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The Mythic Liberal Voter in the Solid Crystal of Society:In Response to Michael Hannon’s “Disagreement or Badmouthing?”

            This document came about because of a public (however small that public might’ve been) Twitter conversation. I lamented that people fail to read a great deal of very useful political epistemology literature. As evidence, I (not realizing that what I took to be an inconsequential complaint would unexpectedly turn) pointed to what I saw as a disappointing volume—that which Michael Hannon recently edited. For me, this document serves to respond to Hannon’s challenge and to demonstrate how a rather large body of literature could solve the problems that present themselves in Hannon’s (but not only Hannon’s) volume. I understand the result of my response to be evidence of the problem in the academy by which ever-increasing specialization leads disciplines and sub-disciplines apart, never again to cross paths. Were Hannon and his colleagues to have taken seriously some literature in certain strands of phenomenology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, anthropology, social psychology, and related areas, many of the philosophical mistakes that appear in the volume’s chapters would likely have been avoided, but alas, here we are: Hell.

            Hannon argues that, because many people don’t really hold beliefs on political matters, it’s often the case that people neither agree nor disagree on political matters. At certain points in Hannon’s chapter, he (whether intentionally or not) gestures toward possible ways of explaining why people often appear unconcerned with facticity, coherence, or consistency. That is, in political matters, people often appear to make claims that they couldn’t believe, to make claims that appear inconsistent with other claims that they make, and to arbitrarily change their minds and even change their minds back again. While Hannon’s explanations for these phenomena ultimately fail, on the surface, it’s reasonable to assume—from the way that these phenomena appear—that people, at least sometimes, really don’t have political beliefs. How else could one explain the glaring appearance by which people seem either to obviously lie or to have no convictions about matters of fact?

            In fact, Hannon’s explanation for these doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Hannon argues that, while people often don’t really have political beliefs, they do express what appear to be political beliefs. What occurs, in Hannon’s conception, is a substitution: people often express political allegiance when they make claims about their beliefs: (I neither believe nor disbelieve in climate change, but) I support the Republic Party, and so on. For Hannon, there are sneaky political actors among us who pretend to have political beliefs, but really don’t. Why would they do so? This is one problem that Hannon’s argument faces.

Hannon offers no explanation for why people would claim to have political beliefs that they don’t have. Realizing the absurdity of claiming that no people ever have political beliefs, he assures the reader that some people, at least sometimes, do have political beliefs, but this might make matters somewhat worse for him. If it were the case that some people do always have political beliefs and some people never do, then one could understand people’s statements of political commitments by realizing that some political discourse is about people’s political beliefs and some political discourse is about people’s political allegiance. So long as everyone is always only ever someone with political beliefs and the other people are people who never have political beliefs, sorting people, and sorting discourse, into either one bucket or the other might not be very difficult.

Hannon repeatedly divides those who have no political beliefs from those who do have political beliefs. By this formulation, there are those whose political activities express political beliefs and those whose statements of political belief actually express mere allegiance. As far as I’ve been able to tell, he never claims that anyone both has political beliefs and expresses allegiance in their political activities. He appears to begin to hedge: “[S]ome voters may initially get their political allegiances by enculturation, but this does not preclude them from genuinely coming to believe some (or a lot) of the things their political party stands for. This may occur through a process of reflection on the attitudes they inherited from their community.” (p. 305) For Hannon, reflective thinking on people’s attitudes may lead them to actually adopt the beliefs (or at least what appear to be beliefs, Hannon clarifies) that the party prescribes, but here, reflection is not a process for someone to break from their community, so insofar as it’s belief, it’s belief in that to which one’s already committed. The reflective thinking that leads to what appear to be beliefs is, for Hannon, merely a matter of “post hoc reasoning.”[1] In other words, this is reasoning as performance; I’ll return to this point. What matters is that, for Hannon, it appears that some people never really hold political beliefs. Does this mean that no one does? Hannon writes, “[P]olitical realism”—the idea that “one’s kind” of person belongs to the political party to which they, themselves, belong—“is implausible as an account of political elites and people who devote their careers to politics. These people surely have genuine beliefs about the issues. My point, however, is that many people are not like this.” (p. 305) For Hannon, there are two classes of people: those elites among us who hold political beliefs and we (they?) plebes who’ve never held a real political belief in their life. For Hannon, one must suppose, the two sides really speak two different languages that merely appear identical.

A better way to understand what Hannon rightly observes—that people can appear contradictory and inconsistent—is that, whether some people always do have political beliefs and/or some people never do have political beliefs, many people sometimes do and sometimes don’t have political beliefs. This could help to explain why people who make political statements, even when they don’t have political beliefs, express their political allegiance in a form identical to that of political belief even though their expression isn’t really one of political belief. This seems to be right, but then, much more explanation is required; at least two things must be established. First, why does political allegiance get expressed in the idiom of political belief?

Why it should be the case that people act as if they hold political beliefs, even when they don’t, isn’t intuitive. It’s not clear that the political agent would lose anything at all by claiming that their political activity is a function of their allegiance rather than a function of their belief. In fact, many people do and have based their political activity on allegiance alone. Hannon even refers to this (p. 300); we know it as identity politics. It’s the politics of nativism, fascism, and the like, and many people’s political activities adopt these forms. It’s the idea that I belong to some naturalized, or dehistoricized, group, and my political actions only reflect my membership in that group and my wish for my group to benefit as much as possible and be harmed as little as possible. If one’s politics are only motivated by their desire to benefit their group as much as possible, then don’t they risk alienating, or at least confusing, their group and, therefore, losing support? What’s gained by translating allegiance into belief? If some people, sometimes, are willing to acknowledge that their politics only express their allegiance, then Hannon offers no explanation for why those whose political activity only expresses allegiance, when that’s the case, go through the process of converting their expression of allegiance into an idiom of belief. Obviously, we seem to have encountered a mistake, and it’s a mistake that leads Hannon to make other mistakes and to fail to account for phenomena that are highly relevant to what he means to explain. So, why would people without political beliefs act as if they do have political beliefs? This is the second problem with Hannon’s “as-if” argument.

