John Protevi's Blog

Edges of the State: Introduction

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Click the link above to download a PDF file of the Introduction to Edges of the State (University of Minnesota Press, 2019)

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PDF of Power Point: "States of Nature: Geography and Human Evolution"

Download Roanoke Feb 2019 (8M pdf file)

Synthesizes material from this course, from this paper, and from these posts.

Crisis and State Marginality

(Opening disclaimer: I'm a rank amateur with regard to the sociology of squatting I mention below, but am going to be working on it, so I may come back to this note later in either shame or relief at my good luck in guessing at things.)

The preamble to the June 14-15 ENS colloquium "Margins of Europe: Borders Now" asks us to consider the margins of Europe in both geographical and social senses. The geographical sense would be national borders and the attempt to regulate flows of immigrants and refugees, and the social sense would be the manner in which national governments manage their populations by distinguishing citizens and non-citizens, and, within the latter class, the criteria for and treatment of those who are documented or undocumented residents.

I'd like to show here, by considering the work of James C Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) and Against the Grain (2017), that Europe's current struggles with its marginalities are examples of practices that are constitutive of the state as social form.

First, let us note that Scott, like Pierre Clastres (1989; 1994), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and others, reject any notion that the state evolves from pre-state conditions; rather, they insist, states are born by "capture," the violent imposition of the state form (taxes, obligatory labor, and rent on land) on non-state peoples. The state is then one social form among others, not the telos of sociality.

Such capture, however, provokes flight or marronage[1]. The first maroon societies are thus contemporaneous with the first states; as soon as there were states, people "ran for the hills." However, those fleeing the state could rarely simply ignore states, and would sometimes wish to return either to settle down, or to trade with the state. In fact, non-state people came to be necessary to states as supplying both non-human (raw materials) and human (enslaved people) commodities.

Thus, flight, while it is in one sense a mere consequence of capture, is in another sense co-constitutive of states; without those who flee, the state would have no one to trade with and would have to attempt raw material resource extraction itself. But this would dangerously stretch the power of the state to extract taxes, labor, and rent in its core. Much better then to manage the margins of the state qua geographical border.

At the same time as states dealt with those on their geographical borders, internal population management by means of "social marginality," was instantly set up, as states were in constant need of importing new members whose differences in political status (free vs slave; urban vs rural; and so on) needed to be regulated.

Overall, Scott's (2017) analyses of the first states fit Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) "Urstaat" thesis of the necessity of assembling state forms all at once in a mutually constitutive functioning unit: taxation, including the special apparatus of collectors, assessors, accountants; work gangs for agriculture or monumental architecture; scribes and their record-keeping apparatus; military specialists; standardized weights and measures (Sibertin-Blanc 2013; 2016; Smith 2018). These mutually constituting functions of the state are themselves as a whole in constant negotiations with their geographical and social margins with non-state peoples.[2]

Scott talks of the relation of state and non-state peoples as "symbionts" or "dark twins," a situation which sometimes produced a sort of shared sovereignty (or sharing of appropriated surplus), in which state and non-state peoples are competing for ability to extract surplus from captive primary production populations (2017, 243). Non-state control of trade routes enabled them to trade with states, and also to extort "taxation" of state-traders via "tolls" to allow passage, and piracy as predation on state trading. Non-state people did not always flee or repel the state; sometime they conquered it and become the new ruling class, and at other times they become mercenaries of state armies (250-251).

Scott ends Against the Grain by noting that while the "Golden Age" of non-state peoples lasted a long time, enslavement of other non-state people and sale of military service to states ultimately tipped the scales in favor of states, which now dominate the globe to a much greater extent than ever before (255-56). In the periphery, surveillance with GIS and drones; force projection with helicopters, and brutality with automatic weapons, can keep peasantry in line, and keep nonstate people confined to margins and ineffective in resisting resource extraction when desired.

Moving now to consider social marginality, contemporary biopolitical and neoliberal state administration can keep internal population management going in the core: the middle and working classes that are registered, tracked, and managed, some with full disciplinary force, others with the more "dividualizing" practices of "control" via databases and so on (Deleuze 1992).

In both these ways, then, the purely geographical and the "control" management of populations, fleeing the state by seeking territorial marginality is compromised to the point that for a full picture of marronage, we must make the turn to social marginality, and the ways non-documented people, or those dissatisfied citizens, go about trying to live as squatters, as inhabitants of "no go zones," as those who "go off the grid," and other forms of evading state rule within state territories.

For reasons of limited space and professional training, I won't continue except to ask that we consider one last turn of the screw. Scott agrees with Deleuze and Guattari on the need to conceptually separate the primary or originary violence of statification as capture and enslavement of non-state peoples, and the ordinary, everyday, or secondary violence of policing, tax collection, and labor coercion, which repeat and reinforce the originary violence by which tax and labor become obligations and attempts to evade them and / or to appropriate surplus by private means become criminalized.

