[p2p-research] varieties of radical left positions towards democracy

[Michel Bauwens]

Andy,

thanks a lot for having engaged with my questions and objections, I'm
learning a lot from your considerations and in-depth knowledge!

I notice a distinct reichian influence in your approach? reminds of the
three years I spent in a reichian intentional community ...

Michel

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 2:23 AM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi again,
>
> Apologies for the delay in responding, I'm busy with work at the moment.
>
> You say:
>
> “So I reverse the burden of proof. People who deny any human universality
> have to proof that not a single human trait is shared”
>
> No, I put the burden of proof in the right place, for several reasons.
> Firstly, the danger of positing as universal something which is not is both
> greater (it leads to dehumanisation) and more pervasive (it is in continuity
> with colonialism and western epistemological privilege) than any cost on the
> other side. Secondly, this kind of claim is constantly falsifiable, and
> hence insecure as a basis for future-oriented actions. Orienting ethically
> towards the future is not the same as trying to deduce scientific cause and
> effect. There is always the possibility that the next human born will
> falsify everything that went before, and ethics has to be alert to this
> possibility. More likely, the revelation or closer listening to formerly
> silenced voices will falsify everything that went before (as it has
> repeatedly already).
>
> “... are there any humans which never experience love, hate, mothers who
> are at least challenged by their infants, etc... ”
>
> Well, firstly, this would be a question of whether there are languages in
> which these categories (love, hate, mothers, challenge) do not exist. For
> instance, there are many cultures where nothing like the western concept of
> love exists, because attachments are situated and relative; and cultures
> where older female relatives would all be called the same name. But I
> suspect you're actually trying to argue from a supposed universality of
> emotions rather than the language used to describe them. In this case I
> would say that emotional reactions make no sense without specific
> character-structures or bioenergetic structures which are inherently variant
> (remember also that actual neurological structure is different in autism,
> and is altered in schizophrenia). Even if two emotional reactions are
> conventionally called the same name, they might be fundamentally different
> in their real structure. For instance, the “hate” a heavily
> character-armoured reactive personality-type feels towards difference –
> which is composed of painful excitation of repressed desires and the
> corresponding activation of superego defences to repress such excitation –
> is fundamentally different from the “hate” an active personality-type feels
> towards external agents of control, which is connected to fight-or-flight
> reflexes articulated experientially to certain symbols. With “love” we'd
> have to unpack whether romantic love reinforced by distance and focused on
> the perceived perception of the love-object is phenomenologically the same
> as psychological dependence on another person interpellated as master, and
> whether either of these has anything to do with affinities arising from
> bioenergetic overlap.
>
> In any case, the relevant question is not whether the emotion is universal
> but whether it provides a basis for universal claims. And for this, it is
> far more relevant *what* people love or hate than *whether* they do.
>
> Yes, there are mothers who are not challenged by their infants – those who
> gave them up at birth :)
>
> Probably the relevant question here is whether the mother-child relation is
> universal. I have heard of societies with extended-family or village
> childrearing where it is reported that crying babies are almost unknown,
> because those appearing unhappy are passed around among relatives.
>
>  Of course it is possible to argue that, since “human” is a concept and
> concepts are constructed through defining characteristics and exclusions,
> therefore certain things are necessarily part of it – but this simply
> displaces a Schmittian stance (arbitary attachment to a certain founding
> decision) from the ethical choice to the choice of defining features. In
> addition, it only applies if “human” is a concept with a conceptual core. It
> does not apply if the concept is marked by Wittgensteinean family
> resemblances. It also does not apply if the concept refers to similarities
> at the level of thegenotype which are expressed in variation at the level of
> the phenotype. The question further arises of why the “human” is the focus
> of ethics or community here. Humans are not self-sufficient as a
> group/species any more than as individuals, but always depend on a wider
> actor-network composed of ecological entities. Further, supposing that
> similarities can be adduced, it is still doubtful the extent to which they
> can be used as grounds for unity. One could start from abstract
> characteristics such as mortality, but these have little fix as objects of
> projects. Or perhaps from physical needs such as food (though one would then
> have to deal with anorexia, fasting saints, and hunger strikers...) - but
> this does not explain why commonality would serve as a unifying force, as
> people could just as easily fight over food. If you're positing something
> like a need to produce meaning (as in Geertz), this similarly leads to a
> situation where the exercise of the proposed “similarity” produces
> difference rather than unity.
>
> “- as for the social and collective field, this again would mean for me
> that we are born and relate in a tabula rasa world, where nothing conditions
> us, where only agents exist and no communion. Again for the these are
> co-existing polarities in an integrative field ”
>
> You're confusing two entirely unrelated questions here: the question of
> atomism vs relationality, and the question of structure vs agency. You're
> attributing an atomist position to me when what I've taken is an agency
> position. I take agency and relational positions. Of course the world is not
> tabula rasa. There are already relations in existence at any point. The
> field of relations “conditions” people – though not in a passive way. But
> the relations are constantly invented and reinvented through agency (and not
> only human agency). The point I insist on is that the relations never form a
> complete totality which composes of all their parts. The field of relations
> as structure is an illusory effect of the repetition of forms of agency. On
> a more spiritual level we might even say that we come entirely from the
> previous field, we are composed entirely from elements in it. But we are
> also “differenciated” from it as a particular combination of elements, and
> this combination exercises agency. The only way to believe in an external
> field or communion is via reification and fetishism, by imagining things
> which are products of agency to actually be inert things with no history.
>
> “- transcendent objects ... I concede that there may be other type of
> socialities, but I would argue that my life's experience has shown me that
> without a transcendent object, no human relationships can persist ”
>
> I suspect this really means, “among the normal type of people as
> subjectified today”, and the whole point of social change is to break down
> the dominant forms of subjectification today. Life-experience provides an
> inadequate data-set for testing claims of this type as it is composed mainly
> of interactions with people subjectified into the dominant type.
>
> “what I would call human transaction cost, humans in my view, can live in
> insecurity, but there always need to be some anchor somewhere, if all things
> have to be negotiated all the time, the huge energy input required to
> maintain this, would eventually dissolve the community and/or the project”
>
> And this is exactly the problem – the in-group, the “normal”, decide to
> exclude everyone else on the basis that they're too “costly” to include
> (meaning that the “normal” have to put in the same effort that the different
> have to put in all the time), the result being that they monopolise
> everything for themselves as an in-group able to take short-cuts at the
> expense of excluding others. But of course the existence of difference does
> not disappear with this exclusion/repression, and neither do the transaction
> costs. Rather, the transaction costs are concentrated at the point of
> difference: the “normal” do not have to make the stretch to include others,
> whereas others have to put in constant effort to engage with a world
> rendered all the more difficult for its lack of critical literacy. In other
> words, if we take the transaction cost between “normal” and different as -50
> on each side in a condition of equality, it becomes -99 to the different and
> -1 to the normal in a case of outright exclusion, or, say, -80 to the
> different and -20 to the normal in a case of relative inclusion, where the
> “normal” retain hegemony and determine the procedures but make some
> allowances. (I'm bracketing the possibility of differential capabilities to
> make such energy contributions because there is little reason to assume the
> “normal” have *lower* capabilities than others).
>
> The point being twofold: firstly that this is absolutely ethically
> indefensible, and secondly that it logically entails a situation of social
> war between the “normal” and the different.
>
> On the first point: How is it possible to maintain that the cost of -50 is
> intolerable because of the “huge energy input”, and yet that it is
> reasonable to expect an energy input of -80 or -99 from others? The “normal”
> are simply claiming the *privilege* of reduced energy input at the expense
> of displacing it onto others (and if they resent a redistribution back to
> -50 each way, this is simply a defence of privilege – though none the less
> likely *predictively* to happen as a result).
>
> On the second point: If the position taken is either 1) that it is
> actually, literally impossible for people to put in an input as high as -50,
> or 2) that the “normal” can never be expected to give up their privilege
> once they have it, even though this means intolerably high demands on
> others, the net effect is irreconcilability. Because on 1) it is also
> impossible for the different to make the demanded sacrifices, and on 2)
> there is a collision of two equally intolerable demands. If this is the
> situation then the best we can hope for is coexistence on the basis of
> separation, which can only occur if ingroup resource monopolies are
> addressed. Given that the barrier to a just settlement (either a return to
> -50 each if possible or coexistence based on separation if it is not) is
> dominance of the field by the “normal”, the net effect is that conflictual
> acts by the different become justified and acts by the “normal” to maintain
> the existing social field are unjustified. The effect, in short, is that
> irreconcilable social antagonism is inevitable and in this antagonism,
> justice is absolutely on the side of the different.
>
> On the question of “anchors”. Again this is not a universal thing. The
> “need” for “anchors” is exacerbated by traumas, to the point that it is hard
> to know how “basic” it is. The usual autistic response to “need for anchors”
> is intensely personal (routines, rituals etc), but this is a response to a
> very specific “anchoring” problem (in relation to sensory overload). I've
> nothing against people having anchors, but I don't see why they need to be
> collectivised. The easiest way to achieve anchoring on a collective level is
> through “othering”/scapegoating, so it is desirable to curb the impulse to
> collectivise such desires. One could also argue that the Buddhist doctrine
> of mindfulness and similar are responses to the problem of anchoring which
> also maintain radical immanence.
>
> “I have experienced many different communities in my life, but have never
> seen one that did not consolidate habits after a while, these are mostly
> negotiated unconsciously, and in your vision as I understand it, should be
> brought into consciousness, which I applaud as a goal. ”
>
> My main point is that they should be open to contestation and should be
> suspended in cases where they are inapplicable. Which I daresay happens a
> lot more often at the micro level (intentional communities and the like)
> than the macro level, and a lot more easily in networks than in formal
> structures. I have a sense that localising/downscaling of communities is
> generally helpful towards inclusiveness, that diffusion of power within
> communities is even more helpful, and that formal procedures tend to lock in
> the “wrong” kinds of attitudes and mentalities, though ultimately everything
> comes down to the attitude people have to difference and sameness on a
> meta-ethical level. In programming communities and the like, a lot of the
> problems are warded off through the temporary, contingent nature of whatever
> authority exists, and by the constantly available option of branching and
> forking: difference is articulated at different points in the network, often
> at points where transaction cost is relatively low and potential gain
> greatest. This is also what I see happening in diffuse activist networks:
> people distribute themselves into different friendship networks and projects
> and in a sense “flow around” the problems (such as personality
> incompatibilities) which would be fatal if everyone was in a big
> organisation. When institutionalisation happens, it is usually a response to
> the dissipation of the creative energies fuelling a network, and corresponds
> with the decline of the network. The biggest barrier to living entirely in
> diffuse networks is the monopolisation of resources by large organisations
> (corporations, states) which then distribute resources conditionally. The
> net effect, for instance, of a basic income would be the proliferation of
> diffuse networks, which is why the big organisations are hostile to it. It
> is also the effect of pulls away from the centre in economics. Indigenous
> peoples are very interesting in this regard. They have some degree of
> habituation (what Deleuze terms “supple segmentarity”) but it is interpreted
> very loosely and in the best cases, is constantly shaken up by practices of
> diffusion of power and by the counterbalancing of different power-centres –
> many of the most anarchic seem to specifically avoid institutionalising
> power.
>
> bw
>
> Andy
>
>


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