other selves that are available to us. These selves, instead of standing apart and above the world “get on” with it. Firstly, in this paper, I provide a critique of representation, through Henri Bergson’s metaphysics. He denies the detour that representation takes through reality. Bergson wishes to get into the thing, rather than at its surface. I use Bergson’s critique of time as an example of representation’s falsehood. I then explore the disparity of classical and generative music as an analogy of Bergson’s representation versus intuition, introducing Pickering’s Dances of Agency, applying to the composition of Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain” and subsequent concepts. This leads to the thought of cybernetician Beer and Buddhist thought. These ideas express the potential for a new narrative. It provides an almost spirituality. A sense of wonder from a posthuman and Dao narrative follows. “In Modernity, science and spirituality have nothing to do with one another” (Pickering, “BD” 16). But with a posthumanist narrative perhaps a fertile ground will be prepared,”from which a glorious Phantom may / Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day” (Shelley). I make no apology for the spiritual bent to this paper. I feel that, in our current lifeless representational idiom, a little mystery and wonder, a recognition of the richness and endless variety that is intrinsic not just within ourselves, but within everything, is something that we need in our lives.

Bergson’s Critique of Representation and Science’s Representation of Time.

We represent everything and quantify it, neglecting the reality of the thing we are representing. “We are not dealing here with real parts, but with mere notes of the total impression” (Bergson, ItM 7). The Enlightenment’s ideology of scientific materialism — representationalism — denies “anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility”. It is “viewed with suspicion” (Adorno 3). Our epistemology is of a “scientific knowledge” that is a “pale simulacrum of the world […] a simulacrum one nevertheless finds it hard not to mistake for the thing in itself.’ (Pickering “BD” 18) A shell, devoid of any externality with its surrounding universe, a ‘simple line drawing’ (Lawlor 24).   Representation “multiplies to infinity its observations of this material from outside points of view. It soon comes to believe that by putting together all these diagrams it can reconstitute the object itself “(Bergson, ItM 8). “For Bergson, the apprehension of real processes as discrete parts is a misrepresentation”. (Vaughan 18).. A movement away from a representational model is required in order for us to “get on” with the world. Bergson gives the solution against representation: Intuition. “Intuition […] requires the experience, from the inside, of life itself before its differentiation into discrete things […] and grasp, at the same time, the nature of the participation” (Vaughan 18). Bergson’s critique of the representation of time is useful to explore this notion of representation as a whole here. Bergson terms true time as ‘duration’. Rather than a whole split into divisible parts, duration is intermingled and inseparable — it is the real lived reality. It is impossible to point to where one thing begins and another ends. There are no distinguishable parts, for there is no stability. However, through the representation of scientific materialism, space is superimposed onto time. Time is seen as a frame by frame process; whereas actually it is pure duration. For the materialist to fracture this, then would be only showing a mere simulacra of the real, rather than the real itself. To grasp duration, then, one must move outside of homogenising representation. Bergson uses ‘intuition’ as the method of grasping the real of duration. It is a performative interaction with the world, outside of representation. One views time from intuition, rather than representation to intuition. “One cannot move from without to within, from analysis to intuition, just as one cannot isolate a moment, and attempt to reconstitute it into its whole” (Yusa 124).

Time is but one example of where representation gets it wrong, however. The world is also forced into representation. It is quantified and dissected, as we seek to enframe all things classified, static units. The forest turned to the lumber will; the hogs running wild kept in cages in the factory farm. As hown in Pickering’s Dances of Agency, however, the universe is very much alive and heterogeneous, despite our attempts to contain it. He argues that one needs to forget “about the representational aspects” and to “begin with questions of practice, performance and agency” (“IoS” 3). Dances of Agency are open ended dialectics of resistances and accommodations and, I argue, are analogous to Bergson’s ‘duration’. There is no centre or privileged position. Like Bergson’s duration, were one to isolate one dialectical moment and represent it, one would lose the quality of the whole thing. Reality is that of endless flux. “Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not” (Heraclitus, Barnes). A post-humanist ontology opens up to us. Real “reality is mobility. Not things made, but things in the making, not self-maintaining states, but only changing states, exist” (Bergson, ItM 151). One is in a performative relationship with the world. One does not stand above it. This abstract talk of duration and representation works well. But through Reich and Eno’s generative music and dances of agency, one can see performativity in action.

Simulating Posthumanism Through Reich and Eno’s Generative Music

Art is viewed by Brian Eno as “A simulator where new ideas are formed” (1). Generative music is a posthuman process. It expresses the interrelationship of human and non human. There is a no privileged position between the agents. There is a clear distinction between generative music and that of the representationalist classical music. The latter “specifies an entity in advance and then builds it”. Generative music does not do this. It “specifies a set of rules and then lets them (author’s note: non-human agent: computer, algorithm and so on) make the thing” (Eno 2). This generative music moves out of representation and is instead based on performativity between human and non human. A Dance of Agency. Rather than representing and dominating the non-human, the human is a cultivator of the seed of a coevolutionary creative process. In classical music, the human represents and dominates the music. These posthuman methods of music, these simulators of ideas can provide us with a microcosm of thought that expresses other ways of being and perceiving the world. To continue the music analogy: there is beauty in my dropping the pin on the vinyl player. However, I know that I will hear the same track over and over (unless I rather horrifically scratch the disc) if I stick to the same LP. New ways of thinking about the songs may occur, but those ways of thought are confined to the boundaries of that disc. In the same sense, we may move within our current humanist and representationally constrained ontology, but it is trapped within the limits of our represented world of which we spin upon. Representation is a “valuable substitute where the intellect can be thoroughly at home”. However, “they do not in the least represent reality as it is” (Costeolle 12).