Might it not be the case however, that in "no go zones" that non-state actors, often seen as "criminal gangs" by the state, engage in a sort of "shared sovereignty" by which they compete with states for appropriation of surplus ("protection" rather than taxes being a form of regularizing plunder, hence requiring punishment of those even gangs consider free-lancers infringing on "their people") and, sometimes, for provision of services (food handouts, housing via squatting or camping, and so on) from the marginal populations that states show little interest in managing other than by intermittent raids for deportation and camp dismantling purposes?

It’s an ambiguous situation, of course, as some (or indeed many) sans-papiers on the margins do indeed want to be recognized and documented. But I think that’s because they see that as the only way to a secure and stable life, given the way states render people on their (geographical and socials) margins precarious. But as precarity for the documented populations in the core grows, the difference in quality of life shrinks, and some documented folks themselves look for ways to avoid state capture by squatting and so on. I’m not an expert here by any means on squatting, but it does seem to be a positive, sought-after marginality.

---

REFERENCES

Clastres, Pierre. 1989. Society Against the State. Trans. Robert Hurley and Abe Stein. New York: Zone Books.

Clastres, Pierre. 1994. Archaeology of Violence. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Semiotext(e).

Deleuze, Gilles. Postscript on Societies of Control. October, vol. 59: 3-7.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Protevi, John. 2015. Economies of Violence. http://www.protevi.com/john/ECONOMIES-28-March-2015.pdf

Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Scott, James C. 2017. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Sibertin-Blanc, Guillaume. 2013. Politique et Etat chez Deleuze et Guattari. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

-----. State and Politics. New York: Semiotexte, 2016

Smith, Daniel. 2018. 7000BC: Apparatus of Capture. In Henry Somers-Hall, Jeffrey Bell, and James Williams, eds., A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 223-241.

 

[1] Here Scott disagrees with Thomas Nail, who reads early state marronage as expulsion rather than flight.

[2] None of this is to deny an economy of violence among non-state peoples (Protevi 2015), including 1) fighting against state agents; 2) internal state-preventing violence (capital punishment as "reverse dominance hierarchy" practices); and 3) predation on state economies in a) targeting trade routes for robbery or extortion of tolls, in b) raids which steal from the produce of valley agricultural producers, and c) enslavement practices, in which other hill peoples, or the valley population is itself the target, a commodity to be sold to competing states (Scott 2017: 219-256).

Power Point draft for "Inhuman Gaze" conference

I'll be speaking at the "Inhuman Gaze" conference, to be held June 6-9 in Paris at the Centre Culturel Irlandais. I'm very grateful to the organizers, Anya Daly, James Jardine, Dermot Moran, Fred Cummins, and Brendan Kelly for the kind invitation.

You may click the following link to  Download 27 May Inhuman Gaze (12MB) of my presentation, entitled "The Inhuman Gaze of the Berserker." 

I think it will be in accord with the conference themes, which take off from this passage of Merleau-Ponty: 

In the gaze …. ‘the other person transforms me into an object and denies me, I transform him into an object and deny him, it is asserted. In fact, the other’s gaze transforms me into an object and mine him, only if both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature, if we both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us feels his actions to be not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an insect’s’.

As my previous work on berserkers was from a more or less 3rd person perspective, in keeping with the conference, the current work incorporates 1st and 2nd person perspectives alongside neuroscience in an attempt at a neurophenomenological treatment. 

Lecture notes on Louise Barrett, Beyond the Brain

PDF file here:  Download Lecture notes on Barrett Beyond the Brain

Lecture notes on Widerquist and McCall, _Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy_

PDF file here:  Download NOTES ON WIDERQUIST AND MCCALL Chapter 1-4 and 8-10

Lecture notes on James C Scott, Against the Grain

PDF file here:  Download Notes on Scott Against the Grain

Open Letter in support of Jason Stanley and Rebecca Kukla

We stand in solidarity with Jason Stanley and Rebecca Kukla. They have unjustly been subjected to waves of online harassment produced by twisting their meaning and feeding their names to legions of online haters. Their support of colleagues, pointing out that civility should not excuse brutal and dangerous ideas, do not deserve the anonymous third-party abuse they have received. They are valued members of our profession and we sign to make public our defense of their right to live free of such attempts at intimidation.

Should you wish to co-sign this letter, you may do so by commenting below with your name and institutional affiliation. As with these signatories, affiliations are given for identification purposes only.

Eric Brown, Philosophy, Washington University, St Louis

Taylor Carman, Philosophy, Barnard College, Columbia University

Jon Cogburn, Philosophy, Louisiana State University

John Collins, Philosophy, Columbia University

Keith DeRose, Philosophy, Yale University

John Drabinski, Black Studies, Amherst College

Richard Drayton, History, Kings College London

Tom Eyers, Philosophy, Duquesne University

Branden Fitelson, Philosophy, Northeastern University

Leigh M Johnson, Philosophy, Christian Brothers University

Ed Kazarian, Philosophy, Rowan University

Jonathan Kramnick, English, Yale University

Sally Haslanger, Philosophy, MIT

Bonnie Honig, Political Science, Brown University

Bryce Huebner, Philosophy, Georgetown University

Chad Kautzer, Philosophy, Lehigh University

Mark Lance, Philosophy, Georgetown University

Utz McKnight, Political Science, University of Alabama

Joshua Miller, Criminal Justice, University of Baltimore

Donna Murch, History, Rutgers University

Kathryn Norlock, Philosophy, Trent University

Kathryn Pogin, Philosophy, Northwestern University

John Protevi, French Studies and Philosophy, Louisiana State University

Carl B Sachs, Philosophy, Marymount University, Virginia

Eric Schliesser, Political Science, University of Amsterdam

John Schwenkler, Philosophy, Florida State University

David Livingston Smith, Philosophy, University of New England

Mark Steen, Philosophy, Boğaziçi University

Lynne Tirrell, Philosophy, University of Massachusetts at Boston

Adriel Trott, Philosophy, Wabash College

Eric Winsberg, Philosophy, University of South Florida

ON THE ALT-RIGHTING OF PHILOSOPHY BY RC

Let's distinguish doxxing from signal-boosting, as the RC people would like us to do. Doxxing is two-fold: 1) revealing the real identity of someone using an anonymous or pseudonymous screen name, or 2) making public what is private. Signal-boosting is taking what was public in a small sphere and broadcasting it to a wider audience. Critics of RC claim they doxxed our colleagues, while the RC people say it was signal-boosting. 

Let's accept it was signal-boosting, even though there is a strong argument to be made that some instances really are doxxing.

IN ANY EVENT, IN THIS PARTICULAR CASE SIGNAL-BOOSTING WAS ETHICALLY WRONG BECAUSE IT EXPOSED OUR COLLEAGUES TO STOCHASTIC HARASSMENT. 

Stochastic harassment occurs when someone is exposed to mass vitriol by 3rd parties. The exposer initiates and mediates the harassment but does not directly conduct it. Having the RC story picked up by Dreher, Washington Times, and so on exposed our colleagues to vastly larger audiences and thereby predictably exposed them to harassment. (It seems plausible that the first move, from RC to Dreher, occurred via backchannel emails, though the idea that Dreher was simply a reader, while implausible, is not impossible.)

[EDITED] The real problem here is that our colleagues were falsely portrayed as hating traditional Christianity and Christians, when in fact the real target of their anger was 1) those who made a queer colleague's professional life miserable because of beliefs about sexual orientation similar to Swinburne's, and 2) people who were acting like cursing was less civil than Swinburne's disability claim.

WHEN YOU FALSELY PORTRAY JEWS AS HATERS OF CHRISTIANS IN 2016 AMERICA YOU EXPOSE THEM TO HARASSMENT AND INCREASED CHANCES OF PHYSICAL HARM.

Corollaries: 

1) Swinburne suffered no comparable harm by having his "disability" claim cursed out on Facebook to that suffered by our colleagues. So RC can't be said to be evening the score. 

2) Even if one were to say our colleagues acted imprudently by not taking sufficient notice of the danger of RC exposing them to stochastic harassment, that has no bearing on the ethical evaluation of RC's behavior. 

Swinburne and his "disability" claim

This piece, entitled "Homophobia and the Limits of Scientific Philosophy" by Martin Pleitz is a fine paper on Swinburne's "disability" claim.

It's relevant, because if Swinburne had stuck to a claim about the immorality of homosexuality, none of this controversy would have happened. My sense of the sociology of the profession is that a great number of philosophers would a) have never heard of it, or b) if they did hear of it they would have shrugged it off as "dog bites man" level stuff, or c) they would have thought that there are resources within Christian moral philosophy to combat the claim, and if pressed, would have expressed solidarity with those using those resources to combat Swinburne's claim. 

But, once it became known that "disability" language was being used, then anger and obscenity were among the reactions. FWIW, I'm in favor of obscenity directed at people using "disability" in the manner in which Swinburne uses it. But if in addition you want a cold dissection of the claim, Pleitz's paper is a good start: 

Some excerpts from Pleitz's paper:

Abstract: To criticize Richard Swinburne’s recent argument for the thesis that homosexuality is a disability that should be prevented and cured, I show that it rests on implausible premises about the concepts of love and of disability, and that the endorsement of its conclusion would lead to grave consequences for homosexuals. I conclude that Swinburne in his argument against homosexuality has moved beyond the limits of scientific philosophy, and into the realm of homophobia.

