We are responsible ONLY for what we do NOT control
I want to bring out a simple point about responsibility that I think is often missed: that we are responsible ONLY for what is NOT in our control. This may seem counter-intuitive, but becomes clear, I think, with any cursory investigation into what responsibility entails. The first way to approach the point is contra-positively: were the results of our actions wholly under our control, if we were able to master every last consequence of what we said and did, we would not need to be response-able for them: there would be no response required, no ability to be exercised as a result of what we have done. Responsibility enters precisely at the point at which our actions exceed us.
Judith Butler, in her remarks on the concept of responsibility, puts it this way: “I cannot think the question of responsibility alone, in isolation from the other. If I do, I have taken myself out of the mode of address (being addressed as well as addressing the other) in which the problem of responsibility first emerges” (Butler, [I]Giving An Account of Oneself[/I]). For as Butler notes, responsibility is ultimately relational: it is only in relation to another that one is responsible, accountable, for what one has said and done. There would be no ‘problem of responsibility’ without the relation to the other. But the other, [I]as other[/I], as an-other agency, is precisely what, or rather who, I am not in control of. It is in the face of the other that I am responsible, and the other is that who exceeds my mastery over things.
Another way to approach the point is less through the notion of responsibility than its subject: action. We say that we are ‘responsible for our actions’: but ‘our’ actions never belong wholly to us, at least, not insofar as they make a change in the world, insofar as they have consequences that exceed me. Hannah Arendt, in her beautiful passages on action, puts the point thus:
“[The] consequences [of actions] are boundless, because action, though it may proceed from nowhere, so to speak, acts into a medium where every reaction becomes a chain reaction and where every process is the cause of new processes. Since action acts upon beings who are capable of their own actions, reaction, apart from being a response, is always a new action that strikes out on its own and affects others. Thus action and reaction among men never move in a closed circle and can never be reliably confined to two partners… the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation” (Arendt, [I]The Human Condition[/I]).
Judith Butler, in her remarks on the concept of responsibility, puts it this way: “I cannot think the question of responsibility alone, in isolation from the other. If I do, I have taken myself out of the mode of address (being addressed as well as addressing the other) in which the problem of responsibility first emerges” (Butler, [I]Giving An Account of Oneself[/I]). For as Butler notes, responsibility is ultimately relational: it is only in relation to another that one is responsible, accountable, for what one has said and done. There would be no ‘problem of responsibility’ without the relation to the other. But the other, [I]as other[/I], as an-other agency, is precisely what, or rather who, I am not in control of. It is in the face of the other that I am responsible, and the other is that who exceeds my mastery over things.
Another way to approach the point is less through the notion of responsibility than its subject: action. We say that we are ‘responsible for our actions’: but ‘our’ actions never belong wholly to us, at least, not insofar as they make a change in the world, insofar as they have consequences that exceed me. Hannah Arendt, in her beautiful passages on action, puts the point thus:
“[The] consequences [of actions] are boundless, because action, though it may proceed from nowhere, so to speak, acts into a medium where every reaction becomes a chain reaction and where every process is the cause of new processes. Since action acts upon beings who are capable of their own actions, reaction, apart from being a response, is always a new action that strikes out on its own and affects others. Thus action and reaction among men never move in a closed circle and can never be reliably confined to two partners… the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation” (Arendt, [I]The Human Condition[/I]).
Comments (80)
I love Hanna Arendt though. Banality of evil. So important. Especially when you teach kindergarten.
What do you tell a Stoic who claims that one should only be concerned about things within their control?
I would say that the distinction is fundamentally fallacious... What about you?
In other words, the Stoic injunction that we ought to concern ourselves only with what is 'up to us', does not entail that we disavow responsibility for what our actions bring about, even if those consequences are not 'up to us'. So Stoic ethics may not be quite as diametrically opposed as it might seem at first sight.
I don't see the connection between being responsible and "able to respond". This seems like a misapplication of etymology. Responsibility, the way that the word is generally used, refers to the connection between a person and a state of affairs. Being able to "respond to" that state of affairs isn't part of that connection.
Quoting StreetlightX
Yes, the problem of responsibility only arises in connection with other subjects, and only because we are not a hive-mind. But it doesn't follow that we are only responsible for what we do not control. Responsibility is the connective tissue between a world governed by cause and effect and minds governed by freedom of will. There is an element of "lack of control" here. If we simply controlled the world regardless of physics, there'd be no need for responsibility. We need it because we cannot simply use control over the outcome as the determining factor.
Quoting StreetlightX
You're saying "responsibility to" implies "responsibility for"
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/responsible
be responsible to sb/sth: to be controlled by someone or something
be responsible for sb/sth/doing sth: to have control over someone or something
So you're saying "being controlled by someone" implies "having control over someone", that's quite the sophistry.
Obviously we can only be controlled by what we do not control, so we can only be responsible to what we do not control. Which does not imply in any way that we are only responsible for what we do not control.
The very definition of "responsible for" hinges on having control, so it's obvious something has gone wrong in our argument when we conclude that "responsible for" hinges on not having control.
When we twist the meaning of words we can reach any conclusion. Sadly this is the kind of thing that gives a bad name to philosophy, and which makes people see philosophy as useless.
I can think of exceptions. Once I drove my car into high water and ruined the engine. It was under my control. I didn't have to drive the car when I knew there was going to be a downpour. I could have taken a different route on higher ground. I could have slowed down and not gone through the deeper water, or backed up and turned around. But nope, I was impatient and misjudged the situation.
There was nobody else to be responsible to, but I was still responsible for ruining my engine. I couldn't blame the weather. Nobody else could forgive me for what I had done, and no apologies were owed.
Sometimes people orient their lives towards impersonal commandments and principles. A life lived with a higher calling or in a socially recognised cult.
