Digifesto

Tag: max horkheimer

October 16, 2017

A quick recap: from political to individual reasoning about ends

So to recap:

Horkheimer warned in Eclipse of Reason that formalized subjective reason that optimizes means was going to eclipse “objective reason” about social harmony, the good life, the “ends” that really matter. Technical efficacy which is capitalism which is AI would expose how objective reason is based in mythology and so society would be senseless and miserable forever.

There was at one point a critical reaction against formal, technical reason that was called the Science Wars in the 90’s, but though it continues to have intellectual successors it is for the most part self-defeating and powerless. Technical reasoning is powerful because it is true, not true because it is powerful.

It remains an open question whether it’s possible to have a society that steers itself according to something like objective reason. One could argue that Habermas’s project of establishing communicative action as a grounds for legitimate pluralistic democracy was an attempt to show the possibility of objective reason after all. This is, for some reason, an unpopular view in the United States, where democracy is often seen as a way of mediating agonistic interests rather than finding common ones.

But Horkheimer’s Frankfurt School is just one particularly depressing and insightful view. Maybe there is some other way to go. For example, one could decide that society has always been disappointing, and that determining ones true “ends” is an individual, rather than collective, endeavor. Existentialism is one such body of work that posits a substantive moral theory (or at least works at one) that is distrustful of political as opposed to individual solutions.

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December 28, 2015

Jung and Bourdieu as an improvement upon Freud and Habermas

I have written in this blog and in published work about Habermas and his Frankfurt School precursor, Horkheimer. Based on this writing, a thorough reader (of whom I expect there to be approximately zero) might conclude that I am committed to a Habermasian view.

I’d like to log a change of belief based on recent readings of Pierre Bourdieu and Carl Jung.

Why Bourdieu and Jung? Because Frankfurt School social theory was based on a Freudian view of psychology. This Freudian origin manifests itself in the social theory in ways that I’ll try to outline below. However, in my own therapeutic experience as well as many more informal encounters with Jungian theory, I find the latter to be much more compelling. As I’ve begun reading Jung’s Man and His Symbols, I see now where Jung explicitly departed from Freud, enriching his theory. These departures are far more consistent with a Bourdieusian view of society. (I’ve noted the potential synergy here).

Let me try to be clearer about what this change in perspective entails:

For Freud, man has an irrational nature and a rational ego. The purpose of therapy is the maintenance of rational control. Horkheimer’s critique of modern society invoked Freud in his discussion of the revolt of nature: society rationalizes itself and the individuals within it; the ‘nature’ of the individuals that is excluded (repressed, really) by this rationalization manifests itself in ugly ways. Habermas, who is less pessimistic about society, still sees morality in terms of social norms grounded in rational consensus. “Rational consensus” as a concept angers or worries postmodern and poststructural critics who see this principle as a basis for social ethics as exclusionary.

For Jung, the therapeutic relationship absolutely must not be about the imposition of the therapist’s views on the patient; psychological progress must come from within the individual patient. He documents an encounter between himself and Freud where he discovers this; he is very convincing. The Jungian unconscious is a collective stock of symbols, as an alternative to a Freudian subconscious of nature repressed by ego. The Jungian ego, therefore, is a much more flexible subject; at times it seems that Jung is nostalgic for a more irrational, perhaps primitive, consciousness. But more importantly, Jung explicitly rejects the idea of a society’s sanity being about its adherence to shared rational norms. Instead, he opts for a more Durkheimian view of social variety:

Can we make any sort of objective judgment about the final result [of therapy]? Only if we make a comparison between our conclusions and the standards that are generally valid in the social milieu to which the individuals below. Even then, we must take into account the mental equilibrium (or “sanity”) of the individual concerned. For the result cannot be a completely collective leveling out of the individual to adjust him to the “norms” of his society. This would amount to a most unnatural condition. A sane and normal society is one in which people habitually disagree, because general agreement is relatively rare outside the sphere of instinctive human qualities.

A diverse society of habitual disagreement accords much better with the Bourdieusian view of a society variously inflected as habitus than it does with a Habermasian view of one governed by rational norms.

…

There’s a subtlety that I’ve missed again and again which I’d like to put my finger on now.

The problem with the early Habermasian view is that ethics are determined through rational consensus. So, individuals participate in a public sphere and agree, as individuals, on norms that govern their individual behavior.

Later Habermas (say, volume two of Theory of Communicative Action) begins to acknowledge the information overhead of of this approach and discusses the rise of bureaucracy and its technicization. In lieu of a bona fide consensus of the lifeworld, one gets a rational coalescence of norms into law.

Effectively, this means that while the general population can be irrational in various ways (relative to the perspective of the law), what’s important is that lawmakers create law through a rational process that is inclusive of diverse perspectives.

We see a similar view in Bourdieu’s view of science: it is a specific habitus whose legitimacy is due to the trans-historical robustness of its mathematized formulations.

The conclusion is this: scientists and lawmakers have to approach rationality in specific trans-personal and trans-historical ways. In fact, the rationality of science or of law are only achieved systemically, through the generalized process of science or lawmaking, not through the finite perspectives of their participants, however individually rational they may be. But the general population need not be rational like this for society to be ‘sane’. Rather, individual habitus or partial perspective can vary across a society that is nevertheless coordinated by rational principle.

There is bound to be friction at the boundary between the institutions of science and law and the more diverse publics that surround and intersect them. Donna Haraway’s ‘privilege of partial perspectives‘ is a good example of the symptoms of this friction. A population that is excluded from science–not represented well within science–may react against it by reasserting it’s ‘partial perspective’ as a viable alternative. This is a kind of refusal, in the sense perhaps originated by Marcuse and more recently resurfaced in Michael Dumas’ work on antiblackness. Refusal is, perhaps sadly, delusional and seems to recur as a failed and failing project; but it is sociologically robust precisely because in late modernism the hegemonic rationality allows for Dukheimian social differentiation. The latter is actually the triumph of liberalism over, for example, racist facism; Fred Turner’s The Democratic Surround is a nice historical work documenting how this order of scientifically managed diversity was a deliberate United States statebuilding project in World War II.

If a top-down rationalizing control creates as a symptom pathological refusal–another manifestation perhaps of the ‘revolt of nature‘–a Jungian view of rationality as psychic integration perhaps provides a more palatable alternative. Jungian development is accomplished through personalized, situated education. However, through this education, the individual flourishes through a transcendence of their more limited, narrow sense of self. Jungian therapy/education transcends even gender, as the male and female are encouraged to recognize the feminine “anima” and masculine “animus” aspects of their psyches, respectively. Fully developed individuals–who one would expect to occupy, over the course of their development, a somewhat shared habitus–seem to therefore get along better with each other, agreeing to disagree as the recognize how their differences are based on arbitrary social differentiation. Nothing about this agreeing-to-disagree on matters of, for example, taste precludes an agreement on serious trans-personal matters such as science or law. There need not be any resentment towards this God’s Eye View, since it is recognized by each educated individual as manifest in their own role in the social order.

Societal conditions may fall short of this ideal. However, the purpose of social theory is to provide a realizable social telos. Grounding it in a psychological theory that admits the possibility of realized psychological health is a good step forward.

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September 18, 2015

Ethnography, philosophy, and data anonymization

The other day at BIDS I was working at my laptop when a rather wizardly looking man in a bicycle helmet asked me when The Hacker Within would be meeting. I recognized him from a chance conversation in an elevator after Anca Dragan’s ICBS talk the previous week. We had in that brief moment connected over the fact that none of the bearded men in the elevator had remembered to press the button for the ground floor. We had all been staring off into space before a young programmer with a thin mustache pointed out our error.

Engaging this amicable fellow, whom I will leave anonymous, the conversation turned naturally towards principles for life. I forget how we got onto the topic, but what I took away from the conversation was his advice: “Don’t turn your passion into your job. That’s like turning your lover into a wh***.”

Scholars in the School of Information are sometimes disparaging of the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom hierarchy. Scholars, I’ve discovered, are frequently disparaging of ideas that are useful, intuitive, and pertinent to action. One cannot continue to play the Glass Bead Game if it has already been won any more than one can continue to be entertained by Tic Tac Toe once one has grasped its ineluctable logic.

We might wonder, as did Horkheimer, when the search and love of wisdom ceased to be the purpose of education. It may have come during the turn when philosophy was determined to be irrelevant, speculative or ungrounded. This perhaps coincided, in the United States, with McCarthyism. This is a question for the historians.

What is clear now is that philosophy per se is not longer considered relevant to scientific inquiry.

An ethnographer I know (who I will leave anonymous) told me the other day that the goal of Science and Technology Studies is to answer questions from philosophy of science with empirical observation. An admirable motivation for this is that philosophy of science should be grounded in the true practice of science, not in idle speculation about it. The ethnographic methods, through which observational social data is collected and then compellingly articulated, provide a kind of persuasiveness that for many far surpasses the persuasiveness of a priori logical argument, let alone authority.

And yet the authority of ethnographic writing depends always on the socially constructed role of the ethnographer, much like the authority of the physicist depends on their socially constructed role as physicists. I’d even argue that the dependence of ethnographic authority on social construction is greater than that of other kinds of scientific authority, as ethnography is so quintessentially an embedded social practice. A physicist or chemist or biologist at least in principle has nature to push back on their claims; a renegade natural scientist can as a last resort claim their authority through provision of a bomb or a cure. The mathematician or software engineer can test and verify their work through procedure. The ethnographer does not have these opportunities. Their writing will never be enough to convey the entirety of their experience. It is always partial evidence, a gesture at the unwritten.

This is not an accidental part of the ethnographic method. The practice of data anonymization, necessitated by the IRB and ethics, puts limitations on what can be said. These limitations are essential for building and maintaining the relationships of trust on which ethnographic data collection depends. The experiences of the ethnographer must always go far beyond what has been regulated as valid procedure. The information they have collected illicitly will, if they are skilled and wise, inform their judgment of what to write and what to leave out. The ethnographic text contains many layers of subtext that will be unknown to most readers. This is by design.

The philosophical text, in contrast, contains even less observational data. The text is abstracted from context. Only the logic is explicit. A naive reader will assume, then, that philosophy is a practice of logic chopping.

This is incorrect. My friend the ethnographer was correct: that ethnography is a way of answering philosophical questions empirically, through experience. However, what he missed is that philosophy is also a way of answering philosophical questions through experience. Just as in ethnographic writing, experience necessarily shapes the philosophical text. What is included, what is left out, what constellation in the cosmos of ideas is traced by the logic of the argument–these will be informed by experience, even if that experience is absent from the text itself.

One wonders: thus unhinged from empirical argument, how does a philosophical text become authoritative?

I’d offer the answer: it doesn’t. A philosophical text does not claim authority. That has been its method since Socrates.

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September 10, 2015

de Beauvoir on science as human freedom

I appear to be unable to stop writing blog posts about philosophers who wrote in the 1940’s. I’ve been attempting a kind of survey. After a lot of reading, I have to say that my favorite–the one I think is most correct–is Simone de Beauvoir.

Much like “bourgeois”, “de Beauvoir” is something I find it impossible to remember how to spell. Therefore I am setting myself up for embarrassment by beginning to write about her work, The Ethics of Ambiguity. On the other hand, it’s nice to come full circle. In a notebook I was scribbling in when I first showed up in graduate school I was enthusiastic about using de Beauvoir to explicate what’s interesting about open source software development. Perhaps now is the right time to indulge the impulse.

de Beauvoir is generally not considered to be a philosopher of science. That’s too bad, because she said some of the most brilliant things about science ever said. If you can get past just a little bit of existentialist jargon, there’s a lot there.

Here’s a passage. The Marxists have put this entire book on the Internet, making it easy to read.

To will freedom and to will to disclose being are one and the same choice; hence, freedom takes a positive and constructive step which causes being to pass to existence in a movement which is constantly surpassed. Science, technics, art, and philosophy are indefinite conquests of existence over being; it is by assuming themselves as such that they take on their genuine aspect; it is in the light of this assumption that the word progress finds its veridical meaning. It is not a matter of approaching a fixed limit: absolute Knowledge or the happiness of man or the perfection of beauty; all human effort would then be doomed to failure, for with each step forward the horizon recedes a step; for man it is a matter of pursuing the expansion of his existence and of retrieving this very effort as an absolute.

de Beauvoir’s project in The Ethics of Ambiguity is to take seriously the antimonies of society and the individual, of nature and the subject, which Horkheimer only gets around to stating at the conclusion of contemporary analysis. Rather than cry from wounds of getting skewered by the horns of the antinomy, de Beauvoir turns that ambiguity inherent in the antinomy into a realistic, situated ethics.

If de Beauvoir’s ethics have a telos or purpose, it is to expand human freedom and potential indefinitely. Through a terrific dialectical argument, she reasons out why this project is in a sense the only honest one for somebody in the human condition, despite its transcendence over individual interest.

Science, then, becomes one of several activities which one undertakes to expand this human potential.

Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom.

Science is the process of free inquiry, not the product of a particular discovery. The finest scientific discoveries open up new discoveries.

What about technics?

The attempt is sometimes made to find an objective justification of science in technics; but ordinarily the mathematician is concerned with mathematics and the physicist with physics, and not with their applications. And, furthermore, technics itself is not objectively justified; if it sets up as absolute goals the saving of time and work which it enables us to realize and the comfort and luxury which it enables us to have access to, then it appears useless and absurd, for the time that one gains can not be accumulated in a store house; it is contradictory to want to save up existence, which, the fact is, exists only by being spent, and there is a good case for showing that airplanes, machines, the telephone, and the radio do not make men of today happier than those of former times.

Here we have in just a couple sentences dismissal of instrumentality as the basis for science. Science is not primarily for acceleration; this is absurd.

But actually it is not a question of giving men time and happiness, it is not a question of stopping the movement of life: it is a question of fulfilling it. If technics is attempting to make up for this lack, which is at the very heart of existence, it fails radically; but it escapes all criticism if one admits that, through it, existence, far from wishing to repose in the security of being, thrusts itself ahead of itself in order to thrust itself still farther ahead, that it aims at an indefinite disclosure of being by the transformation of the thing into an instrument and at the opening of ever new possibilities for man.

For de Beauvoir, science (as well as all the other “constructive activities of man” including art, etc.) should be about the disclosure of new possibilities.

Succinct and unarguable.

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August 27, 2015

Nissenbaum the functionalist

Today in Classics we discussed Helen Nissenbaum’s Privacy in Context.

Most striking to me is that Nissenbaum’s privacy framework, contextual integrity theory, depends critically on a functionalist sociological view. A context is defined by its information norms and violations of those norms are judged according to their (non)accordance with the purposes and values of the context. So, for example, the purposes of an educational institution determine what are appropriate information norms within it, and what departures from those norms constitute privacy violations.

I used to think teleology was dead in the sciences. But recently I learned that it is commonplace in biology and popular in ecology. Today I learned that what amounts to a State Philosopher in the U.S. (Nissenbaum’s framework has been more or less adopted by the FTC) maintains a teleological view of social institutions. Fascinating! Even more fascinating that this philosophy corresponds well enough to American law as to be informative of it.

From a “pure” philosophy perspective (which is I will admit simply a vice of mine), it’s interesting to contrast Nissenbaum with…oh, Horkheimer again. Nissenbaum sees ethical behavior (around privacy at least) as being behavior that is in accord with the purpose of ones context. Morality is given by the system. For Horkheimer, the problem is that the system’s purposes subsume the interests of the individual, who is alone the agent who is able to determine what is right and wrong. Horkheimer is a founder of a Frankfurt school, arguably the intellectual ancestor of progressivism. Nissenbaum grounds her work in Burke and her theory is admittedly conservative. Privacy is violated when people’s expectations of privacy are violated–this is coming from U.S. law–and that means people’s contextual expectations carry more weight than an individual’s free-minded beliefs.

The tension could be resolved when free individuals determine the purpose of the systems they participate in. Indeed, Nissenbaum quotes Burke in his approval of established conventions as being the result of accreted wisdom and rationale of past generations. The system is the way it is because it was chosen. (Or, perhaps, because it survived.)

Since Horkheimer’s objection to “the system” is that he believes instrumentality has run amok, thereby causing the system serve a purpose nobody intended for it, his view is not inconsistent with Nissenbaum’s. Nissenbaum, building on Dworkin, sees contextual legitimacy as depending on some kind of political legitimacy.

The crux of the problem is the question of what information norms comprise the context in which political legitimacy is formed, and what purpose does this context or system serve?

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August 23, 2015

Instrumentality run amok: Bostrom and Instrumentality

Narrowing our focus onto the crux of Bostrom’s argument, we can see how tightly it is bound to a much older philosophical notion of instrumental reason. This comes to the forefront in his discussion of the orthogonality thesis (p.107):

The orthogonality thesis
Intelligence and final goals are orthogonal: more or less any level of intelligence could in principle be combined with more or less any final goal.

Bostrom goes on to clarify:

Note that the orthogonality thesis speaks not of rationality or reason, but of intelligence. By “intelligence” we here mean something like skill at prediction, planning, and means-ends reasoning in general. This sense of instrumental cognitive efficaciousness is most relevant when we are seeking to understand what the causal impact of a machine superintelligence might be.

Bostrom maintains that the generality of instrumental intelligence, which I would argue is evinced by the generality of computing, gives us a way to predict how intelligent systems will act. Specifically, he says that an intelligent system (and specifically a superintelligent) might be predictable because of its design, because of its inheritance of goals from a less intelligence system, or because of convergent instrumental reasons. (p.108)

Return to the core logic of Bostrom’s argument. The existential threat posed by superintelligence is simply that the instrumental intelligence of an intelligent system will invest in itself and overwhelm any ability by us (its well-intentioned creators) to control its behavior through design or inheritance. Bostrom thinks this is likely because instrumental intelligence (“skill at prediction, planning, and means-ends reasoning in general”) is a kind of resource or capacity that can be accumulated and put to other uses more widely. You can use instrumental intelligence to get more instrumental intelligence; why wouldn’t you? The doomsday prophecy of a fast takeoff superintelligence achieving a decisive strategic advantage and becoming a universe-dominating singleton depends on this internal cycle: instrumental intelligence investing in itself and expanding exponentially, assuming low recalcitrance.

This analysis brings us to a significant focal point. The critical missing formula in Bostrom’s argument is (specifically) the recalcitrance function of instrumental intelligence. This is not the same as recalcitrance with respect to “general” intelligence or even “super” intelligence. Rather, what’s critical is how much a process dedicated to “prediction, planning, and means-ends reasoning in general” can improve its own capacities at those things autonomously. The values of this recalcitrance function will bound the speed of superintelligence takeoff. These bounds can then inform the optimal allocation of research funding towards anticipation of future scenarios.

In what I hope won’t distract from the logical analysis of Bostrom’s argument, I’d like to put it in a broader context.

Take a minute to think about the power of general purpose computing and the impact it has had on the past hundred years of human history. As the earliest digital computers were informed by notions of artificial intelligence (c.f. Alan Turing), we can accurately say that the very machine I use to write this text, and the machine you use to read it, are the result of refined, formalized, and materialized instrumental reason. Every programming language is a level of abstraction over a machine that has no ends in itself, but which serves the ends of its programmer (when it’s working). There is a sense in which Bostrom’s argument is not about a near future scenario but rather is just a description of how things already are.

Our very concepts of “technology” and “instrument” are so related that it can be hard to see any distinction at all. (c.f. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology“) Bostrom’s equating of instrumentality with intelligence is a move that makes more sense as computing becomes ubiquitously part of our experience of technology. However, if any instrumental mechanism can be seen as a form of intelligence, that lends credence to panpsychist views of cognition as life. (c.f. the Santiago theory)

Meanwhile, arguably the genius of the market is that it connects ends (through consumption or “demand”) with means (through manufacture and services, or “supply”) efficiently, bringing about the fruition of human desire. If you replace “instrumental intelligence” with “capital” or “money”, you get a familiar critique of capitalism as a system driven by capital accumulation at the expense of humanity. The analogy with capital accumulation is worthwhile here. Much as in Bostrom’s “takeoff” scenarios, we can see how capital (in the modern era, wealth) is reinvested in itself and grows at an exponential rate. Variable rates of return on investment lead to great disparities in wealth. We today have a “multipolar scenario” as far as the distribution of capital is concerned. At times people have advocated for an economic “singleton” through a planned economy.

It is striking that contemporary analytic philosopher and futurist Nick Bostrom’s contemplates the same malevolent force in his apocalyptic scenario as does Max Horkheimer in his 1947 treatise “Eclipse of Reason“: instrumentality run amok. Whereas Bostrom concerns himself primarily with what is literally a machine dominating the world, Horkheimer sees the mechanism of self-reinforcing instrumentality as pervasive throughout the economic and social system. For example, he sees engineers as loci of active instrumentalism. Bostrom never cites Horkheimer, let alone Heidegger. That there is a convergence of different philosophical sub-disciplines on the same problem suggests that there are convergent ultimate reasons which may triumph over convergent instrumental reasons in the end. The question of what these convergent ultimate reasons are, and what their relationship to instrumental reasons is, is a mystery.

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July 25, 2015

Land and gold (Arendt, Horkheimer)

I am thirty, still in graduate school, and not thrilled about the prospects of home ownership since all any of the professionals around me talk about is the sky-rocketing price of real estate around the critical American urban centers.

It is with a leisure afforded by graduate school that I am able to take the long view on this predicament. It is very cheap to spend ones idle time reading Arendt, who has this to say about the relationship between wealth and property:

The profound connection between private and public, manifest on its most elementary level in the question of private property, is likely to be misunderstood today because of the modern equation of property and wealth on one side and propertylessness and poverty on the other. This misunderstanding is all the more annoying as both, property as well as wealth, are historically of greater relevance to the public realm than any other private matter or concern and have played, at least formally, more or less the same role as the chief condition for admission to the public realm and full-fledged citizenship. It is therefore easy to forget that wealth and property, far from being the same, are of an entirely different nature. The present emergence everywhere of actually or potentially very wealthy societies which at the same time are essentially propertyless, because the wealth of any single individual consists of his share in the annual income of society as a whole, clearly shows how little these two things are connected.

For Arendt, beginning with her analysis of ancient Greek society, property (landholding) is the condition of ones participation in democracy. It is a place of residence and source of ones material fulfilment, which is a prerequisite to ones free (because it is unnecessitated) participation in public life. This is contrasted with wealth, which is a feature of private life and is unpolitical. In ancient society, slaves could own wealth, but not property.

If we look at the history of Western civilization as a progression away from this rather extreme moment, we see the rise of social classes whose power is based on in landholding but in wealth. Industrialism and the economy based on private ownership of capital is a critical transition in history. That capital is not bound to a particular location but rather is mobile across international boundaries is one of the things that characterizes global capitalism and brings it in tension with a geographically bounded democratic state. It is interesting that a Jeffersonian democracy, designed with the assumption of landholding citizens, should predate industrial capitalism and be consitutionally unprepared for the result, but nevertheless be one of the models for other democratic governance structures throughout the world.

If private ownership of capital, not land, defines political power under capitalism, then wealth, not property, becomes the measure of ones status and security. For a time, when wealth was as a matter of international standard exchangeable for gold, private ownership of gold could replace private ownership of land as the guarantee of ones material security and thereby grounds for ones independent existence. This independent, free rationality has since Aristotle been the purpose (telos) of man.

In the United States, Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 Executive Order 6102 forbade the private ownership of gold. The purpose of this was to free the Federal Reserve of the gold market’s constraint on increasing the money supply during the Great Depression.

A perhaps unexpected complaint against this political move comes from Horkheimer (Eclipse of Reason, 1947), who sees this as a further affront to individualism by capitalism.

The age of vast industrial power, by eliminating the perspectives of a stable past and future that grew out of ostensibly permanent property relations, is the process of liquidating the individual. The deterioration of his situation is perhaps best measured in terms of his utter insecurity as regards to his personal savings. As long as currencies were rigidly tied to gold, and gold could flow freely over frontiers, its value could shift only within narrow limits. Under present-day conditions the dangers of inflation, of a substantial reduction or complete loss of the purchasing power of his savings, lurks around the next corner. Private possession of gold was the symbol of bourgeois rule. Gold made the burgher somehow the successor of the aristocrat. With it he could establish security for himself and be reasonable sure that even after his death his dependents would not be completely sucked up by the economic system. His more or less independent position, based on his right to exchange goods and money for gold, and therefore on the relatively stable property values, expressed itself in the interest he took in the cultivation of his own personality–not, as today, in order to achieve a better career or for any professional reason, but for the sake of his own individual existence. The effort was meaningful because the material basis of the individual was not wholly unstable. Although the masses could not aspire to the position of the burgher, the presence of a relatively numerous class of individuals who were governed by interest in humanistic values formed the background for a kind of theoretical thought as well as for the type of manifestions in the arts that by virtue of their inherent truth express the needs of society as a whole.

Horkheimer’s historical arc, like many Marxists, appears to ignore its parallels in antiquity. Monetary policy in the Roman Empire, which used something like a gold standard, was not always straightforward. Inflation was sometimes a severe problem when generals would print money to pay the soldiers hat supported their political coups. So it’s not clear that the modern economy is more unstable than gold or land based economies. However, the criticism that economic security is largely a matter of ones continued participation in a larger system, and that there is little in the way of financial security besides this, holds. He continues:

The state’s restriction on the right to possess gold is the symbol of a complete change. Even the members of the middle class must resign themselves to insecurity. The individual consoles himself with the thought that his government, corporation, association, union, or insurance company will take care of him when he becomes ill or reaches the retiring age. The various laws prohibiting private possession of gold symbolize the verdict against the independent economic individual. Under liberalism, the beggar was always an eyesore to the rentier. In the age of big business both beggar and rentier are vanishing. There are no safety zones on society’s thoroughfares. Everyone must keep moving. The entrepreneur has become a functionary, the scholar a professional expert. The philosopher’s maxim, Bene qui latuit, bene vixit, is incompatible with the modern business cycles. Everyone is under the whip of a superior agency. Those who occupy the commanding positions have little more autonomy than their subordinates; they are bound by the power they wield.

In an academic context, it is easy to make a connection between Horkheimer’s concerns about gold ownership and tenure. Academic tenure is or was the refuge of the individual who could in theory develop themselves as individuals in obscurity. The price of this autonomy, which according the philosophical tradition represents the highest possible achievement of man, is that one teaches. So, the developed individual passes on the values developed through contemplation and reflection to the young. The privatization of the university and the emphasis on teaching marketable skills that allow graduates to participate more fully in the economic system is arguably an extension of Horkheimer’s cultural apocalypse.

The counter to this is the claim that the economy as a whole achieves a kind of homeostasis that provides greater security than one whose value is bound to something stable and exogenous like gold and land. Ones savings are secure as long as the system doesn’t fail. Meanwhile, the price of access to cultural materials through which one might expand ones individuality (i.e. videos of academic lectures, the arts, or music) decrease as a consequence of the pervasiveness of the economy. At this point one feels one has reached the limits of Horkheimer’s critique, which perhaps only sees one side of the story despite its sublime passion. We see echoes of it in contemporary feminist critique, which emphasizes how the demands of necessity are disproportionately burdened by women and how this affects their role in the economy. That women have only relatively recently, in historical terms, been released from the private household into the public world (c.f. Arendt again) situates them more precariously within the economic system.

What remains unclear (to me) is how one should conceive of society and values when there is an available continuum of work, opportunity, leisure, individuality, art, and labor under conditions of contemporary technological control. Specifically, the notion of inequality becomes more complicated when one considers that society has never been equal in the sense that is often aspired to in contemporary American society. This is largely because the notion of equality we use today draws from two distinct sources. The first is the equality of self-sufficient landholding men as they encounter each other freely in the polis. Or, equivalently, as self-sufficient goldholding men in something like the Habermasian bourgeois public sphere. The second is equality within society, which is economically organized and therefore requires specialization and managerial stratification. We can try to assure equality to members of society insofar as they are members of society, but not as to their function within society.

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July 23, 2015

Horkheimer on engineers

Horkheimer’s comment on engineers:

It is true that the engineer, perhaps the symbol of this age, is not so exclusively bent on profitmaking as the industrialist or the merchant. Because his function is more directly connected with the requirements of the production job itself, his commands bear the mark of greater objectivity. His subordinates recognize that at least some of his orders are in the nature of things and therefore rational in a universal sense. But at bottom this rationality, too, pertains to domination, not reason. The engineer is not interested in understanding things for their own sake or the sake of insight, but in accordance to their being fitted into a scheme, no matter how alien to their own inner structure; this holds for living beings as well as for inanimate things. The engineer’s mind is that of industrialism in its streamlined form. His purposeful rule would make men an agglomeration of instruments without a purpose of their own.

This paragraph sums up much of what Horkheimer stands for. His criticism of engineers, the catalysts of industrialism, is not that they are incorrect. It is that their instrumental rationality is not humanely purposeful.

This humane purposefulness, for Horkheimer, is born out of individual contemplation. Though he recognizes that this has been a standpoint of the privileged (c.f. Arendt on the Greek polis), he sees industrialism as successful in bringing many people out of a place of necessity but at the cost of marginalizing and trivializing all individual contemplation. The result is an efficient machine with nobody in charge. This bodes ill because such a machine is vulnerable to being co-opted by an irrational despot or charlatan. Individuality, free of material necessity and also free of the machine that liberated it from that necessity, is the origin of moral judgement that prevents fascist rule.

This is very different from the picture of individuality Fred Turner presents in The Democratic Surround. In his account of how United States propaganda created a “national character” that was both individual enough to be anti-fascist and united enough to fight fascism, he emphasizes the role of art installations that encourage the view to stitch themselves synthetically into a large picture of the nation. One is unique within a larger, diverse…well, we might use the word society, borrowing from Arendt, who was also writing in the mid-century.

If this is all true, then this dates a transition in American culture from one of individuality to one of society. This coincides with the tendency of information organization traced assiduously by Beniger.

We can perhaps trace an epicycle of this process in the history of the Internet. In it’s “wild west” early days, when John Perry Barlow could write about the freedom of cyberspace, it was a place primarily occupied by the privileged few. Interestingly, many of these were engineers, and so were (I’ll assume for the sake of argument) but materially independent and not exclusively focused on profit-making. Hence the early Internet was not unlike the ancient polis, a place where free people could attempt words and deeds that would immortalize them.

As the Internet became more widely used and commercialized, it became more and more part of the profiteering machine of capitalism. So today we see it’s wildness curtailed by the demands of society (which includes an appeal to an ethics sensitive both to disparities in wealth and differences in the body, both part of the “private” realm in antiquity but an element of public concern in modern society.)

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May 19, 2015

resisting the power of organizations

“From the day of his birth, the individual is made to feel there is only one way of getting along in this world–that of giving up hope in his ultimate self-realization. This he can achieve solely by imitation. He continuously responds to what he perceives about him, not only consciously but with his whole being, emulating the traits and attitudes represented by all the collectivities that enmesh him–his play group, his classmates, his athletic team, and all the other groups that, as has been pointed out, enforce a more strict conformity, a more radical surrender through complete assimilation, than any father or teacher in the nineteenth century could impose. By echoing, repeating, imitating his surroundings, by adapting himself to all the powerful groups to which he eventually belongs, by transforming himself from a human being into a member of organizations, by sacrificing his potentialities for the sake of readiness and ability to conform to and gain influence in such organizations, he manages to survive. It is survival achieved by the oldest biological means necessary, mimicry.” – Horkheimer, “Rise and Decline of the Individual”, Eclipse of Reason, 1947

Returning to Horkheimer‘s Eclipse of Reason (1947) after studying Beniger‘s Control Revolution (1986) serves to deepen ones respect for Horkheimer.

The two writers are for the most part in agreement as to the facts. It is a testament to their significance and honesty as writers that they are not quibbling about the nature of reality but rather are reflecting seriously upon it. But whereas maintains a purely pragmatic, unideological perspective, Horkheimer (forty years earlier) correctly attributes this pragmatic perspective to the class of business managers to whom Beniger’s work is directed.

Unlike more contemporary critiques, Horkheimer’s position is not to dismiss this perspective as ideological. He is not working within the postmodern context that sees all knowledge as contestable because it is situated. Rather, he is working with the mid-20th acknowledgment that objectivity is power. This is a necessary step in the criticality of the Frankfurt School, which is concerned largely with the way (real) power shapes society and identity.

It would be inaccurate to say that Beniger celebrates the organization. His history traces the development of social organization as evolving organism. Its expanding capacity for information processing is a result of the crisis of control unleashed by the integration of its energetic constituent components. Globalization (if we can extend Beniger’s story to include globalization) is the progressive organization of organizations of organization. It is interesting that this progression of organization is a strike against Weiner’s prediction of the need for society to arm itself against entropy. This conundrum is one we will need to address in later work.

For now, it is notable that Horkheimer appears to be responding to just the same historical developments later articulated by Beniger. Only Horkeimer is writing not as a descriptive scientist but as a philosopher engaged in the process of human meaning-making. This positions him to discuss the rise and decline of the individual in the era of increasingly powerful organizations.

Horkheimer sees the individual as positioned at the nexus of many powerful organizations to which he must adapt through mimicry for the sake of survival. His authentic identity is accomplished only when alone because submission to organizational norms is necessary for survival or the accumulation of organizational power. In an era where pragmatic ability to manipulate people, not spiritual ideals, qualifies one for organization power, the submissive man represses his indignation and rage at this condition and becomes an automoton of the system.

Which system? All systems. Part of the brilliance of both Horkheimer and Beniger is their ability to generalize over many systems to see their common effect on their constituents.

I have not read Horkheimer’s solution the individual’s problem of how to maintain his individuality despite the powerful organizations which demand mimicry of him. This is a pressing question when organizations are becoming ever more powerful by using the tools of data science. My own hypotheses, which is still in need of scientific validation, is that the solution lies in the intersecting agency implied by the complex topology of the organization of organizations.

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February 5, 2015

Horkheimer and “The Revolt of Nature”

The third chapter of Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason (which by the way is apparently available here as a PDF) is titled “The Revolt of Nature”.

It opens with a reiteration of the Frankfurt School story: as reason gets formalized, society gets rationalized. “Rationalized” here is in the sense that goes back at least to Lukacs’s “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” in 1923. It refers to the process of being rendered predictable, and being treated as such. It’s this formalized reason that is a technique of prediction and predictability, but which is unable to furnish an objective ethics, that is the main subject of Horkheimer’s critique.

In “The Revolt of Nature”, Horkheimer claims that as more and more of society is rationalized, the more humanity needs to conform to the rationalizing system. This happens through the labor market. Predictable technology and working conditions such as the factory make workers more interchangeable in their jobs. Thus they are more “free” in a formal sense, but at the same time have less job security and so have to conform to economic forces that make them into means and not ends in themselves.

Recall that this is written in 1947, and Lukacs wrote in 1923. In recent years we’ve read a lot about the Sharing Economy and how it leads to less job security. This is an argument that is almost a century old.

As society and humanity in it conform more and more to rational, pragmatic demands on them, the element of man that is irrational, that is nature, is not eliminated. Horkheimer is implicitly Freudian. You don’t eradicate the natural impulses. You repress them. And what is repressed must revolt.

This view runs counter to some of the ideology of the American academic system that became more popular in the late 20th century. Many ideologues reject the idea of human nature at all, arguing that all human behavior can be attributed to socialization. This view is favored especially by certain extreme progressives, who have a post-Christian ideal of eradicating sin through media criticism and scientific intervention. Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate is an interesting elaboration and rebuttal of this view. Pinker is hated by a lot of academics because (a) he writes very popular books and (b) he makes a persuasive case against the total mutability of human nature, which is something of a sacred cow to a lot of social scientists for some reason.

I’d argue that Horkheimer would agree with Pinker that there is such a thing as human nature, since he explicitly argues that repressed human nature will revolt against dominating rationalizing technology. But because rationalization is so powerful, the revolt of nature becomes part of the overall system. It helps sustain it. Horkheimer mentions “engineered” race riots. Today we might point to the provocation of bestial, villainous hate speech and its relationship to the gossip press. Or we might point to ISIS and the justification it provides for the military-industrial complex.

I don’t want to imply I endorse this framing 100%. It is just the continuation of Frankfurt School ideas to the present day. How they match up against reality is an empirical question. But it’s worth pointing out how many of these important tropes originated.

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