Williams is writing about a third sort of necessity, distinct from two he treats earlier in Shame and Necessity: the first is the necessity of one human being acting under the power of another while the second is the necessity that is felt to hold due to some sort of practical grasp of a situation. The first is “necessity imposed on some human beings by others,” the second is “the inner necessity of practical conclusion” (130). The type he is treating in this chapter he calls “supernatural necessity,” but by this he does not mean ghouls and goblins. He means a sort of necessity that escapes typical human ways of explaining the world—this method of explanation, for Williams, is something that is historical, and the supernatural of the ancient Greeks is not self-evidently the same as what we moderns might feel to be supernatural, and there is not typical way of explaining the world, as such.
News on the street is that Hugo Chavez has done it again: the Venezuelan president has made the wild claim, this time, that the United States was behind the earth’s recent attack on Haiti. In English, the source of these claims seems to be the TV channel Russia Today, especially this clip, which has been bandied about the Internet:
I gave a version of the following paper on Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power in a seminar on political judgment this semester. Enjoy, dislike, ignore.
In Rationality and Power, Bent Flyvbjerg takes a close look at the effort Aalborg, a small Danish town, makes to design and implement a comprehensive renewal plan for its downtown. In providing the account of Aalborg, Flyvbjerg wants also to offer an analysis of “how knowledge, rationality, and power work in real life” (3). This emphasis on the “real” will at time put Flyvbjerg at odds with protagonists of the “Enlightenment tradition” (Flyvbjerg makes it a point several times to contrast himself with Habermas, for instance), yet also begs a question to which I will return: given his effort to outline “real” politics, what are we to make of Flyvbjerg’s repetitive remarks about how power defines “reality?”
How do knowledge, rationality, and power work in real life? Flyvbjerg believes their working out demonstrates, as he says in his oft repeated paraphrase of Pascal, “that power has a rationality that rationality does not know. Rationality, on the other hand, does not have a power that power does not know” (234). On the one hand, there is the rationality of power, power’s ability to form a “reality” according to various strategies and tactics and have that reality be upheld on account of its force. On the other hand, there is the power of rationality, the power of reason to discern the nature of things, which Flyvbjerg paints as weak in a fight and only partially capable out of one. This asymmetrical relation between rationality and power could be said to be the center of Flyvbjerg’s understanding of politics; using his understanding to judge the judgment of political actors, we would have to take into account their sensitivity to power-relations, to how the force of arguments gains purchase.
When, after 2004, the notion of a “troop surge” started to become something of a cliché, and the verb surge began to appear in more and more places, I had a shadowy, antagonistic response every time I came across it. But, like an itch that needs scratching but isn’t intense enough to force its way into your consciousness, troop surges remained at the periphery of my attention. And, until this morning, I never investigated if the prickly intuition I had about the phrase — that its unthinking repetition and proliferation in the media masks something more significant than just another shift in news-cycle language — were true. But, since I am somewhat without anything to do today — no announcements to copyedit, no desire to pound out several more pages on Arendt — I went to LexisNexis and looked into the use of “troop surge.”
From 1999 to 2003, a search for the phrase turns up nothing. The first article in the last 10 years to contain both “surge” and “troop,” “Relax, It’s Only a Surge,” occurs on February 05, 2004, in Washington Outlook. In it, the then chief of Central Command, John Abizaid, discusses the novel way that troops will be deployed in conflicts of the future:
“I would prefer [that a commander] should feel free to go to the secretary of Defense and say, ‘Look, we’re going to need a brigade here for probably 60 days for a certain operation.’ I think this concept of [employing] a combination of a base force in the region plus surge forces — to use things as you need them, and for all of the combatant commanders to have less ownership — is pretty important. You [can then] use surge forces to deal with specific military problems.”
I take the trouble to name these organizations in order to illustrate the mainstream support carbon trading has enjoyed within the environmental movement. To many, it might appear as though the climate bill being passed now that is a long-overdue success after eight years of inaction, institutionalized denial, and the sabotage of climate policy by the Bush administration, its industrial handlers, and their shills in Congress. For consumers who “care about” the environment there is the feeling that something is finally being done. And for some well-positioned professional environmentalists, the sort that might work for carbon trading firms or the many organizations that might do business with them, there will finally be the steady growth in private-sector “green” jobs that everyone has been hoping for. It might look like the United States is finally turning a corner in climate policy.
