IOW, we need not be ultimately responsible for our actions in order to be morally culpable? — Noah Te Stroete

Stronger than this: 'need not' implies an option. I'm saying this is a matter of principle, of necessity: we are only responsible to the degree that we are not 'ultimately' (?) in control of our actions. In yet other words: responsibility implies - necessarily - an exposure, on our part, to the accidental, to the unforeseen, and to the 'uncontrollable'. Without such an exposure or risk, it makes no sense to speak of responsibility (or 'accountability'). Without the element of risk inherent to action (without which an action would not be an action, but a mere mechanical process), responsibility cannot be attendant to the agent who engenders it.

And you're probably best off ignoring Terrapin's sophistry.

As are horseshoes, which are not made any which way.

This is one of the few clear instances where a politics of 'identity' is clearly not in any way at stake: there is no question here of 'identifying' with the mainland or 'identifying' with some ephemeral spirit of Hong Kong. The stakes here are differential and clear: political and juridical autonomy from the state apparatus of the PRC. 'Identity' is secondary, derivative, and mystifying. Analysing the situation in those terms is to lose sight of it entirely. China, of course, would like to frame it in those terms, precisely because it allows it not to talk of the real stakes involved - much better to appeal to some mythical sense of the 'Chinese identity' which HK is supposed to partake in.

A nice lesson in the uselessness - or even harmfulness - of identity politics.

I'm still not clear on the reasoning behind being accountable for the unintended consequences of my actions. Is that because I was acting irresponsibly by engendering some result that I ought to have foreseen? — Pantagruel

I wouldn't say that 'intention' is at stake here, or at least I don't think intention is coextensive with control. What I'm trying to argue for is rather that an internal relation exists between the concepts of action, accountability, and a certain incapacity ('lack of control)': that you cannot have one without the other, and that all three are a package deal, as it were. Or put otherwise: that the concept of responsibility cannot be made sense of in any coherent way without recognising that to be responsible (or 'accountable') commits us necessarily to that which inevitably exceeds our control, without which we would not be accountable at all.

Or yet another way to put it: I'm not arguing that we should enlarge the extension of the concept of responsibility/accountability to 'include' what is not in our control; as if there are two distinct classes of things which I want to subsume under a larger class. Rather, I'm arguing that the very intension (not to be confused with 'intention'!) of the concept of accountability includes that which is not in our control.

Psychoanalysis is now so diffuse among contemporary theory that if you don't find 'post-Lacanians' or 'post-Freudians' it's because the use of psychoanalysis can no longer be neatly fitted into any particular school or movement. Not because it's not out there, but because it's everywhere, with so many taking their cue from Lacan and Freud but developing them in vastly different ways. In many ways I think this is a healthier environment than one in which one or two new 'schools' dominate and claim the mantle of paychoanalysis.

And what of other classic psychoanalysists like Winnicot, Klein, Laplanche and Pontalis? People were thinking 'beyond' Lacan even while Lacan was still around.

The Hong Kong protestors are democratic heros, actual, real life superheroes, and what they're doing may just be the last gasp of democracy anywhere in the world. They deserve our support, if only because they know far better than 'us' what democratic politics looks like. We ought to support them because they can teach us, miserable students that we are. I look at what is happening there with sheer, untrammeled admiration. And I feel shame that we're so fucking useless in comparison.

I want to write this quote out in my notebook. I love that interpretation; I have always felt that way but never found the right words beyond "accessing foreign subjective experiences and realities" which is a bit metaphysical and not always correct; because it doesn't address the concept of time-experience and perception.

I am curious though, what other ways did you have in mind as a way to "hollow time"? Intimacy? Drugs? Hard work? — Grre

It's a lovely phrase right? I borrowed it from Merleau-Ponty, who uses the language of the hollow in a different context (for him, we are hollows in time), but which I think is really beautiful and useful on its own. I think we create little hollows or eddies in time (to change the metaphor) all the time - in play and in games, in art, in conversation, in writing, in work, artistic practice, certainly in intimacy... basically anything that disengages us from our more familiar rhythms of hunger, sleep, and breath even.

If I privilege the written word though, its because the words have have a particular power that other modes of disengagement do not: words can be entirely self-referential. One can use words that refer to nothing at all in the world, so much so that you can create entire new 'worlds' with them (Tolkien's world, Lucas's world). In the language of semiotics, words can be employed as 'symbols', rather than 'icons' or 'indexes', which is just again a fancy way of saying that they don't have to refer to anything in the real world at all to 'work' - their 'deietic' function can be entirely erased. Some detail on this here, if you're interested).

