Liberal Humanist Zombies: Why We Need Post-Kantian Thought Post-Tucson

The following reflection on the Tucson Shooting will be deeply and intentionally polemical.  And necessarily so, as the philosophical foundations of not only the act itself, but America’s reaction(s) to it will bear out. I aim to be polemical for another related, yet, deeper reason. We are not merely told to refrain from “partisan” politics at such moments of national tragedy, but, more fundamentally, inclined towards such restraint. What I want to get at is this implicit sense of restraint. We are supposed to see such moments not as political moments, but as moments of unification in remorse and healing. Fine. And I fully agree that this is an American tragedy -- that is precisely what animates this post! Except that such implicit demands do little more than shore up the status quo of an ideological (meant in the Althusserian sense) system repeatedly shown (the gulf oil spill, the financial meltdown of ’08) as being utterly bankrupt and yet, as this latest tragedy shows, ghoulishly functioning. In other words, a Liberal Humanist zombie lurks about not only in the raving and murderous desires of a lone gunman, or in the infantile political discourse of the far-right, but also in the very sentiments of a purportedly “leftist” president’s call for national healing. All of these things are, ultimately and fundamentally, the same. (Reminder: Liberal does not mean leftist. I will always use "liberal" in its proper, philosophical meaning as a system based, amongst other things, upon the cult of autonomous subjects who are constituted through a subject-object dialectic; i.e. all that boot-strap jargon about the efficacy of the individual over and against the contingencies of any system. Hence liberal means conservative!)

            Let us commence with the link between the shooter and the far right’s neoliberal/libertarian discourse. As Tim Morton recently expressed, it only tacitly matters that the shooter was a borderline personality – that he is “crazy.” Tim’s reasoning is profoundly spot-on. The right’s role in the shooting is that of an enabler. Far from providing an excuse as to why the Palins of the world are not responsible, the argument of singular insanity in fact places more responsibility on their discourse. What the instance of insanity brings forth is multiformed. First, according to an illogical logic, such an argument claims that this shooter is an autonomous individual acting independently and who should accordingly be held individually responsible. The philosophico-juridico basis of such an argument is clear: the cult of the liberal subject asserting that everyman is, insofar as he is free-thinking individual, autonomous and hence a subject fit for all the rights offered to members of a democratic society.

            So from one perspective, Palin and others' argument that they are not responsible in any way for the shooting rest on such logic. The shooter is a liberal subject and hence should be able to read the right’s discourse and iconography critically.

            But, the lynchpin of such a defense is the shooter’s insanity. The right is ultimately not responsible because an autonomous yet crazed man misread their discourse. The right is having their cake and eating it too. The shooter is to be held responsible, not their discourse, because he is a liberal subject; yet the shooter is also responsible, not the right’s discourse, because he is crazy and cannot read critically. Yet, clearly, the later defense cancels the first. If the shooter is insane and hence not in control of his mental-faculties, he cannot be a liberal subject. Precisely because of this contradictory logic, the right is ultimately responsible for the shooting. According to their own paradigmatic model of thought (liberal humanism, no matter how bastardized it may have become in neo-liberal formations – formations that pathetically pay lip service to the rich philosophical tradition of liberalism, i.e. Kant), the shooter is not a subject and thus not juridically responsible; instead, those who are (or claim to be) liberal subjects are responsible because they are, purportedly, in control of their critical, language-producing faculties. Palin et al, as liberal subjects, are directly responsible for the shootings. No ethical firewall separates them from the shooting – according to their own logic.

            As for the shooter himself? We can say, according to a liberal humanist model, that he is simply parroting the ideological blather of the right, merely carrying out uncritically their inane discursive threats (those cross hairs targeting Representative Giffords). However, assume for a moment that he was not troubled with a clinically diagnosed illness. Assume for a second he was Timothy McVeigh or the man who recently flew his airplane into a Texas tax office. While such persons have been stigmatized as insane according to the same excepting-machine that produces our conceptions of Islamic radicals, they were, at least clinically, sane. Likewise, let us rule out “temporary insanity.” No, what we have here, hypothetically, is a person by all means fit for liberal subjecthood that has, nevertheless, been controlled and possessed by radical political discourse.

            One of two avenues of thought opens up for us here. First, we can make such individuals into the exception figures who prove the paradigm of liberal subjecthood’s rule, therein demanding more rigorous liberal education. In other words, their uncritical, interested, and possessed comportment towards radical discourse proves the necessity of a liberal education that, had such individuals only listened more in school, would have trained them to reflect critically, disinterestedly, and self-possessedly on radical discourse.

