Long Sunday

The White Messiah Complex

2010-03-07T17:57:13-06:00

Who would have thought that it would take the block buster film Avatar to get David Brooks, condescending spokesman for the establishment, and Slavoy Zizek, the hyper caffeinated Marxist, to agree on something. First, here is David Brooks apparently offended by the cliche of simple primitives unable to make their own destiny:

"It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration."

No to be out done, Monsieur Zizek sees the film, despite its sympathies with the aboriginy Na'vi, as the clear expression of neoimperialist racism:

"Avatar's fidelity to the old formula of creating a couple, its full trust in fantasy, and its story of a white man marrying the aboriginal princess and becoming king, make it ideologically a rather conservative, old-fashioned film. Its technical brilliance serves to cover up this basic conservatism. It is easy to discover, beneath the politically correct themes (an honest white guy siding with ecologically sound aborigines against the "military-industrial complex" of the imperialist invaders), an array of brutal racist motifs: a paraplegic outcast from earth is good enough to get the hand of abeautiful local princess, and to help the natives win the decisive battle. The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them. In other words, they can choose either to be the victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white man's fantasy."

No doubt Zizek would be amused by this dialectical unity of opposites. Both the defender of the status quo and the radical critic agree that the portrayal is racist and simplistic. But that is as far as I think they can agree - for example Brooks has to slip in the fact that "The plotline gives global audiences a chance to see American troops get killed." When I saw the film the first thing I thought of this was "Blackwater vs. Indians" but I suppose that isn't much of a difference.

As usual Zizek uses the film as an opportunity to make his larger ideological critique. Just in case we forget, there are always real life wars of resistance whose the plot lines are not as easy for us to digest; he refers to Arundhati Roy's recent account of the Dongria Kondh people's uprising that is currently taking place in India. The Hills that they inhabit in the state of Orissa "were sold to mining companies that plan to exploit their immense reserves of bauxite (the deposits are considered to be worth at least $4trn). In reaction to this project, a Maoist (Naxalite) armed rebellion exploded:"

"The Indian prime minister characterised this rebellion as the "single largest internal security threat"; the big media, which present it as extremist resistance to progress, are full of stories about "red terrorism", replacing stories about "Islamist terrorism". No wonder the Indian state is responding with a big military operation against "Maoist strongholds" in the jungles of central India. And it is true that both sides are resorting to great violence in this brutal war, that the "people's justice" of the Maoists is harsh. However, no matter how unpalatable this violence is to our liberal taste, we have no right to condemn it. Why? Because their situation is precisely that of Hegel's rabble: the Naxalite rebels in India are starving tribal people, to whom the minimum of a dignified life is denied.

So where is Cameron's film here? Nowhere: in Orissa, there are no noble princesses waiting for white heroes to seduce them and help their people, just the Maoists organising the starving farmers. The film enables us to practise a typical ideological division: sympathising with the idealised aborigines while rejecting their actual struggle. The same people who enjoy the film and admire its aboriginal rebels would in all probability turn away in horror from the Naxalites, dismissing them as murderous terrorists. The true avatar is thus Avatar itself - the film substituting for reality."

While I appreciate the larger point Zizek is making, I have to say I really enjoyed the film. Besides it being visually stunning, I also liked the mercenaries getting their asses kicked. I suppose that means I am merely reinscribing the current neoliberal ideological coordinates - but it's still just a movie, right?

Quotidian Nihilism

2010-02-27T17:51:17-06:00

Over at Broken Power Lines, there is a very interesting interview with Wendy Brown:

CPS: You have argued, speaking of neoliberalism, you have argued that neoliberalism does not simply promote economic policies but to quote you “disseminates market values into every sphere of human activity.” What distinguishes your perspective here from the despair found in someone like Adorno? What would it require to translate the despair that many people experience in very personal and de-politicized ways into a form of political mobilization?

Wendy Brown: That is an interesting question because it assumes that neoliberalism produces despair. I wish it did but I am not convinced that it does. I think that the process that some of us have called neoliberalization actually seizes on something that is just a little to one side of despair that I might call something like a quotidian nihilism. By quotidian, I mean it is a nihilism that is not lived as despair; it is a nihilism that is not lived as an occasion for deep anxiety or misery about the vanishing of meaning from the human world. Instead, what neoliberalism is able to seize upon is the extent to which human beings experience a kind of directionlessness and pointlessness to life that neoliberalism in an odd way provides. It tells you what you should do: you should understand yourself as a spec of human capital, which needs to appreciate its own value by making proper choices and investing in proper things. Those things can range from choice of a mate, to choice of an educational institution, to choice of a job, to choice of actual monetary investments – but neoliberalism without providing meaning provides direction. In a sad way it is seizing upon a certain directionlessness and meaninglessness in late modernity. Again, I am talking mainly about the Euro-Atlantic world: without providing meaning, it provides direction. So I think it is quite a different order of things from the one that Adorno was describing.

I am in charge

2010-02-21T10:02:53-06:00

Of course much has been made of Al Haig's attempted coup after President Reagan had been shot, but I think Larry David does a great job of analyzing it in real time. (Thanks to Dennis Perrin for the link)

Haiti Latest Target of the Shock Doctrine

2010-01-18T11:56:08-06:00

In a very disturbing blog post over at the Nation, Richard Kim discusses how the IMF has agreed to an emergency loan to Haiti of $100 million. The bad news is that this comes with restrictions like pay freezes for all public employees and an increase in the retail price for electricity. As Klein argues in the video, it is up to us to insist that Haiti receives grants, not loans.

John Ralston Saul and weak thought

2009-08-17T11:46:39-05:00

After all of the talk of what is 'critical' about Axel Honneth’s Pathologies of Reason it represents a bit of transition to read John Ralston Saul's most recent book A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada (Viking: 2008). In a word, his book is not critical in the technical sense of a rejection of dogmatism and an effort to constantly 'tarry with the negative'. Rather, Saul's book is for the most part just a bad book in nearly every way a book can be bad -- moralistic, elitist, boring, repetitive, one-sided, etc. But it might be said that the book is arguably built on an interesting idea, and, that is, that Canada is a 'Métis civilization'. The book's main strength is contained in this provocation, but it appears to have failed there too since the response to the book so far have been minimal if non-existent beyond the occasional remark in The Globe and Mail. One can find glowing reviews out there, but they are far from critical and for the most part do not address Saul’s exaggerated and over-blown thesis. The overall reaction appears to be that ‘oh my, Ralston Saul is at it again. Duck!’.

There is much to be explained about the main idea, but the gist of it is that Saul is enticed by the idea that Canada was created as a product of negotiation between aboriginal peoples and the 'newcomers'. He argues that even though most Canadians, particularly its elites in government and the Universities, may not admit it, Canadians love to negotiate and basically reject war. The Métis, as a distinct people, are the direct outcome of Canada’s ongoing love of negotiation that goes back to the beginning of the world and continues to characterize the country to this day. One gets the feeling that Canada will always love to negotiate for as long as the world lasts. Saul finds evidence of his thesis everywhere – in various aspects of colonialism, in the way that many Canadians reject and exclude the First Nations today, the way Canadians reject certain forms of European progress and embrace a hybrid form of citizenship, the ‘obsession with egalitarianism’, the ‘minimal’ approach to environmental protection, and the list goes on and on. As the reader learns, if Canada has any good ideas or practices they are due to its Aboriginal cultural roots, and if it has any bad ideas or practices these have to do with various Canadian elites who long for Canada to express its connection with Europe or with the US (via Europe). So, when Canadians ignore issues of Aboriginal poverty or when they disregard and exploit the environment this is because it is following Euro-centric principles. But, when it gives way and realizes its ‘true self’, this is because it is following Aboriginal, holistic principles stating that ‘everything is one’. (This obviously downplays the holism that is part of major tenants of European theory, but that issue is for another day).

One of the ‘truths’ that Saul discovers is that Canada rejects linear thinking (history, progress) and instead embraces ‘an ever-enlarging circle’. This, again, is the specific form of egalitarianism in Canada that is derived from Aboriginal ideas. The circle is inclusive and tolerant, whereas the linear line is not. Here is how Saul puts it:

The original party, the Aboriginal, is built upon a philosophy that has interdependence at its core. This is the opposite of such European ideas as the melting pot, which was picked up by our neighbour as a way of explaining how you could get a new kind of European-style purity out of a mix of peoples. The idea of difference is central to indigenous civilization. These differences are not meant to be watertight compartments, not vessels of purity. It is all about working out how to create relationships that are mixed in various ways and designed to create balances. It is the idea of a complex society functioning like an equally complex family within an ever-enlarging circle. That is the Canadian model.