There's a beautiful quote by Elizabeth Grosz - one of my favourite - on how philosophy, art, and science can all contribute to 'enlarging the universe' in their own way, creating what she calls 'small pieces of chaos' in which chaos can be 'elaborated' on - these can also be understood as ways in which one 'hollows time':

"Art is the opening up of the universe to becoming-other, just as science is the opening up of the universe to practical action, to becoming-useful and philosophy is the opening up of the universe to thought-becoming. ... What philosophy can offer art is not a theory of art, an elaboration of its silent or undeveloped concepts, but what philosophy and art share in common—their rootedness in chaos, their capacity to ride the waves of a vibratory universe without direction or purpose, in short, their capacity to enlarge the universe by enabling its potential to be otherwise, to be framed through concepts and affects. They are among the most forceful ways in which culture generates a small space of chaos within chaos where chaos can be elaborated, felt, thought." (Grosz, Territory, Chaos, Art)

It seems like what you are talking about is actually "accountability" not responsibility. Those are, I agree, two very different things. — Pantagruel

We can call it accountability instead if you prefer, and keep responsibility for causal attributions. In any case it's not the latter idea I'm concerned with. I'm not particularly fussed about the nomination here.

The essence of the term responsibility is a causal attribution. — Pantagruel

Not at all. We regularly distinguish between those (held) responsible for their actions and those not, if by means of age, mental capacity, or otherwise. Certainly we say that the sun is 'responsible for warming the stone, but this is an equivocation on the term, much in the way we say that he did a cartwheel in the backyard, without asking for his load-bearing capacity. Responsibility, in the ethical or even juridical sense that I am discussing here, is an imputation, not description (and even all descriptions are normative, but let's not go into that).

Hello! Sorry for the late reply, I wrote the OP at the airport before a weekend trip, which is a terrible idea, but I'm back so better late than never. Gonna go with a general reply as it's a little tough to respond one by one at this point:

So - there are some misunderstandings among some replies here, but that's partly because I titled the post in a deliberately provocative way. 'Control' is clearly not some black and white property, like an on/off switch. It's obviously more of a gradated notion, a matter of degrees and the of more or less (more control, less control). But that's also precisely the point: to the degree that what we can control always 'shades off' and is mixed into what we can't, responsibility itself must always include a degree of that which we cannot control, by necessity. That's the crux: there's no sharp diving line where control ends (or begins, for that matter), which correspondingly implies that responsibility must involve what is not in our control, as a matter of conceptual necessity.

Consider it like this: the alternative is solipsism (or at least a certain kind of solipsism). For the solipsist is neither responsible nor not responsible: 'In control' of everything that happens, the world of the solipsist is pure cause without effect: the solipsist coincides with the world and everything that happens in it (Witty: "The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it"), and in such a situation both the very idea of responsibility or non-responsibility become meaningless. The solipsist does not act, at least, not in any way humanly recognizable: coinciding with the world and all that occurs in it, nothing that happens escapes or exceeds the solipsist: the solipsist is a theological figure, commensurate with the monotheistic God.

But such is exactly the figure that humans are imagined to be when it isn't acknowledged that only when the act exceeds our control can we even count as being responsible for something. So the glib parodies of 'I was fully in control, therefore not responsible miss the point - there is no possible way you were fully in control to begin with, which is why you can even begin to count as responsible. The one who murders the other on purpose always has the effects of that action outrun any possible intent: only then could it even qualify as murder, let alone an action able to which responsibility could be imputed.



This doesn't cover everything, but here's at least some extra fuel for the fire.

Reader here! General responses to your smattering of questions: I've been hovering around 50 books per year recently, though I've been a bit behind this year due to circumstances. Probably do at least an hour a day, if I can get to it. Was lucky to grow up in a house which put a premium on reading, and still does.

I sometimes get asked by other how I read the volume of books I do - and I always that that it is a discipline and a habit, like going to the gym, or knitting. It has to be developed, but once you're 'there', it becomes a part of you. Short of going out to a party or a dinner, I don't go anywhere without a book.

Never look down on those who don't read, or are not as literate as you. To be able to be well read is to be privileged - the time needed, the ability to disengage from life and it's necessities: these things are what reading need, and many do not have the opportunity, or are not in an environment that enables such opportunity, and is an indictment on our social and cultural organization, not on individuals.

Reading is an act of temporal disengagement, among other things: it plucks you out from the currents of life and inserts you into a temporality of its own making, a kind of adjacent time, or tangential time, next to, but not of, the time of life. As such it is uniquely suited to philosophy, for it allows thought to similarly disengage and occupy it's own plane, carving a little hollow in time, like an fragile experimental laboratory insulated from the forces of life. Books and reading are an exemplary mechanism that allows one to access such hollows in time, which give thought a consistency proper to their own being. Reading is not the only way to do this, but it is an important and vital one.

I think the point is that the two are consubstantial: there is no responsibility for without responsibility to: as she says, the entire 'problem of responsibility' is engendered through the relation to the other, which I take to encompass both 'poles' of responsibility.