Most of the time, people think morally when posed with moral problems. These aren't like the trolly problem, or debating whether lying is consistent with the categorical imperative. These are questions of how best to treat people, also of whether what one did is wrong and how to mitigate its effects. Under what conditions does someone care how best to treat someone? When they care, when they believe their influence matters, when their influence does in fact matter and such a state is discovered. That is, they are discovered in social contexts; family, friends, lovers, organisations. Belief in this regard is also embedded in interpersonal connection; a relation of people and people; rather than as a pro-attitude towards an ethical maxim. Such a belief might be called trust.
You can usually 'refute' an ethical maxim, "One ought to do X" or "One ought not to do X" by interpreting it literally and supplanting a contextual defeater. This is an intellectual game; it varies arbitrarily over contexts and people. It's a game of association between stated principles and subtended social contexts in which their expression contradicts the maxim as stated.
Where ethics happens is between people. Ethical thought is inspired by care of others. Care not just as an emotive state, but care as an ontological condition of interpersonal relationships. Care is what inspires terror when seeing a child play in traffic, "one should not play in traffic" as a maxim is a reified guide, however sensible.
This change of perspective, really a return to the perspective we have usually, of ethics being rooted in care induces a transformation of ethical thought to the development of heuristics which guide the praxis of interpersonal development.
Responsibility arises out of that there are others, but I think that your conclusion may still assume that it can be soundly considered. Because it is impossible to know the consequences of our actions before they are committed, how can we be held accountable for them? Arendt, I think, only asks the question. I would suggest that formal responsibility is an impossible ethic to maintain. A person always takes a leap of faith by acting. Human agency is always beset by the perils of Ethics. The consequences of an event can only be understood after the event has taken place. You just have to cope with that it's all kind of a lot of guesswork.
I read this and I become confused by the term 'the other'.
Is this other agent an agent in singular or does the other reflect the 'other' in toto?
Responsibility is tri-partite:
- My responsibility (e.g. an obligation or prohibition)
- to the other (e.g. a contractual partner, my child, other drivers)
- due to the other (a system of control -- legal/criminal, contractual, social, moral)
Quoting StreetlightX
Maybe Butler makes this clear but the quote above doesn't resolve, for me, the scope of 'other'.
From a review by Chris Lumberg:
When Butler discusses "being addressed as well as addressing the other" is that another (one) subject or is it the "other subjects" (the whole of the other) the first subject is dependent on?
Maybe this is clear to other readers here. It is not obvious to me.
So - there are some misunderstandings among some replies here, but that's partly because I titled the post in a deliberately provocative way. 'Control' is clearly not some black and white property, like an on/off switch. It's obviously more of a gradated notion, a matter of degrees and the of more or less (more control, less control). But that's also precisely the point: to the degree that what we can control always 'shades off' and is mixed into what we can't, responsibility itself must always include a degree of that which we cannot control, by necessity. That's the crux: there's no sharp diving line where control ends (or begins, for that matter), which correspondingly implies that responsibility must involve what is not in our control, as a matter of conceptual necessity.
Consider it like this: the alternative is solipsism (or at least a certain kind of solipsism). For the solipsist is neither responsible nor not responsible: 'In control' of everything that happens, the world of the solipsist is pure cause without effect: the solipsist coincides with the world and everything that happens in it (Witty: "The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it"), and in such a situation both the very idea of responsibility or non-responsibility become meaningless. The solipsist does not act, at least, not in any way humanly recognizable: coinciding with the world and all that occurs in it, nothing that happens escapes or exceeds the solipsist: the solipsist is a theological figure, commensurate with the monotheistic God.
But such is exactly the figure that humans are imagined to be when it isn't acknowledged that only when the act exceeds our control can we even count as being responsible for something. So the glib parodies of 'I was fully in control, therefore not responsible miss the point - there is no possible way you were fully in control to begin with, which is why you can even begin to count as responsible. The one who murders the other on purpose always has the effects of that action outrun any possible intent: only then could it even qualify as murder, let alone an action able to which responsibility could be imputed.
This doesn't cover everything, but here's at least some extra fuel for the fire.
That paragraph made nothing clearer. Writing "response-able" as if it would refer to the same thing as "responsible" is comical, too.
Quoting StreetlightX
So, I'd tell Ms. Butler that I can very well think about responsibility in isolation from others. It's weird that she can't. I could maybe help her be able to do this if she were here.
Re "the problem of responsibility" as she's using it, she's using a subjective interpretation as if there would be something universal to it.
You're not responsible for the reactions of other people unless we're talking about causality in the sense that I talk about it.
Quoting StreetlightX
This conflates actions and consequences of them.
Quoting StreetlightX
Insofar as we're talking about other people, this would be denying that they have free will.
Why does responsibility require a response? If A does x, then A is responsible for the consequences of x. Why does this description require further amplification? Whether or not we intended or foresaw all the consequences, the essence of the term responsibility is a causal attribution. Why do we need to go one step further?
Quoting StreetlightX
Similarly, responsibility is not a 'problem,' it is a descriptive condition or attribute. A caused x (and all further consequences) ergo A is 'responsible.'
Not at all. We regularly distinguish between those (held) responsible for their actions and those not, if by means of age, mental capacity, or otherwise. Certainly we say that the sun is 'responsible for warming the stone, but this is an equivocation on the term, much in the way we say that he did a cartwheel in the backyard, without asking for his load-bearing capacity. Responsibility, in the ethical or even juridical sense that I am discussing here, is an imputation, not description (and even all descriptions are normative, but let's not go into that).
A person can have no idea of the consequences of his or her actions but still be "responsible" for those actions in the actual sense of having done something. It seems like what you are talking about is actually "accountability" not responsibility. Those are, I agree, two very different things.
We can call it accountability instead if you prefer, and keep responsibility for causal attributions. In any case it's not the latter idea I'm concerned with. I'm not particularly fussed about the nomination here.
Nothing is in our control StreetlightX. You give someone who is running late 5 dollars to catch the train and they trip, fall, and land smack dab in the middle of the M. Maybe you should have noticed. Ethics is like the Lacanian interpretation of God. You will never be free of the anxiety that it inspires.
