Vibrant Matter – Initial Thoughts: Skepticism, Vitalism and the Ecology of Politics

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As I stall my more substantive comments until Bennett’s book arrives I can at least begin with some remarks about the interesting introductory content posted at Peter Gratton’s blog Philosophy in a Time of Error :

My first impression of Bennett’s project after reading Peter’s outline and interview with Bennett was one of skepticism. It wasn’t clear to me that Bennett will be able to achieve what she seems to attempt: namely, a non-metaphysical, non-transcendent, refurbished immanent vitalism. Although, i suspect such skepticism is more about 'vitalism' in general than about Bennett's abilities. As Daniel Dennett has quipped, "Vitalism—the insistence that there is some big, mysterious extra ingredient in all living things—turns out to have been not a deep insight but a failure of imagination." [source] And all my past contacts with so-called vitalist thinking (mainly in Spinoza and Bergson) has left me with a sense that the ‘vitality’ of these accounts rely on some sort of theological projection – where God or an outside ‘something else’ bestows reality with its animating character.

However, Bennett’s approach seems intent stretching the discourse on vitalism by linking a wide range of theoretical movements in Continental philosophy and political theory - from Spinoza to Bergson to Deleuze and even Bruno Latour - and rethinking traditional notions of matter and life. While I’m not qualified or capable of assessing exactly how successful she is with this project, I remain skeptical about anyone’s ability to synthesize the best ideas flowing from all these thinkers while also jettisoning the most distracting. I will, however, remain open to the prospect that Bennett’s treatment of the issues and ideas will provide ample opportunity to prove me wrong. As Peter writes,

“What Bennett offers is a “vital materialism” that negotiates the difficult —some would say impossible —task of presenting a vitalism that comes unhinged from Spinozist teleologies of nature. She thus describes vibrant networks of change operating beyond and within human beings without providing a purposiveness to the separable matter of nature, either coming from human beings (anthropocentrism) or some divinity (ontotheology).” [source]

I do hope she achieves exactly what Peter implies here – because materialisms in general, and political materialisms in particular are in desparate need of re-theorizing if we ever hope to both describe the world as it is and more affectively rouse the imaginations of our species towards more sane and ecological worldviews and behaviors.

And, at the risk of giving up my game from the start, I’ll be most interested in any possible questions her descriptive encounters with more-than-human assemblages might raise for politics (broadly and practically conceived), rather than in her philosophical leanings per se. Here, too, Peter gives me hope when he writes, “Bennett’s book gains its vitality from her descriptions of the life of metal, the agency of food, and even the wrong way to read vitalism as she approaches recent debates over stem cell research.” [source]

In a nutshell: my reading of Vibrant Matter is charged with an anticipation of encountering in Bennett’s prose any potential articulation and development towards an affective and therefore decidedly 'political' vocabulary of radical immanence. I'll be reading to see if Bennett's lines of reasoning provides some means to not only take the living properties and powers of the world and ‘things’ seriously, but also if she can develop a post-Cartesian description of human agency as it relates to the wider carnival of nature’s beings and becomings. If Bennett can navigate the rough seas of vitalist theory and ecological description she might just help provide some very important bridging work towards enacting, evolving and engaging the various realities, intensities and opportunities within our contemporary conditions. I look forward to the journey.

Reading Vibrant Matter

As I try to juggle a thousand responsibilities, I have decided to up the ante and partake in my first online reading group. A while back Adrian Ivakhiv over at Immanence announced his participation in a blog-based reading group of political theorist and philosopher Jane Bennett’s new book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010). With more than a few major projects underway I was initially going to pass on following along with the participants – consisting mostly of a cadre of academic philosophers and grad students in the tradition of continental philosophy (although I would consider Adrian’s work too eclectic to grouped under any particular umbrella). However with my recent endeavor to sketch out the rudiments of my own philosophical position came an increased an intense interest in fleshing out my thoughts as they intersect to relating literature in some of the newer philosophical trends. And with Bennett’s book buzzing around the Speculative Realism crowd, I decided as late as last week that I would read along with the group and participate as possible.

The schedule for the reading group is as follows:

Note: Peter Gratton over at Philosophy in a Time of Error has posted a very useful overview of the book, along with an interview with its author. Anyone interested in participating is invited to read these for a great introduction.

May 23-29
Host blog: Philosophy in a Time of Error
Under discussion: Preface & Chapter 1, "The Force of Things" (and overview/interview).

May 30-June 5
Host blog: Critical Animal (James Stanescu)
Under discussion: Chapters 2 and 3, "The Agency of Assemblages" and "Edible Matter."

