Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Grooming Gangs: Musk Explodes the Great British Cover Up" video.

  1. In 1996 the French feminist philosopher Catherine Malabou published in French her PhD thesis as “The Future of Hegel”. It was not published in English until 2005. There she goes against the post modern orthodoxy particularly Derrida’s deconstruction of the Western tradition in metaphysics, by invocating Hegel as not a mere historical precursor to the post modern, but as offering a source for Critique against the radical Critique of post modernism. It is articulated as a call for some kind of limit or determination against the highly contextual situated political tactics and strategies. She expresses this as a need for a re-examination of whether radical politics can really do away with ends or aims, and operate blindly with proximate praxis affordances taking the lead. It would have been highly un orthodox at a time, for end determinations, would be classed as closing in advance affordances under some pre idea or formulae of homogeneity. Its limit on freedom of assemblage and so on, but also from the tradition from Aristotle through to Hegel, ends or purpose or progress aim, are bound to the tradition of talking about essence as telos. Indeed Derrida was brought in to viva her thesis and wrote a customary long introduction to her book. Ironically in a later book “Changing Difference” published in French in 2009, Malabou complains, that women’s studies and so on in Universities are still only marginal and held to be a mere add on to the tradition. It’s ironic because that situation had already changed by then. Indeed this book was published in English only two years later in 2011. Her Critique can perhaps be seen as the rejection by some French feminist philosophers that the emphasis on radical difference against identity has resulted in the homogenisation of male and female difference. She then will argue for a privileging of sexual difference over all others. In this she addresses the Critical traditions of the biological human sciences, or perhaps their use by Critical Theorists, as grounds for rejecting any “essential” differences biological or otherwise. Malabou cites Naomi Schor’s discussion of Derrida and the deconstruction of the law and Kafka’s “Trial” in “Before the law” “Force of the Law”, and asks if the Women’s Studies departments and the Universities in general its officials have been true guardians of the law. Have they failed in their duties as custodians of their proper roles, and so on. (pg 103-4.) The Critique of anti-essentialism here can be situated also in regard to Manual DeLands’s “A New Philosophy of Society”(2006) Chapter 2 “Assemblages against Essences”. This phenomenological critique of anti essentialist Critique would also I think Critique the liberal idea of a person as also an abstraction from context and difference. This could mirror then, but rather in what they oppose only a mirror of the negative indeterminate of the indeterminable: difference in itself, of criticisms by Bernard Williams and others of the modernist liberal tradition to. I mean if there is a return to a Critique of duties, then can that critique be from people outside of the immediate scope of the duties and authorities they Critique. Must the source of the Critique of an authority be themselves under the scope of the duties been performed or not. Or has every person in the world got such a duty to Critique authorities. Does it make a difference where the “person” stands. The left or liberal can enjoy the notion of international right or justice perhaps here as the source of their legitimacy, right or obligation even. Arendt though seems to have though this was too weak a basis, rights need States. That might suggest a limit to the legitimate exercise and scope of extra territorial Critique. One thing clear to me is that there is instituional and duties neglect but also it seems a structural ideological issue here that suggests a political motive and aim that can be substantively equivalent to an intention even though it is done though rules and regulations and their norms alone. But then the Critique of this failure or neglect must also ask itself is the Critique aimed at the issue alone or is it also being used for some other perhaps politically essentialist aim. I think Nigel Farage in his speech described it as an “example”. That is it’s is not exclusive to this one instituional assemblage, and it is not only women and girls that have been failed, and not only this particular network of institutions. The issue then relate back to Kant and his Essay on "What is the Enlightenment". I found Malabou's work via her later and recent turn towards Kant in lectures and seminars on YouTube. Thank you for this Peter Whittle.