            Yet, here is where both the president’s call for national unity and our own implicit desire for non-partisanship undermine such a call for liberal education. (And even deeper and more terrifying: the philosophical ground from which the president petitions for national consolation and that out of which the shooter emerged are the same) Because, under all the liberal ideology (and again: liberal does not in any way mean leftist politics) there is a presupposition of man’s innate potential to be radically influenced – his/her actions, discourse, thoughts being little more than socially constructed. Kant, the great liberal himself, was very much aware of this. His definition of freedom was, after all, rule-bound. Hence all the liberal apparatuses (broadly construed: education, discourse, etc) and their stress on critical separation and disinterestedness. To be a fully actualized subject one must be fully self-divorced. Or, in Kantian speak: that which is most subjectively my own (freedom) is what is most radically universal and thusly not my own.

            But that presupposed flux of powerfully influential goop (in the shooter’s case, the right’s discourse and iconography) remains in force despite any critical disinterestedness. Liberal humanism and the subject its logic produces is, in the end, a passive observer. He or she is simply a “beautiful soul,” to steal a phrase from Tim Morton.

            So what happens in tragedies like this is painfully obvious. We construct the shooter as a lone agent, crazed or not. We critically sever him from the historical, social, material, and ideological contingencies out of which his actions arise. Why? Because we have been taught (explicitly, sure, but more powerfully, implicitly) to perform such critical divorcing, but also and ultimately, because it does not demand a rethinking of our political and ideological ground – how we form a collective and what it means to be an singularity in that collective.

            That is the other path opened up by such “lone” murderers. Their heinous acts momentarily tear asunder the fabric of liberal political and subjective belonging. And our reactions to such acts model and repeat that torn fabric, tearing it further apart even as we attempt to patch it back together.

           While now may seem be the time for "non-partisanship" and the avoidance of "polemics," it is, in reality, the time for a philosophical (and hence polemical) inquiry that refuses unequivocally the liberal framework of politics, subjectivity, and critique. Without such a wager in the seeming abyss opened by moments of tragedy, we will have repeated Tucson shootings, oil spills, financial collapses.  

So far, 2011 looks just like 2010, and 2009, and 2008, and . . . 

Paradigm, Attempt One

     Because my Leave No Trace post made extensive use of the term paradigm, I feel that an attempted full-fledge definition cannot be postponed any longer. As my "About" page indicates, I have appropriated the term from Giorgio Agamben’s chapter “What is a Paradigm?” in his most recently translated work, The Signature of All Things: On Method (the chapter was initially a lecture given at the European Graduate School in 2002; you can find it here. It is somewhat long, but definitely worth the time as an introduction to Agamben’s more recent work and methodology). I will be taking, therefore, most of the following definition from this seminal text.

