la parte maldita

Calais: how to organise a secret festival

2010-10-21T02:47:00.000-07:00

No Borders Calais: how to organise a secret festival

"Dwelling, moving about, speaking, reading, shopping, and cooking are activities that seem to correspond to the characteristics of tactical ruses and surprises: clever tricks of the 'weak' within the order established by the 'strong', an art of putting one over on the adversary on his own turf, hunter's tricks, manouverable, polymorph mobilities, jubilant, poetic and warlike discoveries." Michel de Certeau, "The Practice of Everyday Life"

"Everything is possible if people work together -- even stopping Calais from being Calais." Arnaud Borderer.

We actually did it: No Borders Calais organised a successful week-long music festival in Calais (6-12 September 2010), one of the shittest towns in Europe, in the teeth of the French police and the local authorities, with no publicity at all, a few hundred euros, and little of what you could call organisation. And some of us say it was just about the best party we've ever been to.

It's safe now to let the cat out of the bag: anyhow there's a crop of videos up on YouTube already, and a few references to "Hafla bila Hudud / Festival Without Borders" have scattered themselves across the web. At the time, though, there was every need of secrecy. In February, when No Borders legally rented a warehouse (the "Kronstadt Hangar") as a social and sleeping space to be shared with undocumented migrants, it was raided and closed down twice in two days by French riot police. The immigration minister Eric Besson appeared on national television denouncing No Borders as "violent left extremists" and repeating his vow to make Calais a "migrant free zone". We knew that any public event would be met with gendarmes and batons, so the festival was announced only by word of mouth and on closed email networks. Even so, around 100 international supporters came from all over Europe, from Ireland to Poland, to join migrants and local Calaisiens for a week of music, art, and festivity.

Since last November the number of migrants in Calais, trying to cross the channel, has fallen to perhaps less than 200. But if anything the number of police has increased: there is still the permanent presence of the notorious CRS (Compagnies Republicaines de Securite) riot police who make constant raids and patrols against migrants, and the PAF (Police Aux Frontieres) border police have become increasingly active alongside them. The grim everyday for Calais sans-papiers goes on: raids, beatings, arbitrary arrests, bedding and belongings destroyed and stolen, teargas in the water, pepperspray in the sleeping bags, etc. etc.

In Calais a party, a night out, a simple gathering of friends, is much more than just hedonism. A party in Calais is something extraordinary. A music festival is an insurrection. We held concerts in the park and in some friendly local bars, as well as at the camps ("jungles") and squats where people live. The first night in the park we were sniffed at by undercover police: but when they saw our numbers they had to back off, and through the week our numbers grew. Internationals and locals with papers stood in the street outside events ready to form protection rings around migrants if the police moved in to snatch. CRS looked on bemused -- where had all these pesky No Borders come from? -- and drove past empty handed. And that is what solidarity means -- that is what we can do when we simply stand together.

In Calais, cooking and sharing a meal together is an act of rebellion. The routine: philanthropic associations hand out tasteless food, truly reminiscent of Dickensian gruel, in a bare yard surrounded by barbed wire, overlooked by undercover cops, council inspectors, and racist charity bosses. The festival took place at the end of Ramadan, the Islamic fasting month, a particularly hard time in Calais with hunger and thirst compounding fear and exhaustion. And through Ramadan the police customarily raided at sunset to catch Muslim migrants gathering together to break their fast with heated-up charity slop. For the festival, the Dutch activist kitchen Rampenplan came to cook nutritious meals at lunch and sunset. We ate the evening meal together in the park, in the town square, and in the open space opposite the official "food distro" point. People with and without papers, sharing food with music, banners, laughter, comradeship.

Just a few highlights. The massive Eid (end of Ramadan) party in Africa House (the squatted ex-factory which is the home of mainly Sudanese migrants), which brought together all the migrant communities of Calais -- Sudanese and Eritreans and Pashtuns and Hazara and Kurds and Iranians and more, eating and dancing together. Saturday night's final party in the park with Pashtun dancing and Kurdish singing, followed by a parade up the main street to a bar for sets from Combat Wombat (Australia) and WildKatz Project (Brighton). Rebel recording sessions in the jungles, and in our short-lived new No Borders squat which for two days became a cauldron of sound and visual creation. The "Food not borders" stall in Place D'Armes. Taking over the food distro yard for weekend picnics with klezmer music, football, and multilingual chalking everywhere.

"For a few days," said one sans-papier, "I felt I wasn't in Calais." Yes, it was only a few days. The next monday, the biggest police raid seen since February fell on Africa House, this time particularly targeting No Borders activists in a "revenge" attack. Since then, the daily grind of raids and brutality continues -- back to normality. But in those few energetic days we won something longer lasting: not just a vital breather, a glimpse of life beyond state repression, sweet sustaining memories, but the creation of new links of solidarity that we will continue to build on. That brief breathing space brought Calaisiens, visitors, and migrants from different, sometimes mutually suspicious, communities together like never before, creating new connections and relationships, deepening trust, knitting together our resistance. Not to mention: we learnt how to organise a secret festival. What next?

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2010/10/465428.html

festival videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkK2lrJDNeg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvbsOzzabbg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96VHLlt-zMk

more info:
http://calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com/

brussels is a beautiful city

2010-10-11T14:11:00.000-07:00

No Borders in Brussels: becoming a movement

25 June 2010, Steenokkerzeel by the airport outside Brussels, 60 people occupy the building site of the new 127 tris immigration detention centre, shutting down work for a day, taking direct action against the construction site, and upping the ante in a campaign of resistance against the border regime in Belgium. Over the past year: successful blockades of most of the six existing detention centres, including the simultaneous blockade of Bruges and Vottem by over 150 people last October. Well planned, media savvy, acts of surprise. And these little bursts of "activism" sit against a background of what has become one of Europe's most active sans-papiers (undocumented) movements: mass occupations, hunger strikes, practical solidarity. Sometimes flaring into direct revolt: back to 24 August 2008 when the existing Steenokkerzeel immigration prison 127bis burst into flames at midnight, two of its three wings burnt to the ground.

29 September 2010, Steenokkerzeel again, with our faces pressed into the mud along the road from the same building site, hearing a friend screaming as a boot twists her neck. The first demonstration during the No Border camp, just 150 of us were there, but met by overwhelming force -- riot police bussed in from as far away as Antwerp, with horses and water cannon. They call it "zero tolerance" policing, and we are going to see plenty more of it through the coming week. It means: they're afraid of us.

Two points on the "repression" of the No Border Camp in Brussels. Firstly, the treatment we're getting is just a little taster of what our comrades without documents have for a daily diet. Second, we can take it as a sign of the success of No Borders in Belgium. Here (as also in Calais, where we are regularly targeted with surveillance, arbitrary arrest, beatings and humiliation tactics) we're becoming a movement that has to be taken seriously.

That was my overwhelming, surprising, reviving feeling during last week: the feeling of actually being part of a movement, of something moving. With maybe 800 people and so much activity going on in and around the camp, of course I only caught glimpses. Six months of solid organising by our Belgian comrades; logistics down to four kitchens and an onsite bakery; the media centre like some command base from "24" with all night video editing, radio streaming, live action feeds, fuelled by the world's best beer; all those quick warm hugs with friends rushing off purposefully into the night; I never actually made it to a timetabled workshop, but so much networking, information sharing, catching up, ideas sparking, seeds of plans; reflecting on all we have done, all we've been learning in Brussels and Calais and Amsterdam and ... and the panoramas ahead.

With the police arresting people just for walking from camp to an official demo, the comparison with Copenhagen kept coming up: but for me they were very different. In Copenhagen we shouted about saving the world, bragged about shutting down the summit -- then turned tail at the first whiff of pepper spray. Copenhagen left a queasiness in the stomach: with its "peoples assembly" parodying the representative politics of the "leaders", or that rubber lilo assault bridge out of some English public school prank, it was activism shown up as farce. In Brussels we weren't there to moan outside the summit walls: we set up an encounter space to make our own plans, develop our own ideas, build from the ground up. And an action space where, despite a multi-million-euro police clampdown, people even got a few covert actions done.

Are we ready to take ourselves seriously? We talk about fighting injustice, we want to turn the world upside down ... do we really mean it? Becoming serious doesn't just mean facing beatings, prison, maybe death. It also means facing ourselves -- and taking the time and care to look carefully at what we do. For example, the Friday night demo, called by a Brussels group unconnected to No Borders for the evening before the main demo, made little sense. In an announced location that was guaranteed to be surrounded by the full force of the law, this was an obvious arrest trap. Nearly 200 people walked into it. The "righteous" anger we felt after the repression kicked in was totally justified. It's what we do with it that counts. Tactics are tools to pick up, drop, adapt as needed. When facing overwhelming force, avoid full frontal encounters. Is this militant action -- or a temper tantrum?

If I'd had more time in Brussels ... I'd have investigated more the connections with sans-papiers movements. Maybe spent more time in the occupied Gesu monastery, where squatter activists with papers live and work together with 150 undocumented comrades. Or got involved in mobilising for the big demo with asylum-seekers staying in the Petit Chateau complex. The police clampdown undoubtedly succeeded in scaring many undocumented people away from the camp; though on the other hand, as we've seen in Calais, if anything brings people from different backgrounds together it is a shared experience of repression and building resistance. That was the energy you could feel on the final Saturday demo: 1500 of us, with and without papers (and most of us with ID documents left them behind) taking the street together -- celebrating our solidarity, and prepared to defend it.

Where does No Borders go from here? In Brussels and Calais, especially, the last year has seen us taking action, building networks, learning and growing -- becoming a movement. What I find particularly exciting is the way our more spectacular "actions" are rooted in everyday practices of solidarity. No Borders is not just an occupied detention centre, but a communal kitchen, a squatted housing project, a night shelter, a visiting clinic, a legal advice drop-in, a film/discussion night. Bringing together our styles and tendencies: it's great to see adrenalin junkies getting involved in grassroots community building; and community organisers getting a taste for direct action. We should keep spreading and growing these practices and networks -- back in the UK, too.

Some comrades dismiss No Borders as a "single issue" campaign, or charity work. In fact what we are doing is putting militant grassroots struggle into practice on one of the harshest frontlines of the class war. But the lessons we are learning, the practices we are developing, don't just apply to migration, but wherever we're attacked with poverty, criminalisation, surveillance, and techniques of control in home, workplace, public spaces. Particularly as the economic conditions worsen in Europe, the solidarity hubs and networks we create now will become the ground level of our resistance.

more info:

http://bxl.indymedia.org/

http://www.cemab.be/archives/display_by_id.php?feature_id=187

http://www.cemab.be/archives/display_by_id.php?feature_id=148

http://www.noborderbxl.eu.org/

http://calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com/

we write your name

2010-07-17T09:48:00.001-07:00

Sur mes refuges détruits
Sur mes phares écroulés
Sur les murs de mon ennui
J’écris ton nom

Sur l’absence sans désir
Sur la solitude nue
Sur les marches de la mort
J’écris ton nom

Sur la santé revenue
Sur le risque disparu
Sur l’espoir sans souvenir
J’écris ton nom

Et par le pouvoir d’un mot
Je recommence ma vie
Je suis né pour te connaître
Pour te nommer

Liberté

course they do

2010-07-16T05:02:00.000-07:00

For Life, To Power

In the note to the first essay of the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche outlines a two-stage model for his project. First, in a preparatory stage called genealogy, "scientists" must uncover the forces and values at work in our conceptions and practices of morals, science, philosophy, and more. Second, the true work of "philosophy", these values are to be ordered and "re-valued". Although we might find it helpful to break the last stage into two: in a stage of critique, the true philosopher ranks and values these uncovered values; finally, in an affirmative stage to come, (BGE210, 211) she creates new values of her own. Of course the schema is inexact, as all three aspects of genealogy, critique, and creation/affirmation are interwoven throughout Nietzsche's writing. From the beginning of his work Nietzsche has values of his own to affirm, and he maintains that it is impossible to do preparatory genealogy other than from an evaluative perspective: bad "English" genealogists who deny this are yet unwitting "shield bearers" of their morality (GS345). And Nietzsche's affirmative and critical values are clearly tied together: for example, a positive ethic of life, health, strength, together with a critique of values of decay, sickness, weakness.

In this essay I want to explore Nietzsche's own values, which can thus be seen both as the ground of his affirmative project and of his critical perspective. One bright thread to follow is the notion of life. Life, and life-filled concepts and imagery, carry the positive charge in Nietzsche's thinking from early on (e.g., the essay on history for the sake of life), and they never lose it. What is life for Nietzsche? There may be one sense, and an important one, in which life is everything there is. This enters in the context of affirmation, yes-saying, and the eternal recurrence: to affirm life is to affirm everything, the good and the bad, the small as well as the great, weakness and sickness too. But more often, life and related concepts can stand in contrast to anti-life forces: sickness, decay, exhaustion. It is this more restricted usage I will pursue here: although we may see that the two are not always so easily disentangled.

In his later work, Nietzsche connects life to the concept of will to power. Indeed (BGE259) "life is will to power". The introduction of the will to power, I think, provides the conceptual apparatus or system for a more developed life-philosophy which clarifies Nietzsche's thought. Here I follow the approach of those commentators who read the posthumously published notes on the will to power as outlining a systematic philosophy -- a "power ontology" -- which unites Nietzsche's thinking on diverse themes. In particular, I go along here with the approach taken by Gilles Deleuze (1962), and more recently in English language philosophy by John Richardson (1996), of beginning by looking at Nietzsche's terms on the level of forces, sub- and super-individual, active and reactive. It is these forces, striving for power, that are the stuff of life.

forces and values

We might identify three domains in which Nietzsche talks of the Will to Power. According to Walter Kaufmann (1950), Nietzsche early on introduced the concept in looking at human psychology, only later extending it to the broader domains of the "organic", or biological (life), and ultimately to all physical matter. In the published writings willing and power remain mainly features of human activity -- where some commentators would like to confine them. On the other hand, at least one important facet of the will to power doctrine is developed as an account of forces, as conceived by the physics of Nietzsche's day. But I won't here delve into these issues of the "anthropomorphising" or otherwise effect of Nietzsche's philosophy of biology and physics.

Nietzsche plays loose with terms and assignations, and fixing his terms is the work of later commentators and systematisers. Following Deleuze, here, I will fix on the notion of a force (kraft). Nietzsche himself often uses the expression quantum of force, amongst many other formulations. In Deleuze's general formulation, which perhaps somewhat Spinozises Nietzsche -- "Every relationship of forces constitutes a body -- whether it is chemical, biological, social or political. Any two forces, being unequal, constitute a body as soon as they enter a relationship." When operating in the more limited and less controversial domain of psychology, we might follow Richardson's systematisation in which a psychological force is a sub-individual drive (trieb): a human individual (human body) is a multiplicity of drives bundled together in relations of tension.

Deleuze here cites WP635, in which Nietzsche says that all "unities" -- being the root of our concepts of a thing, number, identity, and also dynamic concepts such as motion and activity -- are human fictions, and that when "we eliminate these additions, no things remain but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all dynamic quanta". The will to power is then not being, not even becoming, but "a pathos": which we might perhaps parse, following Kaufmann's suggestion, as an "event" or occasion. (Also compare Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of immanent events and momentary assemblages in the Thousand Plateaus (1980).) For John Richardson, we would be better to think of these forces not as intentional agents (some kind of "homunculi") but as "behaviour patterns", or "projects". This follows Nietzsche's call in GM1:13 to drop the illusion of a "doer" behind the doing: "A quantum of force is just such a quantum of drive, will, action, in fact it is nothing but this driving, willing and acting, and only the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reasoning petrified within it), which construes and miscontrues all actions as conditional upon an agency, a 'subject', can make it appear otherwise."

And yet perhaps the clearest way to grasp the notion of Nietzschean forces, and it is a way that Nietzsche himself often takes, is to see them as goal-directed entities. The picture I'll sketch here borrows largely from Richardson. Every force has a specific "internal goal", or series of such goals, which it strives after. For example, a hunger drive pursues food, a sex drive pursues sex. This is also where the notion of value comes in: another aspect of a force's activity, its striving for goals, is that this always involves valuing and interpreting. Perhaps the simplest way to see this is: a goal of a force is a value for that force. Thus, here in a psychological context (although Nietzsche elsewhere extends this theme much more broadly), HH32: "all disinclination depends on a valuation, just as does all inclination. Man cannot experience a drive to or away from something without the feeling that he is desiring what is beneficial and avoiding what is harmful ..." We could say: to pursue or desire something is to interpret it as good, to give it a positive value.

Valuing here is primarily not a conscious activity, and indeed the thrust of the genealogical approach is that human consciousness on the whole mistakes or misidentifies human values. On an individual level, we might say that a person's "true" values are the values or goals of the largely unconscious drives that act in and through her body. Her consciousness is merely one force amongst others, itself with its own goal-directed striving, and not gifted with particular interpretative perspicacity (indeed, consciousness is subject to a form of systematic error -- cf. GS354, amongst others). It requires the grey science of genealogy, with unflinching courageous honesty, attention to detail, and a highly developed sense of smell, to unravel the mystifications with which conscious re-interpretation has obscured the real values at work in us.

will to power

From here, one approach to the doctrine of the Will to Power is then to see it as identifying an underlying commonality, perhaps a common nature (for Richardson, an "essence"), behind all of these diverse goal-seeking value-creating forces. Nietzsche himself sometimes presents his theory as a replacement for more traditional such accounts in which all (human, or organic, or physical) activity is associated with (and, maybe, explained by -- or, even, reduced to?) a common motivating force. Thus, in WP688, Nietzsche says that "all driving force is will to power, that there is no other physical, dynamic or psychic force except this." Here he proposes will to power as a replacement for a hedonic theory of motivation: "it is notably enlightening to posit power in place of individual 'happiness' (after which every living thing is supposed to be striving)... pleasure is only a symptom of the feeling of power". Elsewhere the rival theory that will to power replaces is variously the Schopenhauerian Will; Spinozist connatus (drive to self-preservation); or a reading of Darwinism (perhaps, more accurately, Spencerism) in which survival and preservation of the species take on a quasi-Spinozist character. For example, to frame the position in contrast to Spinoza: it is not that bodies seek to preserve themselves in being; but that forces (within bodies) strive to become more powerful.

A few alternative understandings of what power might mean here have developed in a recent English language debate. On one position, advocated by Maudemarie Clark, power is the "second order desire" of an individual for the ability or capacity to realise her "first order desires", e.g., appetites for food, sex, etc.¹ I think Clark's account is confused by remaining figured in terms of human individuals (rather than drives), but the point might be rephrased: while drives strive for different first-order "internal goals", they all also strive for the second-order goal of increasing their ability to attain these -- their power. This usage broadly corresponds to what in political theory is sometimes called "outcome power": the ability to attain desired outcomes, perhaps by the use of resources (Dowding 1996). It seems in tune with a rather basic notion of power as ability or potential; but it falls short of much of the rich meaning Nietzsche wants to attribute to the will to power. As we saw above, Nietzsche appears to say not that all forces seek power as well as, or for the sake of, other (first-order) goals, but that the seeking of power is the most basic and primary pursuit -- "there is no other ... force except for this."

But if power is not just a means to other ends, what is it? One approach, taken by Bernard Reginster amongst others, is to identify power with the overcoming of resistance. (More precisely, for Reginster, will to power is the second-order "desire for overcoming of resistance in the pursuit of some determinate first-order desire" (2006:132).) This reading emphasises passages where Nietzsche suggests forces go out looking for trouble. E.g., GM1:13's "thirst for enemies and resistances"; or Z2:12: "That I must be struggle and a becoming and an end and an opposition to ends ... Whatever I create and however much I love it, soon I must oppose it and my love; thus my will wills it"; or indeed the memorable analysis of tickling in WP699.

John Richardson follows another line which is strongly suggested by many passages in which power is associated with domination or mastery over other forces. A force has its specific internal goals -- or better, less teleological, its own projects or behaviour patterns. But these ends are not fixed: a force is always in a process of self-overcoming (Selbstueberwindung), in which its activity changes -- grows -- and new goals replace old ones -- "striving to enhance itself, to extend its own scope of activity". A first sense of Nietzschean power is then "power as growth in activity".The question may arise here: what of the identity of the force, does it remain the same force when its goals and activities are transformed by self-overcoming? But Richardson (and I think Nietzsche would approve) is happy to let go of identity-ontology, here it seems taking a cue from neo-Darwinist "population thinking": "it wills to rise to a new and higher level of effort -- perhaps indeed a level at which its internal ends are also overcome and replaced by descendent ones that will have to be overcome in turn."

The next move is to see what "growth" consists in for Nietzsche. As Richardson argues, Nietzsche "most often and most emphatically identifies growth as increased 'mastery' (Herrschaft) of others." Thus in (BGE6) "every drive seeks to be master"; WP490 "the only force that there is, is of the same kind as the will: a commanding of other subjects, which thereupon alter"; D113: "the striving for distinction is the striving of subjugation of the nearest", and many more.

If we take the power ontology seriously -- if we say that all there is in the world, in life, are forces brought together in "relations of tension" -- then there seems to be a clear route from (1) power as growth in activity; to (2), power as mastery. In an un-Nietzschean ontology of agents and objects, we might suppose a way in which an agent increases her power by acquiring more resources, where these resources are objects. E.g., by acquiring an axe I increase my power to cut trees, and potentially boost my tree-cutting activity. But if we think of the world as made up of only forces, a force can only grow by acquiring or accumulating more -- force. The next move, a crucial one for Nietzsche's ontology and for its evaluative implications, is to ask: from where can a force take more force?

Here Nietzsche posits something like a law of conservation of energy for forces. That is, the only way for a force to increase its strength is to take it from other forces. WP369: "life lives always at the expense of other life". WP689: "Not merely conservation of energy, but maximal economy in use, so that the only reality is the will to grow stronger of every center of force -- not self-preservation, but the will to appropriate, dominate, increase, grow stronger."

More exactly, it is not (or not usually) that a successful force "steals" or subtracts strength from other forces: the subdued forces persist and maintain their energy, but they themselves are appropriated, dominated, re-directed under the control of the ruling force, which adds their strength to its own. As Richardson explains it : "drive A rules B insofar as it has turned B towards A's own end, so that B now participates in A's distinctive activity. Mastery is bringing another will into a subordinate role within one's own effort, thereby 'incorporating' the other as a sort of organ or tool" (p33).²

This also means that power as mastery is closely tied to (3) power as overcoming resistance. That is, the resistance here is precisely the resistance offered by an opposing force. Nietzsche himself often joins the two ideas of mastery and resistance. In GM1:13, for example, we have "a willing to subjugate, a willing to throw down, a willing to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs." Or, e.g., in WP693 he writes that "opposites, obstacles are needed: therefore, relatively, encroaching units"; in WP694 the formulation is "the resistance a force seeks to master". Of course, the opposite force here is also seeking to grow, achieve mastery, and the resistance it presents to a dominant force encroaching on it is of a piece with the domination it would exert if it were the stronger or mastering force: attack and defence are two aspects of the same willing. Thus, e.g., in WP693 displeasure is "every feeling of not being able to resist or dominate" (my emphasis); or WP634 "a will to violate and to defend onself against violation."

Resistance, on this picture, is not sought out by the aggressor force, or not usually, simply for "its own sake", but because achieving mastery over a force necessarily involves overcoming its resistance. While Nietzsche associate the experience of overcoming resistance with the feeling of pleasure (meeting resistance in the first place causes displeasure, which turns into pleasure when the resistance is successfully overcome), he is insistent that pleasure is merely epiphenomenal (WP702): it is not the pursuit of pleasure itself that drives forces. (As for Kant the cold pleasure of Selbstueberfriedenheit is merely epiphenomenal to the performance of duty?)

In short: forces increase in power by (1) growing, increasing their activity (or perhaps, in some senses, also, their capacity for activity -- which also ties us back to a version of Clark's theory); they grow by (2) assimilating or dominating other forces; and to do so they (3) overcome the resistance of these other forces. These three senses of power are intrinsically linked, given Nietzsche's picture of a world made just of forces which can only grow at the expense of others. This is the fundamental agonistic ontology in which the world is war or, at the least, competition of struggling forces. Triumph in this conflict is not to destroy enemies/opponents but to subdue, enslave, master, absorb, alter.³

life values

In these late notes life and will to power often seem to be interchangeable terms, making it easy to read them as synonyms. Or at least, as in WP689, life is will to power operating specifically in the organic domain. "Life, as the form of being most familiar to us, is specifically a will to the accumulation of force; all the processes of life depend on this; nothing wants to preserve itself, everything is to be added and accumulated." Life is "essentially a striving for more power; striving is nothing other than striving for power."

To start looking at Nietzsche's values, then, we can outline a first approach which works on this level of forces. Nietzsche's values here are values he gives (or strives to give) to forces. Recalling that all these forces are also, for Nietzsche, engaged in evaluation -- they have their own values (goals) -- we can also say: he is re-valuing, or (re-)ranking, the values of forces. The core criterion for evaluation/re-valuation here is the life -- that is, the power or growth -- of forces. I.e., Nietzsche assigns positive values to strong forces, forces that grow, dominate, overcome others. Throughout Nietzsche's writings we find praise of strength, activity, liveliness, "virility", conquest. Again, this positive evaluative stance is connected to Nietzsche's critical position, exposing and overturning "slave morality" and ascetic doctrines which denigrate strong forces and praise the weak.

strong, active, creative

However, Nietzsche's position is more subtle than a simple ode to strength. For example, in The Genealogy of Morals, we see how Nietzsche's common assault on the otherworldly values of priests turns with the recognition of the new value created by the ascetic ideal: it is thanks to priests "that man first became an interesting animal ... and that the human soul became deep in the higher sense and turned evil for the first time -- and of course, these are the two basic forms of man's superiority, hitherto, over other animals! ..." (GM1:7) Linked to this is the theory developed in Beyond Good and Evil (BGE262) in which decadent periods beginning when a triumphant "species" relaxes after the end of struggle, although they lead to the decline of strong warlike values, allow the creative upsurge of new variations and "deviations". Similarly, in the Gay Science, Nietzsche develops a cyclical story in which periods of sickness and recuperation are also to be valued. Thus there are various points in Nietzsche's work where it seems that retreating as well as aggressive forces are valued. A common thread is perhaps that these forces, while apparently weak and self-destructive, are creative: they invent new variations, new values, new ways of life.

This points us towards a tightly complex issue in Nietzsche's evaluative thinking, which here I'm just musing on. Nietzsche often positively values forces that create. Here the affirmation of life seems to become an affirmation of newness, change: new life, or forms of life. But the relationship between creativity and strength is not always so clear.

Sometimes Nietzsche does plainly associate creativity with strength. An important case is his assertion in GM1:2 that the judgement 'good' can only have been initially created by masters: "It was from this pathos of distance that they first claimed the right to create values and give these values names ..." Creativity, here, is closely linked with the idea of an active, spontaneous, and aggressive force -- creation is the over-flowing of super-abundant power. Creativity is what gets covered over by herd mentality and unexplained by the mechanistic chains of reactions and adaptations celebrated in modern science (physics and biology): "The victorious concept 'force', by means of which our physicists have created God and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate as 'will to power', i.e., as an insatiable desire to manifest power, or as the employment and exercise of power, as a creative drive, etc." (WP619)

The importance of activity in Nietzsche's evaluation is brought out in the discussion by Deleuze, who begins by distinguishing quantity and quality of Nietzschean forces. When two forces meet, there is always a stronger one that dominates and a weaker one that resists. On the one hand, we can consider their difference as a differential of quantity: one has more strength than the other. But Deleuze also considers a corresponding, but distinct, difference of quality: the force with more strength takes on an active quality or role in the relation, while the weaker force is reactive. Qualities indicate the ways in which forces express their different powers within the relation. An active force, with its over-abundance of power, casts off or flows energy into creation -- new values, new arrangements -- as well as seeking new expansions and struggles. A reactive force has to devote its energy to resisting assimilation by the conqueror; alternatively, it may self-destructively turn its aggression inward.

The ambiguity (if that's what it is) here is that reactive forces can also be creative. For example, a few sections further into the first essay of the Genealogy, the "priestly method of valuation" becomes a creative force which stems precisely from a lack of power: "the history of mankind would be far too stupid a thing if it had not had the intellect of the powerless injected into it." (GM1:7). A resolution of this knot might be to distinguish two sorts of creativity: only an active force can create a truly new or "original" value or meaning; the creativity of a reactive force is always a re-working, inverting, twisting, combining, deviating a mutation, adaptation or otherwise variation of the original creation of an active force.

There are two issues which I will just flag up for now. First, even if we can maintain this distinction, it is not clear that it provides the criterion for value: reactive creativity still seems valuable; it is reactive inventiveness that has made human beings interesting, "superior" to other animals. Despite himself, Nietzsche does repeatedly acknowledge the value of, in the terms of Michel de Certeau (1980), the bricolage of the weak who tactically adapt through their "consumption" the systems laid down by dominant forces of production.

Second, the distinction requires an account of creativity in which active forces create new activities and meanings, as it were, ex nihilo: or, Nietzsche thinks, "from within", from their own internal abundance. It is this internality which distinguishes these originary creations from mere variations and adaptations. A theory of active creativity is central to the part of Nietzsche's project that emphasises the will to power doctrine as distinct from mechanistic interpretations of Newtonian physics or Darwinian evolution. Non-creative evolutionism misunderstands "the essence of life, its will to power" by ignoring "the prime importance that the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, re-interpreting and formative forces have, which adaptation follows only when they have had their effect" (GM2:12); "the essential thing in the life process is precisely the tremendous shaping, form-creating force working from within" (WP647). In passages like this, an idea of life as spontaneous creativity seems central to Nietzsche's vision: however, I am not sure that, beyond these insistent flashes, Nietzsche managed to develop such an account.

life of bodies

So far we have looked at valuation in terms of "simple" forces and their goals. But although Nietzsche sees an individual -- or some other body, such as a nation or a species -- as an assembled multiplicity of forces, it is still the case that the "beings" he is primarily interested in are these composite bodies rather than their component forces. His writing is largely concerned with the conditions of life, persistence, growth, of human individual and social bodies. For example, he is interested in how a human individual (e.g., a philosopher, a free spirit) can live well, or whether or how a society or people (e.g., Europeans⁴, or sometimes the human species) can flourish. It may be that Nietzschean life-values become clearer when we look at them at this level: our interest is the life of bodies.

A healthy body is something like a collection of rival forces that have managed to unite, despite their mutual antagonism, and form a coalition against the outside world. More generally, we could think of nested layers of forces coalescing into organised bodies, which then as united forces form coalitions with other bodies, constructing joint larger body-forces, etc. WP636: "My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (-- its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (‘union’) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on --"

A second layer of the power ontology is, then, a theory of what different structural relations of forces in bodies mean for the health and strength of those bodies as composite forces: their ability to act effectively as coalitions struggling against other coalitions. Here Nietzsche has a clear stance: the strongest bodies are dictatorships, strict hierarchies where one dominant force within establishes itself as master to shape and direct the collectivity. "Democratic" or "levelled" structures make for weak bodies which tear themselves apart in internal dissension, or become flabby and vulnerable to invasion

Another theme in Nietzsche's treatment of life -- as hygiene, extirpating violence, "cleanliness and severity" (BGE210) -- comes in here. In GS26 he writes: "What is life? Life -- that is: continually shedding something that wants to die. Life -- that is: being cruel and inexorable against everything about us that is growing old and weak ..." This theme can be reconciled with life as growth when we take it to the level of bodies rather than (simple) forces. A body (composite force) can gain strength and grow at the expense of other weaker bodies if dominant forces within it can carry out an internal restructuring which includes: (1) asserting their mastery over and re-directing weaker but "sufficiently related" complementary forces; but also (2) cutting away, or excreting, from the body weak forces which are harmful to the dominant project.

This theory of the benefits of hierarchy gives an ontological grounding both for Nietzsche's political elitism⁵, and for his approach to transformative individual psychology: a personal ethic of self-mastery "through long practice and daily work". To focus in on the latter, one strong statement of Niezsche's values is GS290: "One thing is needful. -- To 'give style' to one's character -- a great and rare art ... In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed, and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!" The strong and domineering nature imposes a strict law on itself -- as opposed to weak spirits which cannot serve without becoming slaves. These self-dominating spirits are successful and powerful in the world (they build palaces); they know satisfaction and gaiety; and they do not harm others through revenge or ugliness, as weak dissatisfied spirits do.

In this passage we find a bundle of Nietzschean positive values, values which run through his thought and again and again resurface in colour: joy, brightness, strength, pride, creativity, dominance, magnanimity, more. If it does make sense, though, to try and identify a more or less stable core or main thread amongst these, the more metaphysical notion of growth of power still seems the most reliable guide. Success -- "worldly power" -- conceived in any common terms is never a core value for Nietzsche, and avoiding harm to others is far from a main concern. While Nietzsche often affirms sensations, experiences, of joy, happiness, gaiety, these are, in terms of the power ontology, consequences (epihenomenal, if inextricable) of the overcoming of resistance by growing forces, rather than intentions or ends. The key value, then, that guides the picture of self-mastery in this passage, and runs through many other affirmative statements, is not attached to the consequences of the strong spirit's actions, but to the alignment of forces that gives this body strength. Nietzsche would (presumably) still affirm the project of self-mastery even if such a domineering will failed to overcome worldly obstacles, and perished suffering in the attempt, without experiencing joy.

for whose life?

On this account, Nietzsche's core concern is with the healthy life, i.e., the growth of power, of bodies. He positively values forces and values that contribute to the growth, and ultimately the self-overcoming and transformation, of these bodies. But if the rise of any force is the decline of another, the power of any body the weakness of another, then we can ask: why should Nietzsche be concerned with the flourishing of any (particular) body, if its failure to flourish will just mean an opportunity for a rival? I'll conclude with a few sketchy suggestions on this: maybe there are elements of some or all of these in Nietzsche's work.

(1) Perhaps the simplest answer is that Nietzsche begins with a concern with particular bodies with which he (or dominant drives in his own body) identifies; e.g., the individual body of Friedrich Nietzsche, or a European Culture of which he feels himself to be part. This identification is the starting point for Nietzsche's evaluative perspective, an unquestioned fixed point from which his values operate. At the level of societies or cultures, this position would amount to a kind of chauvinism, a bit like the cultural chauvinism admitted and embraced by a philosopher such as Richard Rorty. However, many would be more comfortable with this stance on the individual level: we don't find so much to object to in the idea of "care of the self".

(2) Some passages may suggest, though, that Nietzsche is able to, or aspires to,dissociate himself from such contingent attachments. But then it may be that affirmation of life in the restricted sense, life meaning the growth of particular forces and bodies, collapses into the affirmation of life in the broadest sense: life as everything there is. But what content is then left in Nietzsche's values? What is the difference between affirming growth and affirming decay, its inevitable converse?

(3) We might look at Nietzsche's evaluative stance as tied to the critical project of opposing levelling moralities, the ascetic ideal. He affirms values of aggression and growth in a particular context of opposition to the conventional moralising of selflessness and timidity, morality which seeks to cover up the role of aggressive forces in life. Though this version would subordinate Nietzsche's affirmative values to his critical stance: and so make it an essentially reactive thinking?

(4) While the growth of any one force implies an equal decline in the strength of other forces, the distribution of strength amongst forces may be changed in various ways. For example, we could imagine on the one hand a kind of general melée involving many small bodies, all more or less equal in strength; on the other, a more polarised landscape in which a few mighty bodies absorb and concentrate the available forces. It may be that what Nietzsche is interested in are particular distributions, or movements towards distributions, of power between bodies. But why? This might be the case, for example, on aesthetic grounds -- recalling that existence and world are justified solely as an aesthetic phenomenon (BT1). Nietzsche may believe that certain kinds of force distributions and patternings (more hierarchical ones) produce more beautiful results (e.g., greater art, higher culture); or perhaps that certain patterns of force are intrinsically more beautiful. Then values of life ultimately serve, in Nietzsche's evaluative scheme, values of art?

Works by Nietzsche

(BGE) Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, (London: Penguin Classics, 1990)

(GM) On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)

(GS) The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974)

(D) Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)

(HH) Human, All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehman, (London: Penguin Classics, 1994)

(WP) The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York, Vintage Books, 1968)

(Z) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Classics, 1961)

Other works

de Certeau, Michel. 1980. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berekely, CA: University of California Press, 1984)

Clark, Maudemarie. 1991. Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Deleuze, Gilles. 1962. Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson (London and New York: Continuum, 2006)

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. 1980. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004)

Dowding, Keith. 1996. Power (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press)

Kaufmann, Walter. 1950. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press)

Reginster, Bernard. 2006. The Affirmation of Life (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press)

Richardson, John. 1996. Nietzsche's System (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

1Clark's more general definition of a first order desire is effectively a desire that contains no references to other desire-terms ... which seems to create a circularity.

2Though note that, e.g., WP642, Nietzsche sometimes suggests that this "incorporation" is only ever partial or temporary: resistance can always flare up again. "To what extent resistance is present even in obedience: individual power is by no means surrendered. In the same way, there is an admission that the absolute power of the opponent has not been vanquished, incorporated, disintegrated. 'Obedience' and 'commanding' are forms of struggle." This passage is important for the left Nietzscheanisms of Deleuze and Foucault; Deleuze gives it some prominence in (1962: 37).

3Though there is also in some places another picture -- in which forces or organisms are competing for resources, and here power would be the control of these resources but always in place of other rivals -- e.g. WP704 "For what do the trees in a jungle fight each other? For 'happiness'? For power!"

4Nietzsche famously writes to his mother in 1886: "For even if I should be a bad German—in any case I am a very good European" cf. Kaufmann (1950: 44)

5 Nietzsche's agonistic picture of the world is very open to "left-Nietzschean" interpretation as a form of anti-liberal "conflict theory" in which history is made up of conflict and resistance of classes and other power groups. But, if we want to trace the links between Nietzsche's theory of will to power and his own avowed political stances, we can identify two particular claims that seem to have unavoidably elitist implications: (1) forces can only grow at the expense of other forces: a "law of conservation of energy"; (2) strong bodies (coalitions of forces) must be organised hierarchically. One question for a left-Nietzschean is then: what can we do with Nietzsche's polemology if we get rid of these particular ideas?

well do they?

2010-07-15T12:13:00.001-07:00

more studying on liberalism ...

Kant on political freedom

This essay looks at Kant's political philosophy through his theory of freedom. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant develops a famous conception of "practical freedom" as independence of the will from determination by "sensuous impulses"; or, in its positive characterisation, the "autonomy" of the rational agent. When Kant later comes to develop a formal theory of justice or "right" in The Metaphysics of Morals, an idea of freedom is again central. But is this juridical/political idea of freedom the same conception as that developed in the foundational moral philosophy? Pursuing freedom through these two works not only helps us to understand the relation between Kant's moral and political thought, but elucidates the political project -- a project of liberalism -- which works through the theory of right.

1. moral freedom

We will need at least a thumbnail sketch of Kantian psychology in order to work on these questions. A useful starting point is the distinction which Kant makes, particularly in the Metaphysics of Morals, between Willkuer or (the faculty of) "choice" from Wille or the "will". As Henry Allison (1990) explains, Wille has both a broad and a narrow sense. We can think of Wille, narrow sense, as the legislative and Willkuer as the executive functions of the overall "faculty of volition" -- or will in the broad sense. Willkuer, choice, makes the final decisions to act. Non-rational animals, Kant believes, have only this lower faculty of choice, and the desires on which their choices are based are always sensuous "impulses" or inclinations (Neigungen) which enmesh them in the causal chains of the sensual world. But humans also have the higher faculty of will, which can command Willkuer and cause it to follow reasoned desires rather than impulses.

The issue of causal determination, or its absence in the case of a free noumenal human, is central to Kant's thinking. Choice (Willkuer) is always determined by another force; will (narrow sense) is never determined, but determining. Kant says that for humans, choice is "affected but not determined by impulses"; instead, choice can be "determined to action by pure will" -- and this pure will is identified with "pure practical reason". There is perhaps an ambiguity here: does will always operate and command choice, or are there at least some occasions when human beings respond directly to impulses, i.e., act (or simply move) non-rationally, like animals? If so, we might say: there may be occasions where human choice is caused by impulse, but it is always at least possible for the will to intervene, overriding impulse and instead directing choice according to a rational principle.

Where Wille (narrow sense) is active, it determines willkuer by setting it laws or principles; willkuer then chooses particular actions (or, more accurately, maxims) which follow these principles. Thus for Wille, the legislator, principles are freely chosen; for Willkuer, they are imperatives. There are two kinds of principles or imperatives, hypothetical and categorical. A hypothetical imperative is a principle which tells Willkuer to act in a certain way in order to pursue an impulsive desire. That is, in the case of acting following a hypothetical imperative the ultimate guiding desire is still a sensuous impulse, and in this sense the human agent is still causally linked to the world of sense: affected, but not determined.

The human agent is only fully free when she follows a categorical imperative. In the Groundwork Kant gives both a negative and a positive characterisation of this "practical" freedom. Positively, freedom means that the will is autonomous, self-legislating. Kant famously holds that "Everything in nature works in accordance with laws." (4:412). But a free rational will makes its own laws. It is "a law to itself (independently of any property of the objects of volition)." (4:440). In this essay, however, we will work with the negative characterisation of freedom as independence from determination by sensuous impulses, from being causally bound to the "world of sense". So the observation above that human choice is not determined by sensuous causation can be restated thus: it is always, at any moment, possible for a human being to be morally free.

2. morals and politics

The relationship between Kant's moral philosophy and his political theory is a debating topic. Is Kant's political theory, in what Marcus Willaschek (2009) calls the "traditional approach", a "mere application of his moral theory, developed in the Groundwork and the Second Critique, to the juridical sphere"? Or, on the other hand, does Kant's discussion of right introduce wholly new principles which, as Stuart M. Brown (1962: 36) alleges, "have no discernible logical relationship to the Categorical Imperative"?

The first position is taken by, for example, Howard Williams (1983), one of the first of the recent English language writers to revive interest in Kantian political philosophy. Williams begins with the point that Kant himself expounds his theory of right as a division of the Metaphysics of Morals. Right and Ethics (Ethik) are presented as two sub-domains of morality; in both cases the subject matter is the application of a priori principles of morals to the empirical world. The Doctrine of Right opens with the Introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals, in which Kant restates the preliminary concepts developed in the Groundwork. Foremost amongst these, of course, is the Categorical Imperative, the "supreme principle of the doctrine of morals", which is here given pithily in the "Universal Law" formulation:

(CI): "Act on a maxim that can also hold as a universal law". (6:226)

Within morality as a whole, the particular sphere of Right concerns the "external relations" of people through their actions (6:230). Whereas ethics looks at the world of inner intentions for actions, what is right or wrongful in the sphere of Right is simply the action itself (or its maxim). Williams explains: "The theory of right outlines ... those maxims of moral philosophy which are capable of being made into external laws, whereas the theory of virtue outlines those maxims of moral philosophy which it is not possible to make into external laws." (60-1)

As we shall see, the fact that these "external laws" dictate only external conduct means that they can be enforced not only through inner promptings of the will but also through external applications of force to other people. So can say: the political or juridical domain is that area where moral principles can be enforced by lawful coercion. Note that this external enforcement complements the internal obligation which duties of right also carry as moral duties: Kant believes that it is always virtuous, as well as right, to obey the law -- to the point that it is morally obligatory to obey even unjust laws made by a legal sovereign (though I won't cover that well trodden ground here).

However, in contrast to the very careful treatment given to the derivation of the categorical imperative in the Groundwork, the principles in the Doctrine of Right are introduced quickly and sparsely. This is the universal principle of right:

(UPR): "Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone's freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone's freedom in accordance with a universal law." (6:230)

For Christine Korsgaard (2008: 237), UPR is a "restricted version of the categorical imperative"; and clearly there is, at the very least, a strong resemblance to the universal law formulation. However, Kant does not presents a deduction of UPR from CI, or even discuss the relation of the two. In fact, as Willaschek or Arthur Ripstein (2009) point out in arguing against the "traditional approach" and for the "independence" of the doctrine of right from Kantian moral theory, Kant instead calls UPR "a postulate incapable of further proof". This opens the way to the position held by Willaschek that principles of right are "independent expressions of rational autonomy, on a par with, or at least not derivable from the Categorical Imperative."

One theme from Willaschek's discussion could be useful for setting out our question here. He notes that Kant himself at some points used the universal law formulation of CI to deduce grounds of legitimate coercion (he maintains that Kant later moved away from this approach). Thus in a 1793 lecture transcript Kant argues that a "moral coercive act" is one whose maxim qualifies as a universal law (27:524f; Willaschek 2009:61). For example, one such maxim could be ‘I will coerce others into fulfilling their duties from a promise where this is necessary.’ But, notes Willaschek: "The problem with this is obvious. If the maxim in question would in fact pass the test of the universal law formula, it would be morally admissible to coerce others into observing their promises even in non-juridical cases."

More generally: if the principle of right is derived directly from CI, with the same scope of application, then all of morality is enforceable: the juridical domain is simply the whole moral realm, and there's nothing left for ethics. This leaves us with two alternatives. Either: (a) as Willaschek argues, the principles of right are not deduced from the categorical imperative at all; or (b) they are deduced from not from CI alone, but from CI plus "further postulates" which serve to delimit the scope of the juridical. In other words: if the universal principle of right is indeed a "restricted version" of the categorical imperative, we need to see where the restriction comes from.

3. the law of freedom in a maxim

John Rawls (2000) analyses the "natural law" formulation of the Categorical Imperative as a staged "CI procedure" for testing potential moral laws. Similarly, we might get clearer on the principles of right by looking at UPR as a staged process for lawmakers to test potential "external laws".

(1) frame the maxim under consideration: "I am to do X in circumstances C"^¹

(2) consider it as a "universal precept": "Everyone is to do X in circumstances C"

(3) the test: if this universal precept became an external (and thus -- enforceable) law, could everyone's freedom of choice remain intact?

An external law is rightful if it passes this test. It seems that the content is carried by the notion of freedom applied in the test, which is where we must now turn.

4. external freedom

In the Introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant's begins with a definition of freedom (in its negative form) which is directly carried over from the Groundwork: "independence from being determined by sensuous impulses" (6:213). Though there is one qualification: we are only concerned now with external relations, with how one person's choice affects the choice of another, rather than their "mere wish", desire or need (6:230). Thus what is at stake in this context is what Kant calls "freedom in the external use of choice" (6:214).

But further in to The Doctrine of Right , in the definition of the one innate or "original right" of freedom, we find a new definition:

"Freedom (independence from being constrained by another's choice), insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law, is the only original right belonging to every human being by virtue of her humanity." (6:237)

I will use the label "external freedom" to refer to the second characterisation of freedom as "independence from being constrained by the choices of others". But are these just two different characterisations of the same idea of freedom; or are there actually two distinct ideas of freedom at work in the Doctrine of Right?

To see this we need to understand what it means, in terms of Kantian psychology, for one individual's choice (Willkuer) to be constrained (genoetigt) by the choice of another. Things become clearer here if we relate the language of constraint back to Kant's understanding of causation.² I will propose the following gloss. To affect choice or action, as when sensuous impulses affect but do not determine human choice, is to provide not a cause but an influence or, in contemporary philosophical usage, a causal factor. At the other end of the scale, determination (bestimmung) of an action means straightforwardly to cause it.

Between these two, constraint seems closer to determination. It might in fact be the case that they are equivalent, at least in terms of how they relate to causation. Or if we don't want to go that far, I would suggest the following: if a constraint does not in fact cause an action, it at least prevents the choice of certain actions. For example, if you have a choice between three possible actions, and an action of mine removes one of them, leaving you only two available options, then I have constrained, though not fully determined, your choice. If I leave you only one possible action (if such a thing is possible), then my constraint is also a full determination. (In this sense I will approach a determination as a special case of a constraint.)

We can think of a number of ways in which someone's Willkuer may be constrained. For one thing, when Wille determines Willkuer in an action that stems from pure practical reason to act morally this can be seen as an internal constraint. Kant holds that the Willkuer of animals is determined -- hence, constrained -- by their sensuous impulses. But, as we well know, human choice is not so determined. I will assume here (without arguing for it) that in fact Kantian moral freedom can also be understood of freedom from constraint (in the sense above) as well as from determination by sensible impulses.

As we saw above, Kant believes that it is always open, at any time, for a human being to be morally free. An obvious but important corollary is that no other person can ever prevent me from being morally free. Or, to put it another way: no action or choice of another person can cause me to be constrained by sensuous impulses. That is: while another person's choice may affect my choice via influencing my sensuous impulses, it can never constrain my choice in this way.

Another way to make this same point is: no other person can choose my ends for me. But Kant understands a purposive action as involving choosing both an end, and means to achieve that end. Someone's actions can then be influenced not only through affecting their ends, but through affecting the means at their disposal.

In his Force and Freedom, Arthur Ripstein explains Kant's political freedom as: "you are independent if you are the one who decides what ends you will use your means to pursue, as opposed to having someone else decide for you." (2009:33). Strictly speaking, given what we said above, no one else is able to "decide what ends" another pursues; but what others can do is to interfere with your means, or use them for their own ends. For example, if someone takes away a tool that you need to perform a certain action, you are no longer able to choose (rather than simply wish) that action. That is, in the sense defined above, by interfering with your means they have constrained your choice.

We can now clear up the question about the two characterisations of freedom. If this account is right then external freedom is indeed something distinct from moral freedom. I am externally free if I am independent from others interfering with my means. Others can take away my external freedom by interfering with my means; but they cannot take away my moral freedom, which is always only in my own hands.

5. legitimate means

But now there's another question: what does the "my" mean in "my means"? For example, if freedom were simply the ability to use any means at all without interference, then, e.g., it would be an infringement of my freedom for someone to interfere with my using stolen goods -- which seems a rather un-Kantian conclusion.

We can outline two possible responses here; it remains to be seen which is compatible with Kant's position. On the one hand: (a) we might indeed define (external) freedom simply as independence from interference with any means at all. Freedom here means being able to act however I choose, making use of any means available to me. We can still say that it is wrong for me to use stolen goods, and right for someone to constrain me from doing so: only it is not wrong because it restricts my freedom. Rightfulness is not tied to freedom: there can be wrongful uses of freedom, and rightful constraints of freedom.

Alternatively: (b) we might define (external) freedom as independence from interference only with legitimately held means. We will then have to say what makes means legitimately held.

To see the implications of these alternatives, we can try and apply them in the universal principle of right. It's easier to start with the second case:

(b) an action is right if, were its maxim to become a universal external law, no one's legitimately held means would be interfered with.

To formulate UPR in the first case forces us to think a bit more about what we can mean by the means available for an action. For example, we might say: freedom is being able to use, without interference, any things (tools, objects, etc.) that I can physically take up. But in fact this is already a limitation of my available means. For example, as Kant emphasises in his theory of property, we can use things as means in our actions without having any physical connection with them. For example, a merchant can use and profit from goods she owns which are being shipped far away; or make contractual arrangements for future delivery of goods that might not even exist yet. The only general formulation of UPR which didn't already involve a restriction on peoples' use of things as means would be something like this:

(a) an action is right if, were its maxim to become a universal external law, no one's use of any thing at all as a means would be interfered with;

But on that formulation, any action that made use of any thing, unless that thing were a truly non-depletable (non-rival) resource, would be wrong. This is the point that Ripstein (2009:12) makes in observing that the principles of right are about "governing persons represented as occupying space"; or Willaschek (2009:63), somewhat more generally, with what he calls the "principle of impossibility of non-conflicting rights". The subject matter of right is the application of morality to external relations in the empirical world; means of action are things in the empirical world (or agreements based on empirical things), with all the properties of finite things. We get the possibility of conflict over resources: if I am able to use a thing as my means, in many cases (though perhaps not as many as Kant thought: he seems to ignore the possibility of public goods), that means that someone else is not.

This means that freedom in the sense of an absolute licence to use any thing in the world is an impossibility. Or more precisely: it is a possibility for only one person in the world, who is either the sole inhabitant, or keeps everyone else as slaves. It is only possible for more than one person to be free -- and, specifically, for all people to be free, for there to be freedom "in accordance with a universal law" -- if we take freedom in a more restricted sense as the ability to use certain means without interference.

Thus we come to position (b): the definition of external freedom needs to involve some way of specifying what means count as available for my use, that is, what means are legitimately available for me. For Kant, this is a question of what means are rightfully mine: that is, the idea of external freedom, from the beginning, involves property.

6. mine and yours

If this account is right, in order to fully characterise the idea of external freedom we need to jump forward now to the next section of the Doctrine of Right, where Kant expounds his theory of property. Here I will just pick out a few points.

Kant's starting point in the section on private right is a general idea of rightful ownership: "That is rightfully mine (meum iuris) with which I am so connected that another's use of it without my consent would wrong me." (6:243) He then goes on to look at how this concept can be applied to external objects, beginning with a "nominal definition of what is externally mine" in the terms of UPR:

"That outside me is externally mine which it would be a wrong (an infringement upon my freedom which can coexist with the freedom of everyone in accordance with a universal law) to prevent me from using as I please." (6:248)

On the account above, these propositions -- or definitions -- are tautologous. Something is rightfully mine if it would infringe my freedom for another to interfere with its use; but freedom has to be defined just as independence from interference with what is rightfully mine. If Kant is not making a circular argument here, there must be additional principles which ground the idea of rightful ownership. While his account is not easy to follow, we can identify or extrapolate a few such basic principles, some of which are argued for, others assumed.

First of all, following Ripstein (chap. 2), we can interpret the innate right of freedom as self-mastery or ownership of one's person, where "your right to your person is your right to your body". In the first place, then, my rightful means include the powers and capacities of my own body. Note that Kant gives an illuminating characterisation of innate right as "the 'internal mine and thine' (meum vel tuum internum)" (6:237).

I can then supplement these means by acquiring external objects. An infringement of my freedom can be interference with either my own body or with my external property. As Ripstein puts it (43): "your powers can be interfered with in two basic ways, by usurping them or by destroying them." Usurpation means using means without the rightful owner's consent: e.g., non-consensual use of a person's body, or stealing their property. Destruction can involve, e.g., bodily injury or property destruction. Rightful property can be acquired through "original acquisition" in an act of "taking control (occupatio)" of unowned things (6:259); or through consensual transfer. (Both, for Kant, are possible only in civil society, i.e., once a system of law is already in place.) As well as rights over "corporeal objects", Kant also discusses two further categories of external rights involving contracts and "relations of status." Kant devotes some time to arguing that property must be understood in a strong sense of ownership, with full rights to dispose of a thing as the owner sees fit, rather than some form of "usufruct".

7. property and freedom

A quick recap. There are two main elements in the universal principle of right: the idea of a universal law -- so a universalisation procedure for testing potential external laws; and the idea of external freedom. The first element clearly comes from the moral theory of the Groundwork. The question of the relation between Kant's moral and political theories then concerns the second element, the idea of external freedom. We saw that the idea of external freedom is distinct from the moral freedom of the Groundwork; but can it be understood as derivable from the idea of moral freedom under the specific conditions of the domain of right, i.e., of external relations?

Up to a point. First, we saw that external freedom must involve independence in the use of means, as no one can constrain another's ends. Second, we saw that the properties of things in the empirical world already place a limit on the notion of external freedom. But this limit in itself is not enough to determine the definition of external freedom: for that we need further principles to define the legitimate availability of means. In Kant's theory, these further principles are those that identify rightful property. Some of these (there may be more) are principles of bodily self-ownership, original acquisition, and the necessity of absolute ownership. A particular conception of property ownership is at the heart of Kant's idea of political freedom.

I think that none of these ownership principles derive from wither the categorical imperative or elsewhere in the moral theory of the Groundwork. As I can't go into detail here on Kant's property theory, unfortunately I have to leave this claim with no full demonstration but only the following sketchy remarks. The criterion of universalisability in the universal principle of right is not sufficient to lead us to Kant's ownership principles: quite different property systems (for example, systems of usufruct ownership, where no one has rights of alienation) could also be instituted as universal laws. The idea of a universal law tells us that, (a) however our system of right defines what a person can legitimately use as means, it must be a principle that applies to all people alike. And that (b) given the nature of the empirical world, of finite spatial objects, our system of right must account for the possibility of conflicting demands for use of a thing. Neither of these demands uniquely identify Kant's system of property, or his idea of freedom.

8. Coercion

We have defined external freedom as independence from interference with one's legitimate means. However, interference with bodies or things through immediate usurpation or destruction -- that is, through force -- is only a small part of the mechanics of unfreedom. Can Kant's theory account for coercion in a broader sense?

We can distinguish a few senses of coercion. Just two are: (a) coercion as force -- actual interference with a person's legitimate means; and (b) coercion as threat -- of future acts of forceful interference conditional on a person's present actions. Leaving aside whether these two categories describe coercion in all its forms, is there a Kantian account of threat?

In the recent literature on coercion starting with Robert Nozick (1969), a threat is a proposal in which: A proposes an action X to B; if B refuses to do X, A performs an action which makes B worse off than she would be "in the normal and expected course of events". A good deal of the subsequent discussion on this theme then focuses on the definition of the comparative "baseline" (Nozick's "normal and expected course of events"). We cannot simply define a threat as involving making someone worse off than they are at present, as events might "naturally" have led to the situation deteriorating, even without any intervention. An assessment of threat then needs to suppose a hypothetical baseline state against which outcomes are measured.

To follow Alan Wertheimer's analysis, it makes sense to recognise that there is no one universal definition of the appropriate baseline for assessing all threats. There may, e.g., be "phenomenological" baselines defined according to the expectations of the different parties; or "moralised" baselines defined according to whether the proposal makes the coercee worse off than what is considered the morally right state of affairs. On a rights-based moral theory this becomes: "we set B's baseline by what A has a right to do". (1987: 215)

With some adaptation, a Kantian account of coercion can be approached as such a moralised account of threat. The appropriate baseline can be defined in terms of the concept of external freedom. There is a necessary adaptation: Kantian theory of right is not about what makes a person better or worse off, but whether her external freedom stays intact. Incorporating that, we can analyse a (Kantian) threat as follows: A proposes an action X to B; if B does not carry out X, A will carry out the threatened action T; T is an action which interferes with B's legitimately held means.

9. the circle of right

Kant holds that people can acquire new rights to external things through consensual agreements: for example, through transfers of property. But if we define coercion as above then there seems to be a danger of circularity: in order to assess coercion we need to know what means people rightfully own; but we may not be able to know that without assessing coercion.

In contemporary liberal theory Nozick (1974) employs one type of solution to this problem: we might suppose that a person's rightful powers must have been rightfully acquired at every historical step; in theory we could trace back a full history of each transfer to primitive origins where there were only innate powers and "original acquisitions" of unclaimed things. Of course, this story is very much "in theory": not only does no one suppose it can ever actually be told, but no one really thinks that its supposed truth or otherwise makes much difference to justice claims in the present.

Does Kant take an approach of this kind? It is compatible with the theory of contract and consent developed in The Doctrine of Right. As Ripstein puts it (p116): "In the case of a transfer of property ... there is a right ... which is transferred ... and the transfer itself does nothing to alter either the form or the matter of right in any way." There is no way that the legitimacy of a property holding can change through transfer: if I am a rightful owner and transfer my property to you, your ownership is now rightful, whoever you are. Nor does there seem any other way, in Kant's theory, that the legitimacy status of a property right can change over time: for example, Kant's absolute sense of property as alienable ownership includes the right to neglect or damage one's property. Then there seems nothing more to say about the legitimacy of property accumulated through transfers than whether the historical chains involved were rightful.

On the other hand, Christine Korsgaard (2008: 244) reads Kant's position as: "we simply take it for granted that, generally speaking, what people now have is their property. And we try to ensure that, from here on in, transactions will be legitimate and just."

Kant himself is elusive on this point. For example, in the essay "Theory and Practice" he famously pays attention to the lack of any historical "original contract" for the establishment of a state, which leads him to a "hypothetical" version of social contract theory. He also notes the parallel question of the absence of a history of legitimate property transfers. Then he quickly drops it: "we leave aside the question of how anyone can have rightfully acquired more land than he can cultivate with his own hands (for acquisition by military seizure is not primary acquisition), and how it came about that numerous people who might otherwise have acquired permanent property were thereby reduced to serving someone else in order to live at all." (Reiss 1970:78)

10. liberalism

We can understand Kant's political theory as a form of liberalism. There is an important distinction to be made with, say, a Lockean theory based on natural property rights, in which individuals transfer to the state a coercive authority which they already possessed in the "state of nature". For Kant, external property rights are impossible without a juridical order, and the need for human beings to realise their freedom through property ownership in fact presents them with a duty to institute government. Without government, we could have ownership only of our own bodies, and then "freedom would be depriving itself" of legitimately available means. (6:246).

At the same time, the outcome of Kant's position is similar to Locke's. Here too, legitimate coercion is restricted to the defence of property; and legitimate coercion is the province of the state; thus the domain of law and government is limited to the protection of individuals' "mine and thine". The core of Kant's political position is thus a classical form of liberalism. But the way this delimitation of the domain of right is derived is specifically Kantian, involving the theory of the human will and its relation to sensual causation, and of the meaning of freedom in a finite world. While Kant never makes all of the links explicit, we can construct the following argument:

(1) Individuals are always able to be morally free; that is, it is always open for the pure will to override sensuous impulses.

(2) This means that, while other people can affect our desires and ends through our impulses, they cannot constrain our choice in that way.

(3) The only way other people can constrain our choice is by interfering with the means we have legitimately available, in our bodies or in the external world, to pursue our ends.

(4) To coerce someone involves constraining their choice.

(5) Thus coercion involves interference with another's legitimate means.

(6) Coercion is only legitimate where it resists the coercion of another: is a "hindrance of a hindrance". That is: protects individuals' means from interference by others, by interfering with their means.

(7) The juridical realm is that area where coercion is legitimate.

(8) Thus, the juridical realm -- the domain of the state -- is the protection of individuals' rightful means: their bodies, and their property.

Works by Kant:

Citations to the Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902 --). Translations used are:

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. by Mary Gregor, 1997, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Metaphysics of Morals, trans. by Mary Gregor, 1991, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

"On the Common Saying: This May Be True In Theory, But It Does Not Apply In Practice"; and "What Is Enlightenment?"; in Political Writings, trans. by H.B. Nisbet, ed. by Hans Reiss, 1970, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Secondary writings:

Allison, Henry. 1990. Kant's Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Brown, Stuart M., Jr. 1962. "Has Kant a Philosophy of Law?", Philosophical Review 71: 1, 33-48

Korsgaard, Christine M. 2008. "Taking the Law into Our Own Hands", in The Constitution of Agency - Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

------ 2009. Self-Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Nozick, Robert. 1969. “Coercion”, in Philosophy, Science, and Method: Essays in Honor of Ernest Nagel, ed. by Sidney Morgenbesser, Patrick Suppes, and Morton White (New York: St. Martin's Press)

------ 1974. Anarchy, State, Utopia (New York: Basic Books)

Rawls, John. 2000. Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press)

Reath, Andrews. 2006. "Legislating the Moral Law", in Agency & Autonomy in Kant's Moral Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press)

Ripstein, Arthur. 2009. Force and Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press)

Wertheimer, Alan. 1987. Coercion (Princeton: Princeton University Press)

Williams, Howard. 1983. Kant's Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell)

Willaschek, Marcus. 2009. "Right and Coercion: Can Kant's Conception of Right be Derived from his Moral Theory?", International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 17: 1, 49-70

1One obvious differences from Rawls' discussion here is that, given the nature of Right as solely concerning external relations, we have to think of a maxim as a simple decision rule for actions in contexts without referring to agents' ends or "in order to"'s. This goes against Rawls' interpretation of a Kantian maxim as a hypothetical imperative, and of an action as always including an end -- an interpretation which is also strongly defended by Christine Korsgaard (2009). It might be worth pursuing the question how that interpretation fits with Kant's use of the idea of a maxim in the Doctrine of Right -- but I don't have space to do so here.

2It might help to note that the word (noetigung -- genoetigt -- noetigender) used here, as Mary Gregor advises in an endnote to her translation of the Metaphysics of Morals (1991: 283), could also be translated by "necessitation".

do they owe us a living?

2010-07-15T12:06:00.000-07:00

course they do

here's what i learned in school this year:

Why do we follow the rules?

"Rules govern all aspects of experience, what we are able to experience, and what not to experience, the operations we must and must not carry out, in order to arrive at a permitted picture of ourselves and others in the world. But a special situation exists if there is a rule against examining or questioning values: and beyond that, if there are rules against even being aware that such rules exist, including this last rule." R.D. Laing (1972)

The role of social norms and conventions has been a central area of study in sociology since the subject's beginnings, and in philosophy it goes back at least to David Hume (2000). The contribution of the game theory approach is more recent: the ground was laid by David Lewis in his Convention (1969), followed by Edna Ullman-Margalit's Emergence of Norms (1977). These game theory approaches can bring powerful analytic tools to work on old questions; but they also come with unhelpful baggage, carried over from the narrow use of rational choice theory associated with neoclassical economic theory. The essay begins by looking at some of the problems rational choice theory has faced in getting to grips with norms; it then moves to develop an alternative "context/heuristic" approach for looking at norms as decision rules within a framework of "procedural rationality".

norms and reasons

In a field where authors often reinvent the terminology as they go, one useful anchoring point is Max Weber's (2002) account of "conventions", equivalent to what theorists nowadays more usually call "social norms". Weber defined a convention as a "customary rule" supported by "sanctions" applied by a social group as a whole, distinguishing a custom from a "law" where sanctions are wielded by a "specialised staff". Many recent accounts still include the following key Weberian elements: a norm is, in some sense, a rule (we will discuss this point in much detail further on); norms are bound up with custom, tradition, habitual social practice; they are usually (if, at least for some writers, not necessarily) enforced with sanctions; some of the most forceful sanctions may be ones which are "internalised" or self-applied; norms are, for many writers, to be distinguished from formalised laws; and they carry some kind of "normative force" -- a perception of obligation, “oughtness”, or, perhaps, "rightness" or "legitimacy".

The first major work on social norms in the rational choice tradition is Ullman-Margalit's 1977 The Emergence of Norms. Adapting legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart's (1961) analysis of what he called "rules of obligations", Ullman-Margalit defined three characteristics for norms of obligation:

(i) "a significant social pressure for conformity to them and against deviation -- actual or potential -- from them";

(ii) "the belief by the people concerned in their indispensability for the proper functioning of society";

(iii) "expected clashes between their dictates on the one hand and personal desires on the other".

The first two characteristics are fully in step with sociological thinking about norms: we can relate condition (i) to Weber's "sanctions", and condition (ii) to his work on "legitimacy". But condition (iii) serves to highlight where sociological and rational choice theories typically part ways. In Weber's view people can be motivated by self-regarding desires and wishes, by altruistic desires, by emotions, by habits, by values, and more. Sometimes individuals will experience conflicts between different types of motivations; but it is not generally assumed that self-regarding wants stand in a particular relation of conflict with normative obligations.

On a broad interpretation, a rational choice explanation of a social action involves: an agent who performs the action; and reasons which explain the agent’s action. These reasons are the agent’s desires (or – preferences) and beliefs. Saying that an agent is rational here is to say two things: first, that she acts (as if) to achieve her preferences, given her beliefs; and, second, that her preferences form a coherent pattern specified by certain consistency requirements -- for example, Savage’s rationality axioms, though I won't go into the details here. Finally, explaining the actions of an agent within a broad framework of rationality does not need to imply anything about the cognitive states of agents: for example, whether or not they act consciously or deliberatively, or in what way (if any) their preferences and beliefs are “instantiated” in minds or brains.

"Broad" rational choice theory (RCT) thus says much about the "form" of agents' beliefs and desires, but is silent about their "content". On this line we can cite Geoffrey Brennan's suggestion that rational choice theory would be better thought of as a rational choice grammar (or – framework). As Brennan puts it: “the rational actor / rational choice approach is best interpreted expansively and better understood as a kind of grammar of argument than as a particular theory ... any particular application of rationality assumptions involves a specification of the content of utility functions that is not itself part of the theory ....” (2007: 112)

But in practice most rational choice theory does typically "narrow" in with specific assumptions, explicit or not, about the content of utility functions. Very commonly, given RCT's ties to economic theory, it is connected to a view of human behaviour as dominated by economic self-interest. Indeed, as Brennan puts it: “in some circles it seems to count as a professional accomplishment to show how phenomena most naturally explained by altruism (or commitment to norms) on the part of relevant agents can, with a measure of ingenuity, be explained as wealth-maximising.”

And so the recent engagement of rational choice theory with norms largely takes the form of a series of puzzles. Game theorists have been turning to this area to help "resolve" the apparent breakdowns of such narrowly self-regarding models, for example in situations where subjects are seen to act "fairly" against their economic self-interest.

the ultimatum game problem

One example much discussed in recent literature is the "ultimatum game" experiment. Two people divide a sum of money (say, $10) in the following way: first, the Proposer suggests a split of the money; then the Responder can either accept the offer or reject it. If she accepts, the money is divided as proposed; if she rejects, neither player receives anything. Under standard game theory assumptions, and if we assume that both players value only money, a rational Proposer will offer the minimum amount (say, one cent) to the Responder; and a rational Responder will accept, as anything is better than nothing. In reality, players in experiments from Slovenia to Tokyo do anything but this. The most common offer is a roughly equal split; and responders commonly "punish" low offers with refusal.

Most commentators conclude that the players, rather than pursuing economic self-interest, are instead following norms of "fair division". In principle, this should not be a problem for a broad rational choice theory. As Brian Skyrms (1996: 28) makes the point: “we have a clear violation of the rational choice paradigm here only on the assumption that, for these subjects, utility equals income. There is no principled reason why norms of fairness cannot be reflected in their utilities in such a way as to make their actions consistent with the theory of rational choice.”

More generally, a challenge for any theory of human action is how to explain not just the regularity but the diversity of social behaviour: as Dan Hausman (2007: 56) puts it, to help us understand “why people may be cut-throats at work, devoted parents at home, liberals at the voting booth, racists at the club, public spirited one moment, pious at another, principled before lunch, and utterly selfish afterwards.” There are some situations where some people pursue material self-interest above all, and RCT models have (arguably) done well in economics when confined to "market" interactions. But what if we recognise "the market" as just one limited sphere of social life which operates on quite specific rules? Can rational choice approaches work in non-market contexts, if broadened?

There are maybe two possible approaches open to broad rational choice theorists. The first, which we might read in Philip Pettit (1990), is to stick to the idea that agents have just one coherent set of preferences (utility function) which applies in all contexts, but make it one which encompasses a richer, more realistic, range of motivations and desires. This approach is still reductionist: it seeks to reduce or relate apparently conflicting "surface" motivations to an underlying basic ordering that holds throughout all the different situations in which individuals act. But it recognises that economic reductionism boils away too much. Thus, e.g., Pettit citing John Harsanyi (1969) proposes not one but "two dominant interests: economic gain, and social acceptance." The problem for this approach is to leave enough motivational variety to explain behavioural diversity; but not so much that the explanatory power of a simplifying theory is diluted away.

Alternatively, one might stay within the "grammar of rationality" but abandon the idea of a single preference set for an approach in which agents have a range of different, possibly conflicting, preferences operating in different contexts. This is the approach taken by Cristina Bicchieri (2006), and which we will develop further into this essay. Then, if rational choice explanation is to remain explanatory, the problem becomes to explain how or why these different preference sets come to obtain in given contexts.

regularities, rules, and reasons

Ullman-Margalit's book on norms followed a trail blazed by David Lewis' (1967) work on convention.¹ Lewis starts by looking at coordination problems. In Lewis' game theory approach, a coordination problem is an interaction where there are multiple combinations of actions which are proper coordination equilibria; and where "coincidence of interest predominates". Roughly speaking, the players are relatively unconcerned as to which of the coordination equilibria they arrive at, so long as they arrive at one or them. Thus, for example, while I may have some personal preference for driving on the left or on the right side of the road, what really matters to me is that everyone else drives on the same side as I do, whichever it may be.

Thomas Schelling (1960) had studied coordination problems experimentally and argued that, even for novel problems where players cannot communicate, players manage to coordinate on an equilibrium by taking advantage of "salient" features which mark out that combination of actions as somehow unique -- a "focal point". Following this lead, Lewis notes that one important type of salient feature is the existence of a precedent: if we have seen a certain coordination problem solved a certain way in the past, and a relevantly similar problem then occurs, we can coordinate by following the precedent.

This is then the root of Lewis' explanation² of the origins of the social regularities he calls conventions: groups are often faced by recurring coordination problems; it doesn't matter how a particular coordination equilibrium is settled on in the first instance, but once it is chosen it quickly becomes established as a "regularity"; the next time the situation occurs, we will turn to that action as "salient", and we expect that others in the group will do the same. "Once the process gets started we have a metastable self-perpetuating system of preferences, expectations, and actions capable of persisting indefinitely."

A key feature to note is that, as "coincidence of interest" already holds in a coordination equilibrium, there is no need to introduce any new incentives to motivate agents to follow a convention. If we suppose that the players start with certain personal preferences modelled by the coordination game, these preferences can stay fixed throughout the analysis. In a fuller analysis, we may see that new preferences grow up around a convention: e.g., it may (in a Weberian account) acquire the status of "tradition", and gain some "normativity" (Lewis argues that conventions are also norms). But these extra motivations are supplementary, not necessary.

Lewis' conventions are regularities: recurring actions which agents take in relevantly similar situations. Lewis also goes on to claim that they (or at least many of them) are rules. While, as Lewis notes, the word "rule" picks out "an especially messy cluster concept", here I will use it in the following sense: in a particular situation S, a rule R specifies a particular action (or a restricted set of actions) for actors to take. To say that actors "follow" or "conform to" the rule in this situation means that they perform the specified action. A rule in this sense is a purely descriptive term which says nothing about normativity -- about whether, and if so why, actors should, or believe they should, follow any rule.^³

A rule can feature in a causal explanation of an observed regularity. We see agents acting in a certain regular pattern not just because they happen, for whatever reasons, to choose actions which fit the pattern -- but because they are choosing in accordance with the rule. We may then go on to ask: why do they choose following the rule? This is how we can schematise a central line in rational choice analysis of social regularities: first, identify a regularity; second, explain that regularity as a result of agents following a rule; third, identify the reasons why agents follow the rule.

rules and reasons

But here we get to a second kind of puzzle for rational choice theory. This is what Edward McClennen (2004: 224) calls the "fundamental dilemma" faced by all rational choice accounts of rule-following: "either the rule gives the wrong result, in which case it is irrational to follow it; or it gives the right result, in which case guidance by the rule is irrelevant."

Lewis' conventions appear to escape the dilemma: they deliver the best result, and are also relevant in identifying it. This is because the convention-rule is essentially just a tool for achieving the right result: that is, it is what Rawls (1955) would call a "rule of thumb", a heuristic instrument for arriving at a good decision. It plays no part in determining the "rightness" of the right result, which is defined by preferences which exist independently of the rule. So we can say, in the case of conventions: the reason agents follow the rule is because doing so best realises their pre-existing preferences -- it "gives the right result".

The situation is more difficult for norms. In particular, the norms that rational choice theorists have been most interested in are those which Ullman-Margalit identifies as "PD norms", Lewis as "social contracts", and for which other writers such as Bicchieri reserve the term "social norms" altogether. In the standard game theory analysis, while the role of conventions is to solve coordination problems, these norms are rules which enable groups to solve collective action problems.⁴ A collective action problem exists where there is an available combination of actions for the group which is collectively beneficial, but which rational individuals following their personal preferences do not take.⁵ Public goods problems (where individual freeriding leads to failure to provide a collectively desired public good) and commons problems (where individuals exhaust a common resource) are the classic cases. A relevant norm, here, is a rule that tells agents to take the collectively beneficial action.

Of course, for a norm to "solve" a collective action problem, there have to be reasons for agents to follow it. The basic framework of game theory approaches to norms is one in which norms "emerge" to solve problems: this provides a simple (or simplistic) schema for thinking about the role of norms and conditions in which they might develop. We can think here of two social situations: an initial state (a "state of nature") in which there is no norm in place, and a collective action problem exists; and a subsequent state after the norm has emerged and taken hold, in which the collective action problem is solved.

By way of example, we can skip through Hume's story of the origin of property norms, the venerated ancestor of game theory work on rules. "Emergence" kicks off when "I observe that it will be in my interest to leave another in the possession of his goods, provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me" (Treatise 3.2.2). If this were merely a coordination problem, mutually noticing common interest and a salient property convention would be enough. But in a "numerous society" "we may frequently lose sight of that interest that we have, in maintaining order, and may follow a lesser and more present interest": i.e., we face a collective action problem. Thus while "self-interest is the original motive to the establishment of justice" it only takes us the first step. Next we learn to associate principles of justice such as property norms with moral approval and disapproval; and so justice is created as an "artificial virtue". While Hume believes that this is a "natural" and "necessary" process, it is helped along by "private education and instruction" as well as by "the artifice of politicians, who, in order to govern men more easily and preserve peace in human society, have endeavour'd to produce an esteem for justice and an abhorrence of injustice." And once the norm has become "firmly established", it is bolstered by social sanctions in terms of "merits and demerits" to our reputation. Finally, formal property laws add legal sanctions backed by state power.

Without digging deeper into Hume's story, or other authors' versions, I will just use it to note a basic distinction between some types of reasons for following norms:

(1) where a norm is also a convention, it also fits the Lewisian analysis above: once it is noted as salient, agents may follow it because it achieves the "right result" given their existing preferences.

(2) if sanctions are put in place to uphold the norm, agents may follow it because they prefer to avoid those sanctions. Again, here the introduction of a norm need not involve changes to agents' preferences (e.g., suppose agents start out with purely economic preferences, and monetary sanctions are introduced).

(3) on the other hand, following the rule may become a good in itself: agents acquire a preference for following the rule. For example, they come to see it as "right" or "virtuous" to do so; or maybe they simply desire to follow it, without this preference being articulated in the language of morals. Unlike the other types, here the "emergence" of the norm is accompanied by a change in preferences.

I am not going to say any more in this essay about the analysis of norms in terms of collective action problems; or about the actual processes in which norms, and reasons for norm-following, develop. Here I just want to note one more formal point: all of the above types concern reasons for following a rule, rather than just reasons which independently lead agents to act in line with an observable regularity. In the first two cases, following the rule achieves a "right result" which can be defined without reference to the rule: but this does not make rule-following irrelevant. In the first case, I follow the rule in order to co-ordinate my behaviour with others; in the second, in order to avoid sanctions defined in reference to the rule. In both cases the regularity of my behaviour is not coincidental: I know that the rule exists, and choose to follow it.

The third type is different. Here the "right result" cannot be defined without reference to the rule: the result is right, at least in part, just because it results from the rule. Here we have indeed broken with what McClennen characterises as "a theory of rational deliberation in which personal, moral, social or legal rules are regarded as having an instrumental value"; we are saying that sometimes there can be a "special value" attached "to rule-following as such" (or rather, to the following of certain rules). We might want to say that it is in this case that a norm is truly normative.

substance and process

Herbert Simon (1986: 369) distinguishes two kinds of rational choice theories. On the one hand, he characterises the orthodox theory we have been looking at up until now as a theory of "substantive rationality": the idea is that an agent's choice is rational if she chooses the right result given her preferences; how she goes about making that decision is irrelevant, with decision-making procedures kept within a "black box". Simon himself proposes an alternative "procedural rationality" approach in which a rational agent "goes about making his or her decisions in a way that is procedurally reasonable in the light of the available knowledge and means of computation". What counts here for attributing rational is not the "substance" of decisions but the procedures used to arrive at them.

Specifically, the procedural approach I will explore here follows that of Gigerenzer, Todd et al. (1999), whose suggest that human individuals use an assortment of heuristic principles to choose actions. As with other forms of "bounded rationality", this approach incorporates the idea that human decision-making always faces constraints on time and other resources. Gigerenzer and Todd take on Simon's idea that decision-making is bounded in two ways: "the limitations of the human mind, and the structure of the environment in which the mind operates." The mind's limitation means that "optimal strategies are unknown or unknowable" -- there is no approaching, or recognising, a "right answer" -- and thus decision makers must always use "approximate methods". Secondly, Gigerenzer and Todd introduce a notion of "ecological rationality" to explore the interaction of mind with environment.

On the first point, Gigerenzer and Todd model heuristic principles in three stages: principles for searching for information to make a decision; principles for when to stop the search (given that searching is a costly activity); and principles for using the search results as input into a decision. Through the lens of a procedural rationality approach, orthodox RCT can be viewed as a model in which there are no constraints on search: an agent has omniscient power to identify the choice that maximises her utility function. (More exactly, if we accept the "black box" principle, orthodox RCT is a model in which agents can be understood as acting as if they had unlimited decision-making powers).

Taking bounded rationality to its fullest extent, a heuristics approach drops any idea of optimisation: there is no way of assessing a "best" solution to the decision problem faced at any of these stages. Instead, the idea of ecological rationality is meant to provide the criteria for "reasonableness" of a decision procedure. The "measure of success" of a heuristic is how well it serves the agent in a particular environment: "A heuristic is ecologically rational to the degree that it is adapted to the structure of an environment." (13).

Although this is perhaps a weak point for the model as it stands: if we are to have a standard of rationality, we still need some success criteria which cannot be read off environmental conditions -- what does it mean for an agent to succeed in an environment? Though I will leave this point alone for now: my interest is not so much in characterising the rationality (or otherwise) of decision-making than in pursuing the idea that people act by following procedures which they learn, pick up, adapt and develop in the course of repeated interactions.

Cristina Bicchieri applies such a heuristics approach to the analysis of social norms. Individuals use contextual stimuli to categorise a new situation, drawing on an existing "memory store" of past encounters. Categorisation activates a cognitive schema of "beliefs, expectations, and behavioural rules" associated with the context. Bicchieri proposes that these "schemata" often take the form of scripts in which we cast ourselves and others in set roles. The roles in which we cast others come with associated behavioural and normative expectations.^⁶ The roles in which we cast ourselves come also with context-dependent preferences: including preferences to follow particular norms or other behavioural rule in certain contexts.

However, Bicchieri dilutes the procedural rationality approach in a dual theory of "deliberational" and "heuristic" decision-making. She identifies norms as "default rules" within heuristic decision-making processes; but she maintains that there is also a non-heuristic way in which people make decisions through a conscious "process of rational deliberation". Bicchieri thus maintains ties with standard RCT, arguing that expected utility maximisation approximates, albeit "somewhat ideally" (p4), this deliberational form of decision-making which we apply in certain types of decision situations.

A more fully "procedural" approach would make no such clear cut distinction between deliberational and heuristic decision "modes". Rather, we could think of a spectrum of more or less simple or intricate, quick or lengthy, rough or "careful" decision procedures. (Nor, I think, is conscious awareness a key distinguishing feature.) On this view, deliberational reasoning processes could be seen as schedules or programmes of linked or nested heuristics. For example, "take time to consider a range of options, and weigh up the pros and cons" is a heuristic decision principle.

Below I will explore such a "context/heuristic approach", and its differences from orthodox RCT, in more depth. First, though, we can get a better feel for this approach by applying it to the puzzle we started with.

the ultimatum game revisited

The ultimatum game becomes puzzling because there is a confusion between two different "scripts" -- though we may want to ask just who is getting confused. We can see narrow (economic) rational choice theory as a theory that explains, successfully or not, the decision-making of human beings when they are conforming to a particular script which mandates decision procedures aiming to maximise personal economic gain. We could call this a "market script". But in reality most people (even, it seems, economics students) do not categorise the ultimatum game situation as a market interaction. Many people seem to class it as the type of context that requires them to follow what we might call a "fair division" script; though the scripts people play also show some interesting cultural differences. For example, according to Joseph Henrich (2000), some indigenous Mapuche Proposers make big (more than 50%) offers, which are rejected by Mapuche Responders: they seem to be playing a script familiar from the kind of gift exchanges famously studied by Marcel Mauss (2002).

Some theorists might want to claim that ultimatum game players are acting irrationally. This might be understood as a case of misreading an unfamiliar situation: fair division scripts and Maussian gift exchange scripts are appropriate for situations where players can expect recurring, so potentially reciprocal, interactions; the ultimatum game presents some of the same cues as these familiar situations, and therefore players categorise it wrongly. Is it possible to frame such a claim in a contextualised approach? To do so, we would need a standard for assessing the correct categorisation of contexts. For example, the irrationality claim might come down to the view that players have a "real" basic preference for economic gain which underlies their behaviour in non-market situations.

I think this kind of reductionism is grounded more in ideology than evidence; but even supposing it were right, it does not sustain the idea of irrationality. If the ultimatum game results are systematic human error, that means that actual decision-making procedures are second-bests which people fall back on because, as cognitively limited creatures, we are unable to directly optimise our "basic" preferences. But then rationality becomes an impossible, and so unexplanatory, standard: or else we should move to an idea of bounded rationality. We might still want to pursue the interesting question: how far have some deep "self-aggrandizing" instincts shaped the way in which human decision-making scripts have developed, in different cultures? But this is a question of (evolutionary) history not rationality.

a context/heuristic approach

We looked above at two puzzles faced by rational choice theory when it engages with norms; and began to develop an alternative context/heuristic approach. However neither puzzle necessitates moving away from a broad enough version of orthodox RCT. There are two specific areas where the theory needs to become broad. First, it needs to allow contextualised preferences (or, alternatively, find a "richer" reductionism of basic preferences -- though I am not investigating that route here). Second, it needs to allow preferences for following rules. Neither of these seems, in principle, closed to orthodox RCT; and I am not here attempting a conclusive argument that a context/heuristic approach does better, only a suggestive outline of an alternative. Ultimately the question is likely to be: by accommodating these changes, so diluting the simplicity of standard RCT, does the theory lose much of its explanatory power and become just a (perhaps trivial) way of reading human behaviour as purposive?

A key feature of orthodox RCT here is that the fundamental level of explanations -- of giving reasons -- is always in terms of agents' preferences (and beliefs). We may explain regularities by pointing to rules, but we then have to show the reasons why agents follow those rules. The context/heuristic approach moves away from this. An explanation involves identifying and characterising the decision-making script or schema which operates in a given situation; decision rules, beliefs and desires can all be seem as component parts of the script, on the same level.

Suppose, for example, that an agent makes a decision following a normative decision rule. We might say that she believed or felt it to be right to follow the rule. These locutions point to the normative character of the rule she is following, but they do not uncover some more "fundamental" reason for following the norm in terms of preferences. We can say: she followed the rule because she had a preference for following this rule in that context; but this does not add to the explanation.

We can put a bit more shading on our sketch of the decision-making process. We can say that any script involves both beliefs (including expectations about others' -- and one's own -- behaviour) and desires; and decision rules. We might say: beliefs and desires give the background or depth of character to a role, and can be called on in the decision-making process; heuristic decision rules are the immediate prompts which steer the process.

We can start by thinking about an initial heuristic that kicks off the decision process; as the process continues, and further informational cues are received, new rules are triggered. For example, a heuristic may mandate a certain search procedure. This may involve searching information coming from the external environment; but it could also involve searching the "internal background" of the agent's own beliefs and desires: for example, weighing up one's preferences, comparing environmental information with expectations, etc. That is: a search can also involve "deliberational" procedures. On the other hand, we might come to what Bicchieri calls a "default rule". This is a rule which stops the search and commands an immediate action. A default rule can be triggered by a cue (from external or internal information) at the very beginning of the process, or at any later stage.

In fact there is no particular reason to associate norms particularly strongly with default rules. Normativity is by no means confined to more hasty less "deliberational" decision-making: we often reason, reflect, weigh up, ponder and anguish at length upon normative demands. And of course there are plenty of default rules that are not norms: e.g., urgent fight or flight responses; or, say, mechanical "buy/sell"calls of an experienced market trader. A norm might be a default rule or a factor in deliberation.

It could be interesting to look more at how (narrow) RCT developed as a theory in which normative behaviour is considered abnormal; but in fact is self-interested behaviour any less normative than fairness? We can find plenty of "oughtness" claims and sanctioning behaviour in market interactions: sharp dealers get approval and status rewards; the gullible get laughed at; risk-lovers are alternately admired and shunned, etc. Market scripts, like other scripts, mix deliberation, default rules, and rules with greater or lesser normative force.

Of course we may well want to explain how the actor came to operate with the norms, rules, schemas that she does. Just as in a preference-based account we may want to know how she came to have the preferences she does. These are the really interesting questions: but the answers go beyond what rational choice theory, orthodox or otherwise, can offer.

Bicchieri, Cristina. 2006. The Grammar of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Brennan, Geoffrey. 2007. "The Grammar of Rationality", in Rationality and Commitment, ed. by Fabienne Peter and Hans Bernhard Schmidt (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Gigerenzer, Gerd, Peter M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group. 1999. Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (Oxford, Oxford University Press)

Harsanyi, John. 1969. "Rational Choice Models of Behaviour versus Functionalist and Conformist Theories", World Politics, 22: 513-38

Hausman, David. 2007. "Sympathy, Commitment and Preference", in Rationality and Commitment, ed. by Fabienne Peter and Hans Bernhard Schmidt (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Henrich, Joseph. 2000. “Does culture matter in economic behaviour? Ultimatum game bargaining amongst the Machiguenga”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 37: 316-324.

Hume, David. 2000. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Clarendon Press)

Lewis, David. 1969. Convention. A Philosophical Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)

Laing, Ronald David. 1972. "Rules and Metarules", in The Politics of the Family and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books)

Mauss, Marcel. 2002 (1950). The Gift, trans. by W.D. Halls (London: Routledge Classics).

McClennen, Edward F. 2004. “The Rationality of Being Guided by Rules”, in The Oxford Handbook of Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul)

Pettit, Philip. 2002. "Virtus Normativa: Rational Choice Perspectives", in Rules, Reasons, and Norms (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Simon, Herbert A. 1986. "Rationality in Psychology and Economics", in Models of Bounded Rationality, volume 3 (Boston, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press)

Skyrms, Brian. 1996. The Evolution of the Social Contract (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Weber, Max. 2002. Basic Concepts in Sociology, trans. by H.P. Secher (New York: Citadel Press)

Ullmann-Margalit, Edna. 1977. The Emergence of Norms (Oxford: Clarendon Press)

1Here I will follow the majority practice now and distinguish conventions (in Lewis' sense -- not Weber's) from social norms. Both are sub-classes of what in general (for both Weber and Lewis) are called "social regularities" -- or "social rules".

2I am reading Lewis' account here as an explanation of how actual conventions are generated. However this is not the way Lewis (mostly) presents his work. In the introduction he explains that his task, motivated originally by issues in the philosophy of language, is one of conceptual analysis rather than causal explanation of "convention". This approach leads to him actually defining -- rather than explaining -- conventions in terms of coordination problems. It may at least in part be Lewis' influence that leads to a tendency for subsequent game theorists working in this area to stipulatively define the regularities they are looking at (norms, conventions, etc.) in terms of game models.

3A rule in this basic sense doesn't carry the weight of some rules under some classifications: for example Rawls (1955) "rules of practices", Searle's (1995) "constitutive rules", or indeed Hart's "rules of obligation".

4It is usual in the game theory literature to define norms in terms of particular game structures: e.g., for Lewis, Ullman-Margalit, and many others, the prisoners' dilemma; for Bicchieri the broader class of "mixed motive games". I am trying here to avoid begging questions that might be raised by bringing game theory representations into definitions.

5I leave open how to define "collectively beneficial": one interpretation might be "Pareto optimal", but we don't need to commit to that.

6Here Bicchieri's rational choice theory comes close to Talcott Parsons' doctrine of "role-expectations" and values (1951) in the sociological tradition.

saudosa maloca

2010-06-18T06:23:00.000-07:00

Saudosa Maloca -- samba -- by Adoniran Barbosa

Se o senhor num tá lembrado
Dá licença de contá
Ali onde agora está esse adifício arto
Era uma casa véia, um palacete assobradado
Foi ali, seu moço
Que eu, mato Grosso e o Joca
Construímo nossa maloca
Mas um dia, nós nem pode se alembrá
Veio os home c'as ferramenta, o dono mandô derrubá
Peguemo todas nossas coisa
E fumo pro meio da rua
Apreciá a demolição
Que tristeza que nóis sentia
Cada táuba que caía, doía no coração
Matogrosso quis gritá, mas em cima eu falei
"Os home tá com a razão, nóis arranja outro lugá"
Só se conformemo quando o Joca falô
"Deus dá o frio conforme o cobertô"
E hoje nóis pega as paia
Nas grama dos jardim
E pra esquecê nóis cantemo assim:
Saudosa maloca, maloca querida
Qui dim donde nóis passemo
Os dias feliz da nossa vida

very rough translation:

Mister, if you don't remember
let me tell you about it
there where now you see that tall building
there used to be an old house, a ruined mansion
and that's where, mister,
me, Matogrosso and Joca
made our home
but then one day, which isn't easy to recall
came the men with tools, sent by the landlord
to knock it down
we got all our things
and stood in the middle of the road watching the demolition
such a sadness we felt
every tile that fell was a pain in the heart
Matogrosso wanted to shout, but i stopped him and said
"they're right, we'll find another place"
but we only calmed down when Joca said
"God makes the cold, then he gives you a blanket"
and now we sit here
on the grass in the park
and to forget it we sing:
we miss you old squat, dear home,
where we spent
happy days in our lives

goodbye africa house

2010-06-18T04:04:00.000-07:00

Mesdames,
Messieurs,

Vous
avez été nombreux à m’écrire
pour vous élever contre l’expulsion par les forces de l’ordre de
migrants soudanais et de SDF qui ont pris possession de la friche
industrielle
située rue des quatre coins à Calais, dont l’EPF s’est rendu
propriétaire, à la demande de la ville de Calais.

En tant
qu’opérateur foncier
public, l’Etablissement est au service des collectivités publiques pour
les aider à maîtriser le foncier de leurs projets. Dans cette optique,
l’EPF a été sollicité par la commune de Calais afin d’acquérir
l’ancienne usine Pagniez et, du fait de la dangerosité et de la vétusté
de cette friche industrielle, de procéder à sa démolition dans les
meilleurs
délais.

Des
hommes, migrants soudanais et
des SDF ont occupé les lieux dans des conditions de salubrité et de
sécurité
particulièrement risquées : dangerosité du bâtiment liée à son ancien
usage industriel (amiante, fosse de deux mètres de profondeur, forage
d’eau de 180
mètres ), insalubrité du fait de l’occupation sans
titre (ni eau, ni sanitaires, ni électricité, rats en grand nombre).
L’EPF n’ayant ni la compétence ni les moyens de procéder à leur
réinstallation, il a agi en exerçant ses responsabilités de propriétaire
dans
le souci d’éviter tout accident, fréquent sur ce type de site. Il a
travaillé de concert avec les services de l’Etat, la mairie de Calais,
et
les associations de défense des droits de l’Homme présentes sur le site.

Les
lieux ont été évacués lundi 15
juin 2010 afin de permettre la démolition des bâtiments, seul moyen dans
le
court terme pour en assurer la sécurité.

Cette
mesure ne permet pas de régler
sur le fond la question posée par la présence sur le territoire national
de
personnes étrangères par ailleurs titrées et dont les pouvoirs publics
ont à prendre
en charge le devenir.

Sachez
que c’est en pleine
conscience du fait que l’ancienne usine Pagniez ne peut constituer en la
circonstance un lieu décent d’hébergement, que j’ai été amené à
prendre cette décision.

Le
Directeur Général

Marc KASZYNSKI

Marc KASZYNSKI

Directeur Général

m.kaszynski@epf-npdc.fr

Tél : 03.28.36.15.53

translation:

Dear Sirs/Madams,

Many of you have written to me to protest at the security forces' expulsion
of Sudanese migrants and homeless people who had taken possession of the
derelict industrial unit situated on rue des quatre coins in Calais, which
the EPF (public land organisation) had taken charge of on the request of
Calais town council.

Speaking as a public land officer, my Organisation serves public bodies
by helping them to manage land and property in their projects. With this
aim, EPF was approached by Calais town council in order to take over the
former Pagniez factory and, owing to the dangerous and dilapidated state of
this industrial property, proceed to its demolition as soon as possible.

Sudanese migrants and homeless people occupied this building in unsanitary
and unsafe conditions: the building posed particular dangers due to its
former industrial use (asbestos, a two-metre deep pit, 180 metre deep bore
hole), lack of hygiene due to adverse possession (no water, toilets,
electricity, large numbers of rats). As EPF did not have the capacity nor
the funds to proceed to the reinstallation of these services, it acted in
line with its responsibilities as owner in order to prevent accidents, which
are frequent on this type of site. EPF worked together with the State
services, Calais town hall and the human rights organisations present at the
site.

The property was evacuated on Monday 15th June 2010 in order to allow for
the demolition of the buildings, which is the only short-term measure which
can ensure safety.

This measure does not allow us to resolve the deeper question posed by the
presence of foreign people on national soil, whose future must be decided by
the authorities

Please know that I arrived at this decision as a result of the knowledge
that the former Pagniez factory cannot provide decent accomodation in these
circumstances.

Le Directeur Général

Marc KASZYNSKI

Marc KASZYNSKI

Directeur Général

m.kaszynski@epf-npdc.fr

Tél : 03.28.36.15.53

notes on liberalism 1

2010-05-21T04:41:00.000-07:00

my academic project this term -- try and get a quick historical grasp of the development of liberal political theory starting from the english civil war
and when i read liberal theory that picture above is always in my mind

some general themes:
1) the idea of equality (de jure): a state based on equality, commonality, identity -- of interests, of reason
2) the idea of peace: all citizens share a common interest in peace, prosperity, stability
3) this idea of equality hides the reality of inequality (de facto) and difference
4) this idea of peace hides the reality of conflict

in Calais recently the celebration of VE day as a historical victory over fascism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YQXEZ9Fhjg
nearby, the CRS after yet another violent raid on Africa House scrawl swastikas on the wall: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2010/04/449134.html

notes 1 -- english origins -- hobbes & hume vs. the diggers

1. In his Evolution of the Social Contract, Brian Skyrms identifies two "traditions" of thought running through social contract theory from Hobbes until today. The first is "the tradition of Hobbes and -- in our own times -- of John Harsanyi and John Rawls" which "approaches the social contract in terms of rational decision". The second tradition "of Hume", with which Skyrms himself identifies (as does that other leading game theory moralist Ken Binmore), asks not about reason but about "how can the existing implicit social contract have evolved? How may it continue to evolve?"

2. Of course Hume himself vociferously rejected the idea of an "original contract". In re-situating a Humean account of moral and political institutions in terms of convention within the social contract tradition, Skyrms and Binmore perhaps put themselves at odds with a more traditional interpretation in which Hume set himself in opposition to that line. However we draw up our categories, here I will agree that they are right to emphasise the commonality between Hume and social contract theorists. In both Hobbes and Hume, political society can reach an implicit accord, truce or compromise -- in game theory terms, an equilibrium state -- which rests in some way on the commonality of interests of its members. There are two key traits here: 1) all members of a political society share interests in common; 2) this commonality of interests both (a) is causally involved in processes by which we arrived at the status quo -- a more or less stable political or social settlement; and (b) provides the ground for its legitimacy.

We may or may not want to call this status quo settlement a social contract. But that's not the main issue I'm concerned with: with Skyrms, the main difference between "Hobbesian" and "Humean" "traditions" that becomes relevant here is rather about how such a state is achieved: that is, the role of "reason" or "evolution" in the process by which the statis quo is reached and maintained.

3. Whilst we're naming political philosophy "traditions", the third one I'm going to invoke is what Michel Foucault, in the lecture course Society Must Be Defended, calls "the tradition of Nietzsche". This differs quite radically from both Hobbesian and Humean thinking. Without wanting to get stuck into a discussion of the meaning of liberalism, it is perhaps roughly accurate to say that these Hobbesian and Humean traditions are both strands within liberal political thought -- whereas the "Nietzschean" line comes from somewhere well outside of liberalism, whether to left or right.

While Foucault calls this "Nietzsche's tradition", it certainly does not begin with Nietzsche -- just as social contract theory doesn't begin with Hobbes. Foucault himself traces such ideas back through representative voices in Hobbes' own time: the radicals of the English Civil War, levellers and diggers (and ranters), John Lilburne and Gerrard Winstanley, as well as many less well known and anonymous thinkers, writers, pamphleteers. For these radicals, the political order is not seen as an accord made by or for all people (whether issuing from a divine plan or from human agreement) but as an imposition by some people, a dominating group. In mid-17th century discourse this is the "Norman Yoke" or rule of "Anti-Christ" which has emerged victorious in a history of struggle, expropriation, oppression, "theft and murther". Foucault goes so far as to see in Digger texts: "the first formulation of the idea that any law, whatever it may be, every form of sovereignty, whatever it may be, and any type of power, whatever it may be, has to be analysed not in terms of natural right and the establishment of sovereignty, but in terms of the unending movement -- which has no historical end -- of the shifting relations that make some dominant over others." (109)

4. I will characterise this other position in terms of its differences from the two traits identified above. Noting that this is not necessarily the same as Foucault's characterisation -- I think there is a lot more in what he is saying than the limited characterisation I will try to give here. In any case, for the tradition of Winstanley and Nietzsche: 1) members of a political society, rather than sharing common interests, have interests which are radically opposed; 2) the status quo is not then an outcome of a process (evolutionary or rational) grounded in common interests -- but of a process of conflict and struggle between opposed interests.

A few questions to flag up here. Even with this radical move away from common interest, can we maybe still think of a political settlement or outcome in terms of an agreement, accord, compromise (or equilibrium)? That is, not so much a mutually beneficial agreement but a treaty imposed by the victors and accepted grudgingly by the losers -- possibly even a treaty with which no party is truly satisfied? And what implications does this have for the notion of legitimacy of an accord? And what implications do these different ways of thinking have for how we conceive of the dynamics of social change -- for the stability of any political settlement?

5. In the fifth lecture of Society Must Be Defended, Foucault reads Hobbes, against the usual grain, not as a theorist of war but as an anti-conflict theorist who "wants so much to eliminate war". This doesn't just mean that Hobbes' system is based fundamentally on the desire for peace, and particularly to avoid the great catastrophe of civil war; but that his work is all about disappearing the "secret" history of conquest and domination in a theory of contract and consent.

In fact Hobbes, unlike some other social contract theorists, is quite open about the fact that states originate and change hands not with voluntary agreements but in acts of violence -- conquest and usurpartion. His move is not, then, the brazen historical denial which Hume witheringly exposes. Rather the key step (Leviathan chapter XX) is to identify "commonwealth by acquisition" -- i.e., institution or takeover of a state by force -- as simply another form of "sovereignty by institution". In both cases subjects enter a contractual relationship in which they consent to the sovereign becoming their representative, and are motivated to do so by fear for their lives. The two cases "differeth ... onely in this, that men who choose their sovereign, do it for fear of one another, and not of him whom they are afraid of." The moment where sovereignty appears is not in battle itself but in the aftermath where the loser surrenders to the victor in return for her life. This interaction is simply a particular case of contract; and the particular circumstances that led up to this interaction -- war and violence -- are irrelevant for questions of right and duty, which are fully addressed in the theory of contract.

To put it another way, Hobbes' theory is indeed one which, in Hume's terms, seeks to establish the "tacit consent" of subjects for their subjection. Hobbes and Hume are then at odds in terms of theories of consent: what Hobbes sees as a valid contract is for Hume a case of coercion or involuntary submission "from necessity". (Treatise 3.2.xxx, Essays 2:.12.22).

This difference, in so far it goes beyond terminology, is of course about the origin of a legitimate political obligation. Hobbes agrees that conquest in itself cannot source legitimate sovereignty. His stated alternative is a theory of contractual obligation which sites the transfer of sovereignty in a moment of consensual agreement. On one level at least this is a position which puts him close to positions common in parliamentarian theory of his day -- for example, John Cook's view that until "the people consent and voluntarily submit to a Government, they are but Slaves, and in reason they may free themselves if they can" (Sommerville p65) -- the difference, again, lying in how voluntary a submission this is taken to be.

Without delving too deep into theories of consent and coercion, 17th century or 20th, one point we can make is that Hobbes does not believe that consent to a sovereign is just a certain speech act -- merely "saying yes" at a given moment (or written act such as a signature). On the one hand, no formal act of promising is in fact necessary for obligation to arise: the subject can covenant "either in expresse words, or by other sufficient signes of the Will." On the other, only covenants on certain terms are sufficient to create the obligation: specifically, terms that guarantee the subject's life and "corporal liberty". So for example, the asking of "Quarter", which only defers deliberation on the granting of life, cannot create sovereignty; and we can imagine other forms of agreements between masters and slaves which do not go far enough to grant "corporal liberty", and so stop short of turning the slave into a "free" servant.

The corollary, which Hobbes acknowledges (at least in Leviathan), is that the obligation disappears once a sovereign ceases to guarantee the subject's life and corporal liberty, either because she herself threatens the subject's life or because she fails to protect her subjects against other aggressors. "The Obligation of Subjects to the Sovaraign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them." The subject can never relinquish the natural right to self-protection, and "the end of Obedience is Protection" (Leviathan 21).

Once this point is made, in fact little of the force of Hobbes' theory of obligation rests in the idea of of a covenant or promise. As Johann Somerville elucidates, Hobbes' discussion of obligation and protection in chapter 21 of Leviathan can in part be read as a contribution to the debate on the legitimacy of the Engagement of 1650, in which all Englishmen over eighteen were required to "declare and promise ... to be true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England, as it is now established, without a king or House of Lords." Hobbes made the promise, but many of his former partisans on the Royalist side refused. On his theory, however, an Englishman living in England would still be bound by an obligation to the new state even if he refused the Engagement; because the Parliamentary government had become the effective protector of his life and corporal liberty. The source of this obligation is not then any promise, but rather the true nature of the subject's interests, of her need or "natural right" to self-protection, whether or not she is aware of, or acknowledges, how this right is in fact guaranteed.

In this sense it is right for Skyrms to identify Hobbes with a tradition "which approaches the social contract in terms of rational decision". The Englishman who refuses the Engagement fails to make a promise that he should, rationally, make. He is all the same subject to political obligation -- on grounds of reason rather than of commitment.

6. In On The Original Contract, Hume demolishes pretences that any government (or its legitimacy) has ever been established through an act of voluntary covenant by its subjects -- rather than in histories of violence and conquest. But, on the reading above, this does not address the core of Hobbes' version of the social contract. Where Hume more clearly differs from Hobbes is, as Skyrms identifies, in his understanding of the processes by which political legitimacy arises or "evolves".

But before the differences, we can start with how much both theories share. First, Hobbes and Hume are both theorists of peace, in the basic sense that both desire above all a political society to guarantee "peace and public order" (Essays 2.12.35). Hobbes is characteristically, notoriously, more bare in his decomposition of the underlying interests or fundamental goods that motivate adherence to political society, which he reduces to individual self-preservation. Hume can talk less individualistically about "the interest and necessities of society" (2.12.45). But, despite different psychological underpinnings, Hobbesian and Humean political theories converge on a shared vision of a stable, well-ordered, prosperous, property-owning society.

Of course there is no reason why a convergence of individual and "social" interests shouldn't take place -- if we take it that society is made up of individuals who all share the same fundamental interests and necessities. The common or social interest in peace and public order is shared by all individual members of society.

(At least on these terms, the possibility of a conflict between individual and general "wills" does not arise for either Hobbes nor Hume. It's worth noting here that, while Hume is claimed as a founding father by contemporary game theorists, his accounts of the origin of conventions -- of justice and property, or of political allegiance -- do not grapple with freerider problems.)

Second, for Hume as much as for Hobbes, it is this underlying interest that grounds the obligation. "The general obligation, which binds us to government, is the interest and necessities of society; and this obligation is very strong." The differences with Hobbes are rather about how this grounding reason -- or interest -- creates political obligation.

For Hume the naturalist, moral virtues and vices are no more than sentiments or impressions of approval and disapproval (Treatise 3.1.2). To say that human beings have a moral obligation to the state is indeed to say that human beings feel such an obligation. (??) In The Treatise, political obligation, or the virtue of "allegiance", is presented as an "artificial" virtue (though he drops this terminology in later texts). An artificial virtue is one that will "produce pleasure and approbation by means of an artifice or contrivance, which arises from the circumstances and necessity of mankind." (Treatise 3.2.1) In one contemporary jargon, we might say that it is "socially constructed"; in another, perhaps, that it is a product of human cultural -- not biological -- evolution.

One possible consequence of this view (at least on some readings) is that political allegiance is not universal to all human beings and communities across space and time: at least in the past there were human communities which had not yet developed conventions of government (and property, and promising) as we know them; such "virtues" or obligations did not then exist for these people; and there are histories to be told about how they first "arose".

And yet, says Hume, at least the rules of justice (i.e., private property conventions), though artificial, are "not arbitrary ... nor is the expression improper to call them Laws of Nature; if by natural we understand what is common to any species, or even if we confine it to mean what is inseparable from the species." Here Hume does assert that, at least in the stage of (cultural) evolution we have reached as modern humans, artificial virtues are universal -- they have been evolved, constructed, and internalised by all humans, and become "inseparable" from human being.
This universalisation is such that the ground of allegiance is available to the reasoning of any rational human being.

However, this inseparably human reasoning needs to be actualised, as it were, in any individual human through a process of experience or learning. We need exercises of "reflection and experience" to learn the "pernicious effects" of disrespect for property; similarly "a small degree of experience and observation suffices to teach us, that society cannot possibly be maintained without the authority of magistrates, and that this authority must soon fall into contempt, where exact obedience is not payed to it."

Hume continues: "the observation of these general and obvious interests is the source of alll allegiance, and of that moral obligation, which we attribute to it." For Hume, as for Hobbes, the existence of a (common) rational interest in social order is what underlies allegiance: but for Hume, the mere existence of this interest is not sufficient, it needs to be actualised in an experiential process.

Hume offers an evolutionary story about the origins of the virtue -- or sentiment -- of political allegiance; and an accompanying story about what happens to obligation in transitions between sovereigns. Of The Origin Of Government gives a complex account of the gradual development of conventional subjection through a combination of force, consent, and habituation. The account of regime changes in On The Original Contract shows how these processes are re-worked each time that a "people" has to reaffirm the bonds of allegiance to a new ruler. Subjects are "commonly dissatisfied" with a new government and "pay obedience more from fear and necessity"; but "time, by degrees, removes all these difficulties" as the people come to cast the new sovereign in the role of legitimate ruler and so re-establish the relation of subjection to which we are already well habituated.

Thus Hume does set out to answer Skyrm's second question -- "how can the existing implicit social contract have evolved? How may it continue to evolve?" But this question, for Hume, is not in opposition to the other "Hobbesian" question of reason: in fact the two questions are complementary.

This complementarity, however, rests on the claim that the evolution of political allegiance is non-arbitrary and "inseparable from" the rational interest of the species. After Darwin -- and after Nietzsche -- Hume's identity of universality, reason, and non-arbitrariness of conventions and moral norms appears less straightforward. Now we're accustomed to the idea of evolutionary contingency we might ask: could it not have been the case that some, or all, human cultures developed their artificial virtues very differently?

7. Now to move away from Hobbes and Hume to the alternative "Nietzschean tradition". Though there might be a number of ways to conceptualise this alternative as an attack on the position outlined above, here I will focus on the first step: the idea of shared fundamental interests. In particular, we can see at least two ways in which an alternative line might attack that position: 1) it can say that members of society have interests which are so opposed that they lead to radically different and conflicting desires for a social settlement; 2) it might question altogether the notion of "interests" at work here.

Here I'm just going to note the possibility of the second, more radical, attack. It could be found in Nietzche and in Foucault. In The Birth of Biopolitics Foucault discusses the origins of "the subject of interest" in early modern theory -- and its later development as "homo economicus" accompanying the growth of economic thought from Adam Smith to 20th century neoliberalism (see lecture 11). At the core of this conception of the human individual, for Foucault, is the principle of "an irreducible, non-transferable, atomistic individual choice". Irreducibility means: there is a bottom line in any explanation of human behaviour in terms of a basic disposition which itself "does not refer to any judgement, reasoning or calculation" -- for example, self-preservation in Hobbes, or the avoidance of pain in Hume (Enquiry CPM appendix 1) and later writers. This irreducible stratum of individual subjects' interests forms the fixed foundation of "liberal" political conceptions. A challenge to such theory is the idea that individuals' interests are not fixed but must be understood as constructed within the social world; and the more we have a conception of this social world as unstable and tumultuous, the less firm such foundations will be.

8. But even if we leave aside such questions about the very idea of a political theory founded on individual interests, a "Nietzschean" position attacks Hobbesian and Humean liberal theories on their understanding of what these interests amount to. Nietzsche himself rejects outright the idea that human beings are interested in peaceful coexistence: contra Hobbes (and Spinoza), he believes that humans (and other organisms) seek not preservation but growth and "self-overcoming". As growth, for Nietzsche, means growth in power at the expense of others -- power is always domination -- individuals' interests are irredeemably irreconcilable. However, we do not need to share Nietzsche's "tragic pessimism" to reject the idea that a state of peace -- a stable social order -- is always a good for all humans.

Hobbes admits (xxx) that there are some people who love strife, risk, and disorder. But even if these are meant to be rare cases, the main point is that an individual's interest in peace or strife does not stand on its own, but is related closely to how their other interests are realised in a social settlement. Put simply, those who do well from the status quo are more likely to desire its persistence. Those who are dispossessed may pursue their claims for a just re-settlement even at the cost of war. The idea that all members have a common interest in maintaining social peace, for both Hobbes and Hume, is thus tied to the idea that the status quo is a victory for all, rather than a victory of some over others. The idea is that all members of society gain in terms of realisation of their other basic interests -- whether these basic interests are understood on a bare Hobbesian model or a richer Humean one.

In fact there we might identify two propositons. (1) That all members gain in the status quo. This gain can be seen as relative to some other available outcome: e.g., a "state of nature", or a state of strife or civil war that will result if the status quo is effectively challenged. (2) That all members gain more or less equally.

I think one interesting question is why, in fact, (early) liberal theorists often advance not just the first but also the second, stronger, proposition. Why is it that equality of gain from political society is emphasised, and inequalities downplayed -- or ignored altogether?

9. For example, there is an elephant in the room in Hume's account of justice. For Hume, as for Locke, the original need for the state is to act as an administrator and guarantor of property rights. The state arises because the artificial virtue of justice -- adherence to property conventions -- is not strong enough alone to protect us from the strife that arises once humans become able to produce, and lust after, large amounts of transferable goods. Political allegiance bolsters justice in serving the same interests of prosperity (associated with a regime of private property) and peace.

The process begins with the observation of common interest: "I observe, that it will be for my interest to leave another in the possession of his goods, provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me. He is sensible of a like interest in the regulation of his conduct. When this common sense of interest is mutually express'd, and is known to both, it produces a suitable resolution and behaviour. And this may properly enough be call'd a convention or agreement betwixt us ..." (Treatise 3.2.2).

Hume's political theory thus begins with a fantasy picture of a world of possessors who all have "like interests" in maintaining their property holdings. Of course in reality Hume, like us, lived in a highly unequal world where the majority of people owned little or nothing, subsisting in near poverty. How can the idea of "like interests" survive once we introduce political theory to reality?

A more subtle pro-status quo position contents itself with the weaker proposition: even admitting that people have very different outcomes under the social settlement, all are meant to do better than under any available alternative. Discussion here is usually then about what range of alternative positions are available: whether the choice is only between the existing unequal social settlement and civil war (return to the state of nature); or what other possible social settlements are available.

We can find both these lines, coexisting, in liberal theory going back to the 17th century. On the one hand, emphasising commonality and downplaying -- or simply ignoring -- difference and inequality; on the other hand, admitting difference but re-asserting commonality with reference to a baseline of feasible alternatives.

In either case, we have theories that ground obligation and legitimacy in reasoning from common interest.

10. Now to the questions flagged up earlier. First, can we still think of a status quo as a social settlement of some kind even in the tradition of conflict? Yes -- where now the "social contract" may be seen as a peace treaty or ceasefire agreement which at least some parties may hope is only a temporary settlement until a time when the balance of forces has shifted.

What goes, though, is an idea of legitimation. On the accounts of Hobbes and Hume developed above, we de-stressed the notion that legitimacy -- moral obligation -- comes from an act of promising. (Hume, of course, sees covenant as at most a secondary source of legitimation for the state; and in Hobbes too, I argued, the real force lies elsewhere.) Similarly, the conflict theorist is unlikely to put much weight in the obligatory force of a covenant -- even if she believes that such a covenant ever took place.

Then if legitimacy derives from rational interest, the temporary peace treaty remains legitimate for a party only so long as it remains in the party's interest to observe it. If the underlying balance of forces does shift so that a party believes it has the power to demand a new treaty, won't such a demand become legitimate? (Or perhaps in a Humean version there will be a lag before the evolution of articificial moral sentiments catches up with a shift in underlying interests?)

In The Birth of Biopolitics Foucault gives another characterisation of liberalism as the doctrine that first creates the subject of interest -- and then collapses the distinction between the subject of interest, bound to follow her irreducible choices; and the subject of right, bound by juridical obligations, for example obligations to uphold covenants. Foucault sees Hume's move away from social contract theory as a key step in this shift: now it is only ongoing interest in the status quo that maintains allegiance, and legitimacy evaporates if this interest fails. Though I have been arguing that this turn begins even in Hobbes ...

(Note: the other characterisation involves how liberalism sets the boundaries of politics and civil society. If the distinction between right and interests collapses, then these realms have to be distinguished in terms of spheres of common vs. individual interests. Everything said here about the identity of common and individual interests applies only in political theory -- not in the market; and in fact this can be what distinguishes the political realm from private affairs.)

11. Liberal political theory is then about identifying true interests that underly legitimate obligations to the status quo. But then liberal theory is vulnerable, on its own terms, to assaults which contest its identification of common interests and instead point out the reality of unequal and different interests.

This is the field of conflict opened up for political theory in the 17th century. Liberal theorists make new legitimacy claims for the status quo by identifying commonality of interest: with two complementary strategies of, on the one hand, downplaying or ignoring (writing out) differences of interest; and where differences are identified, in relativising them by the limitation of feasibility. Against them, radical theorists contest the legitimacy of the status quo by showing that the existing settlement is not in the true interests of the people; that it is in fact an unjust and oppressive settlement imposed by enemies; and that in fact the balance of forces is now shifting, the time has come where a new settlement is possible.

nietzsche and anarchism

2010-05-02T15:53:00.000-07:00

Rebel Nietzscheanism

"Struggle! To struggle is to live, and the fiercer the struggle the more intense the life. Then you will have lived, and a few hours of such life are worth years spent vegetating. Struggle so that all may live this rich, overflowing life. And be sure that in this struggle you will find a joy greater than anything else can give!" Peter Kropotkin, "Anarchist Morality"¹

We love Nietzsche so much, we anarcho-Nietzscheans. Nietzsche helps us uncover the genealogies of power and domination behind the idols -- the state, religion, moralities, the norms and values dug deep into our bodies. He shows us the virtue of solitude, and how to live philosophy for real, dangerously, radically, everything at stake. He speaks to us of the possibilities, as well as the contingencies and the challenges, for self-transformation -- a life beyond the human. For over 100 years anarchists have loved Nietzsche, found so many tools and weapons in his writing, proving that it is certainly possible to put these ideas to work in ways which Nietzsche himself would never have expected, certainly never have approved.

But, we who love Nietzsche so much, what do we do with the man's own reactionary politics? Yirmiyahu Yovel (1994) praises Nietzsche's self-overcoming of one malaise of his place and time: despite, or perhaps thanks to the stimulation of living in highly "infected territory", Nietzsche eventually came to take a stand as an anti-anti-semite. It could be that Yovel reads him too favourably even on this score, but unfortunately there's just no such question when it comes to gender or class: here Nietzsche stays firmly stuck in the perspective of his origins.

Take the Genealogy of Morals, where Nietzsche celebrates a type of human spirits that are forceful, joyful, audacious, sometimes mad and absurd, uncontrollables who take on improbable challenges, go looking for trouble, strife and frenzy. To the timid world they are "not much better than beasts of prey turned loose", "joyful monsters", enjoying "freedom from all social constraints." But amongst themselves they live by a code of "resourceful consideration, self-control, refinement, loyalty, pride, and friendship". (GM 1:11) Where might you go looking in the late nineteenth century for bands of free spirits living short dangeous lives of joyful struggle, committed to overturning established values, to creating new selves and new worlds? While wary of ancestor worship, we will avow that you'd be more likely to find active examples of such "noble" values where anarchism and other revolutionary movements bubbled up amongst migrant workers, landless peasants, lumpen dispossessed, than amongst the gouty aristocracy.

The thing is that Nietzsche, amongst many other all too human things, was a terrible snob. This snob perspective placed very effective limits on his political vision -- for one thing, it left him constitutionally unable to recognise "heroic" acts amongst the lower orders. Nietzsche's political understanding was confined to a band of "high culture" running from a mythologised ancient world to the nihilism he identified amongst the elite of his own day; non-nihilistic forces outside of this stratum were just not visible from this perspective.

But as well as the sight impediment of snobbery, Nietzsche's politics also involves a substantial anti-egalitarian critique which flows from his overall view of the world as will to power. In this essay I'll work mainly on this second seam, though we will see how the two interweave: after all, Nietzsche is the philosopher who insists that all thinking (all "thinking, feeling, willing") comes from its limiting perspective. We will grapple with two specific thoughts which Nietzsche links to the conception of will to power: the idea that life flourishes only in hierarchical organisations; and that life is essentially a violent struggle for limited energetic resources.

These ideas are the substantive underpinnings of Nietzsche's elitism; but what role do they play in Nietzsche's psychological (and/or ontological) conception as a whole? Can we still take value from Nietzsche's thinking of power and life if we challenge them? I'll suggest that challenging these ideas, if that means deepening our understanding of the agonistic dynamics of will to power, will actually lead to a stronger anarcho-Nietzscheanism.

life, power and hierarchy

Nietzsche makes some of his clearest political statements in the last book of Beyond Good and Evil, which opens: "Every elevation of the type 'man' has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society -- and so it will always be: a society which believes in a long scale of orders of rank and difference between man and man and needs slavery in some sense or other." (BGE257).

Nietzsche is a philosopher of values and valuing, but just what is it that Nietzsche himself values? One positive theme throughout his writing is an affirmation of life, where life is usually associated with growth, strength, health, newness, creation, activity, ascending motion; and contrasted with weakness, decadence, exhaustion, submission, reaction, descending motion, etc. "Elevation of the type 'man'" is in this conceptual line, and in the above passage Nietzsche expands the phrase with: "the formation of ever higher, rarer, more remote, tenser, more comprehensive states ... the continual 'self-overcoming of man'".

Overcoming, and particularly self-overcoming, provide important keys here; but first we need to understand something of the basic structure of Nietzsche's thinking of the will to power. In this "power ontology", we can see the world as made up of forces (drives, wills, quanta of force) constantly striving for power. Perhaps the first and easiest place to understand the will to power at work is on the level of psychology, where the forces are largely unconscious drives, desiring energies, struggling to direct the activity of our bodies: it is this picture that became so influential on Freud.

Nietzsche sees intentional explanation as a human, all too human, fiction in which we erroneously separate the flow of becoming into a "deed" and "doer"; and so it is inexact to think of these drives or forces as mini-agents or homunculi with their own hidden goals (although Nietzsche himself sometimes uses intentional language as, perhaps -- to be charitable, a kind of shorthand). The more accurate, less error-prone, description of Nietzschean forces is as processes, or patterns of activity. When Nietzsche says that a drive strives for mastery of a body, this means: that force, if it becomes the strongest force in a body, will shape the activity of the body as a whole, re-directing other activities towards its characteristic pattern. For example, for an athlete in training, hunger, sleep, sex, must become co-ordinated and disciplined sub-functions of the drive to compete.

Thus one way in which Nietzsche understand human individuals is in terms of the way forces are arranged or structured in our bodies. An individual in whom many forces of more or less equal strength compete for dominance is a weak individual, oscillating between different activities without any direction. In The Gay Science Nietzsche outlines a "stylistic" project for individual self-mastery: "One thing is needful. -- To 'give style' to one's character -- a great and rare art!"(GS290) Through long practice and daily labour the self-artist works on herself like a sculptor assessing, molding, pruning, reinterpreting. But the key to success is to achieve a hierarchical organisation of the individual -- one drive must rule: "In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!"

Nietzsche comes to apply the same conception of will to power not only to human psychology but to all life, and even to non-organic "material" activity.² In the most general terms (here following Deleuze) a body means any relation, meeting, of forces, whether a brief encounter or a complex persisting organism. We can see another application of this principle in Nietzsche's (unpublished) notes on biology: there an organism is an assemblage of forces in "collaboration and mutual opposition" (WP707), but the essential structure is that of "slavery and division of labour" (WP660). Nietzsche theorises "the body as a political structure", where the particular form this polis takes is that of an aristocracy: lower forces are subjugated organs or "functions" in service of the higher forces directing the body. (See also WP647).

Nietzsche repeatedly distinguishes his thinking from any theory (such as Spinoza's or, as he sees it, Darwin's) of preservation of bodies, species, or societies. "It can be shown most clearly that every living thing does everything it can not to preserve itself but to become more --" (WP689). Will to power is incessant energetic movement in which forces always seek to increase, grow, spread their activity further. Expansion by a strong force always involves conquest, domination, "incorporation", of outside forces: until, perhaps, a force overreaches itself and appropriates more than "the ruling cells are [capable] of organising" (WP660)³. If a force becomes weak, it will itself succumb to attack and assimilation. As there is always either an outside opposing force, or the possibility of a "rebellion" from a subordinated internal force, staying still is not an option, stasis turns swiftly into decay.

So, first of all, only organised as a hierarchy can a body, social or otherwise, resist attack from outside, disintegration from within, and advance to overcome and conquer outside rivals. Noting here that attack and defence, domination and resistance are the two aspects of the same motion called will to power, only depending on whether in a given moment the force or body under consideration is stronger or weaker than its rival. This is the insight that Foucault will take up: "resistance is present even in obedience: individual power is by no means surrendered. ... 'Obedience' and 'commanding' are forms of struggle." (WP642).)

But the "elevation of the type 'man'" which Nietzsche associates with aristocracy involves not just overcoming (domination/resistance) of outside forces but internal "self-overcoming". A strong, active, force strives not just to dominate other forces but to transform itself: its own activity pattern will change, become something new, something more. (In fact the two points can be related -- as, for example, the idea of evolution as an arms race of invention in which predators and prey must constantly develop new adaptations or lose their advantages/defences and face extinction.) This is one of the main themes of Thus Spoke Zarathustra -- humanity, if it is to be active, life-affirming, must become something else, grow beyond the bounds of its own nature and so voluntarily perish, as humanity, to evolve into a new form of life, the "overman". In general, the active body is always pressing forwards, beyond itself, in a process of becoming, change, evolution.

Hierarchy is also essential for this process. Lower forces or "organs" in the body perform essential preservative functions, but only the higher, leading, forces do the work of "elevating" the "type". These are the creative forces, inventors of new goals, new values, new ways of living -- the "shaping, form-creating" forces (WP647) -- the organism's "highest functionaries, in whom the life-will is active and manifests itself" (GM2:12). In human societies creativity, for Nietzsche, is always the work of a rare elite, a few "higher men", geniuses, whether lucky strokes or (potentially) products of breeding, who propel the self-transformation of the species.

culture critique

It could be interesting to trace the threads of hierarchy and struggle through Nietzsche's work, perhaps involving his unpublished notes and letters, and his personal political involvements. One approach might be to start with his early writing on the Greeks, where he is interested in ancient state forms and in the idea of contest (agon) within an aesthetic view of the world, and follow how these ideas develop into the doctrine of will to power. Unfortunately all I'm able to do here is just point out a few basic features of these ideas as we find them in Nietzsche's later work.

To start with the idea of hierarchy, we might roughly separate out three lines. First, an old chestnut: that a society needs leadership, hierarchical ordering, in order to survive in the face of both internal conflict and external aggression. The more specifically anti-liberal extra which Nietzsche adds here is the idea that social stasis is untenable: the only real means of defence is to constantly attack.

Yet this more strictly "political" thought never carries the main load in Nietzsche's social thinking. We can ask: why should Nietzsche (or anyone) be interested in the "flourishing" of any particular group, society, people? One answer might bring out a chauvinism that is generally implicit in much political thinking: we are interested in our own bodies, or in groups with which we feel in some way identified. (Richard Rorty is the contemporary philosopher who most explores this way of being "honest" about political perspective.) This element is certainly there in Nietzsche: while early on he disavows German nationalism, he considers himself to the end "a good European"; there is a "European" people whose fate, history, future, he feels intimately concerned with.

But most of all Nietzsche is interested in a certain kind of flourishing which could be summed up in Georges Bataille's words: "In Nietzsche's mind, everything is subordinated to culture." Keith Ansell-Pearson puts it: politics "is viewed not as an end in itself, but merely as a means to the production of culture." Military historians might measure the success or "life" of a nation by a tally of victories; economists are obsessed with GDP growth rates; for Nietzsche, for whom "existence and the world are justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon", history and politics are all about aesthetic creation.

Just what it is that culture stands for in Nietzsche's philosophy is not something we can sum up in a few lines. Yes we are talking about art, and art as understood in a tradition of European "high culture". But also, more generally, art means an expression of the will to power in its highest, most active form as creative self-overcoming. In this sense there are arts of living (self-creation, "style" in the sense of GS290), and arts of doing. Nietzsche's great men are military commanders as well as poets and philosophers, but Napoleon is valued here not as an effective technician of victories but as an artist of deeds -- and above all, as a creator of values.

The second line on hierarchy I'll identify here is also old and familiar. Back in his 1871 essay The Greek State Nietzsche argues that with the surplus created by slave labour "the privileged class is to be relieved from the struggle for existence, in order to create and to satisfy a new world of want." In Beyond Good and Evil this elite is then the whole "meaning and supreme justification" of a social system: "society should not exist for the sake of society but only as a foundation and scaffolding upon which a select species of being is able to raise itself to its higher task and in general to a higher existence ..." (BGE258).

The third, more peculiarly Nietzschean, line comes in with the concept of the "pathos of distance". Nietzsche believes that the existence of hierarchy is not just economically necessary (to create a surplus for the use of the creative elite), but that the very structure of distance between classes is somehow a necessary stimulant for creative activity. BGE 257 continues: "Without the pathos of distance such as develops from the incarnate difference of classes, from the ruling caste's constant looking out and looking down on subjects and instruments and from its equally constant exercise of obedience and command, its holding down and holding at a distance, that other, more mysterious pathos could not have developed either, that longing for an ever-increasing widening of distance within the soul itself ..."

This draws on the association -- even, identity -- Nietzsche makes between dominating and creating. Creativity is active force; active force is strength; strength is always expressed in the struggle to overpower other forces. There is, however, a jagged edge in Nietzsche's account of the pathos of distance: Nietzsche so often insists that creativity is a force that comes from within. Active creation, as opposed to what Nietzsche calls reactivity, is not supposed to be a response to the action of any external force or body, but an unprovoked self-expression. But if the elite artist is simply expressing something found within, why should she care at all about the position of the slave? Why should she need anything more from the inferior than economic energy to parasitise and spend?

It is certainly not that she needs some Hegelian "recognition" from the slave. Rather, Nietzsche's idea seems something like the one found in the old English public school system, where budding members of the elite were supposed to be trained to command through their experience of the school hierarchy. Only here the school is the social world as a whole, and what the soul learns is not just to command but to perceive and experience distance, to take the view from above and afar. This experience of social distance is introjected back into the elite creator's inner life, where it can be put to work in the process of self-creation, of making oneself an artist by differentiating and "elevating" ones own higher forces. Social hierarchy is where elitists learn style.

cyclical Nietzsche

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra experiences a terrible vision (Z3: The Convalescent): if we are to embrace a tragic pessimism and say yes to life, even to the point of willing the eternal recurrence -- that our actions recur eternally, forever and ever again -- then this means affirming everything, that everything will recur, not just moments of growth and strength, but moments of weakness and sickness, the "small man" as well as the great.

As we saw above, life for Nietzsche is most often a positive evaluative pole associated with "flourishing", strength, growth, newness; contrasted with a negative pole of weakness and decay. But there is also another sense of life as "everything there is", all strong and all weak moments too. There are places in Nietzsche where this all-inclusive sense comes to the fore, where decaying is just as necessary as flourishing (another sense of pathos of distance: there cannot be any high without a low) -- and not only is decay necessary, but it is also to be affirmed.

The all-affirming strand in Nietzsche appears in the Genealogy of Morals where, for all the condemnation of priestly morality and the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche has to admit that it was priests, after all, who made man an "interesting animal" (GM1:7). Deleuze puts it exactly: "we can recognise an ambivalence important to Nietzsche: all the forces whose reactive character he exposes are, a few lines or pages later, admitted to fascinate him, to be sublime ... They separate us from our power but at the same time they give us another power, 'dangerous' and 'interesting'". (2006: 62).

This line gets still stronger in Nietzsche's last works and late unpublished notes. After a career spent decrying the "levelling" of European culture in the modern age, by 1887 Nietzsche starts to imagine that the "mechanisation" of humanity could actually be a good thing -- a precursor condition for the overman. One note (WP866) outlines a science fiction plot in some ways reminiscent of HG Wells' The Time Machine. The "consumption of man and mankind becomes more and more economical and the 'machinery' of interests and services is integrated ever more intricately". Not only will future capitalism create a greater than ever "luxury surplus", but also an ever more levelled, "dwarfish" (WP890), herd class; and thus potentially a greater than ever creative pathos of distance if only a new aristocracy is able to escape the overall levelling of culture.

Nietzsche's futurology is not dialectical but contingent, and he offers at least two possible scenarios: either an "overall diminution", European culture as a whole down the drain; or the appearance of a new "higher form of aristocracy" to justify the 20th century. "Morally speaking, this overall machinery, this solidarity of all gears, represents a maximum in the exploitation of man; but it presupposes those on whose account this exploitation has meaning." The question is: how can such a "stronger species" "raise itself" out of the degenerated, pampered form of the 19th century European intellectual? "A dominating race can grow up only out of terrible and violent beginnings. Problem: where are the barbarians of the twentieth century? Obviously, they will come into view and consolidate themselves only after tremendous socialist crises ..." (WP868).

There we have perhaps Nietzsche's most positive comment on socialism: at least social upheaval has a role to play in the great cycles of history that bring us to the possibility of the creative moment. In one other note from the same period: "The revolution made Napoleon possible: that is its justification. For the sake of a similar prize one would have to desire the anarchical collapse of our entire civilisation." (WP877).

From these notes, and some late published passages, it is possible to trace a kind of cyclical theory of social change. The general idea is developed in BGE262: moment (1) "a type becomes fixed and strong, through protracted struggle against essentially unfavourable conditions" which force on it narrow severity and durability; (2) once a triumphant people arrives at an "easier state of affairs" it loses its "ancient discipline", but instead acquires the "splendour and abundance" of variation, whether as deviation (into the higher, rarer, more refined) or as degeneration and monstrosity"; however, (3) this "glorious, manifold, jungle-like growth and up-stirring" inevitably brings the society to the "dangerous and uncanny point" that tips into decay -- inner order (hierarchy) has broken down, disrespectful individualism reigns, universal nihilism; (4) only one "species of man" manages to flourish in these conditions -- the mediocre (bourgeois liberalism), may manage to preserve its levelled version of culture against the raging mob.

Mediocrity is as far as Nietzsche takes the process in Beyond Good and Evil, but in later unpublished notes he sketches possible further developments which close the cycle: (5) mediocrity itself breaks down into a stage of "socialistic revolts"; which then bring us back to (6) -- or (1') -- these harsh conditions clear the ground for a new "aristocracy of the future".

Nietzsche recognises that all these moments are necessary (xxx) to cyclical life. The very nobility of the active moment is its squandering and brevity: "History shows: the strong races decimate one another: through war, thirst for power, adventurousness; the strong affects; wastefulness ...; their existence is costly; in brief -- they ruin one another; periods of profound exhaustion and torpor supervene; all great ages are paid for ..." (WP864). And he even finds, as we saw, ways to affirm the declining moments: not only does the priest makes humanity "interesting", but there are even passages (xxx) where Nietzsche finds value in the mediocre.

However, necessity and value remain distinct. Nietzsche does (perhaps contra Deleuze) affirm the reactive declining forces, but certainly not as often, and not as openhandedly and openheartedly, as he affirms the highest moments. It is as if, whatever may be necessary, one can still show some reserve, some discretion, about what one affirms, for: "One must have a standard: I distinguish the grand style: I distinguish activity and reactivity; I distinguish the excessive, the squandering from the suffering who are passionate." (WP881/fn).

herd dogs

What is especially relevant for us anarcho-Nietzscheans to observe here is that one "moment" in the grand cycle never gets affirmed by Nietzsche: revolution always remains at best an unpleasant necessity. And the revolutionary, the rebel -- anarchist, socialist -- is never affirmed. In fact, more than this: the master, the priest, the mediocre are characteristic human "types" that emerge in their given moments; but, even as a pure negative, Nietzsche never makes the rebel into a distinct "type" for study. (The closest we get is the type of the "criminal".) More often, though, the rebel remains hidden in the great herd, undistinguished from the general type of slave.

This despite the fact that anarchists make quite a few appearances in Nietzsche. The position we occupy is always the same, militant wing of the great levelling movement called "democracy". Democracy, socialism, and anarchism are sub-movements within the same modern phenomenon of the herd asserting its mass power (agglomeration of weak forces) against hierarchy and rank order. For all his praise of upper class aggression, Nietzsche's particular disdain for "anarchist dogs" seems to come from an aversion to mob violence. One of his clearest statements on anarchism is in BGE 202:

"... the ever more frantic baying, the ever more undisguised fang-baring of the anarchist dogs which now rove the streets of European culture: apparently the reverse of the placidly industrious democrats and revolutionary ideologists, and even more so of the stupid philosophers and brotherhood fanatics who call themselves socialists and want a 'free society', they are in fact one with them all in their total and instinctive hostility towards every form of society other than that of the autonomous herd ..."

All these levelling movements, placid or aggressive, share the same essential fault. In attacking hierarchy they want to destroy the conditions for creative culture. Another level of Nietzsche's critique addresses the way herd movements present egalitarianism as a particular kind of truth, a "law of nature". This is largely an inheritance from Christianity, whose moral law Nietzsche sees as the antecedent for the socialistic-scientific conception of nature as neutral, equal, without distinction of rank. As Saul Newman points out, this kind of naturalistic essentialism certainly was a popular theme in 19th century anarchist rhetoric -- a classic example is Bakunin's avowal (xxx) that we should be bound by a "natural law" rather than artificial laws of men and states.

But before, with Newman, we plead guilty to essentialism and side with Nietzsche against "classical anarchism", we should note a couple of points: (1) an essentialist philosophy of nature never formed any kind of core doctrine of anarchist thought, even in Bakunin's day; anarchism is not an axiomatic system but a lived tradition of ideas and practices. And: (2), Nietzsche's own thinking is also vulnerable to being read as an account of nature or essence. As Nietzsche himself explains in BGE22, what he is offering against egalitarianism, with the doctrine of will to power, is simply a very different interpretation.

Indeed levelling doctrine is for Nietzsche not just dangerous, harmful to life and culture, but actually false: it denies the reality of the world (in his interpretation) as domination. Often this false doctrine is a deceit. While the drive to dominate may only express itself openly in the strong, it is equally present in the weak, only in a disguised form -- again, resistance is just domination on the back foot. Thus in a note on the "'Machiavellianism' of Power" (WP8xx), Nietzsche alleges that cries for 'freedom' among the oppressed, and calls for 'justice" from a class that is ascending but still not yet able to take power, are both expressions of the same will to power.

energy struggle

Nietzsche gives us will to power as production, expenditure and abundance. A strong force, in dominating another force, seeks not to preserve itself but to discharge its energy in expressing its characteristic activity pattern (WP650). And yet at the heart of this theory of life as energetics is a fundamental scarcity, and it is this lack which leads to the theory of essential domination.

Put simply, in order to expend energy a force first has to accumulate energy. The division of labour in hierarchical bodies splits the twofold motion of accumulating and discharging: ruling forces rob (exploit) energy from dominated forces; then expend it in creative activity.

Nietzsche sees the world as a closed and finite system: the total of energy available overall is limited. However, we need to distinguish between two conceptions of energy: "Regarded mechanistically, the energy of the totality of becoming remains constant; regarded economically, it rises to a high point and sinks down again in an eternal circle. This 'will to power' expresses itself in the interpretation, in the manner in which force is used up; transformation of energy into life, and 'life at its highest potency', thus appears as the goal." (WP639).

The idea here is that certain distributions of force -- equivalently, certain organisations of bodies -- make greater or lesser use of the available (mechanical) energy. This stems from what we have seen about hierarchy: a levelled, flat, distribution of energy is fruitless, "economically" inefficient, because without hierarchical organisations and the pathos of distance no higher forces are able to arise and transform energy into "life", i.e., new creation. Only when the world's energy is distributed hierarchically is energy converted into "'life at its highest potency'". As we saw, hierarchical and levelled forms flow cyclically into each other and thus life potency, energy conceived "economically", rises and falls with this movement.

But at the "mechanical" level -- the level of "input" into the creative production process -- energy remains constant, strictly limited. And because all forces are constantly seeking growth, what we have is the classic picture of a conflict over scarce resources, a zero sum game, never enough to go around. The only way forces can keep growing is by parasitising, incorporating, exploiting other forces. Or, to restate in the underlying language of processes: a force can only expand the scope of its characteristic activity by co-opting other activities, incorporating them into its pattern.

struggle and affinity

Again, a detailed scholarly account might trace why and how Nietzsche comes to hold this doctrine of scarcity, perhaps placing him in the context of the science of the time. Does Nietzsche observe domination as a supposed constant of nature and then work back to an energetic theory; or is there some such underlying force theory even in his early work, perhaps in the notion of the Dionysian? But here we are just going to skip over these questions. Instead we will ask: what happens if we can free the will to power from the scarcity constraint, and paraphrase Bakunin to say: The power of others, far from limiting or negating my power, is on the contrary its necessary condition and confirmation.⁴

From the interpretation of Nietzsche developed above, we can identify the following essentials of his "power ontology":

(i) forces are patterns of activity;

(ii) bodies are relations of forces;

(iii) forces seek to increase their power -- that is, to expand (and transform) their characteristic activity patterns;

(iv) forces increase their power by dominating other forces -- that is, assimilating them to their characteristic activity patterns.

Where we saw above that (iv) is rooted in the assumption of scarcity, limited energy. But, as anarcho-Nietzscheans, we will try and substitute for (iv) an alternative, more general, principle:

(iv') forces increase their power by forming alliances with other forces -- that is, combining (in some way) their characteristic activity patterns.

There will still be struggles, relations of domination and resistance. An alliance may be unequal, hierarchical, and then a combination of activities is still a Nietzschean assimilation or incorporation. But this kind of relation is not the only one available: forces can also ally in relations of co-operation, mutual aid. One way to see this might be by looking at the relative directions of the activities of forces: if forces are working in similar directions, have similar "goals" and practices -- we could say, if they are in affinity -- then it will be possible for them to co-ordinate or combine their activities in ways that empower both. Indeed, such combinations might amount to joinings or "mergers", in which the new body formed by two forces becomes a unified force. Such a joining on equal terms is not a Nietzschean incorporation but the formation of a new joint body.

This anarcho-Nietzschean picture moves us towards a Spinozist ontology. In Spinoza, two bodies may "agree" in their natures, and join together to form a new, greater body. (This principle underlies the politics Spinoza works out in the Tractatus Politicus: "If two men unite and join forces, then together they have more power, and consequently more right against other things in nature, than either alone ..." (TP II/B) -- although here we don't move beyond the idea that humans must at least be dominators of "nature") At the same time, it remains fully within the non-substantialist thinking of power as activity and becoming; it is "Nietzschean" on every point except the specific characterisation of force-relations as always dominating.

Is there any reason to think that dropping that one premise, which is certainly one Nietzsche sees as central to his thought, will bring the rest of the power ontology crumbling down? Actually, on the contrary, there is a good reason not to worry: Nietzsche himself is not consistent on insisting that all relations involve domination. In fact he regularly admits the existence of relations of mutual respect and at least cagey collaboration between members of the elite. (cf. GM1:11, ...) This collaboration is presented as the exception to the incessant strife that goes on elsewhere; but the important thing is that it does happen. Domination/resistance is then not the general form of interaction between forces but only a specific, contingent, (even if "dominant") version. From there we may agree or disagree with Nietzsche's own view about how prevalent domination happens to be in different realms.

In fact, as anarcho-Nietzscheans, we may largely accept Nietzsche's agonistic view of history in which any thing, name, institution, is "continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it" in an unfolding of "overpowering, dominating ... re-interpretation, adjustment ..." (GM2:12). Anarcho-Nietzscheans can certainly accept history as largely a struggle of interpretive forces (in conditions of evolutionary contingency not dialectical necessity). Though we may also want to point out the role of alliances and affinities, and of those counter-tendencies of mutual aid which can flash up even in the thick of battle, which Kropotkin in particular liked to discover even in the densest capitalist spaces. And certainly we will be interested in the dynamics of constructive affinity: in the possibility that we can actively transform at least some of the relations of domination in which we find ourselves into relations of co-operation.

the rebel -- a missing type

We saw that Nietzsche praises aggression and daring so long as these are traits of an elite, yet when members of the lower orders become restive they are impatient, merely destructive, "anarchist dogs". Revolutionary or insurrectional violence is associated by Nietzsche with vengefulness and ressentiment; and the anarchist, in so far as she emerges as a separate figure, is the reactive force of the herd turned rabid. I want to finish up here with an anarcho-Nietzschean sketch of a missing type.

It's true that rebels, anarchists, start from the position of slaves, and initially act in response to violence from "above" -- we rebel against the masters, and hating the masters and the domination they exert over us. Thus the beginning of rebellion is a reactive seed -- a reaction against the oppressor. However, if we do something Nietzsche was never able to do, and look at the lived experience of anarchist rebellion, which we can find expressed in a rich heritage of letters, memoirs, biographies, testaments, fictions, (and, for those of us ourselves active in this tradition, at our own personal experience and that of our comrades), another note comes across very strong: the idea of rebellion not as vengeance but as self-transforming joy.

Just to give a few tasters, this is how Peter Kropotkin expresses it in very Nietzschean terms: "Struggle! To struggle is to live, and the fiercer the struggle the more intense the life ... And be sure that in this struggle you will find a joy greater than anything else can give!" Or Nicola Sacco in his famous last letter to his son Dante: "In this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved." ⁵ Or Severino di Giovanni:"Life needs to be toasted with the exquisite elevation of rebellion in mind and arm."⁶

This anarchist ethic of joy is an active ethic in Nietzsche's sense: it locates the source of its values in its own condition. What's good is just to be this: to be what I have become, a rebel, fighting joyfully, whether alone or amongst comrades. In standing up as rebels we find joy in the struggle, in our own strength, and now the motivating force and source of value is no longer a reaction against the oppressor, but the experience and affirmation of the new life we have entered into.

We can thus characterise the rebel as a body actively engaged in self-overcoming: or, as Deleuze would put it, as "a becoming-active of reactive forces" (61). Deleuze says: "in order to become active it is not sufficient for a force to go to the limit of what it can do, it must make what it can do an object of affirmation." But this is precisely what occurs with the rebel force. In Nietzsche's own story of active ethics (GM1:2), the caste of masters first created (or named) their values when they stopped to look at themselves and, like the God of Genesis, "saw and judged themselves and their actions as good." Similarly, the rebel force makes the switch to activity when it discovers what it can do (that, despite what it had believed as a slave, it has the power to act), and judges it as good. The rebellious transition from reactive to active is a moment of self-recognition, experienced as joy, which becomes the affirmation of a newly discovered power.

Of course, there is the danger that the rebel will disappear as a type almost as soon as she appears: once she has become strong, she may turn, like so many ex-rebels, into the familiar type of the master, forming a "new class", same as the old boss, more little Napoleons. This is the possibility suggested by Nietzsche's analysis of "Machiavellian" will. But that pattern is inevitable only so long as we accept Nietzsche's characterisation of will to power as essentially dominating; in our anarcho-Nietzschean thinking, the possibility is open that the rebel will instead, whilst transforming herself into active, also work to transform the social relations in which she finds herself from relations of domination into relations of affinity.

1http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/AM/anarchist_moralityIX.html

2Walter Kaufmann argues that Nietzsche first develops the theory of will to power as a psychological conception, before extending it to all activity. ...

3This is Nietzsche's view of procreation -- "the crumbling that supervenes when the ruling cells are incapable of organising that which has been appropriated".

4The original has "freedom" for "power".

5Letter of Niccola Sacco to his son Dante, 18 August 1927 -- http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/SaccoV/sacltrchar.html

6Severino Di Giovanni, Culmine, August 1928, quoted in Felipe Pigna, Los Mitos de la historia argentina, Planeta, 2006, p114 http://www.elortiba.org/severino.html -- (my translation)

Calais

2010-04-26T08:11:00.000-07:00

Calais -- nomination for European City of Shame 2010

Sometimes a place -- it could be a town, a camp, a crossing, or some muddy field -- becomes a concentration point, a sink, a trap, for all the latent evil of the system of power that surrounds it. Calais is not just a symbol of the brutality of the European border regime, of the violence of colonialism turned inwards and compressed by "Fortress Europe". The repression and misery here is very real, everyday.

Calais is the only town where the French police division called the CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité), dedicated riot police with a vicious reputation, is on permanent duty. The policing strategy here is simple: harass migrants, terrorise them away from Calais and the France/UK border with the constant threat and reality of arrest, beatings and detention. Like an occupying army, CRS companies are based in barracks and rotated through Calais on three week tours.

There are somewhere around 300 destitute migrants living in Calais. They come here in the hope of making it across the 26 miles of water to the UK. There used to be several times that number, but the clampdown has been at least partially successful. (Though the political ambiguity here: does the repression shift the migrants away from the border; or only make them try harder to get across?) Since the closure in 2002 of the Red Cross run Sangatte refugee camp, migrants have lived in whatever squats, shacks, tents, ruins "slums and holes in the wall" they can find. Last September the Pashtun migrants' "Jungle" was evicted in another show of state force. The remaining Pashtuns currently live in a camp of disused train stock not far from the old site.

I spent most of my recent two week stint in Calais with the mainly Sudanese, Somali, Eritrean and Ethiopian migrants who live in the squat called "Africa House". This deserted factory has been occupied by different groups of African migrants for a number of years now. When I arrived at the start of April, the CRS were raiding Africa House early every morning. Every morning: beatings, and more sans-papiers arrested, "controlled" and fingerprinted, and either just held for a few hours or overnight, or the unlucky ones taken to the detention centre at Coquelles. In the daytime, they patrol the streets in their white vans, picking up migrants on the way to the charity food distribution point, or by the water pumps, or at the phoneboxes, or in the park catching a moment of sunshine. Calais without papers -- no safety nowhere.

Fear compounded with deprivation. In bigger raids the CRS are followed by council workers who take away everything, blankets, tents, even firewood. Drinking water poured into the sand. Sans-papiers have no recourse when their personal belongings -- phones and money, or photos and momentos -- are stolen by the men sent by the mayor who has promised to "clean up the city".

"Calais, Calais, it's a horrible town." While I saw some solidarity from locals who gave warning of police raids, I also saw how shops and cafes in Calais are routinely "closed for a private event" whenever a black face appears at the door. On goes everyday life, above and below. Shopping malls, booze runs, Friday night on main street, sunshine in the park ... beatings, detentions, humiliations, fingerprintings, cataloguings, photographings, questionings, controls, paper checks, "disinfectant" sprayings. Swastikas found scrawled on the wall in soap after a police raid. The same shitty charity food every day handed out in a blank open space surrounded by barbed wire. The morning CRS wake-up call: allez allez - degache degache! (Go Go - get out get out).

There are other nominees -- Brussels, Ceuta and Melilla, Lesbos ... -- but personally I'm backing Calais as clear frontrunner for European City of Shame 2010. Some Darfuri refugees said -- "the police here are worse than the Janjaweed. In Darfur you die in a moment and it's over. Here they kill us slowly, day by day."

It's true, where there is power there is resistance. Power in Calais is biopolitical, remorseless drip of control and deprivation. Resistance, too, is small scale, everyday. Our morning patrols, roadblocks or just trying to give a bit of early warning, are sustained by cups of sugary tea brewed over pallet wood fires. Smashing wood, carrying water, cleaning a wound, gifts of friendship, gifts of words, Arabic words Amharic words English words, smiles and gestures of welcome, phone numbers, morsels of information, music as medicine.

I did morning watch in Africa House every morning, in the afternoon I taught English classes, in the evening I walked with my friends to get food and water. Teachers and students will come and go, this is a transient place, but we can share some useful information that should help those who make it across. The lesson I'll always remember was on the future tense, we each wrote on the board one sentence about a world we would like to live in. "One day we will live in a world with no borders and no governments." "There will be no wars." "There will be no police." And one friend wrote: "we will all live together like we do here in Africa House." Sharing firewood and sugar, welcoming newcomers, keeping watch together, learning each others' languages. My friend, one day soon I'll see you here in England, inshallah, and make you welcome, as you made me welcome in Africa House.

Calais is a shameful place. But in the holes, in the cracks, adversity creates courage, warmth, sparks of resistance, seeds of the future. Against the searchlights of the CRS -- the firelights of travellers. Calais gave me a new meaning for old words: "We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall ... We are not in the least afraid of ruins ... We carry a new world here, in our hearts." (Buenaventura Durruti).

Activists are always needed to work with Calais No Borders: both on the ground, and back in the UK. We have had a constant presence in Calais since the No Borders camp last June. Apart from police patrols the work can include first aid, opening squats and social centres, film-making, assistance for the many unaccompanied minors in Calais, supporting migrants arriving in the UK, solidarity demos, exhibitions and infonights ... and much more.

For more information see our blog: http://calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com/
Email: calaisolidarity@gmail.com
UK phone: 07534 008380.

noborders evening 11 march

2010-03-07T08:21:00.000-08:00

West Midlands No Borders and Coventry Peace House

are hosting an Evening of

resistance and dignity

with film, discussion, and food
Thursday 11 March 6pm-9pm

Coventry Peace House, 311 Stoney Stanton Rd, Coventry
all welcome

The ever-stronger border regime is an assault on our freedom and our dignity. Racism, arbitrary detention, destitution, injustice, affect us all. Against us is not only the State but also private corporations who make money from the immigration system. How can we resist such power? We will watch films and hear from people who have shown that the system is not unstoppable. What can we do in our area?

noborderswestmids@riseup.net

info@covpeacehouse.org.uk

noborders evening this thursday 25 feb

2010-02-22T04:17:00.001-08:00

West Midlands No Borders Group

and

The Coventry Peace House

present

What are Borders for?

An evening of film, discussion, and food.
Thursday 25 February 6:0 pm - 9:00 pm
Coventry Peace House
311 Stoney Stanton Rd
Coventry
CV6 5DS

All welcome

Britain is being turned into a fortress with stronger border controls, surveillance cameras, detention centres, anti-terrorist laws, restrictions on movement. Why are we so afraid? Politicians and tabloids tell us to fear migrants, that we need strong laws and borders to protect and control. But what are borders really for? Could freedom of movement be something worth fighting for? Instead of fear and rhetoric, we want to create an open discussion. Whatever our points of view, we can learn from each other, exchange stories and ideas, and maybe find new solutions ...

info(at)covpeacehouse.org.uk
noborderswestmids(at)riseup.net

report: february 2010: on power

2010-02-22T03:53:00.000-08:00

little bit of Nietzsche scholarship ...

For Life, To Power

In the note to the first essay of the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche outlines a two-stage model for his project. First, in a preparatory stage called genealogy, "scientists" must uncover the forces and values at work in our conceptions and practices of morals, science, philosophy, and more. Second, the true work of "philosophy", these values are to be ordered and "re-valued". Although we might find it helpful to break the second stage into two: first, in a stage of critique, Nietzsche ranks and values these uncovered values. Then, in an affirmative stage to come, the true philosopher (BGE210, 211) creates new values of his own. Of course the schema is inexact, as all three aspects of genealogy, critique, and creation/affirmation are interwoven throughout Nietzsche's writing. From the beginning of his work Nietzsche has values of his own to affirm, and he maintains that it is impossible to do preparatory genealogy other than from an evaluative perspective -- bad "English" genealogists who deny this are yet unwitting "shield bearers" of their morality (GS345). And Nietzsche's affirmative and critical values are clearly tied together -- for example, a positive ethic of life, health, strength, goes with a critique of values of decay, sickness, weakness.

In this essay I want to explore Nietzsche's own values, which can thus be seen both as the ground of his affirmative project and of his critical perspective. One bright thread to follow is the notion of life -- life, and life-filled concepts and imagery, carry the positive charge in Nietzsche's thinking from early on (e.g., the notable essay on history for the sake of life), and they never lose it. What is life for Nietzsche? There may be one sense, and an important one, in which life is everything there is. This enters in the context of affirmation, yes-saying, and the eternal recurrence: to affirm life is to affirm everything, the good and the bad, the small as well as the great, weakness and sickness too. But more often, life and related concepts can stand in contrast to anti-life forces -- sickness, decay, exhaustion. It is this more restricted usage I will pursue here -- although we may see that the two are not always so easily disentangled.

In his later work, Nietzsche connects life to the concept of will to power. Indeed (BGE259) "life is will to power". The introduction of the will to power, I think, provides the conceptual apparatus or system for a more developed life-philosophy which clarifies Nietzsche's thought. Here I follow the approach of those commentators who read the posthumously published notes on the will to power as outlining a systematic philosophy -- a "power ontology" -- which unites Nietzsche's thinking on diverse themes. In particular, I go along here with the approach taken by Gilles Deleuze (1962/2006), and more recently in English language philosophy by John Richardson (1996), of beginning by looking at Nietzsche's terms on the level of forces, sub- and super-individual, active and reactive. It is these forces, striving for power, that are the stuff of life.

forces and values

We might identify three domains in which Nietzsche talks of the Will to Power. According to Walter Kaufman (1950), Nietzsche early on introduced the concept in looking at human psychology, only later extending it to the broader domains of the "organic", or biological (life), and ultimately to all physical matter. In the published writings willing and power remain mainly features of human activity -- where some commentators would like to confine them. On the other hand, at least one important facet of the will to power doctrine is developed as an account of forces, as conceived by the physics of Nietzsche's day. But I won't here delve into these issues of the "anthropomorphising" or otherwise effect of Nietzsche's philosophy of biology and physics.

Nietzsche plays loose with terms and assignations, and fixing his terms is the work of later commentators and systematisers. Following Deleuze, here, I will fix on the notion of a force (kraft). (Noting that Nietzsche himself often uses the expression quantum of force, amongst many other formulations.) In Deleuze's general formulation, which perhaps somewhat Spinozises Nietzsche -- "Every relationship of forces constitutes a body -- whether it is chemical, biological, social or political. Any two forces, being unequal, constitute a body as soon as they enter a relationship." When operating in the more limited and less controversial domain of psychology, we might follow Richardson's systematisation in which a psychological force is a sub-individual drive (trieb) -- a human individual (human body) is a multiplicity of drives bundled together in relations of tension.

Deleuze here cites WP635, in which Nietzsche says that all "unities" -- being the root of our concepts of a thing, number, identity, and also dynamic concepts such as motion and activity -- are human fictions, and that when "we eliminate these additions, no things remain but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all dynamic quanta". The will to power is then not being, not even becoming, but "a pathos" -- which we might perhaps parse, following Kaufman's suggestion, as an "event" or occasion. (Also compare Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of immanent events and momentary assemblages in the 1000 plateaux.) For John Richardson, we would be better to think of these forces not as intentional agents (some kind of "homunculi") but as "behaviour patterns", or "projects". This follows Nietzsche's call in GM1:13 to drop the illusion of a "doer" behind the doing: "A quantum of force is just such a quantum of drive, will, action, in fact it is nothing but this driving, willing and acting, and only the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reasoning petrified within it), which construes and miscontrues all actions as conditional upon an agency, a 'subject', can make it appear otherwise."

And yet perhaps the clearest way to grasp the notion of Nietzschean forces, and it is a way that Nietzsche himself often takes, is to see them as goal-directed entities. The picture I'll sketch here borrows largely from Richardson. Every force has a specific "internal goal", or series of such goals, which it strives after. For example, a hunger drive pursues food, a sex drive pursues sex. This is also where the notion of value comes in -- for Nietzsche another aspect of a force's activity, its striving for goals, is that this always involves valuing and interpreting. Perhaps the simplest way to see this is: a goal of a force is a value for that force. Thus, here in a psychological context although Nietzsche elsewhere extends this theme much more broadly, HH32: "all disinclination depends on a valuation, just as does all inclination. Man cannot experience a drive to or away from something without the feeling that he is desiring what is beneficial and avoiding what is harmful ..." We could say: to pursue or desire something is to interpret it as good, to give it a positive value.

Valuing here is primarily not a conscious activity, and indeed the thrust of the genealogical approach is that human consciousness on the whole mistakes or misidentifies human values. On an individual level, we might say that a person's "true" values are the values or goals of the largely unconscious drives that act in and through her body. Her consciousness is merely one force amongst others, itself with its own goal-directed striving, and not gifted with particular interpretative perspicacity (indeed, Nietzsche presents consciousness as subject to a form of systematic error -- cf. GS354, amongst others). It requires the grey science of genealogy, with unflinching courageous honesty, attention to detail, and a highly developed sense of smell, to unravel the mystifications with which conscious re-interpretation has obscured the real values at work in us.

will to power

From here, one approach to the doctrine of the Will to Power is then to see it as identifying an underlying commonality, perhaps a common nature (or "essence" -- cf. Richardson), behind all of these diverse goal-seeking value-creating forces. Nietzsche himself sometimes presents his theory as a replacement for more traditional such accounts in which all (human, or organic, or physical) activity is associated with (and, maybe, explained by -- or, even, reduced to?) a common motivating force. Thus, in WP688, Nietzsche says that "all driving force is will to power, that there is no other physical, dynamic or psychic force except this." Here he proposes will to power as a replacement for a hedonic theory of motivation: "it is notably enlightening to posit power in place of individual 'happiness' (after which every living thing is supposed to be striving)... pleasure is only a symptom of the feeling of power". Elsewhere the rival theory that will to power replaces is variously the Schopenhauerian Will; Spinozist connatus (drive to self-preservation); or a reading of Darwinism (perhaps, more accurately, Spencerism) in which survival and preservation of the species take on a quasi-Spinozist character. For example, to frame the position in contrast to Spinoza: it is not that bodies seek to preserve themselves in being; but that forces (within bodies) strive to become more powerful.

A few alternative understandings of what power might mean here have developed in a recent English language debate. On one position, advocated by Maudemarie Clark, power is the "second order desire" of an individual for the ability or capacity to realise her "first order desires" -- e.g., appetites for food, sex, etc.¹ I think Clark's account is confused by remaining figured in terms of human individuals (rather than drives), but the point might be rephrased: while drives strive for different first-order "internal goals", they all also strive for the second-order goal of increasing their ability to attain these -- their power. This usage broadly corresponds to what in political theory is sometimes called "outcome power" -- the ability to attain desired outcomes, perhaps by the use of resources.² It seems in tune with a rather basic notion of power as ability or potential; but it falls short of much of the rich meaning Nietzsche wants to attribute to the will to power. As we saw above, Nietzsche appears to say not that all forces seek power as well as, or for the sake of, other (first-order) goals, but that the seeking of power is the most basic and primary pursuit -- "there is no other ... force except for this."

But if power is not just a means to other ends, what is it? One approach, taken by Bernard Reginster amongst others, is to identify power with the overcoming of resistance. (More precisely, for Reginster, will to power is the second-order "desire for overcoming of resistance in the pursuit of some determinate first-order desire.") This reading emphasises passages where Nietzsche suggests forces go out looking for trouble. E.g., GM1:13's "thirst for enemies and resistances"; or Z2:12: "That I must be struggle and a becoming and an end and an opposition to ends ... Whatever I create and however much I love it, soon I must oppose it and my love; thus my will wills it"; or the memorable analysis of tickling in WP699.

John Richardson follows another line which is strongly suggested by many passages in which power is associated with domination or mastery over other forces. A force has its specific internal goals -- or better, less teleological, its own projects or behaviour patterns. But these are not fixed ends, a forces is always in a process of self-overcoming (selbstueberwindung), in which its activity changes -- grows -- and new goals replace old ones -- "striving to enhance itself, to extend its own scope of activity". A first sense of Nietzschean power is then "power as growth in activity".The question may arise here -- what of the identity of the force, does it remain the same force when its goals and activities are transformed by self-overcoming? But Richardson (and I think Nietzsche would approve) is happy to let go of identity-ontology, here it seems taking a cue from neo-Darwinist "population thinking": "it wills to rise to a new and higher level of effort -- perhaps indeed a level at which its internal ends are also overcome and replaced by descendent ones that will have to be overcome in turn." (Cf. Nietzsche on species.)

If we take the power ontology seriously -- if we say that all there is in the world, in life, are forces brought together in "relations of tension" -- then there seems to be a clear route from (1) power as growth in activity; to (2), power as mastery. For example, conversely, in an ontology of agents and objects, we might suppose a way in which an agent increases her power by acquiring more resources, where these resources are objects. E.g., by acquiring an axe I increase my power to cut trees, and potentially boost my tree-cutting activity. But if we think of the world as made up of only forces, a force can only grow by acquiring or accumulating more -- force. The next move, a crucial one for Nietzsche's ontology and for its evaluative implications, is to ask -- from where can a force take more force?

Here Nietzsche posits something like a law of conservation of energy for forces. That is -- the only way for a force to increase its strength is to take it from other forces. WP369: "life lives always at the expense of other life". WP689: "Not merely conservation of energy, but maximal economy in use, so that the only reality is the will to grow stronger of every center of force -- not self-preservation, but the will to appropriate, dominate, increase, grow stronger."

More exactly, it is not (or not usually) that a successful force "steals" or subtracts strength from other forces: the subdued forces persist and maintain their energy, but they themselves are appropriated, dominated, re-directed under the control of the ruling force, which adds their strength to its own. As Richardson explains it: "drive A rules B insofar as it has turned B towards A's own end, so that B now participates in A's distinctive activity. Mastery is bringing another will into a subordinate role within one's own effort, thereby 'incorporating' the other as a sort of organ or tool."³

This also means that power as mastery is closely tied to (3) power as overcoming resistance. That is, the resistance here is precisely the resistance offered by an opposing force. Nietzsche himself often joins the two ideas of mastery and resistance. In GM1:13, for example, we have "a willing to subjugate, a willing to throw down, a willing to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs." Or, e.g., in WP693 he writes that "opposites, obstacles are needed: therefore, relatively, encroaching units"; in WP694 the formulation is "the resistance a force seeks to master". Of course, the opposite force here is also seeking to grow, achieve mastery, and the resistance it presents to a dominant force encroaching on it is of a piece with the domination it would exert if it were the stronger or mastering force -- attack and defence are two aspects of the same willing. Thus, e.g., in WP693 displeasure is "every feeling of not being able to resist or dominate" (my emphasis); or WP634 "a will to violate and to defend onself against violation."

Resistance, on this picture, is not sought out by the aggressor force, or not usually, simply for "its own sake", but because achieving mastery over a force necessarily involves overcoming its resistance. While Nietzsche associate the experience of overcoming resistance with the feeling of pleasure (meeting resistance in the first place causes displeasure, which turns into pleasure when the resistance is successfully overcome), he is insistent that pleasure is merely epiphenomenal (WP702) -- it is not the pursuit of pleasure itself that drives forces.

life values

strong, active, creative

However, Nietzsche's position is more subtle than a simple ode to strength. For example, in The Genealogy of Morals, we see how Nietzsche's common assault on the otherworldly values of priests turns with the recognition of the new value created by the ascetic ideal: it is thanks to priests "that man first became an interesting animal ... and that the human soul became deep in the higher sense and turned evil for the first time -- and of course, these are the two basic forms of man's superiority, hitherto, over other animals! ..." (GM1:7) Linked to this is the theory developed in Beyond Good and Evil (BGE262) in which decadent periods beginning when a triumphant "species" relaxes after the end of struggle, although they lead to the decline of strong warlike values, allow the creative upsurge of new variations and "deviations". Similarly, in the Gay Science, Nietzsche develops a cyclical story in which periods of sickness and recuperation are also to be valued. Thus there are various points in Nietzsche's work where it seems that retreating as well as aggressive forces are valued. A common thread is perhaps that these forces, while apparently weak and self-destructive, are creative -- they invent new variations, new values, new ways of life.

This points us towards a tightly complex issue in Nietzsche's evaluative thinking, which here I'm just musing on. Nietzsche often positively values forces that create. Here the affirmation of life seems to become an affirmation of newness, change -- new life, or forms of life. But the relationship between creativity and strength is not always so clear.

Sometimes Nietzsche does plainly associate creativity with strength -- an important case is his assertion in GM1:2 that the judgement 'good' can only have been initially created by masters: "It was from this pathos of distance that they first claimed the right to create values and give these values names ..." Creativity, here, is closely linked with the idea of an active, spontaneous, and aggressive force -- creation is the over-flowing of super-abundant power. Creativity is what gets covered over by herd mentality and unexplained by science's mechanistic chains of reactions: "One overlooks the essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions ..." (GM2:12).

The importance of activity in Nietzsche's evaluation is brought out in the discussion by Deleuze, who begins by distinguishing quantity and quality of Nietzschean forces. When two forces meet, there is always a stronger one that dominates and a weaker one that resists. On the one hand, we can consider their difference as a differential of quantity -- one has more strength than the other. But Deleuze also considers a corresponding, but distinct, difference of quality -- the force with more strength takes on an active quality or role in the relation, while the weaker force is reactive. Qualities indicate the ways in which forces express their different powers within the relation. An active force, with its over-abundance of power, casts off or flows energy into creation -- new values, new arrangements -- as well as seeking new expansions and struggles. A reactive force has to devote its energy to resisting assimilation by the conqueror (alternatively, it may self-destructively turn its aggression inward).

The ambiguity (if that's what it is) here is that reactive forces can also be creative. For example, a few sections further into the first essay of the Genealogy, the "priestly method of valuation" becomes a creative force which stems precisely from a lack of power -- "the history of mankind would be far too stupid a thing if it had not had the intellect of the powerless injected into it." (GM1:7). A resolution of this knot might be to distinguish two sorts of creativity: only an active force can create a truly new or "original" value or meaning; the creativity of a reactive force is always a re-working, inverting, twisting, combining, deviating -- a mutation, adaptation or otherwise variation of the original creation of an active force.

There are two issues which I will just flag up for now. First, even if we can maintain this distinction, it may not determine much for Nietzsche's evaluative criteria: reactive creativity still seems valuable -- it is reactive inventiveness that has made human beings interesting, "superior" to other animals. Second, the distinction requires an account of creativity in which active forces create new activities and meanings, as it were, ex nihilo -- or, perhaps, from "within" themselves, from their own internal abundance (however we can understand that); and which distinguishes these originary creations from mere variations and adaptations. A theory of active creativity is also central to the part of Nietzsche's project that emphasises the will to power doctrine as distinct from mechanistic interpretations of Newtonian physics or Darwinian evolution. However, I am not sure that Nietzsche managed to develop such an account.

life of bodies

So far we have looked at valuation in terms of "simple" forces and their goals. But although Nietzsche sees an individual -- or some other body, such as a nation or a species -- as an assembled multiplicity of forces, it is still the case that the "beings" he is primarily interested in are these composite bodies rather than their component forces. His writing is largely concerned with the conditions of life, persistence, growth, of human individual and social bodies. For example, he is interested in how a human individual (e.g., a philosopher, a free spirit) can live well, or whether or how a society or people (e.g., Europeans, or sometimes the human species) can flourish. It may be that Nietzschean life-values become clearer when we look at them at this level -- our interest is the life of bodies.

Despite its internal struggles the body as a whole, if it is healthy, presents a united front to other forces and bodies outside. A healthy body is something like a collection of rival forces that have managed to unite, despite their mutual antagonism, and form a coalition against the outside world. More generally, we could think of nested layers of forces coalescing into organised bodies, which then as united forces form coalitions with other bodies, constructing joint larger body-forces, etc. WP636: "My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (—its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (‘union’) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on --"

A second layer of the power ontology is, then, a theory of what different structural relations of forces in bodies mean for the health and strength of those bodies as composite forces -- their ability to act effectively as coalitions struggling against other coalitions. Here Nietzsche has a clear stance -- the strongest bodies are dictatorships, strict hierarchies where one dominant force within establishes itself as master to shape and direct the collectivity. "Democratic" or "levelled" structures make for weak bodies which tear themselves apart in internal dissension, or become flabby and vulnerable to invasion

Another recurring theme in Nietzsche's treatment of life -- as hygiene, extirpating violence, "cleanliness and severity" (BGE210) -- comes in here. In GS26 he writes: "What is life? Life -- that is: continually shedding something that wants to die. Life -- that is: being cruel and inexorable against everything about us that is growing old and weak ..." This theme can be reconciled with life as growth when we take it to the level of bodies rather than (simple) forces. A body (composite force) can gain strength and grow at the expense of other weaker bodies if dominant forces within it can carry out an internal restructuring which includes: (1) asserting their mastery over and re-directing weaker but "sufficiently related" complementary forces; but also (2) cutting away, or excreting, from the body weak forces which are harmful to the dominant project.

This theory of the benefits of hierarchy gives an ontological grounding both for Nietzsche's political elitism, and for his approach to transformative individual psychology -- a personal ethic of self-mastery "through long practice and daily work". To focus in on the latter, one strong statement of Niezsche's values is GS290: "One thing is needful. -- To 'give style' to one's character -- a great and rare art ... In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed, and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!" The strong and domineering nature imposes a strict law on itself -- as opposed to weak spirits which cannot serve without becoming slaves. These self-dominating spirits are successful and powerful in the world (they build palaces); they know satisfaction and gaiety; and they do not harm others through revenge or ugliness, as weak dissatisfied spirits do.

In this passage we find a bundle of Nietzschean positive values, values which run through his thought and again and again resurface in colour: joy, brightness, strength, pride, creativity, dominance, magnanimity, more. If it does make sense, though, to try and identify a more or less stable core or main thread amongst these, the more metaphysical notion of growth of power still seems the most reliable guide. Success -- "worldly power" -- conceived in any common terms is never a core value for Nietzsche, and avoiding harm to others is very far from a main concern. While Nietzsche often affirms sensations, experiences, of joy, happiness, gaiety, these are, in terms of the power ontology, consequences (epihenomenal, if inextricable) of the overcoming of resistance by growing forces, rather than intentions or ends. The key value, then, that guides the picture of self-mastery in this passage, and runs through many other affirmative statements, is not attached to the consequences of the strong spirit's actions, but to the alignment of forces that gives this body strength. Nietzsche would (presumably) still affirm the project of self-mastery even if such a domineering will failed to overcome worldly obstacles, and perished suffering in the attempt, without experiencing joy.

for whose life?

On this account, Nietzsche's core concern is with the healthy life -- i.e., the growth of power -- of bodies. He positively values forces and values that contribute to the growth -- and ultimately the self-overcoming and transformation -- of these bodies. But if the rise of any force is the decline of another, the power of any body the weakness of another, then we can ask the question: why should Nietzsche be concerned with the flourishing of any (particular) body, if its failure to flourish will just mean an opportunity for a rival? I'll conclude with a few sketchy suggestions on this -- maybe there are elements of some or all of these in Nietzsche's work.

(1) Perhaps the simplest answer is that Nietzsche begins with a concern with particular bodies with which he (or dominant drives in his own body) identifies -- e.g., the individual body of Friedrich Nietzsche, or a European Culture of which he feels himself to be part. This identification is the starting point for Nietzsche's evaluative perspective -- an unquestioned fixed point from which his values operate. At the level of societies or cultures, this position would amount to a kind of chauvinism (a bit like the cultural chauvinism admitted and embraced by a philosopher such as Richard Rorty). However, many would be more comfortable with this stance on the individual level -- we don't find so much to object to in the idea of "care of the self".

(2) Some passages may suggest, though, that Nietzsche is able to -- or aspires to -- dissociate himself from such contingent attachments. But then it may be that affirmation of life in the restricted sense, life meaning the growth of particular forces and bodies, collapses into the affirmation of life in the broadest sense -- life as everything there is. What content is then left in Nietzsche's values? What is the difference between affirming growth and affirming decay, its inevitable converse?

(3) We might look at Nietzsche's evaluative stance as tied to the critical project of opposing levelling moralities, the ascetic ideal. He affirms values of aggression and growth in a particular context of opposition to the conventional moralising of selflessness and timidity, morality which seeks to cover up the role of aggressive forces in life. (Though this version would subordinate Nietzsche's affirmative values to his critical stance -- and make it an essentially reactive thinking?)

(4) While the growth of any one force implies an equal decline in the strength of other forces, the distribution of strength amongst forces may be changed in various ways. For example, we could imagine a kind of general melée involving many small bodies, all more or less equal in strength; or a more polarised landscape in which a few mighty bodies absorb and concentrate the available forces; etc. It may be that what Nietzsche is interested in are particular distributions, or movements towards distributions, of power between bodies. This might be the case, for example, on aesthetic grounds (recalling that existence and world are justified solely as an aesthetic phenomenon -- BT1). He may believe that certain kinds of force distributions and patternings (more hierarchical ones) produce more beautiful results (e.g., art); or perhaps that certain patterns of force are intrinsically more beautiful.

Note -- on left-Nietzscheanism

Although I haven't been able to go into much detail, one of the main themes emerging here is that Nietzsche's political and personal ethical programmes can be seen as grounded in a number of commitments he makes within power ontology. There is at least one strong sense in which Nietzsche's agonistic picture of the world is very open to "left-Nietzschean" interpretations -- as a form of anti-liberal "conflict theory" in which history is made up of conflict and resistance of classes and other power groups. However there are two particular claims that seem to have unavoidably elitist implications:

(1) forces can only grow at the expense of other forces -- a kind of "law of conservation of energy";

(2) strong bodies (coalitions of forces) must be organised hierarchically.

While anarchists, in particular, have found much in Nietzschean thinking (despite Nietzsche's absolute scorn for anarchism and indeed class struggle in any form), these two claims are just about as un-anarchist as any could be. E.g., the first point is exactly the idea that Bakunin refused with his claim that "the freedom of any individual is multiplied by the freedom of others"; or that Kropotkin tried to argue against with the theory of "mutual aid" as a "factor of evolution". The second point is what all of us involved in organising non-hierarchical social forms attempt to counter in practice every day. So -- how central are these claims to Nietzsche's power ontology? Can we make a left-Nietzscheanism without them?

... to be continued ...

1Clark's more general definition of a first order desire is effectively a desire that contains no references to other desire-terms ... which seems to create a circularity.

2Dowding (xx); Dahl (xx); Lukes (xx).

3Though note that, e.g., WP642, Nietzsche sometimes suggests that this "incorporation" is only ever partial or temporary -- resistance can always flare up again -- "To what extent resistance is present even in obedience: individual power is by no means surrendered. In the same way, there is an admission that the absolute power of the opponent has not been vanquished, incorporated, disintegrated. 'Obedience' and 'commanding' are forms of struggle." This passage is important for the left Nietzscheanisms of Deleuze and Foucault -- Deleuze gives it some prominence (p37).

report: january 2010: on genealogy

2010-02-22T03:15:00.000-08:00

Genealogy -- English or free-spirited

Nietzsche did not invent the method of genealogy in the study of morality. In the opening line of the first essay of the Genealogy of Morals he credits "English Psychologists" with "the first attempts so far to write a history of the emergence of morality" -- before launching into a full-blown, if nuanced, attack on these inadequate predecessors. The thought of this essay is that the ways in which Nietzsche distinguishes his practice from this "English Psychology" or "English Genealogy" may give some insight into the meaning of Nietzsche's own genealogical method. The comparison at stake here is relevant not just for exegesis of Nietzsche's writing, or for situating his outlook against the moral theories of his time -- it can also help orient us with regards to contemporary approaches to the evolution of morality.

a German

First off, just who are these English Genealogists? In fact the only name Nietzsche provides is a German one, Paul Ree, his erstwhile friend, and, on some interpretations, romantic rival, and there are good reasons to read these references as straightforward assaults on Ree. The thumbnail sketch Nietzsche gives in GM 1:2 of the English genealogy is a clearly recognisable precis of Ree's argument in The Origin of Moral Feelings (1877). As Christopher Janaway (2008) argues, Ree is implicated in the terminology Nietzsche uses to describe the English vices -- for example, using Ree's "rather ungainly" term ‘unegoistic’ (unegoistische) rather than altruistisch. The titles of the essays in the Genealogy mirror chapter titles of Ree's book. The only actual Englishman referred to, Herbert Spencer, is in fact introduced as providing a counter-theory to the exposition of English thinking.

Yet, though Ree is likely the direct adversary in question, Nietzsche chooses his national epithets with care. Ree's theory, on which Nietzsche closely based his own earlier account of ethical emergence in book two of Human, All Too Human (though he neglects to remind us of that in the Genealogy), is indeed recognisable as an offshoot of a tradition of mainly English (or British) theorising about ethics. Maudemarie Clark and Alan Swensen (1998 p129) note "it has been suggested that this phrase ['English psychologists'] refers to the British philosophers of the utilitarian–associationist school, perhaps especially Hume, Hartley, Hutcheson, Bentham and Mill." Though maybe there are two "schools" involved: Ree's (and Nietzsche's) accounts are also very much informed by the application of Darwin's evolutionary theory to the emergence of morality. Darwin had embarked on his own such "genealogies" in the Descent of Man, although even before its publication the "Neo-Darwinists" had already begun their own sociological extrapolations of the ideas in The Origin of Species. By Nietzsche's time, Spencer had become the most influential of these thinkers -- and, argues John Richardson (2004), Nietzsche's reception of Darwin was largely mediated through a "careful" reading of Spencer.

and a Scotsman

Ree's genealogy incorporates both these "English" lines -- there is the central notion of moral goodness as deriving from utility, drawn out with a specifically evolutionary story. Here is Nietzsche's summary in GM1:2: "'Originally' -- they decree -- 'unegoistic acts were praised and called good by their recipients, in other words, by the people to whom they were useful; later, everyone forgot the origin of praise and because such acts had always been habitually praised as good, people began to experience them as good -- as if they were good as such.'"

In fact this description fits pretty neatly Hume's account of the origin of "artificial virtues" in book three of the Treatise of Human Nature, which maybe deserves the title of grandfather of the "English" genealogical line. While Hume identifies a limited realm of "natural" or innate moral virtues founded on sympathy, he historicises -- genealogises -- the extension of moral valuation to a wider range of social "artificial" values, first of which is respect for property, which he takes to underly all justice. Property conventions begin with the recognition of the utility, the mutual self-interest, of respecting one anothers' rights of possession. Morality enters first of all in a basic form in virtue of Hume's observation that everything "which gives uneasiness in human actions, upon the general survey, is called vice." Later, as the convention becomes an established custom, its moral hold grows firmer -- the opinion develops that "a merit or demerit attends justice or injustice". The movement from convenient convention to moral institution for large-scale societies is further helped along the way by, amongst other things, the endeavours of "politicians" using "artifice", and of parents or other educators instilling a sense of "probity and honour".

Hume's account, as Nietzsche's will be, is grounded in a psychology of human drives or motivations. The "passion of self-interest" is just one of these, but a virulent one that presents a particular threat to developing society in which the gains of social organisation build scarce material possessions. Ree tells a very similar story in which a basic "egoistic" drive, if unrestrained by justice, will tear society apart before it can get off the ground. Darwinism allows Ree to build his theory on a countervailing "social instinct" which is "maintained and strengthened by natural selection, that is, by the fact that the animal species whose members were most closely bound together by social instincts displaced other species and so continued alone."

For both Hume and Ree, the genealogy could be seen as involving an account of how these drives play out in a new historical/social environment where humans come together in large groups with the ability to produce and exchange alienable material goods. With drives and environment in place, the story then unfolds pretty much "like clockwork". For Hume, given universal characteristics of human nature, all human beings in the situation at question will be able to recognise their interest in agreeing rules of property and justice.¹

Ree remarks on Hume's theory that it lacks an "explanation" of these universal innate drives -- natural selection fills this gap in his own version. It is less clear in Ree's theory what role, if any, evolution plays in the later unfolding of the process. References to the evolution of "knowledge" and "understanding" suggest that a force of selection might continue working on human societies as well as "animal species", so helping the further development of morality. But, like other evolutionists of his time, Ree does not clearly identify mechanisms of social or cultural evolution, and how they may relate to or differ from biological selection mechanisms.

We can note a few common features in these two "English" genealogies. The work is done by basic drives or motivating forces which are innate and universal to all humans. Universal motivations lead to universal morals -- different environments might cause variations in the detail of groups' moral systems, but both Hume and Ree focus on what seem to be common moral constants for all humans. And there seems to be little room for contingency about the outcome -- could the emerging values have been otherwise? And as well as uniformity across human societies, there is uniformity within -- all members of the group have the same interests. For example, neither Hume nor Ree consider that inequality in the distribution of material possessions might mean very different and conflicting interests for haves and have-nots.

and some frogs

So what does Nietzsche have against "the English?" There are a number of critical references to "English psychology/genealogy" in the preface to the Genealogy (4,7), and the first (1, 2, 3, 17note) and second essays (4, 12²). Nietzsche had already begun this critique of previous "historians of morality" in an important section in The Gay Science (GS345), on "morality as a problem", which condenses a number of his points against Englishness. Here I try to disentangle some of these points:

i) English genealogists display methodological "selflessness" or "impersonality". GS345 opens with a rant, or perhaps lament, on the "lack of personality" of previous Genealogists. These "weakened, thin, extinguished" specimens are unable grasp the problem of morality, because they are unable to have a "personal relationship" with it as a great and distressing problem. "Why is it that I have never yet encountered anybody, not even in books, who approached morality in a personal way and knew morality as a problem, and this problem as his own personal distress, torment, voluptuousness, and passion?" This passage, populated by "frogs", "weaklings" and avowedly "incidental" references to the conduct of "redoubtable females", refers pointedly to Ree ("one particular case"), and resonates with, indeed, a personal and sexual engagement of Nietzsche's own on a number of levels. Similarly, in GMP7, where Ree is named directly, Nietzsche attacks him for not taking "the problems of morality" seriously.

ii) They have unacknowledged moral allegiances. "Usually they themselves are still quite unsuspectingly obedient to one particular morality and, without knowing it, serve that as shield-bearers and followers..." (GS345). This moral allegiance is to the Christian "slave morality" of selflessness. "Their usual mistaken premise is that they affirm some consensus of the nations, at least of tame nations, concerning certain principles of morals, and they infer from this that these principles must be unconditionally binding also for you and me." (Though an alternative relativist position, that necessary differences between moral valuations of different nations means that no morality is binding, is "equally childish".)

iii) They critique stories about moral values, but not the values themselves. "The more refined" genealogists "uncover and criticise the perhaps foolish opinions of a people about their morality" -- "opinions about its origin, religious sanction, the superstition of free will, and things of that sort" -- but still affirm the very same values. Thus, for example, Hume's and Ree's accounts provide new "explanations" of selfless values, but the values themselves are unchanged and uncriticised. "Thus nobody up to now has examined the value of that most famous of all medicines which is called morality; and the first step would be -- for once to question it. Well then, precisely this is our task." In this passage, at least, Nietzsche is very clearly far from commiting a "genetic fallacy" of believing that the worth of a thing is entailed directly by the circumstances of its origin.

iv) They simply identify morality with altruism. GMP4: "altruistic evaluation (which Dr Ree, like all English genealogists, sees as the moral method of valuation as such)".

v) They tell speculative "just so stories", instead of doing careful history. GMP7 castigates -- "English hypothesis-mongering into the blue. It is quite clear which colour is a hundred times more important for a genealogist than blue: namely grey, which is to say, that which can be documented, which can actually be confirmed and has actually existed, in short, the whole, long, hard-to-decipher hieroglyphic script of man's moral past!"

vi) They are mean-spirited, blind to "higher" or "active" forces. In GM1:2, after precising Ree's thesis, Nietzsche notes that it "contains all the typical traits of idiosyncratic English psychologists -- we have 'usefulness', 'forgetting', 'habit', and finally 'error', all as the basis of a respect for values of which the higher man has hitherto been proud ..." The argument here, and in the preceding GM1:1, is dense and twisting, and complicated further by the way that it appears in some places to strike against the last point (v) made in the preface. There Nietzsche called for genealogists to dwell in greyness and adopt a "long, brave, diligent, subterranean seriousness". Now "subterranean" ways are associated with animosity and meanness as the frogs of GS345 reappear -- "people tell me that they are just old, cold, boring frogs crawling round men and hopping into them as if they were in their element, namely a swamp" -- although Nietzsche ends with a "hope" that these genealogists are "actually brave, generous, and proud animals" making great sacrifices to dig out ugly truths. Through all the nuances of Nietzsche's prose, though, GM1:2 arrives at a clear accusation: the preceding genealogists have missed the "real breeding ground" for the concept "good". Whether mean or brave, they are unable to see that moral values appeared first of all in an active creation, an aggressive and spontaneous (cf. GM1:10) assertion of right by "the 'good' themselves" who first "claimed the right to create values and give these values names".

vii) They ignore valuation perspectives. In the note concluding the first essay, Nietzsche emphasises the perspectival nature of valuing. Values are not objective, but "values for", in two senses: for (of) a certain perspective (or agent, drive, or group); and for (towards) a certain end or interest. (These two sense might be brought together if we suppose that the end or interest is that of a drive or agent -- see, e.g., Richardson (2004, chapter 1) for such an account of Nietzschean goal-directed drives.) Thus, in terms of perspectives: "the good of the majority and the good of the minority are conflicting moral standpoints". Or in terms of goals: "something, for example, which obviously had value with regard to the longest possible life-span of a race ... would not have anything like the same value if it was a question of developing a stronger type." The "naievety of the English biologists" is to view a certain perspective -- here, the majoritarian valuation -- as objective, "as higher in value as such". Scientists (which we might take to include biologists) should investigate the perspectives and interests involved in valuations -- "The question: what is this table of values and morals worth? needs to be asked from different angles; in particular, the question 'value for what?' cannot be examined too finely." Their role is to "prepare the way for the future work of the philosopher" who will "solve the problem of values" and decide on the "rank order of values".

viii) They think unhistorically. In GM1:2 the genealogists, despite being the only ones so far to tackle the history of morals, are berated for lack of a "historical spirit" -- "as is now established philosophical practice, they all think in a way which is essentially unhistorical". At least one sense of what Nietzsche means by the unhistorical thinking of these historians becomes clearer in GM2:4. What Nietzsche seems to be arguing is that these genealogists interpret the actions and life possibilities of "primitive" humans without attempting to understand their very different psychology. They project their own values and interpretive stances -- "no more than five spans of their own, merely 'modern' experience" -- back onto the ancestors. Whereas Nietzsche claims that his own reading manages to "measur[e] with the standard of prehistoric times" (GM2:9). This unhistorical thinking could be seen as another failure to account for evaluative perspective. Valuations are made from perspectives which differ not just "spatially" between -- and within -- "societies" and "nations", but also temporally, as human psychologies change over history. (One question is how/why Nietzsche thinks he is able to access these remote and different psychological perspectives. Perhaps there is a suggestion in the parenthetic remark in GM2:9 that this prehistory "by the way, exists at all times and could possibly re-occur" -- the perspective of our ancestors is still available to us in the present.)

ix) They confuse origin and purpose, commiting the "causa fiendi error". In the discussion of the origin and purpose of punishment in GM2:12 Nietzsche alleges that the moral genealogists "highlight some 'purpose' in punishment, for example, revenge or deterrence, then innoccently place the purpose at the start, as causa fiendi of punishment, and -- have finished." They thus miss the point that "the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate ..." As Daniel Dennett (1995) observes, Nietzsche's insight here is "pure Darwin" turned against dodgy "Social Darwinism". Here is Darwin himself (1862): "throughout nature almost every part of each living thing has probably served, in a slightly modified condition, for diverse purposes, and has acted in the living machinery of many ancient and distinct specific forms."

x) They are blind to the will to power. In the same key passage (GM2:12), Nietzsche gives one of his strongest accounts of the notion of the will to power in relation to evolutionary theory. This is a rich and deep subject, but very briefly, Nietzche here appears to widen his target from histories of morality to what he sees as the "modern misarchism (to coin a bad word for a bad thing)" which has become "master of the whole of physiology and biology, to their detriment, naturally, by spiriting away their basic concept, that of actual activity." Nietzsche here appears to be opposing Darwinian theory's acceptance of "absolute randomness" and "the mechanistic senselessness of all events", which he identifies with the notion of evolutionary change as reactive "adaptation" of organisms to external circumstances, with his idea of active change originating in "spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, re-interpreting, re-directing and formative forces" of organisms themselves.³ This notion of active vs. reactive forces in organic processes parallels the discussion of action and reaction in the ethics of masters and slaves, and Nietzsche clearly sees the dominance of reactive or "mechanistic" thinking in science as linked to the hegemony of slavish morality. Again, "selflessness" in ethics is tightly linked to "impersonality" in scientific method.⁴ Denial of will to power is also denial (or ignorance) of the way that change (historical and organic) is driven through conflict, struggles of domination and overpowering.

There are a number of interwoven, supporting (and perhaps, in places, conflicting) themes running through these points. Here I will emphasise one main line. English genealogy begins from an evaluative perspective of its own -- modern "selfless" morality (ii, iii, iv). But its great failing is not to recognise this standpoint as a limited perspective, instead holding it to be objective or true for all humans (vii, viii) -- it sees its own contingent values as values as such. In particular, by projecting these values back into past humans, it blinds itself to the real forces that have driven history. Thinking of its own values as universal, timeless -- thus, equally present at the origin -- it falls into the causa fiendi error (ix), and the telling of "blue sky" just so stories (v). Its lack of perspectival awareness (or "historical spirit") is also implicated in the failure to recognise that history essentially involves conflict between rival or warring interests (societies, drives, etc.) associated with different, and changing, evaluative perspectives.⁵

values and errors

The English genealogists make numerous mistakes, at least some of which (I argue) are related to a fundamental error -- unwittingly taking their own evaluative perspective as objective, universal and timeless. But how exactly does this error damage their genealogy? To understand that we need to think about the criteria on which English genealogy fails, and Nietzsche's new approach can surpass it -- that is, we need to look at the aims of Nietzsche's genealogy.

Skimming a deep discussion, we might separate two issues here. First, Nietzsche wants genealogy to be truthful, illuminating, yield knowledge about the actual history of morality. Unpleasant truths must be uncovered, for which the genealogist needs courage, honesty, and attention to detail. Along the lines of GM1:17n, this truth-seeking role of genealogy could be called its "scientific" role. But Nietzsche's project does not end there -- scientific genealogy is just a preparatory stage for the second "philosophical" task of re-evaluating and ordering values. Perhaps it is best to clearly separate these two tasks -- genealogy is then the name for the preparatory stage alone, providing "raw material" for re-evaluation to work with⁶. But even in this case, we may need to think whether and how re-evaluation imposes certain requirements on how genealogy is done -- and on the type of knowledge, "material", it needs to provide.⁷

Here the question of the "genetic fallacy" looms. As Nietzsche argues in GS345, facts about the history of values do not by themselves imply the "rightness" or otherwise of those values. So how does uncovering the history of morality help us make our own evaluations? To understand the role Nietzsche intends for genealogy we need to look in some more depth at his notion of value. This is another massive topic -- here I'll just outline an interpretation or reconstruction of a Nietzschean account of values which I find interesting, combining some themes from John Richardson and Alexander Nehamas (1994), but without making much effort to argue for it as Nietzsche's own position.

(1) History is about the conflict of forces in power relations. These forces may variously be, or be identified with -- or work through -- human individuals, or other animals, or nations, species, lineages, races, or organs within organisms, or instincts, drives, etc. In general terms, wills.

(2) Wills have goals. There is a basic sense of "intentionality" (or even "teleology") here -- forces are goal-directed -- but these goals need not "rise to consciousness" (GS354) in any way.⁸ (It is important for Nietzsche that these goals are all connected to struggle for power/dominance/mastery -- but in fact that may not be necessary for the story to be outlined here.)

(3) Values (in a first basic sense) are the goals of wills. This is Richardson's reading -- values are the "goods" or goals of a drive or other force (in Richardson's Darwinian interpretation, "the outcomes it was selected to bring about"). This translation fits most comfortably where Nietzsche is talking about human action -- HH32: "all disinclination depends on a valuation, just as does all inclination. Man cannot experience a drive to or away from something without the feeling that he is desiring what is beneficial and avoiding what is harmful ..." I'll leave aside here the question of how we might understand Nietzsche's idea that all organic (and indeed, in some places, physical) processes involve valuation and interpretation. Note here that values, then, as we saw in GM1:17n, are always values for (of) a particular will. (Also, while values are themselves goals, they may also be values for (towards) other goals.)

(4) Human beings can misinterpret their own values. Modern human beings, having developed language and consciousness, and morality, are able to self-reflect on their own goals -- or the goals of the drives, forces, or other wills that cause their actions. Following Nehamas here, we can draw on Nietzsche's thought that "morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena -- more precisely, a misinterpretation"(TI..). In Nehamas' reading, morality is the interpretation of human suffering -- thus, e.g., in GM3 the priest, inventing sin, provides an interpretation of the experience of bad conscience. More generally, if we also understand the masters' invention of "good" as a form of morality (in the broader of Nietzsche's sometimes varying senses), we could say that morality is a form of interpretation of human affects -- not only of suffering, but also of active joy.⁹

Relating this to the remarks above, I'll say that moral values are humans' interpretations (in Nehamas' sense) of the "actual" values that drive our actions. We might here distinguish two kinds of "value": in the first sense, value(a) is the goal of a will, and is causal for human actions and historical processes; value(i) is a human's own conscious interpretation of her value(a). Humans do not, through consciousness, have direct access to these "true" causal values(a) -- we can only access them indirectly through "interpretation" of our affectual experience, and our actions.¹⁰

(5) In fact Nietzsche thinks not just that we can be mistaken about our values, but that this is systematically so. Conscious self-interpretation is not neutral territory, but itself a battleground for competing wills. (A stronger claim is that consciousness is intrinsically directed towards certain kinds of "reactive" interpretations associated with the "herd mentality.¹¹) Nietzsche's task in the Genealogy is to uncover these (historical) forces that have shaped our values(i). At the same time, this enquiry involves unravelling the "true" values(a) of these forces.

For example, in slave morality, slaves espoused values(i) of humility and selflessness; but in truth the values(a) of the slaves, or of the wills (drives, forces) that were causal in their actions, were quite different. The real value(a) involved in the slave revolt in morality was not a moral value but a more basic goal of avoiding -- or otherwise overcoming-- suffering at the hands of the masters.

(6) What then entitles Nietzsche to believe that, doing genealogy, he is able to uncover the true forces and values at play? How can genealogical method(s) provide better interpretations than those usually made by conscious self-interpretation? ...

history for life

Nietzsche may (or may not) be right in his analysis of the true forces and values behind the development of slave morality -- but what bearing does this have on our own modern values? If there were no connection between the values of the slaves and our own, Nietzsche's account would have only academic historical interest, whereas sees genealogy as a necessary part of his own project of critique and revaluation of contemporary values.

Our own values can be connected to those of our genealogical ancestors in a number of ways. We may have (some of) the same underlying values(a) as, for example, the inventors of slave morality -- the same forces may still be at play. We may cover up those values(a) with the same interpreted values(s). Or, more generally, our contemporary values and interpretations may be descendents of those ancestor values, having evolved from them through further compounded processes of struggle, accretion, re-valuation. (And interpretations of values will also come to have causal effects on the formation of new values in new conflicts/relations of forces ... cf. Geuss on the way interpretations re-structure practices) Understanding earlier historical processes and stages in the formation of our own values help uncover why we have the values -- and (mis)interpretations we have -- how they came to be so.

report ends abruptly unfinished ...

Clark, M. and Swenson, A., (1998) trans. and eds., On the Genealogy of Morality, Indianapolis: Hackett

Conway, D. (1994) "Genealogy and Critical Method", in Schacht, ed. Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality Berkeley: University of California Press.

Darwin (1862) On the Origin of Species

Deleuze, G. (1962 / 1986) Nietzsche and Philosophy, London: Continuum

Dennett, D. (1995) Darwin's Dangerous Idea, London: Penguin

Hume, D. (2000) A Treatise of Human Nature, eds. Norton, D.F. and Norton, M.J., Oxford: OUP.

Janaway, C. (2008) Beyond Selflessness,

Lewis, D. (1969) Convention. A Philosophical Study, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Nehamas, A. (1994) "The Genealogy of Genealogy: Interpretation in Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation and in The Genealogy of Morals", in Schacht, ed. Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ree, P. (1877) The Origin of the Moral Sensations in Basic Writings (2003), ed. & trans. Small, R., Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Richardson, J. (2004) Nietzsche's New Darwinism, Oxford: OUP

Skyrms, B. (1996) The Evolution of the Social Contract, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1 Jumping to more recent theorising, Hume's story can be seen as vulnerable to a basic objection -- he has nothing to say to the danger that his nascent property-owners will "free ride" and break property conventions when they can get away with it. In the terms of David Lewis' (1969) analysis of convention, Hume reads the situation as a "coordination game" in which actors have common interests which they only need to coordinate, rather than a "social contract" situation (or collective active problem) in which there are genuine interests in deviating from the rule. Contemporary versions of moral genealogy like those of game theorists Brian Skyrms or Ken Binmore, both self-identified "Humeans", introduce mechanisms of cultural evolution to get over this hurdle.

2Though Nietzsche doesn't use the adjective "English" in the second essay, "genealogists" refers to the same antagonists.

3This close but tense relationship between Nietzsche's will to power doctrine and Darwinian theory is explored in depth in Richardson (2004), particularly chapter 1. For a very different account see also Deleuze (1962), chapter 2.

4Janaway (2008) chapter 2 goes into detail on this.

6E.g., in Daniel Conway's (1994) reading, the role of genealogy is to contribute to "critical method".

7This two stage division comes from GM1:17n -- but another question is where "critique" fits in here -- are there in fact three stages: knowledge-uncovering, critique, and re-evaluation? If it's right to separate these out, then which of these stages lie within the remit of "genealogy"?

8Richardson (2004 chap1) gives a Darwinian interpretation in which he expresses the goals of "drives" in terms of mechanisms of natural and/or social selection. Part of his aim there is to provide an account in which Nietzsche can "naturalise" human action without in fact "anthropomorphising" non-human processes. Richardson's Darwinian alternative seems interesting to me, but I'm not sure it's necessary to get Nietzsche away from humanising organic forces -- for now I'll just assume that some mechanism, Darwinian or otherwise, is available to make Nietzschean intentionality of wills respectable, at the very least, as a framework for understanding historical if not all "organic" or even physical processes.

9Nehamas here seems not to investigate Nietzsche's affirmations that all willing, not just moral evaluation, involves some form of interpretation ... but I'll skip over that too for now.

10E.g., WP524: "In summa: that which becomes conscious is involved in causal relations which are entirely witheld from us ..."

11For this reading cf. Richardson (2004) pp92-4; Deleuze 2.1.

my sweetest friend

2010-01-15T03:33:00.000-08:00

"Except for a few exceptions, my company on this earth is mostly Nietzsche ..." (Bataille, On Nietzsche)

We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and with good reason. We have never looked for ourselves -- so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves. How right is the saying -- 'Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also'; our treasure is where the hives of our knowledge are. As born winged-insects and honey-gatherers we are constantly making for them, concerned at heart with only one thing -- 'to bring something home'. As far as the rest of life is concerned, the so-called 'experiences', -- who of us has even enough seriousness for them? Or enough time? I fear we have never really been 'with it' in such matters: our heart is simply not in it -- and not even our ear! On the contrary, like somebody absent-minded and sunk in his own thoughts who, the twelve strokes of midday having just boomed into his ears, wakes with a start and wonders 'What hour struck?', sometimes we, too, afterwars rub our ears and ask, astonished, taken aback -- 'What did we actually experience then?' or even -- 'Who are we, in fact?' and afterwards, as I said, we count all twelve reverberating strokes of our experience, of our life, of our being -- oh! and lose count ... We remain strange to ourselves out of necessity, we do not understand ourselves, we must confusedly mistake who we are, the motto 'everyone is furthest from himself' applies to us for ever -- we are not 'knowers' when it comes to ourselves ...

(Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, preface s.1, trans. Carol Diethe)

Oh! how happy we are, we knowers, provided we can keep quiet for long enough ...

(preface s.3)

report: winter 2009-10

2010-01-15T03:15:00.000-08:00

on the emergence of norms

(rough summary of my academic research on social norms in winter term 2009; last term i was studying how analytical philosophy and game theory looks at norms; this term i am just reading Nietzsche)

The role and development of social norms and conventions has been a central area of study in sociology since the subject's beginnings, and in philosophy it goes back at least to David Hume (2000). The contribution of the game theory approach is more recent -- the ground was laid by David Lewis with his classic Convention (1969), followed by Ullman-Margalit's Emergence of Norms (1977). A second wave came with the application, taken over from biology, of evolutionary game theory models, pioneered particularly by Robert Axelrod (1987). These game theory approaches can bring powerful analytic tools to work on old questions -- but they also come with unhelpful baggage. In this essay I suggest, first, that we can advance on the "first wave" game theory models by jettisoning the neoclassical economists' conception of "omniscient" rational choice and looking at norms as decision rules within a framework of bounded or procedural rationality. Secondly, this framework provides the theoretical structure for looking at accounts of cultural evolution. But these evolutionary models will come to life when we drop assumptions taken over piecemeal from biology and pay attention to processes specific to cultural change.

norms as decision rules

In a field where authors often reinvent the terminology as they go, one useful anchoring point is Max Weber's (2002) account of "conventions", equivalent to what theorists nowadays more usually call "social norms". Weber defined a convention as a "customary rule" supported by "sanctions" applied by a social group as a whole, distinguishing a custom from a "law" where sanctions are wielded by a "specialised staff". Many accounts still include the key Weberian elements: a norm is, in some sense, a rule; norms are bound up with custom, tradition, habitual social practice; they are usually (if, at least for some writers, not necessarily) enforced with sanctions; some of the most forceful sanctions may be ones which are "internalised" or self-applied; norms are, for many writers, to be distinguished from formalised laws; and they carry some kind of "normative force" -- a perception of obligation, “oughtness”, or, perhaps, "legitimacy".

In this essay I won't deal with most of those points in depth. I focus here on the question of how and why norms change, or new norms arise. The core of the approach taken here is the idea that a norm is a rule for acting or making decisions. Actually much of what I will say will apply to such decision rules more generally, and I will leave a lot of the specifically normative features of norms uninvestigated. In fact, though I don't explore this point in depth, I tend to think that normativity is more a matter of degree than type -- little human behaviour has no relation at all with sanctioning, "oughtness", and "the norm".

Following Lewis (1969), it may be helpful to distinguish between rules and regularities. The notion of regularity is behavioural: a recurring action which agents take in relevantly similar situations. The notion of a rule goes beyond observed behaviour and towards explanation. An individual's behaviour may follow a certain regular pattern because she is following a rule -- the rule helps explain the regularity. However a regularity or pattern may have nothing to do with rule-following (for example, it may be a coincidence); while, conversely, a rule may exist even if it is not being followed.

While, as Lewis notes, the word "rule" picks out "an especially messy cluster concept", here I am using it in a narrowly descriptive sense: in a particular situation S, a rule R specifies a particular action (or a restricted set of actions) for actors to take. To say that actors "follow" or "conform to" the rule in this situation means that they perform the specified action (or one of the restricted set of actions).

Norms being rules goes a long way to explain why they have been so problematic for standard rational choice theory (RCT) accounts of social behaviour, in which actors are modelled as making decisions that maximise their expected utility. The problem, as posed by Edward McClennen (2004), is that: "either the rule gives the wrong result, in which case it is irrational to follow it; or it gives the right result, in which case guidance by the rule is irrelevant."

Rational choice theory supposes that in a given situation there is such a "right" decision which best achieves (probabilistically) the agent's preferences given her subjective beliefs, and that a rational agent will choose this "right" decision. RCT doesn't concern itself with the question of how the agent is able to identify the right decision, using what cognitive or other procedures -- these mechanisms are left within a "black box". Although some defenders have developed arguments as for why the model will yield meaningful results, at least on aggregate or as an approximation, the evidence that human decision-makers fail to meet the requirements of the theory continues to stack up.

In what Herbert Simon (1986) calls a "bounded rationality" or "procedural rationality" approach, no objectively or substantively "best" decision is defined. Rather, the procedurally rational person "goes about making his or her decisions in a way that is procedurally reasonable in the light of the available knowledge and means of computation". (p369). A definition of "rationality" (and conversely, irrationality) in such a theory requires an account of when a procedure is "reasonable" -- but I will slide over that question in this paper. My interest here is less in characterising the rationality (or otherwise) of decision-making than in pursuing the idea that people act by following procedures that they learn, pick up, adapt and develop in the course of repeated interactions.

To be more specific, the approach taken here largely follows that of Gigerenzer, Todd et al. (1999), whose basic idea is that human individuals use an assortment of heuristic principles to choose actions. We can think of these heuristics as tools in a decision making toolbox. Different tools will get taken out and applied depending on the situation: for example, some decisions call for lengthy processes of reflection and deliberation; but sometimes we need to make snap decisions using crude rules of thumb. Context thus becomes central to this approach.

Cristina Bicchieri (2006), although she stays within the RCT language of preference and utility functions, applies such a context/heuristic approach to the analysis of social norms. Individuals use contextual stimuli to categorise a new situation, drawing on an existing "memory store" of past encounters. Categorisation activates a cognitive schema of "beliefs, expectations, and behavioural rules" associated with the context. Bicchieri proposes that these "schemata" often take the form of scripts in which we cast ourselves and others in set roles. The roles in which we cast others come with associated behavioural and normative expectations.Our own roles come also with context-dependent "preferences"-- for example, the preference (or -- desire) to follow a particular norm or other behavioural rule, where the situation calls for it.

However, Bicchieri dilutes the procedural rationality approach in a dual theory of "deliberational" and "heuristic" decision-making. She identifies norms as "default rules" within heuristic decision-making processes; but she maintains that there is also a non-heuristic way in which people make decisions through a conscious "process of rational deliberation". Bicchieri thus maintains her ties with standard RCT, arguing that expected utility maximisation approximates, albeit "somewhat ideally" (p4), this deliberational decision-making which we apply in some types of decision situations.

A more fully "procedural" approach would make no such clear cut distinction between deliberational and heuristic decision "modes". Rather, we could think of a spectrum of more or less simple or intricate, quick or lengthy, rough or "careful" decision procedures. (Nor, I suggest, is conscious awareness a key distinguishing feature.) On this view, deliberational reasoning processes can be seen as schedules or programmes of linked or nested heuristics. For example, "take time to consider a range of options, and weigh up the pros and cons" is a heuristic decision principle. And there's no reason to think that normativity is confined only to more hasty less "deliberational" decision-making -- in fact we often reason, reflect, weigh up, ponder and anguish at length upon normative demands.

ultimata and scripts

This context/heuristics approach cuts through the problem that norms pose to the standard rational choice analysis. We can see this by focusing on a key example, the problem of the ultimatum game experiments.

Two people divide a sum of money (say, $10) in the following way: first, the Proposer suggests a split of the money; then the Responder can either accept the offer or reject it. If she accepts, the money is divided as proposed; if she rejects, neither player receives anything. Under standard game theory assumptions, and if we assume that both players value only money, a rational Proposer will offer the minimum amount (say, one cent) to the Responder; and a rational Responder will accept, as anything is better than nothing. In fact, players in experiments from Slovenia to Tokyo do anything but this. There are some interesting cultural differences in the results, providing material for economic anthropologists -- but what seems "universal" is that few people, anywhere, act "rationally" on standard game theory terms. The most common offer is a roughly equal split; and Responders commonly "punish" low offers with refusal.

Most commentators conclude that the players, rather than rationally pursuing economic self-interest, are instead following norms of "fair division". This is a particular puzzle for those rational choice theorists who hold tight to a "narrow" doctrine, close to neoclassical economic theory, in which individuals' utility functions incorporate only economically self-interested preferences. The RCT theorist can get round this problem by moving to a "broad" conception where players don't value money alone -- for example, they may have preferences for following fairness norms. This is the step taken by Bicchieri or, for example, by Philip Pettit's (1990) account in which rational individuals pursue "social acceptance" as well as "economic gain".

Perhaps the real challenge for any theory of human action is how to explain the diversity of social behaviour -- as Dan Hausman (2007) puts it, to help us understand “why people may be cutthroats at work, devoted parents at home, liberals at the voting booth, racists at the club, public spirited one moment, pious at another, principled before lunch, and utterly selfish afterwards.” There are some situations where people pursue material self-interest above all, and RCT models have (arguably) done well in economics when confined to "market" interactions. But can rational choice work when broadened beyond these particular contexts?

There are maybe two possible approaches open to broad rational choice theorists. The first, which we might read in Pettit, is to stick to the idea that agents have one unique utility function which applies in all these contexts, but make it one which encompasses a broader, more realistic, range of motivations and desires. The problem is then to reconcile apparently conflicting preferences (e.g., economic self-interested preferences with norm-following preferences) within one consistent preference set that holds throughout all the different situations in which individuals act. Alternatively, similar to Bicchieri, they might abandon the idea of a single preference set for a model in which agents have a range of different, possibly conflicting, contextualised preference sets. The problem is then to explain how or why these different preference sets come to obtain in given contexts. While I see the second route as more reasonable, one might think that it leeches much of the content or explanatory power from RCT, a theory based on the idea that humans follow consistent choice patterns.

It is not a big step from contextualised preferences to a fully procedural theory: we just drop the idea that there is a "best" decision for agents to take, even a contextualised or local "best". A rough answer to the ultimatum game "puzzle", taking the context/heuristic approach, is as follows. We can see the way (narrow) RCT theorists approach this situation as incorporating an implicit expectation that players follow a particular "script" -- call it the "market script" -- which mandates decision procedures aiming to maximise personal economic gain. But in reality most people categorise the situation quite differently, and follow instead a quite different "fair division" script.

Hobbesian emergence

This brings us, at last, to the focal question of this essay. Why do people follow the different scripts they follow, with different norms, different rules, in different situations? Once we give up the idea that there is a (rationality) standard of rightness for decisions, this becomes more clearly a question of contingency not teleology. Particular rule-following patterns have built up along particular historical or evolutionary paths of cultural development. What we are interested in here is how these patterns develop, how they change (and how we can intervene to help change them).

The game theory approach to norms often goes together with a certain way of thinking of their development -- or "emergence". David Lewis showed how a convention, as a salience solution for a coordination game, could arise in a situation where no convention yet existed. Similarly, Ullman-Margalit (1977) posed the question of how a norm can "emerge" from normlessness, and this schematic remains standard even in the more recent evolutionary game theory work on norms. Models begin with a kind of Hobbesian "state of nature", a scene in which self-interested rational actors are trapped in a collective action problem -- i.e., their rational decisions lead to an outcome that is worse than some other available "collectively beneficial" outcome. This preferable outcome can be reached if the game is "transformed" so that players come to follow a cooperative norm. The emergence question is how this switch can come about.

The context/heuristic approach poses the question otherwise. If rational self-interested behaviour is also another kind of rule-following action, then we are not looking for a jump from a rule-free state of nature to rule-following, but a shift from one kind of heuristic principle, or script, to another.

There might still be a question of how a rule with the particular features of norms ("oughtness", external and/or internalised sanctions) "emerges" from a situation in which only non-normative rules apply. For example, one approach, which goes back to Weber and indeed Hume, looks at how rules which become customary end up acquiring normative weight through a kind of inertial force.

However, we might want to be careful about making distinctions too sharp here either. Rather than think of norms as a distinct class of decision rules, we might say that there are rules carrying greater or lesser normativity. Specifically, normativity is still at work in areas that standard RCT theorists usually take to be the realm of pure substantive reasoning. The very idea of rational or consistent behaviour has normative implications; and is self-interest any less normative than fairness? For example, there are plenty of "oughtness" claims and approval/sanctioning behaviour in market interactions: sharp dealers get approval and status rewards, the gullible get laughed at, risk-lovers are alternately admired and shunned, etc. Much game theory work on norms assumes, explicitly or implicitly, that economic self-interest (however defined) is the "default" -- that is, while normativity is needed to support fairness, instrumental rationality is all that is needed in explaining market interactions. Yet few theorists make any attempt to ground this assumption. In fact it could be argued that it is contradicted by research in economic anthropology, economic history and institutional economics on the conventional and normative background to market behaviour.

evolutionary mechanisms

Here is a very simplified schema for looking at the development of norms within a context/heuristic approach. To start with, when an actor A categorises the situation she is in as type S, she follows a decision rule R. Later, the same actor A comes to follow a new rule R' in the same type of situations S. So what explains this shift from R to R'?

Evolutionary game theory models address this with tools adapted by biologists. In John Maynard Smith's (1982) basic model, animals are genetically programmed with fixed strategies which they play through their lifetimes; strategies are passed on (with the possibility of mutation) to offspring; thus strategies which foster survival and (asexual) reproduction are more likely to spread in future generations.

Robert Axelrod (1987) and Brian Skyrms (1996) simulate the evolution of fairness norms with straight analogues of Maynard Smith's model. Individuals are programmed with fixed strategies (decision rules) which they play in interactions; they are awarded payoffs which measure their "success"; after each round they die off and reproduce offspring in proportion to the payoffs; offspring inherit their parents' strategies, with the chance of random mutation. For example, Skyrms models dynamics of ultimatum game strategies to show that, under certain assumptions and with the right starting conditions, there is no reason to suppose that cultural evolution will favour "selfish" strategies even if money (which he takes to stand in for humans' biological fitness) is all that matters.

Maynard Smith advised that -- "If ... the idea of evolutionary stability is now to be reintroduced into sociology, it is crucial that this should be done only when a suitable mechanism of cultural heredity exists." On the face of it, there seems little reason to believe that cultural transmission mechanisms directly parallel biological ones. Individuals do not inherit fixed rules from biological (or "cultural") parents -- instead they mimic, learn, and adapt, from many others all around them all the time. A graph of cultural transmission networks does not have the linear structure of a genetic "family tree", but looks something more like a rhizome with links sprouting in all directions.

Indeed Axelrod and Skyrms themselves both note that cultural evolution works on its own lines. The use of the basic biological model is meant as a modelling abstraction which stands in for what Axelrod identifies as the general principle that: "what works well for a player is more likely to be used again while what turns out poorly is more likely to be discarded." In reality this "evolutionary principle" can work through different mechanisms, of which Axelrod lists three:

"It could be that the more effective individuals are more likely to survive and reproduce. This is true in biological systems and in some economic and political systems. A second interpretation is that the players learn by trial and error, keeping effective strategies and altering ones that turn out poorly. A third interpretation, and the one most congenial to the study of norms, is that the players observe each other, and those with poor performance tend to imitate the strategies of those they see doing better."

Are Axelrod and others justified in claiming that a model based on the first mechanism of heredity can account for mechanisms which involve learning and imitation? While I don't have an answer for that question here, I suggest that the claim calls for more than an assumption.

stability and change

The question of how a new norm develops is the flipside of the question: how does an existing norm stay in place? There is a full literature on mechanisms that stabilise and fix normative rules, which I can barely skim here. Many writers link normative rule-following to "conformist" psychological mechanisms. There are lots of issues here: do humans have innate propensities to seek acceptance from their peers, to follow and learn what is "commonly done"? How important are different kinds of social sanctions and "meta-norms" in keeping established norm in place? What are the mechanisms by which sanctions become "internalised" in individual conscience (and "bad conscience")?

Without digging in to these questions, we can say: when a norm has become established, it is embedded in a system of values, assumptions and expectations. A decision rule which is an established norm for a group thus has, to say the least, a force of "inertia" on its side, which a new norm will have to overcome if it is to "take over".

But before a norm gets to that stage, first of all it has to appear as a new mutation or innovation. There are various just-so stories about how innovations get going. One obvious approach is to look at transmission via contact between groups. For example, Boyd and Richerson (2002) have a model in which innovations spread from out-groups: members of a group (e.g., a "clan"), while subject to conformist normative pressure from their own, have an eye on the behaviour of members of neighbouring groups; if some members observe that counterparts in the other group do better using a different rule, they may start to switch. Or Axelrod, for example, suggests that innovators may be particularly powerful or prestigious group members who are less needy of approval or less vulnerable to sanctions. This is one way in which power enters into the shaping of norms, as these individuals are likely to innovate rules that serve to maintain their status.

Following "innovation", a new contender norm has to go through what marketing gurus call an "early adopter" stage in which it is initially picked up by just a few individuals in the group before, if it is successful, building up a momentum or "critical mass" of support and supplants the existing norm. In the initial phase the heretical new rule is working against the norm: it therefore has to have some strong intrinsic attraction for new adopters.

Following Axelrod and also Boyd and Richerson (1995), I will focus on how what the latter call a principle or heuristic of "imitate the successful" can play this role. Supposing that some innovator begins acting differently from the norm, some other group members may begin to see that the innovation brings them "greater success" than the majority. This extra "success premium" may be noticeable enough to outweigh the force of normativity for at least some individuals.

local success

Moving from inheritance to imitation could be a necessary step in moving theory of norm development away from biology and towards social realism. But there is another big step still to go. What here is the measure of "success" or effectiveness that leads actors to switch behaviour? Again borrowing from biological models, writers standardly work on the assumption that there is a single, extrinsic and independent criterion to play this role. Again, this is far from true to the processes of cultural evolution.

Biological evolution has such a simple success criterion -- an effective strategy is one that increases the reproductive fitness of its hosts. But as Daniel Dennett (1995) writes, the reproductive success of cultural replicators ("memes") is only very loosely tied to their ability to keep humans' physical bodies alive -- witness the success of celibate priests or suicidal poets as cultural incubators. More generally, what matters is the ability of new ideas and behaviours to fit, as Dennett puts it, with "whatever it is we hold dear". But then the standard for "success" is not an extrinsic measure but itself a construction of ideas, beliefs, practices, expectations. As Maynard Smith notes, in cultural evolution "the criteria of success are themselves to some degree culturally determined." As such, cultural valuation criteria are not fixed, but also subject to cumulative evolution.

Back to our simple market vs. fairness example, imagine a mixed population in which, when a situation of type Su occurs, some individuals habitually follow rule Rm, and others Rf. Situation Su is an ultimatum game-style division problem; rule Rm is a "market" principle -- offer the minimum amount, and accept any non-zero offer; rule Rf is a "fair division" rule -- offer an equal split, and refuse offers that depart too far from equality.

We can introduce a simple assessment and switching procedure: after each turn, players give a score to their own performance in the previous round, and also to the performances of their neighbours, and compare. Change follows Axelrod's mechanism: maybe after assessing over a number of rounds, a player will decide to switch to the strategy of a more successful neighbour. In general terms, we might model this by saying that player i uses a valuation heuristic Viu to assess or score the outcomes of interactions of this kind.

One simple valuation scoring principle could be: add up the money accumulated over a given number of terms. We can read this as the measure implicit in Skyrms' models. But there is no reason a priori to suppose that money payoffs are the only inputs into the score. For example, players may intrinsically value their actions themselves (whether they follow Rf or Rm, etc.). They may also value how others view (approve or disapprove of) their actions. If we think that normativity shapes the motivation for actions it seems quite intuitive that it is also involved in the assessment of those actions and their outcomes afterwards.

There is no reason a priori to assume that valuation principles are the same for all individuals: some people value money more, some are more conformist, etc. Nor to think that an individual always applies the same valuation standards. Having broken with the standard RCT idea that actions are motivated by a unique cross-contextual set of preferences, there is no more reason to assume that actors operate one fundamental ordering for assessing outcomes. In fact, it seems more likely that the way actors value outcomes (V) is linked to their rule-following choices (R): decision rules and outcome values are two connected facets of the scripts actors follow in decision contexts.

holistic shifts

If we move away from a single fixed success standard, have we lost tractability on understanding the dynamics of cultural evolution? Perhaps this approach might make it harder to construct neat computer simulations or mathematical models. However, it fits quite nicely with some other philosophically established ways of thinking about change processes. I propose that we think of cultural evolution here along the lines of processes of shift or revision in holistic systems of propositional attitudes.

For example, shifts in cultural behaviour can be seen as analogous to the revision of beliefs on a coherentist theory such as that advanced by Donald Davidson (1986). Indeed, it is more than a question of analogy -- as we can in fact retell the story of normative assessment outlined above in terms of belief revision.

To do this, we need to make one Davidson-style rationality-attributing step. The move is to say that an actor follows a rule R in a situation of type S if and only if she believes that doing so is the best choice in such a situation. Suppose that, after the event, she then assesses the outcome with the benefit of new evidence which suggests to her that, in fact, there is a better choice R' for situations of this type. This new evidence could involve, for example, the observation of another individual following R' and doing better. This new evidence causes her to revise her belief, so that she now believes that R' is the best choice.

Davidson explains his coherentism as follows: “what distinguishes a coherence theory is simply the claim that nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief. Its partisan rejects as unintelligible the request for a ground or source of justification of another ilk.”(p310). More particularly, Davidson’s coherence theory has a holistic form: it is not that certain identifiable foundational beliefs “serve as the basis for the rest”; but that “there is a presumption in favour of the truth of a belief that coheres with a significant mass of belief.” That is, the holding (or adopting) of a particular belief is justified by its coherence with the “web” of beliefs as a whole.

Davidson’s position is thus that we have no direct access to circumstances in the “external world” to justify beliefs – even though these external circumstances are causes of beliefs. Applying this principle to our discussion: an actor observes herself and others applying different decision rules R and R’, and observes different resulting outcomes. These observations (or, maybe better, these observed events) cause her to form new beliefs, such as the belief that R’ is a better rule than R. Assuming that this belief is in fact justified (is rationally formed), it is justified because it coheres with a “significant mass” of her other beliefs. Including both existing beliefs (e.g., longstanding “principles” for evaluating action) and other newly formed beliefs (e.g., beliefs formed in response to observation of recent actions.)

On this approach, can we make sense of the idea that an actor forms (justified) new beliefs in line with a fixed valuation standard tied to her biology? Yes, so long as we don’t try and import some mechanism which bypasses coherentist justification. That is, so long as we don’t imagine that the actor can directly assess the “success” of an action against some biological standard accessible independently of belief (that would make some kind of biological “insight” play the part that sense-data are usually called on to play in the verificationist positions Davidson is attacking). Rather, any biological standard must operate indirectly through causal mechanisms which shape the “significant mass” of beliefs that bear on valuation of action.

Here we have to leave philosophy behind and get to empirics. Does biology impose fixed structures on our beliefs which cause us to keep valuing actions in the same terms, even as other aspects of culture move rapidly on? If so, then the modelling assumptions used by writers such as Axelrod, Skyrms, or Boyd and Richerson may provide abstracted yet accurate pictures of reality. Or do the beliefs that bear on evaluation of actions cumulatively evolve at their own pace, breaking free of genetic imperatives? I think these discussions can't be had in the abstract, but need to be based in detailed study of actual cultural processes.

to microsociology

Gabriel Tarde (1899) once outlined a plan to make "sociology a truly experimental science" by having between twenty and fifty sociologists eschew "vague generalities" and devote themselves to detailed local studies of "minute transformations" -- "for instance, it might first be asked, by whom and how the custom was originally introduced and generalised, among the peasants of certain rural districts in southern France, of not saluting the well-to-do proprietors of their neighbourhood." Such work couldn't fail to identify "most important truths" about the processes of social change.

While not a Tardean sociologist, I'll give a minute example of my own to illustrate some of the points made in this essay. Recently at the protests at the COP 15 summit in Copenhagen I was part of a process of shifting a decision rule for a group of a few thousand people. After a few days of having demos scattered and destroyed by police, a comrade of mine from Argentina suggested a new tactic which she knew well from demonstrations there. Rather than march in a loose group as usual, we would form tight lines along the sides of the march, linked arm in arm in human chains, to stop the police breaking through the line of march. Following a meeting in advance of the demo, a committed group of us, early adopters, took on the work of promoting the tactic against the norm. In the demo itself a critical mass of imitators grew, and by the end conformist and normative effects had also played their part in spreading the behaviour until it successfully took over the group.

We started the new tactic because we believed it would be more effective. Effective for what? Different people there might well evaluate success very differently: for some, the important thing is safety, for others, the noise made or attention gained, or acting non-violently -- or violently. At least in my conscious thinking, I was quite focused on the objective of reaching the target destination without allowing the police to arrest anyone on the way. Many beliefs were involved in my evaluation: more general beliefs about what the aims of a demonstration should be; about the purpose of this demonstration in particular, and how much I was prepared to do to support it; beliefs about how demonstration tactics work, about why the previous days' demos had failed, about likely police responses, etc. With work, maybe I could trace many of these beliefs through the personal cumulative evolution of my history as an activist, and my personal history more generally.

Axelrod, R. (1987) “An Evolutionary Approach to Norms”, American Political Science Review, Vol. 80, 1986, pp. 1095-1111.

Bicchieri, C. (2006) The Grammar of Society, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Boyd, R. and Richerson, P.J. (2005) The Origin and Evolution of Cultures, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Davidson, D. (1986) “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge”, in Truth and Interpretation, Ernest LePore (ed.), Oxford, Blackwell.

Dennett, D. (1995) Darwin's Dangerous Idea, London, Penguin.

Gigerenzer, G., Todd, P. M., and the ABC Research Group. (1999). Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Hausman, D. (2007) "Sympathy, Commitment and Preference", Rationality and Commitment, Fabienne Peter and Hans Bernhard Schmidt (eds.), Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Henrich, J. (2000) “Does culture matter in economic behaviour? Ultimatum game bargaining amongst the Machiguenga”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 37: 316-324.

Hume, D. (2000) A Treatise of Human Nature, David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (eds.), Oxford, Clarendon Press.

Lewis, D. 1969. Convention. A Philosophical Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Laing, R.D. (1972) "Rules and Metarules", in The Politics of the Family and Other Essays, New York, Vintage Books

McClennen, E. F. (2004) “The Rationality of being guided by rules”, The Oxford Handbook of Rationality, Oxford, OUP.

Maynard Smith, J. (1982) Evolution and the Theory of Games.

Parsons, T. (1951) The Social System, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Pettit, P. (2002) "Virtus Normativa: Rational Choice Perspectives", Rules, Reasons, and Norms, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Simon, H. A. (1986) "Rationality in Psychology and Economics" reprinted in Models of Bounded Rationality, volume 3, Massachussetts Institute of Technology Press (1997).

Skyrms, B. (1996) The Evolution of the Social Contract, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Tarde, G. (1899) Social Laws, Howard Warren (trans.), New York, Macmillan.

Weber, M. (2002) Basic Concepts in Sociology, H.P. Secher (trans.), Citadel Press.

Ullmann-Margalit, E. (1977) The Emergence of Norms, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

la polla

2010-01-01T11:26:00.000-08:00

ciervos corzos y gacelas

estoy jodido y me siento idiota
en este mundo tan estupido
la situación me esta aplastando
soy solo desesperación
pero tu, pero tu, pero tu
me limpias
mil veces veo a los payasos locos
jugando con armas de verdad
mil veces veo a su rebanyo imbecil
y siento el asco que me dan
pero tu, pero tu, pero tu
me limpias
quiero mirarte
quiero que me mires
quiero tocarte
quiero que me toques
y después quiero jugar
yo y tu cuerpo
tu y mi corazón
tengo celos de la muerte
que nos separara
tengo miedo de perderte
y no temo a nada mas
por eso yo
necesito estar en ti
yo, entenderte sin hablar
y que se vayan a la mierda todos

i'm fucked i feel like an idiot
in this stupid world
this situation is crushing me
i am just despair
but you, but you, but you
you clean me
a thousand times i see these crazy clowns
playing with guns for real
a thousand times this herd of imbeciles
they make me feel sick
but you, but you, but you
you clean me
i want to look at you
i want you to look at me
i want to touch you
i want you to touch me
and after
i want to play
me and your body
you and my heart
i am jealous of death
that will separate us
i am afraid of of losing you
and i fear nothing else
that's why
i need to be inside you
to understand you without words
and they can all go to hell