June 6-12
Host blog: Naught Thought (Ben Woodard)
Under discussion: Chapters 4 and 5, "A Life of Matter" and "Neither Vitalism nor Mechanism."

June 13-19
Host blog: An und für sich (Anthony Paul Smith)
Under discussion: Chapters 6 and 7, "Stem Cells and the Culture of Life" and "Political Ecologies"

June 20-26
Host blog: Immanence (Adrian Ivakhiv)
Under discussion: Chapter 8, "Vitality and Self-interest," and the book as a whole (final overview)

With my copy of Bennett’s book gliding towards me down the major highways of the Canadian interior I wanted to let readers know what they can expect from this blog over the next month or so. For the next few weeks I interspersing my thoughts and discussions as it related to Bennett’s book and the reading group with a jumble of other short posts about oil spills, Thai politics and at least one post on drunken gorillas. Sound like fun? I hope so.

I invite all my readers, philosophically inclined or otherwise, to comment and/or follow-along with the collective reading and my other ramblings as they find time. I appreciate all my readers – and especially those of you who have no background whatsoever with the abstractions and wordy pontifications of philosophy or academic theory. Theory and conceptual design is only as relevant and practical as we apply it. I use intellectual activity to stimulate more conscious engagement with the world – as a tool rather than as a guide to ultimate truth. My hope is that readers with always jump into the fray with whenever comments, criticisms or questions that arise. You feedback is essential to whatever growth might actually occur.

Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges at The New School

As a bit of distraction - and while I attempt to make Part 2 of the Untangling The Mesh series less rambling (hopefully much more so) than the first - I though I'd share this poignant and spirited talk by controversial speaker and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chris Hedges, delivered at The New School in New York on December 08, 2009. Well-known for his edgy and politically charged commentaries, Hedges writes for a number of rackets including The New York Times, Mother Jones, Foreign Affairs and The New York Review of Books. His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, tracks the rise of a post-literate North-American society that craves fantasy, ecstasy, and illusion.

Below, Hedges argues that we now live in two societies: one, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world and can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth; the other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic where serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins.

Whereas at times his commentary comes off as a whole lot nostalgic and even quasi-conservative, Hedges does make some very cogent points about how media operates in capitalist-consumer culture, and warns of the dangers of creating a populous so divided - and how a lack of an effective and dispersed social solidarity can breed virulent new social forms and alliances. Leaders in the so-called civilized societies, it seems, will have to negotiate a very precarious future indeed. The talk runs about 1 hour and 22 minutes.

Chris Hedges is also author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, and is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Fellow at Princeton University. He often blogs at Truthdig.com.

Situated Knowing and the Visceral Encounter

Recently, I have been following with great interest the debate between philosophers Adrian Avakhiv, Levi Bryant, Graham Harman, Chistopher Vitale and Steven Shivro (and others) on the metaphysical and ontological distinctions between ‘objects’ and ‘relations’. Are objects composed of their internal or external relations, or are real objects some how radically other than any relations they might enter into? Alternatively, are relations primarily what happens between objects (broadly defined), or are relations a result of objects interacting viz. space-time? Or none of the above?

These are questions that arise in thinking about the fundamental nature of reality – what the Western intellectual tradition calls metaphysics, or more specifically ontology. Avakhiv, Bryant, Shaviro and company have provided interested readers with a fascinating exchange of ideas and positions – each offering glimpses into their respective ontologies and metaphysical commitments. Such clashes and exchanges provide ample intellectual sustenance for those eager (or crazy?) enough to follow along. Even those of us who have never committed ourselves to any definitive position end up, at least in my case, left feeling more inclined do so.

Now I will suspend my judgment for the time being on the merits, abuses or otherwise of professional philosophy (and academic theory more generally) and instead simply say that I sincerely believe that what is at stake in thinking and discussing these fundamental questions is nothing less than our ability to effectively address the challenge faced by every generation of thinking individuals: that is, how do we adequately and creatively think the world as it is presented and disclosed to us through our living it in the here and now?

Uniquely evolved to create elaborate systems of discourse and communication our species inevitably seeks to understand the world at large and our place in it. We live and we love, we rebel against convention or rally around tradition, but whatever else we do, we are continually called upon by material circumstance and our social realities to find meaning in our contemporary conditions. Intellectuals, families, artists, religious authorities, musicians, novelists, filmmakers, etc. all contribute to this collective process of meaning-making through narratives and stories, ‘conversations’ and institutions - each effectively helping to frame and reframe the dynamics and events that provide the texture and tone our individual and collective lives. And this generation is no different. We too must use the means available to us in order to weave together meaningful understandings and relevant engagements in the world.

However, the people alive during this young millennium seem to be both blessed and cursed in that our challenge appears significantly greater. Not only do we face grave personal, ecological and political challenges, but we also live an age where all the ‘grand narratives’ or overarching stories with which to make sense of such challenges, and therefore deal with them, have become untenable.

All the ideologies, dogmas and doctrines that have animated the imaginations of generations past have collapsed in a self-defeating critical consciousness of doubt and relativity. To be sure, the old stories persist among those of us either unwilling to face the consequences of what our brightest and most educated minds have to say, or are too entangled in the mesh and mangle of daily life to care. But for those of us reckless enough to take the skeptics path, or to have time enough to listen to the astonishing lessons of our scientists as well as our poets, our world remains open and tentative.

So, then, what of objects and relations, or objects and the relations they enter into, or of the relations that generate objects? How are we to begin to make sense of such questions without already fashioned narratives or maps handed down to us with which to proceed?

For centuries the most inquisitive thinkers have offered their own suggestions on how to proceed towards understanding the world. From Pythagoras’ mystical intuition, Plato’s allegory of the cave and Popper's falsification, to the Taoist’s ‘un-knowing’, Najarjuna’s negations, Ramakrishna's rapture or Aurobindo’s integrations, we now have a virtual cornucopia of ways to approach reality and seek Truth. But, again, these methods and approaches have also been swept away be the unrelenting force of the critical thought and contemporary technorational experience. 

For me, however, those critics and commentators who either rightly posit the inescapably untenability of all claims to certain knowledge, or point out the limited but reliable knowledge we already possess, miss an even more fundamental insight about the human condition: that all attempts to ground human knowledge, East and West, ancient and post-modern, inevitable lead down a path that returns us right back to brute facts our very own existence. That is to say, all human knowledge becomes anchored in the reality and actuality of our being. And as we become cognizant of the primacy of this self-reflexive return we are compelled to go even deeper and begin investigating the fundamental properties of our all too human experience.

This type of inquiry has gone by different monikers over the years - as phenomenology in the west, known as Dhyāna (ध्यान) in the Sanskrit traditions, or jhāna (झन) in Pāli canon. But regardless of what label we give them, all our inquiries into reality begin in the raw experience of being alive in the world. And, contrary to the influential doctrine of Rene Descartes, a founding contributor to western philosophy and science - which argues the only thing we could truly be certain about is that we have minds with which to think (this is Descartes' famous cogito, ergo sum) - an intense and thorough attentiveness to the experiential quality of our own immediate awareness reveals that it is the more general and distributed  non-linguistic experience of our lived bodies in which the world becomes present. Rather than thinking the origins of human knowledge into existence, as so many rationalists and idealists have assumed, we feel the world directly. Indeed, how else do we encounter the world if not through our very own embodied experience?!

It is only after we feel, experience and encounter ourselves in the world that we then begin to translate and rationalize, or make meaning out of, such encounters. This most basic confrontation with the world I call ‘the visceral encounter’ - and it is radically self-evident in a way that simultaneously preempts, but also occasions, any possible theoretical translation of it. The visceral encounter is, for me, the undeniable nexus – or what the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty called “the chiasm” - where world and experience meet and where meaning and consequence are actually generated.

Going further, if it is through our embodied and perceptual encounters with the world that the world itself becomes available to us then such encounters must also be the basis for any attempt to understand the limits and efficacy of human knowledge. Because without this primordial contact with the world, and the resultant sensations of difference generated between ourselves as perceiving-beings and some relatively separated ‘other’, there would be nothing at all of which to come to knowledge of.

In the west, this search for the conditions and limits of knowledge has, for centuries, been called epistemology. However, if it is through our visceral encounters with the world that we enact the very conditions and possibilities for differentiated experience and knowledge, then epistemology (questions about how we know) and ontology (questions about what we know) are revealed to be fundamentally intertwined.

To be sure, this is no mere tautaology or conflation - but instead the only authentic way of describing the primordial embeddeness of all embodied human action and awareness. It is in the intensive interplay of our visceral embodiments and contact with the immediate multiplicity of the world that all subsequent encounters and interactions become immanently situated. Human knowledge and action, perception and expression are thus two inseparable aspects of a more fundamental process of being and becoming that situates all human activity within a perpetually disclosed horizon of lived awareness and intimately encountered material, biological and differential field of being. Therefore, as a direct result of this entangled simultaneity of embeddedness and embodiment, the task of thinking thus becomes radically more practical and creative.