An apt example of generative music, that inspired Eno himself, is Steve Reich’s composition, “It’s Gonna Rain”. ‘Composition’ is an inappropriate word here, however. Reich, in contrast to the classical composer, sets the initial conditions of the piece and allows the rest of it to become of itself. As the music progresses in the piece, the two same samples begin to move out of sync with one another. Sounds emerge that could not be predicted beforehand — they reveal themselves in real time. The compositional process, which occurs in real time, is a perfect example of a dance of agency between human and non-human. The human sets the conditions, cultivating the seed of its inception, and then the music goes of its own, in its own dances of agency with the other sample and the conditions first set. This is not just within the compositional process itself, though. To our human ears, too, the piece moves from dissonance (resistance) to consonance (accommodation and synthesis), sounds appear out of nowhere. At 5.00, the two samples of the preacher yelling “It’s gonna rain!” suddenly begin to produce the sound of cannon fire, which then fades away to the sound of a strange type of birdsong. Rather than attempting to represent everything, reducing and fixing them in place, we “get on” in a performative relationship with the piece. “Something happens because of one’s perception rather than because of anything physically happening” (Eno 2). So, then, where am I going with this analogy? “If you move away from the idea of the composer as someone who creates a complete image and then steps back from it, there’s a different way of composing. It’s putting in motion something and letting it make the thing for you” (2). To move away from representation is to ‘step back’, engaging with the non-human in coevolution, rather than enframing and domination. One draws art out, rather than stamping one’s own representation of art onto the notation sheet. This is a form of hylozoism, which “stages the idea that everything, including art, is already there in nature, so that the work of the artist is less to create art than to set up the conditions for nature to manifest itself as art (Pickering “Sigma” 10).

自然

“That Which Happens of Itself”

Hylozoism to Daoism

However, “the arts alone cannot carry enough weight to sustain a revolution” (Pickering, “Sigma” 12). An ontological shift from humanist to posthumanist is necessary that starts with a change of how one perceives oneself. A narrative needs to be formed, or rather, found. Hylozoism was also expressed outside of art, in the practical designs of Beer. He noted that “man has become accustomed to regard his materials as inert lumps of matter which have to be fashioned and assembled to make a useful system. He does not normally think first of materials as having an intrinsically high variety which has to be constrained” (209). Rather than building systems that were top-down organised, treating matter without agency, he ‘latched on’ to the world. Like Reich’s ‘compositions’, Beer cultivated the seed, rather than imposed upon the concept. Beer devised plans for wonderful and, at first blush, bizarre ideas, such as running industrial practices with Daphnia pond life. Though fascinating, it is with the hylozoist thought that I wish to focus on. His hylozoism and posthumanism harkens to the East. “Beer’s awe at the excess of matter, towards a Buddhist and very non-modern image of the human mind as extending beyond the Modern self in performative engagement with the nonhuman mind-stuff of the cosmos” (“Beyond Design”, 249). In China, 自然, (Ziran) is a central tenant of Daoism: “That which happens of itself’. Rather than constraining the world, one lets it go about of its own volition. This concept flows through the ideas of Bergson, Pickering, Beer and the generative art of Reich and Eno. Agency is innate as “all beings and phenomena exist or occur only because of their relationship with other beings or phenomena” (Yun 19). If we acknowledge the agency that has been “suppressed in the modern ontology”, and the “sheer agency and liveliness of nature itself” (Pickering, “Sigma” 9), and turn oneself away from representation and towards Bergson’s intuition, or to Pickering’s “getting on” we begin to realise that the human:non-human asymmetry is a delusion. One sees the self as a part of the whole. An ontology of the self as intrinsic, but not over and above the rest of the university. “The mind turns according to the external environment; it does so effortlessly and exquisitely” (Nishida 668).

Different Ways of Perception:

Meditation as a Technology of the Self

 

Following on from the aforementioned thought, that “nothing can exist in absolute independence of other things or arise of its own accord” (Yun 19), one sees the self as a performative agent that is another aspect of the world. “We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe ‘peoples.'” (Watts “Meditation”) We are just another agent in multitudinous dances of agency, living in duration, rather than representation: a “going with the flow” (Asplen 163). Distinction between human and non-human seems immaterial, we just “get on”: “Getting along is what everything does in the world—animals, bacteria, rocks and stones, stars and planets. We’re all in the same boat.” (AHE). Other ways of perceiving the world become open to us, outside of the representational idiom, such as Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, in which Huxley takes mescaline to explore other worlds and ways of being. However, there is a more immediate ‘technology of the self’ that is available to us, inherently. A brief exploration of Foucault’s Technologies of the Self is necessary first, however. He writes of the self-technologies that were used to deny the self in relation to the world. For Christianity, for instance, one is forced to focus on the other world — the transcendent, heaven and so on. These technologies of the self are methods of self-regulation which control one’s perception to the world: to the Christian, this would be the reaffirmation of dualist interpretation of the mind being irrevocably separated from the natural world. Essentially, this Christian method was based on the concept that “you cannot disclose without renouncing” (Foucault, IV), yourself. There are two methods of self-control discussed by Foucault: Exomologesis, which “had as its model martyrdom. In exomologesis, the sinner had to ‘kill’ himself through ascetic macerations.” The second, Exagoresis, which is “modelled on the renunciation of one’s own will and of one’s own self” through “martyrdom or through obedience to a master, disclosure of self is the renunciation of one’s own self”. In renouncing oneself to both God and their master, the self is fixed in the world and constrained into ”renouncing your will and yourself” (Foucault, VI).

These technologies of the self do not necessarily have to be for the constriction of the self, however. They can also be used as a way of opening up the self to new ways of perception. One can move away from the ascetic technologies of the self to a different kind of technology of the self: meditation. Meditation is a method used by the Daoists as well as many other movements —both secular and non-secular (though prominently — Eastern religions and philosophies). It moves away from representation and is just ‘to be’. “The art of meditation is a way of getting in touch with reality” (Watts, “Meditation”). It is a simple act. One, usually, sits with eyes closed, focusing on a chant or on simply existing without judging one’s own thoughts. The mind’s thoughts go on. But it is just chatter. Thoughts that are not judged, like someone watching traffic go by, rather than trying to frantically move after each car going like an over-excitable dog. The eventual aim is to move to a mode of no-thought — completely out of representation. One moves from Bergson’s surface of representation to the core of reality, through meditative intuition. Meditation is a way of 自然. “Most civilised people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it is with the world as they think about, and talk about it, and describe it” (Watts). If the self can move out of representation and in to intuition and we view “this reality is mobility. Not things made, but things in the making”. The self becomes just as fluid as the music on Reich’s composition. Without the intellect needing to represent everything, living in the intuition of duration, where there are “no self-maintaining states, but only changing states, exist. Rest is never more than apparent, or, rather, relative” (Bergson, ItM 15). If the self is never fixed in one moment, and the entirety of existence is comprised of dances of agency that are constantly flowing and moving, then this leads to the conclusion that “the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination” (Watts, Taboo 1). ‘The Self’ as a fixed concept is a myth — we are forever changing.

The Dance of Bliss

I think to draw this paper to a close, a narrative that appeals to the wonder of agency is required. What better tale than that of the cosmic dancer. It preceded the post humanists by a couple of thousand years: Shiva’s Dance of Nataraja (sanskrit for ‘Lord of the Dance’). “Shiva first performed Ananda Tandava (the dance of bliss), to enlighten some sages who had been so immersed in their scholasticism that they had forgotten the existence of God” (Shakti). Shiva continues the dance — encapsulating both creation and destruction in the dance — the underlying dance of agency in the universe. Capra, author of The Tao of Physics “saw the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and I heard its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva, the Lord of Dancers” (11). We can view ourselves in relation to the universe as a part of it, another expression of the universe, in a cosmic dance of agency with everything else. Following the Hindu story, we can see the self also as the God, Brahman, who is playing a game of hide and seek from himself. Brahman is so good at hiding that he has forgotten he is just playing a game. Like Brahman, we need to realise, through the ontologies of posthumanism and eastern philosophy, that the self that we assume is separate from the world, is actually It: An expression of the world. We dance out of stars, form into human beings. And, when when Brahman’s human game exhausts itself, he dances the Ananda Tandava again, playing another role as another agent in the dance of the cosmos.

Works Cited

Asplen, L. (2008) ‘Going with the Flow: Living the Mangle in Environmental Management

Practice,’ in A. Pickering and K. Guzik (eds), The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society

and Becoming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press pp. 163-84. Web.

Barnes, J., The Presocratic Philosophers, revised ed., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Print.

Beer, S. “Towards the Automatic Factory,” in H. von Foerster and G. Zopf (eds),

Principles of Self-Organization: Transactions of the University of Illinois Symposium on

Self-Organization, Robert Allerton Park, pp. 25-89. 8 June 1960. New York:

Pergamon. Print.

Bergson, Henri. An Introduction to Metaphysics: The Creative Mind. Totowa, N.J: Littlefield, Adams, 1970. Print.

Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics. Colorado: Shambhala Publications, Inc. n.d. Print.

Costelloe, Timothy. “Between the Subject and Sociology: Alfred Schutz’s Phenomenology of the Life-World.” Human Studies 19 (1996): 247-266.

Eno, Brian. “Generative Music.” Generative Music: A Talk Delivered at the Imagination Conference. San Francisco. 08 June 1996. Web. 18 Jan. 2015.

Foucault, Michel. Technologies of the Self. Massachusettss: University of Massachusetts Press, 31 Dec. 1998. Print.

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Print

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972. Print.

Lawlor, Leonard. The Challenge of Bergsonism. New York: Continuum, 2003. pp 176. Print.

Nishida, K. Nishida Kitaro Zenshū Complete Works. Tokyo: Iwanami. n.d. Print.

Pickering, Andrew. “Against Human Exceptionalism, paper presented at a workshop on ‘What Does It Mean to Be Human?’”. University of Exeter, 25 January 2008. Web. 15. Jan 2015.

——— “Beyond Design: Cybernetics, Biological Computers and Hylozoism,”

Synthese, 168, pp. 469-91. Web. 18t Jan 2015.

