Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "The Media's Great Trans "Cover Up". A "Misogynistic & Homophobic Men's Rights Campaign"" video.
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Part 1: Graham Linehan is correct to say that protest movements migrate from one cause to another. My example would be the anti Vietnam War protests in US at least it seems were initially, in terms of Capacity at least, students who had being campaigning for Black Civil Rights. So after Lyndon Johnson passed the civil rights bills in 1964-5, the protesters were now highly organised in universities and seeking a new cause for there organisational capacities and capabilities. Just how this became anti Vietnam War is complicated. Already by 1966 Robert Vaughn in an interview had researched the origins of the War in the Archive and questioned its basis in extreme detail. Its clear that this anti war movement was a middle class university movement to start with, but maybe became widespread in US Campuses when they realised they might be drafted too. Now LBJ already knew from McNamara's visit to Vietnam in early 1960's that for US involvement this had gone beyond simply a anti terrorist heart and minds project since the north was a full on experienced massive army with Chinese support as the French left and Australians and Us advisors were moving in. McNamara projected the need would be hundreds of thousands of troops every year into the 1970's. A analysis kept internal to the Pentagon and RAND, until the Pentagon papers , but the pentagon papers had little public effect at the time only in constructed retrospect was it seen as effective it wasn't at the time. Now, I've tried to follow up on Vaughn's research, by looking at the institution al mechanisms of the draft in the 1960's. Remember the government already knew that it would require a draft at some point in late 1960's. Now the mechanics of the draft required the interconnected use and combination of three institutions, the first source for names and a kind of lottery was the electoral role. That creates a possible conflict of interest in that the civil rights bills of 1964-65 facilitated many more blacks onto the voting register, and so afforded the reach of the draft to include them after the civil rights bill on voting the right to vote having been demanded though black and then some white middle class supporters. Its was clear by 1963-4 that a draft would be required and so the civil rights movement involved the "double effect" or covert aim to include blacks into the draft.
So the narrative could be put that the civil rights protest allowed the inclusion of the blacks into the draft, those protesters unlike the government did not know this of course. Indeed the extra ordinary massive success of the LBJ 1964-5 civil massive rights bills is put down to the effect of Kennedy's assassination, and LBJ in his first period of taking office had said that he was only going to propose policy that Kennedy himself was going to do in his full term eg civil rights. Most of early troops it seems were poor and white from the southern states and later blacks from the south and then projected across the country to include students and middle class whites. But by then 1968, LBJ was out and Nixon had to deal with this war that was projected to needed many more hundreds of thousands of troops.
This does suggest what is classed as progress of civil rights over time could be viewed not as a sublimation progress, but from a black perspective as a unintended process to get blacks into the army, and then middleclass white out of it.
The university context must be understood to be very different then than now. Since faculty was not all on board with the "new" left movements at the time unlike now perhaps. Also its was to become two interpretations of being an American not American verses anti American. I'm not sure but i think the link to far left politics was from Europe, the first Anti Vietnam War protest were in March 1968 in London, "lead" i think by Tariq Ali and others who were Marxists Trotskyists and Maoists. That's what my friend said who was actually there at the time. The "story of May '68" makes out this began with students in Paris in May and spread from there. Again people forget that not all French intellectuals were on board with this Paul Richoeur for example.
Personally the first moment for me is from the Vietnam War films of the 1980’s with all the countercultural 1960’s music going on in the background. When You Tube started I used to listen to a lot of Glen Campbell and reading the comments sections they were always full of recollections of the War by Vietnam vets. Glen Campbell its seems was their background music not the Rolling Stones.
