Post Doggie Post: On Post-Structuralism

So now I'm reading Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics (1975) and enjoying it very much. It's a great review of this post-structuralism and semiotics course I "sat in on" while "hanging out" in Australia longer than I had initially planned. Semiotics doesn't do it for me in itself, but I enjoy it very much as a major facet in the history of twentieth-century thought. The first thing that impressed me was that Culler (an American Rhodes scholar now teaching at Cornell) says something to the effect of: "We Anglophone critics need to start reading the French!!!" He's also influenced by Roland Barthes, one of my very favorite philosophers. He also draws from Noam Chomsky and C. S. Peirce (pronounced "Purse").

I've only finished the first chapter ("The Linguistic Foundation"), and it occurred to me that I've never understood the structuralist problematization of the binary opposition until now. Here's what Culler says:

"[W]hen two things are set in opposition to one another the reader is forced to explore qualitative similarities and differences, to make a connection so as to derive meaning from the disjunction. But the very flexibility and power of binarism depends on the fact that what it organizes are qualitative distinctions, and if those distinctions are irrelevant to the matter in hand, then binary oppositions can be very misleading, precisely because they present factitious organization."

Politics, Freedom, Ideology

If you are so inclined, you may refer back to the previous posts entitled and Morals, Ethics, Politics and Molecular Politics in Practice. Here it goes:

To reiterate, politics is the opening up of possibilities for one agent at the expense of closing possibilities for another agent. Power applies to any living agent.

Freedom, on the other hand, only applies to humans. Freedom is the recognition of the multiple possibilities open to oneself. Freedom is limited by what the existentialists call mauvaise foi, or "bad faith." Bad faith occurs when a human convinces itself that opened possibilities are actually closed.

Ideology is the factor that regulates which specific possibilities a human believes are actually open or closed. Ideology does not limit a person's power, but limits a person's freedom. In his essay "Ideology and the State," Louis Althusser makes the following points about ideology:

1. "Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence."

2. "[T]here is no practice except by and in an ideology."

3. "[T]here is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects."

4. "Ideology [i]nterpellates [sic.] [i]ndividuals as [s]ubjects."

Political Films and Media Watch

Last night, I watched Wag the Dog. Technically, it was flawed. But the 1997 film raises issues that need be raised, issues which are uncannily important in 2004. The film was released approximately one month before the Clinton sex scandal, and involves an American president using the media to invent a war in order to cover it up his indiscretion. Because of its (un)timeliness, many view it as an anti-Clinton film. But it's not about Clinton, really. The film's strategy is to reveal the love-hate relationship between politicians and the corporate media, a relationship that has destroyed American democracy.

In the extra material on the DVD version, there is an interview with Dan Rather, who describes the changing news environment. I find it ironic that he discusses the lowering of standards to please a public that is less and less trained to desire the charismatic or intellectual news anchor. These people create and maintain the system that ruins them. (My thoughts on neoconservative values and the notion of the "pyrrhic victory" will be coming soon.)

As someone who dabbled in journalism, I feel it is time to see Network again. If you want to feel the uncanny, put it on your short-list.

Enlightenment Ethics

It's interesting that the Democrats are reasserting their morals in light of the evidence that the recent election was determined by "moral" issues. What is the difference between the two sets of moral values? The logic used to create them, for one.

Democrats have re-embraced Enlightenment ethics, opposing themselves to what they feel are ethics guided by fundamentalist Christians (and I refuse to call them "evangelical" or the "religious right" because being evangelical does not mean fundamentalist and belonging to a religion does not mean Christian).

Question: Keeping in mind the reciprocal relationship between fundamentalist Christian ideology and material prosperity for the few, are the morals created by the neoconservative right based on a system of ethics at all? I've already problematized the way values underlie any system of ethics. But I think its appropriate to consider that morals created out of economic (rather than truly life-giving) values and the phony religious rhetoric used to keep the current system in place are not created out of an ethical system at all.

Hence the term "unethical." It seems to me that when we are talking about molar politics, we should examine the values that underlie the ethical system to determine if the morals produced by the ethical system are truly moral. The value underlying Enlightenment ethics is progress; the value underlying neoconservative "ethics" is maintaining an economic and ideological status quo. (That's not to say the Enlightenment thinkers ignored economic prosperity, but they took it for granted that progress meant progress for all of humanity rather than for the top five percent of the wealthy).

What I find so ironic is that neoconservatives will argue that their idea of status quo originated in eighteenth-century America. No it did not. The founders of this country subscribed to Enlightenment ethics, which is one reason the country prospered as it did.

Don't forget about Marx. Love him or hate him, he has a tendency to sneak up on people.

Molar and Molecular Politics in Practice

Aias Grimmelschausen's recent comments are very helpful in illustrating precisely why ethics, or the logic used to determine "right/wrong," is inexorably infested with values of molar politics. He writes:

Case #1: Should I fight for the resistance against Marco in the Spanish Civil War.
Case #2: Should I, as a Arab-American, give up some of my civil rights to help protect my fellow Americans and other citizens of the world.
Analysis: In case #1 the Molecular approach appears to give us what we would call "the right answer", but in case #2 the molar approach provides "the right answer". Please comment.

I would actually modify his conclusion as follows: In case #1 the molar approach grants us the "right" answer from the perspective of a molar agent ("I"). In case #2 the molecular approach produces the "right" answer from the perspective of a system that values molar agents.

