A reading room, perhaps — Chris Hughes

Woah woah woah. I donno if this kind of highly charged erotic language is allowed here.

This is really good stuff! I especially like the section on warrant, the use in this context which I'd not come across before. It's nice to have a name for something so important. I'd suggest two additional principles as well, which I tend to employ alot and think useful:

(1) Establish your 'enemy' early (even an idealized one, if there isn't an existing one). The claim should be counterposed early on with it's opposite or competing claim, so as to -
(2) Establish the stakes of the claim: what difference does the claim make? Against the counterclaim, what would be different or what implications would follow if either one were true or untrue? If we can establish the motivations for why this claim matters, it becomes alot easier to follow lines of argumentation.

and there are plenty of idealist continental philosophers. — Terrapin Station

Debatable, but not particularly worth debating.

--

As far as continental philosophy goes, I like Catherine Malabou's characterization of it as broadly transcendental in outlook: asking after the various conditions of modalities [possibility/actuality] of various things. This being what it learns from Kant. I lean continental, obviously, but I quite like the analytic tradition too.

My other favourite cheeky way of characterizing the split is Jack Reyonds' one, in which analytic philosophy is sadistic and continental philosophy is masochistic [link, pdf]. That's more probably the level at which the discussion should take place.

Continental philosophers want to point out the necessity of epistemology in talking about "what is this stuff/how exactly does it work" — Terrapin Station

This seems an odd characterization. One of the more common critiques of 'continental philosophy' is it's almost utter neglect of epistemology.

:ok:

Survival of the fittest might - and can and does - translate into survival of the most cooperative (though not only this).

Ugh.

No. This is your thread. What is it about?

A comic? Seriously? Does your thread have a point? You listed a bunch of Wittgenstein buzzwords, briefly invoked Chomsky - a thinker who could not be more antithetical to late Wittgenstein if he tried to be - and then asked 'is this something that modern scholars think about?' - what is 'this'?

In that, there is an embedded syntax and grammar that we all possess — Wallows

What you think Wittgenstein - Investigations Wittgenstein - says this?

Trump and the Trumpets — Wayfarer

This is an anarcho ska-punk band waiting to happen.

This discussion was merged into Immodesty of an Egoist Mind

This discussion was merged into Immodesty of an Egoist Mind

This discussion was merged into Immodesty of an Egoist Mind

Christian Marazzi - The Violence of Financial Capitalism

Read this over a couple of days. Was a bit too condensed to be particularly useful, but the emphasis on considering the global (rather than regional) nature and reach of financialization was a good takeaway.

"Marx's systemic critique of the long term behaviour of capitalism is wrong, except for its central predictions, and how they assert themselves" — fdrake

:snicker:

But really, OP is 150 years too late.

Yeah, I thought the last chapter - along with the legal analysis in chpt 4 - were the most original of the book. I think you're entirely right too in saying that liberalism stifles the development of moral relations, rather than eroding a given.

70 pages in, and it's pretty fun so far. I think Graeber gets a bit of flak for coming off as a bit glib, but he's got the chops to back it up so I don't mind. Seems to me the basic point is to say of debt what Marx said of capital: it's a social relation. The rich anthropological and historical discussions are all meant to flesh this out.

Just quickly - need to sleep - my hunch is that everything turns on negation, and the ability to treat negation as positive: to treat 'not-X' as a positive variable and not simply the absence of X. Only this allows for abstraction proper: abstraction without a ground-level, 'material' token, the double-incidence of token and type birthed at the same time - that which is not itself. Once you can do that, concepts, proper concepts, bloom full bore. No negation, no concepts.

Daivd Graeber - Debt: The First 5000 Years
Maurizio Lazzarato - The Making of Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition
Maurizio Lazzarato - Governing by Debt

A slight theme.

I think that any discussion of the political action should take into account the existence of subjectivities of a new kind as well as their relation to Canetti’s crowd subjectivities. — Number2018

It's not the new kinds of subjectivities that need to be 'taken into account' per se - at this point I take it for granted that different kinds of subjectivities are produced in varying circumstances - so much as how they are produced. If fact, one wants to say that the question is not even so much to do with the production of certain subjectivities, but in looking to think about 'counter-productions' of subjectivity, 'our' productions against 'their' productions. This is what I find interesting about collective subjectivity - it runs against the dominant mode of subjectivity production today, which is atomistic and - in D&G's terms which you are familiar with - 'dividual'. Collective subjectivity is neither individual (the liberal subject of disciplinary society) nor dividual (the neo-liberal subject of 'control societies') but common (commune-ist?). A subject-to-come to use the lingo.

