Wednesday 31 December 2014

Again on Shunning Marriage

It is perhaps too great a demand for the majority of men, but one must recognise the fact that the greatest minds are possessed by those who simply shun women and marriage altogether. These are the minds that are interested in more than just the material, they question the nature of existence itself, they peer through to the ultimate: as such they are generally philosophers and artists of the highest calibre. When one is concerned with that which surpasses the carnal, one simply has no care for sex or reproduction, let alone the company of women, who really cannot act to civilize those who are representative the height of civilization, contrary to popular claims that they do so.
Sir Isaac Newton

Baruch Spinoza
Immanuel Kant
Nikola Tesla
George Frideric Handel
Leonardo da Vinci
Michelangelo
Orville Wright
Wilbur Wright

I could go on, but all great discoveries and innovations can typically be traced back to dependence upon some achievements made by men of great minds that would not have achieved such had they been married and distracted. Einstein, famously, was a very cold husband, had he been as devoted as the ideal then he certainly would not have achieved what he did. As a model for humanity as a whole, certainly I cannot say that a society would be able to function had it no men who married and had children. Certainly some level of stability and tradition must be in place by and large. But what does the neoreactionary movement need at the moment more, simply, than bright minds and leaders, who can see through to the ultimate. Hence, the rise in "game" and pick up type advocacy amongst neoreactionaries seems somewhat odd - since the kind of men women are attracted to, and the kind of men who care for the time of women (of whom there are nearly none worth the time), are not the kind of men who can truly benefit the world or produced the height of insight required of the advancement of a highly intelligent species. 

The kind of women men are attracted to are also typically not those who have the highest IQ. Many of the traits that are preferred are those indicative of double digit IQs only. A model of artificial reproduction and positive eugenics in this regard would be ideal. I still think that the best way to raise children is with a traditional family structure, but we must be prudent in what we ask of the future, and what we choose in the present.

Sunday 23 November 2014

Gilbert and Sullivan Rankings

While it is difficult to rank these, as I think just about every one is a masterpiece, here is my order of preference. This is not to say that I think that HMS Pinafore is in any way a bad work, since it is a masterpiece. Only that I would rather listen to something higher up on the list. If anyone must know, I think that it feels too "music hall" like to be a genuine light opera, and perhaps a bit too silly. One can't relax into HMS Pinafore like on can with the top ranked ones. The same would be true of the Sorcerer if it weren't for the revisions made to the Act I finale and Act II opening. 

The first five I would probably hold as about equal in their virtues, but the Gondoliers is musically the most satisfying. Once again, each rating is so close as to almost make no difference in my mind. The only surprises here, for G&S aficionados, may be my rankings for The Grand Duke and Utopia Limited. I happen to love the Austrian Waltz feel to The Grand Duke, and while I love all the songs in Utopia Limited, some of the music is not quite as satisfying, and while every plot has its holes, Utopia Limited has an extremely unsatisfying unresolved plotline. 

Patience is fantastic, but it's just not to my tastes, there are only a few songs from the work that I can truly say I enjoy.
  1. The Gondoliers (1890)
  2. Princess Ida (1884)
  3. The Yeoman of the Guard (1888)
  4. The Pirates of Penzance (1880)
  5. The Mikado (1885)
  6. The Sorcerer (1877)
  7. Ruddigore (1887)
  8. Iolanthe (1883)
  9. The Grand Duke (1896)
  10. Trial by Jury (1875)
  11. Utopia Limited (1893)
  12. Patience (1881)
  13. HMS Pinafore (1878)


Friday 31 October 2014

Why Marry?

It's really worth questioning, why, when it has become continually a tool of vampiric extraction, men really would encourage marriage at all. What benefit is there in the end? Because sex isn't worth marriage. The risk isn't worth the return. There will always be people who continue to have kids, so there's little need to worry about depopulation of any demographic - birth rates are fluid, they won't be on the decline in any state forever, since birth rates are also density dependent. Just let those who wish to propagate reap the returns of their choice and suffer the consequences be them what they may, while you get to enjoy and relax with peace of mind and sanity as society either gets a grip on itself or undergoes dissolution. Ideally, there'll be little need to associate with women at all until that time.