As it turns out, however, the Kyoto Protocol and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — now seen by many on the bourgeois left as global benchmarks for climate change policy — were themselves hand-crafted by American and European industrial interests to essentially make money from privatizing the atmosphere, permitting themselves to pollute it for free, and creating an entire bureaucracy for quantifying and trading various offset “products”, regardless of their ability to actually limit the emission of greenhouse gases. The IPCC and the Kyoto Protocol are, as we shall see, neoliberal inventions intended primarily to profitably “financialize” global warming, rather than intergovernmental instruments to be used for ending it. In both cases, the United States and some of its European allies essentially absorbed the language of scientists, environmentalists, third-world diplomats, and climate activists, only to regurgitate their efforts as a form of incomprehensible free-market amphigory which might actually be worse than doing nothing about global warming at all. When it comes to climate policy, American private enterprise has been a coprophilic Midas: everything it seems to touch turns to shit.
The historical basis upon which supposes that there is a connection between social emancipation and social labor has changed so much since the nineteenth century that practically none of the critical social theories of this century continues to place any confidence in the liberating, consciousness building potential of the social labor process. The social change in concrete forms of work has had a similarly destructive effect upon the concept of work. In his concept of work, Marx retained a categorical tension between alienated and unalienated work activity — between integrated organic craft work and atomized, mechanical fragments of activity — while not possessing the conceptual means to describe the mediating process of reflection itself. This tension has gradually been resolved in favor of a one-sided concept which merely reflects the actual relations of social labor. In the course of this complex theoretical development, the concept of work has lost the critical of its meaning, its significance for the potential transcendence of established forms of work in society. The categories of ‘alienated’ or ‘abstract’ work, with which Marx criticizes the capitalist organization of work activity, have practically disappeared from the theoretical language of Marxist-oriented social philosophy because there seems to be no criterion of appropriately human, that is, unalienated work which is independent of the norms of a particular culture. In the same way, the actual claims and ideas about work held by the subjects who are engaged in social production according to the rules set by a factory leadership trained in scientific management have lost all significance for modern theories of society. They have handed over to the empirical methods of industrial research under the rubric of ‘occupational aspirations’ and no longer play a decisive role in the critical diagnosis of the major conflicts in the contemporary social system. (39-40)
So Honneth writes in his essay “Work and Instrumental Action: On the Normative Basis of Critical Theory.” I think there’s something quite askew in Honneth’s appraisal of “work,” which might be a result of the thinkers he is responding to; at any rate, I want to trace out some of what I think it is.
As someone making my way through the treacherous waters of the publishing industry, I have a somewhat vested interest in growth projections and models — I don’t want to become “redundant,” or even, gawd forbid, “outmoded,” by industry standards. So I’ve been watching with somewhat more than passing interest the projections and prognostications about e-readers, online imprints, and all the rest of the webification of print media.
Yourstruly has started reading some selections of Thucydides for a class on political judgment. Thucydides is, apparently, one of the landmark thinkers for people who are concerned with the correct way to gauge and respond to political situations — “correct way” here meaning the way most likely to secure one’s ends — and, at any rate, I am enjoying his quips and the way he presents his take on things.
Take his gloss on how it was that Agamemnon was able to rally troops to re-kidnap Helen. Greek tradition had it that all the suitors who attempted to wed Helen swore an oath to her father, Tyndareus, that they would come to the aid of whoever became her husband if he needed help. Thucydides dispenses with this as a cute and incorrect story, saying that Agamemnon didn’t benefit from fealty or obligation in raising his army so much as he relied on his ability to coerce. He rallied the troops because he had power to do so, and not in the form of sentiment or fidelity. Thucydides writes,
In my view, Agamemnon was able to get the fleet together because he had more power than anyone else at that time, and not so much because he was the leader of the suitors of Helen who were bound by oaths to Tyndareus.
There is little reverence for the power of words to bind people here. Instead, there is a recognition of the capacity of another sort, political power.
There’s a lot to be said about the flaccid, subjective idealist bent of Simon Critchley’s approach to money in thisNew York Times blog post — money is merely the product of our beliefs! Believe it! it was instantiated from upon high by an act of the sovereign! thus sayeth the books! — and I am going to try to write something up on that, but at the moment I think it’s more pressing to note the really aggravating part of this sort of writing. It amounts to a bait and switch. There is a lot of handwaiving and wringing about money and how it functions merely because we believe it has such and such a value; there is some likely untenable and anecdotal argumentation about money’s value being imposed by a sovereign act of the state, which is reinforced by argument from etymology; and then there is this:
In response to this crisis, the only political response (by Obama-Geithner-Summers over here and Brown-Merkel-Sarkozy over there) is the attempt to restore faith, to shore up the credit systems by making governments the bank of last resort. Sadly — or happily for the politicians — people have short memories and their momentary crisis of faith is washed away in the waters of forgetfulness and overcome by a relentless will to believe.
I am finally getting around to reading the Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi’s investigation of both the relative peace of the 19th century and the birth of a self-regulating market. I hadn’t realized before that the book was written in the full swing of World War II, and that Polanyi had a more than academic interest in the institutions that he saw as sustaining peace in the 1800s, before they produced the general cataclysms of the 1900s.
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