1 Introduction
Richard Swinburne argues for the thesis that homosexuality is a disability that should be prevented and cured where possible (R 303ff.). The purpose of my talk is to criticize this argument against homosexuality. After giving you an outline of Swinburne’s argument, I will criticize its premises, concentrating on the concepts of love and disability (section 2). In a second step, I will outline some negative consequences for homosexuals living in Western societies that would emerge if the conclusion was widely accepted (section 3). After this discussion of homosexuality, I will change the stance and apply the sociological concept of homophobia to Swinburne’s text (section 4). 

My presentation will be different in character from the other contributions at this conference. At Münstersche Vorlesungen, we usually try to offer internal and mostly constructive criticism to our guest philosopher. My criticism of Swinburne’s arguments will be neither internal nor constructive. I will rely on considerations external to Swinburne’s philosophy, e.g. on different concepts of love and disability and on the sociological concept of homophobia. And my criticism will not be constructive in spirit because I do not intend to help Swinburne improve his argument against homosexuality.

Outline of Sterelny, "Cooperation, Culture, and Conflict"

PDF available Download Sterelny notes. 

Trust the RSA! Love the RSA!

The ISA instructing us to trust the RSA, to believe its "official accounts," is nothing new (as below). John Drabinski asks us to consider whether there isn't now an additional imperative that the RSA must be loved.

 

Notes on the killing of Micah Johnson and Christopher Dorner

In a number of discussions of the use of the robot-delivered bomb in Dallas to kill Micah Johnson, I've seen some folks say it was justified, because, in addition to the present risk posed by Johnson, "he had already killed 5 people." If this were part of the police calculation and not just online armchairing, then the police are not entitled to use that notion, as that is a fact to be established in a court of law. They are only allowed to assess present risk. The difference between those two sentences is the difference between a society of laws and a police state.

Nothing I'm saying here implies a yea or nay to the question whether the robot bomb was justified. There are specialists in risk assessment and ethical issues of law enforcement use of deadly force whose reports we can read and think about.

But the principle that the police must only consider present risk is what keeps us from condoning extra-judicial killings in which the police are judge, jury, and executioner. And insisting on that principle doesn't require special training; it's the very most basic duty of citizens to insist on it. It's what defines people as "citizens" in fact.

In addition, nothing I'm saying here implies that the USA is in fact "a society of laws," nor that there is a (non-color-marked) "we" who are "citizens." I'm purposely leaving open the possibility that in fact it has only ever been such a police state in a way that constituted whiteness as temporarily exempt from non-citizenship; I'm only making a conceptual distinction.

[UPDATE, following online discussion: 9:45pm, Sun 10 July: I think "reasonable suspicion he had killed 5 people" can be part of assessment of "present risk." I'm just objecting to the flatness of the statement of the armchair folks. (In this particular case, I'm not sure when the police shifted from the multiple sniper to the single shooter hypothesis, but even on the former, "reasonable suspicion the current shooter had been involved in an event with five deaths," can certainly be factored into the assessment of current state of mind of the shooter.}

--

Further, on the question of what to think about the threshold breached by the robot-delivered bomb in the Johnson case, we could consider the case of Christopher Dorner.

There were rumors of drones being used to track Dorner, and others being prepped for killing him, but they ended up using a bulldozer to knock down the walls of the cabin he was in and then using "burners" (flash-bang tear-gas grenades known to cause fires) which burned down the cabin, causing him to kill himself to avoid being burnt alive.

Pull quotes from this LA Times piece:

Samuel Walker, emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska Omaha, was critical of the decision to use the "burner" tear gas canisters. "It's true, he was firing at them. But he was cornered. He was trapped. At that point, there was no rush in the sense that he was barricaded. The standard rules on barricade situations are that you can wait the person out," Walker said. "To use a known incendiary device raises some very serious questions in my mind."

Other law enforcement experts interviewed by The Times, however, said the move was justified. Even though SWAT officers were certain to have known a fire was a strong possibility, the use of the gas was reasonable in the face of the deadly threat Dorner presented, they said. Allowing the standoff to carry on into the night, they emphasized, would have added an unpredictable element to the drama that officials were smart to avoid."

The still-invisible dimensions of "Western philosophy"

Of all the reactions to this NYT Stone column saying that if philosophy won't "diversify," then we should rename philosophy departments as "Dept of European and American Philosophy," I thought John Drabinski's post distinguishing the decolonializing project from "diversity" approaches was the best.

 

John pointed out the still-invisibly-white dimension of "Western philosophy" with an anecdote about the incredulous laughter from his students when he points out that while he labels his course "Black Existentialism," the phil dept's offering isn't named "White Existentialism," but just "Existentialism." John continues: "That laugh at the absurdity of visibility cuts to the heart ... whiteness doesn’t just hide from visibility, it is in fact defined by its insistence on being invisible – what Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks calls the colonial measure."

 

Among other reactions, there was Eric Schliesser's post, in which he showed that putting Jewish and Islamic philosophy under the "other" or even "non-Western" category revealed a still-invisibly-Christian dimension. This moved me to the following remarks which I left at his place but reproduce here:

1) Very good way to show Christianity as another dimension of invisibility, along with "white" per Drabinski, hidden behind "Western." I think we should take that as a clue to uncover other interlocking dimensions of invisibility along with those two. "Western" also stands for "still-invisibly-ableist," "still-invisibly-hetero," "still-invisibly-anthropocentric," and so on. I don't include "still-invisibly-male" as that dimension of unthought default setting mode for philosophy is now becoming visible (to many people at least) thanks to the centuries of work by feminists.

 

[After the fact comment: so, in my view, behind our usage of "Western philosophy" -- and even more so, behind "philosophy" -- there's a multiplicity at work: a heterogeneous set of interlocking processes of (de-)racialization, (de-)gendering, (de-)ablizing ... , with concrete bodies politic being crystallizations of those dimensions. I think there are connections here with "intersectionality" that I'm going to try to work out this summer.]

2) When Schliesser notes the racism and genocidal calls of "the others" that you can find when you read outside the "Western" canon, that is to my mind a devastating counter to calls to "diversity." The call has to be to de-colonializing, de-racializing, de-ableizing ... philosophy, not just to broadening our sources. It's to change the way we do philosophy, to bring out the invisible dimensions which serve the social-structure-forming (or at least reinforcing and justifying) as well as epistemic, moral, and aesthetic functions of philosophy.

3) The still-invisibly-Christian aspect allowing "Western" to be used as it is didn't become awkward after slavery and colonialism the way it did after Auschwitz, perhaps because of the long term nature and intricate workings of slavery and colonialism meant the entire society, religious organizations and doctrines included, were so permeated by and so involved in the reinforcement and justification of those power relations that can't we see that involvement in the past, let alone see it now in our current society, still structured as it is by the succeeding permutations of the racism and exploitation that were slavery and colonialism. The documentary evidence presented in the case of the Jesuits at Georgetown show just how direct that involvement could be; the real challenges lie in showing the more indirect cases -- as well as continuing to unearth other direct ones.

 

Eric then replied on Facebook to the effect that we tend to homogenize "the West" and thereby render invisible the fighters against slavery and misogyny within "the West" and thereby risk reinforcing injustice, accepting a crude historicism and incompletely complex narratives. 

 

In response I of course acknowledged his points, and then wrote,

 

"When, upon Chike Jeffers's suggestion I made my Spring 2015 HMP course centered on the Atlantic, and included Montaigne's "Of Cannibals," the De Las Casas vs Sepulveda debate, and Jim Maffie's work on Aztec philosophy, I also included Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, I made sure to stress the internal conflict within "Western philosophy." One point I made went something like this: "we talk about the polemical mode of philosophy, but it's mostly just folks scoring points in a seminar room, but Cugoano against the slavers, that really was war, in the form of philosophy. They weren't his "opponents," or his "interlocutors" -- they were his enemies."

 

4) Elsewhere on Facebook I made this comment to forestall the "lack of specialists" objection to changing our approaches:

 

"The de-colonialism challenge -- or better, rooting out all the "still-invisibly-X" dimensions of the "philosophy" multiplicity -- is a generational and collective project. People today are going to have to retool a little, but the hope is that the kids we turn on to de-colonialized (....) phil in our UG courses will go on to be the specialists we're not. This is not some impossible project. Think of 30 years ago in French Studies. Plenty of ppl trained in Hexagonal literature added a little bit of Francophone lit here and there, and over time it's become a research speciality, mostly with kids turned on by those early profs. And there was an importation of African and Caribbean profs into French departments. I think a similar story would be told in English departments both w/r/t post-colonial / de-colonialized / world lit, and w/r/t cultural studies and so on." 

 

That I should have to make such a point shows the ridiculous self-ghettoization of far too many philosophers, who are -- and I'm using the genderizing term advisedly -- scared of the cooties they'd pick up by actually knowing the first thing about the history of almost all the other humanities disciplines. (Which is not to say they have all successfully confronted the de-colonial project instead of settling for "diversity" qua boutique exoticism -- a "world lit," or "world music" course here and there.)

 

5) So, w/r/t current practice, the dividing lines should not be between Eastern and Western, or between continental and analytic, but between work furthering de-colonializing, de-racializing, de-abilizing, de-gendering, .... and work that is "still-invisibly-white," "still-invisibly-abilized" and so on.

