Digifesto

Tag: herbert marcuse

December 14, 2017

Marcuse, de Beauvoir, and Badiou: reflections on three strategies

I have written in this blog about three different philosophers who articulated a vision of hope for a more free world, including in their account an understanding of the role of technology. I would like to compare these views because nuanced differences between them may be important.

First, let’s talk about Marcuse, a Frankfurt School thinker whose work was an effective expression of philosophical Marxism that catalyzed the New Left. Marcuse was, like other Frankfurt School thinkers, concerned about the role of technology in society. His proposed remedy was “the transcendent project“, which involves an attempt at advancing “the totality” through an understanding of its logic and action to transform it into something that is better, more free.

As I began to discuss here, there is a problem with this kind of Marxist aspiration for a transformation of all of society through philosophical understanding, which is this: the political and technical totality exists as it does in no small part to manage its own internal information flows. Information asymmetries and differentiation of control structures are a feature, not a bug. The convulsions caused by the Internet as it tears and repairs the social fabric have not created the conditions of unified enlightened understanding. Rather, they have exposed that given nearly boundless access to information, most people will ignore it and maintain, against all evidence to the contrary, the dignity of one who has a valid opinion.

The Internet makes a mockery of expertise, and makes no exception for the expertise necessary for the Marcusian “transcendental project”. Expertise may be replaced with the technological apparati of artificial intelligence and mass data collection, but the latter are a form of capital whose distribution is a part of the totality. If they are having their transcendent effect today, as the proponents of AI claim, this effect is in the hands of a very few. Their motivations are inscrutable. As they have their own opinions and courtiers, writing for them is futile. They are, properly speaking, a great uncertainty that shows that centralized control does not close down all options. It may be that the next defining moment in history is set by the decision of how Jeff Bezos decides to spend his wealth, and that is his decision alone. For “our” purposes–yours, my reader, and mine–this arbitrariness of power must be seen as part of the totality to be transcended, if that is possible.

It probably isn’t. And if it Really isn’t, that may be the best argument for something like the postmodern breakdown of all epistemes. There are at least two strands of postmodern thought coming from the denial of traditional knowledge and university structure. The first is the phenomenological privileging of subjective experience. This approach has the advantage of never being embarrassed by the fact that the Internet is constantly exposing us as fools. Rather, it allows us to narcissistically and uncritically indulge in whatever bubble we find ourselves in. The alternative approach is to explicitly theorize about ones finitude and the radical implications of it, to embrace a kind of realist skepticism or at least acknowledgement of the limitations of the human condition.

It’s this latter approach which was taken up by the existentialists in the mid-20th century. In particular, I keep returning to de Beauvoir as a hopeful voice that recognizes a role for science that is not totalizing, but nevertheless liberatory. De Beauvoir does not take aim, like Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, at societal transformation. Her concern is with individual transformation, which is, given the radical uncertainty of society, a far more tractable problem. Individual ethics are based in local effects, not grand political outcomes. The desirable local effects are personal liberation and liberation of those one comes in contact with. Science, and other activities, is a way of opening new possibilities, not limited to what is instrumental for control.

Such a view of incremental, local, individual empowerment and goodness seems naive in the face of pessimistic views of society’s corruptedness. Whether these be economic or sociological theories of how inequality and oppression are locked into society, and however emotionally compelling and widespread they may be in social media, it is necessary by our previous argument to remember that these views are always mere ideology, not scientific fact, because an accurate totalizing view of society is impossible given real constraints on information flow and use. Totalizing ideologies that are not rigorous in their acceptance of basic realistic points are a symptom of more complex social structure (i.e. the distribution of capitals, the reproduction of many habiti) not a definition of it.

It is consistent for a scientific attitude to deflate political ideology because this deflation is an opening of possibility against both utopian and dystopian trajectories. What’s missing is a scientific proof of this very point, comparable to a Halting Problem or Incompleteness Theorem, but for social understanding.

