Thus, thankfully, with the death of Brezhnev and the rise of Thatcher and Reagan, irrealism retreated and realty gained salience. The world was now a fixer-upper to be flipped. Conveyancing mattered, Provenance or 'Genealogy' did not.
Amia Srinivasan, seeking to find a relationship between Seventies style 'critical genealogy'- stuff like how Society had brainwashed prostitutes into taking money from johns instead of paying them for their jizz- and irreal 'World-making'- which is about how visualising the world as being one where you've already done your homework and the washing up means not having to do your homework or your chores- writes-
A genealogy endows us with more than the knowledge that there were once people who thought differently than us.How? Looking at a family tree does not endow us with knowledge about different modes of thinking. The same is true about intellectual or aesthetic genealogy. The Mathematics genealogy project picks out mathematicians who are likely to belong to the same methodological school or research project. It gives us no information about those who thought differently from each other.
Amia's next sentence appears to acknowledge this-
(Indeed, certain genealogies, such as evolutionary genealogies, do not endow us with such historical knowledge at all.)But, if she knows this, why does she say the opposite? A genealogy that is not 'evolutionary'- i.e. track genetic or memetic changes- is no genealogy at all.
A genealogy (also) endows us with the knowledge that there are other, perhaps many other, uninstantiated possible ways of thinking.Rubbish! My neighbour's pedigree cat has a genealogy. It doesn't endow anybody with knowledge of the sort Amia mentions. How could it?
Put more simply, when genealogies reveal to us the contingency of our representations, they reveal to us that we could, perhaps even easily, represent the world otherwise.The 'contingency of our representations' are immediately revealed to us when they disappear when we get drunk off our heads or are coshed by a mugger or fall asleep. Genealogy, on the other hand, doesn't reveal anything at all save who begat whom.
We all know we can represent the world differently because that is what happens when we take drugs or dream or listen to a persuasive speaker or study a subject, like Mathematical Physics or Economics, which makes representing aspects of the world its business to some useful end. Marxism is based on Economics- its votaries thought it enabled them to envision a very different Social and Political world. The same is true of the 'Washington consensus'- it is based on a mathematical model of the economy. Similarly, the world that Edison and Ford and the digital computer and A.I and so forth ushered in was based, ultimately, on Mathematical Physics. Even the theory of Evolution got a second wind and was able to dispose off false notions such as that 'homosexuality' was unnatural, once it got a consistent mathematical representation.
However, all this sort of scientific and mathematical progress which enables us to represent the world very differently- for e.g. by getting rid of the notion that there is some essential difference between the races or genders- restricts our ability to represent the world otherwise. The Nazi's found out that they couldn't get rid of 'Jewish Science' without falling behind technologically. Stalin and Mao found out that Lysenko type Lamarckian theories caused mass famine. Genetics wasn't 'anything goes'. Neither was genealogy. Magick does not exist. Critical genealogy is merely magical thinking. It is not the case that reviving Vedic mathematics or Aztec cosmology will enable India or Mexico to overtake America in technology.
Amia thinks magical thinking opens doors for us-
Critical genealogies, then, open up the possibility space for our representational choices.But imagining anything we like can only offer us a momentary respite. Castles in Spain can't ameliorate our economic condition. The psychological comfort the provide are at best masturbatory. How does it help anyone if representational choices open up a space for surreal speculations about worlds where hookers pay johns and lunatics institutionalize the sane?
Such an enhanced modal sense is not itself sufficient for practical action. But by pointing to the contingency of what we took to be necessary –or whose contingency we were dimly aware of but never seriously considered – a genealogy can prompt us to ask questions that lead in the direction of action.Wanting to make the world better, or just our own lives better, leads directly to practical action. But only actions which do in fact make our lives better get reinforced.
In the short run, we may feel better if we lend credence to someone saying to us- 'you don't have to believe you are dying a painful death from cancer. Imagine yourself free of that terrible disease. Say to yourself 'everyday, in every way, I am getting better and better. Soon I shall be able to rise from my bed and walk unaided. Then I will be able to go back to work. I will then invent an anti-gravity machine. I will get the Nobel Prize. I will be elected President of the Universe.'
In the medium to long term, however, we will find that this sort of 'world making' is counter-productive. It leaves us spiritually and morally impoverished. We are trapped in denial, not on on our way to recovery.
That is why pointing to something already obvious to us does not prompt us to anything buy annoyance at the imbecility of the person doing the pointing. Hence 'critical genealogy' and 'world making' died a death, or were still-born, in even the drug addled Seventies.
If our representational arrangements could be otherwise, why this way of thinking rather than that?Coz this way is useful. If some other way were more useful we might hire someone who has mastered that way of world-making to do useful stuff for us. My 'representational arrangements' w.r.t my TV involve little people living inside that box who put on nice shows for me. When my TV breaks down, I hire a guy with a different 'representational arrangements' involving...urm...electrons? pixels?...dunno...anyway the guy fixes my TV so the little people come back to life and put on nice shows for me once again.
How do our current arrangements compare with counterfactual arrangements? Might there be better ways of thinking? Quick on the heels of these questions comes another: in what sense ‘better’? We standardly compare ways of thinking in terms of their epistemic qualities: to the extent that they are true, valid, rational, justified, apt, and so on.No we don't. We only care about utility. Epistemic qualities don't exist anymore than little people inside my TV set.
Certainly, discovering that our beliefs or concepts are contingent can prompt such calls for epistemic comparisons. Are our beliefs more plausible, or more grounded in evidence, than the alternatives? Are our concepts better at cutting nature ‘at its joints’ than the alternatives? But we can also make non-epistemic comparisons between our actual and possible representations. Instead of asking whether our representations are superior to the alternatives at getting onto the world – viz., whether they are superior qua representations – we can ask whether our representations are superior to the alternatives at making the world: whether they are superior qua social arrangements.Sheer nonsense! We are in the world. Representations are a way of functioning better in it. We outsource representations it would be costly for us to acquire so as to function better than we otherwise could. We don't have to evaluate other people's representations. We can 'cloud source' the evaluation provided any given agent is more likely to be right than wrong- in which case Condorcet's Jury theorem applies. Those fields in which a person is more likely to be right than wrong- e.g. is the food at such and restaurant tasty- are also those directly linked to utility.
As for 'social arrangements'- better functioning means we find social arrangements are more satisfactory for ourselves. That is the extent of our interest in the matter.
To answer this question, we will want to know what it is our representations do.They represent.
This, I will now suggest, is also a question that can be answered by genealogy.Which represents stupidity, so it can answer the question stupidly.
The idea that a genealogy of a representation could tell us what that representation does – what effects it has in the word – is, on reflection, puzzlingStupidity isn't puzzling unless one is very very stupid.
. A genealogy is an account of the causes of a representation.But it is a stupid one.
How then could it tell us anything about the effects of that representation?By saying the effects of that representation are stupidly genealogical.
The puzzle is dissolved via the notion of a function.The notion of a function is mathematical. It involves dependence or unique association.I don't believe Amia is smart enough to know what that is.
To say that a representation R has a function F – e.g. that theism has the function of social deterrence, or that bourgeois morality has the function of sustaining capitalist relations of production – is to say that (1) that R has a tendency to cause, sustain or otherwise produce F, and (2) that the fact that R has the tendency to produce F is the reason for its current existence.No. It is to say no F would obtain absent R. An ignorant fool may say 'there is no social deterrence in atheistic China. Everybody goes around raping and robbing whom they please. The Chinese think rape and robbery are quite delightful. That is why they have embraced an atheistic creed'.
A functional explanation of a representation, in other words, explains the emergence and dominance of that representation in terms of the worldly effects it tends to bring about.No. A functional explanation says if F is absent, R would not exist. Thus, if I were asleep I could not have this representation of my computer screen in my brain.
A better functional explanation would permit an entrepreneur to create a cheap implant so that I could always have a representation of this computer screen with me.
A stupid person may give a stupid functional explanation- e.g. the 1 per cent have got you hooked on computer screens because they want to steal all the oil in your hair while you are occupied watching Porn.
Since genealogies are accounts of the emergence of representations, many genealogies are also functional explanations.Very stupid ones.
Indeed, this is true of most of the genealogies we encountered in §1 are also arguably functional accounts, including the Sisyphus genealogy, the genealogies of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, and Foucaultian and feminist genealogies of our sex and gender concepts.All worthless shite.
Not all genealogies are functional explanations – recall the earlier examples from Herodotus and Xenophanes – and not all functional explanations are genealogies.But they are all worthless shite nevertheless.
For one can offer a functional explanation (e.g. the heart is for pumping blood) without embedding that functional claim in a genealogical account (the heart evolved because it was selected for its capacity to pump blood). This raises an interesting question: if we can learn about the function of a representation not via genealogy, but simply by observing what it does now, what is the point of genealogy?Good question. The answer is that it provides a playground for stupid shitheads.
Or, to put it differently, why take a historical approach to our representations, instead of an anthropological or sociological approach? I think there is much to say here but I will leave this question aside in the interest of space.Anthropological and sociological approaches, as we have all discovered, are equally shite.
For a reading of Marx as offering a functional explanation of bourgeois ideology, and a general discussion of the notion of a functional explanation, see Cohen (1978), Karl Marx’s Theory of History and Cohen (1988), History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx. See also Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism. 32 Some functional genealogies – like Williams’ genealogy of the value of truthfulness, or the Sisyphus fragment’s genealogy of theism – offer explanations of our contemporary representationsin terms of the socially valuable functions they play, like social trust and harmony. In this they are (practically) vindicatory. By contrast, (practically) critical genealogies attempt to reveal the oppressive functions of one or other of our dominant representations, for one or other group. (As I will discuss below, even Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals can be read in this way.) Such genealogies, we can say, purport to reveal the ideological function of our representations: they explain the emergence and continued dominance of our beliefs, values and concepts in terms of the role they play in producing, propping up, legitimating and obscuring oppressive social arrangements. The practical upshot of such a revelation of ideological function is clear: insofar as we can – more on this shortly – we ought to jettison these representational practices.Really? I should stop using my computer because some paranoid nutjob tells me that the 1 percent will steal all the oil in my hair while I'm watching Pornhub?
That's what I ought to do?
The idea that a genealogy can reveal the ideological function of a representation might seem to ignore Nietzsche’s warning, echoed by Foucault, not to mistake the historical function of something for its contemporary function.If a historical function existed, it must be exactly the same as the contemporary function unless some decay or breakdown has supervened. Suppose I use an eighteenth century snuff box to hold cocaine. Its function has not changed. Even if I use that snuff box as a 'store of value', this remains the case.
But when I say that a genealogy of a representation can reveal its ideological function, I mean its contemporary ideological function.
Which cashes out as the 1 percent stealing the oil in my greasy hair.
A genealogy of a representation, like a family genealogy, does not simply pinpoint the ‘first cause’ of its explanandum. (A genealogy that simply identified a single historical ancestor of a living person would not be much of a genealogy.) Rather, a genealogy traces descent: it explains why it is that a contemporary thing – a living person, a dominant representational mode – exists, now.Very true. The Aristocracy allied with the Church to steal the oil in the hair of poor people like myself. They then cunningly disguised themselves as the two main Political Parties and carried on their nefarious trade.
Part of that story will be one of origination: it will identify, to the extent it can, the earliest ancestor of the relevant explanandum. But then it must explain, further, how the current phenomenon emerged from that ancestor. In the case of a contemporary representation, a genealogy will tell us not only when and how the representation was first introduced into our representational lexicon, but how and why it survived and flourished from that originary moment until now.It's coz them 1 percenters are very cunning. Also, as David Icke says, they are actually lizard people from the Planet X.
And that story can and often will be a functional one: the contemporary representation survived and flourished because of the particular purpose it serves. The idea that a representation can function ideologically has an uneasy place in mainstream analytic philosophy. Indeed, analytic philosophers often see the attempt to reveal ideological function as a kind of historicist non sequitur. I don’t mean to suggest that it is only philosophers who in this way resist the notion of ideological function. For a defence by a historian of Enlightenment values against Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument that they function ideologically, see Wokler, ‘Ernst Cassirer’s Enlightenment’ (2012). Thus a common response to the observation that a certain form of representation has historically gone hand-in-hand with – and thus plausibly serves to legitimate and sustain – a certain set of oppressive practices, is that there is no necessary or conceptual connection between the representation and its effects. Take, for example, John Tasioulas’ response to Samuel Moyn’s genealogical critique of human rights discourse as having done ‘far more to transform the terrain of idealism than…the world itself’. Tasioulas objects to Moyn’s holding human rights responsible for doing, or failing to do, this or that. One might with no less cogency say that justice, equality, fairness, mercy and love have not ‘done enough’ to transform the world as it is…however, this way of speaking conflates human rights, understood as genuine normative demands, and the fallible practical measures through which we seek…to fulfil them. But Moyn is presumably not holding the discourse of human rights (morally) responsible for anything. His point is, rather, that the discourse of human rights serves the function of maintaining certain forms of political domination (specifically, material inequality), all the while purporting to serve the interests of justice. Thus the concept of human rights functions ideologically. Tasioulas’s response to this critique is to simply deny that this oppressive function could be part of the concept of human rights: thus ‘the project of limning the concept of human rights is not one of cataloguing the various uses – legitimate or not – to which speakers put that concept’ (ibid). But this retort misses the point of a functional genealogy. The connection that Moyn draws between human rights and inequality is not one of conceptual necessity. But nor is it not one of mere contingency, either. Rather, the proposed connection is functional.No, it is wholly dysfunctional. The reason Human Rights are off the agenda is because they dilute Hohfeldian Rights. Poor people vote against Rights based approaches because their Entitlements can't be further diluted without their perishing.
Whatever the proper analysis of the concept human rights, and whatever the noble intentions of some of its users, its ascendancy as a normative concept, Moyn is arguing, has something to do with its ability to legitimate certain aspects of the political status quo.That ascendancy vanished like a dream. Indeed, it never existed. It was an availability cascade simply.
That said, the notion of ideological function is not without its problems. Functional explanations are teleological: they explain the means in terms of the ends. But, barring backwards causation, how could the effects of a representation explain the existence of that representation? The puzzle is easily dissolved in cases where representations are intentionally brought into use because of their effects – for example, when we say that theism was developed by a ‘shrewd and clever-minded man’ in order to deter evil.On the contrary, if a 'shrewd and clever-minded man' could get people to believe in a God who would punish evil-doers, he could also get them to retrain as mathematicians or technologists or anything else. Moh Tzu, the utilitarian, irenic, technologist, thought that belief in ghosts (who see what you are doing when you are alone) was enough to keep the peasants honest. Why introduce a God whom, people might say, judges you to be evil and worthy of death? Ghosts is the way to go.
By explaining our representations in terms of their ideological function, critical genealogies also show us the precise ways in which our representations can and do affect the world they (purport to) represent.Nonsense! Our representations don't affect anything. Only actions do. But actions are costly. They are pruned by economic forces and regulated by 'mechanism design'. Thus it makes sense to let go of fatuous representations because they can't hurt those against whom we feel malice. Furthermore, they irrationally constrain our own decision space thus putting us at a competitive disadvantage.
Some of these effects are straightforwardly causal. The widespread belief that women are submissive or that welfare recipients are lazy have familiar, discriminatory effects on how women and welfare recipients are treated – discriminatory effects that are plausibly part of the explanation for why these beliefs are so widespread.Rubbish! If there were a widespread belief that women were submissive, there would be a female wage premium. Employers would see that women work more overtime than men. They have lower attrition rates. None of this is empirically true.
Welfare recipients may be lazy. So what? That does not affect how they are treated. What matters is whether or not they possess countervailing power. The same is true of employees with property righs in their job. They may be extremely lazy. But they can't be treated badly because they have the power to retaliate by getting the shop steward to declare a strike or go-slow.
Concepts like alien, immigrant, woman and homosexual also arguably serve an ideological function – legitimating the oppressive treatment of the subjects they pick out – as do, more obviously, concepts that might in fact be empty but are widely taken not to be, such as slut.But this 'ideological function' is wholly ineffective. It changes nothing. Aliens, immigrants, women and homosexuals have gained not because ideology has changed but because of their own productivity and moral integrity. Societies and Corporations hostile to immigrants and career women and homosexuals decline relative to those which, no matter how prejudiced, take advantage of their productive and innovative power.
Only economic forces matter. 'Attitudes' don't.
The same might plausibly be said of concepts that are generally thought to pick out natural rather than social kinds. Thus Judith Butler tells us that, while the overt function of the concept biological sex is to help us limn the contours of biological reality, its covert function is to coercively order the world along the gender binary.But this 'covert function' has zero overt effect. It is a waste of resources. No doubt, some evil cabal of men are laughing into their sleeves about the 'covert' manner in which they've got the sheeple to believe there is more than one gender. But this evil cabal hasn't actually achieved anything. The joke is on them.
I have been speaking of the way that certain representations lead ‘us’ to treat the aspects of the world they pick out. But critical genealogy can also reveal the way in which the ideological function of our representations can work via our own self-representation. The belief that women are submissive, for example, not only leads men to treat girl and women in certain ways, but also – because of the internalization of that belief on the part of women – affects how women themselves behave, and treat each other.Where? In Amia's ancestral South India? Are you kidding me? Tambram women pack a hefty punch. What about America or England? Where are these submissive women Amia is talking about? How come I've never met one?
The belief that women are submissive is also an example of a self-fulfilling belief: a belief that can become true, qua generic, precisely because it is widely believed to be true. Likewise, to borrow an example from Ian Hacking, being classified under the concept schizophrenic can lead people to develop schizophrenic symptoms that make it the case that they properly fall under the concept.If this were true, then we ought to propagate the belief that schizophrenic women on welfare can prove the Reimann hypothesis. They will immediately stop hearing Voices- or rather they will hear only the voice of Reimann- and so one or other of them will very quickly win the Clay Prize.
Is there a distinctive wrong involved, as Foucault and his followers often seem to suggest, in bringing into existence a new kind of subject (Amia is speaking of schizophrenia as a medical diagnosis) ? This is a deep and important question, and not one I can fully answer here. But let me say something brief in favour of the thought that there is in fact a distinctive wrong here. That defence takes up Searle’s way of understanding social kind concepts. According to Searle, a social kind (e.g. money) comes into existence because we collectively assign things (e.g. bills and notes) that satisfy a certain constitutive rule (i.e. are issued by a certain authority) a certain status (i.e. being money), which involves being endowed with a certain social purpose (i.e. to serve as an exchangeable bearer of value). Thus our concept money brings into existence a new thing, i.e. money.Has anything like this actually happened in the history of Monetary Economics? Nope. Fiat money comes into existence as part of fiscal policy- it is a way to pay one's tax which the Exchequer finds convenient. It is not the case that a new concept gave rise to something new in itself.
The assignment of the social purpose of serving as an exchangeable bearer of value to certain material objects might be perfectly innocuous.It would also fail immediately unless backed up by a coercive fiscal authority.
We can also collectively bring into existence things with more problematic purposes.No we can't. The best we can do is pool coercive or persuasive power. But the thing will soon collapse unless it is a focal solution for a repeated game in which case we needn't have bothered doing anything collective in the first place. Arbitrageurs would have done the job anyway.
Many radical feminists, most notably Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, can be read as arguing that the concept woman – a seemingly natural concept that simply picks out adult human females – in fact assigns the purpose of being for the sexual use of men to people who satisfy the constitutive rule of being adult human females.Because that's how Society works, right? You are just walking down the street when some guy bends you over and unzips his pants. You say 'unhand me Sir! I do not satisfy the constitutive rule of being an adult human female.' He says 'My bad' and moves on to the next passerby.
The collective assignment of such a purpose might be (now) largely unconscious; but then so is, Searle says, the collective assignment of purpose to those things we pick out with the concept money.There was no collective assignment. Money arose either by the activity of a 'Stationary Bandit' or else by that of arbitrageurs.
It was never the case that all 'adult human females' were assigned the purpose of sexual use by all men.
To see what purpose is essential to the social kind money, we need to examine how we in fact use money; likewise, to see what purpose is essential to the social kind woman, we need to examine how we in fact treat women.Nonsense! To understand monetary economics we first have to understand fiscal policy. How we use money is irrelevant unless we happen to be Despots or Hedge Fund mavens.
We don't need to examine 'how we in fact treat women' because we already know we will get a tight slap if we say 'Mummy, kindly do my Sanskrit homework not due to you are so nice but because doing my Sanskrit homework is the purpose essential to the social kind 'woman' which you represent coz u don't got a dick like wot I do.'
Would it be so strange to think that such an examination would reveal that women are indeed for the sexual use of men, even if few were willing to consciously endorse such a view?If women were 'for the sexual use of men' then there would be a demographic collapse by reason of the spread of STDs causing infertility. Consider what happened during the brief 'collectivization of women' after the Bolshevik revolution. Its victims died very quickly.
If not – and I think not – the concept woman, rather than merely picking out people who satisfy a certain criterion, brings into existence people who have the social purpose of being for the sexual use of men. Since no one ought to have such a purpose conferred on them, there is a case for thinking there is a distinctive wrong in bringing the social kind woman into existence.But no one has ever done so. This 'distinctive wrong' is wholly imaginary. The 'social kind' woman does not exist.
Once a genealogy has revealed the ideological function played by some representation, what practically follows?We laugh at it.
That depends in part on what can in fact be done about it. On one extreme view – call it the idealistic view – worldly statesof-affairs are the mere products of our representations, such that a change at the representational level will necessitate a change in material conditions. But such a view is implausible. As Marx taught us, an ideology may have the function of legitimating and obscuring certain oppressive material conditions, but ideology is ultimately and also the causal product of those conditions. The mutually reenforcing nature of ideological representation and material reality might lead us to the pessimistic view that, after all, nothing can be done about either. But here, as Marx also reminds us, the correct answer is surely that something must be done about both, at once: a revolutionary practice thus consists in the simultaneous ‘changing of circumstances and…self-change’.Which achieved nothing. On the other hand, changes in the mode of production- which occurred for purely economic reasons- caused 'everything that seemed solid to melt into air'.
On the question of how to engage in such revolutionary practice, we might imagine that genealogy – given its essentially backwards-looking and diagnostic nature – must be silent. But this, I want to suggest by way of conclusion, need not be so.The thing is as crazy as a bedbug. Why would it be silent? Shrieking paranoid nonsense is all it knows how to do.
Genealogy as a guide to worldmaking In the preface to the Genealogy, Nietzsche proposes to ‘give voice to this new demand; we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values should itself, for once, be examined’.The value of a value is its value. The truthfulness of truthfulness consists in its telling the truth. The compassion in compassion is its compassion for others. Why should this be examined even once? Univocity prevails save with respect to instrumental values which, however, can always be given univalent foundations by incorporating an intensional theory of types.
To be able to give such a critique, he goes on, ‘we need to know about the conditions and circumstances under which the values grew up, developed and changed’.No we don't. Anyway, the thing is impossible. All we'd end up with is stupid just-so stories of a more or less paranoid type.
This pronouncement has led many to read the Nietzsche’s genealogical inquiry into the ‘conditions and circumstances’ of morality’s development as itself constituting a revaluation of values.That is a perfectly cogent reading. Nietzche was a nutter, true enough, but he could be read as licensing a certain type of cynical power politics.
But in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche goes on to describe the Genealogy, retrospectively, as ‘a psychologist’s three crucial preparatory works for a revaluation of all values’. In what sense is the Genealogy merely ‘preparatory’ for this crucial task, and not the task itself? Nietzsche makes clear, in the Genealogy and elsewhere, that modern morality has the function of controlling, subduing and neutering the instincts of higher men, those individuals capable of the grandest reaches of human excellence.But, there was absolutely no evidence for this whatsoever.
Nietzsche worries that ‘men of great creativity, the really great men…will be sought in vain today’ for ‘nothing stands more malignantly in the way of their rise and evolution…than what in Europe today is simply called “morality”’.But that 'morality' had disappeared by the time he went completely off his chump. Antinomianism was de rigeur. Everybody and their Uncle was writing aphoristicall or epigramatically. Paradoxes were piled on paradoxes till outright Paranoia stood rampant.
The worship of meekness and forgiveness, the priority of the herd over the individual, the insistence on equality and universalism, the belief that suffering is to be minimised and happiness maximized: all these features of modern morality – a bastardized blend, Nietzsche tells us, of Christianity, Kantianism, utilitarianism and asceticism – conspire against what is best and most noble in men.But the thing did not exist in Bismark's Germany, let alone that of the new Kaiser. Nietzche was tilting at windmills in a world of steam engines.
Thus Nietzsche inverts Thrasymachus’ dictum that justice is the advantage of the stronger into his own dictum that morality is ‘the prudence of the lowest order’.Prudence, thrift, hard work, the cultivation of alethic disciplines- yes, these are the virtues of the lower order on its way to supplanting worthless shitheads who think they are the cat's whiskers.
The Genealogy constitutes a profound (if ultimately misguided) condemnation of modern morality.How can something which is misguided also be profound?
In what sense, then, is the Genealogy merely preparatory, and not itself a full-blown revaluation of values? In a famous passage near the end of Book One of the Genealogy, Nietzsche narrates a conversation with someone who has taken up his invitation ‘to have a little look down into the secret of how ideals are fabricated on this earth’.His interlocutor, having descended into ‘this dark workshop’, reports back: I think people are telling lies; a sugary mildness clings to every sound. Lies are turning weakness into an accomplishment, no doubt about it – it’s just as you said.…and impotence which doesn’t retaliate is being turned into “goodness”; timid baseness is being turned into “humility”; submission to people one hates is being turned into “obedience” (actually towards someone who, they say, orders this submission – they call him God). The inoffensiveness of the weakling, the very cowardice with which he is richly endowed, his standing-by-the-door, his inevitable position of having to wait, are all given good names such as “patience”, also known as the virtue; not-being-able-to-take-revenge is called not-wanting-to-take-revenge, it might even be forgiveness…They are also talking about “loving your enemies” – and sweating while they do it…But enough! enough! I can’t bear it any longer. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where ideals are fabricated – it seems to me just to stink of lies…“We good people – we are the just” – what they are demanding is not called retribution, but “the triumph of justice”; what they hate is not their enemy, oh no! they hate “injustice”, “godlessness”; what they believe and hope for is not the prospect of revenge, the delirium of sweet revenge…but the victory of God, the just God, over the Godless…Nietzsche’s interlocutor is here witnessing a sort of pantomime of the slave revolt in morality. But he is also witnessing, as Skinner tells us, the workings of an ancient rhetorical strategy, what Quintilian calls paradiastole, or paradiastolic redescription. This is the strategy whereby, Skinner explains, one replaces ‘a given evaluative description with a rival term that serves to picture the action no less plausibly, but serves at the same time to place it in a contrasting moral light’. What I want to suggest is that Nietzsche here satirizes paradiastolic description in order to call our attention to the basic mechanism by which the slave revolt in morality was achieved: to remind us that it was not a matter of sheer contingency or blind luck, but a product of human artifice and skill. In particular, the slave revolt in morality involved a conscious attempt to change our representational practices – replacing the good/bad dichotomy with the evil/good dichotomy; recasting virtues and vices, and vices and virtues; spreading belief in free will, agency, moral responsibility, and the afterlife – and thereby bringing into being a set of practices (of social debt and punishment, of promise-making and keeping, of asceticism and herd socialization) that are both sustained by and sustain these representational practices. Later in the same passage, Nietzsche describes the ‘black magicians who can turn anything back into whiteness, milk and innocence’ as having performed the ‘boldest, subtlest, most ingenious and mendacious stunt’. The slave revolt in morality is a ‘mendacious stunt’, but one that impresses Nietzsche nonetheless: it is a piece of ‘black magic’ that calls for both revulsion and admiration. It is in this sense that the Genealogy is, I want to suggest, a merely ‘preparatory’ work for the revaluation of values. A full revaluation of values will not merely diagnose the ideological function of our values, thereby prompting the ‘higher men’ to rebel against them, but will moreover revalue them, transforming them anew. For it is one thing to reveal that morality has the function of harming the strong at the expense of the weak, and another still to make the strong good once more. Nietzsche’s Genealogy, by revealing the means by which modern morality came into being, prepares the ground for the ‘reverse experiment’ and ‘redemption of this reality’ that ‘should be possible in principle’, at least for a future ‘creative spirit’ of ‘sufficient strength’.Reading the Genealogy this way is to read it as a guide to what I want to call worldmaking: the transformation of the world through a transformation of our representational practices.Okay. Amia has read Nietzche as a guide to worldmaking. Very good. What world has she made? Does it feature a cure to cancer? No? Then what good is it? Neither Amia nor Nietzche can guide us in any way. Nietzche was crazy and stupid. Amia is a pedant in a worthless University Department. Any 'world-making' of hers will be inconceivably dreary and fatuous.
A critical genealogy is a guide to worldmaking when it not only explains our representations in the terms of the ideological function they serve, but also shows us the role that agents have played in the emergence and continued dominance of those representations.Anything at all, e.g the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbor's cat, which 'not only explains' all cognitive processes in terms of sociological functions but which also is able to specify what role any given agent has played or will play, would be able to reorder the world according to our own fancy. Every 'hard problem' of A.I, or open question in Maths, would be child's play to it. It could create Matrix like multiverses tailored to every individual. Life on earth would exceed any prevision of Heaven. Indeed, it would contain all such previsions.
Why not simply say 'a critical Raja Yoga is a guide to creating our own Trishanku heaven?' Why not dress up in Robes and claim to be the Divine Mother and drive around in a fleet of Rolls Royces?
Why does Amia pick on the ravings of a syphilitic pedant instead of some Tantric text familiar to her own ancestors?
For then we, as agents, might hope to be able to – by a similar mechanism, but to a very different end – make our representations, and thus our world, anew.We could also ensure adequate aeronautical capacity for our porcine chums.
There are grounds to read Nietzsche as exhorting a worldmaking of a very ambitious kind.Those are the grounds of a lunatic asylum where you can roll around in your own filth shrieking unintelligibly.
Nietzsche’s interlocutor describes the masterminds of the slave revolt as ‘telling lies’ and as ‘rumour-mongers and clandestine forgers’.There was no such slave revolt either in antiquity or Nietzche's own century. Instead, there was Harriet Tubman.
That the slaves are lying about morality presupposes that there is moral truth that they are (deliberately) getting wrong: that they are speaking falsely when they say that the weak are good and the strong evil.Oho! That was Gandhi's shtick, surely? Is Amia attacking the Mahatma's slave revolt under cover of drooling over Nietzche's lunatic lucubrations?
It is doubtful however that Nietzsche thinks that the moral truth exists independently of what we make of it. In The Gay Science he writes that, ‘Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature — nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time’.But, this is also the conclusion that Neo-Classical Economics came to. There was no just price or natural wage or rate of interest. The paradox of Value was a piece of stupidity.
This seemingly anti-realist view of morality – on which what is genuinely valuable is constituted by what we think and treat as valuable – implies that we have the power to make what was once good now bad, and vice versa, precisely by changing our patterns and practices of valuing.No. What matters is relative scarcity. That is purely objective. As Chichilinisky showed, 'limited arbitrage' is enough for a realist, but not externalist, Theory of Value to function consistently provided Preferences and Production functions satisfy a Goldilocks condition. If this is not met, there may be a speciation event or channelisation of a certain sort.
While rhetorical redescription thus begins as an affront to our created moral reality – an act of lying and forgery – it can, on such a view, end up as a true representation of it. For Nietzsche, I am suggesting, rhetorical description has the power not only to change our representations of value, but moreover to change what really is valuable: to bring value in and out of existence.Why suggest this? The fact is the fellow went mad. He changed nothing, save for the worse.
Thus the ‘creative spirit’, Nietzsche says, will be ‘misunderstood by people as though [he is taking] a flight from reality’, when in fact he is here to ‘redeem it from the curse which its ideal has placed on it up till now’. In a crucial passage of the Genealogy, Nietzsche describes how it is that representations come to exercise their functional roles in the world: every purpose and use is just a sign that the will to power has achieved mastery over something less powerful, and has impressed upon its own idea of a use function; and the whole history of a ‘thing’, an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations….The form is fluid, the ‘meaning’ even more so…I lay stress on this major point of historical method, especially as it runs counter to just that prevailing instinct and fashion which would much rather come to terms with absolute randomness, and even the mechanistic senselessness of all events, than the theory that a power-will is acted out in all that happens….Schopenhauer, poor fellow, missed out on the Darwinian revolution which however his notion of 'Will' sought to capture. However it had no need to impress a function on anything it subordinated. Coevolved processes have high complexity in a manner driven by, but exponentially faster than, a set of random processes.
Nietzsche’s genealogy is not (as is sometimes suggested) about the revelation of sheer contingency, understood as ‘absolute randomness’ or ‘mechanistic senselessness’. Instead, his genealogy is about revealing just how deeply the way the world is depends on how we represent it; and, moreover, that how we represent it is a matter of which of the various ‘interpretations and adaptations’ vie for domination.Rubbish. Nietzche didn't believe, like Novalis's sorcerer, that we create the world but have forgotten we did so. He did believe he had to write shite and this belief was reinforced by some who cared for him. Anyway, economic forces ensured the thing paid for itself though in a repugnancy market for adolescent psilosophy.
In revealing this, Nietzsche’s genealogy is a reminder – at least for those of us who are sufficiently strong, creative and noble – of our worldmaking power.Very true! And Aleister Crowley's shite is a reminder- at least for those of us who are sufficiently deranged- of our power to do Magic.
It is also a reminder of the limits on that power. For simply changing one’s own local representations is insufficient to successfully worldmake. One’s proposed redescription must vie for uptake against the dominant mode of representation. What is more, for representational interventions to be successful, it is often the case that they must be taken up by the very people whose interests will be undermined if the representations do in fact take hold.Yes dear. To remake the world it is not sufficient that we think of ourselves as very special. We must also convince everybody else that we are oh so special and everybody should do what we tell them. Then the whole world will become so nice.
The slave revolt in morality required not only, Nietzsche tells us, that the slaves believe themselves to be good. It also required that the masters come to believe themselves to be evil.No! The masters had to come to believe that they were not just evil but also addicted to giving blowjobs to hobos. Won't somebody please think of the hobos?!
Such representational interventions – as all the most effective political actors know, and as the best histories teach us – require not only the gifts of sound judgment and persuasive style, but also the gift of good luck.Indeed. Without good luck you can't find Alladin's lamp and command the genie to produce lots of gold and diamonds which you then use to buy political influence and media exposure and so forth.
For his own part, Nietzsche often seemed to rail against the way in which his worldmaking powers were hostage to the uptake of others.Why just Nietzche? You should have heard me rail against Anver Shaked, my tutor at the LSE, who dared to dispute my proof that noughts and crosses is unsolvable.
More generally, every drooling nutjob is very very angry that nobody will take him seriously when he says he is the Emperor Napoleon.
He complains, for example, that his Thus Spoke Zarathustra sold so few copies, and explains that this is because it is an ‘unintelligible book…based on experiences that I share with nobody’. Of Beyond Good and Evil he writes that ‘[e]verybody has complained that I am “not understood,” and the approximately one hundred copies which have been sold have made it quite obvious to me that I am not understood’.Nietzsche’s Zarathustra begins with his title character stepping out of a cave and asking what the sun would be if not for those on whom it shines. After attempting and failing to take his message to the world, Zarathustra returns, at the end of the book, to his cave once more. It is a poignant image of a failed worldmaker. It also speaks of the pragmatic and political problems with Nietzsche’s profoundly individualistic vision of worldmaking.There were no 'pragmatic or political problems' with saying 'Boo to Christianity' more particularly during the Kulturkampf. Ditto with respect to the revolting masses.
For an alternative vision, we should turn, I want to suggest, towards those whom Nietzsche would presumably despise: the participants in the various slave revolts still underway. I am thinking in particular of the representational revolutions, still incomplete, associated with the great liberation movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: workers’ struggle to end capitalist exploitationwhich succeeded in...urm... Venezuela mebbe?
, the struggle of black and brown people against colonial and other racialized forms of oppressionwhich succeeded because Germany started two world wars it was bound to lose.
and the feminist struggle to bring an end to patriarchal domination.which succeeded because patriarchal domination costs money.
All these revolutionary projects are in part projects of worldmaking: the project of transforming our representational practices in order to bring into existence new, as yet impossible forms of life.If so, they failed immediately. By contrast, purely commercial, not revolutionary at all, projects succeeded in bringing into existence new, previously impossible, forms of life.
Thus Marxist revolutionary practice consists, in part, in reinterpreting the world from the perspective of the proletariat.and then fucking them over till they either run away or turn into alcoholics or hook up with a bunch of gangsters.
While the ‘Free-trader Vulgaris’, Marx says, sees the marketplace as ‘a very Eden of the innate rights of man’ where ‘alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham’, those who are forced to sell their labour are positioned to describe a different world: to see buyer and seller transformed into ‘capitalist’ and ‘labourer’, and to see the marketplace as a place not of free exchange but of exploitation.Much good this way of seeing does them. They get fucked over sooner rather than later as the good folk who voted for Chavez are finding out.
Indeed, Capital itself – despite Marx’s claim that it offered only a scientific theory – can be read as an exercise in reinterpretation of our economic and social realities, an exercise that brought into being whole new social categories.Very true. New social categories like 'metrosexuals' or 'hipsters' came into existence because...oh! it wasn't Marx at all. It was Reality TV shows aimed at what Marx would have called the lumpenproletariat which is sooo unfair coz I've been dieting and am no longer just a shapeless lump of fat.
For Marx, it is the proletariat’s relationship to the means of production that allows its members to see, and thus conceptualise, the material reality under the ideological appearance.The material reality turned out to be that they could feather their own nests by extracting a rent but that this would hurt their own children who would be condemned to the 'precariat'.
For a thinker like DuBois, by contrast, it is black Americans’ all too acute awareness of themselves as objects of white consciousness that gives rise to their worldmaking power.Du Bois told the world about the black 'talented tenth'. By the Twenties or Thirties, the whole world could see that African Americans had prodigious talents and capabilities. The M.D of General Motors turned round the fortunes of his company first by selling Cadillacs to blacks and then hiring black women to work on the assembly lines.
By contrast, the equally dark skinned Tambrams- i.e. my and Amia's ancestors- were screwing up big time by following a stupid Mahatma. No doubt, Gandhi's 'worldmaking power' arose from how White people saw puny little Banias. But the world Gandhi made was shite and Tambrams started fleeing it for Greencard holder pastures as soon as racist quotas were lifted in '65.
I do listen to Carnatic Music- now almost entirely a Tambram preserve- but I have to admit it is as boring as shit. Non Brahmin composers like Illayaraja or A.R. Rahman are so good even my African American friends willl listen to their tracks. By contrast, the whole world has given the highest place to African American musicians and singers. Why? Not because of their 'worldmaking' but because of their talent, innovation, and hard work.
Thus ‘the Negro…is…born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world’. What black Americans yearn for, DuBois says, is the reconciliation of two currently unreconcilable identities. (He might have added that, for black women, the challenge was to reconcile three unreconcilable identities.) To end black Americans’ oppression, DuBois says, a new sort of person will have to be made possible, a person who is simply ‘both a Negro and an American’. But that person will be made possible, DuBois thinks, only once we have reconceptualised what it is to be American. Thus DuBois ends The Souls of Black Folk – in a gesture that would later be echoed by James Baldwin -- by retelling American history as a history of its black slaves. ‘Would America have been America without her Negro people?’ DuBois asks. If our answer – or, rather, the answer of white people – is no, then we have opened up some small space of possibility for that which is currently impossible.Facts are facts. The US Army, during the Second World War, realised that African Americans were superb and highly intelligent soldiers. To win they had to promote at least some of them on the basis of ability. Colin Powell's autobiography gives an eye opening account of the manner in which the white soldier learned to respect and honour his Black commanding officer- because the man would save his life and deliver victory. Off the Army base, however, Jim Crow might rule. The man he saluted on base could not sit down and drink a milkshake at the diner.
Similarly, for feminists such as Beauvoir and MacKinnon, it is women’s awareness of themselves as objects of men’s representations – the objects, that is, of male worldmaking – that gives rise to women’s own power to remake the world.Neither Beauvoir nor MacKinnon succeeded in doing any such thing. Instead they helped erode the epistemic status of their own disciplines. They blighted the prospects of their disciples. By contrast, women who never gave a second's thought to 'men's representations' of them, greatly improved life-chances for everybody.
‘[M]ale power creates the reality of the world’ MacKinnon writes, and it is the task of feminism to ‘expose it as specifically male for the first time’. She goes on 'For example, men say all women are whores; feminism observes that men have the power to make prostitution women’s definitive condition…Men say women desire to be degraded; feminism sees female masochism as the ultimate success of male supremacy and puzzle over its failures'.What is this shite? Who are these men? Losers, I take it. No doubt they are busy mounting in each other in some squalid prison cell.
But simply exposing our sexual reality as a result of male power is not yet sufficient. In a paradiolistic gesture more than worthy of Nietzsche, MacKinnon tells us that feminism claims the voice of women’s silence, the sexuality of women’s eroticized desexualization, the fullness of ‘lack,’ the centrality of women’s marginality and exclusion, the public nature of privacy, the presence of women’s absence. This approach is more complex than transgression, more transformative than transvaluation, deeper than mirror-imaged resistance, more affirmative than the negation of negativity. It is neither materialist nor idealist; it is feminist.I don't wish to quibble but surely that should read 'more supercalifragilisticexpialidociously affirmative than the negation of totally un-supercalifragilisticexpialidocious negativity?' In matters of such high import, it is best to err on the side of caution when it comes to precision in language.
Feminism reinterprets the male-created world for itself, in a way that is at once true to reality,that reality being the fact that every passing man keeps bending you over and fucking you when you are struggling with a push-chair and the grocery shopping.
resisting an idealistic flight from it,into a world where strange men are not constantly bending you over
and transformative of it – resisting a materialistic capitulation to it. This dual demand – to resist both idealism and materialism, futility and complacency – structures all endeavours at worldmaking.This dual demand sure is doing a swell job at structuring all the endeavours at world-making women apply themselves to in between being bent over and fucked all the livelong day.
Indeed it, in a broad sense, structures all our creative endeavours.Very generous of it, I'm sure.
A creative act is a proposed interpretation of an artistic tradition.Rubbish! Proposed interpretations of artistic traditions are worthless shite. They aren't creative at all. Rather, they are completely mindless.
If it hews too closely to that received tradition, it will be derivative, a complacent acceptance of what has come before.Very true! That is why Emmy Noether was not a creative mathematician. She should have doodled figures of men being beastly to women and written 'Boo to Men!' in thick crayon on her mathematical papers.
If, however, it departs too radically from what preceded it, it will be simply be unintelligible, a futile attempt to make sense.'Boo to men!' makes perfect sense. So does the claim that one is constantly being raped by all and sundry. I still remember all the Hollywood and Bollywood actresses who ravished me during the mid Seventies. God, they were insatiable!
Likewise with our attempts at worldmaking, individual or communal: our representational interventions must at once feel as if they are getting the world right, and to picture it anew.So, to change the world, it is not enough to visualize Alexandria Ocasio Cortez becoming President in 2020. We must picture in her new way- maybe with her hair done up in an Afro or Mohawk. If that isn't enough, perhaps she could have a parrot on her shoulder.
I do not mean this as an argument for Fabianism, in either art or politics. Far from it.Good! Fabians would definitely object to the parrot.
At its best, worldmaking is a radical endeavour, bringing into existence worlds we scarcely thought possible.Coz the parrot would have the voice of James Earl Jones but the potty mouth of a Sarah Silverman.
But I do mean it as a diagnosis of the difficulty of worldmaking. In that, it is also one answer to why history matters for politicsCoz watching the History Channel can really freshen up your visualisation exercises. We must defeat neo-liberalism by forming an alliance with the Pirates of the Caribbean and the White Walkers from Game of Thrones. Also Nietzche could have a cameo as a Time Travelling hitman for a Colombian Cartel. And Sherlock Holmes would be there and Mahatma Gandhi would do a disco number and then I'd hook up with that nice girl who used to sit in front of me in Chemistry class and then we'd all go to Nirula's for masala dosas and ice-cream floats.
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