While it is quite customary to think the political in Canetti’s manner, conceptualization of the political dimension of the new “subjectivities” could be challenging. Compared with a situation where an individual is becoming a part of a crowd, we do not realize that we unintentionally obey, being involved in, acted upon, and operated by a hidden ensemble. Yet, simultaneously, we amplify our agency. And, differently from Foucault’s panoptical disciplinary mechanisms, the newest subjectivation processes are substantially convenient, safe, miniaturized, and unrecognizable. Anyway, the non-crowd subjectivities have become the unavoidable condition of any political action. — Number2018

One thing I'd like to stress - and this is something that Dean does, and which I quoted her saying in the OP - is a distinction between collective subjectivity and mere aggregates of individuals. In the age of big data we're accustomed to think of masses as individuals simply multiplied - as Deleuze wrote, the collective becomes "samples, data, or markets". What's missing in this latter approach to collectivity is solidarity, an acting together and with one another. Thinking in terms of masses you ironically end-up getting individualized solutions (don't use plastic bags, use a bamboo toothbrush, don't use plastic straws, etc, etc). This stuff doesn't take action-in-concert into account, which, to go by Hannah Arendt's criteria, is the only index of political life.

But what I'm having trouble discerning is precisely the implications of subjectivity when brought to bear on the phenomenon of crowds. — csalisbury

My interest is 'two-way': what can thinking crowds in terms of subjectivity tell us about subjectivity itself? And what can it tell us about crowds? (put like an essay question: 'what can thinking about crowds and subjectivity together tell us about both?'). In terms of the latter question (your question): thinking about crowds as subjects allows us - me - to bring to bear upon crowds all the philosophical resources that have been developed for subjectivity. Like what? 'Historicity' for one: like, it's widely acknowledged today that subjects are historical, 'created' under these or those conditions: feudal subjects, neoliberal subjects, gendered subjects, medical subjects, each of these having a history shaped by institutions, cultures, events, etc.

So can we speak of crowds having histories in this way? Have there been transformations in how crowds have related to the world around them? Can we think of how the agency of the crowds has been shaped and changed under different conditions? I think the answer is yes, especially when one looks to things like techniques of crowd management, the changes in urban space, the mediums by which crowds are brought together, etc etc. Lots to be said here. But what else? What other resources from 'subjectivity' can we bring to bear? Another example might be Jodi Dean's uses of psychoanalytic resources: she follows Freud in talking about the crowd unconscious, about the libidinal bonds that form the crowd, about questions of identification and so on, and drawing out certain conclusions from this use. Won't go too far into it, but just another example.

And then there's the flip side - what can crowds teach us about subjectivity? Given that subjectivity has almost always been thought of in relation to the individual, crowd subjectivity really makes the concept super interesting to me. Dean, again, speaks about how subjectivity has continually been 'enclosed', both historically and philosophically, much in the same way in which the commons have been enclosed, linking the enclosure of the commons with the enclosure of the subject (in the individual, rather than the crowd), and in parallel, thinking about crowds in terms of the commons.

And this is important to me because I think this has a particularly important political valence: if subjectivity is a way of thinking about agency, and we can speak of a crowd subjectivity, then we can speak of the particular agency of the crowd. This is important to me because it's so hard today to think about agency in any other terms that that of the individual - there's been an 'enclosure' of agency in the individual just like there's been an enclosure of subjectivity in the individual too. To be blunt about it: how can we think through the freedom afforded to us by the crowd, as distinct from the only freedom anyone ever seems to talk about, the freedom of the individual? And in current conditions when shitty American politics saturates us and the freedom of the individual has basically colonized any talk of freedom, I find thinking of crowd subjectivity both refreshing and almost liberatory (this is the 'celebratory' note you detected previously).

So yeah, there's alot motivating and informing this particular crossing of concepts, and if all you get out of it is that 'being together changes people', well, I think you're being unfair.

Antinatalism.

Right, but the fact that part of the population is sensitive to moral issues becomes politics. — frank

Sure.

Ha, the thing is that Moore's self-description betrays what he actually says - he says he's not talking about political expediency, but his whole discussion point is about beating Trump at his own game - he talks about how Biden is 'this year's Hillary' (a totally apt description), and has nothing to offer either Trump's base or young and hispanic, etc voters. He talks about needing to speak to Wisconsin and Michigan - like, this is pure politics!