——— (forthcoming) ‘Neo-sigma: Art, Agency and Revolution,’ to appear in M. Søndergaard (ed), Cybernetics Revisited, special issue of Leonardo Electronic Almanac. Web. 18th Jan 2015.

———“The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science”. American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 99, No. 3 (Jul., 1993) pp 559-589. The University of Chicago Press. Web. 15th Jan 2015.

 

         ——— “The Politics of Theory: Producing Another World” Journal of Cultural Economy, 2 (2009), 197-212. Web. 18th. 2015

Shakti, Ma Bhakti. “Ananda Tandava – Dance of Bliss”. Tantrananda. 11 Feb 2009. Web. 18th Jan 2015.

Shelley, Percey. “England in 1819″ The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 9th ed. Vol. 7. New York: Norton, 2012. 2145-49. Print.

Vaughan, Michael. “Introduction: Henri Bergson’s ‘Creative Evolution’. SubStanceVol. 36, No. 3, Issue 114: Henri Bergson’s “Creative Evolution” 100 Years Later (2007), pp. 7-24. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. JSTOR. Web. 18th Jan 2015.

Watts, Alan. “The Art of Meditation.” Youtube. Web. 18 Jan. 2015.

Watts, Alan. The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are. London: Souvenir Press Ltd, 1989. Print.

Whitehead, Alfred N. Science and the Modern World. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Eng: Penguin Books Ltd, 1938. Print.

Yun, Hsing. Between Ignorance and Enlightenment. California, Puddha’s Light Publishing, Oct. 22, 2008. Print.

Yusa, Michiko. Zen and Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida Kitarô. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2003. Print.

Special Relativity: Perdurantism vs Endurantism

Here is a paper I wrote this year, regarding how ‘How Does Special Relativity Contradict the Claim of Endurantism and Support Perdurantism’.

It is “axiomatic for the endurantist view [of] the notion that objects are wholly present at each moment of their existence” (Hales “EP&SR” 532). The object has no temporal parts, for these parts are bound purely within three dimensions. An object “persists through time by being wholly present at different temporal locations. And, of course […] changes over time” (Benovsky 3). The claim of perdurantism is that “not all of an object’s parts are present here and now” (Barnard 183). Objects are comprised of three spatial dimensions and one temporal. Objects extend through time and space, rather than only extend in space. These “temporally extended objects persist through time by having temporal parts” (Sider 443). This is four-dimensional (4D). Things are coincident in time, but not wholly present at one specific time or another. The path to my university has spatial subregions that it occupies. So, too, do temporal subregions occupy the total region of the time ‘path’ that they occupy. I argue for the claim of perdurantism. I argue for this claim by employing a thought-experiment, using the Lorentz Transformation and Special Relativity (SR). In SR, “space time is conceived of as a multi-dimensional object, where one of the dimensions is temporal and the others are spatial” (Hales “EP&SR” 392). SR is based on two premises. First, that physics is the same in all inertial reference frames. Second, that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant. For SR the absolute moments of time of Classical Relativity, become “moments of time in a given reference frame” (Balashov “Relativ” 5). First, I shall briefly explore Balashov’s thought-experiment that, he argues, supports perdurantism. This also also introduces a key aspect of this paper: reference frames. I then anticipate one objection to this by the endurantist. I then shall use a thought-experiment to negate this objection, arguing for perdurantism as the preferred ontological claim.

Suppose that we are 2D ‘flatlanders’. We observe the passage of a 3D cylindrical object through our 2D world from two different reference point/time slices. Let’s call these two different reference points/time slices (a, b, t) and (a1, b1, t1). At (a, b, t), the flatlander observer sees a circle. At (a1, b1, t1) the flatlander sees a stretched out ovular shape. To the flatlander, the shapes in each event are 2D, appearing as two distinct shapes. They ‘wholly exist’ in each reference point (a, b, t) and (a1, b1, t1) as different shapes. But there is actually just one 3D shape. The flatlanders are seeing cross-sections of the cylinder from different 2D reference points. “Even if the object does not change its proper shape” it has “different shapes at time slices of its path drawn in different reference frames” (Balashov “Relativ” 41). Therefore, the “best explanation of the changing shape of objects relative to inertial frames is that they are 4D objects being seen from different three-dimensional perspectives” (Barnard 184). This thought-experiment supports the claim of perdurantism. However, an endurantist could argue that, despite these various time-slices overlapping with one another, if we pick out a certain reference frame, privileging it over the others, then this can be the ‘rest-frame’ of the object. For this argument of the endurantist, we can “restrict the LOCATIONS of persisting objects and their parts to […] regions representing subsets of moments of time in inertial reference frames” (Balashov Ont. 74). This would privilege the rest-frame (a fixed, ‘whole’ point) of an object at a space-time geometrical rest-point at given “position lines” (Balashov Ont. 77). But this argument has a prejudicial error. These locations, the geometric-positions in space-time, are useful but, privileging them over other slices is arbitrary. There is no necessary reason to conclude that we should privilege an imposed rest-frame in a geometric context over other reference points. These geometric-points have no claim to be the ‘rest point’ — an absolute time-slice of the object (and thus an enduring object) — over any others. Geometric-locations are useful, but are not the absolute rest-point, and are therefore not the site of a ‘wholly existing’ (to use the endurantist’s vernacular) object. As Gibson and Pooley argue, “one can equally choose to describe the content of spacetime with respect to some frame that is not so optimally adapted to the geometric structure of spacetime, or indeed, choose to describe it in some entirely frame-independent manner” (162). It is with SR and the Lorentz Transformation that one can see these other points of non-privileged reference. This shows how we cannot privilege one apparent ‘rest-frame’ over another. Therefore we cannot point to when an object has its parts wholly existing in the present.

To reiterate, endurantism posits that all objects are wholly present at each moment. An object “o is an enduring object iff o wholly exists at each moment of its existence. That is, at every time t at which o exists, every proper part of o is at t” (Hales “EP&SR” 533). All parts of the object co-exist simultaneously in the present. And so the inverse is that if parts of o do not co-exist simultaneously in t, then o is not wholly existing in the present at t.  In the “‘rest phase’ of an object, each part of o is at a specific time t and this t is the same for all parts” (Hales “EP&SR” 532). But in SR, “for an inertial reference frame […] moving with respect to an object o, each proper part of o at a different position along the direction of relative motion is at a different time” (Hales “EP&SR” 536). Thus if “there is a reference frame moving with respect to an object o, then in that frame o has proper parts at t, before t and after t” (536). There are inertial frames that are not the same as the rest frame of an object.  The whole parts of an object are not wholly present at one specific time. It is dependent on the frames of reference. Frames of reference are not simultaneous, and therefore the parts of an object cannot be simultaneous from different reference frames. That parts of an object can exist in the past, present and future appears to contradict the endurantist’s claim. But this requires elaboration.

Let us consider a thought experiment inspired by Hales (with a bit of flare from Sagan’s Cosmos). This thought experiment appears outlandish considering our current technological capacities. But this is just a device to explain something that goes on in the non-medium (our) planes of existence, commonly. This is something that was missed by the physics preceding SR. Vincenzo is sat by the road, next to a church. At t0, his friend Paolo starts driving his moped down the hill a few hundred yards away (I use these two ‘observers’/reference points as short-hand. There need not be a human observer in these situations; the points of reference can be anything). Both agree that t0 is the reference point that they share simultaneously — when the wheel first moves on the tarmac. They are ‘calibrated’ to one another in time, exactly. “t0 will represent the time of that event; everything in one’s reference frame that is simultaneous with that event is at t0” (Hales “Time” 504). Paolo drives his moped. This travels, nearing the speed of light c. Paolo draws even with Vincenzo, who is on the side of road at t1 (t1 is subsequent to t0). Both observe the church at exactly t1. Paolo sees a piece of slate roof flying off the church at t1. Surprised, due to the paucity of joy in his life, Paolo turns back round and rides back to Vincenzo at a normal speed. Paolo reports to Vincenzo that when he drew even with him on the side of the road (at t1), he viewed the slate roof fall off. For Paolo, the church had changed at t1. Vincenzo, perplexed, replies that, at t1, the slate roof had not yet fallen off the church. It was only shortly after t1 that Vincenzo perceived the piece of slate falling off — after Paolo had driven on by. Paolo and Vincenzo agree with the history of the church — its change from a church to a church lacking a slate roof. But they disagree with simultaneity—when the event happened. Paolo saw changed slateless roof in his present at t1. But for Vincenzo at t1, the roof had not changed. Thus, the broken slateless roof at t1 is in his future.   

We have a quandary here. How can the church be both simultaneously changed and unchanged at the same t1? This apparent paradox is only a paradoxical if one considers simultaneity to be absolute –adhering to classical relativity. Endurantists would argue that the whole church is present at t0. Following the loss of the slate roof, they would argue the whole church (with all its

parts minus the slate) is present at t1. In the classical notion of spacetime that appeals to the endurantist, “locations of persisting objects, their parts, and temporary properties were indexed to moments of absolute time” (Balashov “Relativ” 5). But through the Lorentz Transformation, devised before SR but in accordance with it, there are no absolute moments in time. The Lorentz Transformation shows that observers moving at different velocities can measure different elapsed times, different orderings of events and different distances travelled in comparison to one another. Due to the differences of speeds between Paolo and Vincenzo, the simultaneity of the church’s slate roof falling off occurs out of sync, despite Paolo and Vincenzo both starting off at the same time t0. “Observers in different inertial frames that are simultaneous with each other will perceive the very same object as changed (in one frame) and unchanged (in the other frame)” (Hales “Time” 511).

  For the church to endure, there can only be one whole set of church parts at t1. In SR, this is not the case. For Paolo on his near-c speed scooter at event t1, there is a church with parts that that has changed (lacking a slate roof) from t0. For Vincenzo at event t1, there is a church that has not changed since t0. These two events both occur at t1. “Observers in different reference frames find themselves simultaneous with different aggregates of the temporal parts of the object, with one series of temporal parts retaining a property and the other series changed and lacking the property.” (Hales “Time” 513). The church cannot have endured, for the parts of the object are not wholly present in the same moment — they overlap. The church has temporal parts. “If one is a spacetime realist then, barring conventionalism, things must have spatio-temporal parts” (Callender 225). Hales concludes that “if there is a reference frame [Vincenzo] moving with respect to an object o [the church], then in that frame o has proper parts at t, before t and after t” (Hales “EP&SR” 535). There is no way to factually conclude which events happened first, last, or at the same time as they all overlap. To return and conclude my original argument, then: we cannot privilege one reference point over another, non-arbitrarily. These two reference points, starting both at the co-existent reference point t0, lose their simultaneity at t1. This leads to the conclusion that o is comprised of parts that, from different points of reference, are not simultaneous, which is conducive with the claim of perdurantism. The church therefore has temporal parts that are extended throughout time in the past, present, and future, not comprised of parts ‘wholly’ in one moment. Vincenzo and Paolo are seeing different ‘time-slices’ of the same 4D spatio-temporally extended church. Just like the flat-worlders saw different 2D cross-sections of the 3D cyclinder. They view a spatio-temporally extended 4D object from different reference points. But they experience it as different 3D ‘slices’ of the 4D church at t1, due to their different velocities, caused by the Lorentz Transformation. But pointing at an object’s time-slice and assigning that as the rest-frame is disingenuous. There are many other equally valid reference points that one could point to, if one thinks outside of the trappings of Classical Relativity and positions in space being absolute, rather than relative. This is a “a distinctly relativistic phenomenon absent from the geometry of classical spacetime”(Balashov “Relativ” 42). Endurantism, intuitively, seems to hold for our perceptions of slow, “middle-sized” objects. However, a “predilection for slow-moving middle-sized dry goods is not a license for philosophy to pretend that such things are all we need consider” (Hales “EP&SR” 539). In order for endurantism to endure, one must constrain oneself to the classical relativistic view of our world. However, the claim of perdurantism, I argue, has a “natural and elegant fit with the physical facts of our world” (Hales “EP&SR” 525).  Our immediate intuitions towards space and time can often fail us. Special Relativity’s elegant fit with perdurantism helps us to overcome these intuitive trappings.

Works Cited

Balashov, Yuri. “Relativistic Parts and Places: A Note on Corner Slices and Shrinking Chairs”. eds.     Calosi, Claudio. Pierluigi Graziani. Mereology And The Sciences. Switzerland:           Springer International Publishing, 2012. Web. 22 Mar. 2015

———. “Persistence and Multilocation in Minkowski Spacetime”. ed Dieks, Dennis G. B. J. The Ontology of Spacetime Ii. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 2008. Internet resource.

Barnard, Robert W. Neil A. Manson. The Continuum Companion to Metaphysics.        London: Continuum, 2012. 180-190. Google Books. Web. 22 Mar. 2015.

Benovsky, Jiri. “On (Not) Being in Two Places at the Same Time: An Argument Against             Endurantism”. American Philosophical Quarterly. 46.3. July 2009. Web. 22 Mar. 2015.

Callender, Craig. Time Reality and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Google Books. Web. 22 Mar. 2015.

Ian Gibson. Oliver Pooley. “Relativistic Persistence”. Oxford UP, 2006. Web. PhilSci. 26 Mar. 2015.

Hales, Steven and Timothy Johnson. “Endurantism, Perdurantism And Special Relativity”. Oxford     Journal (2003). PhilPapers. Web. 22nd March 2015.

———. “Time for Change”. Southern Journal of Philosophy 45.4 (2007): 497-513. PhilPapers.         Web. 22 Mar. 2015.

Sider, Theodore. Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time. Oxford: Oxford         UP, 2001. Web. 22 Mar. 2015.

Blurred Lines Article

Article I wrote for The Exeposé (University of Exeter’s newspaper) last year. A bit of a done topic even at the time of writing but I felt the need to reinforce the message considering a referendum was proposed to vote for a banning of Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’. 

–

Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’ has been around the news a lot recently, with various universities, including Exeter, considering or outright banning the song from campuses, so please do forgive me if this reads as a rehash of many other articles. But I think that this should be talked about and the point repeated as much as possible: This song is damaging. I’ve heard many blithely state that this song is harmless; that banning it would be absurd. It’s just a catchy pop song, right?

Well, no. Not really. When people sing and dance to this song, they’re singing and dancing along to a song that worsens attitudes towards women and contributes to rape culture: the practice of our society accepting and being apologists for rape by blaming the victim as the one at fault or making apologies for the attacker. When was the last time you heard a “she was asking for it” remark or “she was dressed like a slut” comment? That is rape culture. The victim is never to blame for rape. But songs like this distort this fact, with the hazy definitions of consent: “I know you want it”. The inspiring Project Unbreakable (http://project-unbreakable.org/), founded by a rape victim, Grace Brown, displays victims of rape holding a board with the words of their attacker on. Does the picture below seem familiar?

Picture: [from project-unbreakable]

Should we be encouraging these casual and damaging opinions towards non-consent, the dehumanization and degradation of  women as pure sex objects? Thicke states himself “what a pleasure it is to degrade women”. It might come as a shock to some, but women are humans, too. Such misogynistic songs like this cannot be helping the attitudes towards rape . According to studies by the charity Rape Crisis, 400,000 women are sexually assaulted and 85,000 raped every year in England.

One in five women reading this article will have experienced some form of sexual abuse in their lives. I don’t claim to speak for them, but imagine being the victim of abuse, enjoying a night out with friends and then hearing the lyrics “I know you want it. You’re a good girl”. Quite the trigger, especially considering that that phrase is commonly quoted as said to be used by the abusers on Project Unbreakable. There are no blurred intentions behind the meaning of this song. It is misogynistic trash. Which is why I would call you all to lobby for a line to be drawn over this casual attitude towards sexual abuse and have this song banned from the campus.

