Cavell on shame:

"Shame is the specific discomfort produced by the sense of being looked at, the avoidance of the sight of others is the reflex it produces. Guilt is different; there the reflex is to avoid discovery. As long as no one knows what you have done, you are safe; or your conscience will press you to confess it and accept punishment. Under shame, what must be covered up is not your deed, but yourself. It is a more primitive emotion than guilt, as inescapable as the possession of a body, the first object of shame.

...Shame itself is exactly arbitrary, inflexible and extreme in its effect. It is familiar to find that what mortifies one person seems wholly unimportant to another: think of being ashamed of one’s origins, one’s accent, one’s ignorance, one’s skin, one’s clothes, one’s legs or teeth... It is the most isolating of feelings, the most comprehensible perhaps in idea, but the most incomprehensible or incommunicable in fact. Shame, I’ve said, is the most primitive, the most private, of emotions; but it is also the most primitive of social responses.

With the discovery of the individual, whether in Paradise or in the Renaissance, there is the simultaneous discovery of the isolation of the individual; his presence to himself, but simultaneously to others. Moreover, shame is felt not only toward one’s own actions and one’s own being, but toward the actions and the being of those with whom one is identified—fathers, daughters, wives . . ., the beings whose self-revelations reveal oneself. Families, any objects of one’s love and commitment, ought to be the places where shame is overcome (hence happy families are all alike); but they are also the place of its deepest manufacture, and one is then hostage to that power, or fugitive."

Levinas: "Dasein in Heidegger is never hungry". That's about as brutal a critique of Heidegger that I know. Another might be: Dasein is limbless. Or: doesn't (can't?) sing a tune while skipping down a street, merrily, with no particular end in mind (Dasein can brood though!).

Maybe you can say a bit more about the paper and what your take on it is?

§129

This seems like more like rhetorical bluster than anything of conceptual import, much like his grumbling about 'depth' and 'surface' in §111: an effort to change our metaphors, our attitudes.

§130, §131

This pair of remarks are one of a few handful in this section, I think, where Witty actually goes about spelling out - making explicit - why he keeps insisting on the 'descriptive' nature of his investigations, and why there is no 'explanation' in them. They are best approached, imo, as methodological pointers.

The most important thing they insist upon is the presentation of 'objects of comparison', where the objects in question are language-games. The idea is that, by simply putting language-games 'side-by-side', as it were, this 'mere' act of showing or exhibiting, tells us something about language: "throws light on features of our language." This ought to seem puzzling: how can mere exhibition make philosophical problems "completely disappear" (§133)? (I have in mind the distinction between showing and saying; the suggestion here seems to something like: by 'showing', rather than 'telling', we make philosophical problems disappear).

But how to understand this distinction? Well, consider the alternative to the 'method of comparison': when, instead of treating a language-game as something to be compared against another language-game, we treat it as something "to which reality must correspond." That is, rather than a 'language-game to language-game' comparison, we expect a 'language-game to reality' comparison. This is the trap - the 'dogmatism' - that "we fall so easily into when doing philosophy". Reality here stands for the 'ideal' against which philosophy treats language-games as having to measure up to (like Witty in the TLP).

But Witty's 'investigations' do not proceed along these lines: his investigations simply compare language-games to other language-games. And there is no measuring-up to do in these comparisons, no ideals which to aim at: only the bringing out of "similarities and dissimilarities". This is why 'our clear and simple language-games' are not 'preliminary studies': there is nothing they are 'preliminary' to - no end result (no ideal) of which they count as the first step towards. The 'illusions' of philosophy are brought out when we forget this.

---

I think it's hard to really convey what all this means without giving concrete examples, so I think one nice one is the one provided by Witty himself in §1: Augustine's naming of objects. Witty's 'problem' with this language-game is not that it does not somehow 'match up with reality' - whatever that could mean. His problem is that it is taken for a general picture of how language works. In order to see what is 'wrong' with this generalization, one provides a different kind of language-game: a game like that of 'blocks!' and 'slabs' in §2. When you place these two language-games side-by-side, one begins to understand the limits of each, in comparison with each other, with respect to the purpose of each.

So one does not provide a 'theory' of why Augustine is wrong to generalize his language-game as he does: one simply shows another possibility, and this showing 'sheds light', though its 'similarities and differences', on the limits of generalizing the latter. One should thus also keep in mind §104: "We take the possibility of comparison, which impresses us, as the perception of a highly general state of affairs." But as §131 says, the 'model' must be presented as a model, as a object of comparison, and not a 'general state of affairs'.