The Stoics are more subtle than might first appear - recall the story Epictetus tells of Priscus' response to Vespasian, when Vespasian threatens to kill Priscus if he turns up to the senate: “You do your part, and I will do mine. It is your part to kill me, mine to die without flinching; your part to exile me, mine to leave without protest." (Discourses). That Priscus cannot control Vespasians' actions does not mean he does not take responsibility for his own; in fact, Priscus wholly accepts the consequences of his actions, even in the face of death, brought about from without (from what is beyond his control, as it were).

In other words, the Stoic injunction that we ought to concern ourselves only with what is 'up to us', does not entail that we disavow responsibility for what our actions bring about, even if those consequences are not 'up to us'. So Stoic ethics may not be quite as diametrically opposed as it might seem at first sight.

Maybe, maybe not, but your standard is as arbitrary as any so far.

One imagines that stochastic terrorism just happens, out of the blue, for no particular reason at all. What a mystery!

Yes, because that's the only possible way anyone could be held responsible, to whatever extent, for another. Worth noting too that the idea that cause and responsibility are internally related concepts is itself a bogus connection: one can be responsible for the state of a kitchen, a planned event, or car tires, without being the 'cause' of a mess or a death. This is why we have civil suits, and why head chefs can be fired. Responsibility reaches far wider than some narrow understanding of 'cause', and it's an artificial fudge of language to pretend the one only follows from the other.

Almost as funny as attributing words to quotes that weren't there to begin with.

The fact that one may experience speech having a degree of influence over their actions does not make that ‘power’ an objective reality we cannot but accept. It’s still a perception. — Possibility

This is a tortured and spurious distinction. Moreover, there is no question of 'taking back power' over words; one of the ways we exercise our powers and liberties is through our engagement with words (with other words and actions) and not in spite of them. The power of words is positive and constitutive of who and what we are, not a foreign object to be treated at a remove. Words without power are dead letters, worthless to anyone, and leave us diminished. If we don't put ourselves at risk in and through words, we may as well be pigs making sounds at each other - which is exactly what liberal politics would make of us.

Relevance and irrelevance to reproductive success induces a sortal on the environment; a partition of its behaviour into that which counts-as relevant for the seed's reproductive success and that which does not. We can imagine an environment as a series of cycles; seasons, diurnal patterns of animals, weather in those seasons, rain crystallising in spider webs; some are sensitive to others, some are not. — fdrake

I quite like this vocabulary of 'inducing a sortal on the environment': I read it as a way (at a first approximation) of qualifying causality. So rather than the linear indifference of 'cause -> effect -> cause -> effect', this kind of approach forces a proper empiricism of bodies ('descend' from causes to bodies): not just 'what caused it?', but also: 'is that (kind of) body open to that cause?/Does it have that capacity to be so affected?". It 'materializes' cause, it makes of bodies not just a mere vector for causes - as though their particular constitution were irrelevant, and as though bodies were mere carriers or chora for causes - but as something worthy (necessary) of study in their own right. And this in turn allows one to think of 'natural discontinuities', in a way that challenges some approaches to nature as continuous and Whole - a nature full of gaps and forgetting, as it were.

I have in mind in particular some passages in Deleuze (and Guattari) on Markov chains, which they speak about in relation to order arising out of discontinuity, which this discussion has helped me make sense of. I quote a commentary: "For Deleuze, it is a question of thinking about chains in a way that does not rely on causal or final succession, or structure. Markov provides the concept for this kind of chain, which is distinct from both continuity and the absence of order.... Like Markov, Deleuze maintains a dimension of order that operates randomly through discontinuous junction that is comprised of divisions, and also determined sections. In Deleuze, the nature of order is, then, semi-random. Furthermore, the connected elements do not signify and are not homogeneous. In other words, they are nonsignifying and heterogeneous" (Anne Sauvagnargues, Deleuze and Art).

In Anti-Oedipus they explicitly link the Markov chain with the wasp and the orchid: "Each chain captures fragments of other chains from which it "extracts" a surplus value, just as the orchid code "attracts" the figure of a wasp : both phenomena demonstrate the surplus value of a code. It is an entire system of shuntings along certain tracks, and of selections by lot, that bring about partially dependent, aleatory phenomena bearing a close resemblance to a Markov chain". One way in which I think of this is that this elaboration of links between selection (of relevance), forgetting (of what is not relevant) and production (of the new) contains in it a whole 'naturalist' philosophy of nature, which I think is really cool.

When one follows a cladistic tree back in time, one sees not what is unchanging and essential, but what perturbations become reproduced; what contingencies are embedded in a flow of biomass reproduction that can become its moving (really becoming) parts. Essence is stability reified as given in a being; essence as a property forgets the becoming of its subtended sortal; it unasks the questions of what and how flows become partitioned into relevance and irrelevance for that being.

