Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Diaz on the Power of Love

ForaTv

The ontology of power

Understandingsociety
By  Daniel Little

There have been quite a few posts on the concept of power over the years in this blog (link). This continues to be an intriguing subject for me. Fundamentally the question of the moment is this: how does "power" fit into a social ontology of the kinds of things that exist in the social world? Does "power" exist, or is it a term that encompasses a range of other social things and relations? At one point I characterized power as an "influence" concept (link), analogous to "is humorous," "is rude," or "is charismatic". In each case the concept is defined in terms of a capacity possessed by the agent to influence certain kinds of behaviors by others around him or her.  Along these lines we might define power as a feature of an individual as follows:

Caesar is powerful =df Caesar has access to social levers of coercion that permit him to coerce certain kinds of behavior by others.

Those levers might include --

• command of military or paramilitary forces
• relations with conformant legislators positioned to enact legislation and regulation
• relations with conformant private citizens positioned to coerce their dependents to behave this way or that

On this approach, "power" is a dispositional concept attaching to individuals and invoking access to certain kinds of instruments of coercion.

What is "coercion"? This is a topic that Robert Nozick picked up early in his career (“Coercion” in Philosophy, Science, and Method: Essays in Honor of Ernest Nagel). We might define coercion very simply in terms of an actor's ability to influence the terms of choice that confront another actor. The Godfather put it best: "I'll make you an offer you can't refuse." Here is a possible definition:

x coerces y =df x creates a choice situation for y in which the costs of choosing other available options are unacceptably high, leaving only O_n+1 to be chosen.

(Here is an article on coercion in SEP; link.)

We can then broaden this concept to groups in society by postulating that certain groups have greater access to the levers of coercion than others. So we might say that "capitalists have more power than workers" because capitalists have access to the lever of unemployment, whereas workers have access only to the power to withhold their labor at substantial personal and familial cost. And we might say that organized crime lords have more power than shopkeepers because the criminals have greater ability to use and threaten violence against the shopkeeper than the reciprocal.

We can also broaden the concept by grouping the levers of coercion into different families: economic coercion, physical coercion, community coercion (shunning within a religious community, for example), … This allows us to identify the sources of power within a given society. Individuals and groups who are favorably positioned with respect to these different categories of instruments of coercion are more powerful than others.

What this account leaves out is the range of "soft" power associated with framing and ideology. This is a different avenue of social influence. It is possible to impel individuals or groups towards certain kinds of actions by shaping their beliefs and cognitive-affective frameworks. Using the media to shift the terms of debate over a policy -- taxing the rich at higher rates or providing universal health insurance -- is a way of exerting power without coercion.

A few features of "power" emerge from these observations. First, power is a relational concept. An individual possesses power over other individuals (relation 1) and does so in virtue of the relations he bears to other persons and institutions (relation 2). Second, power is the activity side of structure: structures and sets of social relations constitute the environment within which individuals are empowered to exercise power over others. The structures perdure, and individuals act within their elements to exert their will over others. And third, power is distributed over many individuals and groups within society at a time. But it is fluid and subject to fluctuations as structures and individuals change. Dick Cheney was powerful at one point in time but not at other points. And what changed was not Cheney but the levers of power and social networks to which he had access.

This seems to imply that power is not itself a "thing" within a reasonable social ontology. It is rather a relational characteristic that exists at various social locations depending on the connections those locations have to the levers of influence over individuals and groups.

(We might speculate that there is an art to exercising power that means that not everyone is equally adept at the activity. Being well situated with respect to the levers of influence is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition for being powerful.)

This account lines up well with some aspects of Steven Lukes' analysis of power in his classic book, Power: A Radical View (link). It also aligns well with Michael Mann's definition of social power in The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 and elsewhere: "My earlier work identified four primary 'sources of social power' in human societies: ideological, economic, military, and political" (Fascists, 5).

Character and authenticity

UnderstandingSociety

Daniel Little 

Image: Molière's Tartuffe, Comédie Française

When we judge that a person has acted on the basis of character in a given situation, we are implying a judgment about his or her inner constitution, and we are judging that the action derived "authentically" from the individual's underlying traits. Character and authenticity go hand in hand.

So what is "authenticity" when it comes to action? It seems to come down to this. When we talk about authenticity, we are presupposing that a person has a real, though unobservable, inner nature, and we are asserting that he/she acts authentically when actions derive from or reflect that inner nature. This is a kind of moral psychological realism: we work on the assumption that there are real inner features of personality and character that influence (portions of) the individual's behavior.

