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Our Threefold Hope

  Hope #1: I hope that somewhere, in some industry, workers will gain ownership of their own means of production. Hope #2: I hope that these self-owning workplaces, which don't have capitalists parasitically sucking all of the profit and revenue out of them, will out-compete those that do.  And I hope that this will inspire more and more workers to strive to own their own workplaces. Hope #3: I hope that the workers, having attained all this new power, will use that power to make their workplaces into places that respect workers' privacy, maximize our freedom, including freedom of expression, protect our rights, including our right to live however we want when we are not working; and make them into places that are convivial, lewd, silly, and carnivalesque, while at the same time becoming places where we can work together to harness our abilities to realize our deepest desires and our wildest dreams. This threefold hope is not a certainty, only a hope; and yet it is our only ho...
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Political Consequences of the Foucauldian Error

  As I wrote in my previous post, Foucault's main error was his failure to fully think through his "doubts" regarding the repressive hypothesis, resulting his faulty contention that "Where there is power, there is resistance" as if resistance must just always automatically appear, as if by magic.  In other words, Foucault has a dogmatic belief in the automatic spontaneity of resistance, that it always arises "everywhere".  It's not hard to see potential political consequences of this theoretical error: if we are always automatically guaranteed resistance, then it is not necessary to do the work of organizing resistance.  If it is, so to speak, already there - "everywhere" - and so producing it is utterly superfluous, then one might even be led to a kind of suspicion regarding those who are trying to build resistance through too totalizing (rather than local) organization as somehow inauthentic. Thus, quite paradoxically, a theory whose ve...
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Foucault's Main Error

  The problem with Foucault (which is the problem with all philosophers, if you can find it) is that Foucault didn't take his own ideas far enough.  In the introduction to the History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Foucault writes about what he calls "the repressive hypothesis," about which he has "three serious doubts": "First doubt: Is sexual repression truly an established historical fact? Is what first comes into view-and consequently permits one to advance an initial hypothesis-really the accentuation or even the establishment of a regime of sexual repression beginning in the seventeenth century? This is a properly historical question. Second doubt: Do the workings of power, and in particular those mechanisms that are brought into play in societies such as ours, really belong primarily to the category of repression? Are prohibition, censorship, and denial truly the forms through which power is exercised in a general way, if not in every society, most certain...
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Radicalism is Not the Same as Extremism

  Extremism is a symptom of spectacular society .  Far from it being synonymous with radicalism, I would say that people often fall into mere extremism precisely when they fail to be sufficiently radical. Radicalism denotes getting "to the root" of an observed phenomenon, which requires patient theoretical analysis. Extremism is a mere reflex, a reaction against an observed phenomenon, which usually entails an unspoken refusal to consider it. Extremism is easy; radicalism takes more work.  Within a given organization, on any particular issue, several people within the organization will position themselves as the greatest extremists on a given issue - a strategic pose that occasionally brings them some power within the organization.  There are people who are quite skillful at this, and who can make an entire career out of this, doing so in a way that may be, by turns, entertaining, witty, and exhilarating.  These Lord Byrons have their own expertise, specializing...
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Aumann's Agreement Theorem and Its Discontents

  In quantum physics, there are mathematical equations, such as Schrödinger's equation, upon which nearly every educated person agrees.  Not only do they agree on the math, they also agree on the evidence.  What they disagree upon is how to interpret this math.  Thus we have De Broglie-Bohm "pilot wave" interpretation, the Copenhagen interpretation, the "Many Worlds" interpretation, QBism (quantum Bayesianism), and so on.  In a sense, we might say that for the varying schools of interpretation, they all agree on the math, but they disagree on how to "put it into words," to translate the truth of the mathematical equations into a natural language such as English.  But this is not merely a linguistic phenomenon, a mere dispute over semantics.  It might be better to say that there's a dispute over how to translate the truth of the math into human intuition.  Each of the different interpretations of quantum physics is nestled into a different set of ...
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Romanticism and Bourgeois Values

Romanticism should be distinguished from Romance, which is an earlier form, arising in the medieval period - fanciful stories which usually involve marvelous events.  Romanticism, as opposed to Romance, developed during the bourgeois era. Romanticism has a tangled, complex relation to bourgeois values.  Perhaps strangely, romanticism is used to justify bourgeois values, but at the same time, it transcends bourgeois values, and indeed can be defined by way of that transcendence.  Romanticism is best understood as the sublation of bourgeois values, or, as it is said in German, the Aufhebung (from the verb Aufheben ) of bourgeois values.  Aufheben is sometimes translated as "abolition," but it literally means "to lift up," and this paradoxical ambiguity is the essence of the relation we are attempting to understand here.  We can sum it up by saying that romanticism upholds bourgeois values precisely by violating them, or even by rejecting them altogether.  To...
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Nationalism is the ur-romanticism.  It had several offshoots, including internationalism and individualsm, both of which are also mostly forms of romanticism. Of course, religion is even older than nationalism.  But that's a complicated story that I won't get into right now.   
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