How is it that two apparently unrelated things—allegiance and belief—become associated with each other in the first place? This relates closely with the above problem, as we will see, but the point here is that it’s not obvious why people’s beliefs would ever bring about parties, party allegiance, and so on. Someone might avoid the issue of belief altogether by way of participation in identity politics’s forms, but that’s irrelevant to the case that Hannon describes by his as-if argument; in other words, there could be no reason for the as-if style of politics if politics were all a matter of identity politics (that people only, on some occasions, justify post hoc). Hannon doesn’t explain how people whose political activities are based on allegiance and people whose political activities are based on belief might come to form a party. Aren’t they interested in very different things? Clearly, the latter are interested in reasons related to policy choices, and the former are interested in a reified conception of identity. Why would someone with no political belief ally with people who do have political beliefs? If Hannon wanted to argue that people in a geographical area always ally with others in their geographical area, then that could be plausible if the evidence bore it out. Of course, it doesn’t. If people’s political allegiance were always fully explained by familial identification, then that could make sense, but it isn’t. How is it that people without political beliefs ally with people who have political beliefs? In fact, these two problems—the problem of the political idiom and the problem of allegiance—share an explanation.

            One must explain how political beliefs and political allegiance can be converted into each other. Sometimes, Hannon writes, “people count support for a politician or party as a sacred value.” (p. 302n6) If Hannon is right, then one might even claim that support for a political party is itself a kind of political belief. How so? Political beliefs, of course, aren’t completely different from other kinds of beliefs; they always express transcendence in terms of value but also in terms of descriptive difference.  Furthermore, beliefs necessarily always relate temporal moments, but Hannon consistently runs into problems by failing to incorporate considerations of temporality and history.[2] The simplest kind of belief is perhaps that entailed in what Wilfrid Sellars refers to as the “ostensive tie”[3]—the mapping of a signifier onto a phenomenon. When one points at a chair, and calls it a “chair,” they believe that their understanding of chair-ness, which comes from the past, is reliable enough that they can project it onto the somewhat mysterious[4] phenomenon that lies before them. Similarly, the statement, “I believe in gravity,” can be meant as a proleptic statement by which one assumes that available evidence allows for one to make a prediction. To say, “I believe in my mother,” can be to attribute to her a kind of authority based on past experiences. This authority entails assignation of value: the chair’s chair-ness, my mother’s word, or the concept of gravity, is valuable because of the reliability entailed in each. In fact, if authority can always be defined as partly having to do with reliability[5], then all statements of belief are statements that implicate the phenomenon of authority.

We have many ways of determining authority. Erving Goffman notes that things like people’s dress, their gestures, their uses of language, etc. can all signal forms of authority.[6] I wouldn’t entrust a car mechanic to conduct brain surgery and I wouldn’t entrust a brain surgeon to fix my radiator. The fact that someone’s status as a kind of subject depends on what they do exemplifies why, as Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue shows, Hume’s is-ought distinction breaks down. What a car mechanic is depends on them appearing to do what a car mechanic ought to do, and these can’t be separated without breaking down the concrete meaning of each. If the mechanic can’t locate the transmission or properly turn a wrench or assemble an engine, then they’re really no mechanic at all. Whether or not someone understands themselves to be a mechanic, if they can perform all the functions of the mechanic and if they incidentally present themselves as a reliable mechanic, then they happen to be a mechanic. In fact, the degree to which they count as a mechanic depends on the transcendent value of their mechanic-ness—their authority as a mechanic. A person is recognizable as a person because they perform the functions that they ought to perform in order to be legible as a person.

To tie this back to Hannon, he’s right to bring transcendence—the “sacred”—into the conversation. Our values often are made sacred because of the importance of certain possible outcomes, our love for one another, our dedication to certain issues, our attachment to inspiring leaders, and so on. All collectivities only can be collectivities by way of transcendence and its close relative, authority. Because all distinctions entail both descriptive and normative differences, all uses of language entail a transcendent dimension and all uses of language implicate at least the possibility of a kind of authority however vaguely-conceived.

All this granular discussion of transcendence serves the purpose of pointing out that Hannon’s problem has already been solved in a vast, long-standing body of literature. Hannon appears to be wrong when he writes that there are people whose political behaviors reflect allegiance and there are other people whose political behaviors reflect reasoned beliefs. Instead, all political activities necessarily entail both of these dimensions because all social behaviors entail both. To return to our car mechanic, their activities align them with a group of people—car mechanics. They perform their identity as a car mechanic in their professional actions, but also in the different ways that unrelated actions and choices relate them to their identity. The car mechanic isn’t necessarily compelled by their employer to refrain from washing the black grease that distinguishes their hands from those of others, to wear blue coveralls, to speak in a distinct accent, and so on, and yet, one often knows the car mechanic when they see them, just as they—with nothing to go on other than superficial signals unrelated to the actual work—know the professor, the doctor, the construction worker, or the tech bro. People know the members of their group, too, even if they’ve never met them in person.

People recognize styles of dress and speech, social rhythms, expressions of patterns of choices and other types of thinking, and so on. When people who share aspects of their lived experience—what Ernst Bloch calls their “temporality”[7]—they treat them as people who share certain interests and values. In fact, people’s interests and values are constructed through their historical social experiences.[8] The more people appear to share interests and values, the more they can be trusted to reflect shared interests and values. The more people can convincingly express those interests and values in political statements (but not only), the more they’ll be trusted—the more they gain authority among members of their group.[9]

By now, it might be obvious to my reader that there can, in no instance, be a strict division between the values embodied in statements of political belief and allegiance to one’s chosen (or, at least, non-unchosen) political community. Any statement of political belief will be mediated by one’s sense of where their interests lie and by how their interests relate them to a group of people or to multiple groups of people. On the other hand, anyone’s expression of political allegiance demonstrates their commitment to certain political beliefs. At the bare minimum, political allegiance expresses that one values a certain political community and/or political leader. Someone’s allegiance might sometimes appear more important to them than their concern over any particular issue because of how they value allegiance. People sometimes compromise on particular issues because they believe that their perceived group will benefit when their party wins. Their party might not take their own stance on every issue, but they’re better off winning the election than losing it. Different people differently weigh the value of their party winning against the loss by which their particular views won’t be represented. Hannon quotes Liliana Mason on this point, who argues, “[S]ocial identity [… results] in individual differences in identity strength.” (p. 299) Mason seems to be claiming that everyone identifies with a group or with certain groups, but they identify themselves with others to differing degrees. Mason’s claim appears right because it must be the case that anyone who expresses thoughts through uses of human language identifies themselves (whether consciously or not) with a group of people.

