Writing Capital, An Interview with Graham Joncas

22 Thursday Sep 2011

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Graham Joncas is a student of economics, politics, and philosophy studying at the University of Western Ontario where he also finds time to blog at The Wordsmithy. His curious interests range from neuromarketing to the philosophy of science, and his ability to craft theoretical prose is exhibited in the following interview which hopes to touch upon the key points of his developing thought.

To begin in the middle of things, I would like to ask you a very important question: what does theory mean to you? The readers of this blog come from varying backgrounds but it would not be out of place to assume that they all have some love for ideas. How are you situated in relation to this pursuit?

In my own interpretation of the term (which is no doubt somewhat idiosyncratic), ‘theory’ has a couple of meanings which I see as intimately conjoined. Firstly, I adhere to the school of thought which states that human cognition is an inadequate mechanism for encompassing the Real, and that therefore the best that science can hope to do is to construct heuristic models which can approximate the real as closely as possible. The value of a theoretical model, then, is derived from its ability to predict future events. The latter, I think, provides a more precise definition of the common use of the word ‘theory’. There are some uses of the term, however, which do not fit into the former definition, e.g. ‘queer theory’. I would describe the latter brand of theory as the process of developing metadiscourse. To illustrate, when I was reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, people would ask me what I liked about his thought. I could not answer, because I could only think of Hegel within his own terms, rather than ‘above’ him, surveying his philosophy as a whole and comparing it to other philosophical systems. In this view, the function of theory is to provide the conditions for critical speech.

Following from this discussion of theory, I would like to know what – in your mind – is the role of the intellectual (the subject who theorizes), and what is your role specifically as a thinker among other thinkers?

I am actually quite ambivalent to the notion of the intellectual. Just as Nietzsche considered morality itself to be problematic, I consider intellectualism itself to be problematic. As an extension of sorts to the critique of ascetic reason that Nietzsche did so well (in his On the Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil), I find that there are ways of conceptualizing which are peculiar to intellectuals: a mysterious attraction to games (agonistics); reductionism during periods of low mental health; and a disproportionate attraction to art, power, the morbid, & the iconoclastic. These patterns, I feel, justify a degree of anti-intellectualism, and lead me to be attracted to the work of people who are not intellectually inclined, such as Andy Warhol, Gary Chapman, and Don Richard Riso.

As for my own role, that’s difficult to say. I feel that there is a large gap between canonical research programmes and the established insights of contemporary philosophy. There are several figures I particularly admire in this respect. First, Deleuze and Guattari, who veritably ransack scientific disciplines for new concepts, and show the implications of different scientific discoveries for one another and for conceptions of reality―Guattari refers to this as ‘transdisciplinarity’. As well, Piero Sraffa, the economist who refuted Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, (Marion, M. \”Sraffa & Wittgenstein: Physicalism & Constructivism.\” Review of Political Economy (17:3), pg. 381-406, July 2005. New York: Routledge.) serves to a large extent as a model for my potential as a theoretician: he utilized very intricate philosophy to develop an economic methodology which does not require concepts such as supply, demand, or equilibrium.

I’m currently debating whether I want to become a ‘pop intellectual’. There is certainly a ‘market’ for theory, and its popular exponents are such largely because they exemplify one of the above-mentioned intellectual fixations. (Do you really think that undergraduates gravitate toward Foucault because of his poststructuralist epistemology, rather than the fact that so much of his work centers around sex and power?) The popularity of Pierre Bourdieu, however, gives me hope. According to a 2007 study by Times Higher Education, Pierre Bourdieu is one of the most cited authors in both the social sciences and the humanities (Michel Foucault beat him for first place). His ruthless methodological reflexivity is exactly what social science needs to drag itself out of the mire of pseudoscience; though reflexivity (introspection) is itself an intellectualist fixation, I feel that it is a necessary evil for any social scientist.

[See the question on TL;DR sections below for further information]

On your blog you tend to write with a scholarly voice, yet according to your bio you desire a vocation in marketing. Do you consider this to be a contradiction? How would you respond to accusations of sophism?

I do not consider my vocational choice combined with my scholarly bent to be contradictory, but more incongruous, given current ideological portrayals of marketers. The ‘absent-minded professor’ is just as incongruous, but is taken for granted now thanks to being adopted as a trope. Marketing appeals to me mainly because I want to be in the ‘real world’: to practice social science instead of just theorizing.

