But the truth of what, exactly? If two differing conceptions of existence are talking about two different things, then there's no real incommensuribility.

I think it's best not to approach these terms with any pre-set meaning, as it were. Generally, their significance changes depending on what one is trying to do with them. Reality as distinct from what? Being as opposed to what? And what difference is such a difference trying to capture? When you read the history of philosophy, alot of the time it becomes clear that often, when two people talk about say, Being, they don't just advance two different perspectives on 'Being' - they are literally talking about two different things altogether, that just so happen to share the name 'Being'.

Of course, there can be overlaps and so on, and it's sometimes very productive to track what differing conceptions of 'Being' or 'Existence' or whathaveyou might be, but alot of the time this also entails tracking how the kind of work they do - the kinds of problems they are formulated in response to - changes along with them.

My Fox Keller books haven't arrived yet : ( So, before those -

Catherine Malabou - Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality
Catherine Malabou - Changing Difference: The Question of the Feminine in Philosophy
Maurice Blanchot - The Step Not Beyond

The latter momentum or fluidity may be an inevitable requisite that contests the standards that form our understanding of the properties or quality of legitimacy, but in doing so would mean that there is no legitimacy in legitimacy and that therein would contain no properties or quality at all. How do we draw the line? — TimeLine

Perhaps one way to approach this - and this is my inclination anyway - is to give up on thinking of legitimacy in absolute terms. I'd suggest in fact that one of the virtues of democratic systems is that legitimacy itself becomes a site of political contestation such that the shifting boundaries of legitimacy are less a bug than they are a feature. That said, this point of view can only be productive in the presence of strong democratic institutions that allow any such contestation to be robust: separation of powers, mechanisms of transparency and accountability in the drafting of legislation, a well-funded and easily-accessible judiciary, a free press interested in keeping the public informed, conditions of economic security that allow for public participation in the political process, an educated public able to make informed decisions, etc etc.

It's the interlocking of these many systems in operation that allows legitimacy in a democracy to be less than a binary value. Democracy only really works well when it operates in this 'thick' manner; when the quality of these institutions is low, so too is the legitimacy of government which issues from that milieu put into question. Unfortunately, the democratic imaginary has mostly shrunk to the level of 'we have free elections', with everything else being considered more or less incidental. This is, in my opinion, more or less fatal. So with respect to whether or not the US is democracy, I guess I'd say that it is, but a very weak one, and flagging more and more as time goes on. And even then I think it's better than the arbitrary rule found elsewhere.

What is your take on referendums? — TimeLine

I think they can be a useful tool in the democratic arsenal if done on the right terms: was the time enough for debate to occur? How informed is the citizenry? What kind of circumstances have made a referendum necessary? Etc. Practical questions.

In the end, I have to question whether a strictly economic analysis is appropriate here. I understand that this is all very political, of course, but so much of it is enabled/dictated by technological change that I don't think we can analyze it like Marxist historians looking for contradictions in the system or some such. You need to bring in a wider conceptual context to get out of your "mapping" phase, methinks. — Pneumenon

To be clear, if I focus on economic considerations it's because it's just so happened to be that the changes I'm trying to track (Re: risk, time, and biological life) have been largely driven by them. Had it been the case that, say, wars between nations-states had been the primary drivers of such changes, then that's where I would have focused my attention. That is to say, the focus on economics is a matter of 'following where the history takes me', rather than any essentialist conception of history that places economics at the heart of social change. It's to that extent that I find certain Marxist analyticial tools useful for this situation, specifically the thesis regarding capital's ability to liberate itself from all mediation. One can accept this without subscribing to the many other tenets which compose the Marxist edifice.

You see my problem: — apokrisis

Ahh, yes, I do now: It's that you're unfamiliar with the grade school rhetorical trope of topic sentences. Here is a guide from grammar girl that will get you up to speed:

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/writing/how-to-write-a-good-topic-sentence

One step at time, we'll get you over your fear of big, scary words. And now elementary paragraph structure too. I got your back, po po.

This is an essentially historical question, but I would like to say that a reasonable amount of the blame can be stuck on health insurance. — fdrake

Health insurance is an interesting site of analysis because while it definitely contributes to the intensification of the individual, as you put it, insurance still makes it's bed on the mattress of the calculable. That's the whole model after all: get a bunch of subscribers, calculate the risks, and charge accordingly. But the temporal shift I'm interested in consists of two things: (1) a focus on incalculable risk in the future - what might be called catastrophe risk - and (2) the correlative demand that we address such risks now precisely on account of their incalculability. Cooper quotes Stephen Haller's book on environmental catastrophe in a way that nicely captures these two dimensions:

"Some global hazards might, in their very nature, be such that they cannot be prevented unless preemptive action is taken immediately—that is, before we have evidence sufficient to convince ourselves of the reality of the threat. Unless we act now on uncertain claims, catastrophic and irreversible results might unfold beyond human control ... We must face squarely the problem of making momentous decisions under uncertainty." - but once this train of thought takes hold, action in the present becomes impossible to temporally orient. Because actions cannot be measured according to any calculable risk assessment, the borders between norm and exception break down, placing us under the 'state of exception' conditions as specified the Agamben and the like.

One consequence of this is a shift in the means of dealing with risk: no longer subject to calculability, and beset with the demand that one act now, not insurance but security becomes the focal point of action. In turn and with respect to life, the issue shifts from the insurance of life to the securitization or militerization of life in its biological register. Cooper documents a few exemplary instances of this - the treatment of the AIDS crisis in South Africa, the emergence of biosecurity discourse among the US intelligence apparatus, while Agamben has focused more on the ways in which biometric data is being increasingly employed as a vector of state security.

At the widest angle however, the biggest and most consequent danger that securitziation heralds is that of depoliticization: essentially, there is an inverse relationship between security and politics - the need to address security - now no longer reserved for exceptional situations but now immanent and incalculably of the present - displaces the space of politics. It's Agamben again who has perhaps better than most charted this shift, noting how this move to securitization is inescapably bound up with the kind of beings we are: because of the expanding sphere of biopolitics, we can be understood less and less as political actors, and more in terms of our 'bare life':

"If my identity is now determined by biological facts that in no way depend on my will and over which I have no control, then the construction of something like a political and ethical identity becomes problematic. What relationship can I establish with my fingerprints or my genetic code? The new identity is an identity without the person, as it were, in which the space of politics and ethics loses its sense and must be thought again from the ground up" And consequence of this is drawn out explicitly: "Placing itself under the sign of security, modern state has left the domain of politics." In fact it's worth reading Agamben's lecture on these themes, which ranges over this in a better way than I can given the space constraints here.