Any use of language necessarily commits the language-user to a set of descriptive and normative associations. The language-user can only use language because they’ve learned to use their particular language from their experience in social situations.[10] Every language-user participates in a linguistic, and even cognitive, tradition.[11] Anyone’s statements can only be understood by anyone else if the language-user’s simultaneous articulation of both descriptive and normative associations in whatever statement can be understood by the receiver.[12] In this way, every statement is constituted by the foreground of the signifiers—what Ferdinand de Saussure calls “syntagm”—and the background of those signifiers’ sets of associations—the “paradigm.”[13] What Saussure fails to recognize is that the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships between signifiers could never be “arbitrary.”[14]

Every statement entails historically- and socially-determined values that help to constitute that statement’s background.[15] This background entailment of values, especially because these values relate closely to people’s social positions and ethical and political commitments, is what we mean by “ideology.” V. N. Vološinov shows that all uses of signifiers are ideological because signifiers’ descriptive and normative associations depend on the social situations within which people learn language and put it to use. If, in my community, we tend to value croissants more than biscuits, then this evaluative association is already entailed in the background of my statement: “I want a croissant.” Someone might say that they would prefer to have a biscuit. It would be sensible to think that the person might not be a part of my community because, if they were a member of my community, then they would most likely prefer a croissant. If croissants are more expensive than are biscuits, then these signifiers—croissant and biscuit—also imply class differences. The lower-class person might express that they value biscuits whereas the upper-class person might express their preference for croissants. However, this expression isn’t only unidirectional. Within what Pierre Bourdieu calls a social “field,” the interactions between actors express, and form, relations between what he calls “economic,” “social,” “cultural,” and “symbolic” forms of capital.[16] People with similar economic capital tend to interact in shared situations, leading them to create social ties that Bourdieu refers to as “social capital”—access to particular people and particular sorts of people. People’s economic capital allows them to consume certain commodities but, perhaps, not others. Members of social groups—especially groups with relatively equal amounts of economic capital—tend to consume certain sets of commodities with certain qualities that grant them “cultural capital.” A rich person has access to expensive food, high art, and certain patterns of language use to which a poor person doesn’t normally have access. Among a social group, then, cultural capital—valuable understanding of certain artifacts and processes—expresses economic capital in a way that relates to social capital—the value of knowing certain people and groups of people. In fact, if one can gain cultural capital, then, even without economic capital, they can, in some cases, convert that cultural capital into social capital that they can then, sometimes, convert into economic capital. Of course, concrete social practices ground all of this. My expressed preference for a croissant expresses something about my history of cultural consumption as it’s mediated by the possibilities afforded by my economic capital. These both tend to relate me to certain groups of people, including, more broadly, to an entire economic class. Because these phenomena form the patterns that constitute daily-life associations, my social practices form my ideology as my ideology helps to constitute my choices and behaviors.

This all restates the claim from MacIntyre that I referred to above: All uses of language situate one in a community of people who share aspects of a tradition of thought and practice—a tradition full of various rituals and unconscious commitments. Language-use is always, in some way or another, practical, historical, and social. There is no signification that doesn’t arise from shared processes and that doesn’t also bear potential implications on shared processes.[17] Getting back to Hannon, then, when people express political beliefs, this is never merely an exercise in truth-telling for the sake of truth-telling. The practical implications obviously run deeper than this. In order to understand, for instance, why it might sometimes appear that people lie about political beliefs, one has to understand what kinds of political practices people engage in, what are the stakes of those practices, and how people understand the relationship between their social situation and the statements that they make.

Hannon gives examples of people who, when looking at photos from Obama’s and Trump’s inaugurations, seem to lie, and people who seem to lie about changes in employment levels (pp. 301-2). When one views the two photos, it seems obvious that more people appear in the photo of Obama’s inauguration than in Trump’s. Survey participants were asked, “Which photo has more people?” (p. 301) The correct answer, Hannon writes, is that Obama’s inauguration photo has more people in it. We could all look at the two photos and see that he’s correct to write this, but, because rightness is constituted by various criteria, the question’s simplicity makes ambiguous what the right answer might be. In order to know what is the right answer for the respondent to give, one must know how the survey participant understands their role in their situation. On the surface, the most obvious interpretation of the question seems to be this: The question asks the respondent to determine, to the best of their ability, according to the most reasonable possible method, which photo contains more visible people. This might seem obvious, but the situation isn’t without ambiguity. For some people, the value of their political party winning an election is vital. For such a person, any way by which they can reasonably help to secure that outcome puts them on the side of the good—of their “sacred value.” It need not be the case that they ought to act in accordance with an unstated standard that they would—if they thought of it—understand the survey administrator to have intended. It’s easy to imagine ways by which a respondent might ask themselves if perhaps the photos are distorted or if perhaps there are slivers of people barely registering in certain pixels in one photo whereas, in the other photo, eccentricities make there appear to be more people than are really there, and so on. One could call this dishonest, but the respondent themselves might think that every step along the way was perfectly honest—perhaps, even more honest than if they’d tried to meet the expectation of the elitist (read: “evil”) bureaucrat administering the survey! This doesn’t mean that they necessarily don’t realize what the expectation is, but it also doesn’t mean that they understand the expectation to map onto the absolutely and necessarily correct answer. Are they really lying? Maybe.

In Hannon’s other example, people’s responses change when they’re offered money to be more honest (including to say when they’re unsure; p. 302). The findings seem to support Hannon: people’s responses are more correct when they’re rewarded for honesty. What does this tell us? What it almost definitely tells us is that, when people are asked to account for whether or not they’re doing what’s expected of them, they change their answer. Does it mean that they go from lying to telling the truth? The evidence isn’t sufficient to say that this is so. According to Hannon, one of the questions asked is “whether the level of employment has gotten better or worse.” (p. 302) Better or worse for whom? Better or worse in what way? Someone might live in an area where the reality that’s constructed for them—and that they reasonably believe—is one by which the wrong people—people whose employment shouldn’t count—are employed at the expense of the right people being employed. They may be mistaken in facts around this understanding, but it may be that the overwhelming majority of reliable evidence, based on the consensus and authority that they find reliable, clearly indicates to them that the reality of employment contradicts the story that they read in the newspaper (or have editorialized to them by Fox News) each day. Hannon denies that this is what’s happening.

Responding to the claim that “Democrats and Republicans are allegedly seeing ‘separate realities,’” Hannon writes, “An alternative explanation is that such patterns merely reflect a desire to praise one party or condemn another.” (p. 303) Hannon would seem to be right that people sometimes really do cheerlead for their party and badmouth the other, but Hannon’s problem takes a familiar form. Once again, Hannon claims two things to be mutually exclusive[18], rather than addressing the complexity of people’s social interactions. Here, his use of the term “merely” betrays what would seem to obviously be the case: people can cheerlead while they attest to what they believe. In fact, it’s necessarily the case that this is what they really do. One cannot have beliefs without having preferences and one cannot prefer a party without valuing what that party appears to represent. Republicans want to win because they want the good team to defeat the evil team, and the Democrats feel the same in the other way around. It’s true that polarization has changed the nature of this tendency, but Hannon also denies the history of polarization.

When Hannon writes that “those who are the most polarized are […] more motivated to watch partisan news; thus, partisan news may not be the cause of affective polarization” (p. 300), this relies on magical thinking where the consensus on polarization’s history would be much more convincing. Study after study shows that polarization has grown in recent decades. One need not look back more than fifty years to see a dramatic shift in the degree to which Republicans and Democrats claim to dislike and distrust each other and to which Republicans and Democrats claim to hold mutually exclusive views (however inaccurately they may believe this to be so). Moreover, where Hannon denies that historical media tendencies have led to polarization, the explanation appears extremely straightforward. The erosion of the equal time rule and the fairness doctrine has coincided with a decades-long project (especially on the right) to create more extreme and partisan media—from partisan radio to various political and religious cable shows to Fox News to MSNBC to the birth of the unregulated internet, and so on. One can neatly map the graphs of increasing polarization onto the history of eroding regulation and increasingly partisan media. Where does Hannon think that polarization started, and how? Apparently, the Devil made it happen.

That said, polarization can also be explained by a much longer historical process. In After Virtue, MacIntyre writes, “There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture.”[19] Relative to previous times, people today lack the shared socio-cultural resources to be able to meaningfully discuss important issues. He writes that this is for three basic reasons. First, interlocutors’ socio-cultural frameworks are often conceptually incommensurable.[20] Second, the modernist style of debate—characterized by impersonality—implicates a fictional universal and, therefore, transhistorical truth meant to compel people by its naturalist forcefulness.[21] Much of what runs Hannon into logical traps, for example, flows from this tendency. Finally, people argue from the bases of different thought traditions, producing “an unharmonious melange of ill-assorted fragments.”[22] It’s not simply that our concepts are incommensurable but that our thinking tends to be full of bits and pieces of systems of thought that contradict one another. MacIntyre, continues, “[A]ll those various concepts which inform our moral discourse were originally at home in larger totalities of theory and practice in which they enjoyed a role and function supplied by contexts of which they have now been deprived. Moreover the concepts we employ have in at least some cases changed their character in the past three hundred years.”[23] This reinforces Bloch’s point—that people live not only different lives but different temporalities. They live according to different rhythms and tempos; different lifecycles; different transcendental, or even eschatological, ends; different relations to their ancestors, differently conceived of; and different repetitions and novelties.

Of course, one kind of temporality is that liberal temporality characterized by abstraction—as in what Walter Benjamin calls “homogeneous, empty time.”[24] The liberal tends to erase history’s role in conditioning phenomena, including people’s subjectivities. Often, by the liberal account, subjects appear free and autonomous, floating in empty space, without the friction or force of learned values, desires, and concepts—let alone bodies with limits. Ideational phenomena are often understood to have been constructed without any influence from any history whatsoever. This isn’t the only kind of abstraction, though. What Theodor Adorno calls “the cult of the existent”[25] is another form of abstract givenness.[26] With only a thin concept of history—mostly as the kind of national history that celebrates barbarism for its own sake[27]—liberals often overestimate the degree to which phenomena are transhistorical. To be clear, this kind of violator isn’t necessarily in the worst company. Nietzsche mistakenly transhistoricizes the conflict between the person and society. Sigmund Freud does the same. Carl Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty follows Hobbes’s translation of authority into authoritarianism, erasing the modern history of this shift.[28] Of course, there’s good news. Karl Marx writes, “[T]he present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and constantly engaged in a process of change.”[29] It turns out that, in spite of liberals’ best efforts, there is, after all, history. I’ll end with my immediate reaction, after having been challenged by Hannon on Twitter, to the first page of his chapter—not because it’s a significant part of my argument, but because, in spite of its hurriedness, its mistaken interpretive framing, and, in the light of this whole document, diminished relevance, it still captures the essence of the problem with Hannon’s chapter.

Hannon writes, “In the U.S., nearly half of all Republicans and Democrats say they ‘almost never’ agree with the other party’s positions. When it comes to politics, there seems to be no end to the number of issues over which people disagree.” (p. 297) Initially, one may dismiss the egregious overstatement of the case as merely a matter of style, but the implications run much deeper than some consideration for aesthetic difference. To state the obvious, Republicans and Democrats agree on far more political questions than those on which they disagree. They overwhelmingly agree that murder is a crime, that free speech is valuable, that the government should take responsibility for maintaining roads, educating children, regulating lead content in commodities, and an almost uncountable number of other possible policy questions. On how many questions could we say Republicans and Democrats clearly tend to disagree? Ten? Twenty? Maybe 100? Revised, then, Hannon’s claim really ought to read, “When it comes to politics, there seems to be no end to the number of issues over which people agree.” Of course, the diligent Platonist would automatically know this to be true. Differences are only meaningful when phenomena are brought into mediating relation according to the categories by which those differences are constructed. Put in Hegelian terms, individuals’ universal participation in politics is mediated by particular political differences. Still, why does this matter?

The aesthetic (which is to say, perceptual) effect of claims like Hannon’s is that they lead the reader to accept a world in which the things on which Republicans and Democrats agree don’t appear as matters worthy of discussion. If the disagreements between Republicans and Democrats appear endless, then the agreements worthy of consideration must be relatively few. Of course, this is nonsense. The disagreements between Republicans and fascists, or Democrats and communists, are clearly far greater in number and intensity than those between Republicans and Democrats. Yet, by Hannon’s formulation, the disagreements between non-liberals and liberals (by which I mean Republicans and Democrats) are made insignificant; they become the background to the handful of major disagreements between Republicans and Democrats. So long as those things that Republicans and Democrats agree on aren’t to be considered, then they are taken for granted and they become invisible in political discourse. In other words, they become ideology. This is all to say that, by rendering certain considerations invisible, or ideological, Hannon’s claim does aesthetic work toward creating a liberal epistemology.


[1] He gets this idea from, of all people, Jonathan Haidt lol (p. 308)

[2] Later in this response, the importance to my argument of temporality’s consideration will become clearer.

[3] Sellars, Wilfrid. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.

[4] Of course, every phenomenon is necessarily somewhat mysterious to us—we are mysterious to ourselves, others are mysterious to us, and those things and happenings that can’t communicate to us through human language are, in important ways, even more mysterious to us than are people.

[5] I here borrow Massimiliano Tomba’s distinction between authority and authoritarianism. Authority is a category by which social relations are related to shared values. Authoritarianism is authority’s modern (and, to some degree, proto-modern) simulacrum—deference to thin signalings of reliability. Tomba, Massimiliano. “Neo-Authoritarianism without Authority.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 23(1): pp. 1-12.

[6] Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

[7] Bloch, Ernst. “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics.” Heritage of Our Times.

[8] This point is made by many people: in addition to above-cited texts by Bloch, Sellars, and MacIntyre, also in G. W. F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit, V. N. Vološinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language,Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,” Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice,Lev Vygostsky’s Mind in Society, Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding,” and, despite that Hannon might have never read any of this literature (or at least learned this lesson from it), this list could really go on forever, to include works by Plato and Aristotle, as well as a host of authors between them and Hegel.

[9] In this way, authority is constructed as the values and understandings of the group; they appear as socio-historical propriety in people’s appearance and in their various practices.

[10] Again, this point is made repeatedly throughout the history of philosophy, but it’s a point that Hannon seems to miss, and it’s particularly emphasized in Vygotsky’s Mind in Society.

[11] MacIntyre, After Virtue.

[12] Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” See also Vygotsky’s discussion of the “zone of proximal development,” in Mind in Society.

[13] De Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics.

[14] Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice.

[17] Marx, Karl. The German Ideology.

[18] Here, one explanation is standard, and the other is “alternative.” As becomes clearer as his argument goes along, he regards the alternative explanation to be true and the standard one to be incorrect.

[19] MacInyre, After Virtue, p. 6.

[20] Ibid., p. 8; this relates closely with the “separate realities” argument that Hannon disputed but I reaffirmed.

[21] Ibid., p. 9.

[22] Ibid., p. 10.

[23] Ibid., p. 10.

[24] This can be thought of simply as Newtonian time. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Concept of History.” Selected Writings, Vol. 4, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 389-400.

[25] Adorno, Theodor. “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda.” The Stars Down to Earth and other essays on the irrational in culture, New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 227.

[26] On givenness, see Sellars’s Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.

[27] See Benjamin’s “Theses on the Concept of History.”

[28] Tomba, “Neo-Authoritarianism without Authority.”

[29] Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy, New York: Penguin, 1990, p. 93.

Modern Dialectical Intensification and Fascist Compensation

Some of my writing: “ Modern Dialectical Intensification and Fascist Compensation”

Goldfish

I think I was four years old. For my birthday, two different people gave me the same action figure. My family decided to test me. You know those experiments they run to see how long it takes for the child to eat the candy on the table? They told me that they’d exchange one of the action figures for a different one if I didn’t open them both. Of course, I was a small child. The point of the experiment is how long it takes the child to take the candy—not whether or not they’ll take the candy. They scolded me and told me that they wouldn’t exchange the action figure. (Of course, they obviously could’ve still exchanged it.) I cried and said it was unfair. I got angry, and I threw the action figure onto the roof.

A few years later, one of my little sisters went with my father to some sort of carnival. They won a goldfish. The goldfish came in a plastic baggie. We moved it into a little empty glass fishbowl. We kids were all excited about the fish. We fed and fed and fed the goldfish, so it died. In the morning, we encountered a cloudy fishbowl with an upside-down goldfish floating at the top. We all cried. It was unfair. For some reason, we decided that the thing to do was to pulverize any trace of the fish in the garbage disposal. Maybe we all said a Hail Mary. We asked our parents to get us another goldfish. They’re cheap, right? We already had a fishbowl. They refused.

Around the same time, our black and white cocker spaniel had a litter of puppies. They’d been growing for a few weeks. One night, around dusk, the puppies were playing in the garage and in the driveway as it extended out toward the street. Our parents told us it was time to go inside from playing. I dribbled a basketball, while my father yelled from the end of the driveway to my sister who was in the garage: “Close the garage door!” She pressed the button. I could see the problem: one puppy was bounding toward the inside of the garage. At first, I was calmer. Finally, I was yelling at her to stop the garage door. She couldn’t make out what I was saying. I pointed at the puppy, and she realized the tragedy that was unfolding. She pressed the button again, just as the door was coming down on the tiny puppy’s neck. My father scooped up the convulsing puppy and told my sister to come with him. I was wailing, my face covered in streams of tears. They took the puppy to bury it in a wooded area at the end of the street, but they told me that they’d taken the puppy to a veterinarian and that the puppy would be fine. I didn’t find out until years later. The puppy had a name, but I’ve forgotten what it was.

Dilemmas

I met my friend from Turkey to attend this philosophical cinetalk with the director and some philosophers. Two short, kind of postmodernist films. On the way, my friend had been mad at me.

            I’d left the apartment, and she’d called my name. I saw her. She looked beautiful in the twilight—she wore a black, sleeveless top and an olive skirt down past her knee—but she was angry. “Do you have an explanation?” I could tell she was frustrated.

“Explanation of what? For what?” She was mad because, due to lack of time, bad coordination, and lack of communication, she’d had to wait. We’d sort of resolved it before the talk.

At the talk, the main interlocutor seemed confused about the films, but he was trying to be generous. I raised my hand. I tried to point out that the director’s films seemed to advocate for getting rid of language, but I don’t think that I made the point clear. The professor I’d been trying to impress seemed to maybe be trying to defend him? Hard to say, though.

            My friend and I walked around the lush, floral campus, but it was dark by that point. We couldn’t really see the sea anymore. Damn. She pointed out that the light grey, futuristic brutalist concrete spaceship-building didn’t belong between the old academic buildings with their Middle Eastern motifs. Also, because the building was top-heavy, it wouldn’t do well in an earthquake. “Pyramids are perfect for earthquakes.” The Egyptians win again.

            We went to eat shawarma. The toum was good. We had tea. When in Rome (anyway, she’s Turkish). As we walked down Hamra Street, with its little warm lights, the regular carhorns, the shops, the hijabs, I told her I was sorry about earlier. I explained that I’ve recently earned secure attachment, but even though I no longer take things personally as I once did, getting rid of old habits of thought and behavior doesn’t replace them with new ones. I joked that I think she likes me because she acts avoidantly attached (we’re not going to date, but we’ll be friends awhile), but anyway, I’m sorry because I interrupted her a couple times and, while I didn’t quite yell, I did raise my voice a bit once or twice. I’d like to not do those things in the future.

            Comparatively, I’d acted well enough, but it’s a low bar. I explained that I’m still learning how to deal with awkward situations to try to make things better. I’m going to be more patient. She got a bit defensive, but in the end, all of this finally cut the tension that’d been lingering all night.


            We went by my apartment so I could set down my stuff. I was a little tired; my back and feet were killing me. I started the laundry. I came back out, and we walked down to the sea and used some guy’s hotspot so that she could get her ride back to where she was staying. He seemed annoyed, but I think he would’ve been too embarrassed to not help. “You’re welcome!” He grinned at us.

            I explained that, in the US, we would be reluctant to borrow someone’s hotspot. “Why?” Well, because we’re all selfish, and no one wants to help anyone. It’s considered rude and embarrassing to ask for help.

We stood there waiting, and my friend pointed out that, across the street, there was a little boy laying on the ground in front of the building. He had his t-shirt pulled above his head, and he lay in the fetal position. “Where are his parents?” Not good. She thought that the way he was laying was unnatural, so maybe he’s sick, but to me, it looked like a pretty normal way for a kid to sleep. I don’t know what to make of that disagreement, but anyway, I didn’t mention it.

            Eventually, the guy she’s staying with came and picked her up. She left, so I crossed the street to walk back toward my apartment.

As I crossed the street and got closer to the building, I saw the kid, and I kind of wanted to cry. I looked around. No parents, no police, no unoccupied adult. A guy with a corncart walked toward me, so I asked if he spoke English. I pointed to the kid. He smiled and shrugged. “Where are his parents? Could we call someone? What about the police?” He smiled and kept walking. A young guy came, and the same thing ensued. He stood there, smiling, not knowing what to do. He said something in Arabic. Then, an old security guard came. He wore a tan polo with blue letters—the name of some security company. He had brown skin and the white hair that forms a rotunda atop one’s head—caesarian. He also said something in Arabic. I asked about the parents again. He told me in English to go home. The younger guy said that the security guard said that the kid’s parents were walking along the coast. He again said to go home. I wasn’t sure, but what could I do? I walked home, unsure what I should’ve done.

C.E.H. Individual

A soul is an analog—
a whisp around you or me—
liberty to all—
packed and made compulsory.

An individual without
old customs to comply with,
made antilegally devout—
the law of the enlightened.

Groups of “individuals,”
walled in freedom-prisons
—alone-together rituals—
grateful in grey hedonism.

Smiling faces, endless kindness,
a wealth of traces of accruing prices,
solitary waste in endless blindness,
unending spaces of loveless lightness,

boundless praise in life that’s lifeless,
a dogma claimed in controlled climates—
a display of grace through routine crisis—
the brave face saying “Yes!” but spineless.

Individuals dare to choose themselves,
to choose their difference, like all others,
sad-eyed, lost, the tale retells,
forlorn generations—a lack of lovers.

#1 Airbnb Host

A creamy cloud—translucent in front of the three-quarter moon in twilight
—like a sliding paper door before a glowing lamp.
Her favorite thing is when moonlight sparkles on the beach-mirror.
She said what matters most is time spent with the ones she loves
and learning harder lessons ever more deeply.
A man in Istanbul knows the five things everyone needs.
A fresh, fuzzy kitten pounces on electrical cords, squeaks.
In the background, foamy waves make the sweet, soft sound
reminiscent of our origin’s safe embrace.

Escapism and Utopia

(This text represents my argument developed in conversation with my friend, Phikria.)

Authenticity is the concept of nothingness’s fullness. Why “nothingness?” Authenticity entails the supposition that, beneath the dirty surface of things, there lies a quiet, still, harmonious, ineffable being that contradicts all our ways of conceiving the material presence of reality as we experience it. One could never talk of authenticity as something; its nature must always remain fundamentally inutterable. If one is to seek their authenticity, they must find it in a kind of nothingness.