Critique of Postmodernism

Here’s an essay I wrote last year in my first year. Basically criticising the postmodernists’ reaction to Foucault and how it established a fertile ground for the resurgence of Neoliberalism.

“A state of shock is not just what happens to us when something bad happens. It’s what happens to us when we lose our narrative, when we lose our story.” – Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine.

 Since the mid-nineteenth century, the dominant ideology of Capitalism has met its resistance primarily through the socio-economic worldview of Marxism — the working class’s struggle against the oppressive middle class. However, following the rise of Postmodernism, and the resulting rejection of Marxism across most of the world, the people were sent in to a state of shock. Scattered and solitary, their unified struggle was shattered; the decline of a socialist-lite Keynesian post-war economy in Britain gave way to a new strain of Neoliberalism in the nineteen-seventies. This was pioneered by the economist Milton Friedman and political leaders such as Thatcher who propounded the virtues of the Free Market with its emphases on privatisation and unregulated markets. This economic doctrine espoused the virtues of Individualism, which aggrandised the moral worth of the singular person, placing them above the needs of the group. I argue that this Neoliberal rise was caused by the Postmodernist fracturing of society, and the rejection of grand narratives, which held the people together with a sense of unified struggle. I also argue that Postmodernism, where the sub-culture supplanted the whole, provided a fertile ground for the Individualist ideology of the Neoliberal. In the words of philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek, the “thought of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, the ultimate philosophers of resistance, of marginal positions crushed by the hegemonic power network, is effectively the ideology of the newly emerging ruling class.” (Zizek). With the working classes and the left overall shocked in to silence by the stripping of their grand narratives, they were left completely vulnerable to the coming ideologies of Neoliberalism and Individualism, unable to articulate a rebuke or alternative narrative.

In Jean-François Lyotard’s essay, Defining the Postmodern, he sees beyond the ostensibly civil ordering of a unified and shared space, within which society sets itself; that “there is no longer a horizon of universalisation, of general emancipation before the eyes of postmodern man” (NATC. 1463). The unifying forces of the struggling Marxist working classes paved way to a culture where the entirety is supplanted by the sub-culture. This shattering of universalisation was in reaction to the work of the post-structuralist Michel Foucault, who established links between the relations of institutions and powers that dominate us. Foucault uses the Panopticon, the “all-seeing”, — a circular prison where one guard in a central tower can see all of the prisoners — as both a critique of the punitive system, as well as an extended metaphor for the dominant ideology’s disciplinary power, exercised through its various institutions: the media, state, school, and so on.  Through this perspective, the subject (the individual) is surveyed and knowledge is attained about them through bureaucratic power structures; the gathered information is used to create docility in the subject, due to mechanisms that “exercise a power of normalisation”, leading to the frightfully cold and bureaucratic goal of an “accumulation and useful administration of men”. Foucault writes that once this normalisation has been fully enacted: “if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents”. Through this form of subservience of the subject, the productivity of this non-autonomous being rises whilst apathy towards political practice and disorder increases, and thus the profit of the Capitalist is increased. This connection between knowledge and power prompted a Postmodernist critique against these dominating institutions revealed by Foucault. The Postmodernists’ reaction was then to create disorder in this uniform and singular world by fracturing society in to a plethora of sub-cultures. In this way the normalising effects of the power structures are fought against not on a unified level, where all opposition is crushed by the homogenising power institutions, but through small skirmishes of heterogenous groups and individuals, following in the vein of Lyotard’s “incredulity to metanarratives”. This fragmented fight against homogenising forces uses the scalpel, attempting to inflict a death by a thousand cuts against the dominant ideology rather than the singular hammer-blow of the Marxist.