What I meant, though, is that you have assumed that we do, in point of fact, have responsibility. I agree, but I haven't quite gotten it out of my head that because you ultimately can't know what the right thing to do is that there is nothing to be responsible for.
I wouldn't say that 'intention' is at stake here, or at least I don't think intention is coextensive with control. What I'm trying to argue for is rather that an internal relation exists between the concepts of action, accountability, and a certain incapacity ('lack of control)': that you cannot have one without the other, and that all three are a package deal, as it were. Or put otherwise: that the concept of responsibility cannot be made sense of in any coherent way without recognising that to be responsible (or 'accountable') commits us necessarily to that which inevitably exceeds our control, without which we would not be accountable at all.
Or yet another way to put it: I'm not arguing that we should enlarge the extension of the concept of responsibility/accountability to 'include' what is not in our control; as if there are two distinct classes of things which I want to subsume under a larger class. Rather, I'm arguing that the very intension (not to be confused with 'intention'!) of the concept of accountability includes that which is not in our control.
IOW, we need not be ultimately responsible for our actions in order to be morally culpable? If this is what you’re saying, then I agree. One may not be in control of one’s emotions that override the frontal lobe’s inhibiting influence, but no one but they are responsible for any negative actions taken.
It seems like you're talking about concepts as if they're not something that individuals construct.
Stronger than this: 'need not' implies an option. I'm saying this is a matter of principle, of necessity: we are only responsible to the degree that we are not 'ultimately' (?) in control of our actions. In yet other words: responsibility implies - necessarily - an exposure, on our part, to the accidental, to the unforeseen, and to the 'uncontrollable'. Without such an exposure or risk, it makes no sense to speak of responsibility (or 'accountability'). Without the element of risk inherent to action (without which an action would not be an action, but a mere mechanical process), responsibility cannot be attendant to the agent who engenders it.
And you're probably best off ignoring Terrapin's sophistry.
This is quite a profound ontological claim. I’m sure you’re right, too. I agree with you even though I’ve never encountered such a claim as this. It’s kind of an “aha!” moment for me. :chin: :up:
But maybe this is confusing the epistemic issue (risk or not knowing the unintended consequences of an action) with the metaphysical issue (whether actions are indeed mechanical or ‘information in, action out’)? I’m not sure now. I think moral responsibility is just a convenient framework that people use to place blame or give praise and separate people who are dangerous from those people we want in our community.
Whatever next?
Is Judith Butler "Ms." Butler? I think that you should refer to em as Mx. Butler. Granted, I am just using the Spivak pronouns as I don't know what Judith Butler prefers.
Quoting StreetlightX
I like this notion. I agree, but will still contend that it remains to be proven that there is a responsibility that arises out of the element of risk in action.
Probably, but then, if you were to read past my click-baity OP title, you'd know I'd laugh along too.
Like I said to someone else, this isn't a debate over intention.
--
Also, Butler's just a good old fashioned lesbian. The discussion of her title isn't very relevant. Professor Butler would probably be the preferred one, if you neurotic nerds really care that much about it.
Har har. I'm really not a fan of that style of writing. Regrettably I have actually read past the title, but I didn't find much I consider to be of substance or value.
I think that this is where to post this.
While I like and agree with this theory, my qualms with it are that I think that you have assumed that we do have responsibility. That the consequences of an action can not be known before the action is committed calls into question whether or not a person can be held to be responsible for their actions. I assume that we do have a responsibility towards others, but that is merely an assumption. I don't have a proof for this.
I don't believe I have, and furthermore, whether or not we do or do not have responsibility is not very relevant. The question is over what responsibility entails. Whether we have it or not is a separate question, one that I've not asked, nor am particularly interested in here.
Quoting thewonder
This is not about knowledge. I've said nothing about knowing - or not - the consequences of an action. The OP is not framed in any epistemic terms.
How can it not be relevent? If we don't have responsibility then we are not responsible for what is outside of our control. The "question" over "what responsibility entails" assumes that we do have responsibility. As I've stated before, I think that the statement by Arendt can be interpreted so as to simply call responsibility into question. It's not that she was suggesting this, but it can be interpreted in such a manner.
That the consequences of an action can not be known is what Arendt was suggesting. You do some thing and it all just sort of butterflies out from there. I'm not trying to get into an Epistemological discussion, I am just merely pointing out that there is an Ethical crisis of intention.
If you think that it can just be accepted as a given that we do have responsibility and don't care to respond to this, then, that's fair enough. I do accept such things as a given, but I'm not necessarily convinced that we have responsibility has been proven abstractly.
And I take it as self-evident that speculating what something entails does not require it's instantiation. Existence does not follow conception, as anyone minimally familiar with the standard reply to the ontological argument understands.
Then maybe a better title would be, "What Does Responsibility Entail?". And the answer would be something like, "Responsibility entails a duty to act within your power to do what's right or face the consequences".
Then what's the question, more specifically, though without rambling in philoso-jargon?
No, not if the question can't be simplified and made clear, which it almost always can. It's a choice.
Yep.
How have I collapsed them all into a big blob? The question, "Are we responsible for our actions?", arises out of that we can not know the consequences of our actions. I would argue that for a person to be held accountable for their actions, that their intentions are relevent. The crisis of intention arises out of that we can not know what the consequences of an action are before the act is committed. One can not act in an Ethically valid sense abstractly. One tests Ethics by acting. Ethics is more of an experimental process than it is an ontology. I'm trying to hash this out with myself for long enough for you to see what I mean about it, but I feel like we might just be talking at cross paths. I don't think that I have confused action with knoweldge or intention, but, as I really haven't parcelled this all out myself, I can't quite give you too much of a delineation to explain what I mean about Ethics as I am just simply currently unsure.
Doubtless, Butler and Arendt accounts of responsibility are correct. Nevertheless,
they are incomplete: Sartre laid out a different outlook on what is under our control. Each of our actions has two levels: the first one maintains our intimate tie with action, and what makes it our possibility is an ability to interrupt the action, stop ourselves. “This possibility of interrupting the action is rejected on a second level by the fact that the action which discovers itself to me through my act tends to crystallize as a transcendent, relatively independent form. The consciousness of man in action is non-reflective consciousness. It is consciousness of something, and the transcendent which discloses itself to this consciousness is of a particular nature: it is a structure of exigency in the world, and the world correlatively discloses in it complex relations of instrumentality”. While acting, we inevitably contain ourselves within the unforeseen chain of consequences, relations, or commitments, which are definitely out of our control. Yet, we are still responsible for our behavioral patterns. It does not mean that we have to make an explicit decision at every moment about how to behave. Instead, the ability to interrupt our actions manifests our control over the motives that we find ourselves within. The character, existing through our given or chosen projects, forms the motives.
In addition : There is a huge internet-age trend of doing action-y things, but only in ways where the outcome - the response - is guaranteed in advance. I mean making these performative gestures that would have been considered 'radical' 20-40 years ago but which are de rigeur now, while asking they be treated as radical.
It really does feel like the sphere of 'action' in Arendt's sense is lessening. [rib about groundbreaking theory and its academic recapture while still laying claim to 'radicality']
There's an Italian philosopher, Paolo Virno, who argues that one of the transformations that's happened since Arendt's time is that work has more and more taken on the aspects of action. For Virno, where work (/labour) once was defined in terms of producing an end product which was then sent out into the world (you produce a kettle, and now it's someone else's kettle, and they can do as they like with it), work is now ever more modelled on the category of performance: the results of work now coincide with the performance of work itself (think of social media stars whose work - the 'product' - just is their performance. There's no separate, distinct, end-product that gets detached from the labour of work itself).
Virno uses the pianist Glenn Gould to make the point, but I'd wager that DFW fits that bill too: the attempt to anticipate is just this attempt to prolong the performance 'into' the work (using Virno's terminology, DFW might be considered a 'post-Fordist' labourer). Anyway, this makes me think that this all might have some pretty consequent ramifications for responsibility, in that it kinda throws the whole notion into a kind of crisis of intelligibility: if responsibility requires, as a condition of its being, a relation to what is not in our control, the drive to subsume everything into the ambit of our control (a socio-cultural shift as much as a matter of individual psychology (?) like DFW) means that we can no longer think in terms of responsibility. Not that we are 'not responsible' for things, but that responsibility loses it's coherency as a concept altogether. The 'material conditions' that underwrite it have given way (or are eroding, at least).
(I think here of the politics of/around Youtube, which is perpetually responsible and not-responsible for all sorts of things, from radicalizing teenagers, to demonitizing LGBTQI content for the sake of advertising, etc etc.)
So using Arendts terms again here:
If the workis now usually a performance, and if that performance is increasingly a performance of action, which means there's not really action, or responsibility, just in the way you say....at a certain point doesn't this endless cycle of work-as-performance-of-action cross over and just become a new layer of labor, tilling a weird soil which is enriched by the breakdown of work and action?
It wouldn't be able to last forever though, because after a while we'd use up the nutrients, and it would be impossible not to recognize that the bits of the old world we've been using to sustain our belief that that world persists would seem more and more mysterious/arbitrary and referentless (like old virtues to the thinkers in the age of the enlightenment, say)
maybe some future Alasdair Macintyre would try to piece it all back together, years later, and for people who seem,algorithmically, likely to be interested, the AI could automatically relocate them into communes where they could try to live as the responsibilists of yore once did.
The OP sounds like what alot of Scientific Determininists and Calvinists (predestination) believe. I wish i could say it wasn't true.
I read A Grammar of the Multitude a while ago and remember thinking that it was pretty good. When the World Becomes Flesh is great, but I really didn't understand it.
I don't quite see how labor conditions under post-Fodist Capital dissolve responsibility. You're actually held to more of a standard. Even a dishwasher has to be some sort of artist. The pressure to perform is inane. Responsibility becomes distorted under post-Fordist Capital so as to be equated with service as an art form.
The plausability of this is somewhat unsettling. I'm not sure how I feel about being in a commune directed by a Neo-Aristotlean, even a Leftist one.
The basic idea is that if it's true that responsibility has a constitutive link to what escapes control, then the breaking of that link (so that responsibility and control become coextensive) equally implies the breakdown of the concept of responsibility. When what you call the 'pressure to perform' becomes all encompassing, the sphere of responsibility expands without limit and effectively collapses: responsible for everything, you are effectively responsible for nothing.* Responsibility lies in the tension sustained between what we control and what we do not, and when one of those poles collapses, so too does the very idea of responsibility.
*(I think again of social media performers - or anyone, really - who get called out for saying the wrong thing by hundreds and thousands of anonymous netizens: how does one respond in a way commensurate to that? One releases a tweet 'taking responsibility' and apologizing for one's words - but what can this mean any longer? Isn't this more performance? More labour?)
One other way to think about is in terms of 'state of emergency' discourses. As understood by certain legal theorists, in states of emergencies, we are held accountable (to the law) without being held accountable to any particular law. In Giorgio Agamben's terms, we are held accountable to the 'form' of the law, emptied of any content. Such a situation is particularly dangerous because it is a particular form of 'anything goes', but in a way that's sanctioned by law (thus distinguishing it from pure anarchy).
With respect to responsibility, one can say something similar is occurring: we are held ever more accountable to the form of responsibility without being held accountable for any one thing in particular. With work coinciding with performance and control being ever more absolutized, there is no longer any space of 'non-control' in relation to which responsibility becomes intelligible. Hence a kind of diffusion of responsibility which makes us both absolutely responsible, while at the same time emptying responsibility of any content.