     Our common understanding of paradigm comes primarily from Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which Kuhn defines the term according to two phases. First, Kuhn defines a paradigm as a disciplinary matrix designating techniques, models, and values a group (of philosophers, scientists, theologians, etc) more or less implicitly adheres to(what we typically call the “paradigm”); second, Kuhn singles out a solitary element within that matrix which unifies it through its status as an example, therefore not only replacing an explicit set of rules or prescriptions, but also ensuring the formulation of a tradition of inquiry.
     Foucault takes up this second aspect of the Kuhnian paradigm, shifts the focus onto discursive formations in general (wherein the paradigm becomes, an “episteme”), and posits the problem, “In the enigma of scientific discourse, what the analysis of the episteme questions is not its right to be a science, but the fact that is exists” (Archeology of Knowledge 192). This facticity is crucial to understanding the paradigm, especially as concerning historical and critical inquiry (the purpose of my work as a scholar). Agamben asserts that Foucault’s paradigm seems to follow Kuhn, insofar as it is “not only an exemplar and model” but also “an exemplum, which allows statements and discursive practices to be gathered into a new intelligible ensemble and in a new problematic context” (“What is a Paradigm?” 18). However, what makes Foucault’s paradigm different from Kuhn is his treatment of it within historical inquiry; for Foucault, “the paradigm is a singular case that is isolated from its context only insofar as, by exhibiting its own singularity, it makes intelligible a new ensemble, whose homogeneity it itself constitutes.”
     Thus Foucault initiates a new understanding of the paradigm, one that radically calls into question the dichotomous opposition between the particular and the general through its radical singularity. And this is where Agamben takes up Foucault’s definition of paradigm and pushes it to its fulfillment. For Agamben’s paradigm can be, primarily, characterized by its absolute singularity, its radical suspension of several binaries of historical knowledge. Agamben’s (and by extension, mine) paradigm is, to take a phrase from Benjamin, a dialectic at a standstill.
     First, the paradigm is an analogical form of knowledge, not inductive/deductive; it accordingly moves from singularity to singularity (31). Second, the paradigm likewise suspends the dichotomy between the general and the particular (and that form of knowledge wherein the general is known through the particular/ the particular known through the general; i.e. deduction/induction) and replaces it with a “bipolar analogical model” insofar as analogies “intervene[] in the dichotomies of logic . . . not to take them up into a higher synthesis but to transform them into a force field traversed by polar tensions, where (as in an electrical-magnetic field) their substantial identities evaporate” (20). These suspensions are, in fact, a singular gesture, one that also entails the paradigm’s suspension of its belonging to the group of which it also serves as an example. That is, the paradigm exposes itself as an exemplar of a historical group (a sort of historical milieu) through its suspended belonging to that group according to its radical singularity (of course, by extension all historical objects are potentially paradigms, given the premise of historiographical discontinuity). The paradigmatic group, however, cannot be presupposed in the paradigms (they are, after all, absolutely singular, or, to borrow an object-oriented ontology term, “operationally closed”); instead, “it is immanent in them” (31).
     What this diagrammatic structure of the paradigm seeks to map is, namely, that implicit paradigmatic core which allows a discursive formation to exist at all; the diagrammatic structure of the paradigm given above is, then, the structure of the paradigm’s communicativity, its pure potential to be communicated. Accordingly, Agamben’s sketch of the paradigm outlines the particular manner a historical inquiry must comport itself to historical “material,” to those paradigms which will illumine previously ignored series of phenomena. Hence, for Agamben the homo sacer (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life), the Muselmann (Remnants of Auschwitz), the state of exception (The State of Exception), and the anthropological machine (The Open) are all paradigms illuminating not the origin of modernity, but a series of discontinuous connectivity. Likewise, for myself Leave No Trace is a paradigm that, when treated in a specific manner, can be suspended from its belonging to a certain group (anthropocentricism) thereby making that group intelligible in a new light. LNT is, therefore, an absolutely singular historical object that serves as an example of a larger paradigmatic plane, but is nevertheless irreducible to that plane.
     While it has been implicit throughout this post, I will nonetheless make explicit the particular “region” of the paradigm. As a historical object it belongs, properly, to the realm of discourse (I do not use the term “thought” here because I wish to avoid the correlationist fallacy). The paradigm is accordingly a discursive formation (something that is part “thought,” part “lived reality”). So, when writing about LNT, I treated its discursive/expressive formation (as a slogan and proper noun) paradigmatically, i.e. as a singularity allowing the exposure of an under-exposed, “larger” paradigm (for LNT: anthropocentrism). Thus, something like LNT can allow the critic a glimpse at the paradigmatic core, or engine, of a Kuhnian “paradigm” (a set of discourse practices centered on an implicit “example”).

Leave No Trace: The "Wilderness" Isn't Wilderness Anymore

Any outdoors enthusiast knows by heart the mantra and commandment of all wilderness activity: “Leave no trace.” Straightforward stuff: go into the wild and neither leave nor take anything. A seemingly simple directive of outdoors behavior, except Leave No Trace has a curious half-discursive, half-physical composition. On the one hand LNT, is, in the form we all were typically indoctrinated by, simply a set of discursive precepts for behavior in the “outdoors;” and on the other hand LNT is a 501-c-3, nonprofit incorporation (literally Leave No Trace Inc). Here, then, we find ourselves confronted with a curious, complex hybrid of an ideology; nevertheless, out of this intentional confrontation I wish to outline a specific biocultural entity for which I currently lack a technical term – something like a “paradigm-apparatus,” although such a term is, clearly, quite clunky.