A last comment, comparing Badiou to de Beauvoir and Marcuse. Badiou’s theory of the Event as the moment that may be seized to effect a transformation is perhaps a synthesis of existentialist and Marxian philosophies. Badiou is still concerned with transcendence, i.e. the moment when, given one assumed structure to life or reality or psychology, one discovers an opening into a renewed life with possibilities that the old model did not allow. But (at least as far as I have read him, which is not enough) he sees the Event as something that comes from without. It cannot be predicted or anticipate within the system but is instead a kind of grace. Without breaking explicitly from professional secularism, Badiou’s work suggests that we must have faith in something outside our understanding to provide an opportunity for transcendence. This is opposed to the more muscular theories described above: Marcuse’s theory of transcendent political activism and de Beauvoir’s active individual projects are not as patient.

I am still young and strong and so prefer the existentialist position on these matters. I am politically engaged to some extent and so, as an extension of my projects of individual freedom, am in search of opportunities for political transcendence as well–a kind of Marcuse light, as politics like science is a field of contest that is reproduced as its games are played and this is its structure. But life has taught me again and again to appreciate Badiou’s point as well, which is the appreciation of the unforeseen opportunity, the scientific and political anomaly.

What does this reflection conclude?

First, it acknowledges the situatedness and fragility of expertise, which deflates grand hopes for transcendent political projects. Pessimistic ideologies that characterize the totality as beyond redemption are false; indeed it is characteristic of the totality that it is incomprehensible. This is a realistic view, and transcendence must take it seriously.

Second, it acknowledges the validity of more localized liberatory projects despite the first point.

Third, it acknowledges that the unexpected event is a feature of the totality to be embraced, contrary to pessimistic ideologies to the contrary. The latter, far from encouraging transcendence, are blinders that prevent the recognition of events.

Because realism requires that we not abandon core logical principles despite our empirical uncertainty, you may permit one more deduction. To the extent that actors in society pursue the de Beauvoiran strategy of engaging in local liberatory projects that affect others, the probability of a Badiousian event in the life of another increases. Solipsism is false, and so (to put it tritely) “random acts of kindness” do have their effect on the totality, in aggregate. In fact, there may be no more radical political agenda than this opening up of spaces of local freedom, which shrugs off the depression of pessimistic ideology and suppression of technical control. Which is not a new view at all. What is perhaps surprising is how easy it may be.

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November 14, 2015

Marcuse on the transcendent project

Perhaps you’ve had this moment: it’s in the wee hours of the morning. You can’t sleep. The previous day was another shock to your sense of order in the universe and your place in it. You’ve begun to question your political ideals, your social responsibilities. Turning aside you see a book you read long ago that you remember gave you a sense of direction–a direction you have since repudiated. What did it say again?

I’m referring to Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, published in 1964.Whitfield in Dissent has a great summary of Marcuse’s career–a meteoric rise, a fast fall. He was a student of Heidegger and the Frankfurt School and applied that theory in a timely way in the 60’s.

My memory of Marcuse had been reduced to the Frankfurt School themes–technology transforming all scientific inquiry into operationalization and the resulting cultural homogeneity. I believe now that I had forgotten at least two important points.

The first is the notion of technological rationality–that pervasive technology changes what people think of as rational. This is different from instrumental rationality, which is the means ends rationality of an agent, which Frankfurt School thinkers tend to believe drive technological development and adoption. Rather, this is a claim about the effect of technology on society’s self-understanding. And example might be how the ubiquity of Facebook has changed our perception of personal privacy.

So Marcuse is very explicit about how artifacts have politics in a very thick sense, though he is rarely cited in contemporary scholarly discourse on the subject. Credit for this concept goes typically to Langdon Winner, citing his 1980 publication “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture gives only the briefest of mention to Marcuse, despite his impact on counterculture and his concern with technology. I suppose this means the New Left, associated with Marcuse, had little to do with the emergence of cyberculture.