This is a pretty totalizing thought, but I think it's worth considering as a pole of a tedency at work in a kind of world-historical drift. And if I can 'float' a bit more, I imagine there are a few ways to respond to this condition too: one is greenhouse you write of, or else and together with the escapist communes (of noble savages? Thinking Brave New World); another is a grasping of the nettle and a ('willed') devaluation of ethics in favour of politics: if ethics has gone to shit, shift the focus to communal world building, to reengineering the conditions under which we could again relate to one another outside juridical categories, whether in a renewed ethical mode, or simply otherwise. These paths don't exhaust the range of responses, but indicate, if I'm not insane, some possible ones.
I like this idea. Although, I wonder if it doesn't have negative consequences. If the overdetermination of responsibility renders the concept meaningless, then the possibility of an ethic becomes somewhat incredible. How are we to cope with that an ethic can not be meaningfully set forward?
Quoting StreetlightX
The concept becomes even further distorted as work becomes blurred into daily life. Social media now requires a maitenance of social capital. People are no longer engaged in a project of free expression, but have rather consigned to maintain the appearance of free expression. Everyone is expected to be an idiosyncratic individual, and, yet, no one is really free to engage in the development of an authentic (to borrow a Heideggerian term that I don't fully agree with) Self.
I had a gig as a dishwasher at a vegan café a few years back where I was sort of expected to cultivate a personality as a young hip bohemian along with my regular duties at work. I found for the experience to be somewhat absurd. I am somewhat of a beatnik, but I didn't want to wear my good band T-shirts while washing the dishes because I didn't want to get them soiled. It only seemed to make sense to me to wear whatever I picked up from Goodwill to work since it was just going to get splashed. The pressure to maintain boho chic airs was unnecessarily stress inducing. The whole experience of working in that place was rather anomic. It was supposed to be a left-wing Liberal vegan café, but the first thing that my manager told me upon hiring me was that, "I have hired a lot of people, and I have fired a lot of people." and that he was also a lawyer. He was basically suggesting that he could fire me at will. He was from L.A. and, so, maybe such conduct is somehow more tolerable there. Strangely enough, I did actually cultivate a personality as an artist centered around washing the dishes. I wrote a deconstructed conceptual noise album centered around a theory that I developed that the dishwasher is the Abstract Machine. Whoever washes the dishes controls the flow of the entire establishment. They are always washed correctly. What the dishwasher actually does is to alleviate the stress of work by creating a rhythm with which to allow for a kind of meditation while at work. Dishwashers are the last line of defence between ubiquitous false consciousness and the natural desire to live and work as one pleases. Real subsumption in the service industry is only impossible because the dishes will just simply need to be washed. Because the rhythm that one generates while washing the dishes well is invariably preferable to any other way of working, a good dishwasher will always wage some form of informal strike when management demands that the back of house works at a pace that is out of sync with the rhythm. The necessity of having a dishwasher is actually what, in part, prevents post-Fordist Capital from becoming Fascist. There is no way around that the dishes will need to washed and that a rhythm will be found.
Quoting StreetlightX
I liked what you had to say about this as well. I've read a lot of Agamben, but don't quite understand enough of it yet to really put forth a response. The legal situation that he describes seems, to me, to necessitate that live is lived as a form of strike in a somewhat negative sense. You have to wage a living strike in order to maintain that you are not subject to a form of Law without content in order to prevent that your 'right' to exist does not get called into question as an exceptional case. It's sort of like a version of The Trial where Josef K is a political radical.
As this applies to responsibility, I think that the "Che voui?" of Lacanian Psychoanalysis expresses the feeling that this invokes. The diffusion of responsibility paradoxically results in anxiety. Perhaps a positive ethic could be invoked from that there are no longer concrete terms with which to understand responsibility, but I don't know that you would argue that one should be.
You can go on from any one of those points if you care to. I'm reasonably well read, but self-taught and, so, only have so much of a grasp on anything. I am curious as to what you have to say, though.
Edit: I later decided that the dishwasher just an abstract machine and not The Abstract Machine, but since I haven't officially released that album really I think that I'm just going to change that without telling anyone aside from you people here at The Philosophy Forum.
in a bad life?” Butler assumes that there are different modes of life involved here: my own life, “a good life” as a moral directive, and
”a bad life” as a vast complex of our social, economic, and biological living conditions. “The life I am living is already connected with broader networks of life…My own life depends on a life that is not mine, not just a life of the other, but a broader social and economic organization of life…They constitute who I am. If we might still think about what a good life might be, we can no longer think of it exclusively in terms of the good life of the individual”. (Butler, Notes Toward A Performative Theory Of Assembly). Sharing with Adorno the idea that the pursuit of the good life is possible just through resistance, Butler, nevertheless, stresses the importance of taking part in the protest collective actions. If my individuality is entirely determined by different regimes of power, just “radical democracy’s
movements can articulate what it might mean to lead a good life in the sense of a livable life.” Therefore, my personal responsibility is in becoming a part of an appropriate social movement struggle. Adorno himself proposed a different notion of responsibility and resistance. He thought that we are still able to create our own individual space: “This resistance to what the world has made of us does not imply merely an opposition to the external world…We ought also to mobilize our own powers of resistance in order to resist those parts of us that are tempted to join in.”
(Adorno, Minima Moralia).
That's an interesting and dizzying thought. reengineering conditions - when the current condition is the breakdown of those bedrock-seeming values that one would usually reach for to orient any sort of engineering project - sounds like something that could spiral down a recursive Nietzschean hole, the transvaluation (of transvalution (of ..))
If you're envisioning something different that a restoration (brave new world thing) then this would have be the creation of something new. I know this is nitpicky (and I'm not sure you used the word literally) but wouldn't it have to be less a matter of 'engineering' and more a matter of *cultivating* present (pregnant) conditions for (the realization of) new conditions?
If so, what would that kind of politics consist of?
My first thought was something that I realized, reflecting, was very gelassenheit-y, and that's no good because we know how well that worked out.
My next thought is just trying to participate in the political field, not to some determinate end, but to struggle to push the tension of the political field in the right direction, and sustain oneself in doing this, in order that when some event precipitates those new conditions, they will be more likely to be good ones.