In other words, this perspective wishes to bring Aboriginal ideas to the forefront and to then render contingent those ideas and practices that are connected to Europe in any way (which are not clearly defined, except as caricature, including several derogatory statements about Kant and the US). The intention is clearly strategic: to generate a dialogue about what is working in Canada and what is not according to the author’s perspective. However, the effect of this strategic effort is a major polemic and eventually an exaggeration about how Canada was formed as a nation-state at least since the late nineteenth century.

To idealize both sides of the equation – to claim that Francophone and Anglophone ideas are equally racist and that Aboriginal ideas are essentially open and morally superior – seems to amount to little more than the standard Canadian version of American bashing. The elephant in the room of the book seems to be that Canada is better than the US on almost any issue. For example, Saul believes that the Canadian principles of ‘Peace, Order and Good Government’ are flawed primarily because it includes the word ‘order’. A belief in ‘peace’ and ‘good government’ perhaps characterizes Canada, but ‘order’ does not. The latter, largely a legal construct, was only incorporated into the motto to appease the (Tory) Loyalists coming into Canada from England and the US. It ‘was their myth, not ours’, he writes.

So, in one sense this book is an ongoing contribution to Canada’ distinctive form of nationalism. It is a form of nationalism that is resolutely anti-American, and which is hard to overstate or really even come to terms with. But, in another sense, this book reminds one of just how nasty and passive-aggessive Canada’s nationalist scene can really get. Unrelenting in its effort to portray Canada as the best place on earth (rather unfairly on most issues), the insidious form of nationalism in Canada becomes dangerously uncritical and dogmatic in the worst senses of those terms. But, according to the former Viceregal Consort John Ralston Saul, Canada’s nationalism is the best thing its got.

Honneth Elsewhere

2009-07-17T18:04:57-05:00

Luke Mergner at the Decline has commented on our recent Honneth posts.

Back to Reason (and the future of Critical Theory)

2009-07-14T13:53:07-05:00

Critical theorists often claim to be clearing up mistaken, confused, distorted, or fragmented forms of thinking about and acting in society. One of the major tasks at hand for Critical Theory (CT), then, as it has come to be known in some strands of social theory, is at least implicitly to presuppose a model of society predicated on a certain conception of rightness or reason. Axel Honneth's Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory (Columbia, 2009) in this regard is no different from most of the major strands of CT in the work of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas, as well as others. The book is written in many ways as a treatise to today's 'younger generation' of critical theorists who, as he writes, wish to carry on 'the work of social criticism without having much more than a nostalgic memory of the heroic years of Western Marxism' (19). Thus, in the context of the current heterogeneity or 'market' of critical approaches, Honneth begins with a thorough and incisive interpretive reconstruction of Kant's critical project, discussed by Roger Whitson in a previous post. Honneth's reading of Kant links up with the later critique of the idea of social progress found in Walter Benjamin and other approaches influenced by the neo-Kantian critiques of historicism.

In Chapter 2, already discussed by Craig McFarlane, Honneth provides his clearest overall statement about how to rethink the possibilities of critical theory without remaining content to rest finally on Foucault's genealogical method (found in that of James Tully, for example (21)) that he complains implies many concepts that ‘can hardly be empirically measured’ (190). On the contrary, Honneth contends that CT find the steam move beyond that as well as other rival critical approaches to develop forms of social criticism that aim to transform public opinion. His point is that we take the time to discover what each of the critical perspectives hold in common ‘from a practical point of view’ (21). For Honneth, and whether ‘the youth’ know it or not, the critical project is united around what he calls ‘historically effective reason’ or rationality (20). He stresses, on this basis, the need to understand history in a practical way and to conceptually oppose 'socially effective rationality' to that of 'socially defective rationality' (as Craig mentioned). The former designates critical practices that should not necessarily be reduced to a positive form found in the theories of Horkheimer, Marcuse, or Habermas. But neither should CT necessarily be reduced to the negative dialectics of Benjamin or Adorno. Rather, according to Honneth, CT is united in an empirical or meta-theoretic project aimed to develop critical practices to oppose those 'social relationships [that] distort the historical process of development in a way that one can only practically remedy' (21). One of the most important words in this sentence is ‘practical’, which, as we shall see, borrowing from Adorno, Honneth will eventually call ‘preintellectual’ or ‘intramundane’.

Honneth suggests that we bring CT 'up to date' in the historical context of an increasingly hegemonic ‘liberal conception of justice’. This would be done by outlining a form of ethical action inspired by the ‘general thesis’ of Hegel, abstracted from its context, that should not be limited to the liberal 'tendency to reduce social criticism to a project of normative, situational, or local opinion' (20). Again, Honneth is not convinced that CT need to put forth a normative or positive project of individual interest contained in the ‘liberal tradition’ (27). He basically means his former teacher Habermas’ normative project. In fact, in his enduring fidelity to Hegel and Left Hegelianism – which includes the claim that ‘each successful form of society is possible only through the maintenance of its most highly developed standards of rationality’ (23) -- Honneth argues that the most convincing and lasting aspects of CT are found in the negative dialectics of Adorno and Benjamin, particularly as opposed to the other founding members of the so-called Frankfurt School. Honneth presents an impressively agile thesis that enables both a critique of historicist contextualism as well as abstract forms of theory that profess no need for foundation of any kind. The reader is informed again and again that it remains possible to unify the critical project by clarifying ‘the context in which social criticism stands side by side with the demands of a historically evolved reason' (21). The need for adherence to some form of a ‘rational universal’ or reason to clear up various defective rationalities is the overarching theme that unites the at times disjunctive chapters in Pathologies of Reason.

How to unify Critical Theory you ask? Diagnose socially defective rationality!

The main argument of the book revolves around the possibility of critiquing a 'deficit of social rationality'. This form of critique, the author argues, produces symptoms, and the debt to Freud is noted periodically (38; 126-145). Most importantly, Honneth argues that CT take the difficult step of outlining sociological explanations for the precise practical roots of defective symptoms in history, apathy, capitalism, positivism, fetishism, reification, and other recognizable objects of critique in the history of CT. One such arena is the 'consciousness of the proletariat' throughout the debates that now make up the foundation of critical theory (that is, before it became 'Critical Theory' after Adorno as Honneth contends). Honneth only reluctantly uses the term 'proletariat', which he considers to be an extremely ambiguous concept since Lukács. This is because it all-too-easily can become 'excessively historical' and it thus risks foreclosing the ‘possibility of orienting oneself in terms of a rational universal’ (35). Here, Honneth relativizes, and thus renders contingent, the historical role of the proletariat in what closely resembles a post-Marxist strategy (and which might also indicate some solidarity with the deconstructive likes of Badiou, Laclau and Mouffe, amongst others). He is ambivalent about whether capitalism as a concept can be ‘recovered today’ (and unfortunately he does not make note of its wide-spread use by various popular and academic critics today).

Contrary to various forms of determinism contained even in Left-Hegelianism—a tradition he otherwise wishes to preserve as an irreducible foundation of CT—Honneth argues that 'the working class does not automatically develop a revolutionary readiness to convert the critical content of theory into society-changing practice as a result of the consummation of the mechanized division of labour' (37). He cities Eric Fromm's The Working Class in Weimar Germany: A Psychological and Sociological Study (Cambridge, 1984) as an example of the empirical as opposed to speculative aspirations of some important parts of CT. Honneth then moves on to one of his most important arguments: he contends that CT ground itself not in any necessary historical position or even speculative destiny for the proletariat but, rather, in a wide array of historically situated critiques that render the diagnosis of social pathology (in all of its varying forms) to be important to alleviate ‘social evils’ (40). But he opposes the view that a 'submerged rational capacity' contained in the premises of CT will necessarily reveal itself out of responses to social injustice(s). To the contrary, the author contends that a critical consciousness has to be arduously developed by reflecting on the history, theory, and sociological context of injustice and defective rationality. This is to be done without necessarily reifying the results of that study in the form of a new dogma or idealism (Adorno’s unrelenting critique of idealism is alive and well in Honneth’s book). Honneth’s concern is that once CT lost any recognizable ‘social place’ or sociological basis that has some reference point in pretheoretical understanding, it simultaneously risked becoming a ‘totalizing ideology’ or ‘elitist specialized knowledge’ (44-5). This point is fair enough (since it is apparent that CT has this problem) and Honneth discusses whether Habermas’ ‘classical model of critique’ even stands up to the challenge of this criteria. Yet he is unequivocal in the conviction that the so-called Frankfurt School’s ‘historical-philosophical and sociological assumptions’ cannot be seriously defended today as anything more than a historical artifact (as Craig mentioned). This seems to me to be one of Honneth’s most incisive but also controversial points of attack on the ‘tradition’ of CT.

Adorno’s Hermeneutics and the Ideal Type

Chapters 4 and 5 are dedicated to Adorno's diagnosis of capitalism and negative dialectics respectively. I will focus the remainder of my discussion on these chapters in some detail.

Chapter 4 “A Physiognomy of the Capitalist Form of Life” interprets Adorno as thinker with an especially unique intellectual trajectory to follow. As Brian O'Connor writes in the opening paragraph to his useful introduction to The Adorno Reader: 'With few exceptions his writings demand for the reader an unusual level of concentration in order to be able to stay with the vastness of detail, complexity of argument, nunaces of style' (O'Connor, 1). This probably rings true for anyone who has ever read Adorno. But, as Honneth points out in the chapter, Adorno's writings are clearly divided between a concern to describe the sociological dynamics of capitalism on the one hand, and, on the other, several philosophical ‘papers’ that are equally unwavering in the aim to pursue the socially mediated logic of the dialectic. According to Honneth, the latter demonstrated that the major philosophical schools of the early twentieth century were unable to adequately come to grips with 'historicity' and to oppose the devastating 'crisis of idealism' that followed in the wake Hegel and Marx (57).

The philosophical analysis provided by Simmel’s ‘life philosophy’, Husserl’s ‘phenomenology’, Heidegger’s ‘analysis of Dasein’ and Scheler’s ‘material analysis of values’ were inadequate in the task aimed to understand the real nature of 'social events as they are: a blind ensemble of events that has become incomprehensible' because of the dominance of private capital and the rise of the fetishized commodity. Against the other philosophers mentioned above:

Benjamin and Adorno agreed that this initially meaningless "nature" of capitalism could only be decoded by a specific form of hermeneutics that shifts the given empirical material through possible constellations until figures emerge that reveal a cipher with objective, meaningful form (57).

Matters become very complex at this point (but not unnecessarily given that we are talking about Adorno and Benjamin). The main effort in the chapter is to discern the ‘specific form of hermeneutics’ quoted above. Honneth argues that Benjamin and Adorno had several areas of agreement (re: the constellation) but they ultimately disagreed strongly in their philosophical assessment of what sort of ‘specific’ hermeneutic this would imply. Eventually the reader learns that Adorno rejected hermeneutics via Dilthey's historiography altogether, which was too naive in its attempt to immerse the researcher in the context of historical meaning. For Adorno, ‘generalized commodity exchange’ renders this impossible. Adorno distanced himself from hermeneutics commonly understood and instead chose a distinctly materialist concept of 'physiognomy' or the 'physiognomic' that in many ways corresponds to Max Weber’s concept of ‘cultural significance’ that guides the construction of the researcher's ideal type as an ‘empirical hypothesis’ (59). Adorno would eventually even reject the ideal type for its idealism in favor of more readily identifiable ‘Hegelian premises’ (reason) (60). Honneth’s entire argument concerning effective rationality in this chapter hangs on Adorno’s fidelity to Hegel in defense of reason, and which compels Adorno ‘to make a direct parallel between social conditions and the constitution of reason’. This return to reason is precisely what Honneth is driving at today.

Benjamin proposed a form of collective unconsciousness to lend a 'pictorial imagination' to criticism of capitalism, including the reconstruction of 'dreamlike pictures to detect the dark secret that commodity fetishism had caused in the social life of capitalism' (57). According to Honneth, however, Adorno disagreed with Benjamin’s form of hermeneutics that did not necessarily imply a specific materialist interpretation. Adorno, rather, tended to side with Weber’s sociology, which stressed that 'interpreting the meaningless, enigmatic reality was the theoretical business of the interpreter alone' (57). For Adorno’s specific hermeneutic reality was produced not in an organic manner and not as a pretheoretical given either (as he would repeat over and over in his early writings). Rather, reality is produced through the real activities of human beings in the context of their social world via irreducible mediation. However, these practical activities could only be known with reference to a philosophical form of criticism and interpretation, or what Honneth names ‘a materialistic hermeneutic of the capitalist form of life’ (59). In direct similarity with Weber’s work in this regard, for Adorno the ideal type provided by theoretical analysis is capable of detecting 'cultural significance' (in Weber's terms) of empirical reality. This accounts, then, for both sides of Adorno's work: the sociological concern with empirical trends (analysis of capitalism as a general phenomenon) and the philosophical account of negative dialectics and rejection of anything even resembling idealism.

But there is a larger story here. Honneth's earlier work in the article 'The Social Dynamics of Disrespect: On the Location of Critical Theory Today' (1994) already detected in Adorno's turn to negative dialectics in the 1940s a lack of any recognizable sociological basis or location for critique. Against Adorno's best intentions to the contrary, critique itself becomes abstract in his work, and thus not situated in any recognizable sociological location. And, so, Honneth’s own critique of Adorno begins with a consideration of how the project of 'Critical Theory', now as a proper noun once Adorno's project rose to prominence, was decisively rejected by the ‘68 student movement and eventually everyone else thereafter. In Honneth's view, this is why the classical project of the Frankfurt School cannot be continued today either: its foundations remain too abstract and dogmatic; it can’t account for practice nor distinguish itself clearly from the other critical projects (such as Foucault’s genealogy). Honneth provides a historical sketch for how this happened; because Horkheimer and 'his circle' could not escape 'a closed circle of capitalist domination and cultural manipulation' leading to extreme pessimism, the turn to Adorno and his:

historico-philosophical negativism finally marked the historical point at which the endeavor to link critique back to social history failed completely; in the reflections contained in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, the only remaining place where something like an intramundane transcendence could occur was in the experience of modern art (Honneth 1994: 257).

So, put in different terms, as bad as things were with Western Marxism and its infatuation with the consciousness of the proletariat, matters get somewhat worse with Adorno. For Honneth, the ongoing debate today about whether Adorno and Horkheimer adhered to the earlier intervention accomplished in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), one of the most important texts in the history of CT, in their late works is not the crucial debate. It is basically irrelevant. Adorno's work in Negative Dialectics (1966) shortly before his death in 1969, and Horkheimer's later turn to ‘metaphysical pessimism late in life' via Schopenhauer make it apparent that a movement in thought had occurred and it was decisively for the worse according to Honneth. In the article Honneth writes:

Whatever the details may be, the fundamentally negativist orientation of their later writings bequeathed a problem that, ever since, has had to state at the head of every renewed attempt to link up with Critical Theory: if the Left Hegelian model of critique is at all to be retained, theoretical access to the social sphere in which an interest in emancipation can be anchored pretheoretically must be re-established at the outset. Without proof--however this may be provided--that the critical perspective is supported by a need or a movement within social reality, Critical Theory cannot be continued in any way today; for it no longer distinguishes itself from other models of social critique by claiming a superior sociological explanatory substance or in its philosophical procedures of justification, but solely by its attempt (which still has not been abandoned) to give standards of critique an objective foothold in pretheoretical praxis (257-8).

Honneth claims that even by Adorno’s own standards, that is, to outline a materialist philosophy and empirical sociology, CT via the ‘inner circle’ of the Frankfurt School has failed. And, therefore, if it is ever to restore its call for ‘emancipatory interest’, ‘social pathology of reason’, and a ‘rational universal’ (Honneth 2009: 42), it must provide standards of critique and allow for the interpretation of the physiognomic or material level of analysis. This also explains Honneth’s own reservations about retaining the concept of capitalism: he suggests that it tends to take the critique of reification as an excuse for abstraction.

Now we arrive at Honneth’s main point in the chapters on Adorno in Pathologies of Reason. Adorno developed an analysis of capitalism as a form of life or objective physiognomy to express his deep conviction that ‘mental abilities are reflected in the corporeal nature of human beings’. Honneth continues: ‘Gestures, mimicry, modes of practical intercourse in and with the world – all are always as much an expression of the specific profile of rational activity as they, in turn, represent formation to the pressures of nature’ (63). With this reconstruction of Adorno’s complicated strategy of negative dialectics the social analyst can arrive at a concrete interpretation of social pathologies, and to search out justice.

Chapter 5 “Performing Justice: Adorno’s Introduction to Negative Dialectics” leads to Honneth’s reconstruction of the practical aspects of Adorno’s late thought in light of Negative Dialectics (1966). For Honneth, this text is basically part of Adorno’s philosophic papers, but he contends that the main thrust is to combine social historical and philosophical reason to ‘speak of the transformed role of the philosophy in the present’ (73). Honneth finds references to Marx everywhere in the incredibly challenging text, particularly involving the famous ‘realization of philosophy’ in social relations that Adorno contends must take on the task to ‘ruthlessly criticize itself’ in the style of Left Hegelianism (73-4).

Through a good deal of textual analysis the point eventually emerges that Adorno’s critique of Enlightenment and the idealism of absolute knowledge already put forth in Dialectic of Enlightenment is once again repeated in parts of Negative Dialectics (which perhaps represent a partial rethinking of the earlier position). The parts of Adorno’s project that Honneth would like to articulate in his reconstruction would claim that ‘a negative dialectic must, then, unlike its positive alternative, always attempt to bring to light the preintellectual, drivelike, or practical roots of all spiritual phenomena’ (78). This is the materialist, negative basis of Adorno’s project that Honneth valorizes for the purposes of the present. Honneth finds in the text, written in ‘the idiosyncratic form of an ellipse’ (85), a lingering normative commitment that at least implicitly implies that negative dialectics as a ‘self-criticism of philosophy’ holds the promise to include a ‘layer of argumentation on which the phenomenon to be dealt with is presented in light of its effects on the subjective sensibility of the individual researcher’ (82). As we saw, this is Adorno’s partial retention of the ideal type against hermeneutics.

The major difference from Weber that Honneth identifies is that Adorno rejects any sort of ‘schema’, such as that between an unmediated relation of subject/object. On the contrary, Adorno is said to include a sophisticated consideration of individual experiences that have some level of factual objectivity beyond researcher values. In an argument that reaches into the very heart of Adorno’s epistemology, implicit normative foundation (in the terms of ‘justice’, ‘stringency’, ‘exactitude’, etc), and we might even say metaphysics, Honneth argues that for the late Adorno:

the subject of knowledge necessarily belongs to an appropriate representation of a given object. Nevertheless, we have also seen that Adorno only grants such subjective experiences knowledge value when they are sufficiently differentiated, precise, and lucid. Accordingly, he can only ascribe the capacity for truthful, comprehensive knowledge, to those subjects who possess sensorium that corresponds to standards of this kind (83).

Adorno’s conception of the researcher is obviously very interesting from this perspective. Adorno writes at one point that the researcher must feel at least some resistance with the norms of the majority, and to, on that basis precisely, call attention to what the latter for a variety of reasons (loss of attention, personality, attentive experience, etc.) cannot see. Honneth calls this the ‘privileged experiences’ of the researcher, but he contends that Adorno is well aware and concerned about the elitist implications of just such a conclusion (83). For Adorno, the critical intervention of ‘negative dialectics’, as a specific form of hermeneutics, enables ‘the subject’ to become

aware of its “preintellectual,” natural origins [that] would bring so much trust to its own experiences of its environment that it would be able to perceive the multiplicity of aspects in which objects are significant that remained hidden behind conceptual onesidedness under the domination of positive dialectics (Adorno qtd. in 84).

Adorno is certain that the subject has become decentered as a result of capitalist relations. Yet he argues that this is not necessarily a grave problem with the advent of negative dialectics, or philosophical self-criticism. The decentered subject no longer seeks sovereignty or to penetrate reality idealistically. This is no longer possible anyhow given the advances of late capitalist relations. In his systematic analysis of subjectivity, at least as Honneth proposes it in his reconstruction, Adorno’s negative project allows for an epistemological consideration of the subjective loss of sovereignty as a result of decentering. This makes apparent the need for the subject to ‘follows the revaluation of its subjective experience as a central medium of knowledge’ (82). The subject learns to trust its knowledge (to develop ‘unihibitedness’ or a ‘trust in its own experiences’). According to Honneth’s reading, Adorno proposes a rethinking of the possibilities of knowledge after capitalist domination and the decentering of the subject of sovereignty is well underway. Adorno does so in a way that still partially retains an ideal type that can understand the subjective as a crucial part of ‘objective’ social criticism, a form of criticism Adorno calls justice.

Bibliography

Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Maria Pia Lara. "Honneth's New Critical Theory of Recognition." New Left Review November-December (1996).

Honneth, Axel. Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.

———. "Postmodern Identity and Object-Relations Theory: On the Seeming Obsolescence of Psychoanalysis." Philosophical Explorations 2, no. 3 (1999): 225-42.

———. "The Social Dynamics of Disrespect: On the Location of Critical Theory Today." Constellations 1, no. 2 (1994): 255-69.

O'Connor, Brian, ed. The Adorno Reader, Blackwell Readers. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000.

What's so critical about critical theory?

2009-07-11T11:17:22-05:00

A quick inventory: critical race theory, critical discourse analysis, critical food studies, critical animal studies, critical security studies, critical legal studies, critical social theory. Some more: Critical Studies, Critical Studies in Improvisation, Critical Studies in Education, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Critical Studies in Television. There are even departments of critical studies (for instance, at UBC Okanagan, which is the first to show up in Google). You can't go on a campus (or, for that matter, read an academic or political blog) without being confronted by critique and criticism. Originally connected to the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, around the works of Adorno, Horkeimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, Lowenthal, Fromm, Neumann, Oppenheimer, and its successors--such as Habermas and Honneth--the "critical" in "critical theory" has achieved a remarkable degree of autonomy from its origin and, now, we can all be critical without having allegiance whatsoever to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School or its proponents. Indeed, I was even able to write a doctoral comprehensive exam in "critical social theory" a few years back with only having a couple of pieces from Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas on the list.

What is it, then, that we mean by critical when we say "critical whatever studies"? This isn't always clear, if it ever is. More often than not the word "critical" appears to function more as an indicator of club membership than with any actual critical activity (whatever that may mean). The club, in this case, seems to mean something like "theoretically sophisticated" and "holding the right political opinions," opinions which tend, for the most part, towards wishy-washy liberalism and can't-we-all-just-get-along cosmopolitanism. Even though we are critical, we don't want to be too critical, because, if we are sufficiently critical and achieve the social change we strive after (or at least advocate), we could very well be out of our jobs! Afterall, who needs a critical theorist in utopia? Better an employed critical theorist in a liberal capitalist regime than a useless critical theorist in paradise. When I was in the first year of my doctoral program, a tenure-track line opened and we, in the doctoral program, would get to select our priorities with respect to hiring. We elected to search for a social theorist. But not just any social theorist: a critical social theorist. It was never clear what we meant by that and it was never clear what the interviewed candidates understood it to mean (one candidate spoke about Durkheim and Tarde and another spoke about his deep desire to anthologize and translate critical theory from Africa as part of his commitment to cosmopolitanism). Aren't we all critical now? (Except, of course, for those naive positivists and empiricists who can't help themselves and who are lost to the flow of history--even if they get far more research funding than we do.)

So, again, what do we mean by critical? A vulgar sense of critical meaning something like "questioning received opinion" is not unique to any form of critical theory. Take the criminological school of left realism--thoroughly empiricist and positivist (bad! bad!) but also critical of mainstream criminology. (Left realism usually advances, among other things, a program of decarceration.) It would seem that you can be critical without being critical.

For these reasons, it is refreshing to read the second, "A Social Pathology of Reason: On the Intellectual Legacy of Critical Theory", and third, "Reconstructive Social Criticism with a Genealogical Proviso: On the Idea of "Critique" in the Frankfurt School," chapters of Alex Honneth's recently published collected, Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory. In these two chapters, Honneth lays out what he takes to be two core concepts in Critical Theory: the idea of a social pathology of reason and, of course, the idea of critique. Honneth clearly recognizes these problems, "With the turn of the new century, Critical Theory appears to have become an intellectual artifact." We can be critical without being critical. This critical-without-being critical fully demonstrates the "intellectual gap separating us from the theoretical beginnings of the Frankfurt School. [...] Today a younger generation carries on the work of social criticism without having much more than a nostalgic memory of the heroic years of Western Marxism" (19). The gap is so great--between us and the Frankfurt School style of social criticism--that is has been more than thirty years since Marcus and Horkheimer have been read as contemporaries. As discussed by Roger in his post on the first chapter, and in ensuing discussion, history as a progressive movement guided by reason is a concept very foreign to us, especially to those of us who (such as myself) who view Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida as our nearest ancestors. I confess: reading Honneth's essays makes me feel rather uneasy. How could he believe in historical progress? How could he believe in reason? Afterall, as I like to point out, we kill and abuse more animals absolutely and relatively now, at the start of the twenty-first century, than we did a hundred and twenty years ago when the doctrines of "animal welfare" were first created. How can anyone seriously suggest that reason and progress and are both operative in history without sounding as crass as someone like Richard Dawkins who assures us that historical-moral progress is real despite the temporary setback of the Holocaust? How can we take Honneth's suggestion that capitalism blocks the development of historical progress and reason seriously? How can this be anything other than naive belief and ideology in the face of all facts? When was the last time history progressed? Kojeve-Fukuyama has won; Horkheimer-Honneth have lost. Why does Honneth persist in his belief of a "socially effective rationality"?

Social Pathology

This brings us to the central concept of the second chapter, social pathology of reason. Honneth, in his own words:

Critical Theory, in contrast--and in a way that may be unique to it--insists on a mediation of theory and history in a concept of socially effective rationality. That is, the historical past should be understood from a practical point of view: as a process of development whose pathological deformation by capitalism may be overcome only by initiating a process of enlightenment among those involved. It is this working model of the intertwining of theory and history that grounds the unity of Critical Theory, despite its variety of voices. [...] Designating the legacy of Critical Theory for the new century would necessarily involve recovering from the idea of a social pathology of reason an explosive charge that can still be touched off today.