You didn't answer my question. You were talking about spiritual purpose before, now you're talking about creativity in nature. I didn't ask you about the latter.

You are simply highlighting how your abstracted jargon conceals... — apokrisis

When Mr. Apo - "symmetry" "constraint" "triadic" - Krisis accuses you of jargon mongering. You couldn't make this up if you tried.

Except the GFC was caused precisely by investment into assets that were not revenue generating (housing), and speculative finance - derivative trading on futures and so on - is almost entirely unproductive. And given that private debt stands currently at 156% of US GDP - 17% less than it's height during the GFC (and triple what it was in 1950) and growing - you'd have to be completely blind to economic reality to think the 'stabilizers' you speak of are in anyway working.

So at no point did you suggest anything about the fostering of a sense of crisis? Hmm. — apokrisis

Yep, I wrote that in a paragraph about the changing temporal relations of risk, and how that legitimises legislation like that. But sure, yeah, read the word that doesn't appear it in once into it. And then complain I'm using big words. What a joke.

Perhaps if you posted a coherent argument it would go better for you. Have a go at writing out your OP in plain language without all the fancy words. And with proper examples to support your point at each turn. See how much sense you think it makes then. — apokrisis

Big scary words hurt po po? Streetlight type slow for po po now? Don't scared okay po po?

Fostering a sense of crisis to be able to push through a political agenda is quite the opposite of creating the false market optimism on which speculative bubbles depend. — apokrisis

Except at no point did I suggest anything about 'fostering a sense of crisis'. So just one example of how you're a bit slow on the dot connecting front to begin with.

Anyway, as usual you're singularly incapable of holding a discussion without turning it into some sort of dick measuring competition. I almost forgot why you're an awful person to discuss anything with. Thanks for the provocations anyway I guess.

It's not the very fact of explanation that I'm objecting to - it's the purported explanation being that the reason for life is the quickest route to non-existence. Worldly existence is not the portal towards a higher life, but a temporary diversion on the way to non-being. Life really doesn't exist for any reason, it is simply perturbations in the overall tendency towards maximum entropy. So ultimately, any 'reason' which Apokrisis' philosophy offers is subjective i.e. dependent on what I decide, what I designate as real or important. He has acknowledged this earlier in this thread.

My tentative understanding is that the whole rationale of the spiritual life is to 'awaken to an identity as that which is not subject to death'. That is communicated differently in different traditional and philosophical systems. In Christianity, it is the idea of Life, capital-L - a sense of awakening to the 'life of the spirit', which is nowadays, and lamely, understood in a rather 'pie in the sky' sense of being 'going to heaven when you die'. But properly speaking, the life of discipleship is living in that light, whilst still in ordinary existence. Of course, there is also a sense in which this is a hopeless quest, an utterly quixotic undertaking. But one has to persist, regardless.

The reason is sounds like nothing or a non-explanation to you, is because you have no comprehension of it, as we're both products of a culture which is devoted to undermining such an understanding. It's just that some of us are resisting, and some are complacent. — Wayfarer

A bit late of a reply, but I actually have very little problem with that kind of spiritual understanding of life. Power to you if you want to believe in it. But what I don't understand is why you continually invoke this understanding to say that, as a consequence, science cannot explain abiogenesis. I mean, what is the fundamental conflict between understanding life as arising naturally, while being a matter of 'discipleship in spiritual light'? I mean, the two understandings of life seem to occupy such different planes entirely that they don't even seem to be trying to 'explain' the same thing. The conception of life at stake in each seem entirely unrelated to each other. So your hostility to a naturalist account of abiogenesis - even if you want to subscribe to the spiritualist understanding of life that you do - is somewhat puzzling to me on a conceptual level. Even though, yeah, I get it, you have a kind of visceral reaction to the idea of anything to do with 'naturalism'. But it is warranted here, conceptually? And if so, why?

Indeed, a philosopher seeks to articulate moral standards in an attempt to ascertain the most effective political system, but there appears some hesitation to confront legitimacy within these standards imposed. — TimeLine

You should actually check out the video that @cavacava posted above by Reiner Forst. Forst has written extensively about questions of legitimacy and justification, and the debate he has in the video with his respondents flesh out very nicely some of the issues involved. One thing to watch out for when considering questions of legitimacy is to what extent any discussion remains at the level of procedures and rules. One has to always consider to what extent one can/should make a so-called 'illegitimate' claim to governmental redress - think about the sit in protests during the civil rights era, or the occupation of public space during the recent Occupy protests and so on. Certain forms or conceptions of illigitimacy (because not done though the 'right' channels of political participation) may serve as covers for the denial of political representation or redress and undermine democratic expression.

In fact one of the major problems with ideal-theory projects is their inability (or unwillingness) to conceptualize political action beyond or in excess of official mechanisms of 'legitimate' political process. Because the idea is to construct perfect models of political regulation/represnetation which are simply meant to be 'instantiated' in real life, they tend to find it very hard to deal with what might be called democratic 'eruptions' - civil movements, protest action, labour organization, etc etc. There are generally two ways to approach this: say that we need more ideal mechanisms so that we don't need such eruptive moments, or to accept that these eruptions are part and parcel of politics and need to be afforded a place. If it isn't obvious I think the former is quite obviously an utterly naive approach to things.

So the/one way to connect questions of ideality to reality is this: who has access to mechanisms of politics? Can the poor afford to participate? What about those who don't speak the predominant language of the state? Or the uneducated who are simply entirely unfamiliar with the system? In other words: look at operations of power. It is never a given who 'the people' are in any political process, and just having mechanisms in place is never enough. The constitution of 'the people' is - for me anyway - the key problem to be worked though in political theory. It also nicely mediates between 'real politics' and philosophical approaches quite nicely.