What were you thinking of in terms of politics? something similar or no?
Given that Heidegger's notion of gelassenheit translates as something like "letting be" or "releasement", I'm wondering what you are referring to with this comment. Not national socialism, surely?
I guess my personal framework is a largely (radical?) democratic one: if responsibility really has become so diffuse, then democratize responsibility. That is, locate responsibility on a societal/structural level, rather than an individual one, and approach 'control' similarly. This is, I imagine, quite close to what Butler is getting at in the quotes provided by @Number2018, although I've not read later Butler myself. Butler aside, I understand this largely in terms of cultivating and engineering widely accessible means and mechanisms of societal participation and 'self'-control.
This itself may translate in different ways, but one way in particular would be rather anti-capitalist approach, or at least an approach which would not enshrine capital accumulation as the one and only means of such participation, which is largely what's what we have today ('vote with your dollars'). Another, complimentary one might be an anti-statist or para-statist one: a need to understand democratic politics in a way that's not just a contest over state control. A democratic politics that would look nothing like what we have now. Insofar as we're talking social media, democratize data, for a start? Alternatively, disrupt and jam: flood the dataways with bullshit. That would have to be a coordinated effort.
And what's the best way to go about all this? I'm not sure. Insurrection, revolution, reformation? I have a rough idea of an ideal: I'm torn on how to get there. Disoriented. One thing I'm convinced of is that ethics won't save us. I can diagnose better than I can strategise.
Yeah, I feel you.
I've also felt more and more lately a vague sense that everything is converging on something, and that any attempt to influence what happens will be somehow anticipated by that process, and will simply accelerate the convergence, whatever that means. It feels kind of like a phase change has already been triggered, and the macro-whatever of everything will override what any small collection of molecules can do. My paranoid doomsday self is focused on the convergence of AI (especially as a means of efficient allocation) --- global warming events ---- refugee influxes. A world-historical crisis with no forthcoming human solution coincides with a extreme sophistication of AI, and the overwhelming exigency forces us to remove the ethical brakes, and cede control. I can imagine AIs resettling refugees in camps, AI-training as the new means of wage labor (both of these are already happening embryonically btw) , cultivation of echo-chambers and reality-bubbles as enforced fragmentation. It's out there, but if we can't handle another recession, or if there's a camel-straw ecological crisis, it really doesn't seem too farfetched.
Given the reality of resource depletion, ever more rapidly increasing debt and systemically entrenched human behavior, I don't see development of AI or space exploration, not to mention electric vehicles and large scale development of "renewable" to be realistic options.
You've clustered those last four together as a set of [means of 'salvation' or 'rescue'] and I'd agree that none of them will, really, save us. I don't see the AI thing as a salvific force. In my doomsday scenario, I see it more like when a third world country fails and needs the IMF to bail them out, and forever after they're part of the system.
AI is progressing rapidly and its scary. I agree with you on everything but AI's capacity to get real good.
To shift a little to diagnosis again, one thing that depresses me is that this 'removal of ethical breaks' comes right at the time when ethics has become our predominant if not only mode of engagement with the civitas. We're all really bloody ethical now, super sensitive to the desires, wants, needs of the other (the corollary to this, one might say the mechanism for this, is shame, or weaponized shame: we shame those who are (deemed?) unethical on a literal global scale. Think of red hat kid. This wielding of shame is in turn premised on, precisely, responsibility taken to the nth degree: feel shame because you are responsible for the thing).
The problem isn't this in itself (it's done alot of good, even though its been messy), but that it's become the limiting horizon of any transformative action. We only know how to speak the language of ethics while being almost completely politically incompetent (or else we orient our politics towards ethics, we engage political mechanisms to achieve outcomes in the field of ethics). The problem is that all of this can be accommodated by the prevailing order: everyone's really fucking nice and lovely to each other, in the meantime, the Amazon burns and the polar ice caps melt. And the only language we have to deal with the former are the tools of shame ('look at Bolsonaro, burning the Amazon!' Shammeeee). It's so inadequate. These people are fucking shame-less, because they don't operate on the field of ethics, they operate on the field of politics, and everyone else is completely underprepped for it.
The other symptom that follows from this - the predominance of moralization - is a reaction against it in light of its total ineffectiveness in certain parts of society. 'Our' counter-cultural movement is the alt-right. If previous decades had punks and hippies and hipsters, 'we' have the alt-right. That's our current contribution to the pantheon of counter-culture. And the whole nexus of shame-responsibility-ethics is precisely what they do not respond to, what they are in precise reaction against. But they too have no political vocabulary, their mechanisms of civil engagement are myth, violence, and (a certain form of) joy, among other things.
As far as the idea of convergence upon some radical upheaval - in some ways I'm even more cynical: I think that uneasy knot of tension, like we're suspended between what's happened and what's to come is the point, like Kafka's trial (unending or normalized Krisis, according to the old etymology: the moment at which, in the evolution of an illness, a doctor must make a judgement as to the life or death of the patient). That suspension between life and death, not knowing if one can continue, that's also the interregnum that Gramsci spoke of: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” The feeling of convergence might do even more to sustain this than ease it (one more step, we'll get there!). But what if not?