What follows the development of his concept of social pathology is an explanation of how capitalism can be understood as a cause of deformed rationality and, then, an attempt to connect Critical Theory to overcoming social suffering caused by social pathologies of reason. According to Honneth, "social pathology" can be found as an operative concept in many of the core members of the Frankfurt School: Horkheimer's "irrational organization," Adorno's "administered world," Marcuse's "one-dimensional society" and "repressive tolerance," and Habermas's "colonization of the social life-world." Each of these thinkers also offer a corrective to social pathology. For instance, Horkheimer's "human work," Marcuse's "aesthetic life" and Habermas's "communicative action." The standard, then, for identifying social pathology is through reference to the corrective or normative social rationality which is the highest developed form of rationality possible at that historical moment: society is pathological insofar as it does not live up to the highest possible form of social rationality. The normative concept is then both the means of diagnosis--the departure point of criticism--and the cure. The more societies tend toward the normative ideal, the more able are subjects able to "co-operatively self-actualize" and thus lead themselves to freedom in the context of a free society.

At times, this idea of "co-operative self-actualization" sounds a bit like Michael Jackson ethics: "if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make a change." However, Honneth argues that this impression is false by playing off Critical Theory against both liberalism and communitarianism. The simple view of liberalism is that the individual's good takes preference over the community's good meanwhile the simple view of communitarianism is that the community's good takes preference over the individual's good. For Honneth, it is the case that in order to take part in other-actualization, it is often the case that narrow self-interest will have to be set aside. But this does not imply that the other's actualization leads to a communitarianism whereby all others take precedence over the self. Rather, in Honneth's view, self-actualization and other-actualization are closely connected to one another. In fact, the self cannot be free if the other is not also free. Critical Theory, then, at once advocates the liberation of the self and the other, of the individual and the community.

The final section of the essay attempts to connect the concepts of social pathology to liberation through comparison to psychoanalysis. This is the least developed and least convincing part of the essay. It is likely unconvincing because it is underdeveloped. The basic argument here is that social pathology produces social disorders in much the same way as neurosis produces individual suffering. The point of the psychoanalytic cure is to either learn the cause of the neurosis and then develop strategies to enable the patient to live with it. The problem seems to be that individuals are more willing to admit their own personal problems than societies are willing to admit their social problems: the public might complain, but the public doesn't want to change or even recognize its own complicity in the problems. This is why capitalism operates as a social pathology: it creates the conditions under which the effects and the cause are separated from one another. People can easily perceive the effects, but cannot perceive the cause and, thus, cannot work to stop the cause.

The Idea of "Critique"

The third chapter attempts to articulate the specific meaning of "critique" in Critical Theory in an ideal sense. The chapter attempts this articulation or retrieval largely in the face of criticism of the standpoint of critique offered by thinkers such as Michael Walzer and Richard Rorty. These two distinguish between what could be a called a "strong" and "weak" sense of criticism, the latter of which they favour. The weak sense of critique is "internal" to the society being criticized and, to a certain extent, identifies with the prevailing values: it "always already presupposes a certain affirmation of the prevailing moral culture in the society concerned." The strong sense of critique is "external" or transcendent to the society being criticized and tends to refuse identification with prevailing values. The problem with the latter approach to critique is that its appeal to external and universal moral principles "necessarily takes too distanced a perspective to be understood by its addressess." Hence, it "runs the risk of claiming an elitist specialized knowledge." Given these two alternatives, thinkers such as Rorty and Walzer advocate the weak, or context-bound, rather than the strong, or context-transcending, form of social criticism.

This, admits Honneth, is a serious charge to the legacy of Critical Theory. One-Dimensional Man and the Dialectic of Enlightenment are readily provided by Rorty and Walzer as examples of context-transcending forms of criticism. Similarly, there is an admitted distance between the central texts of Critical Theory and the institutional order of society leading to the impression that Critical Theory has lost--if it ever had--its normative reference points and tends towards a totalizing ideology. Despite these obstacles, Honneth sets for himself the task of reconstructing the meaning of critique for Critical Theory. His point here is to develop an ideal-type (not his language) of critique for Critical Theory while recognizing that many, if not most, of the core texts of the school do not come close to exemplifying this ideal-type. Indeed, "I am among those who want to leave no doubt that the basic historical-philosophical and sociological assumptions of the Frankfurt School can no longer be defended." Honneth's potentially surprising solution to this problem is the injection of Nietzschean genealogy into the generally left-Hegelian approach of the Frankfurt School (hence the subtitle to the chapter).

Drawing upon Walzer again, Honneth lays three senses of critique:

Constructive - this refers to a procedure of justification readily and reasonably agreed to by members of the society in question (potentially under fictive conditions, such as a "veil of ignorance") that have the ability to attain normative status which can then be used to criticize the existing social institutions.
Reconstructive - this refers to the attempt to uncover the normative ideals of social institutions and social practice that are suitable to be used as instruments of critique in the existing society.
Genealogical - this refers to the attempt to demonstrate how normative ideals become transformed into their opposite, practices of domination.

With this paradigm in place, what conclusions does Honneth come to regarding the meaning of critique in Critical Theory? His argument is Critical Theory originally began being solely concerned with reconstructive forms of critique (which were admittedly occasionally simple and vulgar), but, in response to Nazism, "Critical Theory underwent a systematic convergence with Nietzsche's geneaology." The lesson to be drawn from this is that social rationality appears to produce normative ideals, however these normative ideals are subject to historical change. Their existence in the present may have little relation to their genesis. That is, what was once normative may have over time come to be instruments of domination. (We can think of a totally administered society or the irrational consequences of rationalization.) Thus, previously normative ideals could lose "the normative kernel" over time. As a result, genealogy and reconstructive criticism must be aligned with one another. Indeed, the form of critique practiced by Critical Theory could conceivably involve all three forms of criticism:

a critical standpoint that develops a concept of rationality that "establishes a systematic connection between social rationality and moral validity"
this connection between social rationality and moral validity determines social reality in the form of ideals
however, these moral ideals must be analyzed in light of the "genealogical proviso" that their original meaning may have been lost or have become unrecognizable.

Honneth's ultimate conclusion is that he "fear[s] that what Critical Theory once meant by the idea social criticism cannot be defended today, short of this extremely high standard." For my part, I see this extremely high standard as falling into the trap of the "strong" sense of criticism whereby social criticism becomes the domain of rarefied expert knowledge with little or no connection to the society as a whole. Indeed, there appears to be a striking disconnect between the two chapters under discussion on this point. The first chapter advocates a close connection between theory and practice, the second chapter advocates an impossibly high concept of critique that is not only inaccessible to most academics, but especially to society at large.

As-if Honneth were one Kant (and not another)…

2009-07-03T20:12:24-05:00

It is quite serendipitous to me that Axel Honneth begins his book Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory with a look at Immanuel Kant’s essay “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.” As an undergraduate, I lived and breathed Kant’s transcendentalism. I kept my heavily underlined copies of the Meiklejohn translation of Critique of Pure Reason in my backpack. “As-if” was my mantra, as one professor or another listed their arguments against Kant. “You make ethical decisions as-if you could will them universally.” “Judgments of taste are subjective, they are only willed as-if everyone would agree.” The Kantian world I inhabited was a mystical place of uncanny “as-ifs” and sublime negative pleasures connecting harmoniously with scientific reason and synthetic a priori knowledge.

When I read “Idea for a Universal History,” however, everything changed. Kant’s desire to prove the inevitability of progress and the connection between progress and nature annihilated my carefully positioned “as-ifs.” “[I]f it considers the play of the freedom of the human will in the large,” Kant argues, “it can discover within it a regular course; and that in this way what meets the eye in individual subjects as confused and irregular yet in the whole species can be recognized as a steadily progressing through slow development of its original predispositions” (10). I had little interest in a “in the large” deterministic Kant. Much of the disillusionment came from my inability to historicize either Kant’s development as a thinker or his place within the prejudices of the Enlightenment. As time wore on, and I entered graduate school, I thought less and less about Kant and more and more about thinkers like Benjamin, Derrida, and Badiou.

Honneth’s chapter brings me back to Kant for two related reasons. First, Honneth aligns Kant with historical awareness and critical social theory. This succeeds in showing an alternative Kant whose model of social progress might be fragmentary, but who is nevertheless interested in the historicity of social and political change. Second, by sketching this portrait of Kant as a social and historical thinker, Honneth places Kant in the tradition of not only the Frankfurt school but also more contemporary thinkers like Alain Badiou. Willing the universal through the powerful and critical figure of the “as-if,” Kant’s ideas of progress become invaluable in thinking the importance of the event as a critical model of historical awareness.