This is why Witty insists that his 'method' here is descriptive: it does not offer theories to contest other theories - it simply places language-games side-by-side in order to point out the limits and utility of each, with respect to the purpose each is meant to fulfil.

Oh its been glorious.

this is precisely the kind of rhetoric that radicalizes both sides — VagabondSpectre

At the point at which you're dealing with fascists, more 'radicalization' - worrying about what's North of the North pole? - is the least of your worries.

As for arresting them? The force most responsible for protecting fascists has always been the state. At any far right rally, the police are inevitably there to protect them. The state is not your friend.

If you look at the contemporary origins of the alt-right, or Shapiro's rise, you'll see that they're reactionaries who are responding to the excesses of the left. — VagabondSpectre

Called this out for the unempirical untruth it is long ago. This is just recycled memes at this point.

Also consider that perhaps debating a fascist isn't an 'intellectual' issue, but an ethical, lived one. But by all means, continue to intellectualize fascism. Consider also that I don't want to 'dissuade' them. I want them to be terrified for their bodily safety.

Unfortunately, we don't have a thriving Nazi forum here so no one is entirely sure if the Nazi's were good or bad. In fact there's good reason to believe they were awesome, precisely because we don't allow discussion of their merits here. It's how we give them the space they deserve.

The only way to answer it is to gather data about how information spreads (harvest all opinion pieces, youtube comments, tweets etc. about lobster daddy, Shapooro, Spencer, all comments related to them, model an 'information space' using graph theory, use linguistics to make distinctions between different kinds of memes, sentiments etc., track the spread of ideas between nodes). Only then can one have a clear picture of the circumstances which allow dangerous ideas to spread. — alieninstinct

The danger of a data-driven approach is that is misses, by necessity, how changing political and material conditions themselves change the uptake and dissemination of ideas (dangerous or not). If, for the sake of argument, it were found that deplatforming - or what passes for it - doesn't work, does that mean it doesn't work flat out? Or does it mean that, under these conditions, given this particular set of political and social constraints, for where we are in history in this time and space, it doesn't? If the latter, then one response might be to attempt to change those conditions. To engage, in other words, in politics (this all assuming the data is conclusive!).

In this sense, data always comes too late: by necessity it must take certain conditions as fixed for the sake of comparison and conclusion at all. But changing conditions just is the sine qua non of political action. There's a nice passge by the political philosopher Byung Chul-Han on data and politics, where he writes that:

"Compulsive transparency stabilizes the existing system most effectively. Transparency is inherently positive. It does not harbor negativity that might radically question the political-economic system as it stands. It is blind to what lies outside the system. It confirms and optimizes only what already exists. For this reason, the society of positivity goes hand-in-hand with the postpolitical. Only depoliticized space proves wholly transparent". (The Transparency Society).

If politics is the effort to make a change in the relations of power in a society - and with it, how information is distributed across those networks of power - then data can only really capture what's already there, 'before' change - before political action. Political theory is not quite like other theory in this sense - one's object of study changes as one collects the data.

Yes it's offensive and emotionally neglectful to have a public debate about things like genetic racial differences, but by refusing to have it altogether we're giving racist pundits the room they need to float their bull-shit/pseudoscience — VagabondSpectre

Did you really just write this? And mean it? 'By not giving them room ... we're giving them room"; How does one go about writing a sentence like this? How does this transmit from brain to fingertip to keyboard without stalling at any point from the self-imploding force of its own vacuity? And add to this a casual acknowledgement of how it happens to be 'offensive and emotionally neglectful' - an acknowledgement made to all the better dismiss these as irrelevant - and one has to wonder what the actual fuck went on during the writing of this sentence.

Incidentally, let me tell you how I, and probably millions of others, learnt how fascism was bad. We studied it, like everybody else; felt its effects as we walked through the remains of concentrations camps, like everybody else; understood its history, like everybody else. You know what we didn't have to do? At least, not until liberals lost their collective fucking mind under the sway of the conservative rewriting of history and political mores? Debate a fucking fascist. Holy hell. In what universe must this be spelt out? Unlearn these memes. They are destructive of your intellectual ability.

Incidentally one wonders why putting away rapists and murderers does not just "encourage more rape and murder". It's all very holier-than-thou after all.

You're juxtaposing Shapiro's conservative beliefs with murder and pedophilia? — VagabondSpectre

Your question was about fascism, not Shapiro. And it remains a stupid fucking question.

