Upcoming Toscano lecture and other Chicago-related announcements

The Interccect reading group is hosting a lecture by Alberto Toscano on March 1. Details are available in this post, which also lists upcoming Chicago-area lectures and conferences.

In addition, Anna Kornbluh, the reading group’s fearless leader, maintains a Google calendar with theory-related events.

Non-speaking beings

It may be a little awkward to post something that draws so heavily on Adam’s Awkwardness here, but I suppose that is itself in the spirit of the book.

W. is impressed by my stammer.—‘You stammer and stutter’, says W., ‘and you swallow half your words. What’s wrong with you?’ Every time I see him, he says, it gets a little worse. The simplest words are beginning to defeat me, W. says. Maybe it’s mini-strokes, W. speculates. That would account for it.—‘You had one just there, didn’t you?’

Perhaps, W. muses, my stammering and stuttering is a sign of shame. W. says he never really thought I was capable of it, shame, but perhaps it’s there nonetheless.—‘Something inside you knows you talk rubbish’, he says. ‘Something knows the unending bilge that comes out of your mouth’. (Lars Iyer, Spurious)

Equality is a central term for Rancière, but it is quite a circumscribed equality, the equality specifically and only of speaking beings. Which immediately raises the question, what about non-speaking beings?Animals would be the most obvious example, but there are also human beings prevented from speaking by age and infirmity, disability, oppression. Rancière might object that these examples of non-speaking don’t exclude people from the class of equals, which isn’t strictly speaking beings, but rather beings that have the logos, that have access to language; and, furthermore, it is the structure of the logos, of language, which ensures this equality. However, in the way Rancière makes his argument, speech is indeed theoretically central, and problematic. The argument for axiomatic equality occurs in what is, as it were, the primal scene of politics for Rancière, the moment at which a master gives an order to a slave. This contains the central contradiction of politics: the master presents themselves as of a different order from the slave and so as entitled to give the slave orders; but in the process of giving the order, the master assumes that the slave is capable of understanding the order, that is, that master and slave are equal in their possession of language. This argument doesn’t depend on speech literally understood – it would work if the order was handed over in written form or using sign language – but it does depend on features of speech broadly construed: the two participants must be in the same place at the same time for their equality, the possibility of the slave speaking back to the master, to manifest itself.

On the impotence of argument

In my previous post, I mentioned the ways that liberal Christians often seem to be attempting to superficially “hijack” Christianity for liberal ends. By this I didn’t mean to say that Christianity is necessarily incompatible wtih such ends, only to point out the inadequacy of their methods. For instance, when liberals try to reach out to “persuadable” evangalicals, they will often point out the wealth of evidence that concern for the poor or environmental conservation are “biblical” values — and I should say that the liberal advocate here is completely, 100% factually right. I agree with them completely, and indeed I think it’s indisputable for anyone who takes an objective look at the Bible. And yet these arguments basically don’t work. Why?

One could point out the fact that evangelicals don’t “really” take the Bible literally, but that just repeats the problem: it’s a superficial, “gotcha” type of argument that doesn’t engage with the issue at the appropriate level. People don’t generally change their minds when you catch them in a surface-level contradiction — they either shrug it off or get mad. In fact, I’m going to risk a bold hypothesis: reasoned argument never produces a change in basic worldview or practice.

This is not to say that reasoned argument is useless. It’s a valuable intellectual skill, but one that only really holds within the boundaries of certain intellectual games. The basic error of liberal proceduralism is that it assumes all of life can be made into one of those intellectual games — that politics and religion, which touch on the most intimate and important matters in our shared life, should conduct themselves in basically the same way as a debate about how you can tell if someone is a philosophical zombie or how to explain the behavior of quantum particles.

Who killed Jesus, and who cares?

I’m currently reading Elaine Pagels’ The Origin of Satan, which despite its title seems so far to be mostly concerned with the ways in which the gospel writers shifted responsibility onto the Jews for the death of Jesus. Historically, of course, most scholars now agree that the Romans were primarily responsible for executing Jesus, though they likely had some assistance and support from certain Jewish leaders.

This work of historical clarification is an insistent theme among many liberal Christians, and while I obviously agree with the historical point that’s being made, I find something unsettling in the way it’s approached. What if events had gone down pretty much as the gospels presented them, with Jewish leaders pushing a reluctant and cowardly Pilate to execute Jesus? Would anti-Semitism then be justified?

Adventures in Church Attendance: Response to a Concerned Voicemail

Dear ________,

First, I want to thank you for your call a week or so ago. I have not been ignoring it, though the delay & your stated concern in the voicemail would perhaps suggest otherwise. Things have just been more busy than normal, attentions tugged this way & then that. While I confess I could’ve made and/or found the time to respond, either by calling or by writing, life is filled with decisions, most of them, we hope, not as malevolent or even as plainly calculated as they might appear, and I opted for decisions that did not include a quick response to you.

