Kritik Toolbox Supplement – bfhhr general

Kritik Toolbox Supplement – BFHHR

general

weak ontology

Prior questions will never be fully settled—must take action even under conditions of uncertainty

To conclude this chapter, while modernist and postmodernist debates continue, while we are still unsure as to what we can legitimately identify as a feminist ethical/political concern, while we still are unclear about the relationship between discourse and experience, it is particularly important for feminists that we proceed with analysis of both the material (institutional and structural) as well as the discursive. This holds not only for feminists, but for all theorists oriented towards the goal of extending further moral inclusion in the present social sciences climate of epistemological uncertainty. Important ethical/political concerns hang in the balance. We cannot afford to wait for the meta-theoretical questions to be conclusively answered. Those answers may be unavailable. Nor can we wait for a credible vision of an alternative institutional order to appear before an emancipatory agenda can be kicked into gear. Nor do we have before us a chicken and egg question of which comes first: sorting out the metatheoretical issues or working out which practices contribute to a credible institutional vision. The two questions can and should be pursued together, and can be via moral imagination. Imagination can help us think beyond discursive and material conditions which limit us, by pushing the boundaries of those limitations in thought and examining what yields. In this respect, I believe international ethics as pragmatic critique can be a useful ally to feminist and normative theorists generally.

In this section, I will further explicate the notion of weak ontology. Although weak ontologists find much to contest in one another’s work, as ontologists they all share a commitment to a political and ethical practice that cultivates fundamental sources from which affirmative gestures of ethical life and liveliness might gain their strength. As weak ontologists, they all affirm the contestable nature of their onto-stories about these sources. Although all insist that fundamental conceptualizations of self, other, and the world are necessary to any adequately compelling ethical practice, they all also acknowledge that all such conceptualizations offered today are tinged with contingency and indeterminacy rather than certainty and that none can be simply demonstrated to be true or even universally compelling (White, 2000, pp. 6-10). In most renderings, this fundamental contingency can itself become a source of ethical care and forbearance. Weak ontology would differentiate itself from both those who want to make strong ontological claims and those who believe ontology should make no claims at all. White (2000) characterizes strong ontological claims as those that purport “to show ‘the way the world is,’ or how God’s being stands to human being, or what human nature is” (p. 6). We might think of Plato’s philosophy of Ideas or of most versions of theistic Christianity but also of the political theories of Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss. These accounts, White notes, carry an assumption of certainty, or truth, that allows them to confidently articulate both a fundamental essence of the world and how that essence ought to be reflected in moral and political life. Against such certainties, weak ontologists insist on the fundamental experience of contingency and indeterminacy in modern life (p. 7). No story of strong ontology could capture, without remainder or violence, the multiplicity of today’s moral–political experiences and possibilities. This has led William Connolly (1995) to replace the term ontology itself with the term ontopolitcal interpretation (p. 1).

at: narratives/individual performance

Personal narrative is not the corrective to technocrats

at: futurism

Future oriented apocalyptic pedagogy is productive

Junio and Mahnken 13—Stanford AND Naval War College (Timothy and Thomas, “Conceiving of Future War: The Promise of Scenario Analysis for International Relations”, International Studies Review Volume 15, Issue 3, pages 374–395, September 2013, dml)

This article introduces political scientists to scenarios—future counterfactuals—and demonstrates their value in tandem with other methodologies and across a wide range of research questions. The authors describe best practices regarding the scenario method and argue that scenarios contribute to theory building and development, identifying new hypotheses, analyzing data-poor research topics, articulating “world views,” setting new research agendas, avoiding cognitive biases, and teaching. The article also establishes the low rate at which scenarios are used in the international relations subfield and situates scenarios in the broader context of political science methods. The conclusion offers two detailed examples of the effective use of scenarios. In his classic work on scenario analysis, The Art of the Long View, Peter Schwartz commented that “social scientists often have a hard time [building scenarios]; they have been trained to stay away from ‘what if?’ questions and concentrate on ‘what was?’” (Schwartz 1996:31). While Schwartz's comments were impressionistic based on his years of conducting and teaching scenario analysis, his claim withstands empirical scrutiny. Scenarios—counterfactual narratives about the future—are woefully underutilized among political scientists. The method is almost never taught on graduate student syllabi, and a survey of leading international relations (IR) journals indicates that scenarios were used in only 302 of 18,764 sampled articles. The low rate at which political scientists use scenarios—less than 2% of the time—is surprising; the method is popular in fields as disparate as business, demographics, ecology, pharmacology, public health, economics, and epidemiology (Venable, Li, Ginter, and Duncan 1993; Leufkens, Haaijer-Ruskamp, Bakker, and Dukes 1994; Baker, Hulse, Gregory, White, Van Sickle, Berger, Dole, and Schumaker 2004; Sanderson, Scherbov, O'Neill, and Lutz 2004). Scenarios also are a common tool employed by the policymakers whom political scientists study. This article seeks to elevate the status of scenarios in political science by demonstrating their usefulness for theory building and pedagogy. Rather than constitute mere speculation regarding an unpredictable future, as critics might suggest, scenarios assist scholars with developing testable hypotheses, gathering data, and identifying a theory's upper and lower bounds. Additionally, scenarios are an effective way to teach students to apply theory to policy. In the pages below, a “best practices” guide is offered to advise scholars, practitioners, and students, and an argument is developed in favor of the use of scenarios. The article concludes with two examples of how political scientists have invoked the scenario method to improve the specifications of their theories, propose falsifiable hypotheses, and design new empirical research programs. Scenarios in the Discipline What do counterfactual narratives about the future look like? Scenarios may range in length from a few sentences to many pages. One of the most common uses of the scenario method, which will be referenced throughout this article, is to study the conditions under which high-consequence, low-probability events may occur. Perhaps the best example of this is nuclear warfare, a circumstance that has never resulted, but has captivated generations of political scientists. For an introductory illustration, let us consider a very simple scenario regarding how a first use of a nuclear weapon might occur: During the year 2023, the US military is ordered to launch air and sea patrols of the Taiwan Strait to aid in a crisis. These highly visible patrols disrupt trade off China's coast, and result in skyrocketing insurance rates for shipping companies. Several days into the contingency, which involves over ten thousand US military personnel, an intelligence estimate concludes that a Chinese conventional strike against US air patrols and naval assets is imminent. The United States conducts a preemptive strike against anti-air and anti-sea systems on the Chinese mainland. The US strike is far more successful than Chinese military leaders thought possible; a new source of intelligence to the United States—unknown to Chinese leadership—allowed the US military to severely degrade Chinese targeting and situational awareness capabilities. Many of the weapons that China relied on to dissuade escalatory US military action are now reduced to single-digit-percentage readiness. Estimates for repairs and replenishments are stated in terms of weeks, and China's confidence in readily available, but “dumber,” weapons is low due to the dispersion and mobility of US forces. Word of the successful US strike spreads among the Chinese and Taiwanese publics. The Chinese Government concludes that for the sake of preserving its domestic strength, and to signal resolve to the US and Taiwanese Governments while minimizing further economic disruption, it should escalate dramatically with the use of an extremely small-yield nuclear device against a stationary US military asset in the Pacific region. This short story reflects a future event that, while unlikely to occur and far too vague to be used for military planning, contains many dimensions of political science theory. These include the following: what leaders perceive as “limited,” “proportional,” or “escalatory” uses of force; the importance of private information about capabilities and commitment; audience costs in international politics; the relationship between military expediency and political objectives during war; and the role of compressed timelines for decision making, among others. The purpose of this article is to explain to scholars how such stories, and more rigorously developed narratives that specify variables of interest and draw on extant data, may improve the study of IR. An important starting point is to explain how future counterfactuals fit into the methodological canon of the discipline.

at: state bad for minorities

Need to have policies to solve for trump

Halberstam 16—Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at USC (Jack, “Winter in America,” https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2016/11/10/winter-in-america-by-jack-halberstam/, dml)

We are in checkmate because we turned our backs for a moment and when we did Donald J. Trump moved chess pieces at will, taking the queen and cornering the king. We are down for the count, lost in translation, behind, bewildered, frustrated and legitimately scared. Trump’s election is bad for women, bad for all people of color, bad for business, bad for immigrants, bad for the environment, bad for the economy, bad for babies, bad and getting worse. Donald Trump is good for himself, good for his scary and much more ideologically extreme running mate, Mike Pence, good for angry white men, good for tax dodgers, global warming deniers, corporate elites, unrepentant white supremacists, good for nothing.¶ As we near the end of the first day of the new order of Trumpocracy, we better ask ourselves what is to be done. We better meet and sound our outrage, we better establish a plan of action. We need to find better leaders – Hilary Clinton was not the leader many of us wanted even as we felt she would be a capable and reasonable presence in the White House. Where are the young, impassioned, visionary leaders who can, unlike Hilary, outline a detailed opposition to Trumpocracy, give people the argument for universal health care coverage, arm people with not statistics but a critical way of thinking? We need a representative who will actively assuage working class resentment without stirring up racial antipathy; someone who will explain why we pay taxes rather than boast about not doing so. We need someone who does not feel entitled to win office but who rides to victory on a coalition of explicitly leftist platforms. We need a smart, informed speaker who understands the history of race in America, who opposes prisons and demands gun reform and who refuses to apologize for working on behalf of the most vulnerable populations and in opposition to the most entitled.¶ There have been many shocks this week, shocks that reminded us that “we” are not at all united and “we” will often be defeated. For example, Five Thirty Eight reports today that while Hilary Clinton won women’s votes by 12 points, she lost the votes of white women overall. This is a devastating reminder of how effective compulsory heteronormativity is in this country. Heterosexual white women, despite being regaled by audio tapes of Trump boasting about “grabbing pussy,” despite numerous women stepping forward to give accounts of being molested or harassed by Trump, despite his public and open contempt for women he dates, women he rejects and women he would not even consider, many of these women voted willingly for boorish, violent, contemptuous masculinity. They voted with their men; they voted their racial investments in whiteness, they voted against the security of Roe v. Wade, they voted to continue being helpmates rather than agents, they voted to be cheerleaders and mascots rather than players in the game, they voted against the first female president of the United States. They voted to continue being what Simone De Beauvoir called “the second sex.”¶ We have faced political winters before and winter will come again. In 1974 in the wake of a horrifying series of political murders in the US, after the deaths of Martin Luther King, JFK, Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X, Gil Scott Heron penned, “Winter in America,” an anthem for dark times. Shana Redmond’s book, Anthem, provides a rich account of the adoption of anthems by Black groups in the diaspora. In the history that Redmond provides, the anthem is wrenched out of its role as a universal statement of belonging and national aspiration and transformed into a rallying cry for a disenfranchised group and a spiritual call to action. We need an anthem now and “Winter in America,” unfortunately, has become relevant again. In the liner notes for his album, Gil Scott-Heron explained his title and connected his music to the political climate around him:¶ Winter is a metaphor: a term not only used to describe the season of ice, but the period of our lives through which we are traveling…Western iceman have attempted to distort time. Extra months on the calendar and daylight saved what was Eastern Standard. We approach winter the most depressing period in the history of this industrial empire, with threats of oil shortages and energy crises. But we, as Black people, have been a source of endless energy, endless beauty and endless determination. I have many things to tell you about tomorrow’s love and light. We will see you in Spring.¶ We are now facing our own winter; we too have just put the clocks back to save Eastern Standard time; we too approach a deeply depressing season run by snowmen buoyed by a “whitelash” (Van Jones); we too want to believe that Spring will come but fear that only more winter lies ahead. In this our own “most depressing period,” we watch bankers and realtors and politicians convince working class people that callous disregard for the public good, outrageous extravagance and corrupt racially skewed economic practices will “make America great again.” They will not. They will confirm us as a confederacy of rogues, a global bully, a white supremacist nation committed to rewarding the rich, locking up the poor and handing everything to the clowns, the snowmen, the would-be kings, the small minded men with small hands, big wallets, self-centered dreams and willowy, empty women on their arms. Gil Scott-Heron looked to Black community for hope and termed Black people as a “source of endless energy, endless beauty, and endless determination.” He promised “love and light” in the potentiality of tomorrow even as he mourned the experience of “living in a nation that just can’t stand much more.” Now that democracy is once more “ragtime on the corner,” now that peace is out of reach, now that white men have their fingers on the scales of justice, now that white heterosexual women are standing by their men, now that we know that many gay people and some people of color must have voted for Trump, we better find some coalitions that will still offer the possibility of “energy, beauty and determination.”¶ As Game of Thrones warned us in season one, episode one, 2011, “Winter is Coming.” For the House of Stark, this was a warning that political peace is fleeting and unreliable. For us it is a terrifying future that we now confront. In Game of Thrones, winter came and went, men were slaughtered, spirits raised the dead, and women rulers rose up as fighters, witches, as young queens, as rape avengers. Even in this most patriarchal of medieval fantasy worlds, there is space to imagine female sovereignty and a better world forged out of a coalition of the very old, the very young, women, queers, native peoples, people of color, trans people, disabled people, wildings, wolves and dragons. We need to tap into our utopian fantasies now, our freedom dreams (Robin Kelley) to find small channels of potential running through the political architectures in which we are currently imprisoned. I am worried we will not find a way out, and I know you are too; but I also know that we are all ready for the fight of our lives.

at: epistemology

Epistemological analysis can’t come before empirical analysis

Isacoff 15 (Jonathan, Associate Professor of Political Science and the Chair of Environmental Studies @ Gonzaga, “Why IR Needs Deweyan Pragmatism,” Perspectives on Political Science, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2015, pg. 26-33)

The well-known RCT scholars Shepsle and Bonchek humorously note that while it might not be “rocket science,” the study of politics should be scientific.46 Others, especially postmodernist critics, argue against the notion of political science and IR as science. A Deweyan pragmatist approach would suggest that this debate is not useful. By that, I mean that what IR is or is not is not nearly as important as what it achieves. So the question should not be whether IR is scientific, but rather, how scientific does it need to be to get the job done? To this, there are many answers, but I suggest a line of reasoning: the scientific method in the most general sense is useful in helping to explain how and why, all else equal, causal processes work. Put differently, if we want to know how and why some states go to war and others do not, it would be more useful—in the sense of getting logically coherent, empirically verifiable answers—to analyze historical cases systematically than it would be to consult with a shaman or use a crystal ball to obtain an answer. This is not say that there is not an important role for textual interpretation in the process of studying war and other international phenomena. Indeed, I elsewhere argue that interpretation of historical texts is crucial to making valid claims about wars.47 But the main point here is that interpretation is a means toward an end, namely, the process of coping with the world via human experience. Toward that end, interpretation is necessary and useful, but it is not the end itself. A second point is that there is clearly a pragmatic and justifiable need for certain types of quantitative methods, namely, statistics, though not necessarily formal models, in some segments of IR. Taking a simple example for illustrative purposes, if one wished to study the effect of speed limits on motor vehicle fatalities, the use of aggregate data statistically analyzed would be far superior to standing on the corner waiting for an accident to observe or reading several diary accounts of individual accidents. The key point here, however, is not that statistical methods are inherently better, or more “rigorous” than any other type of method. Rather, the use of statistically analyzed data to find answers to problems of highway fatalities creates knowledge that if properly applied, would alleviate “concrete human woes,” which is to say it would help to save lives. That is pragmatic political science.48 What Is a Problem? Many political scientists believe in the idea of having a “problem orientation” for the field. For example, Atul Kohli asserts that there is a strong consensus among leading experts “that comparative politics is very much a problem-driven field of study.” “What motivates the best comparative politics research are puzzles of real-world significance,” writes Kohli, in “The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics: A Symposium.”49 Similarly, Ian Shapiro, responding to the question of what would be a better alternative than RCT asks the question: “What is the phenomenon to be explained?… The formulation of alternative explanations, in other words, should be a problem-driven activity.”50 This is clearly consistent with Deweyan pragmatism; in fact, it is inherently pragmatist. “A Deweyan pragmatic approach to political inquiry,” writes Maurice Meilleur, “would transform political science from a discipline, based on a set of methods, into a profession, based on a set of problems.”51 But what, more specifically, is a “problem orientation?” First, it is clear that Kohli and his colleagues mean an empirically driven problem orientation. That is, the study of politics should be driven by empirical, not theoretical or methodological problems. Careful not to push this point too far, a Deweyan pragmatist would suggest that theorization is an important activity, but it must not lose its link to problems of human experience, which is to say empirical problems. However, Kohli and others advocating an empirically driven problem orientation have little to say about how to identify and value problems. After all, there is a limitless supply of political problems only a fraction of which can be studied. In response, I would argue that some problems are more significant to the detection and response to human suffering and thus more deserving of study, than others. This is itself a tricky ethical problem, for who is to say what is or is not a “real problem?” One reader of this manuscript suggested that “What is really going on here, when one scratches the analytical surface, is not that IR theorists aren't discussing problems; it's that they are discussing problems that the author does not feel are worthy of attention. But why should we accept that the author's “problems” are more important or privileged? Why does the author get to decide what a “real” problem is?” This is a good question but it is a misreading of the argument. Nowhere does Dewey or this author imply that any individual could or should decide or dictate which problems matter and which do not. To the contrary, the question of “who decides” is a public deliberation problem, a subject Dewey addressed exhaustively in his classic The Public and Its Problems.52 According to Dewey, problems are the direct outcome of a public's determination of its common good. A full analysis of how this works, or in some cases, fails to work in practice is beyond the scope of this article. But it is important to note that there is no argument here for the privileging of one private individual's notion of what constitutions “real problem” versus that of another. That is for the public to decide. Human Woe and Issues That Matter The final point to be made about reconstruction stems directly from the previous discussion: some problems matter more than others with regard to the alleviation of concrete human suffering. Which issues matter the most in our world? Ultimately, per Dewey's political philosophy touched on above, that is for the public to decide. Assuming that there ever could be a “common good,” we can hypothesize that people might choose to focus on issues that affect them daily, issues such as climate change, poverty, health care, education, racism, and sexism, as well as war and peace, all issues that are of grave importance to humanity. IR, especially in its American form, with its disproportionate emphasis on global security and great power war, has given scant attention to too many other issues, and when attention is given to the “lesser” topics, they are relegated to sub-sub-specializations within the discipline, “Gender and IR,” for instance. More problematic from the standpoint of pragmatism, the approach-driven wing of the discipline is more concerned with which paradigm has scored more points in the epic contest for paradigmatic supremacy than with the matter of how the world could or should respond to climate change or why hundreds of million of children lack basic nutrition and medical care. The interpretivist/linguistic wing, in contrast, is more concerned with how texts are interpreted in graduate seminars than with the fact that children in inner cities cannot even read a text at all.53 Many IR scholars are still fighting over whether and to what extent “unit-level variables” should be taken into consideration in understanding international politics (and if so, whether one might still rightly be accepted in the club of realism).54 Others are trying to demonstrate that IR constructivism is really “liberalism in disguise.”55 This is not a stab at “why realism is (yet again) wrong.” It is a critique of the self-definitionally obsessed, paradigm-driven culture of academic IR. I would not go so far as to claim that there are no scholars who study everyday politics; many clearly do.56 Rather, the problem is that that the incentive structure to contribute to the “big debates” of the discipline, namely, those at the paradigmatic level, is a project that drifts ever afar from the problems of “concrete human woe” that affect the other millions of people who happen not to have graduate degrees in IR.

at: micropolitics

Micropolitical self-artistry that doesn’t forefront the question of state action fails—it’s privileged nonsense that either isolates itself from political relevance or undoes the structures that check against the worst forms of oppression

Dean and Villadsen 16—Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School (Mitchell and Kaspar, State Phobia and Civil Society: The Political Legacy of Michel Foucault pg 48-53, dml)

Rose’s claim for a mutation in the relations of power is also substantiated by another path on which he shifts from second-order observations to observations of the first order. To be sure, he generally operates at the second-order level insofar as he observes how objects of government are made thinkable and actionable by means of governmental rationalities and technologies (Rose 1999, 35). Yet when he drifts to a more positive characterization of “our plural present” (195), Rose replicates some key claims offered by the stories of contemporary cultural theorists and sociologists about cultural differentiation, subpolitics, and aestheticized consumerism. While his approach does not rule out a critical perspective on postsocial, advanced liberal forms of governing, Rose nevertheless emphasizes their positive potentials with respect to social experimentation and alternative forms of political agency: “Within these spaces [of communities], it is possible for subjects to distance themselves from the cohesive discourse and strategies of the social state—schooling, public service broadcasting, municipal architecture, and the like. They can now access a whole range of resources and techniques of subject formation in order to invent themselves, individually and collectively, as new kinds of political actors” (179). This is the precise point in the argument at which Rose does not remain merely diagnostic but explicitly affirms a particular kind of self-inventing subject. The shift from detached second-order observation to affirmative first-order description is complemented by Rose’s invention of what he terms “ethico-politics” (188) to designate the emergent field of contestation and experimental self-creation opened up after the withering of the social perspective and the critique of the welfare state. What is at stake in the view that society as a knowable totality gives way to a form of a sociality constituted by multiple forms of expertise, networks, or communities? What are the costs for political analysis of privileging politics as the “active art of living” that opposes all obstacles to the vital self-assertion of the will to live through active self-creation? (Rose 1999, 283). First, there are of course political costs of what is conceived as no longer possible. They center on the difficulties, to say the least, of referring to the kind of knowledge of society or social structure that has been essential for public policy and provision as remedies against social inequality and its ills and as a condition of exercising civil, political, and social rights. There is a dual displacement occurring: of forms of social knowledge and of questions of the role of the state in resource allocation and the securing of minimum and universal standards. The emphasis on the identifications that form communities, or on aestheticized forms of “ self-creation through somatic individuality” and an “ethic of vitalism” (Rose 1999, 283; 2001, 18) appears to sideline, if not to rule out, the salience of this kind of knowledge and these political questions. In this respect the “birth of community” seems to manifest the long-noted affinities between postmodern discourses on cultural diversity and societal differentiation, on the one hand, and neoliberal strategies for dismantling and transforming welfare services and ossifying and exploiting differences (Taylor-Gooby 1994). Arguments for granting more space to the diversity of civil society, for instance in the shape of “ethico-political movements,” run the risk of ossifying differences of a social nature. While Rose would no doubt insist that differences are in part governmental artifacts and identity the result of active identifications, this still leaves open the wider political ramifications of the enthusiasm for a politics of plural communities beyond the state. There are also analytical costs, as pointed out by urban sociologists and geographers (Brenner, Peck, and Theodore 2010). It is simply very difficult to move from the local, the unique, the contingent, and the relatively unstructured to extralocal contexts, systems, and fundamental question of what kind of active, sovereign state power needs to be exercised for the potentially lethal conflicts of civil society to be kept in check and for individuals to gain the capacities to participate and engage in social and political life. We are left with only a fluid and experimental form of postsocial politics. In Rose’s more recent writings the bracketing of the state is sustained, although the concept of ethicopolitics seems to have receded. In their introduction to the collection Governing the Present, Rose and Miller (2008) make clear their initial ambitions with these studies. The republication of these works, they explain, aims “to counter some of the abstract forms that some of these ideas have taken, and to demonstrate how our conceptual tools were forged in the analysis of some very specific problem fields” (21). Hence, the emphasis on localized and empirical analysis is repeated and thereby underlined. Rose and Miller also state their ambition to avoid economic reductionism and all-embracing, epochal descriptions, and their desire to develop a non—state centered perspective on power. In the place of structural analysis (derived from Louis Althusser) and its tendency to reduce social relations and subjectivities to their function in reproducing economic relations, they claim that they wished to open up more sophisticated ways of addressing “the multiplicity and variability of modes of subject formation” (4) and the specificity and irreducibility of programs of governance operating within various domains. One way of doing this is by concentrating on “minor figures” and their specific activities since it is “only through their activities that states, as they were termed by those who seemed untroubled by the meaning of this term, could govern at all” (Rose and Miller 2008, 5). Rather than the state apparatus as point of origin, the focus should be on “a power without a center, or rather with multiple centers” (9). While such an approach could be read as a fruitful way of supplementing or extending the analysis of state politics and policy, it becomes a substitute for it or alternative to it. Under the aegis of this approach studies of governmentality mistake the analysis of regimes of governing—with their rationalities, technologies, modes of subjectification, and different aspirations and ends—for a study of the state itself. Vital Politics and the Art of Living Rose’s subsequent work (2001; 2007) becomes more focused on life and the neurosciences. He first shifts from govemmentality to biopolitics in its several contemporary manifestations, instanced by genetics and genomics, risk screening and pharmacology, and all the way to aesthetic interventions on the body. There he finds that the days of state-administered biopolitics, exemplified by the eugenic drive for biological and moral perfection, are over, succeeded by alliances between, for instance, self-creating consumers and pharmaceutical companies, and a biomedicine that offers products for voluntary bodily improvements and services for risk minimization. Rose is at pains to avoid a purely negative view of this novel “somatic individuality” and its ethics and recognizes the expanded possibilities for autonomy and self-formation offered by biotechnology that “enables us to intervene upon ourselves in new ways” (Rose 2007, 8). The passage from “the social state” to “advanced liberalism” thus holds the promise of more diversified experimentation and contestation of truth claims about biological normality: “Our somatic individuality has become opened up to choice, prudence and responsibility, to experimentation, to contestation—and so to a ‘vital politics’” (Rose 2001, 20). The phrase “art of living” is here given a more substantive anchorage in the very materiality of the body, and the concept of ethicopolitics has been transmuted into “ethopolitics”: “By ethopolitics I mean to characterize ways in which the ethos of human existence . . . have come to provide the ‘medium’ within which the self-government of the autonomous individual can be connected up with the imperatives of good government. . . . While ethopolitical concerns range from those of lifestyle to those of community, they coalesce around a kind of vitalism. . . . In this highly contested domain, somatic individuals are the key actors” (Rose 2001, 18). None of this escapes the earlier dilemmas we have raised. If we follow Rose and regard a politics of “life itself” as a fundamental form of contemporary agency and contestation, then it is difficult to understand how active choices of self-creation can be available without raising the question of the role of the state in ensuring access to a health-care system that includes the innovations of biomedicine, surgery, and the pharmaceutical industries and in ensuring a set of universal standards so that life can be lived in this self-governing way. Otherwise, ethopolitics becomes the preserve of a privileged caste (on either national or global scales) or, at best, highly unevenly distributed. If we admit this, then the conventional character of politics has not been displaced by the discovery of the ever new forms of biopolitics but will be played out in those old appropriation and allocation struggles, which have been at the core of the territorial state’s quest for civil peace and the welfare state’s establishment of social rights. Without the conventional domain of social politics, typically framed in terms of questions of access and equality, ethopolitics is confined to its vitalist, consumerist, technological, and lifestyle elements. It simply amplifies a kind of narcissistic lifestyle concern with the self’s corporeal perfectibility and vital capacities. It is at these intersections that Rose sees the emergence of a new kind of ethical subjectivity in terms of active self-creation in relation to the plasticity of life and corporeality. At such moments the Foucauldian project reminds us of nothing as much as mainstream sociological assertions of “life as a planning project” and of the self-creation of identity in late modern life-politics advanced some years ago by theorists such as Ulrich Beck (1992) and Anthony Giddens (1991; Beck-Gernsheim 1996)—with the added stratum of a plastic biological materiality. Paradoxically, the demise of the social state leaves us not with the positive conception of power advanced by Foucault but with resistance to a highly negative or repressive power, as “all that which blocks or subverts the capacity of others asserting for themselves their own vitalism” (Rose 1999, 283).

at: root cause

Root cause claims fail and cause violence

Morson 7 (Gary, Professor of Slavic Studies, Russian Literature and History at Northwestern, “Anna Karenina In Our Time: Seeing More Wisely,” P. 152-4)

If Levin resembled so may intellectuals in his time and ours, he might seek “root cause” (as we would call it today) of all these failures. Much as the generals an historians satirized in War and Peace mistakenly seek the cause of historical events in a single decision, an much as revolutionaries often reduce the complexities of social ills to a single conspiracy or institution, so intellectuals often view complexity as a delusion to be explained away by a few simple underlying laws. It is just this habit of thought that feeds utopianism, because if the diversity of evil an misery had a single cause, then one could eliminate it by changing only one thing What could be easier? Abolish private property, alter the way children are educated, pass laws to regulate morals according to a given code, and evil will disappear or, at least, radically diminish. Behold, I make all new things But Levin learns that there is no single cause for what has gone wrong. Looking back on the twentieth century, we may wonder whether the root cause of the worst human misery is the belief that there is a root cause of human misery. In fact, many things happen contingently, just “for some reason.” Friction When l.evin attends the elections, he tries to handle some business for his sister, but discovers that somehow it cannot be done. In Dostoevsky, the reason would be "administrative ecstasy," the sheer delight bureaucrats take in making petitioners cringe, plead, or wait. But nothing of the sort happens here, and the problem is not one of intent at all. No one has any interest in thwarting Levin, so he cannot understand what goes wrong. When conspiracy theorists find they cannot accomplish something as easily as expected, they typically ask cut bono? (who benefits?) ro discover the obstacle. Some person or group must have caused the failure. Defeat means sabotage. This way of thinking presumes that behind every action there must be an intent, whether conscious or unconscious. Such a view rules out the possibility that mere contingency or friction accounts for the difficulty. flic military theorist Carl von Clauscwitz deemed friction, in this special metaphorical sense, an essential concept in understanding armies. Without using this word, Tolstoy regarded the same phenomenon as pertaining not just to war but to everything social. "If one has never personally experienced war," Clauscwitz explains, one cannot understand in what difficulties constantly mentioned really consist. . . . Everything looks simple; the knowledge required docs not look remarkable, the strategic options are so obvious that by comparison the simplest problem of higher mathematics has an impressive scientific dignity. Once war has actually been seen the difficulties become clear; but it is extremely difficult to describe the unseen, all-pervading element that brings about this change of perspective. Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. 'Die difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war. (Clausewitz, 119) The unseen, all-pervading element: For Tolstoy, similar difficulties arise when dealing with bureaucracy, introducing changes in agriculture, and implementing reforms. A Tolstoyan perspective is easily imagined today. Social problems look so simple: people in underdeveloped countries are poor, so give their governments foreign aid; workers arc unemployed, so hire them to perform needed government services; schools do not educate, so raise teachers' salaries; the state regulatory commission keeps energy prices too high, so partially privatize the system: answers seem so obvious, but in practice reforms rarely have the intended effect. They produce unintended consequences, which themselves have consequences; and, as Isaiah Berlin liked to point our, no one can foresee the consequences of consequences of consequences. Experience may teach one to expect certain kinds of difficulties, but some can never be anticipated, lhcrc is always friction: "Countless minor incidents —the kind you can never really foresee—combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls far short of the intended goal" (Clauscwitz, 119). No one is deliberately impeding Levin's efforts for his sister. By the same token, no one is trying to thwart his agricultural reforms. Sabotage is out of the question. "All this happened not because anyone felt ill will toward Levin or his farm; on the contrary, he knew that they [rhe peasants] liked him [and] thought him a simple gentleman (their highest praise)" (340). Friction defeats the reforms. But where does this friction come from and how might one best deal with it? TTic Elemental Force 'Ihe bailiff and peasants recognize in advance when a plan is bound to fail, and at lasr l.evin, instead of growing angry, pays artention to what they say: The bailiff listened attentively, and obviously made an effort to approve of his employer's projects. But still he had that look Levin knew so well that always irritated him, a look of hopelessness and despondency. That look said: " Ihat's all very well, but as God wills." Nothing mortified Levin so much as that tone. But it was common to all the bailiffs he had ever had. They had all taken up that attitude toward his plans, and so now he was not angered by it but mortified, and felr all the more roused ro struggle against this, as it seemed, elemental force continually ranged against him, for which he could find no other expression than "as God wills." (165) Ihe elementalforce: this concept is central to both Tolstoy's great novels. Tolstoy uses a few similar terms for it. In War and Peace, he refers to an elemental force shaping individual lives (W&P, 648) and to "the elemental life of the swarm" constituting the cumulative effect of countless people's small actions governed by no overarching law. In Anna Karentna, he calls the elemental force a "brutal force" when its outcome is cruel. Ihe rough equivalent of friction for Clause-witz, the elemental force applies more widely. Clauscwitz's explanation stops at friction, but Tolstoy takes the elemental force as a starting point for understanding why some plans arc more likely to fail than others. In order to grasp the course of events more easily, we tend to reduce the countless infinitesimal forces making up the elemental force to a single cause. After all, it is impossible to enumerate innumerable actions. And so historians and social scientists naturally look for some super-cause that sums up all those small actions. They may presume laws or postulate narrative neatness. Tolstoy relentlessly exposed the logical fallacies in both forms of simplification, which, at some point, either assume what is to be proven or proceed as if it were already proven. Historians, social theorists, and biographers favor generalizations or symmetries permitting a clear analysis or simple story. They find what they seek, their success demonstrates not that complexity has been adequately explained but that when a discipline demands a certain sort of explanation it is bound to be “discovered.” In disciplines pretending to be social sciences, it is repeatedly discovered that things are not as complex as they appear.

No root causes – human nature is too complex

Hutchison 04 [Fred, M.A. from Cleveland State University, intellectual and author, “American innovation and the culture war: A golden age of American innovation,” March 22, http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/hutchison/040322]
Reductionist ideas reduce man to a simplistic caricature. When man looks in the mirror and sees something less than what is there, it has a depressing effect on his spirit and his mind. Deterministic ideas are the most powerfully compressing of the reductionist ideas. When man believes he is but a cog in a great machine, he feels crushed in a brutal and inhuman wine press. The most pitiless and repressive states are based on deterministic ideas — such as the Soviet regime under Stalin. When man is told that he is not created according to a design but was haphazardly evolved he is reduced to a subhuman status — an animal of no designed species but a beast-monstrosity of accidental origins. In some ways this is worse than being a cog in a machine. At least a cog has a design and an understandable purpose as an integral part of the great machine. Determinism is based upon the inflation of the principle of causation. Causation can be decisively established only for extremely simplified situations. In modern science, an experiment must be reduced to its simplest essentials before proof of causation is possible. But human nature and society is exceedingly complicated and contradictory. Reductionism in the pursuit of proof of causation is illusive because human nature is irreducibly complex. This goes through my mind whenever I hear a liberal speak of "root causes." The illusion that we can ferret out the root causes indicates a liberal who has never read the classics — and is profoundly ignorant about human nature. Our history of trying to manipulate root causes through social programs is a discouraging one — filled with the surprises of unintended consequences. Three Fatal Determinisms The three fatal determinisms of our age are economic determinism, cultural determinism, and biological determinism. Economic determinism is the belief that what we are and what we do is shaped by economic forces. This is an extremely radical reductionism if ever there was one. All the incredibly complicated things that combine in mysterious synergies to make up human nature are all to be explained by one single cause — economics. If ever their was a myth grounded in false confidence and the radical ignorance of tunnel vision — this is it. When liberals speak of the "root causes" of social problems, they typically are borrowing ideas from economic determinism. Root cause arguments obscure rather than enlighten. The poor are not responsible for their poverty because of root causes — we are told. Criminals are not responsible for crime because of root causes. Terrorists are not responsible for murder because of root causes. Such thinking rules out the idea of human conscience, and moral responsibility. When the belief in root causes relieves us of responsibility for our actions it also weakens the belief in the existence of free will. Nothing will destroy a golden age of innovation faster than a paralysis of the will. If we doubt we have a will because of a belief in the myth of root causes, the will becomes either paralyzed or undisciplined. We become ether zombies or maniacs — and return to adolescence. Cultural determinists believe that everything we are and do is controlled by culture. Postmodern philosophers claim that the works of the great masters in literature are purely cultural constructs. What Shakespeare wrote was determined by his culture. Obviously, no modern Shakespeare can arise in a society which believes in cultural determinism. If inspiration, genius, and hard work cannot hope to carry one above one's culture and time for the inspiration of future generations — what is the use of pouring out all of one's energies upon a work of high art? Cultural determinism is a breeder of mediocrity and a killer of the creativity of a golden age. Unfortunately, our public schools are diligently devoted to the indoctrination of students with ideas of multiculturalism — which is grounded on theories of cultural determinism.

Directory: rest -> wikis -> openev -> spaces -> 2017 -> pages -> Michigan7 -> attachments
pages -> Utnif topicality 2017

Download 1.09 Mb.

Share with your friends: