Deep Thoughts (mostly on "politics")
These are some recent (?) thoughts that I can't seem to find the time to write full-length entries on, although I would like to.
- At times it sounds like Merleau-Ponty is saying that the very ground of being, the mode in which we most are something, is when we are "geared onto the world"--oriented towards it in a way that anticipates action within it.
- I this implies a "transcendental" justification of the (Piercean) pragmatist position of the importance of inquiry as an antidote to action-blocking doubt. It turns that project of inquiry into a project for being itself.
- Marcuse is critical of the technological project whereby we dominate nature and think of things in terms of the operations we use to interaction with them. But if Merleau-Ponty is right, there is something more fundamental about this technological stance than I think he would want to admit.
- Phenomenological "will to power", what?
- Contrary to, say, Marcuse's opinion, I think the rejection of technological/functional language by the radical left is largely the cause of its historical impotence. Understanding of mechanism is precisely the understanding that facilitates praxis. Attempts to sublimate out the transcendent concepts from the material are reactionary. Rather, one needs to look at the bright side of the fact that "this society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression." Otherwise you're just reaffirming Ye Olde Antinomies.
- I read a little but of Richard Posner explaining his legal theory today, expecting that it would resonate. Instead, I discovered that it is Teh Suck!
- I was at this conference yesterday and it was full of advertising/branding people. A pervasive theme was how great differentiation is--among products, within culture. I previously thought that this push towards novelty-for-its-own-sake and the differentiation that comes as a result of it was a kind of consumer escape from the market. Now I'm pretty sure that it's now as much a part of the productive apparatus as homogeneity was in the 50's. I think that confirms something I've been wanting to get the energy to articulate really well at some point: the big struggle of our century isn't going to be one class versus another, or one civilization against another. It's going to be signal versus noise.
- Seriously, though, Marcuse is actually pretty great. I wish I had read One-Dimensional Man years ago.
- Lately I've been pretty much ignoring election politics and I don't really regret that at all.
- It's weird to read deliberative democracy theorists argue about it in the context of formal democratic practices (voting, having representatives, etc.) Is it just me, or does the whole deliberative democracy idea just naturally fall into a kind of pseudo-anarchistic, "government" by civil society society sort of thing?
- For something like deliberative democracy to work, it will require some very smart software running on broadly accessible telecommunications systems. Critics of deliberative democracy don't seem to get how much intellectual work we are able to and will be able to offload onto technology, and what this means for the "Public Ignorance Objection" against democracy.
- Open source software--and really, "open" content/data/whatever in general--is a means of production that is publicly "owned" (if it is owned at all). If capitalism is the economic system in which the means of production are privately owned, then open source software is just about the most anti-capitalist thing out there. There should probably be a word for the economic system where markets exist alongside publicly owned capital. What should it be?