About five months ago the head psychiatrist at the clinic where I work approached me about starting a peer supervision group for the Interns and Externs training there. He wanted to construct a space where they could present and discuss their cases, receive feedback from their peers and also raise any issues that they were having in the clinic. As a 5^th year psychology Intern, I was the most senior training clinician (it feels as much as an oxymoron as it sounds) and we agreed that it would be my responsibility for creating this space. Our initial discussions outlined the goals of the group, that it would be voluntary, confidential, open to all the trainees, run for twelve weeks, and that each week a different clinician would present a case for discussion.

However, we were less clear when defining my role and exactly how I would create the space for this to occur. We contrasted the pros and cons of the traditional group supervisor role to the supervisor as a group facilitator. While the former provided more in the way of structure and boundaries we were concerned about it feeling like a therapy group or clinical rounds. Indeed, having established collegial and friendly relationships with the clinicians it was important to be clear that the supervision group was not a therapy group. Alternatively, the latter appeared to engender more space for open discussion but provided less structure and clarity around roles. After going back and forth over the differences, we agreed to use a facilitator model. In this model, I was responsible for bringing the group to a beginning and an end, ensuring that there was a presenter each week, and generally facilitating discussion. We also decided that I would not present my own cases and that I would generally try to allow others to answer questions so that they would not be directed at me. Having established the framework, we ended our conversation with the psychiatrist sounding the ominous and prophetic warning that he had never participated in a successful peer supervision group.

As the group started and began to meet weekly, some of the outlined aspects worked well. Notably, some members appeared to benefit from presenting cases and being given an open forum to ask questions. Furthermore, clinicians felt they could discuss issues they had in the clinic in a confidential area. However, as predicted by the psychiatrist, for the large part the group did not feel like it ever took off. Attendance was spotty from the second week onwards, robust discussions were sparse, and much of the group process seemed to go through me.

Succinctly, the group never seemed to take ownership over itself. While there are likely many reasons and contributing factors for this, reflecting back over the course of the group I am struck by how much my own role influenced the development of the group. Specifically, I believe that I failed to commit to the role of group facilitator. Instead, I moved back and forth between supervisor and facilitator and by not being consistent limited the group’s growth. In hindsight (which is not always 20/20) this is not surprising and seems to me a product of the ambiguity inherent in peer supervision groups, and my own ambivalence towards authority.

There are two important differences to peer supervision groups and other forms of groups, including regular supervision groups, therapy groups, and even support groups. The first is that in peer groups, the members either already know each other, or will at some point through their interactions come to know each other. Thus, unlike other groups, where members maintain little contact with each other outside of the group, in a peer supervision group they frequently interact outside of the group. Secondly, in other groups, the supervisor or leader is typically a more experienced clinician, whose role and position is defined, however in peer groups all members are expected to contribute equally.

The result of these differences is that the boundaries established in other groups to ensure safety are less pronounced and more ambiguous, meaning that the peer supervision group members themselves have to establish trust amongst each other. Although this may seem easy, it is as I learned actually a complicated process requiring a lot of faith and an ability to tolerate vulnerability. Without a supervisor to orientate around (more on that in a minute), group members are asked to establish trust through the act of discussing cases with their peers. This is potentially frightening, case discussions reveal aspects of us as therapists or individuals that we may not be aware of. Doing so in an ambiguous setting, with colleagues we trust, but perhaps not entirely, is daunting, difficult, and anxiety provoking for even I imagine experienced clinicians. Compounding these obstacles, is that many of the trainees were just starting to gain clinical experience and may have felt vulnerable and out of place discussing their experiences with others. It is not that the members did not explicitly trust each other, as much as the valence of the group pulled them away from easily building trust with each other.

One of the ways of lessening anxiety – or countering this valence – is for the supervisor to take an active role in running supervision, establishing boundaries regarding member interaction and a consistent structure for the group to follow each week. In doing so, individuals come to know what is expected of them less through their interactions with each other, than with the supervisor, who acts as an anchor for them to orientate around. Two of the most likely configurations are that either supervisee’s develop trust in the supervisor and it expands towards the other members, or alternatively, they develop trust in each other and perhaps later the supervisor. In either case, the supervisor’s role is defined by stability and consistency.

Notably, while trust can develop amongst all the parties, the power differential of supervisor and supervisee remains. Peer supervision offers the opportunity for a greater balance of power. Each individual can temporarily step into different roles, each taking turns at supervising, facilitating, being supervised, etc. In other words, by giving up the traditional role of supervisee (or group member) and managing the anxiety that comes with it, other interpersonal relationships are possible.

However, not only does the supervisee have to give up their role, but the supervisor as well. Indeed, while I thought that I was ready to do this, in retrospect it proved more difficult than I anticipated. In trying to establish the space for peer supervision I was also (although likely unaware of it at the time) moving away from my own basis of security. In this sense, much as I was asking the supervisee’s to handle anxiety by giving up their role, I was also asking myself to deal with anxiety of not having a clear role either. This process seemed to entail an interesting paradox whereby in order to give up authority I first had to use it.

Broadly speaking, initiating a group already entails a certain relationship between supervisor and supervisee’s (initiator and initiates), although as already described the aim of this group was to move that relationship into the background and place peer relationships in the foreground. In order to accomplish this, I originally thought it would be enough to describe the aims, goals, rules, etc. However, as described earlier, this did not work – and indeed, may have likely contributed to increased anxiety and ambiguity in the group. Looking back, I now wonder if it would have been more effective to use the authority present from initiating the group, being senior, etc to attempt and remove that authority. While I am not entirely certain of the form that this process would take what seems clear is the need to act, as an authority to communicate that there is no authority. In other words, by actively placing my trust in the group (only something the supervisor/authority can do) I would have more fully taken the role of facilitator.

Of course, this is easier said then done, particularly in a peer setting. Indeed, early in the group, the question of authority was raised and despite my wish to move away from these traditional group issues, by spreading authority around I found myself more often then not responding from a place as the supervisor. While this involved using authority it was in the form of maintaining a more conventional relationship. Instead, I wonder what it would have been like to use my authority to let it go. By constraining the extent to which I would reply (perhaps less as supervisor and more as a peer?) would that have facilitated a more effective peer group experience?