I will explore the wider implications of this radical and immanent orientation towards being, becoming and knowing in a future post, but for now I want the notion of entanglement and embodiment to act as a platform from which I will build a more general critical commentary on Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). There is indeed much more to be said about the nature and implications of ‘situated knowledge' and radical entanglement, but for the purposes of this rudimentary sketch I will leave these issues only partially articulated and continue to move forward.

At this point, an attentive reader might be asking themselves why I’m rambling on about entanglements and embeddedness when I had started this post with a gesture towards a discussion about actual objects and relations? Hopefully the reader has so far allowed for this extended preamble and continued to read this post because it has become increasingly apparent that for me to say anything meaningful and committed about objects and relations I would first have to make transparent HOW it is that I can possibly arrive at any particular conclusion.

In fact, for me, at this point in the discussion it is of crucial importance to jettison traditional understandings of epitemological and ontological issues in order to avoid the complicated mess that follows from such impoverished and simplistic conceptual distinctions. Questions about ‘how we know’ and ‘what we know’ are only relevant after the more fundamental realization that all such questions are asked and answered by deeply embodied and situated beings whose primary task in existence is not to theorize and gain some ultimate knowledge of things, but to survive, cope and find our way in a very real and consequential world. That is to say, from an immanent perspective, questions about knowing, relating and being are primarily practical issues, rather than philosophical or metaphysical issues - and only ever truly understood through our lived encounters with the myriad of empirical details, dynamic flows, intricate networks, dialogical communications and material relations at play within the general matrix of existence.

The primacy of the visceral encounter, with all its fleshy entailments of animal intentionally and necessity, is quite literally prior to any socially articulated and linguistic framing assumptions about the world. The visceral encounter leads us into the wilderness of actuality, contingency and difference within which we must first dwell, become and adapt. Only by acknowledging these fundamental realities can we then begin to elaborate abstract theories and meaningful narratives about how the real world unfolds.

Yet there are further complications. Far from being a variety of “naïve realism”, the conception of situated practical knowledge and human emdeddedness I have so far been arguing for in this post refuses to take our various encounters with the world for granted. In fact, contra to whole generations of theorists, all those variously encountered entities, monstrosities, intricacies and ecologies need not fit any of our conceptions of them - as there is no human logical necessity that cannot be undone by them. The conditions and possibility of knowledge emerge directly out of our visceral encounters in the world, but our translation and articulation of those encounters remain open and tentative.

To be clear, the position argued in this post does not perpetuate the errors of those who would naively believe humans can attain complete and perfect knowledge of the world and its contents, nor does it support the delusions and arrogance of those who might assert that our signifiers or representations actually create the world we experience. The world overflows the horizons of our experience  – and in doing so overflows both our ability to fully comprehend it and our williness to deny it.

But, as I will argue in my next post, the immediate abundance and reality of the experienced world does not require any such ultimate explanations. In fact it is this ‘immediate abundance’ of the world of objects, relations, dynamic conjunctions and immanent dissolutions that explodes the false boundaries between epistemology and ontology – while perpetually requiring us to remain open and flexible to the derivative meanings, embodied associations and practical opportunities evolving out of our primitive necessities and raw experience of ‘being-in-the world’ (as Heidegger called it). That is to say, the task of human thinking beyond the limits and tools of experience remains speculative – but pragmatically so.

Let me, then, stop here for the moment and leave the deeper pragmatic dimensions of embedded and embodied speculation to be addressed in a future post, because in this initial discussion my intention was to foreground my own epistemological commitments and orientation towards being in order to make clear the context from which subsequent arguments and positions will follow.

Part 2 will move on to directly address some of the issues recently brought up by Levi Bryant with regards to some hasty remarks I made about OOO generally. In asserting what I perceive as OOO’s “crypto-anti-epistemological attitude” I provoked Levi's defence of OOO's project and prompted him to outline some of the nuances of the OOO position. I hope to outline my own differences and disagreements with OOO thinking by responding to some of Bryant's comments direcly while also splicing relevant and insightful remarks made by Ivakhiv, Vitale and Shavrio on the issues related to understanding real-world objects and relations.

Parts 3 will then pick up more intensely on the discussion of objects and relations (and object-oriented positions compared to relational-oriented positions) and part 4 will then gather the loose threads of the previous 3 posts in order to present a tentative and strait-forward set of coneptual tools to begin moving towards a post-critical realist ontology. Fleshing out this 'tool-kit' into a full-fledged theoretical orientation will then be the focus of subsequent posts in the series.