I am much different from the sophists, insofar as they focused solely on ‘reason’ as a means of persuasion. I am inclined to believe that there are certain immanent (instinctual) codes programmed into the human brain over years of natural selection, e.g. acquiring preferences for nutritious foods (rather than, say, dirt), receptivity to signs of fertility, etc., and that these codes manifest themselves in everyday human life. This research area, known as sociobiology (exemplified best in Morris, D. (1967). The Naked Ape. Toronto: Bantam Books.), is a rich research programme which is unfortunately ignored by creationists. To share one of my more Machiavellian opinions, I feel that value is largely a self-fulfilling prophesy, and that if I have the chance to make people feel better about themselves by marketing a product which will appeal to their habitus, I will pursue it. Optimally, though, my work in marketing will help to expose me to problems in society which may typically go unnoticed, and I can try to change these on my own time.

You live up to your title of the ‘wordsmith’ in your choice of essay titles like a philosopher (e.g. The Dialectical Moment: A Schema of the Adjacent Possible). What does philosophy mean to you? Would you construe it as a venture unto itself, or merely a pursuit in the service of marketing a product? Or, do you consider this to be a false dilemma?

I attribute no priority to philosophy as a discourse. Philosophy is not conceived in vacuo, and critics such as Marx and McLuhan (See McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.) have shown how philosophy is largely a superstructural phenomenon, i.e. determined, respectively, by the economic conditions of production and by the predominant sense ratios (inculcated by the most popular media in a society) of a culture. To illustrate the latter point, much of philosophy since the invention of print has privileged the visual sense over all the others; since electric media is restoring ‘audial thinking’, it is now profitable to study Greek and medieval philosophy, to which I attribute the ‘originality’ (and current popularity) of Nietzsche and Heidegger.

I gravitate toward marketing because I want to do empirical work, since I distrust pure speculation. I am specifically aiming for the emerging subfield of neuromarketing, which utilizes MRI scanners and electroencephalography to measure brain activity when the subject is exposed to an advertisement or stimulus (e.g. the taste of a product). The problem with the field, as it stands, is that it seems to judge according to a disparate collection of data points rather than an integrated theory of mind. I hope to use philosophy as a tool to separate immanent codes from socially constructed generalities (which is extremely pertinent in international marketing), and to generalize upon particular results (i.e. to visualize these results on the macro level), imagining what a certain cognitive response means within the context of the market.

Both your vocabulary and the title of your blog betray a semiotic focus. You write of “the role of language as a determiner of thought”. What is the place of language in your thought?

I am very interested in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that different languages allow people to think in different ways. As I mention above, I believe that language and logic cannot fully represent the Real, and thus I am inclined to be cautious about them as a tool in scientific inquiry, hence my turn to empiricism.

In a more practical sense, I tend to focus on codes (the object of study for semiotics) rather than language proper (the object of linguistics). By making this distinction, we find that spoken language contains a great deal of premises which are unconsciously transmitted via discourse, as well as any other social relation. I am more interested in these unconscious codes (tacit knowledge) than explicit discourse. I define ideology as the set of premises on which people base their reasoning (though these premises naturally vary from person to person). The problem with any premise, however, is that there is no evidence for its correctness: thus, what is known as ‘common sense’ is riddled with obsolete/incorrect premises, some of which, as Sapir and Whorf argue, are provided by the structure of a particular language itself (e.g. Western languages privilege objects over relations). It is my hope to replace some of these premises with better ones.

The TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) section on your blog is an incredibly useful tool. Do you see this as a compromise for the reader with a short attention span, or perhaps a useful summation of the material for the interested reader?

Both, actually. I’ve committed myself to make my work as accessible as possible, since it is my hope to eventually be able to reach ordinary people, not just the educated, and/or ‘intellectuals’. I believe that one of the biggest obstacles to informing the public is the ‘OMG’ moment of confronting an intellectual discipline that one knows nothing about. I hope to combat this via transdisciplinarity: that is, by using concepts from a variety of different fields, I hope to build upon readers’ current linguistic capital in order to reveal connections which they would not normally consider. I’m more or less currently in my research stage, however, in the hopes that someday I’ll be able to look at these disparate fields in a detached manner (via metadiscourse), and hence be able to simplify them for common consumption. My TL;DR sections allow a miniature version of this for each of my essays, allowing the curious browser to see if they are interested, and allowing the close reader to separate the points I make from the ‘math’ behind them.

The use of neurotechnology, in your eyes, goes “straight to the heart of the consumer”. What is the heart of the consumer, in your mind, and what is the ideal role of consumption in the life of a human being?

One of the most evocative definitions of the Ego that I have yet encountered is: “that of the subject which is reflected in his/her objects.” (Evans, D. (1996). An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.) In short, the psychoanalytical subject invests objects with emotional energy (value; this process is known as cathexis), sometimes to the point where they incorporate an object into their self-concept (a phenomenon known as introjection, which is revealed in statements such as ‘those shoes are so you!’). Bourdieu has convincingly argued in his book Distinction that aesthetic tastes are inculcated by one’s social class; this effectively diminishes any romantic ideas of consumption as an act of perpetual self-creation (Bourdieu, P.; Nice, R. (trans.). (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.). Ideally, I would like to see a collection of disparate value-systems arranged non-hierarchically, e.g. where the labor of the domestic worker is valorized just as much as that of the intellectual worker.