More significantly for me than this point was a second, which was Marcuse’s outline of the transcendental project. I’ve been thinking about this recently because I’ve met a Kantian at Berkeley and this has refreshed my interest in transcendental idealism and its intellectual consequences. In particular, Foucault described himself as one following Kant’s project, and in our discussion of Foucault in Classics it became discursively clear in a moment I may never forget precisely how well Foucault succeeded in this.

The revealing question was this. For Foucault, all knowledge exists in a particular system of discipline and power. Scientific knowledge orders reality in such and such a way, depends for its existence on institutions that establish the authority of scientists, etc. Fine. So, one asks, what system of power does Foucault’s knowledge participate in?

The only available answer is: a new one, where Foucauldeans critique existing modes of power and create discursive space for modes of life beyond existing norms. Foucault’s ideas are tools for transcending social systems and opening new social worlds.

That’s great for Foucault and we’ve seen plenty of counternormative social movements make successful use of him. But that doesn’t help with the problems of technologization of society. Here, Marcuse is more relevant. He is also much more explicit about his philosophical intentions in, for example, this account of the trancendent project:

(1) The transcendent project must be in accordance with the real possibilities open at the attained level of the material and intellectual culture.

(2) The transcendent project, in order to falsify the established totality, must demonstrate its own higher rationality in the threefold sense that

(a) it offers the prospect of preserving and improving the productive achievements of civilization;

(b) it defines the established totality in its very structure, basic tendencies, and relations;

(c) its realization offers a greater chance for the pacification of existence, within the framework of institutions which offer a greater chance for the free development of human needs and faculties.

Obviously, this notion of rationality contains, especially in the last statement, a value judgment, and I reiterate what I stated before: I believe that the very concept of Reason originates in this values judgment, and that the concept of truth cannot be divorced from the value of Reason.

I won’t apologize for Marcuse’s use of the dialect of German Idealism because if I had my way the kinds of concepts he employs and the capitalization of the word Reason would come back into common use in educated circles. Graduate school has made me extraordinarily cynical, but not so cynical that it has shaken my belief that an ideal–really any ideal–but in particular as robust an ideal as Reason is important for making society not suck, and that it’s appropriate to transmit such an ideal (and perhaps only this ideal) through the institution of the university. These are old fashioned ideas and honestly I’m not sure how I acquired them myself. But this is a digression.

My point is that in this view of societal progress, society can improve itself, but only by transcending itself and in its moment of transcendence freely choosing an alternative that expands humanity’s potential for flourishing.

“Peachy,” you say. “Where’s the so what?”

Besides that I think the transcendent project is a worthwhile project that we should collectively try to achieve? Well, there’s this: I think that most people have given up on the transcendent project and that this is a shame. Specifically, I’m disappointed in the critical project, which has since the 60’s become enshrined within the social system, for no longer aspiring to transcendence. Criticality has, alas, been recuperated. (I have in mind here, for example, what has been called critical algorithm studies)

And then there’s this: Marcuse’s insight into the transcendent project is that it has to “be in accordance with the real possibilities open at the attained level of the material and intellectual culture” and also that “it defines the established totality in its very structure, basic tendencies, and relations.” It cannot transcend anything without first including all of what is there. And this is precisely the weakness of this critical project as it now stands: that it excludes the mathematical and engineering logic that is at the heart of contemporary technics and thereby, despite its lip service to giving technology first class citizenship within its Actor Network, in fact fails to “define the established totality in its very structure, basic tendencies, and relations.” There is a very important body of theoretical work at the foundation of computer science and statistics, the theory that grounds the instrumental force and also systemic ubiquity of information technology and now data science. The continued crisis of our now very, very late modern capitalism are due partly, IMHO, by our failure to dialectically synthesize the hegemonic computational paradigm, which is not going to be defeated by ‘refusal’, with expressions of human interest that resist it.

I’m hopeful because recently I’ve learned about new research agendas that may be on to accomplishing just this. I doubt they will take on the perhaps too grandiose mantle of “the trancendent project.” But I for one would be glad if they did.

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