Thus, the Authentics manichaeistically divide the world in two—the sacred and the profane. Deep inside everything, the Authentics claim, there is a second register of reality. This second register is the real, or “authentic,” register where only pure, healthy, content, and “higher” phenomena take place. The first register—the domain of quotidian experience—conceals the second register. When one attends to the loud business of the first register, the dirty half-truths of daily life are revealed. When one attends to the quiet, still, full emptiness (again, empty of the hum of all the associations, symbols, and sense-making that occupies our daily life [In The Destruction of Reason, György Lukács refers to this authenticity as the “irrational”]) of the second register, higher, beautiful truths are revealed. This dualism is the necessary condition for both escapism and capitalism.

The full space of authenticity’s emptiness is also the space of utopia. The fundamental reality of the world—that by which reality’s unrepresentable truth is concealed by everyday life’s ugliness—is also the reality of something radically better than what we tend to experience. The achievement of utopia, then, requires a third term—a strategic medium. This medium has been thought to be any number of things: engagement with nature, transcendental meditation, asceticism/self-denial, psychedelic drugs, self-inquiry (despite that many meditators subscribe to the Buddhist concept of anatman [no-self], they ask: “Who/what am I?”), near-death experience, smashing one’s own face with a giant rubber ball, etc. The payoff is figured to be that, if enough people sufficiently participate in the mediating experience, all life in the universe will be freed from suffering. Sounds beautiful, huh? Also, kind of fun, kind of playful, kind of joyous.

Such a process represents the promise of a simultaneous progress for all the world’s phenomena. Indirect progress is also the wager of liberalism, and thus, of capitalism. One might say that capitalism was the innovation by which universal progress would be mediated by the limitless production of abundance and surplus. While, previously, people had often taken care of the poor before securing abundance, liberal individualism permitted the idea that a system of actors would create utopia through rational actions in markets. The payoff, then, was supposed to be that turning focus away from improving people’s lives, and instead, turning toward creating the conditions for creating the maximum possible abundance, would free everyone from suffering, need, and even desire. Oops.

This indirectness deserves reflection; the indirectness itself performs a few functions. It keeps alive the idea of improving things for everyone. Whew! Guilt-free. It allows one to prioritize one’s own comfort above others’ needs without completely sacrificing love for everyone. In fact, by capitalist logic, one can argue that consuming more, and indulging in one’s own pleasure, is a morally good thing to do. By demanding the production of more abundance/surplus, one helps to ensure that more abundance falls into the mouths of the poor. One need not see any conflict between, on one hand, one’s own comfort and convenience, and on the other hand, the needs of others. Enjoy on Earth, and be rewarded in Heaven. There’s no reason, then, to focus on others’ misery. To focus on others’ suffering is uncomfortable and unhelpful. In fact, others’ misery creates an emotional obstacle to one’s enjoyment, which violates the logic of creating abundance in order to perfect life on Earth (or, “in the Universe”—however one prefers). By this reasoning, one could say that focusing on others’ suffering is, then, actually immoral. To focus on others’ suffering might distract someone from the moral good of demanding more. Worry about yourself. Guiltlessly enjoy. This is one of capitalism’s moral commandments.

Of course, one could also guiltily enjoy. Guiltless enjoyment requires a certain kind of discipline. So long as one has enough resources, then it can be relatively easy to go through life without apparently causing harm. One can retreat into ethical purification in order to avoid the frustration and the corruption of politically dealing with others. The good capitalist subject need not engage in politics in order to be ethical. One can escape the world’s stupid and ugly forms of conformity, oppression, and even violence. One can live the ethical life of their choosing. One could, for instance, become a good meditator in the Andes and learn to administer ayahuasca to tech executives, holding out the promise of improving the world in some way. At least, in so doing, one does their small part. So much of contemporary culture hinges on the promise of the supposedly limitless (but also contingent, perhaps even magical) power of tiny acts of kindness. Always be kind. Don’t be critical. Don’t be political. Be a good capitalist subject.

One good reason to escape the direct activity of improving conditions for the most vulnerable people, then, is that it allows one to avoid reckoning with their own complicity in the situation out of which certain people are made vulnerable. Our responsibility makes us sad. It’s far more comfortable to purify one’s own actions with relation to the values of one’s own heart than it is to deal seriously with the overwhelming number of suffering people in the world. One could try and fail. That would be sad. We want to avoid dealing with the ways that the world’s shittiness harms others more than it harms us, so we try to make our world—and, thus, our responsibility—small. In our small world, we can be good and do good. Some people even claim that it’s more important to purify oneself than to improve things for vulnerable people. Before you help others, you should help yourself. Before you support suffering people in some other place, you should pressure your own leaders to stop doing bad things. Purify yourself before you help others. Don’t be so arrogant as to impose your goodness—by doing things like feeding, sheltering, and mending others—before you’re really good.

To be clear, all of this is already entailed in capitalism’s logic. Massimiliano Tomba writes, “Today we can say that ideology has become such a pervasive dimension that it includes both the defense of what exists and its critique, as well as many alternatives to the present.” (“What is Ideology?” forthcoming) Resistance to prevailing ideology is a matter of consumer choice. One can obey the spicy law of disobedience. Thus, ironically, resistance, too, is its own side of the prevailing ideology. Capitalism (and liberalism) welcomes resistance with open arms and tightly-closed prison cells. Violate the law in order to create more options to be commodified. Capitalism loves this. Tomba continues, “[I]ndividual freedom is nothing, because individuals are functions of an existing structure and they are no freer than a stone rolling down a hill; individual freedom is everything, because individuals are free to choose and build their own life; individual freedom is ideology, because the very notion of individual freedom belongs to a historically specific representation of the present.” (ibid.) In the first place, we can say that people think of themselves as “individuals” because they’ve been conditioned to do so. Capitalism necessarily entails the multiplicity of mechanisms for teaching people that they’re free and autonomous—free to choose to act as expected or to deviate. Free to live as they choose and free to die as they choose. Free to engage in violence and free to be imprisoned. Everyone is responsible for themselves, and they’ll be rewarded according to the market value ascribed to their choices at the moment of those choices’ enactment. People’s choices are part of a system that already accounts for, and profits from, differences. Everyone, then, can choose when to conform and when to deviate in order to determine the conditions of their lives from within that system. Such “individual” choices are good because each of them helps to reproduce and strengthen the capitalist system.