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Part 5: To this problematic then I think you just add Lenin: that we don’t have to wait for change rather we can cause it (The “what is to be done?” question, And the action or praxis over theory and philosophy dichotomy from Marx). This idea fits nicely with the French tradition on freedom and right and with the new universal legal rights and freedoms from world war two. But this seems odd since these rights and freedoms are understood as liberal and individualism against Marxism and totalitarianism. Well I think there is not so much a theory coming in here as a praxis, the left had the Frankfurt school critique of capitalism and the Adorno v Horkheimer conflict over social theory verses social action, but I think Derrida and Foucault make the moves that see the liberal ideas of law and freedom as not the antithesis of the left solidarities and communities, but as possible synthesis as affordances or tactical tools. That is they see in law already norms that can be of use. So they dothe Lenin shift form emphisie on negative freedom, that is freedom from given laws to positive freedom , that was seens as claiming a certain normative and substantive account externally applied to a person as a limit of what anyone can mean by freedom (e.g. the one Critiqued by I. Berlin in “Two Concepts of Liberty”(?)) the freedom here is where someone might say freedom consists at least in individual self-preservation (eg against self annihilation as irrational and contradictory performance ) and health and so drug addiction is as unhealthy it is against the very individual freedom that the subject claims is its reason. I ought to be free to take drugs becomes not just irrational, but a kind of performativity contradiction (Indeed they ended up loving J L Austin for this unintended intervention), against the natural order against what is proper to an individual from natural law nature in itself unchanging or essence even: if man’s Being is freedom then freedom is not a property of man (Sartre: Existentialism is a Humanism), but rather man belongs to freedom (Heidegger Letter on Humanism). Now for Naturalist then there is a what it is to be healthy for example doctors in charge, but now if man is in epoch of liberal freedom than the ground of positive is not health but the persons freedom itself, now we doctors of liberalism economics and so on. There is no legitimate speech response “in” freedom to someone who thinks they know what your very freedom must assent to and deny. That is the limit is not the particular duties and stations such as family needing to be cared for, or the country needing workers, its freedom as undermining itself. It can be found in claims about Kant that we can become slaves of even our own sensible natures and so the libertine is not free but a slave to their sensibility that undermines their real autonomy. It’s easier perhaps as a kind of negative theology of what it is not to be free as opposed to saying what freedom “is” which is the wrong category question for Heidegger. But I think Kant here is not saying our sensible natures can be our prison, rather it the capacity for someone else to use our sensible natures to construct prisons for us, with our help. This is clearly taken up by the Frankfurt School discussion of capitalism and commodification and so on. Their arguments are about freedom. Now what happed I think was from early 1970s détente the left opted for an account of positive freedom but not in terms of the Soviet union or Mau, but freedom as capability (Nausbaume Sen) this was emergent in debates critiquing Rawls liberal freedom of speech priorities. But again this can become heteronymous because capability is still to be established publically in general health and economic terms and open up to discussion on distribution welfare tax and so on and this is where it meets with notions of justice at first.
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Part 6: The strange dichotomy though persists we have: the individual artistic anti naturalist creative imaginative freedom in the world unconditioned by others and economic necessity, on one side, versus the idea that it’s paid for by taxes of others. But to do that you need a kind of criteria usual then GDP growth, commercial efficiency, and affordable health care and cultural community preservation. You can get that juxtaposition between the tax paying ordinary worker and the subsidised artist. All the debates then oscillate here but usually confront each other in terms of old views of eternal natures and essences verses freedom of creativity without that natural or ideal limits where in the body itself is the art work the sculpture, that matter or stone from which freedom is emergent as the unfreedom parts are chipped away. In what way is this left and not liberal then?
Well it is linked into the context of the “commune” of the 1970’s emergent solidarities. The experiments of the counter culture a rehash of the 19th century ones, even back to nature stuff on the right back then. But I think it has two roles one is to disconnect people from being subjects constructed repetitiously by the economic capitalist industrial, complex, so a bit like the US transcendentalists even, but it is accompanied by left wing experts internally who do conscientious raising sessions that will point out where people still, have remnants of traditional roles they need to escape from. In the 1980s and 1990s then there was a turn towards community by the left to now take these kinds of creative communities as almost ends in themselves ie mostly praxis of forming alliances and that’s what was justified by the turn to justice here. The communities have their leaders who are not leaders. I have known many people who were in them and they turn out to be as oppressive and silencing as any other traditional structure. Then from fluidity and creativity we got the communities made into functional hierarchal institutions by placing the difference and so on as a regulative process over its existing systems. The architecture shifts from gothic to an Airport waiting room. No we live in a left architectural repetitious environments the same all over the world the very thing Adorno despised by capitalism.
If you are looking for an answer here form the left about freedom or right, forget it. The rest is just driven by tactics affordances strategies that will draw in a normal person to vent their grievances and experiences, and this will be legal expressed as policy, but thought of in terms of the legal semantics and strategies that will be afforded over time. Really the role of creativity and art the individual freedom and imagination is now sublimated to legal political imagination creativity constructions. The artist of the left now are really in the art of policy law and economics and making and breaking solidarities as they are afforded or needed. The artist as sculpture of the body is now the sculpture of the body politic chipping away at the bits they don’t want the Hegelian negativity. Indeed an artist friend of mine in around 2008 created a sculpture of a cracked clay easel and had a recording of someone reading out Tarski’s Theory of Truth paper from like 1930. We had been discussing paradoxes of logic semantics set theory down the pub but I didn’t expect a sculpture to come out of it. It put me in mind of Hobbes’s Leviathan front picture now. Very clever, can you see what I think he is driving at? Or what do you think he might be driving at?
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Part B1: i cant help making the point that: you talk as if the loss of a ground in nature and/or the loss of even a coherent sense of reason is a problem for the left. It is not. the grounding in nature is a target not so much for freedom and art but using freedom and art "in reason" (eg Kant's Schematism following the rejection of Leibnitz and drawing in Aristotle Aquinas and Avencia and Averroes on De Anima phantasm phantasmagoria (Eg Spectres of Marx and hauntology in Derrida Truth in painting) freedom is then constative of reason (evidenced by interpretation and application issues in deductions and casuistry essential for the logic of essences). in a way i think the schematism is thought in terms internal to community and so logic and reason follow community and solidarities, as a kind of purpose but without a set end its strategical and tactical. They have i would say moved the Kantian issue about the unity of the manifold of sense into spoken experience, into the political problem of creating communities: assemblies. But on the other side this involves the disassembly of traditional communities. Here some drawn on Wittgenstein that language rather than meaning, language is use in a form of life. So the disassembly of a community will involve disturbing linguistic shifts under the guise of a political version of correct grammar. This Wittgenstein recognised meant that the notions of essence and definition were over as foundations independent of a form of life. But also the disruptions of reason means the traditions cannot speak of and for itself. That is the old traditions of ground and reason are now useless for agreement and so on. its like a deep propaganda that tears down with paradox and inconstancy our ability to agree in reasons, it is a kind of sideways on disruption of traditional community by the destruction of its model of reasoning. The anomie or dissonance the loss of social cohesion is the point. its jsut a very clever way of doing it.
the endless possibilities of interpretation practiced by artist, the digressive, disruptive and dispersing interventions into the anaphoric cataphoric formations of conversation is the point. the millions of books and papers referring internally to each other is meant o prevent the capture under one logic structure of deduction or induction rom nature.
We think say Aristotle's logic is like a mathematical structure of necessity, but he himself said this was a formalisation of conversations and arguments people had over law and Plato's method over. In Aristotle's logic there is no place no premise for the random comment in the deduction or the sudden mobile phone call, the new bit of science research, the latest horror on the News: its classed as B not logically following from A. but that jsut a negation, in conversation this can be done over and over. In world of random discourse then Aristotle's logic cannot not exist. Has no force.
Think about how years ago pre internet you could go up to people and say did you see that film last night? Not any more. its kind of like T.E. Lawrence going after the Turkish rail systems rather than straight to the city. and much of the old left were very influenced by him in this but their essays are blocked from readership even though publish in London Review of Books and New Yorker at the time. I have found in the American Civil War in the Siege of Richmond the North suddenly and by accident were attacking the rail system after a few months. and Grant saw this and registered it as a important discovery or shape, or new strategic creation an event. Though i think no one actually planned it as such.
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Part B2: I should say that the lefts embrace of freedom and imagination is very like the equilibrium and creativity of a capitalist economy. like in James Burke's Connections it creates the new as much as people create the new. eg Faraday created the new area of physics of electro magnetism, but had no idea or aim of eventually it would lead to a new view of gravity and space and time. Not even within the possibilities of his imagination or even Gods. I think to get a grip on the left think in terms of creation and loss of ground and responsibility in a Capitalist economy, think of real life real military tactics and strategies as real events and how contingency and position and reaction dominates most battels at some point.
I can put it like this for reason: Kant's view of the other is one of openness but within a non logically determined or factual ground, Hegel on the other hand thinks of the self as already in relation of conflict with its other. Spirit in Hegel is community recognition not the individual self as in Kant. This is where the game really is.
I have no personal stake in the trans issues, it is a battle but not the theatre of conflict. its about community and the ability of a community to reason and experience with each other. That's the key: but if you want to retain a tradition under attack, you are not in the game of creating a new community so on the one hand this problem is not like the lefts aims at destruction and creation, and so following its model or the many battles they have created is totally wrong. Even if these are expressed as kinds of the reversals of the lefts semantics logic and institutions, or its arrived at assemblies. The negation of a negation does not take you back to the start.
Remember the new left came out of the war, and the original left were still thinking military action and revolution. The new French left turned to the domestic private world, literary criticism and the psychology and medically of madness, and played a long game a revolution of process not event, drawing in new historical events and contemporary events totally unpredicted in advance but they were able to shift strategy and tactics accordingly. We are at the apex of a very large and old pyramid. Remember the film "Force Ten From Navarone"?
People think this is like the student revolutions of the 60's or the communities of the 70's. Its not because, then, they were the outsider counter cultural to the traditional institutions and its people, now they are the new institutional based tradition and its students? Well are they the counter culture to this, or the negation of the negation or just the new elites source of data and political experiment in action tests and their foot soldiers.
You know the media have made a fetish out of general elections. its like daily politics is all about the once every five year election, we are always jsut between elections. There's a real sense that political change has going on without the need for electoral position. legitimacy is locked into an endless play of scientific papers and conferences. Sort of like free market capitalism, but with a pseudo theocracy now regulating it all.
If you know the old movie "Sebastian"(1968) about a code war code breaking unit of women mathematicians. Dirk Bogarde gets a new code they need to break and its like white noise on a recording. He says this is meant to drive you mad.
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Part C1: After note: I just want to expand on a couple of points i made above , the first is about the shift i recommended in understanding the left as a kind of Hegelian shift in the role of Kant's Schematism. I said Kant's schematism is generally viewed as explicating the role of the imagination in judgement involving intuitions and concepts. Negatively the claim is that: sensory content can ground concepts ie the senses alone do not determine a conscious reference to an external object, in experience and that concepts alone as rules cannot refer or determine a specific object in experience. So, Kant argues that, experience requires the "synthesis" of intuitions and concepts, that is one way to say that the empiricist traditions alone or the rationalists traditions alone cannot account for the nature of conscious experience. Now this is viewed as then a philosophy of the "synthesis" of empiricism and rationalism, a synthesis of the empiricist and rationalists traditions. But my view is this is a historical account that takes it that Kant so called "synthesis" retains both these traditions in the synthesis, the synthesis and schematism then do not "interrupt" or mark a radical break from these traditions but just puts them together. My view is the nature of the faculty or power of sensibility as intuition is a break from empiricism, and that the faculty or power of concepts as necessarily involving metaphysics but as Categories in play in conscious experience not as absolute grounds eg the complete whole or totality of the world, the first cause of the world, the absolute and indubitable nature of the Self as the "i think" independent of the world, are all "rejected" as errored. the real role of these supposed ultimate absolutes, in the metaphysical tradition, is not determined by their reference to absolute transcendent of experience, but rather, this role is deflated to various powers of ordering experience, "in" experience ie order is not from outside experience, but from the minds activity "in" experience. It means notions of absolute objects as the causes of order in experience was a misunderstanding, the order is the role of categories to maintain for example a continuity of an individual object in experience and this is something "we" do, which means we are responsible for. This contrast with empiricism that would maintain responsibility is on the side of receptivity of raw or chaotic data, ie not ours; and it contrasts with rationalism, that also, but from the opposite end, would make responsibility for objects in experience really to be traced back beyond us to an ultimate cause. From the point of view of Kant's experience and mind both these are exculpations of responsibility. This means Kant is not "synthesising" empiricism and rationalism, but showing both these traditions as exculpations are the products of errors of intellectual abstractions one to sense data the other to ultimate causes. Kant then is better viewed as disclosing the real nature of experience "before" these two abstractive errors in the history of philosophy. But i must add Kant's account of the "original position" of non abstractive experience does involve parts of the empiricist and rationalist positions but differently understood. The key thing here is the active production of individual objects "in" experience by a subject that is then responsible for it. Following Peter Strawson a bit here then that this is, and must be, the case because "the conditions of the possibility of even a sense of self or self consciousness the "i think" is nota given but only possible on the employment of the above Categories in intuition. eg if "I" did not do this activity, there would be no "I" or self consciousness possible. the emphasis on responsibility here is from John McDowell's "Mind and World". Maybe think that Kant consider pure empiricism conflates "seeing an object" with a blinding light that hurts the eyes, and pure rationalism always allows me to trace, say objects to something other a transcendent object else beyond me as their cause, and Community (reciprocity between agent and patient). Because: if “I” try to “de-think” or “de-act” our activity with the categories, then objects would break up or be beyond my grasp, then “I” would cease to be as a self-conscious subject over time, the categorised must be applied or be in play, immediately and necessarily to all my experience to be “mine” and to be a “me” at all. This is from Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”.
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Part C2: There is a curious apparent possible consequence of this, not as far as I know in the literature (but it is vast, legion and manifold), that it seems to open up to the possibility that if Kant has figured out the conditions of the possibility of experience, reason about the world and the sense of self and responsibility, then someone an agent, could arrange someone else, the patent, an environment, the architecture of experience, in such a way that deliberately destroys the possibility of the practice of the categories, then it’s would become impossible to order experience, and so apply and justify in terms of reason and so that second patent would cease to be, ie be anything other than a passive (non responsible) object to and of the agent.
My view is that the immediacy of the categories then means a group of activities in the world are really limits of experience, that cannot be deconstructed as there is no “other” to them. Its in Wittgenstein when he says logic is not about propositions or the world or the self but limits “internal to the grammar of propositions”, that is we cannot de think or “subtract” logic from language and still make meaningful, statements since logic is the limit and structure of grammar not some set of certain propositions that work on already meaningful propositions from outside say by connecting them together necessarily but after the fact of them being meaningful in themselves, logic is rather internal to propositions being about objects in the world. We cannot express propositions with logic as logic is about their structure. Even say grammatical errors or mixing up grammatical categories cannot express this apparent absence of logic. Grammatical errors and word play like Chomsky’s “Green ideas sleep furiously” are not sentences without logic just analytics and substation re arrangements. Donald Davison says in language we cannot climb out of our own skin. I take this to mean adverbs are necessary to all propositions even if they are appear to be subtractable from propositions which would still make sense us. All propositions contain covert or subtracted adverbs. This is a very different view of Kant from say Roger Scruton, but I think it captures the feel of a conservatism a conservative orientation toward the world and the history of ideas.
Now in my comments above I then wanted to show how the new French left in a way could be seen as following Hegel in re-establishing the transcendent objects and cause, Kant had rejected in the form of speculative reason. Speculative reason can be thought of as a material basis to the mind e.g. brain science instead of a mind. That seems to have been the view of the risk of this for Straw son and many post world war two work on mind brain relations. But Hegel’s speculative reason involves action as well as cognition or meaning, and this is in a socially organised context a community of minds (notice the shift of the category of community here to the social world). Now for Hegel then what in Kant was the self or the “I think” is now Spirit like spirit of a community under and within reason ie it looks like a version then of the social contract. But the risk in Hegel is a return not to brain materials but the necessary exculpation of a Kantian subject of autonomy and responsibility to a transcendent leader or even a logical formulae the object of an absolute sovereign. This is clearly a way to understand say Eichmann’s revision of Kant’s Categorical Imperative in his trial that of subverting his reason responsibility and duty to the orders of the Furher. For me the furher is accidental here it could be also a deference to a formulae of a law or rule or God as if it was an external escape clause and absolute legitimacy. There is the rift after Hegel between left materialist Hegelains (Marx) and Right Spirit Hegelians (Facism). A liberal version would be to propose “Right” constructs or even is the Being of a individual person before them, but also is a Universal or Speculative Right for all people and in Hegel as notion is better understood as a process towards to end of absolute Spirit and absolute Reason. In this Hegel reason then is a process of transforming the categories of life, of the social world like the domestic private realm, the civic community, even the sovereign state and the individual into and under higher sublations under higher reason as the universal. So the logic of Hegel involves that radical transformation towards reason as efficiency of brains, efficiency of the private domestic realm, and the efficiency of the community and towards absolute Justice or equality. This means the liberal individual right of neo liberalism and the social justice projects are both Hegelian moves towards speculative reason just two sides of the same coin, no responsibility of an individual beyond themselves.
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Part C3: What the left have done then is to “protest to much” about Hegel. They are doing a version of Hegelianism just with the creative and imaginative use of the Categories of Kant are moved into the realm of the political and social not as such poesis but teche of strategy and tactics in sublations of the categories of life over time under higher reason and efficiency for GDP (or between Gross planetary product) and Equality. This is the metaphysics of the new left even if they keep claiming to be anti Hegelain, looks likes and acts like. The sublations of traditional community life is done though deliberate disruptions of continuities in the social world the disruption of reason and then sublatison to an institutions to replace it e.g. with law regulations and sciences of social psychological work. It is of course internationally speculative and orientated. Kant individual becomes the universal Spirit of the efficient and equal world to come.
It occurred to me last night after writing my comments yesterday that Henry Allison in the second edition of his book on Kant’s Transcendental idealism does link elucidate or interpret the “art” and imagination of the schematism in terms of the contrast between the rules of a chess game and strategic and tactical art of “seeing” what move can be made in a game for the best result of winning a seeing that involves more than is just given in and by the rules of possible moves. My point here above I think is quite different, and the analogy with chess neither fits Kant’s view of mind or the strategic social view of left Hegelianism.
Now as a final note for the moment I want to recommend watching a BBC program I saw today called “Click”. I’ve never seen it before. It about computers and new technology I think, and this weeks or todays program basically covers many of the issues above. It will, take some interpretation but perhaps for those who actually have a 9 till 5 job it can do proxy for reading all of Kant and Hegel. There is a risk that I have made a heretical speech act here in mentioning and recommending the BBC. Many want it gone, as the old BBC is now institutionally the new social justice project BBC a speculative international sublimated version of its older self. But remember the lefts project is to sublimate under higher regulative reason traditional unities, and as such the process is to break up existing communities and re assemble them under Speculative reason to come. The clever move here the art is to realise abandoned the BBC even in its sublated version now would be to break it into pieces wherein each piece spoke only to one community or one ideology and this then breaks up one of the institution that at least is place to go to of recognise State tradition. You see we can still legitimacy Criticise the BBC for bias and so on, but at least it is a Criticism they have to respond too, are obliged to justify. Without it we have fragmental silos of interest groups money makers and ideologue reporters. If you critique then for bias they can just day yea bias is what we do, we are the Right Wing media, or as one said from Novara some time ago in response to such a question “look I am actually a communist!”
Happy xmas
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