harvey young
The New Culture Forum
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Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Anti-Social Behaviour: Would YOU Challenge a Lout in Modern Britain? BBC Becomes a Soap Opera" video.
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Comment Part 1: At 22:42 mins into the NCF discussion, Rafe Heydel-Mankoo raises a problem, he describes as in big metropolitan Cities, that an event such as " a woman falling over" can elicit many different responses or no response at all, depending on an observers culture, we might say having, or being in, different language or a making of different sentences, and having different values, or ideologies, or sense of belonging or inclusion to different groups e.g.: either immediately or mediately, by like signing up to as whole nexus of policy from a Political Party. What this suggests is often described as a relativism. Now usually the opposition to this takes the form of attempts to clearly state the facts and the event, along with some positive normative notion of value which might be the law, as providing a standard of objective realism and a standard for objective values.
The idealist like the relativist on facts, might argue that that "event" can be described in many non contradictory ways as made up of many possible facts. They might take this to mean events unlike objects are so manifold as to disappear altogether eg even the boundaries of space and time, for them are open let alone what we describe them as conceptually and by ideology. Badiou has argued that events are multiplicities, meaning they are unique particulars. This would seem to threaten not only any agreement as to the facts: decidability, but the impossibility of any condition of identity of an event and so any identity relation between two events. This would suggest the loss of any constraint such as consistency, and so its related terms contradictory or hypocrisy. It would threaten any genuine normativity of the law in terms of just the "fact", and the idea of law as nomological which would seem to require minimally identity or sameness of different events. These days science bearing down on evidence is meant to sort out the facts, and then law as whether such facts are against the law, if the law applies to the event or case.
This would suggest a close link between multiculturalism/diversity and science and the law as providing the ground for such a shared or sharing of the space and time of the city. This would have to mean that, for agents in these spaces and times, they have a ground duty in acting to consult with and defer to the latest science and legal world action as a guide for action. This means then a space of "private" freedom delimited by what "public" science and law cannot say or does not say. This projects a strange picture of a human being, for working on such a basis will draw one into viewing the world and affordances, from the point of view of such law and evidence. e.g i heard that forensics is difficult now because people know about forensic science from TV, and also from TV the endless court room and legal and police dramas have schooled people not just in the law but to see possibility as only constrained by some interpretation or "clevering" of the law. This will obviously allow all kind of new aims, that are not so much as legally silent but that the law its self-constitutes them as actions. Value follows changing science and laws and is quickened by legal determinations as well as constrained. It can start to look like then that ever changing science and the law become the target for action, that is interested in changing the "objective values".
For politicians and political people this becomes second nature and a sign of high intelligence competence and transcendent value as changing the law change value itself. High personal, and public status then in Cities to people who know and can manipulate the law and science, because they alone can have the power to change objective fact and value for all. The political life is one of strategy tactics and manoeuvring within events as tools for change. There will obviously then be in this movement from multiplicity to multiplicity, many moments where a change of hypocrisy and contradiction can be raised in terms of support for a multitude of policy, but especially as ones private life and values, might well come into conflict with new creations of public law and science. An ironic pragmatism has to take over where first person reasons for action are themselves couched in scientific and legal terms and tactics skill strategy etc. The world of private value of aims though reasons is increasingly captured and taken over by the vocabulary and structure of science and law and its objectives. The notion of a life before the law what is as post public law called the private realm disappears into the public realm together.
People have become aware of this and so they talk about “well it was legal but is it moral?” which implies that everybody is alienated from the science and the law while just using it as tools. The appeal to morality is old but really came into common usage I think after the Public inquiry into the banks after the 2008 financial crisis. This can be interpreted as just more tactics and manoeuvres trying to use some extreme example that no one could deny to do some legal and scientific work.
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Part 2: What all this really does though is expand the scope and coverage and depth of the law in to the private sphere that has already been lead into thinking it needs an objective legal and scientific ground for its subjectivity. What appears as “speaking out” the ordinary people “speaking truth the power” and the rest of it, is actually a device to allow the latest laws and science crated by various power groups to re construct us and our livers in accord with their laws. It must give public people a buzz to know they are not just changing the public realm but changing the private realm of their opponent’s private lives. Be they entrepreneurs or Social Justice Warriors. Its easy to imagine then a media or medias that just do this, and there is no Critique of content, just don’t watch it is the reply. With the BBC, that has a licence fee, they may be metropolitan and international, but as licence payers at least we have the legitimacy to Criticise publically they cannot just say it’s a private matter don’t watch us then. When we ask about truth and someone’s private life, all we will get is this as viewed post facto the vocabulary of law and science as advised by the lawyers and ethics committees. It sound weird to us because we still have a sense that no actually can live in accord with science and the law as determinants of action in some empty subjectivity. Indeed the rise of the private realm and subjectivity in politics and religion into the political realm is really the private and subjective realms being taken over by the public realm. So mental illness as a science and apparent protection from the law is the last station: for this really denies the subjective value of action and brings it in accord with the latest science and cognitive behavioural heuristics. Private escape to mental health is a flight into public human engineering. Give to Skinner and Watson what is due to Skinner and Watson.
p.s. the most structurally gratuitous move I’ve encountered was when it was clear to some that I was not singed up to the Universal Human Rights and it Social Justice Praxis project, they sought out some aspect of me from the multiplicity to attack me on, in the expectation that I would complain but the only way my complaint would be recognised and it stop them, was if I expressed it in terms of Rights Fairness and so on accompanied by the threat of legal and quasi legal force and so by extension and consistency would be committed to the whole project. I mean they were very prejudiced and contradicting their principles but ironically because it’s for a good cause a higher Justice and public utility outcome.
Great discussion many thanks Peter Whittle, Rafe Heydel-Mankoo and Amy Gallagher.
I am drawing very slightly on Donald Davidson here see Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy “Davidson” “Events” “Action” “Logic of Action/ Practical Reason” ? etc.
Note: I am having a break very soon, but still trying to finish a piece on a discussion you had from a few days ago.
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