A Nonviolent Political Ethics

    Farmer's invocation, in Pathologies of Power, of the methodology of liberation theology—"observe, judge, act"—as a way to organize an ethics of human rights in the face of structural violence, relates to a similar methodological rubric, "observation, feelings, needs", this from the practice of nonviolent communication.¹  It is informative that the "observe" of liberation theology, as described by Farmer "implies analysis", given that, as Farmer states "[t]here has been no shortage of analysis from the self-appointed apostles of international health policy".  By contrast, the "observation" of nonviolent communication is understood as operating as an alternative to a habitual tendency to analysis, judgment or diagnosis as a precursor to strategic action.  This contrast thus, likewise, encompasses the "judge" of liberation theology (per Farmer, "nonetheless important even if it is, in a sense, pre-judged").  Nonviolent communication, responding to a structural violence embedded in the very tendency to "pre-judge" in the name of observation, offers an alternative to compounding violent communication through reproduction of the methods of "self-appointed apostles".

    In nonviolent communication, observation as starting point endeavors to be descriptive, emptied as much as possible of explanation, so as to open a space of hypothesis.  When we witness a specific event or behavior, we guess at the feelings that such event or behavior may elicit and/or express, and if possible, seek to verify, to test, our hypothesis.  With confirmation or revision of such hypotheses, the next step is to guess as to the needs such feelings might speak to, seeking, again as much as possible, to verify this hypothesis in turn.  Were nonviolent communication to be employed in the context of Farmer, we would employ this method with regards not only to the poor of Haiti and Zapatista protesters, but likewise to neoliberal policy makers, medical ethicists, Russian prison health officials and their NGO interlocutors, and yes even to Farmer, and for that matter, ourselves in our encounter with his text.

    For the purposes of this response, I shall leap-frog a further elucidation of this methodology to focus on the concept of needs, through the lens of Farmer's argument regarding "social justice".  George Lakoff, commenting on Rawls's famous social thought experiment, notes that the "result of justice is seen as fairness", but then problematizes this by identifying no less than ten models of fairness, each intuitively apparent when taken alone, and yet in tension if held simultaneously.²  Paul Rubin takes up Lakoff's types of fairness in his argument for countervailing drives organizing the affect and behavior of members of social groups, suggesting, for instance that five of Lakoff's models of fairness, namely "procedural distribution, rights-based fairness, scalar distribution, contractual distribution, and scalar distribution of responsibilities" in different ways fulfill a basic drive for "efficiency".³  Rubin's application of Lakoff's fairness kinds can be shown to describe attractors upon a topological phase space of fairness heuristics, which phase space, in turn, corresponds with various projections of political and cosmological types, among them, Mary Douglas's Cultural Theory of Risk⁴.  Here, the attractors for "efficiency" would match up with Douglas's "Hierarchist" quadrant.  What Lakoff's fairness models point to, as developed by Rubin, and from the perspective of nonviolent communication, are a cluster of unarticulated needs, needs that tend to elicit particular cosmologically-informed judgments and strategic responses, as described by Douglas.

    Neoliberalism, as encountered by Farmer, here, would appear to straddle a space between Rubin's pure "efficiency" and a "flattened" variation thereof, corresponding to Douglas's "Individualists".  Farmer, by contrast, would appear to be balancing a cluster of needs-based fairness and equality of distribution (two additional models of fairness, which Rubin identifies as associated with a drive for "insurance"), corresponding with Douglas's "Egalitarian" quadrants, with the same "flattening" drive (which Rubin explains as effecting greater freedom from hierarchical constraints), which Rubin associates with Lakoff's "equality of opportunity, equal distribution of responsibility, and equal distribution of power", insofar as Farmer is appealing to an ethics of individual, rather than purely state, action.  This final quadrant, to which Farmer is not entirely committed (still framing his argument in terms of the "the more you need, the more you get" logic of Lakoff's needs-based fairness), is called by Douglas "Fatalist", but by more recent authors, "Communitarian".  