I believe that my difficulties doing this, reflects some of my own ambivalence to authority and hesitancy to fully embrace a facilitator role. Indeed, much like supervisee’s look to quell their anxiety through the supervisor, I was doing the same. Retreating into roles makes managing anxiety easier but also limits some of the opportunities for novel experiencing. In this respect, my movement between facilitator and supervisor limited the extent to which I committed to either and thus the extent to which a genuine peer interaction could develop.

For me, anxiety around authority stems from the possibility of overly constraining self and other. Accordingly, my response is to make space by either reluctantly (or inconsistently) accepting authority or alternatively challenging it. Although at times effective and important it can also be confusing and prevent roles and novelty from becoming fully developed. Instead I find it necessary to remind myself that authority much like other roles can be taken up, released, and modified, and that constraint enables action, which of course modifies constraint. Being more flexible at doing so may allow for more productive peer supervision groups!

295 pp. | 6 x 9
Available November 2009

FORTHCOMING

from Zone Books:

The pirate is the original enemy of humankind. Before humanitarian organizations, human rights, and the establishment of international law in the early modern period, the Roman statesmen already made this point perfectly clear. As Cicero famously remarked, there are certain enemies with whom one may negotiate and with whom, circumstances permitting, one may establish a truce. But there is also an enemy with whom treaties are in vain and war remains incessant. This is the pirate, whom the ancient jurists considered to be “the enemy of all.”

Departing from Cicero’s account of foes, The Enemy of All reconstructs the shifting place of the pirate in legal and political thought from the ancient to the medieval, modern, and contemporary periods. Antiquity already encountered the sea thief in politics as in the law. Classical letters from Homer to the end of the Roman Empire contain ample accounts of pirates of various sorts. The Roman jurists assigned to the pirate as a legal person an exceptional position in civil and international law. Their theory was to be the point of departure for the Christian jurists of the Middle Ages, who defined the pirate as “the enemy of the human species.” Later, the thinkers and statesmen of modernity went one step further. Elaborating a new international code of law and ethics, the writers of the Enlightenment represented the pirate as the ultimate “enemy of humanity.” Today, as Heller-Roazen argues, the pirate furnishes the key to the contemporary paradigm of the universal foe. This is a legal and political person of exception, neither criminal nor enemy, who inhabits an extraterritorial region. Against such a foe, states may wage extraordinary battles, policing politics and justifying military measures in the name of welfare and security.

Drawing on the diverse materials of several disciplines, from law and history to political theory and literature, The Enemy of All brings to light a single paradigm that defines the act of piracy. This “piratical paradigm” consists in the conjunction of four traits: a region beyond territorial jurisdiction; agents who may not be identified with an established state; the collapse of the distinction between criminal and political categories; and the transformation of the concept of war. Whenever we hear of regions beyond “the line of the law,” in which acts of “indiscriminate aggression” have been committed “against humanity,” we must begin to recognize that these are acts of piracy. Long said to be a person of the distant past, the enemy of all is closer to us today than we may think. Indeed, he may never have been closer.

• Fark Yaralari = Scars of Differance
• Multitude of Blogs
• Museum of Accidents
• Discourse Notebook
• AAAARD.ORG

However, as counterpoint to Janneke Adema’s echoing of John Perry Barlow’s well-known declaration that “information wants to be free“, it should be reminded that information does not just want to be free. As Goldsmith and Wu put it in Who Controls the Internet?:

“The Internet has been celebrated for allowing open, universal communication. ‘Information wants to be free,’ John Perry Barlow famously declared. But information does not, in fact, want to be free. It wants to be labeled, organized, and filtered so it can be discovered, cross-referenced, and consumed.” (Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu. Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006: 51)

With so many texts now available online, in searchable pdf format, wouldn’t it be wonderful if they could be searched, cross-referenced, tagged, etc. before downloading? The kind of possibilities – conceptual, and research-wise – this would open up for scholarship is mind-boggling if taken to its conclusion.

Cheddar Mortadelle Cosmos, 2005, by Philippe Mayaux

My last post on the Biblical and philosophical concept of “kenosis” ended with a reference to Emmanuel Levinas, whose essay, “Judaism and Kenosis,” though unread at the time seemed to promise an altogether different approach that that found in contemporary and poststructuralist philosophies, which remain in large part derived from the Christian tradition. From Luther to Hegel to Derrida and Cixous, kenosis refers to the achievement of empathy, immersion, and other forms of ‘embodiment’ and ‘externalization’. For Levinas and the tradition he captures, kenosis suggests the opposite, an impasse between existences.

Levinas’ essay, for its part, radically departs from this, Christian tradition and sketches out, in my opinion, the more enlightening, the more philosophically authentic position. Where the Christian model stresses a seamless movement between, or transcendence of, ontological orders, the Judaic perspective stresses unbridgeable, unresolvable differences; which, I think, describes our world more closely than does the secular philosophical legacy of incarnation, identification. A fundamental schism in philosophy is thus revealed in the posing of this question, which is itself already a Christian one. Indeed, as one would expect, Levinas quickly reminds us that, “There is probably no need, here, to remind ourselves that the idea of divine incarnation is foreign to Jewish spirituality.” (Levinas Kenosis 114)

That being said, Levinas goes on to point out, in schematic terms, comparable sensibilities in the Judaic tradition and isolates key Talmudic passages where God descends and inhabits human misery, and precisely through that descent is found to be all the more exalted.

But the fact that kenosis, of the humility of a God who is willing to come down to the level of the servile conditions of the human (of which St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians [2:6–8] speaks), or an ontological modality quite close to the one this Greek word evokes in the Christian mind – the fact that kenosis also has its full meaning in the religious sensibility of Judaism is demonstrated in the first instance by biblical texts themselves. Terms evoking Divine Majesty and loftiness are often followed or preceded by those describing a God bending down to look at human misery or inhabiting that misery. The structure of the text underlines that ambivalence or that enigma of humility in the biblical God. Thus, in verse 3 of Psalm 147, ‘He who healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds’ is the same one who, in the following verse, ‘counteth the number of the stars, [page] and giveth them all their names.’ Psalm 113 sings of ‘the elevation above all nations and the glory above the heavens’ of ‘our God that is enthroned on high’; but He ‘looketh down low upon heaven and upon the earth.’ The psalm ends with God’s care for the barren woman, whose despair is deeper than that of the poor person whom God ’causes to rise up out of the dunghill.’ As if to say that exaltation were at its height in these very acts of humbling! The importance of these verses for Judaism is emphasized by the fact that they have become part of Judaic liturgy.

