Philosophical Diversity

Philosophy, like national parks, has a diversity problem, or so it is said. What this actually means is that academic philosophy has a diversity problem, that it is mostly white and mostly male, and that it is generally dismissive toward non-Western contributions. 

Over at The Splintered Mind, Eric is given to collecting numbers regarding the citation frequencies of non-Western, female, and ethnic minority thinkers. As expected, those numbers are all very small, prompting him to ask, "Why don't we [U.S.-based philosophy professors] know our Chinese philosophers?"

I keep thinking of the videotape format war of the 1970s and 80s. Why did VHS win out over Betamax? There are many reasons, but they all seem to boil down to the vagaries of consumer choice. Likewise for the ascendancy of Anglo-American over Chinese philosophers. Any attempt to extrapolate the "determining factors" can only result in generalizations of consumer needs and demands of varying practical significance.

But unlike the market dominance of VHS, the homogeneity of academic philosophy reputedly derives from internal prejudice, a presumed distortion of how differences would actually be accommodated if faculty appointments were subject to external criteria.

And yet the distinction between internal and external is hard to maintain. External criteria, being diverse, can only be applied on the basis of internal prejudice. But where does the formation of such prejudice take place? When Chancellor Phyllis Wise of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "unhired" Professor Steven Salaita for incendiary discourse, is she looking out for the public good or for the good of the university?

Pending Thought

Meta-capitalism.

Common and Uncommon Fear

The securitized lives in fear of a combination of punishments and external threats. Fear of the ruling powers and their police is a factor but more important and effective is fear of dangerous others and unknown threats - a generalized social fear. In some ways those who are in prison have less to fear; rather, even though the threats they face from the carceral machine, the guards, and other inmates, are severe, they are more limited and knowable. Fear in the security regime is an empty signifier in which all kinds of terrible phantoms can appear.

--Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration 

But let's not overlook the formal equivalence between fearful situations by favoring one totalization of concrete experiences over another. Whether you are in prison or outside of it, there is always an Outside to your experiences.

Here, however, Hardt and Negri interiorize the prisoner's Outside within the experiences of the securitized, sheltering the prisoner from an Outside not his own, debasing his fear to accentuate the fear of the securitized.

But does the securitized know true fear? Does he fix his gaze on the Outside with frozen fascination? Hardly. The threat of "terrible phantoms" appearing is an amenity interior to his experiences, an excuse for resuming normal activities which now include the seamless integration of surveillance. The threat of annihilation is a buried nightmare.

Hardt and Negri would turn that nightmare into reality. They would awaken the securitized to true fear, the fear of God, the fear which only a prisoner can know - not to appreciate what he has, but to prove that what he has can be destroyed.

Fear Factory

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live in a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

--H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

--H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"

There is no contradiction here. Knowledge is the necessary precursor to fear of the unknown. Correlating all the world's contents awakens the mind to the horror of an absolute unknown, because it leaves the totality itself unaccounted for, an arbitrary emanation from the nameless abyss attesting to a demonic will. 

Debt Factory

The movement we are tracing from exploitation to indebtedness corresponds to the transformation of capitalist production from an order based on the hegemony of profit (that is, the accumulation of the average value of industrial exploitation) to one dominated by rent (that is, by the average value of the exploitation of social development) and thus by the accumulation of the value socially produced in an increasingly abstract form. Production thus relies, in this passage, increasingly on socialized, not individual, figures of work, that is, on workers who immediately cooperate together prior to the discipline and control of the capitalist.

--Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration

Sometimes is pays (!) not to be a team player.

My Work Here Is Not Done

I give my life of consumption as free labor for producing debt.

Economics and Religion

Post-capitalism is ciphered monotheism.