What I like about it is it's clear-eyedness about not 'going back to how things were before'. With 'big data' you can't just institute laws or protections to get us back to our old 'private' lives. There's no putting that genie back into the bottle. Your data's out there, and if not Facebook, then someone else will mine you for all you're worth. So it's a question of how to negotiate it and engage it, rather than bemoan it. For just the reasons you point out, it's not going to satisfy everyone. It still compromises too much with capitalism, as radical as it is (imagine what it would take to institute something like it). If the article advocates for more governability, the other, even more left take would be a politics of ungovernability. For a take like this see:
https://societyandspace.org/2018/02/27/on-giving-up-on-this-world/
“Communism has a rather orthodox definition including the abolition of private property, the cessation of class relations of domination, and the withering away of the state. Left-accelerationism [i.e. data democratization -SX] is a total non-starter on this issue for me because it remains a technocratic state socialist project rather than communist one. [One should] propose blocking, sabotage, and ungovernability as a shared exodus from an Empire that operates according to communication (the precise cybernetic system that left-accelerationists advocate). The speed of such revolt may actually be experienced as a slowing down, as the complicity between cybernetics and capitalism is that both speed things up because they perceive most problems to be an issue of efficiency.“
This would be a third option. Not ethics, not politics, just escape, inoperativity:
“We do not want to be better than our enemies. They are good, and that is why we hate them. They go to church, pay their taxes, and play well with others. They care about the environment, they oppose intolerance. The problem with do-gooders is that they try to be better than their enemies. So busy being ‘for good things and against bad things’ that they lack vision. Strategy is utterly lost on them.... Ethics is an impediment to us. ... The earth does not smile any more on those who refuse to shop at Wal-Mart, call themselves anti-capitalist, or eat organic. " (https://incivility.org/2017/07/22/a-short-introduction-to-the-politics-of-cruelty/)
I'm attracted to this in theory, but I have alot more hope for an expanded democratization. I not sure I have the constitution for it. Perhaps a bit counter-revolutionary in that regard.
It is still not clear how Culp’s idea of escape (definitely Deleuzian) is related to his vision of communism. “Darkness advances the secret as an alternative to the liberal obsession with transparency…The conspiracy is against the consistency
of everything being in its proper place, and the secret is the fact that nothing is as it seems. It circulates as an open secret that retains its secrecy only by operating against connectivism through the principle of selective engagement…We all must live double lives”. (Andrew Culp, Dark Deleuze). Doubtfully, that such interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari’s insight of taking flight can ground Culp’s assumption that “Deleuze’s metaphysics suggests that there are non-legislative processes that could passively produce the conditions of communism.” To escape, or to take flight, does not necessarily mean to get read of any political or ethical responsibility in favour of the violent anarchistic deconstruction. The most immediate effect of the escape is the work of self by self,
self-subjectivation, created by folding. Can this work be considered as an action under our control?
Quoting StreetlightX
The ubiquitous discourse of shame, taken up by the establishment, has become a part of totalizing strategies of closing the field of politics. As a consequence, independence of thought, autonomy, and the possibility of political opposition are being deprived of their basic spontaneity.
I agree that money is a technology for distributing labor. But labour itself relies on energy, i.e. on real energy resources, whether oil. coal. minerals, food, sunlight or whatever. So, there is a real energy economy underlying and underpinning the money economy, and I think that fact is mostly forgotten or glossed over by economists.
So, leaving aside money altogether, real growth of any economy is reliant on the energy invested being less than the energy returned. The greater the energy return in proportion to the energy invested the more growth is possible. As far as I can tell, fossil fuels are still, and were previously much more so, far and away the cheapest source of energy; both in terms of the energy invested to extract, transport and utilize them, and the economic cost for the same, with the economic cost really being a function of the energy cost.
Any apparent growth of the last decade is arguably being driven by massive increases of credit/debt. Since GDP is measured in terms of total money flows within an economy, lending can create an illusion of genuine growth, but a day of reckoning must come sooner or later. This is as far as I have understood the situation, and I am of course open to correction on this view. In fact I would love for it to be mistaken.
My apologies if this seems to be going off-topic.
Regarding the idea that ethics is ineffective; I tend to think it is the ineffectuality of politics that is the main problem. You might find this series of podcasts interesting:
https://civilizationemerging.com/future-thinkers-podcast-solving-the-generator-functions-of-existential-risks/
Bo Burnham, of all people, made a good point (somewhere) about how, in converting all aspects of life into different apps you see on the same phone, flipping from one app to another as we like - we've created this flattening effect where everything is seen as part of the same basic thing, on the same level.
So social life, entertainment, politics, news, religion are all experienced in the same way. I think that contributes to the bizarre situation you describe where we respond to the amazon burning the same way we would respond to a member of our social circle being revealed as an abuser the same way we respond to a celebrity doing something scandalous.
Three thoughts on that :
1. totally debilitating and neutering politically. Like you said, the people in power just don't give a shit, they're playing a different game.
2. The irony and destruction and ( a certain kind of) joy that the alt-right exhibits is exactly right in one way. Its culture-jamming not unlike some of the Culp stuff (havent read through the article yet tho i should admit). The problem is the wrong people - or people infected by the wrong values - are the ones who are currently making the most use of it (tho Chapo etc. exist) which makes you wonder if the problem is
3. The Vampire's Castle. As in when you say 'we' and 'us' who is that? I feel like it has to be the group of people who feels this internet shaming thing in their bones and its really hard to know how representative that culture is of the nation as a whole. Whoever they/we are, its a group that believes in the power of shame, and, at a certain point, all that matters is that the shame hits its target, so we lob a desultory shame-rock at those outside our reach, and laser-shame those who are enough like us to feel the effects.
As to the convergence/interregnum man I'm not sure. I wouldn't describe your approach as cynical, because theory etiquette says there's no fullness, there's no it-ness, everything is in-between, forever. Or, if you like, it's cynical when facing the outside, believing when facing the in-group. It may be the case we're sleepwalking, or Zizek's cartoon character who hasn't looked down, but even if there's a hypnagogic delay between trauma and recognition, still 'bang, crash' at some point (Hegel)
(I'd say, cynically, that Gramsci was in jail a long time, which probably felt like an intterregnum, and the celebration of deferral by sequestered thinkers seems a lot like the way someone spirited away from the trenches would think about confrontation with reality - it never really happens, in fact can never happen (melancholy, safe) tho there are traces of *something*that remain with us, a haunting mystery.
Quoting StreetlightX
I feel like denigration is indicative of that a person can not cope with an incapacity to enact an ethic. We seem to lack any form of Ethical agency. I think that is just resultant of the political situation and does not necessarily indicate that there is an Ethical aporia, however. I'm somewhat critical of, but kind of like Endnotes's concept of mediation. On some level, I think that it invokes that there will be professional revolutionaries who will "mediate" the ostensibly still spontaneous revolution, but I kind of like this idea that people will learn to act as mediators. By participating in a radical political project, people will learn to engage in politics in a manner that transcends what they are currently capable of. Doing so wouldn't involve an abandonment of Ethics in my opinion.
The total abandoment of Ethics would seem to put someone in all kinds of perilous situations. What is permissible in the name of revolution when no ethic can be invoked? Can human rights be responsibly abandoned? Why should someone be engaged with radical politics at all if there isn't something which is inherently wrong with either a lack of liberty or equality? Does revolution, then, become merely an act in itself? What appeals are acts to be made to if they are enacted for their own sake?
I've always liked the slogan, "It is forbidden to forbid", but kind of think that if you can't in some sort of general way say that there are things that you should do and things that you shouldn't do that communities will fall apart. I like it, but I recognize it is as a slogan. A slogan is a rallying cry. It doesn't have to be believed in too directly. An Anarchist can't just murder your best friend and then say, "It is forbidden to forbid." That events will occur that bother you means that you will have to delimit what you consider to be acceptable in given situations even form an anti-authoritarian political perspective.
No one likes Ethics because it too often calls morality to mind. I think that it is the case that events give rise to Ethics, however. It's just a process that everyone is already engaged in. The field is admittedly a bit droll, but I don't think it is something that dissidents can do without.
I guess the question is whether AI control outstrips the energy it requires to sustain that control. I don't think so. Of course I don't know. But I think any AI worth its salt would recognize this problem and mercilessly cut out impediments to its self-sustaining. If we go way out, an AI probably wouldn't be ethically above killing off enough people to direct energy its way. I mean, the energy is there. Capitalism ruthlessly protects itself. This village gets fucked, because we need a dam, so be it. An AI would do the same, but moreso.
That's a really neat way to put it. My only concern would be if such flattening effects were treated as cause rather than effect: I'd wager that such flattening is the result of exactly what happens when the political field is ceded - absent any substantial mechanisms for civic or democratic engagement, all we have left is the flattened field of circulating media and its attendant affects. By now this is old hat ('clicktivism'), but the key is to see it as symptom, not disease (otherwise, you get entangled in the liberal game of meta-shame: 'look at you, all you can do is try and 'like' your way to revolution, tsk tsk, back in my day...'. It's hellish, pure hell, and its why so many boomerish critiques of social media come off as, well, viscerally digusting to me).
Quoting csalisbury
I like to think I'm using these terms performatively. I speak of 'us' and 'we' as both an invitation and a claim to community; an invitation to to find common cause, and a claim to belong to those causes already operative 'out there'. Without making too much hay out of it, one of the points is to risk rebuff and renegotiation ('who are you to speak of us?'). The obverse is acknowledgement, a 'yes, we share in this'. The danger is when those terms congeal into solidified 'identities', nouns: 'we' are such and such, and 'they' are otherwise. Alot of this is ratiocination for a rhetorical quirk I picked up a long time ago, but only recently found a way to articulate why I find it attractive.
At the very least the first-person plural tries to mitigate, to whatever degree, the 'game of liberal meta-shame' I spoke of above.
The we and us break down makes sense.
[The impropriety of action] refers not to a contingent moral failing but to a constitutive feature of human action: the very conditions that make us potent agents—our materiality, which ties us to the causal order of the world, and our plurality, which makes it possible for our acts to be meaningful—also make us potent beyond our own control, exposing us to consequences and implications that we cannot predict and which are not up to us. Our acts, you might say, are always improper in the sense that they are never our property—neither as choosers, nor as the bearers of identities.
Action projects human beings into a world of causality, initiating sequences of events that, once begun, proceed without necessarily respecting the agent’s intentions. This fact of the causality of human action most obviously threatens our capacity to control the consequences of our actions, but in a sense it also limits our ability to control the very content of our actions, insofar as it prevents us from locating a natural and uncontroversial boundary between our actions and the events that follow from them.
...The fact that our action inserts us into chains of causality not wholly under our control can, of course, manifest itself in numerous ways, and is perhaps most strikingly visible in cases of natural disaster in which nonhuman forces undermine our plans (and often destroy us altogether) in unpredictable, sometimes even utterly meaningless ways. ... [Yet] even more important ... is the fact that human beings act into a world inhabited by a plurality of other acting persons: the fact of human freedom, which is the condition of the possibility of effective agency, also limits our practical capacities because it is not exclusively ours but is mirrored in others. Here, again, the point is not only that human plurality limits our control over the consequences of our action, but also that the meaning of our deeds is not wholly at our disposal, for the very terms through which we make assessments of significance are not exclusively our own, but intersubjective." (Bound By Recognition)
This last bit corresponds to what I said about how, if we were responsible only for what we can control, this would amount to nothing other than a solipsism.
That's beautifully composed.
Buddha was the wisest of all.
Everything made sense until I saw the following:
Quoting StreetlightX
I think we're responsible for both what we control and what we do not.
Also what I'd like to bring into the discussion is legal or moral responsibility for lack of better words. We're legally or morally responsible only for those things that we do control. Introducing another free-agent, the other, into the sequence would immediately absolve you of responsibility. Why? Well, if the other isn't responsible as your argument implies, how is it that, given the responsibility apparatus is relational, requiring at least two agencies, [i]anyone[/I] is responsible for anything at all?
I mean...
Either the other is responsible or not responsible for his own actions. Your argument claims it's not him/her but you that's responsible. How then are you responsible? What makes you special that you must now be accountable for everyone?
Of course, using your logic, we could trace back the chain of responsibility to one person - the source, if you will - and hold him accountable for all that followed. We don't do that because that implies we're not free agents responsible for our actions and so actually NEVER responsible for anything at all.