Given the current state of affairs, however, I think that consumption provides the best opportunity for ruptures between habitus (cultural conditioning; e.g. I may negatively view Hispanic people because I associate them with migrant workers) and hexis (genetic predisposition; e.g. I may be genetically inclined to favor spicy food): conflicts between these separate realms allow people to venture outside of the dispositions inculcated into them by their social class: in our parenthetical examples above, a working class person may discover that they love Spanish cuisine, which may lead them to acquire cultural capital which would benefit their economic situation (they might move to Spain and become a tour guide, for instance). As Louis Althusser puts the matter (and I was shocked to hear this, from him of all people):

I now feel I know for certain that one is not really alive unless one spends, takes risks, and therefore has surprises, and that surprises and spending (freely rather than for profit, which is the only possible definition for communism) are not simply a part of all life but constitute the ultimate truth of life itself, in its Ereignis, its surging forth, its very happening, as Heidegger has argued so well. (Althusser, L.; Boutang, Y.M. & Corpet, O. (Eds.). Veasey, R. (trans.). (1993). The Future Lasts A Long Time. London: Chatto & Windus, pg. 107.)

With your interest in neuromarketing in mind, the question remains: do you see yourself as a capitalist? What are your economic views more generally?

A disproportionate amount of bloggers consider themselves Marxists; one of my objectives in writing my blog is to be antithetical to such thinkers. I’ve committed myself to realpolitik, i.e. to the idea that the best one can hope to do is to work within the conditions of the current system to achieve what one can. Thus, I fully consider myself to be a capitalist, since I feel that lasting changes can only be made if they are in accordance to the logic of capitalism. One of my aims is to figure out ways that crucial changes to society (e.g. sustainable development) can be made profitable.

Regarding my economic views, as an economics major I am still learning about the economy, particularly which methodological approaches work and which do not. As the failure of the stimulus in the United States shows, Keynes’ approach (he developed the idea of financial bailouts) does not work. There’s an excellent video here which provides a cogent alternative approach, but of course real economics is much more complicated, in that it has to take into account the state of current business infrastructure in order to identify what is feasible.

The video Inside Job explains the reasons for the financial crisis much clearer than I could; roughly, policies intended to reduce economic restrictions motivated banks to lower their standards for lending out mortgages, to the point where so many mortgages that were not likely to be paid back (subprime mortgages) were given out that when real estate began to lose value, hardly anyone could pay their mortgages back, so they all defaulted. Investment firms and mutual funds had put a great deal of money into these ‘toxic’ mortgages (which they had thought were entirely safe thanks to inflated credit ratings), and consequently lost all of their money. For these reasons, the government had to spend a great deal of money in order to purchase these mortgages, which were blocking markets, and preventing people from spending freely. (The bailout was a separate policy, but I won’t get into that here.)

I can’t help but hypothesize that these policy efforts fighting against restrictions were largely a projected means of combating the Oedipus complex; in other words, that restriction was being disparaged for its own sake rather than for economic reasons. Thus, I’m currently dipping into various contradictory schools of economic thought so as to receive an all-around view of matters (again, metadiscourse), rather than committing to a particular school of thought too soon, which I fear would reflect more about my personal complexes than the economy itself.

To end biographically, how is your commitment to theory self-reflexive? How does your thought reflect the people and events that constitute your life?

As I’m sure is evident from my answers above, reflexivity is an extremely important element of my work. One’s personal complexes motivate to a large extent one’s research focuses, and what I try to do is to focus on the seemingly dreary areas which are neglected by high theorists. For example, a disproportionate amount of intellectuals are fixated on discourse (e.g. Habermas, Bakhtin, Lyotard), largely because that is the means by which they give and interpret affection. (See Chapman, G. (1995). The Five Love Languages. Chicago: Northfield Publishing.) I prefer to focus on non-discursive communication (such as body language, conspicuous consumption, etc.), which is more useful, I think, but less ‘sexy’.

I’m oddly contentious when it comes to theory, which strikingly contrasts my day-to-day ethics: until a better way of life is available, I see no sense in making people unduly suffer by releasing them from their bad faith (a term used by Sartre to denote the coping strategies which hide from each individual the fact that they are not living the lives that they would truly like to lead.). A prime example comes to mind here: as I was working in a factory over the summer, I was telling a couple of my coworkers about how neuromarketing works, and one of them joked that when I become rich and successful, I should call him, so that I could perform experiments on him while he blissfully consumes (his example was “eating a Snickers bar”). This is a textbook example of alienation: ‘I do work that anyone else could do, hence I am reduced, so to speak, to pure labor. Just as while I labor, all I am good for is what is given to every human, so in this scenario all I am good for is that I have a brain the same as all other humans – I am the lowest common denominator.’ One of my main hopes, as a neuroeconomist, is to develop and implement systemic changes which will work with the limits of the human brain to promote productivity, heterogeneity, and personal satisfaction, and to thus minimize system-induced neuroses.

Review of The Coming Insurrection

05 Tuesday Jul 2011

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The Invisible Committee. The Coming Insurrection.Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009.

Proclaiming the entrance of civilization into “an era whose predominant mode of government is precisely the management of crises,” the opening paragraphs of The Coming Insurrection read like that of a postmodern manifesto. Written anonymously by members of “The Invisible Committee” the small book is published by Semiotext(e), the company who brought the works of Jean Baudrillard (Simulations) and Paul Virilio (Pure War) to the West. Anonymously translated from the French publication by Editions de la Fabrique (2007), this manifesto for nothing less than revolutionary action serves as a polemic against the contemporary malaise of capitalist realism.

The original French work, curiously enough, is a central text in the Tarnac 9 trials in France(2008) in which nine individuals were charged with conspiring to destroy overhead lines of the French rail network. Connected to these individuals is a group known as “Tiqqun” whose Introduction to Civil War has recently been published by Semiotext(e). Tiqqun, like The Invisible Committee, attributes collective authorship to their own texts dating back to the short-lived journal Tiqqun which dissolved in 2001.

Divided into seven “circles” (on identity, entertainment, work, security, possessions, environment, and civilization) and four additional chapters, The Coming Insurrection speaks to the exclaimation: “all power to the communes,” drawing upon the concept of ‘the coming community’ of Giorgio Agamben. Aside from a few troubling passages expressing violent attitudes towards authority figures in France, the work is an inspiring read that sheds light upon certain problems with contemporary society (particularly that of French governance and policing). The contemporary French thinker Alain Badiou writes with disgust about the harassment of his son by French Police in his work Polemics (Verso, 2006). As if to follow The Invisible Committee expresses similar attitudes, labeling the misuse of police forces (gendarmerie) by the government as being wrought with a ‘cold pragmatism’.

While now considered to be a primary text in many anarchist circles The Coming Insurrection should be treated far more seriously for its imperative to critique capitalist realism of which they write prophetically: “A day will come when this capital and its horrible concretion of power will lie in majestic ruins”. The use of the imperative, prophetic, narrative, and polemical voices abounds in the prose of The Coming Insurrection; tones since lost in the sea of pulp politics and the rigidity of so-called ‘serious analysis’. At the risk of reducing the work to its form, it could be said that as a piece of writing alone it is an excellent example of how to go about writing a political text. References are also made to the work of both Alain Badiou (Being and Event, Logics of Worlds) and also Giorgio Agamben (The Coming Community), two political philosophers who express similar anticapitalist convictions.

To find the contemporary political import of The Coming Insurrection and its illicit authorship, we need only look to the 2009 article by the philosopher Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths) who asks us to distinguish between the category of sabotage and the category of terrorism (the latter of which the Tarnac 9 have been accused). In his article for The Guardian, entitled “Criminalising Dissent,” Toscano writes:

“To consider the Tarnac case is to be faced with a pattern for the criminalisation of dissent which is becoming ever more general, and which is likely to intensify as Europe (witness the recent events in Greece) is confronted with forms of social conflict which challenge the viability of the socio-economic order.”

On this note and in closing, one might look to recent events in Tunisia, Cairo, Bahrain, and Libyaand ask, “what would it mean to criminalize dissent in these places?” These Arab uprisings point to a dissatisfaction with dictatorship and oligarchy. What would it mean, inversely, to think upon resistance arising from a dissatisfaction with hyper-capitalism and corporate government? (Alain Badiou’s recent article in Le Monde comes to mind). The Coming Insurrection, prescriptively speaking, encourages the populace to question the Western logic of capitalist realism and liberal democracy and centers upon a call to “enter into the logic of insurrection,” a logic which opposes the contemporary hegemony of reason, materialism, and disenchantment. I would hope, in the spirit of resistance and the tradition that comes with it, that we could take The Invisible Committee seriously and enter into critical reflection upon revolutionary consciousness without the cynicism and skepticism that pervades the typical discourse on these subjects in the West.

The plodding onward of Notes on the Compendium V.1

27 Friday May 2011

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Work on the book plods onward and I am surprised at how drafts from last November and December are largely obsolete. Right now I’m working on taking two drafts and harvesting all the important bits from them. Again the ambitious goal is to finish the draft by the end of July and take late August to edit before I begin my thesis (which I hope will be on the dialectic and the Frankfurt School). It’s slow going now, but I’m hoping to pull the trigger on things soon and get writing every day.

Being and Chiasmus continues on!

Max

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