 

[UPDATE, Th 12 May, 10:51 am CDT: is that a forced choice? Is there a tertium non datur? Is there philosophy that is neither de-invisiblizing nor still-invisibly-X but just plain philosophy? I would of course be open to discussion on that question.]

 

Let's not be thread-jackers all the time! Or, A Plea for Particularism

What I like in this piece by John McWhorter about the Yale president's decision to keep the name of Calhoun College is the author's insistence that we can make judgments, draw lines, and discuss particular cases. We can thereby resist the all-too-prevalent leaping from concrete demands ("we must remove Calhoun's name on this residential college") to grand principles ("should we remove the names of all slave-holders from all buildings?").

That move, something to which I would say philosophers are especially prone, lends itself (I would say non-coincidentally) to facile slippery slopes ("what's next, remove the name of people who didn't educate their daughters properly?") and reductios ("so you're saying we should change the name of the capital city of the nation because Washington was a slave-holder?").

So, fellow philosophers, let's not be inveterate thread-jackers. Let's cultivate the capacity to stick to the topic and discuss concrete demands. If a significant movement arises that demands the removal of Washington's name from the capital city, we can discuss the merits of that demand. In the meantime, let's discuss Calhoun. (And if you're at Princeton, let's discuss Wilson.) There's nothing wrong with a series of concrete discussions.

And speaking of liberal pieties about "discussion" as ways to avoid, well, real discussion, it would be good to call the bluff of the "discussion" proponents. (The Yale president's ostensible reason for keeping Calhoun's name on the building was that it would foster "discussion.") Make Yale a 24/7/365 discussion zone about past, present, and future links between racism, slavery, reparations, student debt, public space and memorialization.

Let's have every single department be required to give a public presentation on their website about their discipline's perspectives -- in all its range of opinion and controversy -- on the above topics. From Anthropology and Architecture to Economics to Philosophy to Psychology to hell, Botany and Zoology (I would love to know what the lasting effects of the industrial plantation system had on the flora and fauna of the South, what effects the mills had on the Northeast, and so on).

The President wants "discussion"? Let's have him marshall the awesome resources of the Yale faculty and students and have a real "discussion."

Text of talk at DRM Ceremony, April 20, 2016

LSU Distinguished Research Master Award 2015

April 20, 2016

John Protevi

Phyllis M Taylor Professor of French Studies and Professor of Philosophy

I am deeply honored to receive this award before so many friends and colleagues at the university that has played such a great role in my life. My thanks go to President Alexander, Provost Koubek, Vice President Valsaraj, Associate Vice President Beck, Associate Vice President Kousoulas, the members of the Council on Research, and to the staff members of ORED who have made this occasion possible. In addition, I’d like to thank Dean Haynie, Associate Deans Blanchard and Richardson, and the College of Humanities and Social Science staff, as well as my colleagues and the staff and students in the Department of French Studies and in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. And most certainly I want to acknowledge the love and support of my family, especially my wife, Kate Jensen, with whom I’ve shared an amazing 21 years.

It’s customary on these occasions, I think, to take a look back at one’s research trajectory. My current work brings together recent French philosophy, with recent developments in the life sciences and the cognitive sciences, all with an eye toward the concrete intersection of the social and the bodily that we live out everyday. I call that intersection “the body politic,” by which I mean to bring out the individual bodily aspect in addition to the usual collective civic aspect.

How I got there, though, requires a little storytelling. I was trained in what we call “continental philosophy,” that is, classical German and French philosophy from the 18^th to 20^th centuries (from Kant to Habermas on one side of the Rhine and from Rousseau to Foucault on the other). I was especially taught to connect those thinkers to the masters of the then-canonical Western tradition: Plato and Aristotle of course, but also Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume and so on.

So how did I get there, that is, to the study of “continental philosophy”?

Notes on James C Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed -- Scott's multiplicity

Notes on James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009).

Scott describes a multiplicity with topographical / transport-technological, political-economic, political-organizational, administrative, and violence elements. A multiplicity is a set of interacting processes in which thresholds in the relations of processes produce qualitative changes in the behavior of the system.

For Scott, “state” and “non-state” processes are in “dialectical” or “mutually constituting” relations. The “state” processes (enclosure, enslavement, taxing …) here are orienting limits, with classic, colonial, and post-colonial states with varying capacities to approach the limits and maintain / reproduce those gains. The “non-state” processes (flight, nomadicism, raiding …) also admit of degrees, with well-administered states in times of economic growth sometimes attracting non-state peoples to settle down. States and non-states exchange (at different rates at different times) people, customs, and goods across the “membrane” that frontiers provide, all mediated by smugglers, traders, brokers, peddlers, and so on.