Leave No Trace Paradigm: How We Think About Others Knowing About Us Out “There”
        What makes LNT so curious is, perhaps, not so much its being both discursive and corporate (in its fullest etymological sense, as a body [corpus] and as a business: something “actual”), but how and for what reason it intersects the discursive and the corporate. LNT is, at its face, a campaign to mobilize a specific manner of behavior within a specific locality. Within the American wilderness (an oddly “out-there” beyond-civilization place), LNT directs us to move through said wilderness without affecting the environment you are an outsider of such that you remain alterior to the environment (a hermetically closed off system of beings who are, by being so closed, non-human . . . according to such a logic). Taking LNT at its face, we appear to be in the realm of ontology (the study of being and its modes of existence considered as such). Yet, why “leave no trace?” Why shift discourse into a seemingly alien field from that which the ideology is purportedly concerned with? That is, why take an ideology that is concerned with ontology and express it with a term ripped from epistemology such that the entire campaign’s “text” ( the slogan and proper noun “leave no trace”) becomes about visibility, about the control over one’s visibility-yet-to-come in a specific medium (those “traces” left behind for others to see), and, ultimately, about the manipulation of the erasure of one’s self within both locality and time (the trace isn’t a trace until it has entered into history, until your presence has “left”)?
      The historical contingencies LNT was created to meet help explain, in part, such a bizarre discursive shift. In the 1970’s our National Parks found themselves inundated with visitors, thus prompting the United States Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and Nation Park Service to draft pedagogies for instructing “non-motorized visitors” how to behave in wilderness areas (for more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leave_No_Trace).
     Crucial here: the parks were flooded with people. To make sense of this particular urgency as pertaining to LNT’s paradigmatic structure, we must examine the “scale” of self-other articulations when considering how an object is known to other objects. A 1:N scale expresses the articulation between an object to an alien object (for LNT, human-animal): in a formula of intelligibility, the “sign” left by an object would not be intelligible to another object that is comporting itself towards knowing the first object; or, more simply: the “sign” of Object A is not visible to Object B as intelligible (it is not information, which is, according to Levi Bryant, “the difference that makes a difference”). A 1:1 scale would correspond to a human-human (or chipmunk-chipmunk, bear-bear, whatever-to-whatever) articulation: the “sign” left by Object A would be intelligible to Object B as a signifying sign, as information (and that sign would with time become, properly, a “trace”). The historical contingency (flood of human visitors) to which LNT responds consists not only of this later scale, but also of a specific declension of that scale: an anthropocentric instance.
      Just look at what LNT seeks to “erase” (how one is to behave so that an other-like-you cannot know of your past presence) from one’s trekking through the “wilderness:” camp and travel on durable surfaces (don’t leave new footprints), leave what you find, including edible plants (to “allow others a sense of discovery” – of non-human life), minimize use of fire (“True Leave No Trace fires show no evidence of having ever been constructed”), and, my favorite, dispose of waste properly (hide your shit). While these behaviors (mobility, shelter, food, food’s apotheosis, and warmth) can have detrimental impacts on wildlife, what LNT’s principles stress are traces that are intelligible to humans. And I am not saying that the signs we leave are not visible and, in some fashion, intelligible to wilderness animals (they certainly are); the point here is that such signs in their intelligibility to animals would not be, properly, “traces.” Those signs which LNT outlines (those “traces” we must not leave in behind) and those signs which to animals are intelligible are not necessarily the same. Again, the signs I wish to highlight are only those that LNT has singled out as “traces,” not those that are intelligible to animals yet have been marginalized by LNT’s scope. Seriously, do bears give a damn about your abject waste?
     The historical contingency LNT responds to (a population increase promulgating a 1:1 scale of intelligibility) and LNT’s response to that contingency reveals something like a “state of exception” grafted onto the “society of the spectacle:” a plane of pure visibility upon which all residue of living presence is made potentially intelligible to such an extreme that even in the “wilderness” (that realm once characterized as being absolutely removed from us) we experience anxiety over being-seen-and-known. (Sorry for the sloppiness of these terms, but I wish to hint at a crucial aspect of the contemporary condition rendered visible through LNT: that we all live in a “Camp” [state of exception] that is in large part characterized by the primacy of images and visibility [society of the spectacle])


Leave No Trace Apparatus: How Our Bodies Are Captured in the Wild
     And what we are anxious about being exposed (or, more precisely, what LNT encodes as being fit for anxiety) gets to the heart of LNT’s curious intersection of the discursive and the corporate: the biological necessities of shelter and food. Keeping in mind LNT’s bivalent status as discursive and corporate, LNT is, properly, a biocultural nexus (bio: private bodily needs; cultural: prescriptions for making bodily acts fit for publicity). That is, LNT can be halved according to a biological/private and cultural/public bifurcation wherein “bio”= biological self-care (how you dispose of your crap) and “cultural” = how those biological acts of self-care are taught to be carried out. Literally, the very gesture of a living being’s taking a shit is prescribed by a cultural discourse – LNT itself, a didactic apparatus using language to teach “proper” biological actions (Leave No Trace, Inc “was incorporated to develop and expand Leave No Trace training and educational resources”). LNT is, accordingly an apparatus: a “thing that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings” (Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” 15).



Paradigm-Apparatus
     Now, hopefully, a working definition of what LNT actually is can emerge. LNT’s discursive existence (as a slogan and proper noun) meshes violently with its corporate manifestation (as an incorporation seeking the control over biological acts) to form something like a “paradigm-apparatus” – an entity whose function is to respond to a historical contingency (population increase) through discursive (slogan encoding proper anxiety over one’s visibility) and biological (self-care) means. Not only is LNT located at the intersection of bio/cultural (as an apparatus), it is also located at the intersection of the paradigmatic and the apparatic. LNT both models thought (how one thinks about one’s being visible and intelligible to others-like-you) and captures gestures (how one effects biological self-care) such that these activities interpenetrate each other, rendering LNT a paradigm with apparatic power and an apparatus with paradigmatic force. With LNT the paradigmatic ensures the apparatus’s infinite deployment (the expansion of its force-of-capture to all levels of being) while the apparatus simultaneously constitutes the paradigm’s naturalness (the appearance of a model of thought as a simple matter of common course).

Openning Comments

     It is time that I begin writing again. Neither sports journalism nor (worse yet) substitute teaching reports. I must begin writing again those exploratory fragments, those brief flashes into the rhizomatic fabric of an otherwise and seemingly invisible “world.” By which I mean: clean the clutter of post-it notes off my desk and windowsills, if possible translating them all from disparate trifles to disparate prose. After all, the good god resides in the details (or so our “detective” epistemic paradigm tells us).
     I have tentatively title this project “Fractal Paradigm.” It is a title in large part influenced by the opening pages of Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, in which a vision of a de-centered mathematics opens the space for a new metaphysics – a new discourse providing the basis for a working understanding of the “archive” in which we find ourselves. A world of infinite finite foldings stretching from the micro to the macro such that their onetime stable binary shatters, leaving open a porous labyrinth (sorry Kim, Deleuze’s term, not mine) traversed with continuous caverns, caverns within caverns, all without emptiness. Such is the fractal half of my blog’s title: the minute curvature/folding (read: meaning) remains identical to the expanded/proliferated curvature. A fractal is that which remains consistent no matter its scale (in fact, in such a way that scale ceases to have its once proper meaning).
     "Paradigm" is, simply, my supreme technical term (as Luken Weaver cannot attest to without, I am sure, some eye rolling). I use the term here not to denote a set defining what is/is not “true” or “expressible” within a specific discipline, nor entirely a “core” or implicit ordering principle inducing adherence to a defining set of proper knowledge within a discipline. Not even something of the two (which is Foucault’s sense of paradigm). Rather, I owe the initial formulation of my technical term “paradigm” to Agamben. The paradigm is, rather, a discourse’s expressibility; it is expressibility as expressiblilty. A motor of sorts. It does not “order” discourses around “proper” utterances. It lacks content of its own (or even content lodged upon it from outside). Neither a means nor an end, but something in between. It is an element lurking (I will use throughout this blog the language of detective fiction and film noir, for reason I hope to slowly tease out) in the shadows of every speech act and discourse, revealing an unseen yet richly intimate affinity, a genealogy between seemingly disparate series. Sort of like Agamben’s use of the signature, his delineating its genealogy from Medieval astrology to Aby Warburg’s Pathosformeln, from the good god in the detail of the stars to the good god in the detail of the nymph (or, a more curious, yet implied, genealogy: from astrology’s signature to the detective’s clue).
      Now something of a working definition of my title can be expressed: the fractal paradigm is an infinitely proliferating series of “clues” in which their meaning remains (scandalously) constant from one manifestation to the next. And this is the really exciting part: in their consistency (here I mean both stability and disposition) they explode into intelligibility an entirely new understanding of the Western world as it convulses and spasms within the labyrinth of that for which we yet have a name (hypercapitalism? biopolitical state of exception? society of the spectacle?). This blog is one lengthy attempt to find a proper name for that in which we find ourselves.
     A note on Fractal Paradigm’s organization. I will try to set up a dual structure in which I have a “normal,” running thread of observations etc, and a “glossary” devoted to not only defining terms (other’s and mine) but also to exploring terminological implications and problems that inevitably arise with this kind of project. With such a bifurcated structure, I hope to provide as comprehensive and comprehensible a blog as possible.