You say that you're not advocating for violence, but when I advocate for non-violence you attack me as part of the problem (because how dare I whine about the left when lives are on the line!). — VagabondSpectre

I attacked the liberal grounds that you put forward as an argument for non-violence, and not your advocacy of non-violence simpliciter.

Quote one line where I alleged or stated that 'anything other than speech amounts to violence'. — VagabondSpectre

Also, since you asked, here's a random sampling of the fake dichotomy between speech and violence that worms its way all through your engagements with me:

So you're arguing that because moneyed interests are supporting Shapiro, and because ideological merit has nothing to do with politics or democracy these days, the use of intimidation, force, and violence to silence him is well justified? — VagabondSpectre

Bandying words at dinner parties is more productive than vaguely preaching fool-hearty revolution from an armchair. — VagabondSpectre

but we embrace the use of force at the expense of the use of sensible political theory, — VagabondSpectre

One thing that's evident upon reading our exchanges is how much you talk about violence despite my initial remarks not even so much as mentioning the word. But I suppose this is to be expected when you're just another cog pushing the standard fanatical media line: who cares if anyone is actually engaging or talking about violence: let's make it seem as though that's the overwhelming, pressing issue de jour regardless.

How is the average 17 year old supposed to learn why Fascism isn't worth considering if they're not allowed to even consider it? — VagabondSpectre

The same way the 17 year old learns that pedophilia and murder are 'not worth considering'. Or would you like to have a nice civil discussion about those too? I'll bring the tea. Then we can discuss, civilly, whether its nice to fuck children, live in fear, and murder minorities.

What a stupid fucking question.

I'm condemning violence and intimidation through force — VagabondSpectre

Quote one line where I advocated 'violence and intimidation through force'.

I would hardly describe my objections as hysterical — VagabondSpectre

'Your' objections belong to a multiplex industry of complaining about 'de-platforming' that just is the standard line churned out by any institution or person which fancies themselves 'thoughtful' about the day's events. An industry moreover that thrives off a tiny proportion of blown-up events all the better to secure the massive, crushing weight of the status quo. That critical mass - that disproportionate swarm, to which your objections belong - qualifies as hysteria by any measure.

And again the the apparently exhaustive duopoly: speech or violence. Nauseating.

Marx.

And this is how we've always done it, so what's changed in recent years? — VagabondSpectre

Simple - the right has coopted liberals into mass hysteria over anything that isn't 'speech'.

it's whether or not to disrupt the private political event of another group with force. — VagabondSpectre

'Private political event' is an oxymoron. Politics is disruption, and the liberal 'stay in your lane' take on politics is not politics at all, but its destruction. If it were up to liberals Rosa Parks would have been chastized for inconveniencing poor bus riders who just wanted to get where they were going. She should have just made a really good fucking argument, maybe written a really eloquent letter instead.

This is liberal 'politics': you ought to have your opinion, so long as it changes nothing, has no effect, amounts to people nodding along in contemplative agreement, looking good while they do so.

I mean look - look at this nonsense choice:

Either:

Shapiro's rhetoric is meaningless, persuades nobody, and need not be protested whatsoever, let alone censored.

OR

Shapiro's rhetoric does persuade people, in which case we must try to counter his persuasive power with persuasion of our own, a large part of which entails addressing the underlying substance of his claims and beliefs.

The choice that either one 'responds' to Shapiro's words or does not; It's as if the world does not exist; as if one could not aim to change the conditions in which Shapiro's words have any hold at all, make them ring false on their own terms, from the moment they leave his mouth. Words, words, words, the thin, impotent reed of liberal dinner party politics.

Ok beautiful soul.

Fuck off you're sincere. You know my point is negative, you're not a complete incompetent so maybe stop pretending.

Timbre? That's what you got? Ok, good chat.

A corrective. Modest. I don't claim more.

In any case not whining about whining about whining about free speech. Want to keep going?

And how do you address that? By whining about free speech?

What things? Speech things, like the liberal thinks? No.

Culture war and identitarian Leftists have not merely forgotten about economics and class. Their position is predicated on an outright rejection of the working class as a progressive political force, and on a concomitant fear and suspicion, namely that the average white Joe is always one Shapiro video away from signing up as a white supremacist. So this Left antipathy to free speech is not merely suicidal or naive, but is an expression of a class hostility. — jamalrob

I don't think I addressed this properly so let me try this on: free speech is a class issue, and until it is understood in those terms, liberals will continue to find themselves arrayed with the fascists whose rights their tender little hearts break for. 'Cause liberals don't - in fact are constitutionally incapable, given the poverty of terms in which they approach politics - have any way to address the material and historical differentials that have made reactionary views so attractive to the uptake now, in this time, in this particular political situation.