Both of these examples presuppose the valuing of molar politics. Thus begins my critique of modern ethics. The Arab-American's acquiescing to the community of "America" at large does not entail the opening of possibilities for a true community, because the "community" has already developed its own Gestalt, which closes possibilities.

Accounting for the way molar units are formed from the heterogeneous is the first step in the opening up of possibilities for the future.

Morals, Ethics, Politics

I've been puzzling out the distinction between these three categories for well over a year now. I'm at a place where I can at least put something down.

Morals are values. That is, they are the specific instances of right/wrong or good/bad. The death penalty is a moral issue because it begs the question: Is it right? or Is it good?

Ethics are the rules used to create values. What I have recently come to realize is that ethics rely paradoxically on two very fundamental values: the opening of possibility and the closing of possibility. All ethical systems have these fundamental issues in mind, but not all ethical systems equate thus: opening of possibility=life=good=right and closing of possibility=death=bad=wrong. Our culture's ethics do produce morals out of such equations, and this is a product of the next (and I would argue, most fundamental) concept, politics.

Politics is the inevitable condition of opening one possibility at the expense of closing another, and is thus a fundamental principle of organic life. There is no actual distinction between biological processes that occur and the recent presidential election. Here's why (and this will take patience and a willingness to embrace dialectical thought):

Envision one molecule within your body that desires to remain in existence. The molecules surrounding it, however, need it to die (need its possibilities of procreation to cease) so that other molecules can grow (and open possibilities) so that your body functions. This molecule loses its power (its open-ended possibilities) at the expense of the "community" of cells around it.

But this molecule does not embrace our ethics because it only exists as part of a whole. It does not think of itself as "I." It embraces a communal ethics that recognizes rules that govern the collective rather than the individual. Within the collective, death is often required for the opening of possibility. In many cases, the artificial prolongation of life can lead to the closing of possibility. The molecule I described earlier as "desiring to remain in existence" is a myth. But picture the molecule's loss of possibilities without its status as "I" and you have molecular politics. It's very difficult to understand, though, because we cannot envision what it would be like to exist as an entity that does not conceptualize itself as a Gestalt, as a unified "I."

Molar politics is what we understand. The "I" that sees the opening of possibilities for "itself" rather than for the whole. Our ethics are governed by molar politics; the ethics of many indigenous peoples are governed by molecular politics.

I will be writing more on this. The implications are mind-boggling.

How I Quit Smoking

In Cigarettes Are Sublime, French professor Richard Klein writes:

"The pain of smoking is nothing compared to the enormous disquiet of having vowed to stop, a promise which smoking 'the last cigarette' nicely absolves. To stop, one first has to smoke the last cigarette, but the last one is yet another one. Stopping therefore means continuing to smoke. The whole paradox is here: Cigarettes are bad for me, therefore I will stop. Promising to stop creates enormous unease. I smoke the last cigarette as if I were fulfilling a vow. The vow is therefore fulfilled and the uneasiness it causes vanishes; hence the last cigarette allows me to smoke many others after that."

I quit by vowing never to quit...never to smoke my last cigarette.

National Guarantees

The United States is the only country in the world that guarantees the pursuit of happiness in one of its national documents. I think the Europeans laugh at us hysterically for it. Maybe that's our problem. Maybe our expecting to be gosh-darn-golly cheery all the time is ruining us. In the past, the pursuit of happiness has been used to wipe out nations of natives, kill Mexicans in the southwest for their land (Mexico was and is a sovereign state), and outsource labour to impoverished nations at the expense of everyone except the profiteers. Personally, I'm sick of pursuing happiness. It's a joke and an excuse for people to devour each other. And pursuing it is not making me happy at all. I think pursuing a nice, quiet melancholy is more to my taste.

This sounds much better:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men ^and women[^] are created ^and/or evolved[^] equal, that they are endowed by {their Creator} ^nature[^] with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of {happiness} ^a nice, quiet melancholy[^]."

Modernism and Recent Politics

In this week's New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg ends his opinion article as follows: 

"This is not a center-right country. It is a center-right country and a center-left country, but the center has not held. The winner-take-all aspects of our system have converged into a perfect storm that has given virtually all the political power to the right; conservative Republicans will now control the Presidency, the House of Representatives, and the Senate so firmly that the Supreme Court, which is also in conservative hands, has abruptly become the most moderate of the four centers of federal power. The system of checks and balances has broken down, but the country remains divided—right down the nonexistent, powerless middle." 

Hertzberg alludes to the W.B. Yeats poem, "The Second Coming" (1921). Yeats writes: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."

Without Pre-tension

Ok, Ok.

I'm not really that pretentious. I am just melancholy. Sometimes the only way to not be melancholy is to try to write like a French philosopher. I'm really not a French philosopher. I'm just a twenty-something student trying to understand the world. I can't believe how hard this is to do, even when you really concentrate.

I am, however, interested in philosophy, so I suppose this blog will be spattered with thoughts of my own. The title of my blog refers to a book by Félix Guattari called Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. He's a nutty philosopher from the sixties and early seventies. He argues that there is really no boundary between politics, philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, sociology, etc.

Politics

In order to cure inscription aphasia, one must invent the raison pour l'écriture. This writing must lie outside of the general economy. One must reinvent the sacred, and when it gets reappropriated by the general economy, the alienation that follows must inspire one to keep inventing, to keep writing what is divinely valueless. This is true politics, this is molecular politics. There is, then, no distinction between politics and philosophy. One must not get overwhelmed with the world that mires oneself in profane economics. Such is the goal of my writing...such is the goal of the molecular philosopher.