:up:

New thread here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6909/ethics

Yeah, so I guess my 'model' is inevitably flawed by being one without me in it — Isaac

Not flawed! It tells us something about the world that it must be 'modelled' in this way (in any way): it is 'objectively the case' that you must include yourself in your model - this is an opening, not a limit. Anyway, sorry to be obscure. We're far away from perception now, and I don't want to derail.

Ok. Then it's just irrelevant. That's fine too.

lol it's not a question about perception. — Terrapin Station

True. But you want to say something about perception by asking it. Still silly.

I didn't really answer the question as "what difference do people make" so much as "what model do you personally have of reality" (a model which, for me is obviously unaffected by people because I took him to be asking about what it is I think people's perception acts on). Does that make any sense at all? — Isaac

Yeah. I would only be careful: we are of reality, and don't stand outside of it looking in. "If no people existed, objects would be...?" is still a strange question. "If there are no clouds, objects would be...?" - one has to wonder: what even is this question? How does the one relate to the other? It's loaded, but badly.

Possibly, yes. — Isaac

No, no. If there are no people (or perceivers, rather) then there is no perception. It's a bad question ('how would one perceive it if one were not around to perceive it?'. It's very silly, don't fall for it).

If that's what you get out of that, okay.

I don't philosophize off the back of linguistic connotations. We bring a great deal of ourselves to what we perceive. Any study of perception will tell you this. Maybe you can start with Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. I've already mentioned the affordance approach of Gibson. Lots of cool things for you to study.

Re: agency - I wouldn't say that agency is like a kind of 'not as good' way to speak of subjectivity. I would rather say something like: subjectivity structures agency; or, agency is shaped by subjectivity. I mean if subjectivity is a set of capacities (to act and be acted upon), then subjectivity is a way to think about agency (as distinct from, say, 'the will'). So I wouldn't want to give up agency. If anything, perhaps one of the main reasons I'm interested in collective subjectivity is because it allows me to think about agency in a different way: a way of 'accessing' a different mode of agency that is not really available to 'mere' individuals (this in turn allowing me to think about politics or political agency in a different way).

Anyway, so I'm not just being a dick about using a big fancy word where another one will do. It's true that I think 'subjectivity' does conceptual work that 'agency' does not, but not because one is 'better' than the other, but because I reckon they work better together, as compliments. And yes this is just me laying out the grammar of a language-game as I'd prefer it, and it's probably not the only configuration of grammar, but consider my spade turned at this point.

As for the the distinction between confirmation vs. encounter - I don't think there needs to be a choice. The one elaborates the other and they both push each other forward (less a harbour, more a snail's shell - you wear it on your back as you go). Another change in vocabulary might help: not confirmation but implication (remembering the Latin root, implicare, to fold, to entwine) - what are the implications of this way of thinking about things? And how can we implicate our encounters into our approaches? What do the encounters teach us? And what can we use of what we've learnt to inform our attempts to respond to the encounter. See my response to @Number2018 above. It's probably the main imperative I follow when I do philosophy: implicate!

You can't _perceive_ how we think about something, how we value it, etc.

"Perception" has a connotation of "sensing information from outside of us." How we think about things, value them, etc. isn't something that exists outside of us for us to perceive. — Terrapin Station

Ah but you're wrong. Valuation is built-in to perception. It's why we are susceptible to visual illusions, it's why people have visual disorders where they can't recognize faces even though they can 'see' them perfectly well and so on. There's a bodily thinking that is irreducible to a rational process of abstraction. Go read about the science of perception, it's interesting.

Yeah yeah. But how else would you put it? I see food on the table, I start to salivate, and move towards it, I reach out to the sweetness, the oil glistens on its surface, my stomach rumbles, etc etc. At some point you have to use words.

So in other words, you're conflating how we think about things, how we evaluate and value them, etc., with what we're perceiving. — Terrapin Station

It takes a particular kind of abstraction to think that we perceive things in their neutrality first, and then evaluate them, as if a two-step process. It's valued all the way down (although not all the way up!)

I don't think there's any one 'kind of thing' we see. I mean, I'm mostly on board the embodied cognition train that says we see for the most part "affordances", opportunities for action, sites of relief and rest, goals to arrive at, hazards and safety, speed and rest, and so on. Perception understood in a bodily sense, according to categories that matter to living, moving, metabolizing beings. We perceive significance far more than we perceive things and stuff (phenomenology teaches us this: perception is normative). We're animals before we're anything else.