My core intention in pursuing these topics and chains of reasoning over the next couple months is to engage recent innovations in contemporary philosophy and begin delineating more clearly my own theoretical positions and assumptions. To be clear, I am not a philosopher by training and have a limited knowledge of the more extensive academic literature in circulation. I am more of a general theorist who is working out a very idiosyncratic philosophical orientation that owes as much to the anthropological tradition and personal relfection than to any particular set of theories or ideas. My intention here, however, is to allow the words and insightful positions of professional philsophers such as Adrian Ivakhiv, Levi Bryant, Steven Shaviro, Chris Vitale and others to fertilize and stimulate my own feral philosophy and strain of 'speculative realism'.

It is my hope that readers will either find these next few posts stimulating and engage in some productive dialogue, or will simply bear with me while I work these issues out and then quickly return to more readerly and mainstream blogging. All comments are welcome.

[note to the reader: trying to pack all the needed qualifications and nuances in a blog post is extremely difficult without ridiculously increasing the amount of words. given enough space and time this post would have been developed using much less convulted terminology and sentences. therefore i apologize for terse and hurried character of the prose, and will seek to improve presentation as the series develops. thanks.]

Critical Aggressions

It seems I have been pegged correctly by another PhD. Levi Bryant from Larval Subjects has responded to a recent comment I made in relation to Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) on Adrian Ivakhiv’s site Immanence. Levi writes,

I’ve often found Michael to be rather belligerent, combative, and disdainful in his questions, so I seldom respond to him, but while I have little interest in entering into dialogue with Michael (everything seems to be a fight or about tearing things down with him), I do think his question raises an important point that might be on the mind of other readers.

 My only response is that he is right. I am often combative, frequently disdainful and I do have a tendency to want to tear things down. I would argue, though, that I’m rarely belligerent - especially towards Levi’s work (or OOO generally) if only because I admire it so. If I thought OOO was rubbish I would simply pass over it and move on to something else. Instead, I read everything Levi offers up and most of what the other members of the OOO tribe post on their blogs. So, if his criticism of my approach is coming from a perspective that seeks to eliminate (or at least point out) barriers to communication - and in this case quasi-academic communication - I plead guilty and sincerely apologize to Levi for any past offences.

Part of my problem (and it is my problem) is that I hold critique as too valuable, and as a result often begin pulling apart ideas I encounter rather than allowing them to peculate and settle. I’m too hasty. The proper gentlemanly thing to do would be to approach carefully and thoughtfully, and get to know a set of ideas before jumping in and trying to wrestle with them. And in the case of Levi’s onticology, I may have been less gentlemanly and cautious than what would be expected by the professor. (although I would note that I was reading Larval Subjects serveral months before ever leaving a comment.)

Another part of the problem, in this case, could be that I abhor metaphysics. Any discourse or philosophy that proclaims to have some strong handle on untimate truth is, to me, worthy of being torn asunder and revealed for what it truly is: learned poetics. Ludwig Wittgenstein demonstrated to the academic world decades ago that all our attempts to delineate the world through philosophical language are inherently limited and utterly implicated in the wider ‘games’ of concrete social life. Thus whatever we say about the real world is fundamentally tentative and constructed.

Through my own investigations in the world I have also come to believe that many of the intellectual projects supported by industrial society have become superfluous to the more primal and necessary project of human flourishing and becoming. We have designed amazing tools for understanding (science generally speaking) and coping (technics) in the world, yet we squander our innovations by orienting our productive activities towards product creation, consumption and the proliferation of superficial differences. So too with philosophy: we are affluent enough to create fantastic institutions of learning and research, yet we pay intellectuals to debate endlessly about the minutia of irrelevant arguments and/or create superfluous theories on which to build careers. Footnotes to Plato indeed!

For me, instead, a radically immanent philosophy takes a definitively pragmatic stance on the world of objects and relations, and enters headlong into direct confrontations with the concrete entities, structures, assemblages and social systems that shape our everyday manifest reality. This is not to say that I reject all intellectualization, because one quick sweep through this blog will show that I’m in love with ideas and often seduced by theory. Yet, in everything I do, say or write my attention has been towards praxis: the practical application of ideas and discourse towards political engagement, social justice and individual development.

What I do mean to say, however, is that both epistemological and ontological questions - e.g., questions about ‘how’ we know and ‘what’ we know - are practical rather than metaphysical issues. And although theory is important to both research and practice, at some point the internal coherence of any particular professor’s model/system becomes ridiculously irrelevant to the work that needs to be done within the social field more generally.