The particularly capitalist notion of individual freedom, then, entails the ideology by which necessity is never fully considered. If philosophers’ dealings with freedom always entailed consideration of freedom’s necessary relationship to necessity, capitalism( and liberalism)’s innovation is to conceive of the “individual’s” freedom as limitless and as absent any forms of conditioning. Generally, the philosophers of the past few thousand years would consider such a conception of freedom to be fantastical. However, again, such a conception of freedom is necessary for capitalism’s reproduction.

The ideology of individual freedom allows one to escape their sense of their social nature and the fundamental debt that they—by their ongoing survival—owe to the collectivity. Such a conception of freedom allows one to avoid the fact that anyone’s pain is tied up with others’ fates through the system that we share. As a “free individual,” one escapes their feeling of social mutuality—their feeling that the conditions of their lives are tied up with the conditions of others’ lives. A conception of freedom that wasn’t based on the fantasy of the so-called “individual” would, thus, have to deal with the necessity entailed in people’s mutual relations.

The dualism that is, on one hand, authenticity’s fullness of nothing, and on the other hand, the quietude of utopia, is the same escapist condition that’s necessary for capitalism’s ongoing immiseration and destruction. This is the dualism that supposedly allows some magical mechanism to make everything better for everyone. That magic is also the magic of the “individual,” the magic of a world of non-mutuality, the magic of the absence of necessity, the magic of a mechanism for which the cause by which it improves everything all at once is never—indeed, necessarily can never be—explained. It’s the same dualism that allows one to avoid the possible frustration and sadness of trying and failing to improve things for people. It’s the dualism that allows one to escape their immediate, concrete sense of responsibility to the collective.

The Fire of Another

Maybe I’m a heartbreak hotel,
but don’t pretend I was cruel to you.
Don’t send Leonard Cohen songs,
don’t ask what happens to the heart.

Don’t we want a little tenderness this time?
We fought around a healing wound—
the silken bandage begged for mercy.
The required patience constituted a crime.

If I stole too many moments
and locked away accrued caresses,
when we were thinking houses, deeds,
then you poured acid on your blessings.

I’ll attend the black funeral, with its death-clouds hanging above;
I’ll carry the Sisyphean load;
but I can’t say I lit this fire under your salty glares,
as you carry me below.

We chose to sit with each other awhile.
We chose each other to hurt and to be hurt by,
but pain is always part of love,
and still, we love all the while.

Alien Culture and Contemporary Paranoia

I wonder if you remember the late-’90s pop culture craze around aliens and UFOs. Movies, TV shows, and video games often referred to aliens. T-shirts, stickers, coffee mugs—bearing levitating discs and/or little green guys with huge black, often upside-down teardrop-shaped eyes—sold by the millions. They often entailed foil and/or holograms. In magazine stands at grocery stores, front covers advertised stories of alien abductions and UFO sightings—right next to stories of Elvis-in-hiding and three-headed people. This sort of thing.

This week, the US admitted that some sites of UFO landings contained “non-human biologics.” This has been taken as evidence of little green men. Some Republican congressmembers said that they knew all along. “I told you so!” What’s more interesting to me, though, is the social psyche of the ’90s. Were we scared? Were we bored? Were we being playful? Was some superstition at play?

Perhaps the contemporaneous culture provides some clues. What other movies were out there? Cyberpunk, horror, rom-com, dark indie comedy, action, disaster, fantasy, and neo-noir films were popular. In this end-of-history moment, characterized by mass incarceration, globalization, deregulation, austerity, increasing economic inequality, high crime, and decaying cities, escapism was the order of the day. In a time when people felt caught, or stuck, they yearned for something radically different. In The Resonance of Unseen Things, Susan Lepselter writes about how UFO enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists share the sense of a constant oscillation between captivity and freedom: “You can be caught, captured, paralyzed, immobilized, stuck. You can be released, restored, redeemed, mobile, free. […] And the two antithetical poles—captivity and release—construct a third term, which is born in the meta-awareness of the relatedness between them.” (29) This third term, then, might just be the spectrum by which one is attuned to the difference between captivity and freedom. It might be the vigilance by which one is constantly accounting for situations of captivity and freedom. It might, then, be a kind of anxiety, fear, paranoia. After all, paranoia isn’t a function of reality, but just the opposite. Whatever’s going on “out there,” paranoia is the pervasive, inescapable, irrational feeling that something is wrong. As many have said, fear is the foundation of conservatism.

In the ’90s, those bug-eyed aliens signified other worlds. Conspiracy theories, paranoia, the promise of New Age (remember Yanni? the chanting monks?) aesthetics, and even the nascent worldwide web offered some hope in an apparently hopeless world. Perhaps, the aliens are ripe for a cultural comeback. Of course, if they seem real, then maybe they’re less culturally useful (for the paranoiacs). The point back then was that they represented alterity.

Those conspiracy theorists in Lepselter’s book seek closure. They want answers, but they want “truth” without reality. They want the fantasy that makes all of the world fit together just so, like a jigsaw puzzle sutured together by the ghosts that they worship. They want for the abstractions of their imaginations to be the glue that explains why their lives have gone so wrong. They want forgiveness. They want mercy. They want to know. After all, fear is always fear of something. Fear is always an expression of powerlessness, of impotence, in the face of potential unwanted consequences. This is why the overreaction to fear is so often domination—or at least attempted domination. The king is rightly a paranoiac. The colonizer is a paranoiac. The money-hoarding capitalist is a paranoiac. One might do away with the other subject who engenders one’s fear: kill or be killed. To the paranoid subject, the leader who recognizes the apparent realism of this imagined zero-sum game grants to the subject assurance that the leader will do what’s necessary in desperate times.

Today’s aliens aren’t those aliens of alterity. Today, Q-anon, vaccines, “the trans agenda,” adrenochrome (an anti-Semitic blood libel conspiracy by any other name…), and other delusions fill that role. Not real aliens.

Proletariat — Feel Like Runnin’ Away

I used to be in a rap group—the Proletariat. I recently stumbled on this.