It is important, I believe, to point out that Honneth’s Kant is a Kant constructed by fragments: not a satisfactory systematic model. Honneth admits, “a satisfactory model of historical progress cannot be constructed from these fragments of an alternative explanatory model in Kant’s writings” (17). He portrays a Kant always almost on the verge of historical thinking, ambivalent, stretched between explanations for why progress makes theoretical and methodological sense. “[I]ndeed,” Honneth writes, “the impression is not entirely unjustified that Kant hesitated between these different alternatives right up to the end of his life” (3). One Kant believes in an explanation for progress based on the tendencies of our reason. Human beings are, like Kant, caught between believing in laws of nature and insisting upon the freedom to make moral choices. For this Kant, our cognition (always wanting unity instead of chaos) bridges this paradox in accordance with the expectation of purpose. Purpose is cognitive, reflective, retroactive, and cultural. Random events are reordered by a purpose-directed rationality to synthesize the opposition between freedom and order. The cosmopolitan state that Kant mentions in his essay is a practical necessity emerging from the need of human beings to imagine better and better purposes for themselves.

Honneth’s second Kant believes in historical purpose stemming from our practical reason. Those who act as moral agents must, in Kant’s view, believe in social progress. Instead of relying upon a theoretical argument about cognition, Kant instead appeals to the ability to will an act universally. Moral agents must act as-if they could will that everyone (past, present, and future) act in the same manner. In this sense, those who act morally and will their moral acts universally must admit that history is turned towards progress. Note that, at least for Honneth, Kant’s argument means that one’s attitude toward history has an impact on one’s ability to be a moral actor. One cannot act morally without willing that act universally and, by doing so, affirming the belief in progress. Even those who eschew the concept of progress, yet act to promote the welfare of others (Honneth mentions Moses Mendelssohn), secretly believe in the possibility that their work will lead to social progress. For Honneth, this is due not to any inevitable transcendental plan but “the narrative organizational principle of historical self-reassurance in the politically-driven process of enlightenment” (10). Acting with regards to political improvement, for Honneth’s second Kant, makes historical awareness of progress a practical (though not theoretical) inevitability.

While Kant hesitates between the cognitive and the practical framework for political and social progress, Honneth does not. Honneth, acting in accordance with his own historically situated political awareness, chooses the interventionist Kant over the cognitive-theoretical Kant. He suggests, for example, several models Kant proposed as mechanisms for continuing social progress. One is social antagonism that, for Kant, develops “a heightened sense of honor […] kept continuously alert by the constant threat of war” (13). Another is embedded within Kant’s theory of education. While nature gives human beings the ability to think freely, the culmination of successive generations of free thinkers creates “the cognitive process of progress” or history as “the unfolding of moral rationalization” (15). Kant argues that such an unfolding depends upon the ability of individuals to not be dulled by conventional thinking or bullied by “intimidation, the threat of violence, and state censorship” (16).

The cognitive-theoretical Kant sees progress emerging from a cognitive necessity: whether necessity comes from a desire for unity or a vanity. The interventionist Kant sees progress between moral actors aware of their place within a history of social progress and suppressive, conventional powers who keep thinking dull and safe. One cannot help but see progress in Honneth’s interventionist-Kant erupting in much the same way Alain Badiou describes the event. While Badiou would be critical of Kant’s description of history, the method whereby moral actors become part of history represents – I believe – a proto-Badiouian elaboration of what he will later call the fidelity to the event. Here, I believe, the description of moral actors acting as-if they could will an act to be universal is key.

Badiou’s description of the event, one’s fidelity to the event, and universalism are probably well known to many people on this site. I will, therefore, attempt to briefly define all three before showing how Honneth’s interventionist Kant fits into this tradition. Badiou describes the event in Ethics as “whatever convokes someone to the composition of a subject […] something that happens in situations as something that the usual way of behaving cannot account for” (41). The subject, in Badiou’s analysis is formed outside of conventionality by something absolutely outside its situation. This something is the event. A little down further on the page, Badiou distinguishes “multiple being, where it is not a matter of truth (but only of opinions), from the event, which compels us to decide a new way of being” (41). The event ruptures the situation and compels a new existence. While creating this new being is a subjective act (in that it creates a subject), the truth of the event is a willed universalism, outside of all opinion. Fidelity to the event is fidelity to this universalism: an act of indifference to opinion and situation that nevertheless fits entirely within the situation of the subject.

Honneth’s and Kant’s work are not reducible to Badiou’s event. I want to suggest, nevertheless, that Honneth’s contribution in this first chapter is formulating Kant as an interventionist social theorist whose commitments to willed universalism, progress, and moral action form analogues to Badiou’s later formulation of the event. The interventionist power of the “as-if” retains an awareness of multiplicity while also asserting the universality of moral and political acts. The non-teleological work done by Kant’s formulation of progress places moral actors within a history whose meaning is established by their actions and decisions. The possibility of moral action depends upon formulating knowledge that erupts convention and, while also relying upon awareness of one’s place within history, also positions itself against the stupefying powers of conformity. Kant’s moral actor chooses progress over cynicism by seizing the power of the “as-if” and willing universality. Likewise, Honneth reconfigures Kant as an interventionist social thinker by seizing the event of his work and choosing the power of decision and fidelity over ambivalence. Honneth’s Kant reminds me of the interventionist power of the “as-if” which, like any political or moral action, must be chosen, willed, and formed out of the chaos of ambivalence.

Works Cited
Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. New York: Verso, 2002.

Honneth, Axel. Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory. Trans. James Ingram. New York: Columbia UP, 2009.

Kant, Immanuel. Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim: A Critical Guide. Ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.

Matt Taibbi on "The Great American Bubble Machine"

2009-07-03T11:33:52-05:00

Oh, I'm a huge fan of this guy's investigative journalism, published today "on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression." (Cue emphatically vague, prosaic protests from the PR wing of Goldman Sachs.) Especially as at times he seems like the only one who is effectively doing this: translating our reality of economic-apartheid/corporate dictatorship/organized crime to a popular audience, and with proper pathos of indignation. Taibbi may not have been possible without the likes of Chomsky, but he sure does a better job keeping us awake. (Needless to say, part of this work is holding otherwise sympathetic but obviously worn-down, increasingly platitudinous critics-become-automatons to a higher standard, which Taibbi also does pretty well.) His conclusion under the fold:

It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers — one of Goldman's last real competitors — collapse without intervention. ("Goldman's superhero status was left intact," says market analyst Eric Salzman, "and an investment-banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.") The very next day, Paulson greenlighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed.

Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bank-holding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding — most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs — and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.

Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict-of-interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank-holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman — New York Fed president William Dudley — is yet another former Goldmanite.

The collective message of all of this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank-holding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage."

Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.

Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion- dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance. (Read the whole article)

WILL THE CAT ABOVE THE PRECIPICE FALL DOWN?

2009-06-28T17:30:24-05:00

The following is Zizek's response to the events currently taking place in Iran. Surprisingly, they seem rather banal and uncontroversial. I am curious what people think of his view that "we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists."

Will the Cat above the Precipice Fall Down?

By Slavoj Zizek

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction.

We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down…

In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman simply withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although there were street fights going on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game is over.

Is something similar going on now?

There are many versions of the events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western “reform movement” along the lines of the “orange” revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, etc. – a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution.

They support the protests as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic secular Iran freed of Muslim fundamentalism.

They are counteracted by skeptics who think that Ahmadinejad really won: he is the voice of the majority, while the support of Mousavi comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth.

In short: let’s drop the illusions and face the fact that, in Ahmadinejad, Iran has a president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the cleric establishment with merely cosmetic differences from Ahmadinejad: Mousavi also wants to continue the atomic energy program, he is against recognizing Israel, plus he enjoyed the full support of Khomeini as a prime minister in the years of the war with Iraq.

Finally, the saddest of them all are the Leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad: what is really at stake for them is Iranian independence. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence, exposed elite corruption and used oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority – this is, so we are told, the true Ahmadinejad beneath the Western-media image of a holocaust-denying fanatic. According to this view, what is effectively going on now in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a West-financed coup against the legitimate president. This view not only ignores facts: the high electoral participation – up from the usual 55% to 85% – can only be explained as a protest vote. It also displays its blindness for a genuine demonstration of popular will, patronizingly assuming that, for the backward Iranians, Ahmadinejad is good enough – they are not yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular Left.

Opposed as they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests along the axis of Islamic hardliners versus pro-Western liberal reformists, which is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: Is he a Western-backed reformer who wants more personal freedom and market economy, or a member of the cleric establishment whose eventual victory would not affect in any serious way the nature of the regime?

Such extreme oscillations demonstrate that they all miss the true nature of the protests.

The green color adopted by the Mousavi supporters, the cries of “Allah akbar!” that resonate from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness, clearly indicate that they see their activity as the repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its roots, the undoing of the revolution’s later corruption. This return to the roots is not only programmatic; it concerns even more the mode of activity of the crowds: the emphatic unity of the people, their all-encompassing solidarity, creative self-organization, improvising of the ways to articulate protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline, like the ominous march of thousands in complete silence. We are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution.