    [Subsequent reading has revealed that the "Communitarian" label, as used in Cultural Cognition of Risk Theory, despite appearing in models derived from Cultural Theory of Risk, and in fact is counter to the Fatalist quadrant.  The confusion results from the transposition of the other three quadrant labels of the Cultural Theory of Risk model to polar positions on the dimensional model of Cultural Cognition of Risk Theory.]

    Understood in this way, the tension between Farmer's proposed ethics, and that of neoliberals, in terms of the needs being spoken to in both fairness regimes, becomes more explicit.  For as much as Farmer favors Rubin's "insurance" over the standards of "efficiency" (i.e., "cost-effectiveness") of the neoliberals, he would appear to share with them a similar cluster of needs around freedom (here, freedom from want).  This, in the end, is the ultimate purpose of the methodology of nonviolent communication, to identify where the needs of parties otherwise bent on markedly divergent strategies, nonetheless converge.

    

notes

¹ Rosenberg, M. Nonviolent communication:  A language of life.

² Lakoff, G. Moral politics: how liberals and conservatives think. pp. 20, 61-2.

³ Rubin, P. Darwinian politics: the evolutionary origin of freedom.  p. 79.

⁴ Douglas, M., Wildavsky, A., Risk and culture: an essay on the selection of technical and environmental dangers.

Mutual Orthogonality

    There is no noosphere, no biosphere or physiosphere, only mechanosphere. Lines of flight taken by lineralized codings, genes and language, flatten stratification to a plane of consistency, a topological Klein bottle or Mobius strip, a single exterior surface in n-1 dimensions. While assemblage wholes may form assemblage parts, this is no more holarchy than it is hierarchy, for a regional market may be part of multiple provincial markets, not Babushka dolls, but neither discrete whole-parts:  regional market as joint, point of articulation, at which Siamese provincial markets are enmeshed in a proliferation of Venn diagrams of perpendicularity.

    We go deep, and tracing a non-Euclidean line of flight, find that up is not opposite of left, a downward course taking us sideways.  Let us stand at the literal liminal of a littoral, epistrata between land and sea. Seaweed and sea shells, beached blue whales and buried turtle eggs, deterritorialize and sediment upon continental shores, a milieu of crabs and microfauna forming epistrata of tidepools, as even the lucid technicolor of particulated plastics from the Pacific Gyre precipitate out of a milieu of oceans, reterritorializing as a new strata of sand.  Likewise, fjords and shores erode, messages in bottles and medicinal estrogens sediment into the waters, nitrogens deterritorialized once from fossils and reterritorialized as fertilizers, deterritorialize again from farmland plots, sedimenting once more as substrata of algal blooms, of which milieu a sediment of dead fish and suffocated lobster accrete upon ocean floor.  Respiration of a clam, by which bodily calcium is deterritorialized to strata of shell, reaching its historical end, these shells too are deterritorialized into epistrata of ocean.  The Pacific Gyre is likewise orthogonal to all this, shopping bags (deterritorialized first by the hands of a supermarket bagging clerk, then from under kitchen sinks to sediment, with their territorialized refuse, in a municipal mass waste stream) and water bottles (once territory of waters deterritorialized from the Catskills only to be reterritorialized along the final stretches of an alimentary canal), so much effluence of affluence, sediment along the surface edges of this Sargasso, accreting to this spinning disc of macromolecule polymers, expressing their longevity through territories of plastic, six pack holders strangling sea turtles (which sediment upon ocean floor) while plastic cups reterritorialize as evolutionary bastions for microfauna contained within, until mechanical motion and ultraviolet rays deterritorialize even these polymers to particulate sands.  We go deep, singing a song to blue whales, diving in the depths off a continental shelf, about Sally, who, having deterritorialized a clam shell with her hand, has reterritorialized that shell upon a pressboard shelf, so much sediment of knickknacks and tchotchkes double articulating as keepsakes, in parastrata at the orthogonal depths of continental commerce, flotsam and jetsam of a meshwork milieu of local, regional, provincial, national, and global markets.

