Just because all the nonsense you’ve spouted has always turned out to make perfect sense in hindsight — it does not follow that the nonsense you are spouting now will eventually make sense.

Whenever I breach etiquette, and do what everyone knows better than to do, and in the course of normal conversation actually make reference to religion or religious symbols or concepts, I sometimes pay the steep price of being asked if I am religious, or, worse, if I’m Christian. I find I just can’t answer that question. Or at least I cannot answer that question as asked. My views on what religion is (and what religion is supposed to do) have moved so far from the common ground of believers and atheists that my “yes” cannot mean the “yes!” I mean, nor can my “no” mean anything that should earn me an ally or enemy.

This is why reading Bruno Latour’s Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech is a relief. At least I know I’m not alone in this difficulty. And maybe I’ve never been, but that’s part of the difficulty… Continue reading The torments of religious speech →

One key purpose of qualitative research is to help us recover philosophical problems in what seem at first glance to be technical problems.

I am leaning toward calling my book The Ten Thousand Everythings.

I am going to return the term “chaos” to the fractal geometers, mythologists and the general public. Chaos is experienced disorder, with many possible metaphysical underpinnings.

My own underpinning for chaos, which is speculative and entirely unprovable, but nonetheless believable and useful, is what I’m calling Myriadex: the simultaneous presence of too many orders which must be filtered down to a manageable subset of systematic, harmonious or at least non-conflicting orders if we wish to experience them as order. Chaos in my view is not ten thousand things waiting to be ordered, it is ten-thousand everythings talking at once in innumerable languages about all things at once and creating intolerable cacophony. We just want reality to speak one truth at a time, so we can hear what the hell it is saying to us.

We tend to think most about what we think best, and this is why so many people love to think in terms of things that are easily quantified. The mind can wrap itself around such things pretty comfortably.

I think this is why when people think about economies, distribution is thought of in terms of material possessions. Material possessions is certainly important, but it is not the only thing at stake in an economy. Another important consideration of distribution that is rarely discussed is personal choice. Really, who would dispute the claim that power is one of the primary “goods” distributed by an economy?

If you look at things in terms of possessions, the problem of poverty appears relatively small. Most Americans are doing very well, even if some have much less than others.

But if you look at distribution in terms of personal choice — how much control people have over how they spend their time — this is where you see extreme imbalances. This is not a matter of quantities of leisure time. It has to do with meaning each person derives from activities, and the control a person has over the decision of which activities to perform. A person who spends 80 hours a week doing something he loves is far freer than a person who

This is the best reason why left-leaners should harp on economic equality: without it, freedom is a mere political theory, not a reality.

Philosophies, like everything, can be designed for usefulness, usability and desirability.

Propaganda is philosophy designed for popular adoption.

Brand is private-sector propaganda.

To wish away politics is to wish away others, and to wish away others is to wish away the world transcending one’s own horizon.

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A widespread cynical rejection of politics as essentially base and unworthy of respect is a symptom of collective solipsism.

In philosophy, finding a new frenemy is the best thing that can happen to you. As the significance and value of the ideas deepens and intensifies, so does the uncertainty of whether your own activation of these ideas will harmonize with the hopes of the author. This electric sense is what jolts me out of bed to read at ungodly hours of the morning.

The horizon is what makes philosophy such a perpetually humiliating discipline. Schopenhauer said it most succinctly: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” Nietzsche also spoke of the horizon myriad times in myriad ways, but always with fathomless irony: “One day we reach our goal — and now we point with pride to the long journeys we took to reach it. In truth we did not notice we were traveling. But we got so far because at each point we believed we were at home.”

This passage from Mouffe’s Agonistics is a beautiful and useful thought-jewel:

…We argued that two key concepts – ‘antagonism’ and ‘hegemony’ – are necessary to grasp the nature of the political. Both pointed to the importance of acknowledging the dimension of radical negativity that manifests itself in the ever-present possibility of antagonism. This dimension, we proposed, impedes the full totalization of society and forecloses the possibility of a society beyond division and power. This, in turn, requires coming to terms with the lack of a final ground and the undecidability that pervades every order. In our vocabulary, this means recognizing the ‘hegemonic’ nature of every kind of social order and envisaging society as the product of a series of practices whose aim is to establish order in a context of contingency. We call ‘hegemonic practices’ the practices of articulation through which a given order is created and the meaning of social institutions is fixed. According to this approach, every order is the temporary and precarious articulation of contingent practices. Things could always be otherwise and every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities. Any order is always the expression of a particular configuration of power relations. What is at a given moment accepted as the ‘natural’ order, jointly with the common sense that accompanies it, is the result of sedimented hegemonic practices. It is never the manifestation of a deeper objectivity that is exterior to the practices that brought it into being. Every order is therefore susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices that attempt to disarticulate it in an effort to install another form of hegemony.