But what is significant for Jewish ‘theology’ as such is the express Talmudic attestation of that importance: there is an inseparable bond between God’s descent and his elevation. (Emmanuel Levinas, “Judaism and Kenosis,” in In the Time of the Nations. Translated by Michael B. Smith. London: The Athlone Press, 1994: 114–115)

That much is shared with the Christian tradition. In each, God’s love for humanity involves inhabiting, or adopting, human feelings and thus in some way the human form. But beyond these generalities, there is little in common between the two.

Levinas’ reading of Rabbi Shimon ben Pazi’s parable “The Moon that makes itself Little”, from his treatise Hulin, expresses this distinction succinctly. “This parable,” he writes, ”approaches the theme without hiding the ontological or logical ‘upsets’ latent in the kenosis.” (Levinas Kenosis 116) Whereas Christian kenosis not only hides the logical upsets, but revels in them, ben Pazi’s parable isolates the upset, lingers on it, and ultimately fails to find satisfaction or resolution.

As a metaphor for God’s authorial power, and so for the structure of the universe itself (with God at the top and lesser entities below), the parable describes, through a dialogue between God and the Moon, a “dissatisfied silence” that cuts across all of creation, potentially undermining the ineffable order into which God has shuffled his subjects.

“The parable, cast in the form of a dialogue between Eternal God and the Moon, is supposedly motivated by a contradiction brought out in Genesis 1:16, which announces the creation of ‘two great lights,’ but right afterward refers to ‘the greater light’ and ‘the lesser light,’ as if, between the first and second half of the same verse, one of the great lights had diminished. The contradiction is set in relation to Numbers 28:15, which specifies the sacrifices to be performed for the new moon.” (Levinas Kenosis 116)

The problem concerns the status of the lesser light relative the greater one. By what law or reasoning, the Moon wants to know, are distinctions formed, and powers and orders assigned? It is as if, for reasons entirely external to the subjects affected, decisions are made concerning their fate, their status, and their hierarchical value. Justice itself seems to vanish in the moment an order of justice is created.

Immediately after the creation of the two great lights, one of them, the Moon, said to the Creator: ‘Sovereign of the world, can two kings wear the same crown?’ And God answered: ‘Go, therefore, and make yourself smaller!’

Was the moon unable, out of pride or vanity, to share the greatness she had received with the Sun? And was not the order she was given, ‘to make herself smaller,’ the just punishment for such pretentiousness? Or was the Moon, troubled by a precocious philosophical concern, affirming the necessity of a hierarchical order in being? Did she already intuit the ‘negativity’ between equals and discern that greatness cannot be shared – that the sharing of greatness is war? Rather than commanding a punishment unjustly imposed, perhaps what the voice of God proposed was the greatness of smallness – of humility, of the abnegation of night. The nobility of the best ones: smallness equal to greatness, and compatible with it. (Levinas Kenosis 116–117)

“Perhaps” is the key word here. Theories are offered; excuses are made; possible reasonings flushed out, but each, in its turn, is proved insufficient. The greatness of smallness, though an attractive idea in its own right, is ultimately a plain contradiction. That one only “plays the part” of the small, and one the part of the big, with each being equal by virtue of their equally but playing a part, is no consolation. The apparent difference cannot be whisked away through so much reasoning. God, it seems, cannot explain himself, and the Moon is not buying it:

‘I just expressed a sensible idea: is that any reason to make me smaller?’ says the Moon in answer to the Master of the World. Hierarchy is necessary, but I already see that it is necessarily unjust. The ontology of the creature is contradictory. It is dangerous to utter truths! As for the greatness of smallness, I do not at the outset see it as being as great as greatness. Is not the ‘glorious lowering’ a scandal to reason? The Moon’s argument is then taken into account. ‘Thou shalt reign day and night,’ says the Lord, ‘while the reign of the Sun will be limited to the day.’ A discreetness in light – is this already a decline? There are lights without brilliance whose lustre the Sun cannot dim: there are insights of the intuitive mind that systematic reasoning, in its glorious clarity, cannot refute. The wisdom of the night remains visible during the day.

‘What would be the advantage of shedding light in full daylight?’ says the Moon. The role of second brilliance cannot heal the wounded ego. And the civilization of triumphant science will one day invalidate all instinctive knowledge and all truths without proof. This is an antimony on the essence of the intellect, between God and the Moon! (Levinas Kenosis 117)

Concessions are made. Space and time are divvyed up to conceal this inaugural injustice. The organization of the universe itself starts to seem like one big compromise, as if the real creation, not the nominal one, took place through negotiations with, of all things, the created. The dialogue continues with a “discussion of the lunar calendar, of days and nights, versus the solar calendar, of years and history. The Sun and Moon are not just lights, but movement, time – history. To the solar calendar of the nations is added Israel’s lunar calendar: universal history, and individual history.” (Levinas Kenosis 117)

The argument, remarkably enough, is never settled. The greatness of humility can never be the greatness of greatness.

“Perhaps it is true that neither the light of thought nor the glory of history can tolerate the alleged greatness of humility. Perhaps its majesty has meaning only in the holiness of the person, where, as exaltation of renunciation in the justice of the just, it is the humanity of man and the image of God! Hence the Creator’s last attempt to console the Moon, offended by her title of ‘lesser light.’ ‘The names of the just evoke your title: Jacob, called littled in Amos 7:2, Samule the Little (a holy rabbi of the Talmudic period), King David, called Little David in I Samuel 17:14.’

Like any tedious argument or negotiation, this one can only peter out, without closure or sure resolution. There’s no final entreaty, no last evening-out. A fundamental inequity is seen to pervade, and possibly constitute, the very structure of the world.  There will be no appeasing the Moon, and the Moon sees no point in pressing it further.

‘The Moon has since then remained without any arguments. But Eternal God sees that she is not satisfied.’ A dissatisfaction without arguments, a dissatisfied silence! This is perhaps the residual ambiguity that surrounds the greatness of the saintly and humble who risk being taken for failures! The residue of the stubborn contention of a nature persevering in its being, imperturbably affirming itself. To this there is no response, but for this, precisely, Holiness takes on the responsibility. Here is the humility of God assuming responsibility for this ambiguity. The greatness of humility is also in the humiliation of greatness. It is the sublime kenosis of a God who accepts the questioning of his holiness in a world incapable of restricting itself to the light of his Revelation.‘ (Levinas Kenosis 118)

The parable of the Moon is not, of course, just about the Moon and Creation. Taken more generally, it’s about the humble, good life that, confined to its own unrecognized corner of the world, risks being mistaken for a failure. In being lesser, or in being recognized as lesser, while in some other sense being greater, the saintly, the humble are doomed to inherit, according to Levinas, a “residual ambiguity” with which they must struggle endlessly.