There are many other kinds of judgments that we make about other people's actions that suggest the opposite of authenticity: pretense, guile, manipulation, scripted, self-flattering, role-playing, acting. What these descriptors have in common is the idea of an individual choosing a series of actions and a style of action that is intended to convey a particular impression of the actor, irrespective of the actor's "true" nature, thoughts, and intentions. There is a disjunction between semblance (based on actions) and self (based on the actor's inner subjective reality). Tartuffe's actions in Molière's comedy are inauthentic and insincere; Tartuffe skillfully shapes his behavior to evoke specific reactions from others.  Politicians come to mind as we consider this list of features of action -- persons who seem always to be playing a role to cultivate positive reactions from others for the sake of electoral gain, with no evidence of authenticity.

Consider the example of Will Kane in High Noon, played in 1952 by Gary Cooper. Will Kane is a small-town marshall who is placed in a position of having to decide whether to stand and fight the armed men coming to kill him, or to slip out of town with a good head start -- and leave the town to the violent depredations of the outlaws. He strives first to gain a collective defense of the town, but all the town worthies suddenly find that they have other urgent appointments. And his deputy Harvey Pell takes this moment to allow his long-standing grievances to boil over and to walk away. So it is either stand alone or flee. He stays.

So how are we to understand Kane's choice? The movie's original poster gives one interpretation: "the story of a man who was too proud to run!" This isn't a particularly satisfying interpretation, though, in that it seems to trivialize his choice. Pride seems like a superficial motivation -- along the lines of "Robert was too proud to ask his boss for a loan for taxi fare when he realized he had forgotten his wallet." Pride seems to be a motivation that has to do with avoiding embarrassment rather than the loftier motivations of character and sacrifice.

Here is a somewhat different line of thought: Kane has learned to become a certain kind of person -- a person who doesn't bow easily to threats, a person who cares about his neighbors and friends, a person who loathes the violent bullying of the outlaw. On this line of thought, Kane has grown into a certain kind of character, which leads him to act in ways that seem contrary to his self-interest. He resists intimidation; we would also expect him to resist subornment or bribery.

Another possibility is that Kane possesses a deeply engrained role responsibility: it is his job as marshall to take risks to defend the town. (It's no longer his job, in fact, since he has resigned in deference to the pacifist convictions of his soon-to-be wife, Amy Fowler, before the crisis began.) But we might speculate that his sense of duty prevails over the fact of risk and the coincidence of having given up his badge; he is the only person on the scene who can or will oppose Frank Miller's gunmen.

There are several entwined complexities in this short discussion. One is the fact that the examples used here are drawn from fiction; so Tartuffe and Will Kane are both played by actors representing their actions and motivations. Certainly it would be a category mistake to judge that "Gary Cooper displayed great character in High Noon"; it is the depiction rather than the performer that needs analysis here.

Second, there is the realism point made above: the idea that the individual has a core set of characteristics that are "really" part of his or her makeup. Without this assumption, the idea of authenticity doesn't have traction. But this takes us in the direction of a real "self" which is the author of one's actions; and there are many reasons for thinking that this is an over-simplification of action and agency. Briefly, it is plausible that an actor's choices derive both from features of the self and the situation of action and the interplay of the actions of others. So script, response, and self all seem to come into the situation of action.

Moreover, even if the realism assumption is justified, character is only one part of the "real" self. One can be inauthentic by violating the impulses of his/her character; but likewise inauthenticity can derive from a deviation between beliefs and thoughts and actions. Iago is inauthentic because he pretends loyalty to Othello, whereas he is secretly disloyal.

And third, it is possible that the relation between "character" and "role" is not as contradictory as is suggested here. It may be that the role sets some of the parameters of the character and serves to reinforce one set of actions over another in particular circumstances of choice. The fact that Will Kane was regarded by others as an honorable and courageous man may be part of the explanation of the fact that he behaved in an honorable and courageous way.

(Here is an interesting source that provides examples of action driven by character in real life -- Bob Blauner's account of the professors in the University of California who resisted McCarthyism at the cost of their jobs; Resisting McCarthyism: To Sign or Not to Sign California's Loyalty Oath.)

Avital Ronell: The Day Off [forgiveness, drugs, ontic, ontological, friendship, blush,...]

egsvideo

Avital Ronell discusses the concepts of forgiveness, drugs, ontic, ontological, friendship, blush, nausea, otherness, alterity, referring to Heidegger, Holderlin, Levinas, Susan Sontag, Lyotard, Kleist, Nietzsche, Wagner, Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, Alfred Hitchcock, Hegel. Free public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies Department Program in 2012. EGS, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Europe, Avital Ronell 2012.

Avital Ronell is Professor of German, comparative literature, and English at New York University, where she directs the Research in Trauma and Violence project. She is a member of the faculty of the European Graduate School, interested in Literary and other discourses, feminism, philosophy, technology and media, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, performance art, and has also written as a literary critic, a feminist, and philosopher.

Avital Ronell was born in Prague to Israeli diplomats and was a performance artist before entering academia. She received a B.A. in 1974 from Middlebury, studied with Jacob Taubes at the Hermeneutic Institute at the Free University of Berlin, received her Ph.D. under the advisement of Stanley Corngold at Princeton University in 1979. Avital Ronell taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1984-1995 and at New York University from 1995 to the present. She served as Chair of the Department of German from Spring 1997 to Spring 2005. She taught an annual seminar in Literature & Philosophy at NYU with Professor Jacques Derrida and has taught with Professor Helene Cixous at Université of Paris VIII. She regularly teaches at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and in Mexico. She was invited by the Humanities Council to offer a seminar at Princeton University in spring 2006.

Avital Ronell has produced English translations of Derrida's work.Her books and works include: The Uber Reader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell Ed. Diane Davis. 2006; 2005 The Test Drive, 2001 Stupidity, 1998 Finitude's Score Essays for the End of the Millennium , 1993 Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania, 1993 Dictations: On Haunted Writing, 1989 Telephone Book Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, 1989 The Ear of the Other, trans., Jacques Derrida, and Dictations: On Haunted Writing 1986.

Sex and Punishment: Eric Berkowitz Talks 4,000 Years of Judging Desire

ReasonTV

Waorani tribe: Bathing in the river

BBCWorldwide

Himba tribe: Unwanted Marriage

BBCWorldwide

La vida diaria de la Tribu Zoe

masDocumentales

Intelligence Agency Predicts 2030

MidweekPolitics

Intelligence Agency's 2030 projections outline a number of predictions about the state of world affairs over the next 18 years.

Neighborhood effects

huduser.org

Daniel Little

In Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect Robert Sampson provides a very different perspective on the "micro-macro" debate. He rejects the methodologies associated both poles of the debate: methodological individualism ("derive important social outcomes from the choices of rational individuals") and methodological structuralism ("derive important social outcomes from the features of large-scale structures like globalization"). Instead, he argues for the causal importance of a particular kind of "meso" -- the neighborhood. He takes the view that neither "bottom-up" or "top-down" sociology will suffice. Instead, we need to look at processes at the level of socially situated individuals.

In this book I proposed an alternative to these two perspectives by offering a unified framework on neighborhood effects, the larger social organization of urban life, and social causality in general…. Contrary to much received wisdom, the evidence presented in this book demands attention to life in the neighborhoods that shape it. (357)

I argue that we need to treat social context as an important unit of analysis in its own right.  This calls for new measurement strategies as well as a theoretical framework that do not treat the neighborhood simply as a "trait" of the individual. (60)

Sampson offers his own instantiation of Coleman's Boat to illustrate his thinking:

But unlike Coleman (and like the argument I offered in an earlier post about meso-level explanation; link), Sampson allows for the validity of type-4 causal mechanisms, from "neighborhood structure and culture" to "rates of social behavior". So neighborhoods are not simply outcomes of individual choices and behavior; they are social ensembles that exert their own causal powers.

Sampson offers an articulated methodology for the study of the social life of a city, in the form of ten principles. These include:

1. Focus on social context
2. Study contextual variations in their own right
3. focus on social-interactional, social psychological, organizational, and cultural mechanisms of social life
4. integrate a life-course focus on neighborhood change
5. look for processes and mechanisms that explain stability
6. embed in the study of neighborhood dynamics the role of individual selection decisions
7. go beyond the local
8. incorporate macro processes 
9. pay attention to human concerns with public affairs 
10. emphasize the integrative theme of theoretically interpretive empirical research while maintaining methodological pluralism (67-68)

The heart of "neighborhood sociology" can be summarized, Sampson asserts, in a few simple themes:

First, there is considerable social inequality between neighborhoods, especially in terms of socioeconomic position and racial/ethnic segregation.  

Second, these factors are connected in that concentrated disadvantage often coincides with the geographic isolation of racial minority and immigrant groups.  

Third, a number of crime- and health-related problems tend to come bundled together at the neighborhood level and are predicted by neighborhood characteristics such as the concentration of poverty, racial isolation, single-parent families, and to a lesser extent rates of residential and housing instability.  

Fourth, a number of social indicators at the upper end of what many would consider progress, such as affluence, computer literacy, and elite occupational attainment, are also clustered geographically. (46)

This set of themes asserts a series of important correlations between neighborhood features and social outcomes. The hard question is to identify the social mechanisms that underlie these correlations. "It is from this idea that in recent decades we have witnessed another turning point in the form of a renewed commitment to uncovering the social processes and mechanisms that account for neighborhood (or concentration) effects. Social mechanisms provide theoretically plausible accounts of how neighborhoods bring about change in a given phenomenon" (46).

This is a fascinating and methodologically innovative piece of urban sociology. Sampson's use of large data sets to establish some of the intriguing neighborhood patterns he identifies is highly proficient, and his efforts to place his reasoning within a more theoretically sophisticated framework of multi-level social mechanisms is admirable. In an interesting twist, Sampson shows how it is possible to expand on the very costly video-based methodology of the original PHDCN study by making use of Google Street View to do systematic observations of neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities (361).

(Here is an earlier post on Sampson's ideas about neighborhood effects.)

The Practice of Anarchy

In my previous three-part series on anarchy (available here, here and here) I argued, among other things, that anarchic (that is to say, non-hierarchical and self-organizing) systems are the norm in evolution and in nature and have also been the norm in human societies through much of their existence. They have a great deal to offer us as we attempt to navigate a landscape dominated by the failure of various centrally controlled, rigidly organized, explicitly codified hierarchical systems based on complex chains of command that have come to dominate human societies in recent centuries. I have also pointed out that, based on recent results from complexity theory, such hierarchical systems are collapse-prone. This is because they scale badly, increasing their metabolic cost per unit size as their size increases, which is just the opposite of how living organisms behave. This is also because, in order to continue to meet their internal maintenance requirements, they have to grow exponentially until they encounter physical limits.

But, as some astute readers have pointed out, what are we to do with all this excellent information? We live in a hierarchically structured society whose sometimes oppressive but always ever-present top-down authority we cannot escape. With many generations of people having become used to hearing anarchists vilified as terrorists, communist revolutionaries and having been conditioned to accept anarchy as a synonym for chaos and mayhem, any attempt at advocating anarchism as a political program is bound to go nowhere. We may be able to accept that anarchy is the way of nature, but we must also accept that it is no longer (at least for the time being) the way of human nature—or, if you like, not the way of man—or at least not the way of “the man”—the one who pays us a little something if we are helpful to him and orders us to be beat up or locked up if we are not. The advocate of anarchy is at best an amusing disembodied voice on the Internet (who must be dong something or other more practical to please the hierarchy in order to be able to afford the free time and the Internet connection). At worst, the compulsion to advocate anarchism as a program of political reform is a sign of mental illness.

Yes, the advocate of anarchist revolution is a sad sort of imbecile, but this is not to say that the theory that underpins anarchism is without any practical applications. It is just that such applications have nothing at all to do with politics. Just as anarchist thinking has at its source the scientific observation of nature, so must its applications to contemporary society start by observing the constructive role that anarchy normally plays within contemporary society, and then look for ways to extend it. Are there any examples of that? Yes, indeed there are. Whenever an existing hierarchically organized system becomes sufficiently ossified and dysfunctional to give an obvious edge to an improvised, anarchic, perhaps initially inferior alternative, there is a possibility that such an alternative will materialize out of nowhere, spread virally, become dominant, and then, in turn, become hierarchical and ossified. Let's list some obvious examples.

The Protestant revolution is an obvious one. Once the Catholic church—a hierarchical organization par excellence, though built on top of the wreckage of anarchic early Christianity—became sufficiently corrupt and obnoxious, putting up toll booths before the gates of heaven and so forth, a variety of new self-selected religious leaders led a revolt, providing a viable, though rather primitive, alternatives, which then took over in many parts of the world, and eventually sprouted their own hierarchical structures thanks to the efforts of Luther. The Russian revolution is another one: once the general senility and obsolescence of the Czarist ancien régime became compounded by its failed effort durng World War I to a point where it could no longer quell bread riots, a variety of new self-selected political leaders stepped into the breach and provided an alternative, until it, again, sprouted a hierarchical organization of its own thanks to the efforts of Lenin. Seventy years later the stiff and morbid hierarchy into which it evolved was also tipped into the dustbin. More recently, when the first efforts at trade liberalization provided advantages of economies of scale, as well as labor and jurisdictional arbitrage, with which national enterprises could not compete, the trend became unstoppable, until there is now a single transnational business environment which is beyond any one nation's control. If history is any guide (as it sometimes is) the inevitable result will be that a dangerously centralized global economic bureaucracy, conceived in an effort to control the forces of chaos globalization has unleashed, will briefly attempt to dominate the scene before crumbling into dust under its own weight. More on Club Orlov >>

Assemblage Theory Revisited/ Manuel DeLanda

egsvideo

http://www.egs.edu/ Manuel Delanda, contemporary philosopher, revisits assemblage theory and answers student questions. DeLanda discusses models, the state, state apparatus, Michel Foucault, and the virtual. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland. 2011 Manuel DeLanda.

Manuel DeLanda, (born 1952 in Mexico City), is a writer, artist and distinguished philosopher who has lived in New York since 1975. He is a professor and the Gilles Deleuze Chair of Contemporary Philosophy and Science at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, a professor at the Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, and professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. DeLanda was formerly an Adjunct Associate Professor at Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University (New York).

He is the author of War In the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002), A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006), Deleuze: History and Science (2010), and Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (2011). He has published many articles and essays and lectured extensively in Europe and in the United States. His work focuses on the theories of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze on one hand, and modern science, self-organizing matter, artificial life and intelligence, economics, architecture, chaos theory, history of science, nonlinear science, cellular automata on the other. De Landa became a principal figure in the "new materialism" based on his application of Deleuze's realist ontology. His universal research into "morphogenesis" - the production of the semi-stable structures out of material flows that are constitutive of the natural and social world - has been of interest to theorists across many academic and professional disciplines.

Assemblage theory

Understanding Society/ Daniel Little 

Deleuze's theory (metaphor?) of assemblage as a way of thinking about the social world is an intriguing one. Fundamentally the idea is that there does not exist a fixed and stable ontology for the social world that proceeds from "atoms" to "molecules" to "materials". Rather, social formations are assemblages of other complex configurations, and they in turn play roles in other, more extended configurations.

What is appealing to me about this way of talking about the social world is that it takes us away from the presuppositions we often bring about the social world as consisting of a range of discrete social objects or things. According to this static way of thinking, the state is a thing composed of other things; likewise Islam is an extended social thing; likewise Chicago; and so on. The assemblage approach suggests a different set of metaphors for the social world: mosaic, patchwork, heterogeneity, fluidity, transitory configuration. And this seems like a more realistic way of characterizing large extended social formation like states or regulatory agencies.

The downside of this way of talking and thinking about the social world is precisely the indefiniteness and indeterminacy it suggests for the composition relation. This poses a very hard problem for explanation. How are we to explain the properties and behavior of the composite entity if there is so much contingency in its parts and the ways in which they interact? The strategy of aggregative explanation seems to be a non-starter, since it is stipulated that composition is not a strongly rule-governed process. But so do the comparative and generalizing strategies. If the composites are indeed sui generis and unique configurations we can't generalize across instances and can't usefully compare them.

So how can we gain greater clarity? The concept of assemblage is expressed by Gilles Deleuze; but it is obscure. Here is a valuable blog post by Levi Bryant in LarvalSubjects that extracts several of Deleuze's statements about assemblage from an interview. This interview provides some description of the construct in Deleuze's own words.  Here is one of Bryant's efforts at clarifying Deleuze's meaning:

Assemblages are composed of heterogeneous elements or objects that enter into relations with one another. These objects are not all of the same type. Thus you have physical objects, happenings, events, and so on, but you also have signs, utterances, and so on. While there are assemblages that are composed entirely of bodies, there are no assemblages composed entirely of signs and utterances.

It isn't easy to paraphrase Deleuze's thinking into a more analytical formulation (though Bryant's efforts are helpful). But the language remains metaphorical, suggestive, and elusive, rather than analytical and discursive. For this reason it is difficult to determine whether the concept has value for sociological theory.

The core ideas are spelled out in a somewhat more accessible form in Manuel DeLanda's A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. DeLanda tries to explain "assemblage" by saying what it is not.  First, assemblage theory is opposed to essentialism and reification (26ff.). DeLanda emphasizes that Deleuze's concept resists the "organismic" approach to conceptualizing the social, by which he means an approach that looks at the whole as an inextricable combination of interrelated parts. This implies that the parts are implicated in each other; the organismic perspective emphasizes the internal connectedness of a thing. (This has affinity to Bert Ollman's philosophy of internal relations in Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society.) DeLanda distinguishes between "interiority" and "exteriority" in conceptualizing the components of a thing. For assemblage theory, the relations among the parts are contingent, not necessary. And, crucially, parts can be extracted from one whole and inserted into another. "These relations imply, first of all, that a component part of an assemblage may be detached from it and plugged into a different assemblage in which its interactions are different. In other words, the exteriority of relations implies a certain autonomy for the terms they relate" (10-11). Another aspect of the theory, according to DeLanda, is the fact that it does not privilege one level of organization over another. "Micro" is not more fundamental than "macro"; instead, social reality is "multiscaled" (38), with assemblages occurring at every level.

Truthfully, neither Deleuze nor DeLanda succeeds in making the concept of assemblage a very clear or analytically specific one. So let's consider a diluted version of assemblage theory that might nonetheless be useful for sociological theory while foregoing much of the metaphysical language characteristic of Deleuze's writings:

1. Social entities are composed of components and lesser systems.
2. The components of a social entity are heterogeneous.
3. The components include both material factors and meaningful expressions.
4. The components have their own characteristics and dynamics.
5. The components may have very different temporal and spatial scales.
6. The effects and interactions among components may be indeterminate because of complexity effects and probabilistic causal mechanisms.
7. The behavior of the whole is difficult or impossible to calculate even given extensive knowledge of the dynamics of the components.

To illustrate this set of ideas, consider a city as an assemblage.

1. A city consists of population, businesses, roads, organizations, government policies, political movements, disaffected youth, and slogans.
2. Population dynamics have a temporal scale of decades, while businesses have a temporal scale of months.
3. The interaction effects of gradual population change, the voting system, and gradual environmental change are difficult to calculate.
4. We can nonetheless make efforts to disentangle the effects of population change, institutional design, and environment on things like land use and effective taxation rates.

This reformulation suggests that large social entities are "messy" but still amenable to analysis and study; and this is what sociology requires.

(Daniel Smith's article on Deleuze in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a readable exposition of Deleuze's philosophy; link. Another useful resource on assemblage theory is Nick Srnicek's masters' thesis; link. )

Would Obama Incite Civil Unrest to Win?

By Daren Jonescu 

Is President Obama willing to incite civil unrest to win re-election?  As we have all been encouraged to wear our dog-whistle decoders these days, one can hardly be blamed for wondering.  Worse yet, we know the answer.  He is already doing it.

Please bear with me, as this topic requires considerable delicacy.

According to Rolling Stone, Barack Obama has now called Mitt Romney “a bull*******,” on the record.  His anger at the challenger was palpable — that is, carefully staged — during each of the last two presidential debates.  And he has made a central theme of his campaign the warning that a Romney presidency would erase all of the “equality” victories of the 1960s and ’70s.

Consider these typical words from his October 25 rally in Las Vegas:

You can choose to turn the clock back 50 years for women and immigrants and gays.  Or in this election you can stand up for the principle that America includes everybody. We’re all created equal — black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, abled, disabled — no matter who you are, no matter what you look like, no matter where you come from or who you love, in America you can make it if you try.

This, to restate, is his message down the stretch: before the revolutionary uprisings of the 1960s, America only "included" white men.  Romney is a white man who wants to return to that time.  So if you are a woman, an immigrant, gay, black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, or disabled, then you should not merely oppose Romney as a candidate who does not represent your interests; rather, you should fear him, as a man who wishes to eliminate you from the American portrait.

If Romney wins, and you are not an "abled" white male, America will no longer "include" you, according to Obama.  In less than two weeks, you are going to be reduced to second-class citizenship, your fortunes cast back to the bad old days of 1962, before radical feminism, the Nation of Islam, gay rights, the Black Panthers, free love, flag-burning, the "drug culture" -- and of course, before the days of America's first "gay," black, America-hating, drug-damaged, contraceptive-dispensing, progressive feminist Islamic-Christian president.

And now, after scowling at him through two debates, after his vice-president spent ninety minutes calling Paul Ryan a liar, and in the context of all this fear-mongering about the threat of a return to White Male America, Obama has branded his opponent a "bull*****er."

From Lyndon Johnson or Harry Truman, this kind of remark might have been regarded as innocuous, albeit unpresidential.  From Obama, the Harvard genius with the well-creased pant leg, the bestselling author and master of political oration, it is an expression of bitter rage and supreme disdain.  And in an era when representatives of Obama's base are flooding Twitter with threats to assassinate his opponent, such heated rhetoric could be dangerous.

Anyone who wonders whether perhaps Obama just does not want to be president anymore should think again.  He wants to be president.  What he does not want is to have to exert so much effort to retain the presidency.  What he does not want is what Hugo Chávez does not want, what Vladimir Putin does not want, what Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not want: a fair fight, an unobstructed challenger, an unintimidated electorate. 

It was so easy in the past.  Swept along on a wave of adulation and enthusiasm, protected by leftist media and academia, and helped out when necessary by an Axelrod-arranged scandal or two, Obama has barely had to lift a finger to gain political office and to climb the ladder.  Authoritarians do not understand why one should have to do so.

So he is angry.  And this anger has become central to his campaign strategy.  The fear he is seeking to inculcate among his base has an even uglier flip-side.  The Obama campaign is attempting to cast Romney and his supporters not as people with the wrong ideas, but as The Enemy.  In this circumstance, fear can easily give way to extreme outrage -- and perhaps to violence and intimidation.  This is particularly true when the target audience of this fear-inducing invective is ignorant, emotion-driven, and dominated in its thinking by entitlement greed, rather than by considerations of right and wrong.  Consider Sandra Fluke, Snoop Dogg, Occupy Wall Street, and student leftists (see examples).

When Harry Truman's daughter, a singer, was panned by critic Paul Hume, the sitting president wrote a letter threatening to bust Hume's nose if they ever met.  In 1950, however, none of Truman's supporters would have been inclined to do the dirty work for him, or even to take the whole thing seriously.  Needless to say, Obama's supporters are quite different from Truman's. 

Could Obama really be reduced to attempting to win re-election through mob protests and intimidation -- i.e., through a climate of fear?

More on www.americanthinker.com >>

J.K. Rowling book and class war

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“Lo especial” que tiene “lo cubano”-Emanaciones1200/ Juan Abreu

Juan Abreu/

Llega a mis púdicos oídos que los cubanos jóvenes van de patriotas y de “lo especial” que tiene “lo cubano”. Es verdad. Hay que ser especial para aguantar una dictadura que te mata de hambre asesina a los mejores y te da de patadas en el culo durante cincuenta años. Muy especial hay que ser.

Después de apartar la diarrea patriótica porque la diarrea patriótica no vale la pena revolverla ya sabemos lo que es (estupidez y sentimentalismo), medito sobre el asunto. Locura colectiva, me digo. Falta de vergüenza endémica, aventuro. ¿Cara dura más allá de cualquier límite? Es posible.

Que gente que pertenece a un pueblo tan aguantón y cobarde tan servil y canalla tan oportunista y tan miserable un pueblo que lleva medio siglo revolcándose y regodeándose en la mierda del castrismo un pueblo ajeno a cualquier decencia y siempre dispuesto a aceptar callado cualquier bajeza presuma de ser especial es algo verdaderamente insólito.

Especiales. Dicen. Bueno. Creo que no ha existido un pueblo tan chivato y colaborador y tan arrastrado ante su opresor como el cubano. Si se refieren a eso, no me queda más remedio que estar de acuerdo con ellos.

The Fallacy of Redistribution [& Cuba]/ Thomas Sowell

thanks nelson

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spectator.org

By Thomas Sowell

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The recently discovered tape on which Barack Obama said back in 1998 that he believes in redistribution is not really news. He said the same thing to Joe the Plumber four years ago. But the surfacing of this tape may serve a useful purpose if it gets people to thinking about what the consequences of redistribution are.

Those who talk glibly about redistribution often act as if people are just inert objects that can be placed here and there, like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design. But if human beings have their own responses to government policies, then we cannot blithely assume that government policies will have the effect intended.

The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example.

In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler's Holocaust in the 1940s.

How can that be? It is not complicated. You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth — and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity.
People in industry are not inert objects either. Moreover, unlike farmers, industrialists are not tied to the land in a particular country.
Russian aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky could take his expertise to America and produce his planes and helicopters thousands of miles away from his native land. Financiers are even less tied down, especially today, when vast sums of money can be dispatched electronically to any part of the world.
If confiscatory policies can produce counterproductive repercussions in a dictatorship, they are even harder to carry out in a democracy. A dictatorship can suddenly swoop down and grab whatever it wants. But a democracy must first have public discussions and debates. Those who are targeted for confiscation can see the handwriting on the wall, and act accordingly.
Among the most valuable assets in any nation are the knowledge, skills and productive experience that economists call "human capital." When successful people with much human capital leave the country, either voluntarily or because of hostile governments or hostile mobs whipped up by demagogues exploiting envy, lasting damage can be done to the economy they leave behind.
Fidel Castro's confiscatory policies drove successful Cubans to flee to Florida, often leaving much of their physical wealth behind. But poverty-stricken refugees rose to prosperity again in Florida, while the wealth they left behind in Cuba did not prevent the people there from being poverty stricken under Castro. The lasting wealth the refugees took with them was their human capital.
We have all heard the old saying that giving a man a fish feeds him only for a day, while teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime. Redistributionists give him a fish and leave him dependent on the government for more fish in the future.
If the redistributionists were serious, what they would want to distribute is the ability to fish, or to be productive in other ways. Knowledge is one of the few things that can be distributed to people without reducing the amount held by others.
That would better serve the interests of the poor, but it would not serve the interests of politicians who want to exercise power, and to get the votes of people who are dependent on them.
Barack Obama can endlessly proclaim his slogan of "Forward," but what he is proposing is going backwards to policies that have failed repeatedly in countries around the world.
Yet, to many people who cannot be bothered to stop and think, redistribution sounds good.

Why Societies Develop Like Embryos: The God Problem

PJMedia/ By Howard Bloom

An exclusive excerpt from chapter 6 of the new science/history/philosophy nonfiction book The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates, the new offering from the author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century and The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism.

The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates is published on August 24 and is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

****

The Zygote Snabs Herbert Spencer

Meanwhile, in 1851, when he is thirty-one years old and walking, talking, and singing with Miss Evans, Herbert Spencer runs across an idea that will make him one of the biggest big-picture thinkers of all time. It is the idea that will keep Spencer a bachelor married to only one thing, his grand “synthesis.” Herbert Spencer will come across von Baer’s principle that cells in an embryo start out looking pretty much alike, then get more and more unique to their species. And more and more specialized in their function. Von Baer’s principle will change Spencer’s thinking. It will become the key to Spencer’s grand unification. And to his view of evolution. It will become Herbert Spencer’s equivalent to Newton’s gravity.

Yes, differentiation and the metaphor of the embryo will enter Herbert Spencer’s thinking three years after he comes to the Economist and one year after he begins to frequent John Chapman’s soirees. Says Spencer, “In 1851, I became acquainted with von Baer’s statement that the development of every organism is a change from homogeneity to heterogeneity.” And that acquaintance will push Spencer to till the soil in which Charles Darwin will plant a seed.

Once Herbert Spencer is exposed to von Baer’s work, the embryologist’s influence will show up almost instantly in Spencer’s work. It is the grand unifying principle that Spencer has been hunting for. It is another unifying principle to add to what Spencer has taken from George Henry Lewes’s explanations of Comte—the principle of evolution, and the principle that evolution constantly churns out something that Spencer calls “progress.” So von Baer’s principle of differentiation becomes central to Spencer’s 1851 first book, Social Statistics. The bigger and the more advanced the society, Social Statistics says, the more differentiation, the more specialization. The more “‘distinct classes’ and ‘special occupations.’” Large-scale societies unfold like embryos. They evolve like zygotes in the womb. Spencer publishes Social Statistics eight years before the publication of the book in which Charles Darwin premiers his theory of evolution, the Origin of Species. But Spencer, like the other habitués of Chapman’s get togethers, is already an evolutionary thinker, and he portrays the differentiation of human societies as an evolutionary process. Again, the word evolution has not appeared even once in Darwin’s only published book, his Voyage of the Beagle. But it appears one hundred times in Spencer’s second book, his 1855 Principles of Psychology. A book that comes out four years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

Here’s how the combination of evolution and von Baer’s differentiation works. Says Spencer, in early societies, everyone did everything—hunting, fishing, and tool and weapon making. But as societies evolved, some men specialized in hunting and fishing and others became full-time tool or weapons makers—full-time spear and fishing hook experts. Way, way down the line, really advanced societies invented machines like railroad engines with hundreds of parts. So in an advanced society, there might be a specialist in Swindon who zeroed in on nothing but hand-making the setscrews for the steam engine, a task so exacting that one real-life machinist of Spencer’s day said “it almost made me sick.” Meanwhile other specialists assembled the engine, tested it, and ran it. And yet more specialists raised fruits, veg- etables, cows, and pigs and sent them into the city via railroad to feed the setscrew specialist. At the same time, even more specialists raised cotton in the American South, carded it and combed it in Manchester, then ran the resulting thread through Manchester’s weaving machines to make the set- screw maker’s clothes.

The result? Says Spencer, societies are like organisms. And their advance toward higher levels of complexity is like “the development of an embryo or the unfolding of a flower.” Yes, societies unfold like flowers or embryos:

Hence it happens that a tribe of savages may be divided and subdivided with little or no inconvenience to the several sections.

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