I argue, however, that the dominant powers and institutions of society subverted the Postmodernists’ resistance by using the very same weapons of resistance that were used against them: fragmentation and diversity. The heterogeneous sub-cultures are digested by Capital and commodified in to one homogenised mass under the banner of Capitalism. Resistance by the sub-culture is futile: it is easier to placate and subdue a crowd of ten than a crowd of ten thousand. As pre-postmodern critics Horkheimer and Adorno portentously argue, “projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit…make him all the more subservient to his adversary — the absolute power of capitalism.” (Adorno 1111). “Under monopoly all mass culture is identical.” The sub-cultures that foster the independently minded artist “are confined to the apocryphal field of the ‘amateur’ (Adorno 1112), and trivialised or subsumed in to capital as a whole. An example of this can be seen with the keffiyeh, a scarf headdress typically worn by middle eastern men. This scarf is also a national symbol of the Palestinians, and by extension has connotations with the Palestinian’s fight for emancipation from Israel. This scarf has now been taken by the capitalist and sterilised of its original revolutionary signification. These scarfs are seen ubiquitously around high street shops in the West, usually around the privileged necks of the white middle class male. Any sub-culture that deviates from the dominant hegemony experiences this further fragmentation, being defined as “The Other” who “is a scandal which threatens his [the capitalist’s] existence” (Barthes, 141), who is then either reduced to a parody of itself by being outcasted from society, or assimilated into Capital as a commodity. Marx defined the alienation of the working class from his or her fellow human as the ‘Entfremdung’ (estrangement)’: the social stratification of the classes. Now, however, we see the evolution of this entfremdung as alienation transcends class boundaries and moves to the very depths of the human mind, stripping us not just of our shared class struggle, but of our shared humanity. Capital’s disintegration of us down to the individual (the subject) leads us to coalesce as faceless consumers and producers beneath it: “Trade brings differences together and the more the merrier!” (Hardt2631). In Hardt and Negri’s work, Empire, they compound this argument, that the dominating powers are using the Postmodernist tools of subversion for themselves: “This new enemy not only is resistant to the old weapons but actually thrives on them, and thus joins its would-be antagonists in applying them to fullest.” (Hardt 2632). With this culture of ostensible difference but inherent homogeneity, society began to focus on the singular, not the plural. The individual began to dominate the zeitgeist of a growingly Postmodern West, leading to an increasingly solipsistic self, alienated from the unified mass struggles of the past. The rich individual who either gained their wealth from nepotism or, especially, by being the ‘entrepreneur’ (profiting off the exploitation of many workers) were praised and revered. It is within this climate in the seventies that the spectre of Neoliberalism began to rear its grotesque head, pioneered by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman and political leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Richard Nixon. They espoused the views of the Free Market, emphasising the importance of the self over society. Ken Loach saw the seventies as a time where “culture reflects politics.” “It was the era of ‘loads of money’, it was the era of ‘look after number one’, the City Boys with their red braces — it was worship of capital.” (Jones 137). With political discourse on the Marxist left split more than ever, as various sub-struggles took precedent over the grand narratives —The People’s Front of Judea seems to come to mind —; with individuals seeking their own personal gains over the health of society, the Neoliberals crushed any resistance both on the ideological playing field, but ale on the field of physical conflict, such as the coup of Chilé’s Allende’s socialist government by Neoliberal-backed Augusto Pinochet.  ”Postmodernism disarmed the left with respect to Neoliberalism. Both ideologies helped to focus people on themselves (or sub-culture) rather than the public good.” (Zon 4). The very fracturing of society that Foucault and his contemporaries used as a means to create disorder was now being used as a tool by the right to conquer and impose their ideology. With a left in discord, impotent to react; with an atomised society, left vulnerable to the politics of the “striving” individual, the Neoliberal ideology cast its shadow over the West, enforcing harsh austerity on the poor and funnelling wealth to the rich.

And so, with the annihilation of the group, and the confinement of the human in to perpetual isolation by both the Neoliberal state and the media — a media which makes it vital “not to leave the customer alone, not for a moment to allow him any suspicion that resistance is possible” (Dialectics of Enlightenment) — the mendacious  ‘freedom of choice for the consumer’, “the charm of novelty”, is hammered into the individual’s psyche through the institutional disseminators of the ruling ideology, such as media conglomerates owned by capitalists such as Rupert Murdoch. Conceiving of society as a whole, rather than one of individual strife is made all the more difficult. The lattice that had held the working classes together had now been heated to its extremes by Postmodernism, worked and re-worked by the Neoliberal, hammered by the blunt forces of the state and sliced into ribbons by the media until atomised beyond recognition. The working classes were in a state of shock — a shock that has stripped them of their narrative.  Donne wrote that “No man is an island, / Entire of itself, / Every man is a piece of the continent, / A part of the main.”, but with the “horizontal universalities”  that once tied us together relinquished by the Postmodernist, and leapt upon by the Neoliberal, are we doomed to be solitary castaways, distracted by the tactics of the dominant ideology as the ‘invisible hand’ of the Free Market claws at our throats? If Foucault’s thesis on power is true, but the Postmodernist retaliation to these power institutions further cements the dominant ideology of the capitalist class, how are we to retaliate and defeat this foe? How do we un-shock the somnolescent subject? As Gramsci states, a successful hegemony disseminates itself within the culture, traditional and individual practices of society. This is evidently the case within our culture of the Individual; within the naturalised ‘traditions’ of the Neoliberal Free Market and concepts of competition — a poison that flows through the veins of our collective consciousness. We see this deleterious rhetoric to this day. The London mayor, Boris Johnson, voted in to office by a majority consensus of the population of London, in The Guardian Newspaper on 27th November 2013, is said to have made “remarks during a speech in honour of Margaret Thatcher, declaring that inequality was essential to foster ‘the spirit of envy’ and hailing greed as a ‘valuable spur to economic activity’.” It is this culture of the Individual that is our battleground. Owen Jones argues “Only an organised movement of working people can challenge the economic madness that threatens the future of large swathes of humanity” (Chavs xxix). A united movement of the working class is desirable to supplant the dominant ideology; however, I feel this workers’ movement requires greater nuance. The Postmodernist celebration of difference that has cemented the Capitalist’s (and Neoliberal’s) position as the dominant ideology can still be used as a means of subversion for the oppressed. However it is not a subversion by the sub-culture or individual, but by a unifying grand narrative of the multitude, to borrow the terminology of Hardt and Negri; a subsumption of the various sub-cultures of struggle in to one potent force, where both the one and the many are in concord with one another, under a revised definition of The Proletariat. This could be fought both on a unified level, but also on a more nuanced platform, too: a battleground of magnitudes. The Individual needs to recuperate from the shock of Postmodernism and the deleterious culture of the Individual, and strip themselves of the ideology that has isolated them. The key goal for an organised refutation of the dominant ideology is for people to reestablish their shared bonds and stories — for people to reestablish their solidarity with their fellow working man and woman in the multitudinous fields of struggle against powers that would seek to oppress them.

Works Cited

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