The other night I was taking my dog for a walk and we happened upon a moderately sized, sunken field that was very well lit. As it has started to get dark at 5:30pm around here and that, often times, I don’t get home and ready to take him out for a walk until 6:45-7:00pm, this field was a pretty solid find for myself and Oliver (pictured above). The field afforded us the opportunity to let him off leash for a bit and allowed me the chance to throw the ball that I had brought on our walk for him without worrying about losing it in the dark.

The only downside was that despite the fact that before letting him off-leash I thoroughly checked the area for signs indicating what I was and was not allowed to do in the area and found nothing, I still spent the entire time looking over my shoulder. I was convinced that at some point some  belligerent individual was going to come out of their lavish home (we were in a pretty well-to-do part of town) and tell me just how irresponsible I was for having the audacity to let my dog off of his leash in this park/field to play fetch with him.

I know, after stopping to think about it, that proposition seemed as ridiculous to me as it looks having been typed out. I mean, I was literally just walking my dog, with no intentions of causing any trouble for anyone. And yet I felt suspect, like I had good cause to be looking over my shoulder. What, for God’s sake, is more natural than a boy playing fetch with his dog in a field?

Which got me reflecting on all of the Deleuze with which I’ve been acquainting myself over the past little while for another project. Gilles Deleuze was a pretty well known French postmodernist who, along with Félix Guattari, coined the term deterritorialization in their 1972 work Anti-Oedipus. You can follow the link provided to see the various contexts in which the concept has been used, but in the Deleuzean-Guattarian spirit, I’m going to take the ball and run with it.

What occurred to me is how heavily territorialized our spaces have become. There is this notion not only that particular people live in particular neighbourhoods, cities, and areas (having kids? out to the suburbs with you! want an “authentic” experience? best leave that city-life behind and head for small-town America. so-on-and-so-forth), but also that particular spaces within our communities are only ever used for particular things.

Not that there isn’t a certain sense and usefulness in designating certain places, of course, but it strikes me that this kind of territorialization runs much deeper into our very conceptions of life lived and interaction between each other. Borrowing from Deleuze’s philisophy itself,  it seems like we utilize this sense of the importance of territorialization and categorization in such a way as to impose a degree of sense and order on a world that, experience indicates, is in constant flux against such rigidity. And yet our need to know and need to feel certain about the world and our place in it, our need to stave off the unknown with the meager light of our philosophical/political/cultural lanterns morphs into an emphasis on the process of territorialization itself, rather than the sensible outcomes that flow from such an exercise.

In short, territorialization becomes its own Frankenstein and dictates the parameters of our lives, rather than vice versa.

What this results in, at least insofar as my experience provides, is a forced mode of being that closes off the potential vitality of those spaces we enact our very expression of existence and purposefulness. There is a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy that a systematically territorialized mode of perception enforces not just in the way that we build and operate in the our spaces of communal interaction and expression, but also in the very means by which we conceptualize those spaces. Which is where I intellectually and philosophically cross paths with a full-bodied libertarianism, insofar as a territorialization of space can be considered, and I think often is, consummate with a governmentalization of  space as a means of enforcing unnecessary and, indeed, intellectually and experientially oppressive systems of order.

I’m not given to wholesale endorsements of postmodernism, but my own feeling is that thorough going Deluezean deterritorialization of our spaces is in order here. At least insofar as we seek to reassert a sense of novelty and creativity in the ways in which we conceive and enact our life intentions against unreasonable controls in this regard. It might be a bit self-serving, but just such a political statement is at the heart of my family’s unwillingness to leave the downtown core of our city in order to fashion a sustainable life for ourselves.

And, of course, Oliver and I play fetch in that park every chance we get.

Addendum: sorry, I got a bit lost in the philosophical weeds there. The point that I really wanted to make with this post and that I feel like it didn’t really circle back around to is that insofar as our territorializing tendencies in conceiving of and organizing communities creates a forced mode of being, it becomes all the more difficult for us to interact and engage one another in an authentic fashion and thereby undermining the very thing that makes our communities so important and vital.

Picking back up the thread of our quadrilogue on ideological dexterity, I’d like to start with this quotation from Scott:

My own diagnosis would take Erik’s focus on the cultural absolutism of prevailing political and cultural perspectives and call for a quarter turn in re-identifying this malady as one of essentialism. As I’ve often griped, overtly ideological thinking seems to persistently exhibit a tendency to speak in unwarranted certitudes about having figured everything out. Much of that false certainty, by my lights, is derived from a belief in the ability to deduce the essential nature of any number of things, be they government, the free market, freedom, or democracy, via one’s particular brand of ideological calculus.

Of course, as soon as any of these institution/concepts cease to operate in the fashion that our essentialist rendering describes, we immediately seek to ameliorate the anomaly via appeals to the evils of the essentials of some other countervailing institution, rather than, perhaps, attempting to come to grips with the fallacy of our logic. Insofar as this tendency is one of an inborn drive towards universalizing a certain subset of beliefs as a means of understanding the world, I think it dovetails nicely with Chris’ contention that the dominant political institutions aren’t much more than outmoded modernist jalopies.

Outmoded because, despite its now decades old lineage, contemporary ideologies still haven’t swallowed the bitter postmodernist pill about essentialism and absolutizing universality being zombie concepts: dead, yet refusing to die.

Heidegger argued that metaphysics (or what he often called onto-theology) obscured the presence of being with Being.  Western metaphysics begins with the distinction between what something is (genus/species) and that something is (whether it actually real or not).  The first is essence, the second existence.  In Plato for example it’s the Ideas/Forms (Essence) and carbon copy imitations of singularity (existence).  With Kant and then later Carnap it’s analytic (a priori) and synthetic (a posteriori) forms of reflection.

In general, the essence always tends towards a oneness overriding all else.  In Spinoza it was the mathematico-physico-theological NATURE of which all natures are various determined versions thereof.  In Aquinas and Scholastic Theology God as the Doer of all things that are done.  In Hegel, Geist finding itself through the vehicle of creation until it reaches its apex in the German state and the philosopher-seer.

Nietzsche finally realized that underneath underneath this overriding lay the desire for power.

Leaving us basically where we are today.  A failed and exhausted left, the over-riding oneness of the market state, and the post-ideological age run by “outdated jalopies” of the bygone era.

Essentialism left no liberating practice and neither has the post-essentialist structuralist ethos.

If as Erik says politics “is simply a way to traverse culture, a language by which we discuss its vagaries”, then I’m mostly interested in the philosophical portion of that culture.  Western philosophy appears to have failed us.*  It’s left us with the undead of zombies (cf the mind numbing number of contemporary and recent zombie/vampire tv & movies).  When what we perhaps need–as Scott says–is unity that doesn’t break diversity.**  Not the undead but the unborn.

But prior to all that Heidegger said, prior to the whatness/thatness distinction lay the primordial revealing of Being (which Heidegger saw as still studied by the pre-Socratic Greeks like Thales and Anaximander).  The unveiling of Being.

The classical metaphysics roots itself in the metaphor of vision (Presence).  The truth is some final reality outside of the self that can be viewed.  [As Fichte asked, who is aware of Kant's categories of the mind?].  That philosophical metaphor drives the political into ideology–into camps that are not bound by time-space, change, or modification.  Even positions that are flexible, adaptable, like Manzi’s libertarianism as means are set–the flexibility is itself a non-flexible feature.

We need another guiding metaphor.  One, as in Heidegger, of “at homeness.”  At place-ness.  [This has echoes of Scott's glocalism].  Another point of view, another way.  Heidegger said that we do not have language–language has us.  Language is the abode of being.  Following Erik’s reference of language, we are becoming increasingly autistic and mute.  Our homes no longer speak to us.  Our homes are not modes of divination (to play on Heidegger’s invocation of Dionysius).  [Read more →]

by kyle cupp

I picked a fight with a book the other day. It was a work on ethics. I’ve occasionally taken it off the shelf and scanned a little here and there, but I’ve never devoted much time to actually reading it. I can’t say that engaging the text was my motivation in this instance. Despite my better judgment, I continue to feel a lingering temptation to approach works expressing views different than mine out of a desire to feel good about my own philosophy. And sometimes I succumb. I knew – okay, suspected – that this particular book on ethics presented arguments that I would find laughably poor. I had no intention of being challenged by the authors or even learning something from them. I wanted to revel in my own superiority.

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson. Back in my university days, I started reading the postmodernists and deconstructionists because I knew they were the latest and greatest bad guys, and I wanted to get to know their particular intellectual villainy so that I could heroically refute them. I had the truth. They were relativists who denied the truth. Or so I thought. Reading them turned out to be very unsettling, but this feeling was not due solely to what they said or even how they said it. I felt unsettled because I had heard from trusted lovers of truth that that these writers were enemies hell-bent on destroying the truth, and what I read of them didn’t seem to support this characterization. Suddenly I found myself asking, like Pontius Pilate, “What is the truth?” Hey, a lot can happen when you learn that Jacques Derrida, the dark lord of deconstruction himself, actually affirms justice, forgiveness, and hospitality. A lot can happen when you actually engage a text. [Read more →]

I read with great interest Kyle’s excellent post on partisanship wherein Kyle made some excellent points about the political process, its strengths and its faults. In that post, Kyle talked about his hopes around the election of Barack Obama saying,

I too am a partisan, and on rare occasions I could be viciously so.  But at the same time my approach to politics would suggest an eagerness for post partisanship that is echoed by my long time support of the newly minted President of the United States.  I am a lefty, but for two years I have been a staunch supporter of the single candidate who succeeded most in making post-partisanship one of the defining themes of his campaign.

Admittedly, I too was drawn in by Obama’s talk of post-partisanship, it formed much of my basis for support early on. But further consideration of a variety of issues and the future of political discourse in general has left me somewhat doubtful about post-partisanship as a likely phenomenon.

When we talk about post-partisanship, the indication is that we’re talking about a point in time at which we’ll get beyond partisanship. The problem here is that partisanship isn’t a temporally located phenomenon. Granted, various ideologies arise in specific time periods and may or may not undergo a process of evolution, but the perspectival interrelationships of those ideologies that give rise to a partisanship persist so long as there are contrasting points of view available. In other words, so long as there are different perspectives that people can take on a variety of issues and so long as those perspectives are roughly represented by some kind of ideological housing, we are likely to see the rise of partisanship. Given that it seems highly unlikely that all of the disagreements we have in the process of perpetuating political discourse will evaporate, it begins to look increasingly likely that post-partisanship is a conceptual misnomer.

One step further, as Kyle points out, we actually benefit from having contrasting points of view expressed on various topics. The veracity of our decisions is greatly bolstered when we’ve had a healthy debate on the issue at hand in which people of contrasting points of view have challenged one another on the strengths and weaknesses of each others’ claims. How else are we  to identify ideological blind spots and uncover previously unnoticed implications from various ideas? It seems fairly clear from the functioning of most modern polities that sincere and passionate debate is an intrinsic ingredient to the health of democracy.

And yet, one can’t escape the feeling that something is amiss in our political discourse. Moreover, much of the stagnation of government actually demonstrably belies the accuracy of that feeling. But if post-partisanship is a misnomer, then what is it we seek to remedy our perceived failings?

I would suggest that rather than post-partisanship, what we really seek is right relation of our partisan tendencies. Or, to put it as Kyle suggested, we seek some kind of guiding orientation towards the “good side of partisanship”, we want partisanship that works in a productive manner. [Read more →]