My style of engagement, albeit crude and sometimes less than congenial, reflects an impatience with spending time with the extrapolation of anyone’s personal ideology/model and is pointedly more interested in cultivating or extracting what I interpret to be the most useful ideas, kinds of reasoning and concepts within that particular discourse, or set of discourses. It simply just doesn't occur to me to want to collect and reify any individual theory or fashionable philosophical position. Therefore, and returning to the issue of my aggressive tendencies towards Levi’s work, any theory or philosophy worth my attention (which OOO certainly is) is also worthy of being deconstructed and held to mirror of practical significance.

All that said, I’m still deeply saddened by the prospect that my approach may end up preventing fruitful dialogue with Levi (and his brethren) about object-oriented thinking, and would only ask that before they consign themselves to slamming the door shut on my input that they also take the time to consider (perhaps in light of what I said above and not in spite of it) that if I truly thought for one moment that WHAT they were talking about and thinking about was wholly irrelevant and unimportant would I be so willing to critique it?

[ next I will turn to the strictly philosophical issues Levi raises in his response to my comments made on Adrian’s blog. I think Levi makes some great points, and, as will hopefully become clear, I am in agreement with most of what he writes. ]

Greece in a Transitional World

Although i'm not as knowledgeable as I want to be about the situation in Greece, a recent comment by a regular reader has prompted me to consider these issues in terms of what I think is going on internationally.

First, in light of the recent interventions ("austerity measures") of the IMF and other international finance institutions into the bankruptcy and governance crisis in Greece, it seems to me that the elite economic institutions are again deploying the now standard neoliberal 'shock doctrine' reforms (i.e., privatization, cutting social programs, decreasing regulation, repealing environmental laws, etc) as a way to intensify the dependence of the Greek nation-state on corporate controlled global flows of material and commerce. In short, international institutions, under the direction of the elites who govern them and whose interests animate their policies, are effectively reorganizing the very character of Greek polity.

To be sure, Greece is only one of a number of European states to begin the process of disintegration that nation-states will go through as the international order unravels. (Which I find ironic, given that core features of Western civilization originate from that region.) Governments, until now, have been supporting a way of life predicated on cheap energy and maintained by the mass production and consumption of superfluous goods. The result is an institutional reality that is extended beyond its functional limits. The Greeks, and everyone else in the so-called West, need to begin to understand that massive change is both inevitable and necessary. The era of governments managing and controlling incredibly complex public-oriented systems is at an end - the party is over.

Contrary to the myth of ‘badly managed finances’ perpetuated by managers and technocrats, the dismantling of many public institutions and social programs in Greece is the direct result of major shifts in the balance of power from nation-states to large non-national corporations. Profit-seekers and technocrats use financial obligations and weak leadership to justify taking over key decision-making powers and responsibilities. As a result, private interest organizations have gained demonstrable control of the flow of finance, material productivity, infrastructure and the institutional assemblages that afford most of our social relations. Corporate projects and decision-making are now openly encouraged to avoid and ignore state mandates and thereby exclude “public interests” from its deliberative practices.

With a developed capacity to control energy utilization, cash flow, media and production, wealthy elites and their corporations collaborate (e.g., "create policy") with large financial institutions to entangle nation-states such as Greece in increasingly narrow and maladaptive activities. Such entanglements have allowed private organizations to routinely supersede state-oriented institutions and interests, and dictate the flux and allocation of resources towards non-national and intensely stratified accumulations of wealth and security.

As nation-states become legally entrenched in international financial obligations and controls they relinquish the power or capacity to continue social programs and manage traditional public activities and incentives. Money and the maintenance of controlled material flows has become the only political concern for national managers and elites. Therefore, outside of direct action, money is now the only available political tool for individuals and groups. And as major corporations take over traditional governing capacities (i.e., infrastructure development, security, basic health care, etc) they also generate a distorted and detached social logic: the logic of isolation, profit and exchange.

Sadly, this is precisely the kind of “freedom” neoliberalism promised us from the beginning: freedom from government and the obligations of anonymous social welfare. Only, now, the “constraints” of government and public life have been replaced by the obligations and imperatives of corporate employment, finance, brand loyalty, and the passive participation in and dependence on unsustainable modes of production and forms of life.

As economic flows shift and the whole international system is comes apart each nation/region will be required to use whatever institutional and operational resources it has remaining to "restructure" accordingly. And while I totally disagree with the way that Greece is going about doing this restructuring - mostly because they are just getting their people even deeper into the system that created the current crisis to begin with - change is both inevitable and necessary. 

Now, as I see it, Greece has two clear choices:

1. Allow the nation-state to continue to whither away and hope the populous creates enough of their own institutions or economic projects to maintain some semblance of a ‘reciprocally regarding’ social solidarity.

2. Use the military to take control of core economy functions and redirect the ebbs and flows of capital, energy and materials towards reorienting productive activities, reinvigorating public life  and reinforcing public institutions.