So that is an important new development arising out of neoliberal thinking - the financialisation of national balance sheets.

But it seems way distance from any biopolitics or bodily precariousness. You haven't actually drawn a connection I can see.

...I agree that neoliberalism is about turning everything that composes life into a tradable commodity. — apokrisis

But the argument is not so much that life itself becomes a commodity but that it has been co-opted into circuits of speculative finance. It's the form of commodification that matters - in this case a matter of financialization and not 'merely' commodification. The key distinction is that of temporal orientation: unlike a commodity, the value of a patented cell line (for example) is not so much it's exchange value - what it can be bought and sold for according to the law of supply and demand - but the promise it holds for future innovation. Life itself attracts finance and becomes generative of surplus by it's mere fact of existence. And while life becomes financialized, what is commodified is not life, but it's promise. What is traded are promises.

The crux of it is that this is exactly the same commodity form as debt. Debt too is now available for financialization in the form of the promise, and in both cases, the promise is self-generative of surplus. Here's Cooper: "What comes to light here is the violence of the debt form and the flipside of the promise—if it is to actualize at all, capital's future embryoid body will need to draw on a continuous "gifting" of reproductive labor and tissues. In this way capital's dream of promissory self-regeneration finds its counterpart in a form of directly embodied debt peonage.... Wealth creation in the pure debt form—the regeneration of money from money and life from life, without final redemption."

In other words this cooption of life into the circuits of speculative finance converges with debt as the high-point of capitalist accumulation - a fantasy realized of money and life that generates more money, indefinitely, by, again, the sheer fact of their existence. The Marxist point - which I only mentioned really more as an aside - is that this fantasy is just that, a fantasy insofar as this self-generativity is bound to encounter limits of the real, whence the GFC - in which the pure promise of the debt form was no longer sustainable re: 'toxic' mortgages in the US housing market - or the popping of the biotech bubble which happened last year (when investors finally gave up waiting on the unrealized promises of patented cell lines and so on).

(The perfect coincidence of life and debt surplus is probably nowhere better exhibited than in the destruction of the centuries old Iraqi agricultural sector: after the toppling of Saddam and the destruction of the Iraqi seed bank, Iraqi farmers were prohibited from using any other seed than Monsanto's particular patented GM ones, which, because of other orders that further made it impossible for them to recycle seeds, meant they had to buy new seed each crop cycle (further, they could only use Monsanto patented herbicides, which kill all other crops than Monsanto's own). And of course, the seed purchases where financed by generous loan offers placing the farmers into a situation of more or less forced indebtedness: the loans could only be used for Monsanto's seed, which basically locked them in. The result, in Wendy Brown's words, were that: "Organic, diversified, low-cost, ecologically sustainable wheat production in Iraq is finished." See the account in Brown, Undoing the Demos).

But even this is not what I'm super concerned with. My real interest lies in the collapse of temporal categories occasioned by such developments: by tethering calculations of risk in the present to the quite literally incalculable speculative promises/fears of the future, almost every and any 'preventative' action is licenced. Essentially what is at stake is a temporal 'state of exception' in which the boundaries between the calculable and the incalculable are effaced such that there is cartre blanche to do anything whatsoever in the name of the incalculable. Hence the widespread 'need' to enact legislation - all around the Western world - that violates fundamental rights in order to protect us from Godknowswhat impending, immanent, but incalculable risk of.... ???. A kind of permanent state of emergency, licenced by temporal collapse. The ubiquitous threat of 'terrorism', unsurprisingly finds a perfectly receptive audience in neoliberal societies.

One consequence of this is that society can no longer be made to bear the costs of well, anything: "Contrary to the philosophy of the social state, [neoliberalism] teaches that the collective risks gathered under the banner of the nation can no longer be (profitably) collectivized, normalized, or insured against. Henceforth, risk will have to be individualized while social mediations of all kinds will disappear" (Cooper) - note that this rounds out what you say about the valorizaion of individual self-actualization against society. What I'm interested in, again, is the mechanisms that underlie this shift. So while I agree with you that of course neoliberalism militates against society and the romanticzes of the individual, this is so obvious a point that it's been made by every critic of neoliberalism since basically time immemorial. But these myths don't just spring up out of nowhere - the point is the chart the mechanisms that have brought it into being, and have allowed it to catch on.

Nothing.

It isn't.

George Williams and Daniel Reynolds - A Charter of Rights For Australia
Evelyn Fox Keller - Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines
Evelyn Fox Keller - The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Culture

Regardless of the specifics, the point was simply to mark a line of bifurcation or divergence between Plato on the one hand, and Thucydides, Pericles, and Homer on the other, with respect to their treatment of politics. To the extent that you read the Republic as a text on ethics, I've no strong objection - indeed the larger point is that Plato subordinates politics to ethics, or, if you please, sees them as operating in harmony. My suggestion is that Thucydides and the like are more attentive to the autonomy of the political, decoupling it from any necessary link to ethics, and as such stand at the beginning of a philosophical lineage that Machiavelli also belongs to.

Also, re: Machiavelli and Thrasymachus: one thing that is often forgotten is that Machiavelli was not, himself, 'Machiavellian' in the sense of simply being a power-hungry schemer. The goal for Machiavelli was never simply power but the cultivation of virtù, the achievement of greatness or excellence (not unlike, by the way, the great deeds of the Homeric heroes). This in turn meant paying attention to the winds of fortuna, those opportune moments that arose for the taking (again, not unlike the Greek notion of kairos, which, unsurprisingly, Plato was supremely suspicious of).

There's a deep attention to political reality in Machiavelli, which sets him very much against the 'ideal-theory' orientation of Plato and Rawls. But importantly this doesn't mean that the only thing to be concerned about is power and it's pursuit, even as they at least now become important considerations. Thrasymachus in this sense is a caricature of Machiavelli, who is far more subtle in his understanding of politics than either Plato or Thrasymachus.

I just bought it online. This occurred to me after just finishing Contemporary Political Philosophy by Will Kymlicka — TimeLine

Ahhh you're in for a treat : D. And I know Kymlicka's text - it's an undergrad standard - and you'd definitely come away with the impression that you have re: applied moral theory having read it. One thing I will say, regarding Rawls, and if you're just getting into the field, is that his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy is fantastic. It super readable, and even though his readings are palpably colored by his own concerns, he really knows his shit and how to communicate it.

Ah, preceding him, perhaps Thrasymachus? It is realistic to accept that political decisions have been made that contradict intent for what is best for the people. Any realistic qualitatative observation of social and political affairs would be amorphous when we neglect the possibility that political systems and institutions are not contained within such singular attributes of what they ought to be but are in fact not good intentionally, since those who try "to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good." — TimeLine

Hah, if we're going back that far then the primordial split would be between Plato and Thucydides/Pericles/Homer. Boiling it down, Plato basically is contemptuous of human, worldly affairs, preferring to fix his eye on the eternal and the contemplative life. As such, politics becomes a kind of dirty business for him, and insofar as it remains necessary, is oriented toward ideals to which people ought to conform - regardless actual reality of human affairs, as it were. Plato basically is the beginning of politics as applied moral theory. Thucydides, Pericles and Homer, on the other hand (and recall that Plato fucking hates Homer), all pay alot more attention to human affairs and the specificity of politics that is not simply subordinated to a kind of wider ethical project. This is in fact something that Geuss talks about in one of his essays which opens with the wonderfully stark question:

"Who is a better guide to human life, Plato or Thucydides? Given this choice, virtually all European philosophers for the past two thousand years would have chosen Plato." Invoking Nietzsche, Geuss continues, "[Yet for philosophers like Neitzsche,] Thucydides had an unprejudiced theoretical sympathy for, and hence understanding of, a much wider spectrum of possible human motivations than Plato had. All the characters in his history are allowed to exhibit the highest possible intelligence, clarity, and rationality in pursuing their respective enterprises, regardless of the judgments representatives of conventional morality would make on them. Socrates, however, “dragged moralizing into science,” and Plato followed in his wake. Such moralizing, Nietzsche thought, was a result of weakness, of a deep seated inability to bear looking the facts of the world in the face; it crippled Plato intellectually and prevented him from ever developing that most highly prized of Nietzschean traits: “Tatsachen-Sinn,” a “sense for the facts,” that steely realism that is so abundantly evident on every page of Thucydides." (Guess, Outside Ethics)

Hannah Arendt went as far as saying that the trajectory of political philosophy itself has been characterized by the attempt to reverse Plato: "Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle.... The beginning was made when, in The Republic's allegory of the cave, Plato described the sphere of human affairs all that belongs to the living together of men in a common world in terms of darkness, confusion, and deception which those aspiring to true being must turn away from and abandon if they want to discover the clear sky of eternal ideas. The end came with Marx's declaration that philosophy and its truth are located not outside the affairs of men and their common world but precisely in them, and can be "realized" only in the sphere of living together ... Political philosophy necessarily implies the attitude of the philosopher toward politics; its tradition began with the philosopher's turning away from politics and then returning in order to impose his standards on human affairs." (Arendt, Between Past and Future).

The point of course being that we need a new tradition of political philosophy altogether. Rawls and his ilk haven't, basically, heeded the call.

The most basic source, now that I think about it, would be Machiavelli, who wisely counseled that one of the principal lessons the Prince ought to learn is how not to be good.

Heh, you're not alone in this concern. Raymond Geuss, among other others, has basically made his career out of criticizing what he calls 'ethics first' political philosophy, and it helps that he is probably among the best and most erudite writers in the English language (check out in particular his little book, Philosophy and Real Politics). And there are others too: Bonnie Honig, Chantal Mouffe, William Connolly, Wendy Brown, Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin, Linda Zerilli - many of these associated with the Foucadian wing of political science, with concerns closer to notions of power and freedom over justice (of this list, the one read I'd say you have to read is Honig's Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics).

Or you can look to the capability theories like Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, 'difference' theorists like Nancy Fraser and Iris Marion Young, recognition theorists like Axel Honneth and Patchen Markell; or if you like your theorists more radical (and Italian), there's Hardt and Negri, Franco Berardi, Maurizio Lazzarato - but these last are pretty high brow. Basically there's alot out there if you know where to look. Mainstream Poli P still tends to labour under the more or less awful influence of Rawls and is indeed a whole of bunch of applied moral theory.

I appreciate your reply, but will note that the quotations are only part of larger readings which make their cases in more detail. I quoted them simply as signposts for further exploration, especially with respect to the question of whether or not Heidi's phenomenology more easily aligns to our spontaneous 'everyday' approaches to things.

I'm not buying this as a central issue. Our biological risk profile feels very secondary to our true modern concern, which is for "the self" - the Romantic agent expressing every variety of power. — apokrisis

You misunderstand: it's not so much that this this is a 'central issue' so much as that it marks the crossing of a threshold that was previously uncrossed, and indeed, uncrossable. And this crossing relieves us of the last bastion we had of excluding ourselves from the immediacy of risk that has always marked the 'cultural' realm. See my reply to fdrake above on what I mean. If you follow it, I'm entirely on board with the fact that we are more than our biology: in fact, it was this 'more than' that was co-opted into the circuits of risk long before the body. What is new is the introduction of the body into those circuits in the form of biopolitics. So you're preaching to the choir here in insisting that we're socio-cultural beings no less than biological ones. I not only agree, but the entirely line of reasoning presupposes it.

So I appreciate your entropic perspective which I think quite nicely compliments much of what I wrote here. As I said, this is a relatively new area of exploration for me, so I'm very much open to these ideas. I've had Robert Biel's the Entropy of Capitalism on my reading list for a few months now since discovering it's existence, which I'm hoping will fill out some of the pieces here. But as it stands my interest is in the confounding of categories of the intelligible, the collapse of temporal distinctions and the kinds of actions they licence. I'm interested in tracing the specific modulations of 'the human' which require a closer attention to sociology and historical ontology (in the vein of Foucault) - changes in our understanding of risk, of time, etc, and the specific, concrete mechanisms which enable them - than it does entropy, even as they (can) compliment each other.

Thanks for the passage. Would you say that this is something like the revenge of common sense and/or emotional intelligence on the artificiality of epistemological tangles? Let's say that we further paraphrased your paraphrase into even simpler language. Would not the average person be tempted to agree? Did he just inject a worldly "emotional" intelligence into an otherwise arcane and dryly "theological" game? This is not intended to diminish the accomplishment, but only to try to specify it. — n0 0ne

I'm super, super hesitant to concede that there is anything like a singular 'common sense' to begin with that Heidegger's views would align with. In fact, one of my favorite critiques of Hiedegger's phenomenological project in B&T comes from William Connolly, who suggests that the whole thing is a very idealized, 'serene' phenomenology which presupposes a whole set of unarticulated conditions about the kind of life it characterizes:

"The links [Heidegger's phenomenology] forges between life and foreknowledge of death, individuality and connectedness, choice and foreclosure, individual and collective life in the present and projections of future prospects for both, presume, first, a close alignment between the identity the self seeks to realize and socially available possibilities of self-formation and, second, a shared sense of confidence in the world we are building, a confidence that links the present to the future through effort and anticipation at one time and memory and appreciation at another. If these connections, sentiments, and projections become severely attenuated, the serene phenomenology of freedom and finitude also becomes strained and anachronistic. To retain it would then be to cling insistently to a picture of the world belied by individual and collective experience... I think something like this is occurring today." (Connolly, Identity\Difference)

Alphonso Lingis similarly criticizes the presumption that the 'world' of which Heidegger speaks is as unitary as he makes it out to be, and thus is not in accord with everyday experience, because of the discontinuity of experience. What Heidi misses for Lingis is the entire realm of the sensuous:

"What, then, is new in Heidegger is not only positing a real experience of the world as a whole, but locating this experience in an agent become discontinuous and singular. But crucial moves in Heidegger's reasoning seem to us unintelligible ... Heidegger argues that the sense of the irreversible propulsion of a life toward its end precedes and makes possible every unilateral array of means toward particular ends and every determinate action. But can death, which has no front lines and no dimensions, assign a determinate direction to one's life, and thereby impart a unilateral direction to the connections in the instrumental field? ...Death is neither present nor future; it is imminent at any moment. How could death then fix the end and bring to flush the ends possible in the time that lies ahead?

... The authentic life that integrates its temporal trajectory from its birth to its death in each of its projects finds its own possibility traced out, Heidegger explains in Being and Time, and left for it by those who pursued their own paths to their own deaths. ... [But] about the few things that are really things with which we live - an old coffee mug, a carved and padded armchair, a violin, a pearl-oyster shell on the window sill - does not the wide world, the common world, break up into so many discontinuous spaces full of dreams and memories? Heidegger's analysis ... argues that things are essentially means; - each mundane end is a means in turn. The relay from implement to implement and to work being done returns to the manipulator. ...But does not the finality in things also come to an end in them? Water which one knows in the savoring and in the drinking, berries which one gathers and which melt in one' s mouth as one walks through the meadow do not catch our eye as refurbishments for our cells and muscles and means for our projects; they are substances in which sensuality glows and fades away" (Lingis, Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility).

To these one may add the feminist critiques like those found in the work of Iris Marion Young (Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays, speaking about the pregnant body, and so on and so fourth. Heidi is definitely not the last word when it comes to speaking about our everyday experiences - although he is a good start.

Please provide reference. — Cavacava

On middle class income growth:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/us-middle-class-incomes-reached-highest-ever-level-in-2016-census-bureau-says/2017/09/12/7226905e-97de-11e7-b569-3360011663b4_story.html?utm_term=.bf4157d9abbf



On black American median wealth:

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/sep/13/median-wealth-of-black-americans-will-fall-to-zero-by-2053-warns-new-report

Re: the Wapo article, I was actually directed to it by a political scientist who noted that the celebratory tone of the title actually betrays the facts I listed above Re: the 'highest ever level' is a tiny increase in when measured against the 1999 high.

--

And for Australia - which I don't imagine too many people care about but which matters to me!:

http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/a-coffee-a-year-how-much-australian-incomes-have-grown-since-2008-20170919-gyk983.html

"Australian weekly household incomes have grown by less than the price of a coffee a year since 2008" - i.e. AUD $3 over 9 years. coupled with: "At the same time, house prices in Sydney and Melbourne have risen by 100 per cent to reach medians of up to $1 million". One can only imagine the abysmal debt to income growth ratio.

One reaction to the crisis of 2008, for example, has been (in my opinion) for right-wing public discourse to problematise levels of public debt that are not at all dangerous. This is a neo-liberal attack on the State, procaliming the need for 'austerity', not an increasing problem of debt. — mcdoodle

Yeah, this is very true: debt isn't in and of itself a problem, but it matters when placed in the context of a whole host of other developments. Specifically, the expansion of credit and debt needs to be balanced out by expanded capacity for income growth. But this is exactly what isn't happening. In fact, the expansion of credit was proposed precisely as a solution to stagnating wage increases for the low and middle classes. Couple this with the divestment in public goods, the dismantling of the welfare state, and the slow death of labor law, and you have recipe in which debt becomes dangerous.

And again, the other dimension here is the securitization of debt by banks enabled by the deregulation of financial markets: this basically means that debt now becomes a source of income which is used in turn to fund projects such that it becomes a structural part of the market; the creation of debt is both incentivized and necessary. And because banks - the very institutions that supply credit - are one and the same institutions that make tremendous amounts of money on this securitization, a market failure translates not merely to the crippling of this or that industry, but the very banking system itself. In essence what this means is that any shock to the system can no longer be localized, but ramifies throughout the economy, which has become more and more fragile. It's this interlocking system - of which debt is a part - that makes it so dangerous. The stakes of default are higher.

Otherwise I think you're right that the focus on public debt, and the almost total eclipse of any focus on private debt is, in fact, an utterly skewed approach to things. And again at stake is at kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that neoliberalism sets into motion: the demand for privatization and tax cuts is incoherently coupled with a demand for keeping public debt low at all costs: the very avenues of revenue raising are forcelosed at the exact same time as the state is asked lower it's debts. It's madness. And where this leads is by now well known - the cruelty of austerity which further entrenches states into cycles of debt, while at the same time destroying the state's capacity to encourage economic growth and placing them into what effectively amounts to a relation of debt imperalism. Greece is a well known case, but this is happening too in other places like - most recently, Sri Lanka. So again it's not debt as such that's the issue, but the economic complexes in which it functions to make it problematic.

So again: debt is OK if coupled with the ability to raise revenue/incomes. But in absence of the latter, it becomes fatal. And neoliberalism does exactly this.

Here is a ditty I wrote on Heidegger a while back in response to a question (about the difference between the ontic and the ontological in Heidegger), which I quite like, so I kept it for recycling. It might help:

One way to understand what's going on is to recognize the difference that time - or temporality, rather - plays in distinguishing between ontic and 'ontological' entities. What makes Dasein unique, as it were, is that it is constituted along a temporal horizon: Dasein, as a finite subject in time, is temporally orientated towards death (being-toward-death). Death, in this sense, functions as a horizon of our acts, loading them with significance; given the finite amount of time I have as a living being, I can only do so many things, which in turns means having to forego other things. The things that I do end up doing, must have significance for me in this regard - the limit that death places on my life means that I cannot be indifferent to the sort of life I live. For Heidegger, it is this temporal orientation that bestows ex-istence to Dasein. To ex-ist is to be temporally orientated, to be ex-centric to oneself such that Dasein does not exist as a sheer actaulity of the here and now, but pro-jects oneself forward according to the temporal horizon that gives meaning to my life: to exist in the mode of possibility.

This is what Heidegger means by existence, and has nothing to do with our common use of it in debates about 'whether things exist or not'. To exist, for Heidegger, is to inhabit an existential structure orientated towards death. Heidegger's use of the 'world' moves along similar lines. 'World' in Heidegger carries with it existential weight, and is closer to the way in which 'world' is used when we say things like: "her world is coming down around her" or "his world was considerably brightened by her". To say that Dasein is being-in-the-world has nothing to do with being in 'the external world', so much as it has to do with occupying a meaningful or significant dimension of existence. To speak of Dasein being always-already in the world is to say that we live lives of significance (thanks to the temporal horizon afforded by our finitude), even if that significance is not of our choosing (this is what Heidegger means by our being 'thrown' into the world).

This is why it makes no sense, for Heidegger, to speak about an 'external' world - it is simply a category error. The world is neither internal nor external; this is what the neologism 'being-in-the-world' is meant to capture, the fact that Dasein 'structurally' wedded to the world - no world, no Dasein, and inversely, no Dasein, no world. So one must be very careful not to conflate our common understanding of 'world' with what Heidegger means by it. Lastly, to say that ontic entities do not 'have Being' is just to say that ontic entities do not exist according to the temporal/existential structure outlined above. A 'thing' has does not project about itself a space of potentiality which it has to negotiate thanks it to temporally finite existential structure. It exists simply in there here and now, as is, in the weight of it's sheer actuality (and 'exist' is the wrong word, even). You have to remember that Heidegger's use of terms is phenomenologically motivated, and their semantic shadings are coloured by that background. Anyway, that's my extremely simplified Heidegger 101.

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With respect to 'Being', basically this whole existential structure of time is what allows 'the determination of entities as entities', brings them forward into the clearing of 'the open', etc etc.

Heh, I think you've misdiagnosed Wayfarer here: the problem is not one of accepting or not accepting one or another variety of cause - its to do with very fact of explanation at all, which Wayfarer sees as a kind of existential threat to his worldview. The unexplained is not an expanandum but a desideratum. This is why he'll be eternally caught in inconsistency: he can provide no explanation for the fact of inexplicability on pain of negating his entire worldview. Hence the need to absolutize a 'line drawn in the sand' beyond which cannot be crossed. But beyond is just the glaring inability to account for the tautologically unaccountable - it cannot be explained because it cannot be explained. The last step is simply to give this yawning abyss a name - God, Mind, or whathaveyou.

The disorientation you describe I think is present, but not 'new', — fdrake

Just wanted to pick back up on this comment as well. I agree that this much of what is described here is not necessarily new - one thinks of Marx's comment, in 1848, regarding 'all that is solid melting into air' (a reference, again, to capital's ability to abolish all mediations bar it's own need to accumulate) - but this is why I think (following Melinda Cooper), that something has changed with the birth of biopolitics. Basically, there was a point at least in which the body itself could be relied upon as a kind of fall-back in the face of any socio-political tumult: the body at least offered a kind of refuge or shelter from the devastation wrought 'out there' ("whatever happens, I least I have my health").

With the birth of biopolitics however, not even the body is exempt form the circuits of built-in precarity: what you essentially get is a kind of collapse of one of the central orienting distinctions of intelligible life, which is that between the 'inside' and the 'outside' of one's self, which enters into - to use Agamben's favoured phrase - a zone of indistinction. This is what's at stake in the medicalization of life. And once this happens, the categories that once used to exempt the body from it's circuits now begin to capture it: beyond the much mentioned 'commodification' of the body (in terms of say, stem cells, DNA sequences, and other, now 'patentable' biological 'innovations'), you also get - as again charted by Cooper - the militarization of biology, where the body itself becomes a site of security concern -

Cooper: "The domains of life that neoliberalism has sought to incorporate into commercial and trade law over the past two decades are now being forcibly recruited into an expansive politics of military security. Increasingly, then, any counterpolitics of health, ecology, and life will need to engage with the pervasive reach of the war on terror; to contest, in other words, the growing collusion between neoliberalism's politics of life and the imposition of a permanent state of warfare." This is also why, for someone like Agamben, the state of civil war counts as the dominant paradigm of our age: not international war but civil war, in which the boundaries again between the enemy 'out there' and the enemy' in here' are left indistinct, thus again licensing the most awful of atrocities. Roberto Esposito has in turn characterized our present condition as one of a generalized 'auto-immunity', where the body - whose distinction between the biological and the civic has been rendered inoperative - now attacks itself.

Beyond commodification and warfare, one can imagine other places in which categories once applicable to non-humans gradually shade into human considerations - I have in mind Agamben's other studies on the growing indistinction between animal and human, law and life, the sacred and the profane, etc.

So again, while it's true that this represents a culmination of long-term trends, what's changed is the specificity of that movement which has now increasingly encircled even the body, which at least at one point could be left out of it. In Marxist parlance, capital has set it's sights not only on the means of production, but on the means of (biological) reproduction as well. This change needs also to be tracked in tandem with the temporal shift in which capital, generalizing the debt form, now beings to place more and more importance on not just the mode of production, but on the speculative mode of prediction which underlies it's upheaval of temporal categories as well (cf. the work of Ivan Ascher on the 'portfolio society' which we now inhabit). But this last is a larger point that needs elaboration.

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Replies to others later, when I have the time.

Not only do emotions influence your decision making, but you are incapable of making decisions in the absence of emotions. Check out the work of Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux on this; Basically, if you study those who have had the emotional parts of their brain destroyed, they are unable to choose between options because there are no emotional spurs one way or another. Here's Damasio writing about someone with brain damage to his prefontal lobe trying to make a decision on when to next come into the clinic:

"For the better part of a half-hour, the patient enumerated reasons for and against each of the two dates: previous engagements, proximity to other engagements, possible meteorological conditions, virtually anything that one could reasonably think about concerning a simple date. ... He was now walking us through a tiresome cost-benefit analysis, and endless outlining and fruitless comparison of options and possible consequences. It took enormous discipline to listen to all of this without pounding on the table and telling him to stop, but we finally did tell him, quietly, that he should come on the second of the alternative dates.... He simply said, “That’s fine". (Damasio, quoted in William Connolly, Neuropolitics).

Emotions are not set 'against' reason; they are constitutive and enabling of decision making.

What would motivate such a depoliticised and fragmented individual to collectively organise with other depoliticised and fragmented individuals? Especially when a thorough analysis of economic power structures (such as the enabling conditions for the TTIP) renders action on the level of the country too small to effect change in any predictable manner? Perhaps this is unfair, a deeper and more appropriate question would be: what are the enabling conditions for collective organisation to address the historico-political structures that are screwing us over? — fdrake

Man, if we could answer this...; in truth I have no idea. Again, I'm very much in 'diagnosis' mode right now, trying to tease out the effects these developments have on our modes of temporarily, intelligibility and the type(s) of practicable politics in today's day and age. I need to sleep now, but lemmie get back to you later : )

I can't say I see anything particularly biologicised or indistinct about the neoliberalised world. .... I can see people might be worried about disease and ill health. But that seems more due to modern life at least being pretty disease free due to medicine. It is when you have a lot to lose that a sense of precariousness sets in. It is when you expect perfectibility that imperfections get magnified. — apokrisis

But this is exactly where indistinction matters: because health is no longer conceived in a purely negative sense - the absence of disease, or as "the silence of the organs" as René Leriche put it - health becomes an active, positive relation of oneself to one's body such that it is continually 'in focus', as it were. One is always a potential sick-person, a possible epidemiological vector, someone always on the edge of obesity if not for exercise, predisposed due to family history, etc. In essence, the default variable is swapped: one is not a healthy person who is currently not-sick: one is a always-potentially-sick person, who, at this point time, happens to be healthy (were it not for the continual self-intervention into the state of one's salubrity). One is essentially ones' biological risk profile.

And neoliberalism basically does the same thing in terms of one's credit risk profile. Again, the terms are swapped: one isn't a 'person' who may or may not take risk upon oneself in the course of living; one is a walking walking risk profile who just so happens to have not yet encountered the danger that will, inevitably, befall him or her. One enters into a risk relation not as one action in life among others, but by virtue of being alive at all. And in parallel, health is seen as a kind of 'vital' credit itself, which one has to actively managed least one go into 'default' -i.e. die.

In both cases what is at stake is a kind of massive intensification of individuation: there's nothing about you, even right down to your biosusbtance itself, that escapes the circuits of potential risk (sickness, debt). The precacity is built-in, as it were, right from the beginning of life itself. And again, this has the profound effect of basically completely altering the temporal order: because risk is the default orientation, the mitigation of risk no longer becomes the management of the possible but the management of the inevitable. Here is Cooper describing this change: "What it provokes is not so much fear (of an identifiable threat) as a state of alertness, without foreseeable end. It exhorts us to respond to what we suspect without being able to discern; to prepare for the emergent, long before we can predict how and when it will be actualized; to counter the unknowable, before it is even realized. In short ... [it] suggest that our only possible response to the emergent crisis (of whatever kind—biomedical, environmental, economic) is one of speculative preemption."

This kind of massive temporal disorientation - in which the future becomes both incalculable and certain, collapsed into each ohter - basically scrambles every category of intelligibility we have. This in turn licences all and any kinds of 'preventative' measures, from the massive 'preemptive strikes' against other countries in the American case - as if the future were taking place in the present - as well as the insane excesses of speculative finance, which began, as you might remember, as simple attempts to hedge against future changes in price, but which have now mutated into making bets on incalculable futures based on literal borrowed time. Present and future collapse in on each other - paralying calculated action in the present, or, what amounts to the same thing, enabling any action whatsoever - while the weight of past pins them both down together. Again Cooper captures this strange temporality in the best way I know:

"The promise of capital in its present form—which after all is still irresistibly tied to oil—now so far outweighs the earth's geological reserves that we are already living on borrowed time, beyond the limits. U.S. debt imperialism is currently reproducing itself with an utter obliviousness to the imminent depletion of oil reserves. Fueling this apparently precarious situation is the delirium of the debt form, which in effect enables capital to reproduce itself in a realm of pure promise, in excess of the earth's actual limits, at least for a while. This is a delirium that operates between the poles of utter exhaustion and manic overproduction, premature obsolescence and the promise of surplus. In the sense that the debt can never be redeemed once and for all and must be perpetually renewed, it reduces the inhabitable present to a bare minimum, a point of bifurcation, strung out between a future that is about to be and a past that will have been. It thus confronts the present as the ultimate limit, to be deflected at all costs." (Cooper, Life as Surplus)

We should probably blame the internet in its place at this point. Regardless, the thrust of the comments implicate a generalised breakdown of people's engagement with life-planning or 'bigger than ourselves' ideals. — fdrake

Part of what's at stake in my post is the attempt to move away from 'psycologizing' explanations: things like saying 'ah, if only people would change their attitudes, think differently, engage with the world in a more productive way', etc. To pin the blame on these sorts of things - 'skepticism', 'cynicism', etc mistakes a symptom for a cause. In this regard, I'm an old school historical materialist: look at the conditions - the political economy and beyond - which give rise to such attitudes, and direct change at that level. The modern obsession with self-help, motivational and inspirational books and speakers and so on are basically signs of resignation, another emblem of depoliticization which aims to change individual to fit structure, rather than structure to fit individual, as it were.

This is why I'm so keen to focus on institutions and policy; in a word - look at where the money is going. This is why I think the debt relation is so fascinating: it provides a concrete mechanism by which to explain the shortened temporal horizon of contemporary life - exactly how can one act politically when when one has to pay off a lifetime of debt? And again, this can be traced to concrete policy decisions: 'asset based welfare' - i.e. the deliberate depression of interest rates and the expansion of credit markets - in the US was occasioned by specific policy initiatives under the Clinton administration with Greenspan alongside, in response, no less, to the destruction of the welfare state carried out by Reagan (coupled with the absolutely bonkers idea, again taken up Reagan and formulated by the Chicago school, that lower taxes for the rich benefits society on the whole).

And things take off when debt, in turn, is securitized (turned into a secondary market which incentivises the creation of even more bad debt - basically the root of the GFC), which in turns fucks over the already poor/the vulnerable and ensnares even more into vortex of poverty. I mean, if you actaully follow the history, the frikkin cynicism of everyday life is anything but a kind of causa sui. It has real roots. And this is to say nothing of the differential ethical and gender effects of all these policies. And this also doesn't yet begin to touch on the geopolitical dimensions of the debt relation, where the IMF and World Bank, and the Eurozone (in the case of Greece), can essentially override sovereignty and democratic will in order to impose what amounts to debt imperialism on already-shattered economies.

So it's true that we can't dream of a 'different tomorrow', but a big reason for this is that we are quite literally institutionally bound to the past in the form of debt, which has the effect of massive depressing any futural orientation that we might want to make. And that's not even the end of the story: the debt relation doesn't just obviate the future, but basically appropriates it in the form of aspiration under the veil of credit: the widespread availability of credit essentially places the asset-poor on the side of the asset-rich by allowing them to reconceive themselves as the potential rich. This translates to support for causes which more or less are entirely against their own current interests for the sake of a promissory future, which of course is largely illusory for most (writes Melinda Cooper of the GFC: "Once the mitigating effects of credit expansion were removed, it was inevitable that the actual polarization of American wages and wealth would reassert itself in the crudest of forms" - which she goes on to document).

Will reply in full in a bit - I'm on a bus - but yes, this entire line of thought is massively influenced by the state of exception arguments. The spectre of Agamben basically haunts the entire OP from top to bottom - I'm super glad you brought it up. It's only recently I've been able to link those arguments with economic considerations - especially those of debt and financialization and the differential socital effects they entail - that have brought together a whole bunch of ideas for me. The temporal, political, and intelligibility crises in particular.

The problem is not inequality per se, but the differences in growth. In the US case, numbers released the other day show that between 2008 and 2016, growth in real income (not wealth mind you, but income) was 10.6% for the 90% percentile of the population, but 0.4% for the bottom 10%. Or to put it in starker terms, in the seventeen years since 1999, median household income increased by exactly $384. One ought to track these numbers along along with standard of living measures to get a fuller picture of course, but on the face of it they are insane to me.

What is more terrifying as well is that many of the prevailing economic policies meant to encourage growth - 'quantitative easing' chief among them - have the effect of perpetuating and even entrenching this differential distribution of growth (see: https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/09/19/2193960/guest-post-central-bank-quantitative-easing-as-an-emerging-political-liability/). My own worry is less moral than it is political: these trends have knock-on depoliticizing effects; mired in astronomically increased burdens of debt, while at the same time seeing incredibly low rates of income growth (zero in the case of African-Americans across the period mentioned above), and coupled with the withering of social safety nets and the growth of social costs (health, transport, etc), is that political participation literally becomes impossible because, well, one is struggling to make ends meet. It basically ends up leading to the destruction of the civitas, and with it, democracy.

These developments are financially mandated and a function of human nature. — Galuchat

Nope. If you study the sociology of the changes, they are most certainly not a 'function of human nature'. they are the result of very specific policy decisions, confluences of power, and historical accident, all of which can be tracked in detail. They are a matter of statecraft, in other words. for the kind of sociology I have in mind, see Melinda Cooper's Family Values, Loic Wacquant's Punishing the Poor, or Wendy Brown's Undoing the Demos.

Not exactly sure what you mean by that statement. — MikeL

Fair question, I was a pretty brisk there. Basically I mean that there's been a change such that health is less and less understood in terms of the binary healthy-sick, but more in terms of a continuum such that we are always, as it were, 'proto-sick' or 'presymptomatic'. This is due to a convergence of reasons, three among them being the rise of genetic discourse (according to which we are or can be predisposed to such and such diseases), the ubiquity of health insurance, which places us all in differing risk categories, etc, etc, and the proliferation of discourses about health and hygiene, such that we keep track of our blood pressure, track out fitness (think Fitbits), take supplements, etc. Basically, health is no longer, as Rene Leriche once put it, "life lived in the silence of the organs".

Or put differently, we have a continuous active realtion to our biology, instead of the relative passive relation that we once did. The point, in the larger scheme of things, is that this development tracks those which occur in the realm of the economic and the social: just as we are always at-risk from disease, we are also always at-risk of loan default, of attack by forces unseen, of losing job stability, of environmental catastrophe, all while the resources that allow us to deal with these issues are wound down. Our bio-pathological risk profiles (susceptibility to disease) are mirrored by our credit risk profiles, such that many of us become, in the words of Guy Standing, a new social class composed of the 'Precariat'.

And this in turn feeds into the bigger story regarding our existential disorientation and loss of temporal markers (what Fredric Jameson called our inability to undertake cognitive mapping). But hopefully that helps answer your question.

But that does mean that you will, at the minimum, be slow to take positions and act towards bringing them about no? — Agustino

Not at all. Which is not to say I'm ruling 'slow' action out. I'm just not ruling radical action out either. One imagines it depends on the situation and strategy goals pursued.