I mean, reactionary fucks like Shapiro have been around since the dawn of time, all with more or less varying degrees of success; so the question is: why now? Why this prevalence, this attractiveness, now? The only piddling, bootlicking answer the liberal can give is something like 'because the Left have gone too far with PC culture and I'm not allowed to make tasteless jokes anymore' (note again the foregrounding of speech). Aside from the fact that anyone who doesn't do politics-by-meme can at a glance note the disproportion between supposed cause and contemptible effect, this simply cannot account for why-now. Can you imagine a Bannon, a Trump, a Shapiro running around in the 90s? They would have been fringe, and would have remained fringe, and not beacuse they weren't engaged with by the left. Platforming - or not - wasn't even at issue.

I'm not saying society was much, if at all, better 'back then' (that time had its own, insane, problems), but - I can't believe I have to spell this out - if you want to know where Sapiro et. al. emerged, perhaps, just fucking perhaps, one ought to look at the material conditions of the poor white working class, rather than 'Muh Free Speech Under AtTaCK fROM ThE LeFt'. Long story short, to put the etiology of the emergence of Shapiros down to 'the left' is such, such, such a stupid and historically myopic idea that it simply cannot be taken seriously. But the liberal simply has no fucking language or vocabulary other than 'free speech' by which to track these issues, so of course for him it's all about 'speech'.

Given all this, the point is not to give up or cede the argument for free speech to the right, but to insist upon creating the conditions under which speech is genuinely constitutive of freedom, and not just a sop to some abstract freedom felt by no one, no where, and has liberals walking in goosestep with the wankers whose speech they cry over. That's the sense in which I think the argument that 'we have to engage them' misses the mark to a fatal degree. Leaving aside the sheer fact the deplatforming works, despite the unemprical meme that it doesn't, the point is to get us to a point at which the 'platforming' - or not - of Shapiros shouldn't even be an issue. I want to live in a society where Shapiros don't matter - not because he's 'deplatformed', but because even if he had all the platforming in the world, no one would care.

Why not both? Why not protests - if one so wishes - and engagement - if one so wishes? Why not disinvitation and invitation? Why not pressure on sponsors, and the occasional chat? A nice broad church of political manoeuvring and democratic expression. Let the man - or men, or women - speak. And let him know that his words are also not welcome. Or ought we simply coddle the fragilities of right-snowflakes who are sad that people don't want to talk to them?

This is one of the reasons talking about 'free speech' as a general concept is so meaningless. Free speech where? In what context? With respect to which audience? In what medium? Among which institutional arrangements? Liberals would flatten these questions out, and bray out the tautology and speech is speech is speech. But it's not, not to anyone for whom politics is anything more than a mild-mannered salon conversation - which is to say, not to most people, everywhere.

This is all irrelevant. I'm not arguing for censorship, and I'm not arguing for violence, and if you think anything other than speech simply is, or can only be, violence or censorship, then I take that to be so obvious a howler as to be beneath serious engagement.

Thus the Left is suicidal in abandoning the defence of free speech to the Right. — jamalrob

But this is not a 'defence of free speech' issue: it's a defence of consequences issue. Or at least, its matter of taking speech seriously, of actually giving it the weight it can and does have, and not treating it like some intellectual parlour game to be played out in salons where people can unironically talk about 'the marketplace of ideas' - a wretched idea indulged in by wretches. Let's be clear about what this means: the response to speech cannot simply be limited to 'more speech'. Politics is not a dinner party, and words can and are, to use a useful word in one of @Maws articles, actualized. In some cases that actualization means fucking genocide, as the Bosnian case makes clear, and the liberal disconnection of speech from its actualisation is doubly a denial of reality on one hand, and an insistence that reality go unaffected by words on the other.

The liberal hypostatization of speech has the effect of draining it of whatever power it can and does have. It sucks the life out of what it claims to be so vital to it. I'm mincing words - lets be sparkling clear: the liberal doesn't give a fuck about speech, dispute her pseudo-veneration of it.

I said above that the response to speech cannot simply be limited to more speech. Which is not to say that speech should always be responded with means other than speech; only that it cannot be turned into a political principle without at the same time destroying the power of speech. Were we to be so lucky, in a good society, speech should be adequate most of the time. Except we don't live, not by any means, in such a society. Things are shit, and liberal with his head simulatiously up his ass and in the clouds misrecognises this to sometimes literally fatal effect.

Another way to put this is that even 'initial speech' (lets call it), speech 'before' response is never 'just' speech: to have a platform is already to have been implicated in whole webs of extra-vocal institutional power: education, money, social and media networks and so on. Speech is never 'just' speech - it is that and a boatload more. To insist that the only politically appropriate response to this is just more words (throw words at fascists! That'll stop 'em!) is fucking idiotic, to put it mildly.

Well, sure, between those who abide by the argument and don't: but that's every argument ever.

You presume a position of political certainty — jamalrob

Do I? In arguing that the liberal appeal to the neutral ground of 'the free and open marketplace of ideas' is bullshit (I'm certain about that), is it battle lines that I'm casting? Is there a discussion, here, that I'm asking be shut down? Hell, I'm not even asking - desiring? - that Shapiro be 'shut down'. I want to talk politics in order to scorn a certain take on politics - one I think disingenuous and potentially harmful.

When the rhetoric skews toward 'words in a vacuum', you have to supply the non-vacuum action. You can't use that ploy without offering something else. — csalisbury

I don't have to supply shit. There's no 'ploy' here, if you think I'm wrong, say so, and why. The rest is noise.

If you can make that attack, if their ideas have no worldly consequence, it must be the case that your ideas do have some worldly consequence. — csalisbury

I've offered no 'ideas', made no claims to political action. I'm attacking an argument. It's informed by a certain understanding (duh), but that's not really relevant. Or at least, it's not this conversation. Perhaps you want a different conversation. Not my problem.

That's a characterization of liberal political ontology, if you like. Must I be committed, somehow (to what?), to make it? Here? Where does fair - or not - come into it? What are you even talking about? Do you know?

Yeah, because pointing out badly drawn conclusions from badly wrought arguments means I'm not doing politics means... ? I dunno man, I think you're just playing meta outta habit, and it's silly.

--

Also strikes me, incidentally, that the concern for appearances from those who avowedly like the arguments to 'speak for themselves' in the 'marketplace of ideas' is irony made thick.

And the point is anything more than trivial because...?

This might make for a nice riposte to those concerned about their 'looks' and powdered wigs:

"A categorical error is made in any media narrative resting on the idea that protests “turn” violent, or counterprotesters instigate violence in these circumstances. The error exists in the tacit suggestion that there was a situation of nonviolence, or peace, from which to turn. Any circumstance in which cops take black life with impunity, any context in which it is still necessary to state that Black Lives Matter, any situation where neo-Nazis march and murder, is a background state of constant violence. Yet the media consistently attributes the act of turning to violence to people who literally cannot turn from it, whose lives and deaths are organized by it. In the book, I cite the late philosopher Bernard Williams who wrote, “To say peace where there is no peace is to say nothing.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/natasha-lennard-fascism-book/

When everything around you is ugly, the concern for 'looks' is just another scar.

What does your worldly practice look like? — csalisbury

It's not mine.

One thing I haven't done is 'condone the forceful censoring of Shaprio'. Not because I don't think he should or shouldn't be censored, but because the only thing I've been doing is pointing out that the liberal grounds for 'non-censorship' (scare-quotes because one person's 'censorship' are another person's everyday life and political situation - the terms for what counts and does not count as censorship are themselves political) are rubbish. My argument is against an argument; not a position on Shapiro being 'censored' or not. Living outside the shithole that is the States, I'm lucky enough to hardly be graced by anything he says or does.

Where's the extra-word center of gravity here? — csalisbury

You don't know?

It's worth noting that 'tHe RaDiCaL LeFt CrEaTeD tHe RaDiCaL RiGhT' meme is just another function of the liberal inability to countenance politics beyond the thin film of speech. Nevermind stagnating wages, the destruction of primary industry, the corportization of the media, the swelling of economic inequality, the ballooning of household debt, the evisceration of state investment into public works, the explosion of prisionfare, the glaciating of social mobility, the crushing inflation of educations costs, the increasing capture of regulatory apparatus, the meteoric concentration of industry monopolies, the gutting of union power - no, won't somebody think of the fucking salons and how they look. All the rest is ViOlENcE. The InDiGnITy!

Liberalism is cancer.

I'm telling you to let the man speak because throwing him out of the saloon makes us look weak and stupid — VagabondSpectre

Yes, you would care about looks, wouldn't you? Words and looks, the substance of the liberal political imagination.

I don't see the asymmetry of means between political camps that you do. — VagabondSpectre

Then there's nothing to discuss. Fascists and racists are always a 'minority' in the liberal imagination. Right up until the point they're not. Because there are no racists and fascists, only ever racist and fascist ideas, ripe for the acedeme debate. What a joke.