Second, you will no doubt notice that I’m responding via email rather than your chosen mode of communication, the telephone. Please, do not read anything into that either. I’m simply far more comfortable in print than I am in person, with even my closest friends. Would that I could carry on my own internal dialogues & diatribes wholly in print, I might make a better go at consciousness in general.

Hayek occupies London

Twitter is abuzz with Jodi Dean’s post on a depressing Financial Times column (which I can’t find on the FT site for some reason) from the Occupy London economics working group, which embraces Hayek:

Fans of Friedrich von Hayek may be surprised to learn that the Austrian economist is the talk of Occupy London. Hayek’s observation that distributed intelligence in a voluntary co-operative is a hallmark of real economy rings true beneath the bells of St Paul’s. Occupy is often criticised for not having a single message but that misses the point: we are committed to incorporating different preferences before coming up with policies. In this sense, it could be said we work more like a market than the corporate boardroom or lobbyist-loaded politics – our ideas are radical but also just and democratically decided.

The policy proposals that follow focus on reducing tax-avoidance, using monetary policy to boost the housing market, and changing the way executives are compensated — hardly revolutionary stuff, but probably beneficial. (I’m not sure, though, how the idea for the Bank of England to use “quantitative easing… to fund housebuilding” would work either logistically or in terms of getting the desired outcome.)

I understand that these kinds of demands are uninspiring for any number of reasons, above all because they embrace the logic of capitalism and implicitly legitimate the system by reference to a “better way” to execute it. At the same time, I don’t think there is widespread understanding of more radical alternatives, in large part because it’s not at all clear, objectively, what the desired answer would be. (In this respect, I’m reluctant to embrace the notion that the problem is the open-ended, anarchist nature of the Occupy movement — though I’m skeptical of that approach to some degree, I don’t think that having greater discipline and structure would be beneficial in the absence of an actual workable program. If an anarchistic/democratic form doesn’t automatically lead to good results, surely we can agree that a centralized “organized” form doesn’t either.)

Indeed, what’s most depressing isn’t that this group would cite Hayek, but that Hayek is objectively to the left of mainstream neoliberal economic ideology at this point — and of course Keynes counts as a radical leftist in this context. To put it another way: what’s most depressing is that drawing on Hayek genuinely counts as a step in the right direction compared to the idiocy that’s driving most policy makers.

Peer reviewing: A suggestion

Since completing my PhD, I have served as peer reviewer for several articles. One thing that stands out to me is the fact that doing so is not very time-consuming — basically, you need to read through the article a couple times, then write up a page or two of remarks in response. It’s a process that can easily be completed in an afternoon.

Another thing that stands out to me is the mismatch between how relatively painless the task is and how ridiculously backed up most journals’ review processes tend to be. Part of that surely results from the procrastination that forms the bedrock of the academic life, but I also assume that there are many academics who are doing little to no peer reviewing at all.

And that’s when it hit me: I’m writing this post to procrastinate on reviewing an article!

In all seriousness, though, there’s no reason academics who are actively involved in research shouldn’t be peer reviewing regularly. I’d even suggest that doing as much as one article per month would not be particularly burdensome.

FYI

Just so everyone knows, according to the excerpts from The Divine Inexistence published in Harman’s book on Meillassoux, the logical consequences of an embrace of the radical contingency of all being and the inexistence of God are as follows:

• The belief in creation ex nihilo
• Anthropocentrism: the contingent becoming of the universe reaches its pinnacle and unsurpassable goal in humanity
• Faith in the resurrection of the dead
• Hope in a coming mediator figure who, though possessing the divine power necessary to inaugurate the resurrection, empties himself
• An ethics based on living in joyful hope of the resurrection

It’s a good thing we have Meillassoux to tell us about these radically new and unheard-of ideas! I wonder if the other sections tell us about such innovations as a ceremonial cleansing to enter the messianic community or a symbolic meal commemorating the mediator figure.

News on Zizek’s Hegel book

Peter Thompson of Ernst Blog has posted the TOC for Zizek’s forthcoming Less Than Nothing, as well as a review.

Rejection letters for dummies

While we see a lot of advice for people on the job market, it is much more rare to see tips for people on the other side of the process. This is a shame, as poor execution on the side of the hiring institution can cause significant unnecessary emotional distress. While there is a lot that could be changed, I’d like to start by providing tips for one of the most common documents produced by academic departments: rejection letters. It’s a delicate moment, to be sure, but I think many common practices, even well-intended ones, make the situation worse. As such, here is my advice: