Doubt

The meteorologists predicted today's weather yesterday, with reasonable accuracy, and with a respectable degree of probability.

But predictions of longer and more devastating fire seasons may be a) incorrect (the further ahead the future, the more determinants there are in play, and the less assurance that predictions will be accurate; prediction becomes statistical -- rather than the accuracy of predicting a cool change around 4.00pm). Similarly the larger the scale, the more abstract the forces: not the causality of a weather system approaching from the SE at 5..00pm but combinations of dipole, el Ninõ, ocean surface temperatures . . . Counting in anthropogenic forces including carbon and greenhouse gases, water extraction etc no longer clearly causal, opening the field for doubt.

In a previous note I worked with truth's antonyms as lies, fictions and fantasies, using the distinction that lies and fictions are not believed but truths and fantasies are. Now we need to address doubt. and to distinguish it from systematic (Cartesian) doubt

Systematic doubt, historically the basis for the Western critical tradition, has been a tool for critical theory versus scientism and common sense. But today it is embraced in the new tactics of populist neo-nationalism (with which neo-liberalism clothes itself in the era of its triumph, which is also the era of the crisis of US hegemony. Every nation positions itself urgently to make the most of the rise of China (and beyond that of India, and somewhere down the line of Turkey) as well as in relation to its reluctant and often rebellious citizenry (and of course against its traditional foes, indigenous and migrant). Preliminary distinctions:

DOUBT 1 is a fortified, strategic position that refuses truth by characterising it as merely one belief among many in the 'marketplace of ideas' - ie a pro-position that all truths are equal.

DOUBT 2 is a critical move in the process of argument, a transitional stage, a recognition of the fundamentally antagonistic relation between truths. Any truth asserts itself as the only one.This is also the case with highly specific truths (it will rain at 4.00pm tomorrow; it is raining now), where the particular stands over against the universal. Doubt 2, critical doubt, asserts the irreducible difference between truths.

Dominant Ideology

“Environmentalism, the dominant ideology” is itself an ideological statement.

The top ten companies in the Fortune Global 500 for 2019 include six oil companies, two automotive, the Chinese national energy grid and Walmart. All are carbon dependent. They range between 0.5 and 0.27 trillion dollars of earnings in 2019.

The leaders of the USA and China, the largest (almost 25% of the global economy) and second largest (15.5%) economies, are not environmentalists. Nor is the leader of India, the fastest growing economy and about to achieve the largest population, with GDP of 10.5 trillion and growth rate around 7.5%.

An ideology is 'dominant' only when it is embraced by those who dominate. Neither politically nor economically can environmentalism be shown to belong to those who dominate the world today.

The source is Rupert Darwall, described as an 'opinion contributor'to The Hill , picked up via Apple's News app. They might consider what they think constitutes "news"

Return to blogging

When I was leaving the UK, Gareth Stanton observed that this once live site had become moribund. The fact is that I was writing stuff - notably Anecdotal Evicence - and didn't need a place to put thoughts while I had a clear project.

Now as I move to a new job I find I have little time to write substantial pieces, so it's back to these short thoughts, components towards the next big project on aesthetic politics

Commodity fetishism revised

The commodity-form, a hundred and fifty years ago, could be described as "the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things"*

Today however, in the context of social media, the frontline of the real subsumption of consumption under capital, this condition has been reversed. Today, the relation between things assumes the fantastic form of social relations.

*Capital volume 1, part 1, chapter 1, section 4 'The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret; page 165 in the Penguin/NLR translation.

Truth (preliminary note)

Truth

1) is a practice.
The Eternal Wisdom has truth a great crystal to which we might ascend. Science, pop science at least, has it something to be approached asymptotically, better with each generation.
Truth is not a construct but the work of constructing, on one side the increasing elegance of its logic, on the other how persuasively it describes the tohu va bohu of the world. The most fascinating practices do both.

2) as legal category
The oxymoron 'formal agreement' is therefore a contradiction: a dialogue (can dialogue ever be exhausted?) that 'ends' in a formal (and performative) statement (guilty/not guilty). Motive (soft) and occasion (hard), testimony (soft) and evidence (hard) assimilated into a single unambiguous verdict.
Query: can ambiguity ever be true? Are some occurrences truly ambiguous.

3) factish, truthiness, post-truth
2018: truth is not to be disdained, even if it means defending institutions we have always criticised (media, intelligence services, judiciary). Is common sense – which is so easily identifiable with ideology – in crisis, eradicating the common in favour of embattled tribes? Or do a) clichés and truisms b) embodied knowledge, habit, know-how and c) 'truths widely acknowledged' still have currency, as common, as commons.

4) hypothesis, proposition, surmise etcetera.
There are subjunctive modes of truth to place alongside ambiguity, the former a trajectory, the latter a condition, not far removed from confusion and proximates like controversy. (Distinguish an ill-formed question that cannot be answered unambiguously or uncontroversially from a well-formed one that is too difficult or whose answer is too complicated. We expect truth to be simple. Is it?)

Reservations: Mathematical (Badiou) and quantum (Barad) ontologies do not much deal in truth in senses 1,2 and 3: concepts of void, multiplicity, intra-action and topology - of the foam of being/becoming – are not crystalline, though persuasively descriptive.
Response: this (descriptive) ontology clashes with (elegant) administration to produce the historical (persuasion, work) as performance of truth in hypothesis testing, verdicts to be picked over.

First diagram on truths

and their contraries.

[annotation: 'Belief' here describes phenomena like pensée sauvage, theology, the hidden hand of the market, certain forms of environmentalism: - a systematisable certainty that x is the case which provides the axiom(s) for a cathedral of thinking. 'Evidence' might perhaps better be expressed as 'Testimony']

a) Truth is a practice and therefore requires media through which it can be practiced: instruments for capturing evidence, means of storing and ordering arguments and beliefs, modes of transmission, persuasion, establishing.
b) therefore truth has a history. As a practice, truth therefore has a media history. The first diagram allows for histories of modes of proof and typologies of data, for example.

Heatwave (after Baudrillard)

Not the desert of the real, but the real of the desert.

After Santayana

Those who do not consider digital media are condemned to serve them.

I thought I had better look up the source of the Santayana quote I was rewriting. It appears in a paragraph headed "Continuity necessary to progress". The context is quite shocking a hundred and ten years later. This is how it reads:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
(George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense. Scribner’s, 1905: 284).

The pretence that oral cultures do not 'retain' is simply silly: that is why we use the term 'traditional cultures' – because they have tradition, which overdeveloped societies lack. Though it is true, as Liam Cole Young argues in his excellent book List Cultures, that the argument that writing stuff down ensures the loss of memory is at least as old as Socrates, far riskier is our delegation of remembering to databases, especially to commercial platforms from diary apps to 'Your memories on Facebook'.

Risky because, as Young says in his intro, there is "a general trend in media studies to conflate layers of form, content, technique, practice, and habit under totalizing categories like 'media' or 'network'" – and not just in media studies. The human and non-human work of remembering the past, which today is inevitably embroiled in the digital, means that a great deal of remembering is undertaken by machines which are decreasingly repetitive. Functioning AIs like Google Translate, for all their limitations (no semantic function, just vocabulary and grammar; constrained by initial design parameters) evolve quasi-autonomously from humans.

Haraway's bon mot, that 'Our machines are disturbingly lively & we ourselves frighteningly inert' requires a different response in the social media era than it did in 1991 before the launch of the first mass browsers. Our machines remember more and more stuff. We have then the job of remembering that they are machineries of remembrance.

To consider is to think through the multiple operations and factors in play in the thing we are considering, including the many historical paths that lead to this one unique encounter with a unique situation. Not only are the devices concrete aggregations of ancestral 'dead labour'; we are increasingly acting like ancestors. Their skills have been assimilated into machines: our knowledge is uploaded daily into vast databases whose operations we mostly fail to observe, let alone understand.

This is why it is so important to restore history: not, or not only, as remembrance, but as process. By and large we no longer believe in progress as Santayana did: as buzzword, 'sustainable' indicates only the modest desire to survive economic, political and environmental catastrophe. The more we act like people who are already dead, uploading our memories at the point of generation to WhatsApp and Instagram, the more urgent it becomes both to understand how databases might operate otherwise than as profit engines, and to engage in making history – not under conditions we would have chosen, but nonetheless making it; and simultaneously, because that is the condition we haven't chosen that is most propitious for making history, making the new 'we' beyond the limits of exclusively human society