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  2. There is an interesting discussion of Malabou's Future of Hegel" in "The Bloomsbury Companion to Continental Philosophy" (Mullarkey Lord ed. 2009) Chapter 3: The Continental Tradition: Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche" Gary Banham. Banham focuses on how in Hegel the absolute, in the process of the Notion from categories to externality, must in some sense be a-temporal or an end of time. He for grounds Malabou's discussion of the Hegelian reworking of Kant's schematism of the Categories where she claims Being must schematise itself. Where Malabou then focuses on the end as an end of time and history here, Banham refers back to Hegel's Phenomenology to fore ground that in Hegel the schematism is about reference to a singular individual. Here subjectivity begins solipsistically and slowly progresses to externality though the dissolving bit by bit, the "structures" of the previous world. Thus there is surprise and rupture in experience, as an old world fades and a new world develops. Banham's point is there is no recognition or place in Hegel for this i.e. the "qualitative" ruptures of maturation, cannot be placed, along the line of a Quantitative temporal continuum. I guess following Hegel and Marx the excuse is that change always has opposition, and conflict, we must ignore this subjectivity. That is any opposition to the continuum the program project is mealy another political agenda, with its own "reactionary" policies for itself of reactive resistance by a fading tradition or just subjective feelings. Its as if dissent from the program is "unhelpful" and "we need to have a conversation", and "these are difficult conversations". These are the responders of silencing and bring the external apparatus of the state to bear down with its quantity continuum upon the qualitative. In the psychological idiom it just means "you're delusional, you are subject to some kind of condition, as opposes to being a subject of that experience as it has no objectivity. I think Banham is bring in the Analytical tradition of raising problems of reference or content in both Kant and Hegel (Russell, Strawson, Evans, McDowell). In Hegelian and Marxist and post modernism this is the problem of the other". I think the point is, that in Hegelianism, only the absolute could have a legitimate reference, but then as an end of time it would be like asking "not where is the point on the line, but where is the point on the point. Or there is positional ambiguity of reference for a point on the surface of cone but not at the apex. its redundant so not reference at all. But there is also the recognition in Hegel and Malabou that political movements begin somewhere with something and with specific people, they have a rupturious origin or Genesis. This is then subjective, or less than even subjective and must be thrown away as such as the movement wishes to bring in more adherents and expand its burocratic scope. the people who start the rupture in their subjectivity have to be "matured" from its subjectivity into and under an expanding burocratic continuum. The revolution eats its originators in their limited and "un-legitimate" attempts to refer in their experience objectively. Banham also brings in Hegel on propositions as positive statements in a kind of phenomenalism, that would require the proposition to have a direct unmediated reference to a fact and a truth. For Hegel denies such reference, here the moves of deflation are that as well as the speakers experiential subjectivity being in their way, the concepts in a proposition have sematic import beyond its lone reference, eg speaking is not reference but a placing in an objective "space of reason to draw on Wilfred Sellers on this. The apparent simple name and reference and concept is really a getting caught up in a world beyond the referred to thing, where, particular in law, the simple statement "commits the speaker to other stuff when its expressed as a legal function. You know i complained about the dog and they made a law and now all the cat are gone as well as the dog. Or more strategically, "I wanted to get the cats gone, but everybody wants their cats, so i said "lets get rid of the dogs", they agreed so i made a law "get rid of pets". Now the parallel tactical move to content of a truth speech of "you're a sexist" or "you're delusional", at the propositional level seems to me to be the 20 character social media post, as un reliable, or not factual by academic standards of a PhD. Here the "It is so" post is placed into the realm (shadow) of undesirable political risk or consequence. like its placed into and under a privileged higher space of political tactics and necessities, but done so via rejecting its factual valid or lack of awareness of political legal semantic spread. eg "It maybe so but..." the left began talking about stupidity i think here. I have to spend time on this, but it seems clear that if a feminism is to bring in a and preserve a genuine subjective private origin that is not subsumed under external public institutions, the feminist has to preserve the value of the domestic realm in itself, not trans substantiate it into a general education by State from birth, but this sense of natural as private must not be thrown away in the process of absolute reason. But now, we have the problem in the State of a special privileged group, with their preserved exclusive private subjective spheres, excluding others as delusional and political enemies. The attempts at a limit of preserving, will mean that such a subjectivity combined with its instituional support in externality, can exclude and silence any dissent as politically and ethically and morally problematic. This ought to be read as only a preliminary discussion. These issues were discussed at a British Society of Phenomenology conference in the early 2000's i attended. One speaker talked about an "elastic schema" for Kant, which may have been take on Malabou's plasticity as schema, but i didn't know this a stuff at all at the time. I did though have a conversation with the late Gary Banham on Wilfred Sellars who's work he knew well. I went on to follow up his recommendations on reading more of Sellars. i began by using Robert Brandom's on line seminars on "Sellars in the Space of Reasons".