However I don’t see either of these two polarized choices being acknowledged by Greek leaders at this time. Greece will instead become one of many nation-states that will continue to slowly and painfully disintegrate - despite calls from the people asking the state to maintain public programs and with the state increasingly ceding sovereign powers and duties to private interests.

It is my contention that when a critical mass (or systemic threshold) of discontent, poverty and social disintegration is reached, recently hollowed-out states will rapidly convert to a loose system of regionalized and centralized corporate military zones with protected enclaves of trading and functionality - so-called “green zones” for those of us who can afford it. Those unfortunate enough to get excluded in these new zones of fuctionality will simply be abandoned , marginalized and left to exist in anarchic and despotic conditions - or so-called “red zones”. In less words, those who have the guns and technology, and therefore the resources, will make that "transition" smoothly while those who don’t will be forced to the periphery.

Now I understand this projection might seem wildly apocalyptic and far removed from current conditions. But let point out why it is not.

For starters, for those lucky and connected green-zoners such rapid and intensive transformations will undoubtedly seem to them as a drastic but necessary step to safe-guard “civilization” from disaster and prevent the overall degeneration of human social life. From the point of view of the protected they will simply be cutting dead weigh, so to speak, on the way to the full rescuing and transformation of social life - with its movement towards neo-feudal corporatist socioeconomic organization.

Yet for the red-zoners it will be not resemble an "apocalypse" because it will be perpetual. An apocalypse implies a particular moment in time, but for red-zoners the harsh realities of post-state life will be constant and relentless. What's worse, at least for the first few generations, is that not only will they become prey to whatever anarchic distribution of power that will follow rapid disintegration, they will also have to watch from the margins how “civilization” continued without them.

Also, for those of you who want to dismiss such possibilities as mere fantasy (as opposed to fantasy per se), please consider that this type of organizational assemblage is not that much different than what currently exists. It has been argued that we post-industrial consumer-citizens exist in our ‘first-world’, while others have their ‘second’, ‘third’ and 'fourth' worlds. And the only strong difference between the zoned societies I describe above and today’s international orders (emphasis on the plural) is mobility.

Right now the international social order is characterized by the activities that support the hyper-mobility and intensive communicative flexibility of a relatively sizable comfort class. Whereas a world that is post-peak-oil, post-cheap-energy, post-mobile, limited in production and non-state organized, will be more situated, guarded and sharply delineated (stratified) while becoming oriented towards the utilization of remaining resources. In other words, the major difference between these the current social orders and those I argue we will transition into is the intensity (and rigidity) with which they are organized, while their structural interests remain the same: controlled subsistence, energy and security.

The fact remains that the economic foundation upon which our lifestyles depend is dying. And as all those ‘goods’ stop being circulated within capitalist international systems (as a result of collapsing bio-physical systems), and the superfluous “jobs” their production makes possible disappear, it will be less possible to placate and pacify the Western hoards. With their jobs, creature comforts, trinkets, vacations and T.V programs vanishing, the appearance of mutual interdependence will weaken and cease to captivate the imaginations of citizen-consumers everywhere. The resulting weakening of imagined and functional mutual dependence will then undermine most types of remaining social non-zero sum ("public interest") activities and "compel" (or provide opportunity for) all those powerful elites and self-appointed guardians to begin setting up their respective zones of influence, economics and security. 

My basic point, if I have one at this juncture, is that nation-states are endangered institutions. State-systems are being assaulted from all angles by ethnic allegiances, corporatist appropriations, ideological devaluation, and libertarian politics alike – while continuing to operate with increasingly scarce resources (both monetarily and ecologically). The era of state-sponsored social systems and forms of solidarity therefore is also coming to an end. Western societies can no longer demand that our leadership and state apparatus provide ‘public goods’ while simultaneously supporting (or becoming entangled in) unrestricted “freedom” for the consumerist and corporate accumulation of 'private goods'.

In this context, and returning to the situation in Greece, it would be much better for populations in the long run if their governments withdrew from the system of economics and dominating practices controlled by private organizations and the international legal and financial order. If Greece carefully extracted its economic participation enough to reallocate its remaining resources towards transitioning to a more local economy – one that includes strong and creative public institutions, and the employment structure (“jobs”) that come with them – the Greek people might be able to dramatically increase their self-sufficiency and resilience for the future.

Of course this would entail Greece rejecting international financing and stopping payments on the exasperating and moronic loans that bind them. In defiance of international processes, and in adjustment to all the punishments and coercive forces that would result therein, Greece would then need to move quickly enough to develop a legal apparatus that would legitimate their internal organization and sovereignty while deactivating the economic relations that perpetuate the whole-sale reliance on international trade and financial systems.