Taking a philosophical turn, Levinas finally defines this inner struggle or dissatisfaction as the ”stubborn contention of a nature persevering in its being, imperturbably affirming itself”, and in this respect, the Moon is an unmistakable figuration of the self, the subject. At once aware of itself and its place in the greater order, the Moon questions both without the possibility of satisfaction. This profound impasse, it would seem, is what most distinguishes the Judaic from the Christian conception of kenosis.

In any event, it makes for great greading alongside his debate with, or really dismissal of, David Harvey’s excellent commentary on recent economic events.

Point and Shoot, 2008, by Martha Rosler

It’s a common accusation of the left that politics, liberal and conservative alike, becomes “aestheticized” through persistent suspensions of law and declarations of emergencies. But what, exactly, Neil Levi asks, in a timely, subtle paper on Carl Schmitt, is so “aesthetic” about political decisionism, a doctrine still fresh on our lips in the Obama era. The following, well-known quote from Schmitt’s Political Theology sums up this philosophy succinctly:

“The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.” (PT, 15)

Richard Wolin, whose interpretation of this passage is widely shared, finds the image of politics promoted here “aesthetic” in spirit, on account of its celebration of “rupture, discontinuity, and shock, which Wolin describes as ‘aesthetic values.’

“Yet Wolin never tells us why Schmitt’s interest in exceptions, hardly unusual in the humanities and social sciences, is ‘quasi-aestheticist,’ never explains why rupture, discontinuity, and shock are especially ‘aesthetic values.’ He takes their status as such for granted and does not ever seem to find it necessary to explain what he means by the term aesthetic.” (Neil Levi, “Carl Schmitt and the Question of the Aesthetic,” New German Critique 34, No. 2 (Summer 2007): 27-43: 35)

But on the other hand, perhaps there is something ‘aesthetic’ about transgression, ‘breaking through the crust’:

“Yet Wolin’s sense that there is something ‘aesthetic’ about Schmitt’s proclamations on the state of exception is understandable. The notion of the extreme has a certain fascination that one might compare to that exerted by certain transgressive works of art. To dwell on the state of exception is obviously to dwell on the more dramatic aspects of political life, on moments that are conflictual and intense. But do these considerations make an interest in the extreme situation quasi-aesthetic?” (35)

Levi indeed observes that Schmitt’s image of transgression “evokes the Russian formalists’ idea of estrangement, or ostranenie“, except that instead of “calling into question [...] outmoded moral and political conventions [...] Schmitt’s estrangement seems designed rather to give one a sense of the awesome sovereign power authorizing and enforcing the laws that govern everyday behavior. Shklovsky’s estrangement ruptures everyday conventions to change the status quo; Schmitt’s exception works to reinforce it” (Levi “Schmitt” 36). Is this, then, the mode of “aesthetics” critics of Schmitt have in mind when they use the term pejoratively?

It would seem not, in that the more progressive theories with which Schmitt’s is contrasted do “not assume that the aesthetic component of a political idea automatically disqualifies it from the realm of politics proper”. Benjamin’s much-touted remarks in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” are for this reason largely inapplicable here, a fact Levi conveys succinctly when he observes that Benjamin’s point was that, for some — e.g. Marinetti, — war, specifically, was “already a work of art”. “Aestheticization” was thus, for Benjamin, more a “mode of perception” than a component of political theory per se (at least in this instance), although, in a different sense entirely, Schmitt does at times define the political “as an intensity, so that any conflict or opposition, once it attains a certain degree of existential antagonism, becomes political” (Levi “Schmitt” 30), a proposition with which Benjamin would most certainly have agreed.

With the more polemical understandings of “aestheticization” out of the way, Levi then turns to Schmitt’s own views on the matter, noting in passing that, “As it happens, Schmitt takes great pains to encourage his readers not to think about politics as aesthetic. What is ultimately so interesting, even amusing, about the charge of aestheticization against Schmitt is that it targets precisely those situations that Schmitt himself thinks distinguish the political from the aesthetic” (Levi “Schmitt” 37). Schmitt in fact spends a great deal of time trying to separate the latter from the former. “The aesthetic,” Levi observes, “functions as a kind of disturbing presence that Schmitt repeatedly disavows” (Levi “Schmitt” 37).

Linking this phenomena to “contemporary diatribes against postmodern irony, especially during the soul-searching that took place in the United States for a few weeks after September 11, 2001” (39), Levi then proceeds to enumerate Schmitt’s identification of “aesthetics” with decadent European bourgeoisie “arts and entertainment”, which for Schmitt categorically functions as the fundamental obstacle to the political. Though Schmitt, and perhaps decisionism in general, does view the arts as a purely negative force, they are nonetheless seen as a powerful and inextricable force acting on, or within, political forces. For Schmitt, the dominance of an “aesthetic perception” announces and prepares political defeat.

“Schmitt sees the aesthetic as the existential negation of the political in two apparently contradictory ways. On the one hand, he suggests that the dominance of aesthetic perception is a precursor to destruction of the Lebensform, to political defeat: “Everywhere in political history the incapacity or the unwillingness to make [the] distinction [between friend and enemy] is a symptom of the political end” (The Concept of the Political, 68). For example, before the Revolution the Russian bourgeoisie romanticized the Russian peasant, he says, while “a relativistic bourgeoisie in a confused Europe searched all sorts of exotic cultures for the purpose of making them an object of its aesthetic consumption” (CP, 68). For Schmitt, romanticization and exoticization of the other are modes of aestheticization. Aesthetic consumption, he thinks, is a condition, like [page] consumption proper, with fatal consequences. It negates political perception—negates, that is, the ability to recognize a mortal threat when one sees it.” (Levi “Schmitt” 38–39)

This final point, which concludes Levi’s piece, points to the limits of the “aestheticization” hypothesis — in several ways. For one, it shows how explicitly-militant political doctrines like Schmitt’s must in the end rely upon a paradoxical relation between aesthetic forms and political disavowals thereof. The bourgeoise romanticiziation of the Russian peasant, much like, say, contemporary American exoticizations of the Middle East, was a form of enmity, not a distraction from it. Indeed, in light of the extensive work on cultural mechanisms of colonial control, represented most forcefully by Said’s Orientalism, Schmitt’s opposing of “romanticization” to “enemy” seems symptomatic of his own clearly militant (not to mention proto-Nazi) political doctrine. Levi’s paper serves to highlight this important distinction, and in the process re-focuses attention away from the aesthetic image summoned up by political discourses to the cultural role of art and aesthetics assigned by those theories, which is something else entirely.

“Sunaisthēsis is the distant origin of the modern “synaesthesia”; the verb from which it was drawn, sunaisthanesthai, can be found in two passages of Aristotle’s treatises. “Formed by the addition of the prefix ‘with’ (sun-) to the verb ‘to sense’ or ‘to perceive’ (aisthanesthai), the expression in all likelihood designated a ‘feeling in common,’ a perception shared by more than one. It is telling that the Stagirite invoked it in his analysis of friendship in the Eudemian as well as the Nicomachean Ethics. [Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics H.12.1254b24, and Nicomachean Ethics 9.9.1170b4] At this point in the development of the Greek language, the term applied to the communal life of many, and its meaning lay far from the one that would later be attributed to it by the commentators.” (Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation. New York: Zone Books, 2007: 81.)

Modern philosophy’s focus on consciousness and cognition has in certain ways served to obscure prior ’corporeal’ conceptions of experience, a fact reflected in translators’ persistent grappling with Aristotle’s terminology, which seems to have no precise modern correlate.  Translations of sunaisthēsis tend to opt for terms that connote its opposite, a mental, cognitive faculty. Thus, in “contemporary discussions of Alexander, Simplicius, Damascius, Philoponus, and Priscian, one very often finds the Greek expression [sunaisthēsis] rendered by ‘consciousness’ and ’self-consciousness’”, even though, to be sure, “other choices have also been made. In his English version of Alexander’s Quaestiones, Robert W. Sharples consistently translates the term as ’self-awareness,’ and in his edition of Alexander’s commentary on the De sensu, Alan Towey opts for another expression, further still from the modern idiom: ‘joint perception.’” (Heller-Roazen Touch 83) These textual decisions seem all the more important when we consider the fact that Aristotle doesn’t seem to have a term for ‘consciousness’ even when he’s not talking about sunaisthēsis.

 ”It has been noted more than once that Aristotle, a child of his times, seems to have lacked any exact equivalent for the modern term. At times, the fact has been presented simply as a matter of linguistic means, as when Charles H. Kahn remarked that ‘the [page] Greek of Aristotle’s day has no term which really corresponds to the modern usage of “consciousness,” for the process or condition of awareness as such,’ or when Richard Sorabji observed that ‘Aristotle has no word corresponding to “mental act,” or to Descartes’ cogitatio (consciousness),’ or when, finally, Deborah K.W. Modrak noted that ‘Aristotle has no general term for consciousness.’ (Kahn, “Sensation and Consciousness in Aristotle’s Psychology,” p. 22; Sorabji, “Body and Soul in Aristotle,” p. 68; Modrak, Aristotelian Theory of Consciousness?” p. 160.)” (Heller-Roazen Touch 38–39)

Modern mistranslations aside, the concept of sunaisthēsis can be seen to have split, and taken on new meanings, over the centuries since Aristotle first introduced the word. For one, beginning with Galen, the original empathetic and communal connotations were overtaken by a more physiological, perceptual register, which remains to this day. Indeed, as Heller-Roazen describes it, sunaisthēsis became a word for sense as consciousness, a collaboration of the senses that produces awareness, attention, or ‘registration’.

“One of the earliest indications of a shift in the sense of the expression can be found in the medical literature that flourished after the beginning of the Christian era. It has been noted that Galen, for instance, employs sunaisthēsis to designate a sensation ‘in common,’ not in that it is shared by many but in that it reaches a single body all at once, while consisting, in effect, of multiple physiological affections: the physician can characterize [page] pain, for example, as being ‘felt simultaneously with the perception of the seething of the blood’ (meta sphugmou sunaisthēseōs). [Galen, On the Therapeutic Method 8.1 (10.875.14 Kühn)] In other medical authors of the period, such as Aretaeus, one finds the nominal and verbal forms of the expression used in a much more general sense: here the word appears to designate the acts of ‘detection,’ ‘registration,’ and ‘realization’ of any sensation. [Aretaeus, Arataeus 2.9.2] The word in this broad meaning soon left the terrain of medicine and entered common usage, and it was not long before authors as diverse as Philo Judaeus and Sextus Empiricus could invoke it to refer to the process of ‘noticing’ or ‘remarking’ upon a felt fact. [Polybius 5.72.5; Philo Judaeus, De virtutibus 76; Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos 9.68]“  (Heller-Roazen Touch 81–82)

This concept, and its historic tension with theories of consciousness, seems especially relevant today, in that the contemporary ‘practical sciences’ — behavioral advertising, product testing, user-based design, etc. — rely on a conception of the subject that seems closer, in principle, to synaesthesia than to, say, the intellect.  Though the former now for the most part refers to an ‘inappropriate’ transfer between senses — where, for instance, you see what you hear — it also refers to the normal developmental process of ‘integrating your senses‘. However, in a much wider sense, synaesthesia is regularly induced, or manipulated, through artistic and commercial practices. “The way the brain buys” is, as the phrase suggests, in many ways the result of a complex orchestration of stimuli, environmental conditions, and subjective desires. It is now well-understood that conscious mental acts are only one, small part of the puzzle.

Indeed, product experience, for instance, is increasingly shown to rely upon subliminal, or at least less-than-attentive, sensory factors. Ludden & Schifferstein’s remarkable paper on the “Effects of Visual-Auditory Incongruity on Product Expression and Surprise” is the case in point. “Product experience,” they conclude, ”is influenced by information from all the senses.

Our experiments provide insight into how sounds contribute to the overall experience of a product’s expression. We manipulated the sounds of dust busters and juicers so that they either did or did not fit the expressions of the products’ appearances. In some, but not all cases, we found an inverse relationship between the degree-of-fit of a sound and the degree of surprise evoked. Furthermore, we found in some cases that the expression of a product’s sound influenced the overall expression of that product.

Though it’s a little odd that Aristotle would be vindicated in this way, the point to be grasped here is that, beyond deliberation and decision-making, experience is also, in a deeper sense than expected, a complex, sub-conscious negotiation of sensory material. What is noticed, what might seem the most important feature, may, thus, be a decoy or constitutive distraction from a more elaborate interplay of explicit and subordinate affects and features. You might think you’re buying the juicer for its juicing abilities when, in fact, it’s that and more — its sound, its look, and the degree of fit between the two. Which is precisely why Harley Davidson has been trying to trademark the Harley-Davidson roar. They’ve realized that it’s a bigger factor than you might think in the appeal of their product and your decision to buy it.

All of this points the way to a recovery of the ‘communal’ aspect of Aristotle’s sunaisthēsis – if only because, ultimately, the relative correlation between a sound and an image, between the juicer’s look and its whir, is cultural, emergent, and short-lived. Though we can’t go into it here, this forgotten dimension to sunaisthēsis, and synaesthesia, constitutes that other ‘common sense’ – the general, widespread, uncharted folk knowledge base that defines a people and their shared aesthetic sensibilities.

Textile display, 1972, Eaton's Department Store

There are, it would seem, two kinds of novelty: the one that breaks from tradition, ushering in a new order, and the one that perpetuates the same under the guise of change. The latter, associated with fads and trends, marks the logic of consumption, whereas the former, querying the new and indeterminate, suggests a revolutionary break from the status quo. Distinguishing the two may, however, prove more difficult than the language suggests. Even for Adorno, the first to really bracket-off the commodity in this fashion, breaks from tradition dangerously compare to the logic of tradition itself:

“It (the concept of Modernism) does not negate earlier artistic exercises as styles have always done; however it negates tradition as such. To that extent, it ratifies the bourgeois principle in art. Its abstractness is linked to the commodity character of art.” (Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. (Frankfurt, 1970), 38; quoted in Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, tr. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 59.)

The “abstractness” common to the negation of tradition and the bourgeois principle of art is the ‘questioning’ integral to tradition itself – which appears, in retrospect, as a succession of fads, styles, aesthetics. Peter Bürger, the philosopher of the avant-garde, so too defers to Adorno’s claim that “In an essentially non-traditionalist society (the bourgeois), esthetic tradition is a priori questionable. The authority of the new is that of the historically ineluctable” (Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 38; quoted in Bürger, 59). Distinguishing the commodity-novelty from the emancipatory-novelty becomes accordingly difficult, if not categorically impossible. Which is to say, if art, too, is driven by a need for “newness”, then the commodity (in this regard at least) may not fundamentally, only substantially, differ from the artwork.

Bürger, for his part, notes this in passing – “It must be remembered that where art does in fact submit to the coercion to bring what is new, it can hardly be distinguished from a fad” – but goes on to accredit the ‘fad effect’ solely to projections of “the person who wants to see it there” (Bürger, 61). Here, in a sharp change of direction, the failing of the artwork is attributed to its apparent over-openness to interpretation, which is to say, the viewer’s appropriation of the work toward ‘whatever’ end. The work as fad – Warhol’s 100 Campbell soup cans, he gives as an example – serves as a projection screen for the subject’s specifically consumerist desires. So, it would seem, novelty is really a function of interpretation and falls squarely on the side of the subject, not the work. (But if it’s only a problem of interpretation, then how is it that certain works are regularly susceptible to this subjective error?)

Bürger moreover attribrutes this form of meaninglessness to the Neo-avant-garde in particular, “which stages for a second time the avant-gardiste break with tradition [and] becomes a manifestation that is void of sense and that permits the positing of any meaning whatever” (61). It is in this sense that the historical avant-garde is perceived as itself sliding into novelty; even the name, neo avant-garde, is designed to mark this empty repetition. The concept of the new, he adds, is “too general and nonspecific [… and] provides no criteria for distinguishing between faddish (arbitrary) and historically necessary newness” (63). Indeed, for Bürger the concept of the new can only fail to adequately “designate what is decisive in such a break with tradition”; it hence remains on the side of “the means of artistic representation” (63).

Bürger’s attitude toward the question of newness in avant-garde works here approaches Gianni Vattimo’s oft-quoted condemnation of the commodity character of the new:

“in a consumer society continual renewal (of clothes, tools, buildings) is already required physiologically for the system simply to survive. What is new is not in the least ‘revolutionary’ or subversive; it is what allows things to stay the same.” (Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 7; quoted in Leslie Paul Thiele, “Postmodernity and the Routinization of Novelty: Heidegger on Boredom and Technology,” Polity 29, no. 4 (1997): 511.)

Vattimo, in this way, extends something of a ‘traditional’ view of novelty, stressing sameness and continuity across non-revolutionary, non-decisive innovations, thus posing a definite choice between a newness that renews and a newness that breaks. Indeed, it is only on account of novelty’s failure to measure up to the absolute break (which never comes) that it is able to appear as a ruse, simulation, or superficiality. Very much in keeping with the Frankfurt School strain that defines as the “surface” of culture that which, with respect to the “objective structure,” appears only as an “expression” of it (–to the extent where, for instance, Adorno can observe that “Baudelaire’s relationship to Wagner is as dialectical as his association with a prostitute” [1]), Vattimo’s position seems to return us to an absolute distinction between surface and structure, sameness and revolution.

Change, however, never comes, and anything that does is, by definition and ‘in advance’, ‘commodified’, ‘absorbed’, ‘appropriated’. This general schema itself seems to have changed very little since Adorno. Nina Power recently summarized Alain Badiou’s opening remarks, for the Communism conference at Birkbeck, as holding-out for just this kind of revolution:

“Nobody represents a party at the conference, everyone is representing his or herself. No party/power. No Kim Jong-Il, no Fidel Castro. There is a collective search for new use of the word communism after terrible experiences of the last century. Collection of phil/pol singularities – we are on the side of novelty, creativity. We are on the side of communism in its newness.” (”on the idea of communism, birkbeck, 13-15 March 2009“, IT 18 March 2009)

This position of course goes hand in hand with a total disavowal of capitalism, the ’surface’ of culture, the actual, day to day events (with a small ‘e’) ’sustaining’ the ’system’. Steven Shaviro captures well this pseudo-libertarian denunciation – of ‘the State’, political economy, economics — that continues to paralyze this region of the Left.

In particular, not only did Badiou leave out political economy from his descriptions of how the revolutionary event might challenge the capitalist status quo; but also, when questioned on this score, he explicitly denounced any attention to political economy as being the sin of “economism”. All this is caaptured in the video here. Badiou claims that economics can only be part of “the situation” which it is the business of a new “truth,” produced in an event and by fidelity to that event, to disrupt. Badiou shows his Maoist pedigree (as Ken Wark remarked to me) in this insistence on politics as the ultimate ruling instance. Instead of engaging in the critique of political economy, and seeing the political as so intimately intertwined with the economic as to makie any separation of them impossible, Badiou relegates economy, in a nearly Gnostic sort of way, to the realm of the irretrievably fallen. His notion of a pure politics (and a pure philosophy) unsullied by any contact with, or ‘contamination’ by, the economic, is really the mirror image of today’s neoclassical economics which imagines itself to be value-neutral and apolitical. What this comes down to is that Badiou is a Maoist without the Marxism — a stance that I find rather terrifying.

At his best, Badiou is a kind of no-Kantian — this is an appelation that he would reject, of course, and one that most contemporary philosophers would find damning (though I mean it as a sort of praise). What I mean by Badiou’s neo-Kantianism is that his whole notion of the event, and of the ethics of remaining loyal to the event, is something like a late-modernist version of the categorical imperative. The event is singular, and yet of absolutely universal import — it commands our obedience, regardless of our merely personal, “pathological” implications. Badiou even defines the event, and the way we are called to be faithful to it, in entirely “formalist” terms — we are commanded by the very form of the event, rather than by anything having to do with its specific content. (Steven Shaviro, “Communism at Birkbeck“, The Pinocchio Theory 17 March 2009)

This attitude would be harmless enough on its own, but to the extent that it necessitates a kind of blanket rejection of, and accompanying disdain for, the world, its effects can be drastic, sweeping. Alex of Splintering Bone Ashes for his part takes the Badiouean line to its conclusion. Since everything that comes into existence is ‘new’, and since there is no intrinsic worth to ‘newness’ per se, everything under the sun is a pointed agent of specifically-capitalist subjectivation — even Badiou’s Event, it would seem.

“But this has further implications, that there is no necessary reason that music for example should change at such rates, that there is no intrinsic moral worth in “the new” per se in the slightest. Pop music is entirely a creature made possible by capitalism. For many thousands of years folk and Art musics likewise changed only very slowly, but since the economic systems built around them (localist minstrels or music for ritual, or the institutional support of wealthy patrons) did not demand endless novelty this was entirely unproblematic. This is a point upon which I believe we might wish to take Badiou to task, (and perhaps modernism as a whole). The valorisation of the new seems to be an artifact of a certain kind of capitalistic subjectivation, and as Nick Srnicek of Accursed Share pointed out here, why change at all? Why not slow emergence instead of rapid revolutionary change? Why not absolute stasis? Why valorise the new? Capitalism’s endless turn-over of products and services serves an obvious purpose within its own terms, but the claim towards inherent worth (whether capitalistic or modernist) is on shaky ground (i.e.- is a massively under-theorized discursive a priori).” (Alex, “Rupturing as foundation“, Splintering Bone Ashes 20 February 2009)

"Ads" (Antje Peters, 2008) refers to typical advertisement compositions. "Through not showing actual brands the focus is on stereotypic style elements and color."

The commodity, in this view, is but a form or function whose content by definition lacks importance or revolutionary relevance. Which brings to the fore a number of easily-debunked assumptions about the commodity, the first being that the folk arts, by contrast, ”changed only very slowly”. No matter that this assertion is, for all intents and purposes, immeasurable, not to mention speculative, it is a myth necessary for the Badiouean blanket rejection to operate. But if the folk arts could be shown to change rapidly all the same, the thesis that capitalism is at heart an engine of constant change, for change’s sake, would begin to fall apart. After all, isn’t the ‘demand for endless novelty’ a feature of art, and culture, that literally predates capitalism? (To take just one example, Francis Bacon wrote of this problem well before capitalism, much less commodity capitalism, existed.) Which is why, to prevent these kinds of objections from being raised, the ’surface’ of culture must be constantly separated-out from the structure beneath it, lest the ‘contents’ of the commodity, or the actual succession of changes, start to matter. Nick of The Accursed Share expresses this necessity succinctly:

“It is a common place today to note that capitalism is more than capable of integrating any culturally revolutionary subjects - in many cases, it even produces them, or at least actively incites novelty. So a resistance to capitalism and a viable alternative can’t be found on a cultural level — it needs to operate on the economic structures of modern capitalism.” (Nick, “Crisis and Change“, The Accursed Share 26 September 2008)

Voidmanufacturing, for their part, breaks-down the Platonic assumptions lurking behind this surface-structure binary, which is indeed derived from Adorno. Though the structure is supposed to be invisible or non-manifest (otherwise it would just be part of the surface), for the culture industry to be described or assigned some kind of a power dynamic, the structure must eventually be associated with a real-world practice, with authorities and institutions. And when this is invariably achieved through a characterization of the corporation, a strictly top-down, hierarchical process is described, one in which a “smooth supply” runs downward, with total determination.

“A constant sameness governs the relationship to the past as well. What is new about the phase of mass culture compared with the late liberal stage is the exclusion of the new. The machine rotates on the same spot. While determining consumption it excludes the untried as a risk. The movie-makers distrust any manuscript which is not reassuringly backed by a bestseller. Yet for this very reason there is never-ending talk of ideas, novelty, and surprise, of what is taken for granted but has never existed. Tempo and dynamics serve this trend. Nothing remains as of old; everything has to run incessantly, to keep moving. For only the universal triumph of the rhythm of mechanical production and reproduction promises that nothing changes, and nothing unsuitable will appear. Any additions to the well-proven culture inventory are too much of a speculation. The ossified forms – such as the sketch, short story, problem film, or hit song – are the standardised average of late liberal taste, dictated with threats from above. The people at the top in the culture agencies, who work in harmony as only one manager can with another, whether he comes from the rag trade or from college, have long since reorganised and rationalised the objective spirit. One might think that an omnipresent authority had sifted the material and drawn up an official catalogue of cultural commodities to provide a smooth supply of available mass-produced lines. The ideas are written in the cultural firmament where they had already been numbered by Plato – and were indeed numbers, incapable of increase and immutable.” (voidmanufacturing, “Adorno and Horkheimer’s classic essay on bullshit“, Void Manufacturing 8 September 2008)

