is truth virtuous?

the disinformation society
in which consciously manipulated statistics, invented figures and downright untruth circulate unchecked on a par with evidence.
- in the first instance, to establish a standard of truth adequate to public discourse, but rather more
- to investigate the terms of a polity in which the pretence to evidence-based policy is constantly undercut by the triumph of dogma over experience or evidence and the willingness to force constructed 'evidence' to serve argument rather than vice versa.
- and to consider whether truth in any of its manifestations still has a role in politics/the political - or whether the distinction rests, inter alia, on the status and mode of truth

such that if the management of public affairs is characterised by untruth and disinformation, information and truth belong to the unaccounted (what is left out of account, the part of no part) clamouring to govern itself. Truth as abandoned virtue of political life

positing the gulf between truth as voice and truth as representation, spoken on-behalf-of

therefore
is truth virtuous?
a historical question, administratively defunct but symbolic thus also an afterlife of truth
constructed - of necessity - not only cynically
so the question of the objective/subjective/perceptual/material moment of truth
[bad faith pervades professional life]
truth then as enjeu/gage, thus as untrue or LOCAL - truth as epiphany, exception

which is either a laudably modest ambition or a heinous abdication of political truth in order to secure a personal nirvana

Mediating (Not Defining) Truth

Working slowly towards the large project I hope to start towards the end of 2017, some posts tagged "political aesthetics"

There's no point trying to define truth, at least in this project - this is a work on aesthetics, and about how truth, however defined, is enacted in some particular kinds of mediation

but nonetheless the thing comes up

1. truth as a something-out-there which is true whether or not we can see and understand it (God, the arche-fossil, gravitational waves, Being . . . )
2.truth is produced by knowing it: a thing becomes true when we can state it
2.b truth is a quality of statements
2.c truth is produced by the method through which we approach it, ie the discourse that gives us ways to make well-formed statements that can be tested by the methods of that discourse (experiment, mathematics, statistics, logic etc)
3. truth is produced by actions, among which verbal actions are only one type. We (variously defined) make things true by enacting them. (this might ally with the proposal that truth is an agreement among a group to accept such-and-such a class of statements as true)

this doesn't give much to the proposition that there is a non-human truth, of the kinds argued for by eco-critique, that has physical etcetera effects on us, regardless of us knowing them; but such that once we do know them we are under an ethical obligation to act on that knowledge and that truth. This would also be true of those human-made truths we call situations or conjunctures - that there is something to be known about a state of affairs; that miscellaneous media forms have a claim not to produce them by stating them but to mediate them to humans (and vice versa)

Emphasising mediation removes the either/or – it permits both the formative (but not generative) power of media in mediations (eg measuring instruments, art) without thereby denying that there is a situation which can be mediated, while also preserving the corollary that mediation, as an action, is not free from the situation, and to that extent not only translates it for an other elsewhere and in another time, but acts in the situation by mediating it. (not merely quantum phenomenon)

the cost of the claim to truth, or at least of realism, is that the mediation alters what it observes; this alteration is the truth (the alteration of both the medium and the worlds it mediates between). The 4-part distinction of truth in the project plan makes sense then by asking what aspects of truth we learn from mediations attempting to be true to the object, to the medium, to perception and to the subject of truth, which in our epoch sees itself as a generator of truth, quite as much as a receiver (Kandinsky and Trump have that - and other things - in common)

(started by Ian Hacker's note on C.S. Peirce and his struggles with the idea of truth, p.212 of The Taming of Chance)

Against Connectivity

At the start of summer I gave a paper of this name at NECS in Potsdam: here's a snippet.

In some indefinite but I hope near future this will become part of the argument of the next book, Anecdotal Evidence, itself both an outgrowth from a paper published by NECS under that title and a partial methodological portal to the much dreamed mad major project on Political Aesthetics

. . . .The self is a performance of its history of 'repression', how it has been conformed to the demands of social living. It is easy to imagine a place-based, local culture whose 'ways of being' or 'whole way of life' generate collective agreement to a shared set of mores, and so to a common mode of self.

Network capital today prefers a non-self whose desire is not at all repressed, not at all socially shaped, but plugged into and endlessly receptive to an unstemmable offer of tailor-made satisfactions. Of course the idea that these satisfactions respond to elemental needs is bogus. They speak only to the needs which their articulation with capital has produced. If the self is ab origine alienated by its socialisation, the consumerist non-self is doubly alienated: from its biology and from the framing of desire in the repression of biology in its encounter with the social. Rather than freeing some original desire, the new need is constructed on this double alienation, as a satisfaction external not only to the self but to the social, in which satisfaction is no longer indefinitely displaced but imaginarily instantaneous, and the repression that forms desire in its image is itself repressed in favour of a compulsory orgy of consumerism. It is no surprise that the deracinated and doubly-alienated subject yearns for and validates the very connectivity that has created it and its demand for networks.

What then are these networks that we long to be connected with? On the one hand, they are the many-to-many constellation that has taken the place of community, a world of parties and holidays, friendships and love-affairs, in a community of the like-minded we catch glimpses of in adverts and celebrity lifestyle reportage. We want to be connected to an other place where people who would really appreciate me are already connected and waiting for me to join them. That is the fantasy. In reality, networks are immense technological infrastructures of optic fibre, server farms, satellites and transoceanic cables whose environmental implications are breathtaking. The internet, increasingly integrated with microwave links and cellphone networks, RFID tags and barcodes, credit and loyalty cards, is a network of physical networks. The remnant of a utopian movement towards autonomous self-governance remains, but the internet is physically built, owned and operated almost universally by corporations. The information superhighway realises Marx's fantasia on the construction of roads(Grundrisse, 532)

The peak moment of capital can be recognised when all social needs are fulfilled neither by communities nor by states but by capital. Roads are a social need, but they are also vital to capital when the falling rate of profit forces acceleration and massification not only of production but distribution, and by the same token demands intense speed-up of the physical act of exchange, which places accelerated demands on consumers likewise to consume more, faster and more efficiently. All those minerals and sub-assemblies in our computers and phones are nothing but costs until they have been sold: the faster they are converted back into money, the better. In the interests of maximising consumption of its necessarily permanently expanding production, Marx argued, capital would eventually take over infrastructural projects like roads and, by his time, railways and canals; and in our time communication networks. Needless to say, having paid the piper, capital calls the tune: networks which serve its needs are the highest priority.

The Mass Image and Anecdotal Evidence

Pressures of work have kept me away from social media and this blog. Summer provides a moment or two of respite. I am working up a book expanding the ideas in a paper from a couple of years back, Anecdotal Evidence, and doing a few papers leading towards the next big project on political aesthetics. A bridging piece is online at academia which posits the existence of (in a passage extracted from the paper)

The mass image – the huge composite picture of the world which is being assembled in databases at Microsoft, Instagram and Google – goes far beyond the single image even though it retains some of its defining qualities. The mass image employs humans to produce a universe of image-commodities that we and others exchange, reproduce and consume. In the era of industrial production, we made houses, tools and clothing because the artifice of comfort held a cruel world at bay. In the age of the mass image, we make and consume pictures because we ascribe to the mass image the ability to replace the unhappy world with happy pictures.

Each image taken negates the scene it captures and replaces it with an image. As the absolute number of images increases, negation produces the mass image which replaces the entirety of the world, not just the unique scene, with a mass of pictures. A culture of compulsorily happy pictures – the culture of Facebook and Instagram – necessarily negates happiness by replacing happiness with pictures. If there is one thing we know about happiness, it is that it isn't single. The aggregate, singular, mass image negates happiness a second time by re-imagining it as normative, coherent, stable and universal.

Flusser fans will not find it hard to see the great man's influence, revivified by the excellent translations (and beautiful books) coming out from Univocal Press. Some developments of these thoughts will be the matter of a keynote I'm doing in Potsdam at the NECS conference at the end of next week with the working title "Against Connectivity"

Community (version 0)

(in)dividual: the self is a crust laid over a swarm. Self as singularity (that is effectively as multiplicity) is a social product, not of or for all time. Communication is not only the fallen state of primal mediation but its overcoming in the form of a communicative community which we demand because we do not possess it. In parallel the dividual is the crushed detritus of a) the destruction of community but also b) of the destruction of self as desire + data (subject as source of its own becoming and as signified). After desire, this dividual remnant stands in need, . . . . of the common (methodologically: Ontology crumbles in the mind's hands as soon as they touch it. We reach out to time, and though it falls apart as concept, we do not believe any the less in its actuality proved by all things temporal, including the time it takes to think time's impossibility. Community is of an other order. Sociologically, after Tönnies, it is quite possible to believe that it no-longer exists, and quite easy to believe that since its no-longer existence is a trope of Western thought since the Odyssey at least, that its failure to exist, or to exist otherwise than as always already over, is in fact its peculiar ontology. In this crumbling in our or any conceptual fingers, community is of a kind with the video image which, in its increasingly minuscule operations, is even more prone to fail to exist than the analog moving image, whose composition as both image and moving depends on the constant eradication of the previous image. The scanned image adds to that ephemerality the fading of the first lines before the last has even been illuminated, a constant self-erasure paralleled by the geography of transmission that ensures that the image is never where its referent has been. The I that speaks from a Skype screen is not even the self-contradictory person that speaks and is signified face-to-face, now manifestly not even the source of the enunciation. But then again, it is only on condition of this imcompossibility that "I" exists in the age of communication, and only on this condition of post-Hegelian compound contradiction that the urge to find community becomes urgent. Community is necessary not because it is lost but because it is a need generated in the failure of supplementation to create a shell robust enough to contain the fragments of a self denuded of autonomy in the very hyperindividuation that consumerism required after the collapse of the nuclear family as core unit of consumption

Against Tolerance

I seem to have written this in August 2015 and forgotten to publish: it comes as an outtake from Finite Media, which I hope will be out by the end of 2016

Toleration names the absence of dialogue. What I tolerate is beneath attention, marginal to my world. It is the kind of tolerance Jodi Dean (2009: 85-7) notes in G.W. Bush's tolerance of dissent: awareness without exchange of reasons. In a culture of complaint, we rail against the unforeseeable – tsunamis, bush fires, floods, hurricanes – and tolerate the greed, corruption and destructive acts of the oligarchy. The political event is a refusal of this kind of tolerance: even of the much praised liberal virtue of tolerance that allows the unaccounted other to live peaceably without threat of Holocaust. Any end to tolerance is portrayed, in the discourse of the current order, as descent into an atavistic Hobbesian war of each against all, but as the political thinkers cited in this chapter all argue in their different ways, it is tolerance itself that, by regarding as unchallengeable the ascendancy of those who do count and can speak, descends into monoculturalism. By excluding, it creates bitterness and revenge, or permits itself its ethnic cleansing under the hypocritical guise of immigration control and security, restrained only by the right to live a bare life. To refuse tolerance is to refuse the illusion of universality, the common claim of representative democracy. The political act contests the silence of tolerance in pointing to the meticulous exclusion of the nonhuman. In thinking the unthinkable politics of the nonhuman, we open the space for a different order, different economies and polities that we cannot reach through shopping and voting. Such a political event throws into question not just the privilege of the human but what underpins it: the identity we award ourselves as human. In the end under the regime of Universal Human Rights all identities are subsumed under the single identity of naked humanity. What is at stake in the articulation of non-human demand is the end not only of rights but of human identity. This is only possible if the demand that instigates it is strictly incommensurable with the existing order, as the demand for happiness is. But if the demand were for square circles, the principle would be the same: it is the contradiction between tolerance and communication, between the true non-communication of the tolerant order and the actual communication of the unheard and ignored, that drives the event.

To break the unity of the screen-image system through the materiality of segmented flow is the revenge of the rationalized on their rational progenitor.

Latin and Greek

"Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of it." This bon mot attributed to C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, in 1928 applies to the word automobile as well. Marshall McLuhan more or less began media studies with his account of these technologies in The Mechanical Bride and Understanding Media. His tradition is alive and well with Paul Virilio (though he likes his Greek dromophilia and picnolepsia).

For the next generation, especially the first generation of (frequently male) internet scholars, Latin roots mattered: community, communication, commonwealth, commons. . . .

For the newer and largely female generation, Greek fights back: synaesthesia, synapses, sympathy, syncretism . . . with a much more embodied but still utopian view of the world.

Sitting down to write a preface to the 2nd edition of Jussi Parikka's Contagions, it's interesting to note how Latin, of a slightly different inflection, fights back: contact, conflict, and the horrors of the contemporary. Perhaps this means nothing at all. Or perhaps it marks the conditions for a new connective synecdoche.