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  3. the left seem to have "added" to the liberal and social feminist "some of the children", so we now have "women and girls" and so on. Thing is this is not just about the present and here tactical political utility of "the children", or as a simple add on attempt to appropriate their critics on this, or even just that "the children" is a silencing move like a timeless absolute that ahs no "...ifs or ...buts...". If the protection of children are placed first in the lexicon as the proposition or imperative that has no condition, then this will be to put women as the first careers protectors of children. This along with the feminist projects of bringing children into the public and instituional spaces, will either exclude men, or view men their as a source of risk. it is a powerful method for the feminist privileging of women in a take over of the public sphere bit by bit.
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  4. You know i cant help but see a similarity here a resemblance, between the attempt to use "the children" now, and the events that unfolded during the 17 th century and the 30 years war in particular. Its an historical period saturated by feminist and post feminist deconstruction and Critique. but this was my "in" back in the 1970's and then by study in the early 1990's. First they hated my Wittgenstein approach on this in the early 2000's but the last conversation in the late 2000's was "We like Wittgenstein now". I thought to take them there via Quine, but there was no chance.
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  5. So that's space and time, world and body, but what of causation, other, adverbs, not just "how" added to "where" and "when", but agency: a "who", and responsibility eg for justification and legitimacy? Different registers and ontologies of reasons.
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  6. Part B1: There are many ways to bury "unhelpful" events and speech's within and outside of political and other institutions, often by exploiting relations between instructions and individuals. Here is a brief guide, its is not exhaustive: You can release the memo or the data, when something else big is going on in the media. eg when a child abuse case is in the News you can release those difficult growth statistics. You can attach the messenger, as biased and as such only cognitively attuned to harm of those like them eg unintended sexism. You can attack the messenger, for their connections to, or membership of a political organization eg; they are only bringing this up because of its power to influence public opinion and so this effecting of the minds of the public can be used and channelled towards bringing them into the solidarity, or attaching them as an assembly to a policy. Related to the above instituional "attaching to a policy" we can see that a real political policy is implemented as a type of single function from a particular institution. This means there are many people not officially or publicly part of, members of, a political movement, but they have an interest in the particular policy that they can rationalise just in terms of its scope and targets to reduce harm and risk. They can appeal to an apparent harm or risk in itself, independent of context, or as occurring with respect to their perceived subjects of the institution, and the institutions policy in this regard. They can appeal to a transcendent view of quantity utility harm and risk that allows a background for some particular quality of harm, that the institution can deal with. The risk here is they may not be expressing this as a political position, but rather as workers in the institution who have an interest in the policy alone. even though this will often means an attachment of interest to a party that would support such and institution. For example women's groups working to reduce domestic violence to women and girls in the home. On the one hand left leaning policy tend to see all harm cases from within a continuum audit structure that would "conflate" all quality differences and differences of time and place, in terms of measurement and the process of ordinality and even cardinality for the case context. Here "absolute" harm and risk of a specific case is schematised or conditioned by its place in the order of harms. The scope can be the local community the country or the world as a whole. But now with this conditioning of the case in itself into a audit, we have difference eg we compare a quality quantity harm in one context to a greater quality and quantity of harm in another. "I got scratched by a neighbours cat" ..."Yes but many people far away are being bitten by dogs". The grounding in a transcendent accounting of harm though as a data heavy epistemology via instituional statistics is a myth. Firstly the only harm data that appears is that for which data exists or has been collected, so possible bias by selective data collection, but also the myth of transcendent data before its use is completely dispelled when it comes to policy for policy is necessary finite and selective. There is no absolute transcendent policy. In policy then selection is necessary and so accusations of bias are also necessarily baked into any policy and so institution. Indeed if real concrete policy has to be biased by some transcendent criteria, but the transcendent is a myth and policy is necessarily finite, then if concretely "unbiased" policy is impossible then surly we cant jsut call the necessary here a bias, since unbiased has no transcendent or practical meaning. cf Wittgenstein "On Certainty".
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  7. Part B2: It seems there can be no such thing as an institution doing politically neutral policy, all as policy projectors will be conditional and subject to support from some political organisation. An example would be health care and the Labour party. Not just with respect to unions connections but with respect to policy coordination and cohesion. Heath care claim to be just dealing with harm and risk in policy but as practical it is wedded to labour polices and policy. This can, or better, will, also be true of other organisations in their condition of being conditioned in its policy to private investment. Here the investment conditionality of an institution and policy can be classed as biased only secondarily to any wider political policy context. The accusation is of a personal interest bias, that conditions all their other relations and the policy supported. But against if unfunded policy is impossible then this is not a simple case of bias. Now when it comes to an investigation by an institution, we are aware that here the scope of the investigation can be arbitrarily limited or expanded in terms of space and time and identity. This is done conceptually, so: a case of violence to girls can become an enquiry into violence to women in generally even all over the world or the transcendent move to violence in itself. Also the violence to the girl case can be fine grained to only specific types of girl’s specific types of violence and specific types of perpetrators. I this context Kant’s regulative idea ask us to regulate our use with respect to the very large wider scope and very small fine grained scope. But for Kant the ethical and moral is already in play here. The transcendent error is to attempt these justifiers and legitimisers from a point outside of ethics and morals eg the fact value distinction is after the fact of an attempted abstract separation of data policy and ethics and morals. Thus it is only the idea of transcendental data and action policy w.r.t. to the world whole that would think we can even have a grip on an ethically and morally free take on the world. So ethical and moral standpoints are also necessary. The “link” or internal relations of facts/action and ethics/morals here means there can be no ethically and moral neutral stance. Thus so called “cherry picking” harms because of relations of belonging, non instituional relations the left class as a bias cannot be right, since the origin of acquaintance here would be shared form of life with its ethical and moral rules and descriptions. “This is this” then is not an ethically moral neutral proposition a pure fact, but such a “this” is fraught with response in an ethical moral context “immediately”. It is only the mediating transcendent audit that would deflate the response or class it as a bias.
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  8. Part B3: Now as well as transcendent data and policy myths we have international institutions, which claim political neutrality and unconditionally. But of course they are not, but also cannot be so. They are in terms of policy and practicality bound to assemblages that have real specific interests and also have specific origins in time and place and wrt to a population. These institutions themselves belong in a context of other institutions as in an order of hierarchy of scope and authority and responsibility, duty and legitimacy as well as data justification. Its not just that the lower institutions are not “deduced” from the absolute unconditioned as more fine grained cases under general rule or laws. Nor ought it to be. Rights at best regulate not constitute situated laws. But really they are attempts to abstract out the “process” of the rule of law in a sovereign territory, and then make as if they are just more higher order or transcendent laws not imminent processes. They are odd because now the legal rights as laws presuppose that the rule of law is already in play in even the application or subsumption under a “rights law”. Now contrasted to the idea of approaching thee bias problems from a standpoint of transcendent data and transcendent formal rights structures that propose to describe the world and events from outside, like a map we have a real world narrative of peoples lives in a place and time. Here a non continuous stream of events happen in the experience of a subject, but these are not experienced as in anything like a utility or rights order and audit. Its not the case yet that if I am disappointed with a live band that I experience this disappointment from within an audit that compares it to the disappointment of being sent to prison. Rather for many complaints about live bands are not really related to complaints about prison. Back in the day, in the 1980’s there was always the peripheral risk of a punch up in town especially if the band were rubbish. But it was well over the horizon that this might be a knife fight or even a gun fight. It is thus a shock to a form of life to find in the 2000’s that knives and guns are now on the table. Now a punch up though could be linked to a war zone form of life or criminality in general by the conflating audits. A bit of a punch up in the 1980’s, I was told, was a big improvement on the 1970’s where you would get a proper kicking with a risk of serious injury. Even so it’s a shock to find guns and knives as a real event in the possibility of that life world now. It like an old episode of a soap, where the police are talking to a guy in his house about a murder nearby and he says “What a murder up the street?” I think Bayesian risk analysis tries to conflate everything into the possible, differentiating them only by probability risk, which they then try a equivocate to potentiality as a kind of tendentious absolute risk “horizon” for all micro actions acts. Again with this kind of computer data analysis.
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  9. Part B4: The risk comparison can deflate the “shock of the new” appearing in a form of life, a living world. But also the shock of the new can be easily utilized by political institutions and actors to do policies they want anyway by association and assemblage to it. There is nothing like this narrative “discontinuity” and psychological rupture of “shock” in getting support for policies the people don’t really understand. Indeed they often make it deliberately obscure. Is there a possible accounting for shock of life narrative in the transcendent continuum of harms. I think this might be a bit of a Keikegaadian point against Hegel. Can there really be an experience of shock, shock of the collision and overlapping of worlds from a point of view, transcendent of a living narrative. No there can only be transcendent continuum data, there is no world totality continuum that could possibility place narrative shock into its audit. There is a shock here though and that is when we find the transcendental position of absolute duty is occupied by people who are shocking in the shocks they can bury or foreground. It’s a shock that they are partial in a supposedly impartial duty. But of course as action this is unavoidable. There is the shock that the institutions cannot really do the transcendent and that means its conditioned from outside. In some cases the shock of apparent bias is just the revealing of the real conditionality’s they are subordinate to. So we can ask what are the similarities and the differences, between a first person narrative of shock on the outer edges and subterranean of overlapping worlds, its claim when expressed in terms of law and policy; and the re-presentation of this shock by political groups and institutions, right up to its re-presentation and in terms of international law, and organisations like State/Private Universities, and assemblages of these into internationally coordinated universities; someone reporting about their own country or another. It might seem that the internet and social media are now affording competing international or coordinated multinational voices, to the voices utilised by international institutions and universities. I mean the latter are bound to complain about it in any way possible, since any media, if it’s not asymmetrically subordinate to their voices there or elsewhere, will be “unhelpful”. The problem is though that Justas the speakers in international institutions have a large degree of immunity from consequence of their actions, it’s a kind of unconditional non return for them, but then is this the same case for speakers on social media. Not the privilege of an instructionally amplified voice but the privilege of immunity from consequence. Ie just as the absolute singular God is immune to change so the micro Gods perceptions in inalienable human rights can enjoy an immunity or exercise of self interest without the return of ownership of any “unintended consequences”, or indeed covertly intended returns subsequently disguised as surprising unintended consequences. Personal then social media is a symmetrical power of address to the powerful international order of institutions. But then like them there is a kind of transcendent claim of unconditionality. Like them it can suffer only the re-presentation of narrative shock, and it has a degree of immunity from returns.
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  10. Part B5: My prime interest is what happens to a speech about shock and its conceptual expression, is subjected to a data audit and then translated into policy. As I have pointed out there is a massive incongruence between what is expressed in shock and the proposed policy that then runs along that same narrative ground. that is the radically different logics and semantics of these genres and intuitions means the thing said is mediated by alien forms of reason to the original narrative space. in some ways its the difference (that is not radical but incongruent between narrative determination in a form of life and negative laws of indeterminacy of that space. The latter can easily take the corrupting form of being a law for positive determination of that form of life for its purposes. Indeed this is overtry in the left and liberal talk of both positive individual freedom and the project of constructing new worlds. We have lost the ability to distinguish the two and the shock events can be utilised by all sides to switch to law as ethical positive determinations which is a very bad idea. For then your first narrative world is a subordinate world to the transcendent and policy projects. the inability to place shock form one genre to another ie substitute shock in and out of context is just one example of the incongruence of these spaces and of reasons and duties. the whole lot is a manifold of equivocations and ambiguities of reason. PS there was a very relevant TV episode for this from around 1988ish. I cannot get hold of it now maybe you can. it was an episode of the late night discussion program "After Dark" .
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