There are a couple of crucial consequences to be drawn from this insight. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His demagogic distributing of crumbs to the poor should not deceive us: behind him are not only organs of police repression and a very Westernized PR apparatus, but also a strong new rich class, the result of the regime’s corruption.

(Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is not a working class militia, but a mega-corporation, the strongest center of wealth in the country.)

Second, one should draw a clear difference between the two main candidates opposed to Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi. Karroubi effectively is a reformist, basically proposing the Iranian version of identity politics, promising favors to all particular groups. Mousavi is something entirely different: his name stands for the genuine resuscitation of the popular dream which sustained the Khomeini revolution. Even if this dream was a utopia, one should recognize in it the genuine utopia of the revolution itself. What this means is that the 1979 Khomeini revolution cannot be reduced to a hard line Islamist takeover – it was much more. Now is the time to remember the incredible effervescence of the first year after the revolution, with the breath-taking explosion of political and social creativity, organizational experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. The very fact that this explosion had to be stifled demonstrates that the Khomeini revolution was an authentic political event, a momentary opening that unleashed unheard-of forces of social transformation, a moment in which “everything seemed possible.” What followed was a gradual closing through the take-over of political control by the Islam establishment. To put it in Freudian terms, today’s protest movement is the “return of the repressed” of the Khomeini revolution.

And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front of our eyes.

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others.

Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

One can also listen to Zizek make similar comments here.

The Idea of "Tradition" and Animal Studies

2009-06-27T10:31:38-05:00

Being the sort of person who reads - and comments - at blogs, I've found myself in discussions from time to time regarding the morality of animal use. Lately, the context has been the Canadian seal hunt and efforts by Native advocates to justify one form of seal hunt (traditional), but condemn another form (capitalist). Notably, the major American animal welfare organizations also make this distinction between traditional use and commercial exploitation. I am in the minority, it seems, as I am opposed to animals being slaughtered by Mr. Money-bags just as much as I am opposed to animals being slaughtered by Noble Savage.

Advocates of the "traditional" hunt will routinely make reference to using much more of the seal's carcass than what is found in the "capitalist" hunt. (Although the reason why Mr. Money-bags doesn't use the entirety of the carcass is likely because there is limited potential for commercial exploitation (e.g., meat, oils, by-products) and, if there were, seals would be rounded up and placed in factory conditions.) Of course, the advocates of "tradition" usually forgot that a commodity, the base unit in capitalist economies, is any good produced for sale. The seal is, indeed, largely slaughtered for sale - the "traditional" hunt is as capitalist as the "capitalist" hunt.

But, from the theoretical standpoint, that isn't the most interesting thing - fetishizing cultures isn't really an academic interest in mine (although one has to wonder if the fetishization of Noble Savage as engaged in an authentic lifestyle outside of capitalism has something to do with a feeling of inauthenticity experienced by many living in large cities where no outside of capitalism can be seen; it is the urban advocates of the "traditional" seal hunt that are interesting). What is interesting is the recourse ostensibly "progressive" people have to defenses of "tradition."

Why do self-named "progressives" find security in tradition? What is so "progressive" about tradition? The question I put to them is quite obvious: how do you justify one form of "tradition" for the very reason that you perceive it to be "tradition" but condemn another form of "tradition" because you just don't like it? How can the seal hunt be defended because it is "tradition" but anti-semitism, homophobia, racism, sexism, and the like cannot? How can you say Noble Savage is a being who finds his moral core in the traditional hunt while at the same time condemning marital rape or genital mutilation? How do you distinguish between "good" traditions and "bad" traditions? Can that even be done? Once you've defended one thing "because it is tradition," it seems that only logical position one can adopt is to defend all practices deemed traditional.

The only response I ever get is that I am being shrill.

Notes from the Long Sunday Beginning June 7, 2009

2009-06-14T14:53:49-05:00

Entry 11 – June 8, 2009: This evening, my outreach team spent a half an hour guiding a staggering Tamil man down Yonge Street and across Queen to Fred Victor, the shelter at which he is living. Nevertheless, he wound up conked out in a bus enclosure across the way. The building was surrounded by fire trucks, cop cars, and news reporters and a second floor room was gutted and still smoldering. D., the brief flame of I.’s around the time she took the broken bottle to her previous boyfriend’s neck, happened to be hanging out at the bus enclosure.

Outreach this afternoon was relatively less eventful. We ran into quite a few people, new and old, including R. just as we were finishing up. I promised to help her connect with Streets to Homes during the evening walk, and, even though I couldn’t get a hold of J. or M., I was able to begin the process in a way that seemed to brighten her outlook. We also ran into R., S.’s Gladue follow up worker. R. promised to see what’s going on with Rainbow Lodge as well as the Inuit specific treatment centre in Ottawa. Also, some progress seems finally to have been made with respect to R. Ferguson’s remains, but it appears as if he still lies unburied after nearly two and a half months. G.’s wheelchair is having trouble again, and he was clearly recovering from a rough weekend. B. [the man with the broken hand] was not home. Two young guys from Steinbach, MB are staying in our building for a couple of weeks as part of a learning tour. One walked with me this afternoon, the other this evening.

As we finished up this afternoon, the other team told me that I.S. wanted to see me and that he was camped out in the cement cove behind the construction site across Yonge Street. I found him there at the end of this evening’s walk along with T., the knife waver. I’d never had a proper introduction. T. was affable enough, but far from remorseful. In between walks, I had dinner and facilitated the monthly meeting at [one of the community houses]. Nearly every such meeting has been fraught with problems since the first one in August or September, but tonight “everything is fantastically fantastic” (M.). D. shared part of his life story. He grew up in a devoutly Catholic home in which his father nevertheless claimed atheism. D.’s high school conversion to Missionary Alliance evangelicalism and subsequent decision to study to become a pastor did not go over so well with his family. His presence in the house has pacified a multitude of storms; hopefully he’ll land a job in the greater Toronto area.

Entry 12 – June 9, 2009: We remembered A. at the homeless today. I have to prepare myself a bit beforehand for these things as I’m now known as the [our church] guy and almost always asked if I want to say something, at least talk about if and when the service will be at our place. T., whose last name I didn’t catch, died this weekend and his name will be added I heard. Is that Cockroach whispered Aylish? Cockroach is one of those very few street legends with a nickname that I’ve never met, and apparently won’t. Those that I have met include The Ratman, Joe Banana, Mr. Fuck You, Teardrop, and Bear. I learned later in the day that T. had recently visited Cockroach in the hospital and that he was in a coma that no one had expected him to recover from. He and A. shared many friends and it had been hoped that he’d at least survive through her memorial service. A few minutes later someone stepped to the microphone and said, “This is unconfirmed, but we just got word that C. died. C. is the guy who played a song on the guitar last month here.” At this point, the weight felt too great and I leaned over and held the knees of my pants for a few minutes.

Toward the end of the memorial, as the awful guitar soloist who plays nearly every month got started, D., Mayor Miller’s receptionist and a former member of my steering committee, arrived for our lunch appointment next door at the marvelous little café staffed by psychiatric survivors. This is the café where H. cursed the manager as a ‘fucking demon bitch’ for calling the cops. After debriefing from the walk I joined J. for a coffee to discuss the Religion and the City syllabus she is putting together. As I headed for the subway station afterward to return home, get a haircut, and pick up the kids, I ran into S., H., and a few others outside the Bay station. G. waved me over. We had only chatted for a few moments when a bike cop came through the alleyway and tried to shoo us away. We moved a few short steps and continued talking. After entering the station, I reemerged a few moments later to make sure the officer, who hung around the whole time we talked, wasn’t just waiting to pursue things further once I’d left. He was out of sight, but S. told me that the same guy had been trying to chase them all out of the area the last few days.

Earlier in the day I’d lost it a bit with the super at G.’s building. They don’t accept cash anymore for new keys and such, and he had told G. he wouldn’t accept the money order made out by the bank to TCHC unless the payer whose name was on the order was there (and that even though I’d written on the order and initialed it for G.’s key). I waited around for him for several minutes and when he finally showed up he said it was now his lunch break and he couldn’t help me. A little outburst did the trick.

Entry 13 – June 10, 2009: A fight erupted during A.'s (aka Apple) memorial service. It nearly went physical. Eventually three long time community members, two of whom had dated her, left the building. N. was the precipitating cause. Also known as Popeye, one of N.'s eyes is half brown and half blue. He smokes a pipe, has a massive tangle of white hair attached to his face, and, as we found out afterward, creeped A. out. She often hightailed it whenever he showed up, considering him a dirty old man, which, as G. pointed out in debrief, he quite literally is. Before the service Popeye genuflected before the makeshift altar at the front, smooching A.'s picture several times. He routinely made comments during the service as others spoke. Near the end of open remembrance time, Gwd, one of the three, rose to speak and Popeye piped up. Gwd lost it with him and simply refused to let it go. R. moved from the back of the room to retrieve his dog C., a burly old shepherd sprawled out at the front on the dance floor. The Colonel joined him as he left and Gwd left off speaking, and at G.'s suggestion signaled for his dog B. and joined the other two out the door. G. gave a moving version of his “fearfully and wonderfully made” eulogy (I was certainly taking notes after the experience in March officiating such an occasion for the first time), but he'd made a bit of a tactical mistake here and later almost acknowledged as much. It is a forgiving community in which we dwell.