But even then I don't think this exhausts perception: I don't doubt that we see things and stuff and properties too. But we have to learn how to see this stuff (a bodily learning, and no less than we have to learn how to see what is significant), and sometimes we 'see' some kinds of things and not others, and sometimes there's a mix of things we 'see', different schemas of perception, as it were, that we engage depending on the particular circumstances of the time (if you're looking for a 'property', you'll likely find it). There's a plasticity to perception, and the important thing is to relate it to the kinds of beings we are and what we do with it.

Call it a Wittgensteinian theory of perception: perception is use. And attempting to come up with an a priori theory of it is neither helpful nor interesting.

I think that's true, but I don't think it precludes any value in such an anthropological approach, nor does it preclude an attempt to unravel what is meant by it in their own terms. Unless I've misunderstood what you're saying? — Isaac

Nah for sure, it's interesting to understand why 'properties' tend to be our 'go-to' when thinking about this kind of stuff. But I am honestly amused - like it makes me smile irl - to think people look out at the world around them and honestly believe in their heart of hearts that what they see are 'properties'. Like, the amount of cultural conditioning it takes to get someone to think that this is their 'spontaneous' self-report is incredible. The degree of abstraction from perception is actually thoroughly impressive, when you really stop to think about it.

Once you start to treat 'properties' as nothing more than a reification of the quirks of ancient Greek grammar, watching people treat it as an ontological category is like watching shamans on a small isolated island argue over which voodoo doll is the most effective. Like, once you distance yourself from it, it becomes almost an anthropological study of a bunch of culture-bound humans who have learened to use words in a funny way.

Crowd adopts a different personality from an individual. This was alluded to, or given an attention, by no other than JS Mill. No? — Caldwell

Mill was disparaging of the crowd - he was no friend of social thought and he was as much as intellectual progenitor to the atomization and destitution of society as any other liberal thinker.

The recent history has shown that institutionalization and hierarchization of a few prominent protest movements have involved them in the totalizing sphere of neoliberal politics.... . If Canetti’s “crowd collectivity” has lost its central role, we need to find another locus of the collective power. — Number2018

I'm not sold on the idea of parallel institutions. I think it's important as a strtegic peice of the puzzle, but as Zizek pointed out, such instiutions rely on, and owe thier very existence to their being embedded in the larger captialist orders: "the task today, their critics say, is to resist state power by withdrawing from its terrain and creating new spaces outside its control. This is, of course, the obverse of accepting the triumph of capitalism. The politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left." (Resistence is Surrender)

I think the left needs to get over their automatic aversion to power as totalizing and authoritarian and whatever. It can't keep playing local games of collectivity and Sunday framers markets while nearly every lever of power that matters is in the hands of capitalists. It likes to speak of 'organization' while eschewing any and all oranizations. I think this is suicide.

Further, crossing a street is not a singular event: it is a routine, mass action; it cannot be related just to the specific context of where and when it is performed - it is a part of collective essential equipment, organizing and managing our lives; the subjectivity of the streetwalker is commonly shared and acts upon everybody, it is supported and maintained by the ensemble of various factors. “Subjectivities” are interrelated and interpenetrated, creating a totalizing network of the possible and recognizable. — Number2018

This is true. One interesting line of thought that this leads into is the question of urban organization. There's alot of really interesting work out there about the geography of cities, and with it, the geography of protests and crowds, and how certain organizations of urban space are more and less conductive to the exercise of crowd power. I'm only somewhat familiar with alot of the issues around this, but one big one that often seems to come to the fore is reassessing the relation between vehicles and pedestrians. There have been movements in alot of cities to displace the presence of cars in order to enable a larger pedestrian presence, and I think this is so worth paying attention to and encouraging. From Vox:

"Oslo, Norway, has effectively banned cars from its center. Last year, Spain’s capital, Madrid, announced plans to do much the same, banning non-resident automobiles in its core. Pontevedra, Spain, has entirely banned cars from its center and substantially reduced them outside it (and has subsequently seen its shrinking economy revitalized). London recently announced plans to make half the streets in its city center permanently car-free. Paris has banned cars from its center on the first Sunday of each month. Other cities are taking on cars with more comprehensive plans. Hamburg, Germany, has a plan to turn 40 percent of its land area over to connected, car-free green spaces. Montreal, Quebec, is building a whole network of car-free streets. Helsinki, Finland, has a plan to densify its suburbs and connect them with public transit ... etc" (source)

This sort of stuff is so vitally important to think about when thinking about crowd subjectivity. I'm glad you brought it up.