Though Adorno’s (and Badiou’s) model is problematic at best, paralyzing at worst, we are still left with the problem of capitalist appropriation, the general theoretical contours of which I remain largely unconvinced. Or, to put it differently, I don’t see this phenomena as by any means exclusive to capitalism. Is it heightened through a certain market logic? Probably. But, again, I don’t see how ‘appropriation’ is not a constant, and therefore highly ambiguous (perhaps unhelpful), dynamic of history in general. Pre-capitalist medieval art, for example, could easily be described in terms of aesthetic appropriations governed by various cultural dominances. Resistances of all kinds — heretical sects, say, throughout the pre-Protestant era – have always been strategically, and unstrategically, incorporated into the institution resisted, be it through deliberate tactics or sustained interaction. To describe capitalist appropriation is only to describe a species thereof, provided that we even want to maintain the theoretical predominance of this concept. Why is this distinction so important? Because without it resistance to capitalist systems in particular would seem dramatically, perhaps programmatically, futile. Furthermore, to confine the powers of ‘appropriation’ to late capitalism alone would give it an almost metaphysical power – according to which everything in resistance is ‘absorbed’ ‘in advance’ – that inflates its already formidable capacity to crush opposition.

The ongoing debates over the difference between immaterial production and classic industrial capitalism have in many ways made these conclusions inevitable, if only because ‘continual structural features’ have to be discerned across more and more diverse historical periods, which can suggest that perhaps some of the features we thought were strictly capitalist are in fact more general. Steven Shaviro thus finds the language of ‘novelty or reversion’ somewhat inappropriate, if only because neither can account for ’structural features’ that persist across each:

“Now, I am largely in agreement with Hardt (and Negri, and some of the economists associated with their position, like Marazzi and even to some extent Moulier Boutang) about the transformations in capitalism over the last fifty years, and especially since the 1970s. But I am not sure I entirely accept the framework through which Hardt interprets these developments. In particular, I do not think that immaterial production involves a more “direct” expropriation of the common than was the case when industrial capitalism extracted value. It is true, as I have already said, that a lot of this new source of capital appropriation comes from a kind of “primitive accumulation” — corporations are now appropriating the commons in the form of things like genomes and songs and procedures of working, in the same way that landlords appropriated the commons of land at the time of the enclosures. But I don’t think that this is either a novelty or a reversion. It is rather the case that “primitive accumulation” never went away; it is a continual structural feature of capitalism, and was at work in the industrial age as much as it was in the agricultural stage, and as much as it is still today. Capitalism always both appropriates to itself things that it didn’t produce — and this precisely by “privatizing” them — and extracts a surplus from the processes of production that it directly initiates and supervises” (Steven Shaviro, “Communism conference — Michael Hardt,” The Pinochio Theory 16 march 2009)

In this regard, the ‘direct expropriation of the common’ starts to seem a lot more diverse in site and mechanism than current theories of capitalist appropriation allow. To be sure, the market’s absorption of presumably revolutionary practices goes hand in hand with its opposite: the political redressing of the same in the guise of the new, which is by no means a strictly capitalist mechanism. Maximilian Forte’s cutting analysis of the rhetoric of novelty where there is none is just one certain example:

“On what basis do we call it a “radical new experiment,” when there is a long history of anthropological service to imperialism, a fact promoted by Montgomery McFate in her own writing? Anyone who knows anything at all about anthropology in the last 30 years would know that we have had these debates before, and anthropologists have served in counterinsurgency programs long before now. So why feign such ignorance, or is it real ignorance? Why the preposterous claims to “novelty” when there is nothing new here? Why the foolish appropriation of the term “radical” in connection with an ideologically reactionary stance and imperial militarism? How many more times will the degraded salesmen pitch their product in such hackneyed terms? Why not just stand for what you mean to say, and what you mean to think, instead of couching it in such awfully banal language of “NEW!”, “experimental!”, “applied!” and “radical!”?” (Maximilian Forte, “A ‘Radical New Experiment’ in ‘Anthropology’? What HTS is NOT“, Open Anthropology 27 August 2008)

The goal here isn’t to argue for some kind of universal notion of appropriation, novelty, absorption, and so forth, though I do find the current theory of the commodity just as totalizing (across geographies, markets, populations, and objects). One proof of this is to be found not in Badiou’s books, but in their market existence. Surely even he must consider the ‘contents’ of his own published commodities relevant, if not transcendent of their commercial ‘form’. This is no small matter. If his works are not just commodities, then perhaps similar things could be said for other commodities or for the revolutionary possibilities for the commodity. And this is precisely where I would like this argument to take us: to the commodity, not away from it. Still reeling from a Marxism that privleges the ‘moment’ of production over consumption, leftist thought is now discernibly lagging behind shifts in other domains — design, for instance.

Along these lines, the most obvious short-coming of the recent Communism conference (aside from its non-representation of the Global South) is its complete lack of interest in environmentalism and the green movement. Which is perhaps no coincidence, in that the green movement is consolidated largely around the commodity form, theoretically and practically. Green design and sustainability in general takes as its locus precisely what the Badiouean rejects — namely, the object, its construction, and its relation to the production process. Though it’s true that rethinking the commodity alone won’t do much for labor conditions or the distribution of wealth, at least not directly, it is nonetheless increasingly clear that a thorough reform of objects would entail the most fundamental, revolutionary reorganization of society. But to begin to tackle these questions, in a philosophical as well as practical manner, would require an interest in the very ‘contents’ of the forms we have been led to disavow.

Notes

[1] Theodor Adorno, “Letters to Walter Benjamin,” in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (New York: Verso, 2007), 119.

* CFP: “Novelty, Transformation and Change” Pli 21 [conference website]

“If philosophy is the attempt “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”, as Sellars (1962) put it, philosophy should not ignore technology. It is largely by technology that contemporary society hangs together. It is hugely important not only as an economic force but also as a cultural force. During the last two centuries, much philosophy of technology has been concerned with the impact of technology on society. Mitcham (1994) calls this type of philosophy of technology ‘humanities philosophy of technology’ because it is continuous with social science and the humanities. In addition to this, there is also a branch of the philosophy of technology that is concerned with technology in itself. This entry focuses on the latter branch of the philosophy of technology, which seeks continuity with the philosophy of science rather than social science and the humanities. The approach is analytic; other approaches are possible, but will not be discussed.”