Wednesday 29 October 2014

Why Marxism is Wrong

Introduction

No, there's nothing salvageable in Marxism for neoreactionary purposes. It's all rubbish. It took me some time to come to that conclusion however. After telling him that I once considered myself a Marxist, my friend quipped, "Yes, everyone was once a Marxist." But it wasn't due to some kind of moral revelation, while I was morally repulsed at Marxism, I had agreed to myself long ago that I will always abide by the Socratic method of "following the argument wherever it leads." I agreed to uphold this maxim after I became a Marxist; reflecting upon the reasons as to why I became a Marxist, I realised that it was not due to accepting the conclusions of any rational argument, but rather that I was swayed by moral argumentation (it's a bit more complex than that, but to make long story short). I decided to suspend my advocacy, temporarily becoming a conditional Marxist: conditional upon scrutiny of the argumentation made within the Marxist canon. I proceeded to read the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, including the dreadful correspondences relating details of bodily ailments. I came out of the project, taking about a year or so, not being a Marxist, having rejected the entire body of thought. This was due to incoherencies in Marx's argumentation, but while some premises were inadmissible, or the economics didn't quite add up here or there, there was a crucial premise upon which the Marxist view of the world either rested or fell. In this post I am going to relate that most crucial problem with Marxism. I will also detail some of the minor issues that further make Marxism a waste of time.

The Moral Appeal

To clarify precisely why I am bothering to discuss this matter, it is because old Marx keeps getting dug up. This is shameful in my opinion, but since I did it myself I have an obligation to do my best to bury him. Most people, in my opinion, do not have a good justification for being Marxists, including myself. Fundamentally, most Marxists I have known simply did not understand the gritty details of Marxism -- As even Ho Chi Minh claimed, "I'm a Leninist, not so much a Marxist." Many were motivated by blood lust, the boiling blood and heart pounding feeling they got from feeling subversive or from the ever present red colours and violent imagery, living a wet dream of pounding Nazis in T-34s to the sound of Священная война. Fundamentally, most Marxists, in my reckoning are doing themselves a disservice by not basing their political beliefs upon footing other than sentiment (sorry Burke), and are fundamentally extremely lazy in believing they can get by without actually figuring out what was thought by the man who was not short in facial hair. Moreover, if you have a reason to be a Marxist, it better be very good, considering Marxism is fundamentally responsible for more politically motivated murders in the past century.

Which brings me to the real issue with the popular perception and acceptability of Marxism. While the promotion of Nazis and fascism will be rapidly opposed by anyone with a brain and cerebellum to in the western hemisphere, somehow communism gets the slip - it even some how gets away by being depicted as in someway moral (which is really where I was duped so many years ago). If we count the dead, communism, however, is an order of magnitude more deadly than Fascism (Stéphane Courtois estimates an indisputable reckoning of at least 94 million dead as a result of communism, as opposed to Fascism, which by all accounts killed at most under 9 million). Yet communism does some how get the slip and appears a bit fun and cool. Whitewashing and defending communism is a waste of time, and ignorant of the fact that Marxism, being fundamentally amoral (as well as immoral) is indifferent to whether 94 million died or not. But on the left, it's entirely reasonable to suppose that real, or true, Marx is the Marx who can flash a peace sign and just be for equality, not all this destroying churches crap. Just as with Jesus, the liberal reader sees in Marx a reflection of what he thinks is best in himself,
For Liberal Protestants, the inquiry was an article of faith. They sought, on the basis of their critical work, to establish the facts of the life of Jesus, which would in turn provide the fundaments of the Christian faith. The problem with this approach, according to Tyrrell, is that the Christ that results from such a quest will inevitably reflect the biases of whoever sets the criteria for what is acceptable as fact. Thus, he writes, "The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic darkness, is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well" (Tyrrell 1909, 49). Yet, he remarks, "Whatever Jesus was, He was in no sense a Liberal Protestant" (22). 
 Or for instance,
NB Sanders on the role of the historian: "It falls to the lot of the historian to be the person who subjects the gospels to rough handling. . . That is, the historian, unlike the politician, novelist or moralist, cannot pick and choose just those parts of the gospels that are noble and that can be used to inspire others. The historian selects, but on different principles: what can be proved, what disproved, what lies in between?" (E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus, 8). 
Complicating the role of the historian is the fact that "virtually everyone has his or her own view of Jesus, and thus has a preconception of what a book on Jesus should say" (6). Thus, if the historian at any time disallows what someone's preconception holds, the historian may well be considered heretic.
Without reading Marx oneself, and without actually investigating his own works, one can go through a library of Marxist writings without ever knowing what he thought. Can liberal progressives be blamed for this? I wouldn't say so, not everyone has time to read and investigate for themselves. This comes down to the structure of the Cathedral again. Who informs the media's representation of such matters and cui bono?

The fundamental issue for a lot of liberals in considering Marxism as somehow acceptable is the fact that they believe that Marx's advocacy of an equal ends (i.e. an equal ownership of the means of production) was in some way due to moral motives. Nothing could be further from the truth. Marx viewed morality as merely functioning as a construction of whatever stage of materialist development society happens to be in at any given time. Thus, prohibiting theft is not a matter of morality, or even common human decency informed by our biological wiring, but rather, is merely a function of bourgeois morals. Morality for a Communist thus is a matter of aligning oneself with that which reinforces and informs common ownership of the means of production and socially direct labour. It's a question of morality being the superstructure determined by the material and economic base. Marxist fundamentally and historically have been fine with justifying any action in order to advance so called "proletarian class interests" - and the reaction that a response to what is commonly considered immoral today is the result of some kind of innate brain wiring is simply your conditioning into bourgeois morality in a pavlovian manner, e.g. see the last post, Foucauldian approaches to propositions as being more interesting for their conditions rather than truth value is a prime example to this kind of thinking. 

Yet, many Marxists still believe that revolution must be in some way innocent and non-violent - no, Marxism not only requires violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie, but doesn't care about hurting people. Coming at Marxism initially with similar moral preoccupations and concerns, some of my life-long-Maoist friends at the time were shocked that I could even suggest having a degree of restraint as regards slaughtering bourgeois capitalist roaders, as if my own morality was the incorrect one: I was still, apparently, being informed by bourgeois morality, whereas they were being informed by proletarian morality. Yet, when their families or loved ones are in danger, would they really hold back from expressing sympathy? I don't know, but I believe that while you can brainwash people into doing just about anything, morality tends to continue being grounded in some semblance of natural sentiments, and property and senses of self-possession are crucially connected to these natural sentiments. Morality for Marx:
We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate and for ever immutable ethical law on the pretext that the moral world, too, has its permanent principles which stand above history and the differences between nations. We maintain on the contrary that all moral theories have been hitherto the product, in the last analysis, of the economic conditions of society obtaining at the time. And as society has hitherto moved in class antagonisms, morality has always been class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has represented its indignation against this domination and the future interests of the oppressed.
 Morality doesn't exist for Marx, but "moralities" do. Each one of these many moralities is used and disposed of in as far as it serves the ebbs and flows of history: this is, for Marx, an amoral and impersonal occurrence. Indeed for Marx, suffering and "exploitation" are even a good thing at times:
Then, whatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world may have for our personal feelings, we have the right, in point of history, to exclaim with Goethe: 'Sollte dim Qual uns qudlen,/Da sie unsre Lust vermehrt:"
 I.e. "'Should we be grieved by this pain that increases our pleasure?" This is the concept that is often called "the worse the better." The more exploited, degraded, and punished a population, the closer they are to rising up in a violent proletarian revolution. If economic conditions degrade, for Marx, that's a good thing. Liberalism is really a big mistake for Marx, as is democratic socialism. One won't be achieving any revolution if one is easing the condition of the working class. One needs to worsen the condition as much as is possible. Suffering is not actually immoral if it is a means to the ends of Marx's cult of humanism. But Marxism is just about equal distribution and equal use of the means of production right? Isn't it just about transitioning to a fair world? This brings me to the main issue, the actual transition to communism, i.e. explain to me how that works. How precisely does one achieve that equality?

The Transition Problem

Marxism, i.e. communism, is defined by its ultimate goal (communism), whereas Capitalism is not defined by its ultimate goal, it is defined by its function (exchange of commodities). Without a functional component, however, the expression of an end goal is just a sentiment and empty hope. This is what Leninism is attempting to get at with the notion of Socialism being a "transitional society," or what Maoism is trying to get at by arguing that experimentation must be used to determine what must be done. Obviously the worse of these two is Maoism, since experimentation using human subjects on a mass scale can only lead to endless misery - especially if it is not clear in the first place that the experimentation is going to achieve anything. This is ironic however, in that Lenin's notion of the transitional society is not actually what Marx intended in the first place. In fact, it appears that Marx may be more sceptical of such a phenomenon than any Marxist thinker after him, the consequences of which I shall discuss later. In this sense, Marx makes some very good arguments. In fact, he's a fantastic writer and a good thinker, with some serious shortcomings that I shall point out. 

But to the point, Lenin based his notion of Socialism being a "transitional society" on Marx's statement in the Critique of the Gotha Programme that
Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Note that Marx does not claim this to be a "transition society." A society is a particular thing in Marx's thought, which is the superstructure that is a manifestation of an economic base. On the contrary, a period of "transformation" is an actual transformation from capitalism to communism. Marx only uses the term society to modify the nouns capitalist and communist - transition does not manifest a corresponding society in Marx's thought. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the process of the gear shift from communist to capitalist, not a society with a culture of its own, i.e. a revolutionary culture as that envisioned by Lin Biao. Lenin's conception in his own words,
The transition from capitalist society--which is developing towards communism--to communist society is impossible without a "political transition period", and the state in this period can only be the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Lenin is trying to make the whole unexplainable process easier to accept by the masses by putting something palpable in the transition, where what Marx is describing is only the dissolution of A and B taking its place. This is the Hegelian understanding that Marx would have been familiar with:
In thinking about the gradualness of the coming-to-be of something, it is ordinarily assumed that what comes to be is already sensibly or actually in existence; it is not yet perceptible only because of its smallness. Similarly with the gradual disappearance of something, the non-being or other which takes its place is likewise assumed to be really there, only not observable, and there, too, not in the sense of being implicitly or ideally contained in the first something, but really there, only not observable. In this way, the form of the in-itself, the inner being of something before it actually exists, is transformed into a smallness of an outer existence, and the essential difference, that of the Notion, is converted into an external difference of mere magnitude. The attempt to explain coming-to-be or ceasing-to-be on the basis of gradualness of the alteration is tedious like any tautology; what comes to be or ceases to be is assumed as already complete and in existence beforehand and the alteration is turned into a mere change of an external difference, with the result that the explanation is in fact a mere tautology. The intellectual difficulty attendant on such an attempted explanation comes from the qualitative transition from something into its other in general, and then into its opposite; but the identity and the alteration are misrepresented as the indifferent, external determinations of the quantitative sphere.
The fundamental problem with most discussions by Marxists about the transition to communism, is that they attempt to explain the process through the creation of an alternative economic arrangement. However, all of these economic arrangements end up functioning within the logic of the law of value, whereas the model of Marx assumes the extinction of the law of value. For instance, in Marx's response to John Gray's proposal for a national bank that issues labour-time certificates in exchange for stocks in commodities, where you would exchange a commodity which took one day to make with the certificate for one day's labour, he explains,
But as Gray presupposes that the labour-time contained in commodities is immediately social labour-time, he presupposes that it is communal labour-time or labour-time of directly associated individuals. In that case, it would indeed be impossible for a specific commodity, such as gold or silver, to confront other commodities as the incarnation of universal labour and exchange-value would not be turned into price; but neither would use-value be turned into exchange-value and the product into a commodity, and thus the very basis of bourgeois production would be abolished. But this is by no means what Gray had in mind – goods are to be produced as commodities but not exchanged as commodities. Gray entrusts the realisation of this pious wish to a national bank.
Similar ideas are still promoted by some, e.g. Ithaca Dollars and Brixton Pounds. If goods are produced as commodities they will naturally end up being exchanged as commodities. Labour will continue to be alienated. From Marx's point of view, these proposals are not directly social, i.e., they do not avoid the law of value; they don't allow a good to be directly usable by society at large, and not go through exchange which requires value. Obviously, the other issue with proposals such as Gray's, is that commodities produced over a one hour period are never going to be of precisely the same value, since they will have variance in use-value, so even if you spend a year making dousing rods, they're still of no value. Value cannot be wished into a commodity, just as any old labour cannot be wished into having value:
The dogma that a commodity is immediately money or that the particular labour of a private individual contained in it is immediately social labour, does not of course become true because a bank believes in it and conducts its operations in accordance with this dogma. On the contrary, bankruptcy would in such a case fulfil the function of practical criticism.
This is because such a bank would continually be short of goods since better producers would form a black market and the sector of the economy that is regulated by the state would keep regressing. When the state coerces the black market into abiding by its rules, the best producers will leave in a brain drain. Anyone who remains in the state will just produce as little as possible, since a single hour of half-assed work would be equivalent to a single hour of Stakhanovite work. This is the most obvious shortcoming of Socialism as traditionally understood (not Marx's notion), i.e. that there is no incentive to work. Furthermore, all production would end up becoming retarded and useless, an hour of producing a useless good would be of as much value as an hour of producing a useful one, and therefore there would be no point in investing in efficiency since it wouldn't produce any returns. These characteristics are all obvious in real-world attempts at communism. Marx actually argues against real-world attempts at communism quite effectively: those who want to get rid of money must abolish exchange-value, which requires abolishing commodities, which means the capitalist mode of production must be abolished; legislating equality doesn't legislate the capitalist mode of production (as so understood by Marxists) out of existence.

So fundamentally, if one wants to abolish the capitalist mode of production in and of itself, one needs to have a better plan to actualise that. It must be a very specific and clear plan. Treatments of revolution that focus on political rather than economic/material-base change, such as those advocated by Lenin and Mao, are pretty much regarded as rubbish by Marx:
Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby. ... Do not the bourgeois assert that the present-day distribution is "fair"? And is it not, in fact, the only "fair" distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production? Are economic relations regulated by legal conceptions, or do not, on the contrary, legal relations arise out of economic ones? Have not also the socialist sectarians the most varied notions about "fair" distribution?
Thus, whatever standards the Gotha Programme set for "fair distribution" were standards that functioned under a capitalist logic (capitalist logic dictates that all exchange is fair, i.e. socially determined value is exchanged for socially determined value). The Gotha Programme was treating the state as an independent entity, instead of a product of the means of production, since they believed that fairness was based on the superstructure and not on the economic base. What then, if Marx rejects all of these economic and political conceptions which are roughly equivalent to what we think of as leftism, is Marx's notion of communism? That is to say, what does communism look like without a "labour-money scheme" and what does a "transformed" mode of production look like? Marx describes the transitioned society, with socially direct labour:
individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion ... but directly as a component part of total labor. ... the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them. ... What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. ... Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning. ... Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. ... The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.
Here, the law of value has been replaced by the law of socially direct labour, where one's societal contribution is not assessed by the quantity of one's production. There is no selling of labour or buying commodities with money. This society also manages not to be a subsistence society, since the work of all contributes to society as a whole, without, somehow, there being any strict division of labour. To put it simply, this is a society in which products are directly socially, i.e. there is no money intervening (i.e. C-M-C).

Marx claims  that such a society is one in which principle is no longer "at loggerheads" with practice.
Hence, equal right here is still in principle -- bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange exists only on the average and not in the individual case.
This means that in capitalism, there is equality of principle (i.e. equality is the "principle" of capitalism, according to Marx) but not equality of practice (i.e. capitalism gives rise to unequal results since the bourgeoisie make a profit at the expense of one who exchanges labour value). The contradiction is that labour in capitalism is supposedly unequal in individual cases due to the law of value, which functions according to "socially necessary abstract labour time," where one's labour is usually not equivalent to another's, whereas in communism, they are equal by default because the law of value, and thus commodity production and exchange, has been abolished. People can thus be remunerated, by some mechanism, according to their actual amount of work. Therefore, Marx does not believe that the law value transforms to socially direct labour due to the beliefs of a bank, or the imposition of fiat, or the agreement of a group to count labour equally. The changes must come about through a material transformation of the means of production.

This, in the end, is what I tentatively call the transition problem. This is a problem because no Marxist, including Marx, has ever made it absolutely clear what the social relations are wherein all labour is counted equally. Not only how the transition takes place, but actually what it is that is being transitioned to has never been clearly defined. It is my contention that this is the pivot upon which the Marxist argument stands or falls. Marx's suggestions in the Communist Manifesto are clearly asinine and childish, and suggestions that he would not have made at the mature point in which he wrote The Critique of the Gotha Programme. The only plausible way to grasp through the dark as regards this issue is what the Maoists resort to, blind social experimentation using communal farms or the like.

This is the task at hand for all communists, and it is a metaphysically implausible task: equality in the world must be established where none really exists. No two "quanta of labour" can be equal to each other on average, this is because some will always be more or less capable. In such a world, not only is capitalism, in the strict sense of commodity exchange, not only is the only economic mode that can exist, but the only economic mode that did exist. This is why modern Marxists, who attempt to go beyond the economic side of things, must make it their lifelong mission to deny human biodiversity - races don't exist, genders and sexes don't exist, families and extensions thereof, nations, don't exist, etc.

Other Issues

For the sake of the argument above, which I believe is based on the pivotal premise of Marxism, I accepted for granted Marx's premise of the law of value. It is unfortunate that the law of socially direct labour simply can't exist, and the only law he attempts to posit is the law of value. It is then, even more unfortunate for Marxist thought, that the law of value strictly speaking doesn't quite seem to exist. To confess my current position at the outset, I accept the typical Austrian approach to questions of value, i.e. subjectivity.

There are, of course, lots of critiques of the law of value, and many cogent ones from the Austrian perspective. But as with the transition problem, the issue that I had as I read through the Collected Works was different from the typical critiques -- most of which, by and large, I also will admit. My problem is that for Marx, values have magnitude both in labour time and in money. Therefore, Marx can talk about the sum of values (labour time) being equal or unequal to the sum of prices (money). It is Marx's contention that the sums are equal, and that production of value precedes the receipt of value, i.e. prices in their totality are not only equal to but determined by the total value produced. So, while the value may not be equal to the price, the totality of prices in the universe is cosmically equivalent to the totality of values. Need I say more? It is my opinion that prices are determined by nothing more than a seller's desire to make a profit. Value is purely mental. In fact, Marx's own critique of fetishism applies just as well to his own imbuing of commodities with value. Value, for Marx, is a kind of quantifiable mystic force.

I also happen to find Hoppe's argument fairly cogent.

The issue in the end with political theorising, is what can achieve the most desirable end. If you don't even know how to define your end, let alone why it is desirable or how to get there. There's no point aiming for it. Communism is a mechanistic explanation of the world, where the end of communism will come about no matter, even if it sucks, which Marx doesn't deny: he believes it will come about regardless. As I said before, there's little reason to dig up old Marx, he needs to be buried deep, the particles of dirt upon his coffin a testament to the arguments against his theory. Most of which are the testament of human blood, the sea of which many deluded people attempt to cross in order to get at their unreachable utopia. The world, no doubt, is an ocean, and a political arrangement, no doubt, is a ship. Does one make a sociological analysis of the behaviour of sailors and argue that according to this and that unsubstantiated theory they will find the dock on the other shore? Or does one find a capable captain, the most capable captain one can, and ask him to guide and instruct us? Must we deny ourselves the right to such a captain?  Unless we think the worse the better, we really shouldn't torture ourselves, poor beggars, thus.

Tuesday 28 October 2014

Some Thoughts on Foucault

Introduction


I intend this blog as a general neoreaction/political thought depository for the products of my mind. I won't go about presenting my views in any systematic way, though I may at some point endeavour to do that. However, I happen to think that the first place anyone should start, is here. I spent every evening of mine for about a month last year going through Mencius Moldbug's very long essays on a variety of topics (is there anything he doesn't cover?). Here, however, I would simply like to begin rather informally by presenting some of my thoughts on Foucault. I think he is sufficiently important to the Cathedral's own thought that a brief evaluation from a neoreactionary perspective is perhaps useful. There are some basic ideas that I think vibe quite well with neoreaction, but others that I think simply must be discarded. I must also admit that, unlike the works of Moldbug (or Marx, a matter for another time), I haven't read the entire corpus of his work, and thus consider myself an outsider to Foucauldian thought, and perhaps even unqualified to evaluate him. That being said, I can't see myself going through any extensive study of Foucault at any point in the future, so I'll go ahead with it now while he is still on my mind.

Impact


Foucault's legacy politically and academically cannot, in my opinion, be underrated. On the whole, I believe that his legacy has been a negative for philosophic thought, and also for the disciplines of sociology and anthropology. This is because Foucault shifted the aim of philosophical inquiry away from the evaluation of propositions for truth value, and towards the determination of the genealogy of a proposition. That is to say, he encouraged the investigation into why someone said something that they did, rather than dealing with statements as statements which carry with them truth or falsehood. Power-knowledge is Foucault's term for the political discourse of truth at any given time, which is informed, ultimately, by power episteme, as used in The Archaeology of Knowledge). In the sense that such things as discourse and religion, for Marx, are superstructural, and products of the material ownership of the means of production, Foucault places power in a similar place. Discourse is a product of power relations, it is not something that one need to evaluate logically. All modes of thought, or epistemes, for Foucault, are products of power relations.

Thus, where feminism or other such schools of thought cannot argue on strictly material or biological grounds for equality, they instead resort to the argument that gender (note the shift from discussing sex equality) is a social construct, a product of, perhaps, oppressive patriarchal institutions. Similar approaches are found throughout anthropology and sociology. There, history is not important, but genealogy, which is to say, the construction of perception of history in the mind of the subject. At risk of painting all humanities as useless, I must say that this is not the case, only generally the case. Any academic who dissents from the view that gender is socially constructed or might in any way suggest that colonialism was not inherently evil and constructed oppressive discourse and modes of knowledge must keep silent until after tenure is granted. A very difficult task indeed.

Thus, if we are to in any way function as an anti-Cathedral, we have to understand that the Cathedral, doesn't actually care about logical argumentation, evidence, or the cases that we make, instead, they want to know what makes us think the way we do? Clearly, it's going to be explained as a result of our racial privilege, our gender privilege, and our fear of having privilege and self-beneficial discourses exposed as oppressive. It doesn't have anything to do, in the eyes of the typical Cathedralite, with the fact that we actually may have come to our conclusions through following arguments to their logical conclusion, or that we we making inferences about the world around us, which we see crumbling as it follows the logic of democracy (or preferably "Дерьмокра́тия").


As far as Foucauldian thinking goes, it's fairly unlikely that the typical academic influenced thereby, directly or by proxy (as naturally happens even to those who haven't heard of him), is going to be the least bit moved by our argumentation. Take for instance the fairly orthodox Foucauldian Judith Butler's treatment of "biological" responses to her own argument of gender as a form of performativity, in Gender Trouble. It amounts to the strawman of the problem that there has, as of yet, not been found any "gender gene." Clearly, Butler doesn't understand genetics, and the proposition in the first place would be taken fairly quickly as pseudoscientific by anyone who did. This doesn't matter for her however, since scientific (or scientistic) thinking is apparently an oppressive tool of the patriarchy, and thus its conclusions matter little. Butler would be an interesting topic for a future post, and there is a lot to go into with regards to both her legacy in the Cathedral and her impact on the humanities in general, but suffice it to say, when we are talking to even the most intelligent Cathedralites, we might as well be talking to a brick wall. We are bound to have our arguments overlooked and dismissed for the fact that we must all simply be nerds who want to rule the world. Not that attacking the Cathedral head on is in any way something I am recommending.

It should be said that Foucault's approach to knowledge construction is fairly popular, and other thinkers have expressed similar sentiments. Bourdieu's notion of habitus comes fairly close. Habitus and episteme or power-knowledge differ in that a habitus is the mode of social behaviour for a certain group, but individuals may have a variety of habiti. Power-knowledge on the other hand is the discourse prevalent in society at any given time, through which one thinks, speaks and acts. There is no independent subject for Foucault, only power determined discourses. Both are epistemologically anti-individualistic, and posit that a person is entirely socially conditioned. This is obviously much more sophisticated, but the approach of reducing propositions to the product of a person's background, despite simply being fallacious from the perspective someone who respects logic, is rather prevalent in society and the Cathedral at large. One might even say that it is the episteme. Just take for instance the typical reaction to neo-reaction in the news.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Foucault for Neoreactionary Purposes

Moldbug's model of the Cathedral can easily be thought of as similar to Foucault's model of power determining the dominant discourse. The diagram below this paragraph illustrates Moldbug's concept from here, which I shall not elaborate presently (I shall simply assume familiarity of the reader with the concept at hand). Any notion of political power-knowledge, and indeed any political habitus, is indeed compatible with the conception of the Cathedral. A Foucauldian would likely not dispute that this structure does exist, but would certainly argue for a greater emphasis on roughly Marxist, perhaps Frankfurtian, grounds, that the bourgeoisie at large is a greater influence than these rather clear cut power-wielding institutions. The judiciary and media, for instance, are not agents, since they are determined, in Foucault's thought, by greater power-knowledge discourses. Similarly, the individual, who in the diagram below, is shown to have their social norms determined by the Cathedral, is not totalised as a product or entity defined in relation to the episteme in question as he is in Foucault's thought. For Foucault, the individual and subject are defined by how institutionalised they are. The prisoner and patient are more individualised than the sane man. By and large, the Austrian economics assumed by Moldbug (which I'd also hold to be the preferable economic theory along with cameralism etc.), presupposes individual agency. A social entity is simply a product of individual agents, rather than vice versa. Social norms can be said to be determined by the Cathedral simply by definition, i.e. social norms.
For Foucault, the modern soul is defined by power, and the body is defined by the soul, a socially determined self-identity. The body is prison to the soul for Foucault, and not vice versa. That souls are determined, I wouldn't dispute, but that scientific discourse is contingent, and therefore biological claims about the body are irrelevant, I would. Discourse on the objective world fundamentally is not compatible with that of the subjective world. A subjective perspective, an inside out perspective, fundamentally cannot be mixed with the outside in, or scientific, perspective. The two worlds tend to work by their own logic, and it is attempts to explain one using the other that gets us into such difficulties. The scientific method is necessarily a matter of personal and collective acceptance in the Kuhnian sense, and I intend to write on that subject in the future, but the world of the scientific method simply is unaffected by critical social discourse of the Foucauldian hue. Likewise, subjective experience is not discussable from the objective perspective, not just because it cannot be observed by anyone more than one person, i.e. the subject, but because it isn't talking about objects, the material world, which is defined by that which has shape and extension. So, my soul, contingent entity as it may be, no matter how much I attempt to project my perception of it onto my body, is not going to change my body. My body isn't defined by power, nor, fundamentally, are economic conditions - they are defined by rules governing that which has shape and extension, i.e. physical laws. Si eppur muove. Economic conditions and bodily conditions are contingent in certain respects, such that agency has an influence on them. Does power influence perceptions? Yes. Does this mean that scientific inference with due admission of the influence of feeling and perception upon sensory experience is meaningless except as a product of social relations? Obviously not. Does it mean that propositions in general are meaningless except as a product of social relations? Even more obviously not. Does this mean, to limit the scope of my claim, that coercion and power are not expressed in any way upon personal experience and don't have an influence upon personal action in a panoptic way? No. The influence, I think, is immense. The problem, for Foucauldian thought, is not whether or not gazes have a coercive power, but what kind of epistemological and metaphysical claims are being implied -- some of which, if taken to their logical conclusions, result in absurd dismissals of perfectly reasonable arguments, which is specifically the message I am trying to get across here. Power and coercive gazes do have immense effect upon subjectivity and upon agency, but there's little point in reducing the whole social and political world to them. Importantly however, the Cathedral does engage in coercion in a Foucauldian way, big time, and it makes the old days of torture seem preferable to the days of constant surveillance that we currently live in.

Some other, perhaps, minor comments on Foucault. Foucault claims that from the 18th to 20th centuries, the rise of the bourgeoisie and the regimentation of daily life lead to discipline as opposed to the kind of torture employed by earlier governments in Discipline and Punish. If this is true, it may be argued that democratic regimes require more control, and more maintenance of social behaviour, more regimentation, and more carceral creation of delinquency than monarchical regimes. Democracy inherently leads to greater requirements for control and power. While ultimately the civil service can manage a country without election, election unreigned results in anarchy. The Cathedral is the institution which maintains this careful balance, but inherently must expand (read, become left-wing), leading to greater and greater economic and administrative incompetence. That the bourgeoisie in particular is to blame is clearly questionable, as the class distinctions laid out by Marx are fairly inadequate reflections of reality. To be clear however, Foucault is not making arguments about the Marxian economic claims of exploitation that Marx made.

Perhaps to be nit-picky about Discipline and Punish, it is questionable that individuality in the Foucauldian sense, i.e. deviance warranting incarceration and discipline, is actually virtuous. An issue that Foucault does not deal with is the actual effectiveness of different forms of punishment at dealing with crime. Fundamentally, this brings us back to the main issue that Foucault has with propositions and truth value. Without being concerned for truth value, such matters are never taken seriously by Foucault. This topic was dealt with quite well in Peter Hitchens' A Brief History of Crime.