However, the whole analysis is governed by the “last enclosure” thesis whereby post-WW2 “distance-destroying technologies” (roads / cars / ATVs; planes / helicopters / drones; electronic communications) are severely encroaching upon ability to live a self-governing or non-state life. However, again (something Scott underplays), climate change could quite possibly throw a spanner in the works and allow more leeway for non-state living.

I. Topographical / transport-technological (“friction of terrain”)

1. State spaces: valleys and rivers / oceans
   1. military enforcement
   2. administrative “visibility”
   3. economic integration limited by cost per unit weight across distance:
      1. much easier by water
      2. by land, human / animal power constrained by its need for fuel, which it also had to carry with it
2. Non-state spaces:
   1. hills / mountains (in this book)
   2. but generalizable to any zone where state reach is hampered: jungles, deserts, marshes, and so on.

II. Political economy (production)

1. state
   1. coerced by state: sedentary river valley rice agriculture is legible, taxable / appropriateable, and the population is conscriptable into army or into corvée labor
      1. slavery
         1. capture of hill people by raiding
         2. debt bondage
      2. share-cropping
      3. corvée labor for infrastructure and / or monuments
   2. however,
      1. Scott rejects Wittfogel: states did not build irrigation, but took over historical, slow, accretions of it
      2. similarly, you can have terraced rice cultivation in hills and wet-rice w/o states or states w/o wet rice (64-65)
   3. tolerated / encouraged by state
      1. independent urban artisanal production
      2. temple / palace luxury goods (also by trade / gift)
      3. products for trade with hill peoples
         1. fish and other foods unavailable in the hills
         2. manufactured goods (e.g., metal tools and weapons)
2. non-state production
   1. food production / consumption
      1. swidden agriculture / horticulture
      2. nomadic steppe pastoralism
      3. nomadic foraging
   2. trade with states (sale, barter, debt payment, tribute [106])
      1. by land (high density / high value
         1. plants: medicinals / spices (opium, pepper)
         2. animals: birds, feathers, honey
         3. minerals: jewels 
      2. by water (can be bulkier)
         1. timber
         2. cattle
         3. animal products (e.g., furs)
         4. hill agriculture (yams, rice, etc)
      3. slaves

III. Political organization

1. state
   1. concentrated manpower (64)
      1. for agriculture
      2. for military
         1. to squeeze peasants
         2. to hold geographically important positions to collect tolls on trade
         3. but concentration allows famines / epidemics
   2. central command authority with radiating subordinates
   3. military specialization / conscription
   4. taxes
      1. land rents based on “visible” agricultural productivity
      2. tolls / taxes commercial transactions
   5. corvée labor

2. non-state “shatter zones”
   1. egalitarian / acephalic bands
   2. chiefdoms
   3. temporary alliances

IV. Ethnic / kinship / linguistic structures

1. state systems:
   1. need ease of incorporation in order to concentrate populations, even if we see use of ethnicity for stratification
   2. once incorporated, we see tendency to uniformity, fixity, religious orthodoxy (155)
2. non-state peoples: multiple / flexible kinship (“ethnogenesis”)
   1. ethnicity: varying declared identities depending who was asking
      1. p 254: “identities are plural … and systematically structured by relations of power and prestige … a bandwidth of traits or identities that could be deployed or performed as the situation required…. Ethnic identity … would be the repertoire of possible performances and the contexts in which they are exhibited”
      2. nonetheless with states providing constraints
   2. tribes:
      1. often state creations for administration
      2. can become a self-identity for political purposes
   3. kinship:
      1. ease of incorporation of immigrants, captives, in-marrying
      2. ease of creating fictitious lineages to legitimate new aristos
   4. languages: hill peoples tend to multi-lingualism

V. Regimes of violence

1. state
   1. primary violence of statification warfare:
      1. territorial incorporation
      2. population enslavement and resettlement
   2. secondary violence:
      1. tax terrorization
      2. enforcement of conscription and corvée labor
2. non-state
   1. anti-state fighting (state avoiding)
   2. internal state-preventing violence (exile, "capital punishment")
   3. predation on state economies
      1. trade routes
      2. raids:
         1. stealing from produce of valley agricultural slaves
         2. slave-raiding (population is targeted commodity)

Notes on James C Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed -- Scott's dialectical method

Notes on James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009).

PRINCIPLES OF ANALYSIS

I will rearrange the order of presentation in the Preface to emphasize some connections of principles. Under each of the three main headings there is a dialectic of escape and living free that is a theoretical mirror of the historical process being examined: first, a critical interpretation of state thought (escape) and then a positive project of examining the practices of self-governing peoples (living free).

ANTI-STATE-CENTRISM

CRITICAL INTERPRETATION OF STATE DENIGRATION OF THE OTHER: “My argument is a deconstruction of Chinese and other civilizational discourses about the ‘barbarian,’ the ‘raw,’ the ‘primitive.’ On close inspection, those terms, practically, mean ungoverned, not-yet-incorporated. Civilizational discourses never entertain the possibility of people voluntarily going over to the barbarians, hence such statuses are stigmatized and ethnicized. Ethnicity and ‘tribe’ begin exactly where taxes and sovereignty end—in the Roman Empire as in the Chinese” (Preface, p x-xi).

POSITIVE PROJECT: WRITING THE HISTORY OF NON-STATE PEOPLES AS THE COMPLEMENT OF STATE-CENTERED HISTORY (the original and implicit affirmative universal “all history is that of the state” has to be changed to an explicit pair of particulars “not all history is that of the state” and “some history is that of non-state peoples”): “The huge literature on state-making, contemporary and historic, pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness. This is the history of those who got away, and state-making cannot be understood apart from it. This is also what makes this an anarchist history” (Preface, p x).

ANTI-PROGRESSIVISM

CRITICAL INTERPRETATION OF STATE PROGRESSIVISM: From a state perspective, “self-governing peoples” are “living ancestors,” a glimpse of pre-agricultural, pre-civilized life. Here is a politics of anthropology, a way that progressivism or evolutionism is put to work, legitimating incorporation of non-state peoples to allow them access to modernity. Scott argues, on the contrary, “hill people are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppression of state-making projects in the valleys—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare” (Preface, p ix).

POSITIVE PROJECT OF DESCRIBING “PRIMITIVISM” AS ANTI-STATE CHOICE: “the argument reverses much received wisdom about ‘primitivism’ generally. Pastoralism, foraging, shifting cultivation, and segmentary lineage systems are often a ‘secondary adaptation,’ a kind of ‘self-barbarization’ adopted by peoples whose location, subsistence, and social structure are adapted to state evasion. For those living in the shadow of states, such evasion is also perfectly compatible with derivative, imitative, and parasitic state forms in the hills” (Preface, p x).

ANTI-DETERMINISM

CRITICAL INTERPRETATION OF ECOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL DETERMINISM, OR, PUTTING THE POLITICS INTO “POLITICAL ECONOMY”: “Usually, forms of subsistence and kinship are taken as given, as ecologically and culturally determined. By analyzing various forms of cultivation, particular crops, certain social structures, and physical mobility patterns for their escape value, I treat such givens as political choices” (Preface, p xi).

POSITIVE PROJECT OF DESCRIBING ANTI-STATE PRACTICES: “physical dispersion in rugged terrain, their mobility, their cropping practices, their kinship structures, their pliable ethnic identities, and their devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders all serve to avoid incorporation into states and to prevent states from springing up among them” (Preface, p x).

Notes on Geroulanos and Meyers manuscript workshop: case studies and organismic integration

Yesterday I had the chance to participate in a pre-publication workshop on a book by Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers of NYU. The book concerns concepts of integration and individuality in early 20^th century medicine, with special attention to military medicine in World War I.

In this note, I’d like to talk about Chapter 2, on case studies. I’ll talk about the manuscript, but also about what thoughts the ms provoked in me. As a philosopher, I was drawn to this chapter for four reasons. 1) The wide variety of logical relations involving individuals. 2) The epistemological question of a “science of the individual.” 3) The mind / body relation in shell shock. 4) The methodological one; we don’t do very many case studies in philosophy, but I think we should.

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Notes on Columbia Foucault seminar 7/13: "Security, Territory, Population"

FOUCAULT 7/13: RESONANCE WITH DELEUZE

In last night’s seminar Adam Tooze referred to Deleuze’s reading of Foucault. In this note I’d like to propose that we can see elements of Deleuze’s thought in Foucault's lectures in the mid-to-late 1970s. I don’t want to claim anything more than “resonance” here; that is, I’m not going to claim “influence” or “dependence,” though I might be willing to accept a claim of a shared intellectual milieu between Deleuze and Foucault, a mutual suspicion of universals and identities, and a mutual desire to analyze the differential field from which those identities emerge. Further, we have seen in the 13/13 seminar so far a number of references to Deleuze or Deleuze and Guattari in Foucault’s lecture courses, and of course we should note that Foucault reviewed Deleuze’s late-1960s works Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense as well as providing the Preface to the English translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.

Deleuze's ontology in Difference and Repetition posits individuation as the integration of a multiplicity. A multiplicity is a distributed and differential system, that is, a system in which multiple processes interact such that qualitative changes in the behavior of the system occur at singular points in the relation of the rates of change of those processes. For a meteorological example, consider how, at a singular point, the relation of the rates of change of temperature, air pressure, air circulation, water vapor concentration, condensation, evaporation and so on will be such that a hurricane forms, an emergent individual worthy of a proper name.

In this note, I'll track Foucault’s use of the concept of integrating a differential field or "multiplicity" to produce an emergent individual.