More happens at one of these memorials than can be logged in summary. N. was a consistent rival of the deceased for the affections of M., for whom we had a service my first February. She arrived just as today’s proceedings were ending. N. turned fifty on Monday, the same day that B., her horribly abusive beaux, was released from the box. It is incredible that N. should be the survivor of the trio; the frigid breath of the grim reaper has been palpable in her presence long since.

A. was born to Mohawk parents on the Six Nations reserve and adopted out to white parents who forced her to keep certain secrets. Her smile, general sense of good cheer, bravado, and love of dancing, drink, and late night quiet for her pet rat were much remarked upon.

Entry 14 – June 11, 2009: J., my bridge partner for an hour and a half this evening, has long reminded me of the old time Marxist from Amores Perros. He certainly has the look. His enjoyment of life gives him perhaps a polar opposite personality, but it also makes his entire being a witness to seventy years of so of a life lived without the infectious spirit of capitalism. He showed up this evening with two dark black eyes and a third black welt between his eyebrows. “I assume the other guy is even worse off.” “No,” says J. slowly, barely suppressing laughter, “I went up against the sidewalk and am now oh for twenty-four in such matches. A beer bottle got caught in the spokes of my bike, and I went right over the handlebars. His enunciation of ‘bottle’ is reminiscent of Louis Armstrong in “The Dummy Song,” and his bicycle is a hippie thing with air horns and streamers and usually a collection of flowers, plastic or otherwise, sticking out of a basket in the front.

My friend T. was formed for seventy-two hours beginning this morning. He went with his housing follow-up worker to a disability qualification assessment. He talked suicide and mentioned the Rosedale bridge, which I’ve twice somewhat casually walked him to, through, and away from. He reached a boiling point in his pursuit of K. the evening prior, smashed his television with a clothes hanging bar again, and is now quite sure he’s done with the apartment he’s now managed to hold down for right at a year with the help of G., an incredibly gifted and devoted housing worker out of NaMeRes who works with Thomas even though he isn’t aboriginal. Thomas wondered aloud throughout the day about all his friends (myself, G., L., E., etc.) being “institutional.”

Drop-in grew increasingly busy during the dinner hour, but was generally smooth and peaceful. At least inside. Outside in the parkette and then on the sidewalk in front of the church, a series of fights broke out. Four out of the five involved B., the most persistent and intimidating and successful of the politicized street crowd. He once kicked out the windows of two cop cars in one evening and beat the charges with the help of OCAP lawyers. As the story goes, according to A. and others, B. fronted three quarters of the money for a bottle of wine. S. [from the other day in front of Bay station], the guy who chipped in the other two bucks and did the LCBO run, invited several other friends to join in the merriment. B. was not amused. He allowed the bottle to go ’round the circle one time then tucked his prize into his coat and walked off. Over the course of the next hour, three of the guys took turns sucker punching Brian, a six foot five and sometimes surly Newfoundlander, as he sat on a bench near our church. Two of the three attackers are rough enough characters to be on our very short indefinitely barred list. Still, B. held his peace until the third incident. At that point he came to wait outside the door of the sanctuary, sending someone in after S., whom he blamed for starting the trouble. An intense scrap ensued in which S.’s face was bloodied, though not terribly so.

I was called out to join others in breaking things up. A few of us were hit in the melee, including our newest nurse, E.. I just managed to duck a massive overhand from B. who though he heard S. coming up behind him again. He did. But I was facing Steve and was between the two. Not entirely sure how I saw it coming. No barrings were laid as almost all the action took place off the property, and even the blow to E.’s shoulder was unintentional. E. had been reluctant to account for being hit as she didn’t want any barrings. Within a week, I’m sure, all five guys will be passing it ’round the circle again.

Entry 15 – June 12, 2009: T. picked C. up from the airport this morning after his flight from Thunder Bay where he spent five weeks in treatment. D. took the train in from her family’s place. They walked along the shore to our house, joined us for dinner, and then left for an AA meeting. They are scheduled to stay at C.’s brother R.’s place this evening.

The Idea of "Evil" and Animal Studies

2009-06-14T10:33:21-05:00

Elsewhere, in a discussion about using the word evil in relation to factory farms, I brought up an incident from the class for high school students I taught a month or so ago. We had just finished watching the documentary "Death on a Factory Farm" (if HBO asks "HBO Canada or HBO USA," choose the latter) and I was trying to impress upon them a significant point: they needed to video of a pig being killed via hanging in order to proceed with animal cruelty charges. They didn't understand why the hanging was so important. The reason they needed to video of the hanging is, in simple terms, that if the practice is generally accepted, then it cannot by definition be cruel. Hence, regardless of how horrible generally accepted practices are, they are completely legal. So, just providing footage of gestation crates, of piglets being thrown up to ten feet into a cart, tossed by their tails or ears into the back of a school bus (what they used to move animals on the farm), segregating dying animals among themselves without food or water or medicine, not providing medical assistance to sick or injured animals, use of electric prods, etc. is not sufficient because these are the normal practices of all pig farms. Cruelty, under the law, requires exceptional cruelty. Thus, the investigation focused on getting footage of the favoured method of euthanasia on this farm: hanging pigs by chains from forklifts. Once I had established this point, the students wanted to know if the people working on the farm were evil - only an evil person would willingly act this way. I wasn't expecting that question and I wasn't sure how to proceed.

Now, this is important. In much animal rights/animal welfare literature, the concept of evil is strongly resisted, largely for rhetorical rather than theoretical reasons: if you are trying to convince someone to change the way they live their life, calling them evil is likely not especially productive. My first attempt to answer their question was to point out a series of incidents in the documentary: the defense lawyers and many locals attending the trials would routinely point out that these are radical animal rights activists coming in from California (the farm was in Ohio) to tell them how they should live their lives. They experienced the animal cruelty charges as an attack on their lifestyle. To an extent this is true. Afterall, most of the people in this community are farmers and all of them had come from farming families. Generations of their families had lived in this way. What they were doing - raising animals for slaughter - was completely normal to them as were the practices entailed in raising animals for slaughter. In effect, to accuse one of them of acting cruelly was to indict the entire community for being cruel and evil. This led the students to consider if evil was dependent upon one's standpoint: how could what they do seem evil to use but seem absolutely normal to them?

After this line of discussion, I tried pushing it a little further and asked them what would mean if the farmers - even the ones charged with animal cruelty - weren't evil. What if it is the system as a whole that is evil, but that the individuals themselves are not necessarily good or evil? The point here, in part, being that if they want to call the farmers evil and if they themselves eat meat, then there is a good chance that they are also evil. The students certainly didn't feel evil even though many of them ate meat, besides they would know - or so they thought - if they were evil or not.

I then pointed out that all of us have incredible capacities for violence and cruelty without even being aware that we are acting in violent and cruel ways. I told them about the Stanford prison experiment. The basic conclusion of the experiment is that so long as an authority is telling us to do it, we tend not to experience the action as evil or cruel. This, in turn, led to another unexpected development. A student who was Jewish - she had previously talked about kosher restrictions on her diet - said this sounded a lot like the Holocaust. I agreed with her that it did, but I didn't push the point. She went on to say that it was hard to call individual Germans evil and that it would be hard to distinguish between death camp guards and regular Germans, but that she also wanted to call the Holocaust as a whole one of the greatest evils ever perpetuated by humans against humans. I agreed with her: it is hard to say that every individual German suddenly became evil in 1933 and suddenly became normal again at the conclusion of the war. Given this, how are we to think about the Holocaust? Surely, we want to call it evil but doesn't that also mean that millions of regular, everyday Germans went into a decade long trance of ultimate evil and then came out as normal as ever? This hardly makes sense.

The conclusion they came to, it seems, is that we need to differentiate between "subjective evil" (the evil individual) and "objective evil" (the evil institution). People can operate within objective evil without themelves being subjectively evil. However, that does not mean that all people in an objectively evil system are more or less good - there are surely subjectively evil people too: those who derive a great deal of pleasure from cruelty. The advantage of this, they agreed, was that we could also talk about incidents of subjective evil admidst a generally objectively evil situation - Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, for instance.

The question they unfortunately never raised was the relation between the objectively evil institution of the factory farm and the rest of society: without the factory farm, societies as they currently exist could not exist. In order to consume nearly 60 billion animals annually worldwide, it is necessary to produce animals under factory conditions. Does that mean that if our societies cannot exist without these objectively evil insitutions that we ourselves are all subjectively evil?