    

Latour's Cartesian Fallacy

    Years ago, I visited New York City's transit museum.  Among the exhibits on display was a retrospective on the mapping of the city subway system. One of the innovations highlighted by the museum curators was the abandonment of geographic scale in subway maps. Designers discovered that a map of the subway system--its stations and lines--was more clearly intelligible when they did not strictly adhere to measures of physical displacement.¹

    After being advised by numerous individuals last semester that my project reminded them of Latour, I was expecting great things. Unfortunately, I've already encountered the ideas in We Were Never Modern, repackaged by Boulder philosopher cum [E/e]nlightenment guru, Ken Wilber.² Of course, I might at least have hoped that Latour, writing a decade before Wilber's Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, would have offered some nuance, some insight, lost in Wilber's later attempt at amalgamating these and so many other ideas within a "theory of everything".  Instead, Latour launches into an all too common misreading of Leviathan³, as he commences to build a theoretical account of modernity upon a conflation of uncanny and chimerical.

    From Wilber, we get the concept of pre-trans fallacy.⁴ Where Wilber uses the pre- v. trans- distinction to identify the undifferentiated masquerading as the integrated, however, I would reverse the directionality, to suggest that while Latour, like Wilber, would "transcend and include" the premodern and the modern to achieve the nonmodern, his nonmodern is arrived at through a confusion of pre- and trans-, from the latter position.

    Latour's new constitution of delegation among networks coarsely put, is stuck in Cartesianism.  Unlike the MTA's subway map designers--who switch between different network representations as needs must--Latour mistakes the networks for reality.  As Alfred Korzybski reminds us, "The map is not the territory."  Now, the territory is no less artifactual than the map, but nonetheless, a network is nothing more and nothing less than a map:  an intelligible spatialized rendering.

    This is Latour's conflation of uncanny and chimerical.  For a chimera is intelligible, or to put it another way, imaginable.⁵  Chimera are distinct, and more to the point, as Latour emphasizes with his appeal to quasi-objects, they are distinctly objectifiable.  Chimera are things, even if only imaginable things, which Latour would organize in relation to other things between his two poles.  The uncanny, however, defies intelligibility, defies the capacity to imagine.⁶  Indeed, Latour touches on this very briefly midway through his text, when he talks of the "event", but then loses it⁷, falling back on safe and familiar objectifiable spatializable quasi-objects (and moments later, quasi-subjects!).  Unprepared to grapple with the pre- of indeterminacy, Latour obscures the uncanny by wallpapering the world with the trans- of networks.

notes

¹ In contrast to Latour's fetishism of modern scale, this clarity was obtained not through a quantitative change in order of scale, but rather by swapping one scale, measured in cartographic distances, for another, measured in stops along a path of movement.  By moving orthogonally, from one qualitative scope to another, they were able to better represent the same space--a commuter rail system connecting five boroughs--within the same quantitative scale of a subway map.

² Latour's four modern repertoires appear a decade later as Wilber's AQAL model, his quasi-objects appear in Wilber under the term holons, the spiral temporality Latour toys with briefly is found in the Boulder philosopher's discussion as a further development of Spiral Dynamics.  I do not recall Wilber attributing these ideas to Latour, but then Wilber would subsume Latour's nonmodern as but one link in a teleological chain of transhuman development.

³ Latour, like so many others, seems to miss entirely Hobbes's painstaking ontological heavy lifting to establish a multitude in covenant with itself, rather than a deified representative king, as "Mortall God".  See Land-Trujillo, B. (in preparation), "Corpuscular Leviathan", A Problem of Number: Social Theory as Physics.

⁴ It is here that Wilber makes his real contribution, but in a way that neither Latour nor Wilber, committed as they both are to a transcendence without immanence, would appreciate.  If Latour's favored workhorse of a prefix is non-, Wilber's is trans-.  Wilber marshals trans- in several modes, including--of relevance to us here--his concept of pre-trans fallacy. Drawing on the work of developmental psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, and harkening to Freud's dismissal of "oceanic fusion", Wilber declares pre-trans fallacy whenever he believes the wrong "yes" has been arrived at in a "yes-no-yes" sequence of development:  i.e., according Wilber, just because you arrive at the same answer as someone developmentally mature, does not mean you are mature, as the reasons for your answer are different.  Like Freud, Wilber believes undifferentiated experience is mistaken for spiritual enlightenment (Unlike Freud, however, Wilber believes the last yes is attainable.)

⁵ To use Descartes's example, "we could quite well distinctly imagine the head of a lion on the body of a goat".

⁶ Schrödinger's cat is uncanny: at once both dead and alive, neither dead nor alive.  Indistinct, indefinite, indeterminate, Schrödinger's cat is no more situated "in" the experimenter's box than she is "between" two ontological poles.  The uncanny is a performance without reference to Cartesian spatial relations.  Where a chimera has committed to being someplace between places, positionable in a network map of relations, the uncanny is not so much uncommitted as acommittal, not a thing in relation to other things, but a happening in relation only to its own immanence.

⁷ Or perhaps jettisons it, so determined is he to achieve a transcendence without immanence.

No Postcards from Old Age

    Cohen, in titling his text No Aging in India, sets out, self-consciously, to construct a palliative to the at once reductive and essentialist gerontological texts consistently titled "Aging in India."  Arranging his text as a series of recollections, which the author suggests mirror the manner in which one encounters the old passing into what is variously called senility, dementia, Alzheimer, sixtishness, etc., as such individuals struggle to retain and regain memories, Cohen at the same time reproduces a travelogue, a travel diary, of his own journeys in the as yet for him still alien land of the significantly aged.  

    In his intent, through the organization of his materials, to ape the caricatured first-person performance of senility grasping at memory, he enacts another caricature, that of the second-person relation of seemingly disjointed yet organized (if only by happenstance and the passage of time) encounters of the natives by the narrator tourist.  Here however, the lands to which he travels sharing such porous borders with younger clines, he also captures the third-person account of others like himself, tourists and others from across the borderlands--the young as so many foreigners--at once curious about and frightened by the old in their native setting, just yonder.

    This, I would note, is not entirely how Cohen set out to explicitly use first-, second-, and third- person perspective.  Yet I would suggest that these perspectives--and not the perspectives of the very old, those who know the very old, and those who study the being of old age--get at something perhaps more interesting than the question of how the people in a given nation or religion or class or pick-your-criteria-of-discrimination encounter and understand aging. For implicit in his study of the cultural coloration of aging and the aged is an appreciation of the realm of the aged as a territory one might be a tourist within.  While the Deepak Chopras of our time continue in a long and storied line of alchemical promissories, investigating and offering elixirs of life to stave off decay as process, Cohen launches his boat into the unfamiliar waters of a River Lethe, that is, a place of forgetting.  

    This is a River Lethe that would have been unrecognizable to the ancient Greeks, so built up are its banks now with retirement condos and care homes and railway stations full of abandoned passengers.  For, while the Greeks recognized a land of the dead, a foreign country the other side of the River Styx, the land of forgetting, on the banks of the Lethe, was a barren landscape.  How then, in India as in the United States and Canada, has this domain come to be so richly developed and densely populated?

    Moreover, just as the Greeks had their priests and priestesses to mind the temples of Hades and of Persephone, so--in superficially very different cultural contexts, those of North America and the Indian subcontinent--we find the priests of the land of forgetting.  Cohen opens with a gathering of such officiants:  a gerontology conference.  In recognizing this, one might ask:  how is a study of aging produced?  How is a realm of old age produced such that Cohen, like Hercules or Dante or Sparrowhawk before him, might travel there, exploring those weird spaces and bringing back his stories from abroad?  This view from the river begins with the river as someplace having a view.

    That this river has a view at all, that age is visible at all in this way, seems to me a much more interesting question than how that view might differ from one boat or another.