This is also a gorgeous way of thinking about cladistics as well - it's the kind of thing that ought to be thought to every first year bio student, if not in high school bio class in general.

Natasha Lennard - Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life
Eleanor Kaufman - Deleuze, The Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being

Which is the reason it's so important to protect free speech rights — T Clark

This doesn't follow and is also really dumb on the face of it. "X is really, really important, which is why we should under no circumstances, in any way all all, do anything about it".

Do you really believe that the words someone says have a power over you that you cannot control? — Possibility

'Control?' Like one 'controls' a toy car? That's not how the power of speech operates - at least not except under the most restricted and terrible conditions. The vocabulary of the question is wrong from the beginning. The point is simply that to say that 'we can't accept speech as a source of power over other people' is like saying 'we can't accept the sky is blue'; human history to a large degree the results of the power of speech and action over and with others. One can try to not 'accept' reality - but the loser here won't be reality.

When we start to accept speech as a source of power over the actions of human beings, — Possibility

Not to be crass but this is almost laugh out loud funny. "Can you imagine if other people's speech were to be influences on other people? My gosh, no, however could we 'accept' that? It's never happened, ever, we better not start 'accepting' it now!". Like - which planet does this line of thinking come from? It's certainly not Earth.

It's always kinda funny to watch Americans suckling at the teet of their daddies. Sorry, 'founding daddies'. 'What would daddy think of this?!' being the neurotic, pre-pubescent axis upon which political action apparently ought to be judged.

OP is a muddle. If it can't be clarified this thread will be closed.

My friend, you need to read some economic anthropology, and see how all these priciples play out in real life. The attempt to measure policy and societal well-being along a single, thinly drawn axis - government vs. Individual - should alone be a red flag for any serious student of politics and society (regardless, even, of what that axis is). Good luck in your studies.

rid yourself of the silly liberty vs. Government crap — Maw

I was just thinking of mentioning how incredibly anemic this kind of libertarian political ontology is: the only actors that exist are 'free individuals' and 'governments'. That it. It's such a pale caricature of society. It'd be laughed off in any other setting except apparently, the actual world we live in.

"An existing political reality ought to be altered irregardless of existing political realities".

That's how dumb you sound.

Because you're not particularly bright.

Better than thinking something justifies itself by its mere existence.

It's ridiculous isn't it? Germany under Hitler was a fascist state, so that complete state control is justified because that's just how it was organized. You don't have to like it! So dumb.

Hate speech must die.

There is no relevant information nature cannot access, nature unfolds according to its own sense of relevance, but its sub-processes learn to contextualise. Perhaps it could even be phrased like the origin of sub-process is a context of development. Like the canopy trees never become immune to lava. Causal histories get absorbed into intermediaries until they become relevant again. — fdrake

Here's what I think is at stake here (let me know if it's different): are you trying to account for the autonomy of systems without at the same time trying to entirely disengage that system from it's wider environment? That is, trying to account for a relative autonomy of systems within (variable) threshold values that when crossed (under equally variable conditions), make it so that the environment now bears upon the system in question?

One thing your descriptions reminds me of - at a totally different scale of time and space - are vesicles, which are like little sheltered chambers formed by fat molecules, which provide something of a micro-environment within the bodies for different kind of chemical reactions that would not take place without them. And of course the coherence of a vesicle is itself dependant on it's own environmental factors, even as it shelters and separates what takes place inside from what takes place outside.

A different question: what's the enemy here? Are they accounts which can't provide such an account? And what do they look like? Trying to triangulate the motives here.

Start your own thread.

Fine, it's not democratically representative of the population. That's the House. Next question is whether all political institutions should be democratically representative — Marchesk

The question of the OP is in the title. Seems like we both agree the answer is in the affirmative.

Weather or not the US is or is not a union of states says nothing to whether the current set-up of state representation is democratically representative.

You may as well argue that because The Soviet Union was a union of Soviets, that it's political organisation was well justified.

So it's sheer existence justifies itself? Are you even trying?

Yes, and the point is that the current set-up of 'state representation' is itself not representative of the nation - that is, is undemocratic. Saying that 'well it's representative because it represents the states' is just tautological bullshit that justifies nothing. You may as well say that the government represents the government, therefore, it is representative, so there's nothing to complain about. Spurious bullshit.

Its representative of state governments, which is its purpose — Marchesk

Lol, you think the job of a representative democracy is to represent governments.

It's depressingly hilarious to read responses here which blame the people for not being good enough for their democracy. As for the semantic dodge that the US is a republic and functions as a representative democracy, well, the whole point is that the senate is unrepresentative, and fails even by those standards.