I have no doubt that such a "withdrawal" would be as hard on the Greek people as any of the current “reforms”, at least in the short term (with massive job loss and economic chaos), but it would also most certainly provide a more stable and socially-oriented polity in the long term. And it would be important, as indicated above, for such 'withdrawn states' to use and reallocate its remaining resources to soften the severity of the transition.

The way I interpret it, we can either choose to do it the hard way (by just letting it happen to us), or the easier way (by taking action to develop positive transitional forms of life). But however we decide to do it, some sort of transition to another way of being is the path ahead of us.

Maher on Hand-Jobs and Empire

I've been focusing on intensely serious topics the last few weeks. But if we can't laugh a little then why even attempt to change the world? A world without laughter is not a world I want to fight for.

Below is Bill Maher making up new rules for the U.S economy and calling an empire an empire. People do a lot of complaining about government and politics but Bill has the guts to call out Teabaggers and so-called Liberals alike for their hypocrisy and their inability to acknowledge the hard choices U.S citizens will need to force their governments to make.

Anyone who can effectively satirize empire economics while using the term "hand job" has my attention...

As just for those who actually think that elite "conservatives" support less government spending, take a look at the following facts:

The largest Presidential spending and debt increase in the Last 25 Years (in order of total amount spent during a 4 year term):

                                              START    GDP debt END     GDP debt Increase  
G.W. Bush (R)                        63.5%            83.4%                       +20.0%
George H.W.Bush (R)           51.1%           66.1%                        +13.0%
Ronald Reagan (R)                32.5%            43.8%                        +10.8%
Ronald Reagan (R)                43.8%            53.1%                        +9.3%
G.W. Bush (R)                        56.4%           63.5%                         +7.1%
Nixon/Ford (R)                       35.6%            35.8%                        +0.2%
Bill Clinton (D)                        66.1%            65.4%                        -0.7%
Jimmy Carter (D)                    35.8%            32.5%                        -3.3%
Bill Clinton (D)                        65.4%            56.4%                         -9.0%

It is no wonder the military-industrial-complex annually makes billions of dollars and the bankers have unlimited ability to spend and manipulate the markets - the Republican party has emptied the national coffers into the accounts of a handful of Caucasian billionaires. Do we really need to say more?

Scenes from May Day 2010

It should be no secret to anyone who visits this site that i openly and proudly support direct social action. Protests, sit-ins, marches, and even riots are some of the few ways the working-class, under-privileged and/or marginalized populations can express themselves politically in an age of corporate financed politicians and utterly ineffective state apparatus.

Today, millions of people got out and celebrated May Day by demonstrating their desires and demands for a world where humans rights are paramount and equality is something to be cherished and nurtured rather than explained away by a fundamentalist belief in the supremacy of "self-interest".

May Day generally refers to several public holidays, but in many countries, May Day has become synonymous with International Workers' Day - a day of political action and public demonstrations organized by unions and other groups supporting working-class interests. As an international celebration of the social and economic achievements of the labour movement, May Day has also become a commemoration of those involved in the 1886 Haymarket affair.

The Haymarket affair occurred during the course of a three-day general strike in Chicago, Illinois, United States that involved common laborers, artisans, merchants, and immigrants. Following an incident in which police opened fire and killed four strikers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. plant, a rally was called for the following day at Haymarket Square. Towards the end of the rally, as police moved in to disperse the event and opened fire on the unarmed crowd on the grounds that an unknown assailant threw a bomb into the crowd of police. The bomb and resulting police riot left at least a dozen people dead, including one policemen. A sensationalized and jury-rigged trial ensued in which eight defendants were openly tried for their political beliefs, and not necessarily for any involvement in the bombing. The trial led to the eventual public hanging of four anarchists without any connection to the initial bombings.

May Day also has roots in the Celtic festival of Beltane and other northern European pagan and neopagan festivals such as Samhain. May Day had traditionally marked the end of winter in the Northern hemisphere, and has been an occasion for popular and often raucous celebrations of all types ever since. In fact, the earliest May Day celebrations appeared in pre-Christian times.

Below are images and links on this years May Day activities from all over the planet . Witness people who care enough to join together and take action in an effort to cultivate a more meaningful and humane world:

May Day Rallies Draw Millions Worldwide

 Germany

Turkey

Cuba

France

Ukraine

Pakistan

Demonstrators in 280 cities join in May Day

Athens

Montreal

China

Swaziland

England

L.A.'s May Day immigration rally is U.S's largest: