Introduction
In the following talk I’d like to present an initial draft and work in progress, in three moments, to what could be tentatively considered a Sellarsian-Marxist ethics which has as its goal the dissection of practices of cruelty in an intersubjective level and which for purposes further exposed here, will be considered as embedded in socially mediated patterns. This meaning that practices of cruelty that interpellate and transgress any index of alterity or otherness within a social formation are to be conscripted within minimally or given prescriptive-representationalist account of experience enacted by social agents. This proposition in turn defies any ethics built downstream from the famous remarks made by philosopher Hannah Arendt more than a half a century ago about the banality of evil in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963): acts of cruelty are not merely a set of blind self-less mechanisms or are fed by irrational drives. I’d like to state the total opposite. Acts of cruelty are normative; they are grounded in mediateness.
Lebensformen
To explore this claim, we have to locate ourselves within a first moment that takes into account the fundamental concept of lebensformen or forms-of-life as developed by the later Wittgeinstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953). The importance of the concept of lebensformen, although scarce throughout the aforementioned work lies in the normative status of a first level of semantic expression which lies in pragmatic involvement in an intersubjective environment or community. In our daily lives we follow orders, recognize and order items within a first level of conceptual abstraction which is not a merely causal-physiological response but constrained within the very structure of language. Here I quote some remarks by Wittgenstein were he refers to the normative aspect of lebensformen.
[Quote A]: «19. It is easy to imagine a language consisting only of orders and reports in battle. Or a language consisting only of questions and expressions for answering Yes and No and countless other things. —– And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.»
[Quote B]: «18. (...) Our language can be regarded as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses.»
I expand on this by mentioning the following: a form-of-life such as is briefly mentioned by Wittgenstein is not merely an ontological but deontological keystone and can be observed within ground-level logical framework of cultural and social practices. Downstream from this deontological purview we can tie a link with Wilfrid Sellars' proximity to the question of social norms as constrained by language through patterns. As mentioned in his 1974 paper Meaning as Functional Classification, from where I quote extensively the following:
[Quote C]: «The functioning which gives the utterances of one who has learned a language their meaning can exist merely at the level of uniformities as in the case of the fledgling speaker. Those who train him, thus his parents, think about these functionings and attempts to ensure that his verbal behavior exemplifies them.»
[Quote D]: «Only subsequently does the language learner become a full-fledged member of the linguistic community, who thinks thoughts (theoretical and practical) not only about non-linguistic items, but also about linguistic items, i.e., from the point of view of VB [note: verbal behaviorism as Sellars had explained previously], about first level thoughts.»
And how does this relate to social norms as mediated by patterns? I quote extensively again:
[Quote E]: «The key to the concept of a linguistic rule is its complex relation to pattern-governed linguistic behavior. The general concept of pattern governed behavior is a familiar one. Roughly it is the concept of behavior which exhibits a pattern, not because it is brought about by the intention that it exhibit this pattern, but because the propensity to emit behavior of the pattern has been selectively reinforced, and the propensity to emit behavior which does not conform to this pattern selectively extinguished.»
[Quote F]: «Trainees conform to ought-to-be's because trainers obey corresponding ought-to-do's.»
With this in consideration, I’d like to turn to philosopher Rahel Jaeggi’s definition of forms of life as something that is not merely arbitrary:
[Quote G]: «Forms of life do not concern just any arbitrary practices, but normatively imbued practices; they are part of the social-norm structure, of a normative social order with a claim to validity.»
Patterning and Ideology
So now that we have defined this first instance of patterns and the normative to be found in the ground of lebensformen or forms-of-life as something that is not arbitrary or blind to self-reflection, I believe it would be essential to do a rundown and quote in full of Rahel Jaeggi’s four point definition of what constitutes a form of life (or the core elements).
[Quote H]: «Forms of life present themselves as clusters of social practices or, in Lutz Wingert's formulation, as "ensembles of practices and orientations" and systems of social behavior. They include attitudes and habitualized modes of conduct with a normative character that concern the collective conduct of life, although they are neither strictly codified nor institutionally binding. This means the following:
(1) We (should) speak of forms of life only when it is not a matter of individual or isolated practices but of clusters of practices that are interconnected and interrelated in the one way or another.
(2) Forms of life are collective formations, that is, "orders of human coexistence." One does not have a form of life as an individual. A form of life rests on socially shared practices, even where one participates in it and relates to it as an individual. The form of life of an individual refers to the respect in which he participates in a collective practice as an individual and through his individual actions.
(3) As established formations with a habitual character, forms of life have a passive as well as an active element. One lives in a form of life as in a structure that is pregiven and laid out in advance, even if one simulta neously creates it through one's own practice.
(4) As orders of social cooperation that rest on regular practices, forms of life are therefore always also demarcated from the possibility of disorder and are distinguished, at least from the internal perspective of their participants, by a certain expectation of cooperation. Thus, not unlike the phenomena of custom and tradition, a certain normative pressure of expectation is associated with forms of life».
This four point definition by Jaeggi highlights the importance of intersubjective interactions when dealing with ground-level linguistic conceptualizations, which is an issue that was implicitly dealt with in Sellars aforementioned paper and which has given way to a series of discussions, most notably in Davidson’s Three Varieties of Knowledge and McDowell’s commentary on Davidson’s observation about the formation of the normative through intersubjectivity. We first follow McDowell’s recapitulation:
[Quote I]: «Davidson argues that knowledge of the non-mental world around us (1), knowledge of the minds of others (2), and knowledge of our own minds are mutually irreducible but mutually interdependent (3)»
Then going back to Davidson’s own essay, we can highlight his triangulation argument which is the following:
[Quote J]: «What seems basic is this: an observer (or teacher) finds (or instills) a regularity in the verbal behaviour of the informant (or learner) which he can correlate with events and objects in the environment. This much can take place without developed thought on the part of the observed, of course, but it is a necessary condition for attributing thoughts and meanings to the person observed. For until the triangle is completed connecting two creatures, and each creature with common features of the world, there can be no answer to the question whether a creature, in discriminating between stimuli, is discriminating between stimuli at the sensory surfaces or somewhere further out, or further in. Without this sharing of reactions to common stimuli, thought and speech would have no particular content—that is, no content at all.»
[Quote K]: «If the two people now note each others' reactions (in the case of language, verbal reactions), each can correlate these observed reactions with his or her stimuli from the world. The common cause can now determine the contents of an utterance and a thought. The triangle which gives content to thought and speech is complete. But it takes two to triangulate. Two, or, of course, more.»
Now, what we can take from Davidson’s and McDowell’s disagreement is the tension between the causal and the normative which would deliver us back the Sellarsian idea of mediateness by way language and the different sorts (or sortals, which won’t be discussed here at the moment) of mediateness, a first level of conceptualization that does depend on facts and not bare or 'naked' sensibilia. I quote Davidson again:
[Quote L]: «When we look at the natural world we share with others we do not lose contact with ourselves, but rather acknowledge membership in a society of minds. If I did not know what others think I would have no thoughts of my own and so would not know what I think. If I did not know what I think, I would lack the ability to gauge the thought of others. Gauging the thoughts of others requires that I live in the same world with them, sharing many reactions to its major features, including its values. So there is no danger that in viewing the world objectively we will lose touch with ourselves. The three sorts of knowledge form a tripod: if any leg were lost, no part would stand.»
[Quote M]: «The normative and the causal properties of mental concepts are related. If we were to drop the normative aspect from psychological explanations, they would no longer serve the purposes they do. We have such a keen interest in the reasons for actions and other psychological phenomena that we are willing to settle for explanations that cannot be made to fit perfectly with the laws of physics. Physics, on the other hand has as an aim laws that are as complete and precise as we can make them; a different aim. The causal element in mental concepts helps make up for the precision they lack: it is part of the concept of an intentional action that it is caused and explained by beliefs and desires; it is part of the concept of a belief or a desire that it tends to cause and so explain actions of certain sorts.»
McDowell of course doesn’t sight right with this and puts forward his Aristotelian-Sellarsian purview of this situation, and I repeat, that the causal already contains a first level of conceptualization, albeit a primitive one that deals with entitlement which is not explicitly expressed (here Sellars’s ghost looms heavily in the background) but that by traversing the roads of discursive actualization can become objective, it can become a tractable belief by way of intersubjectivity. And I quote:
[Quote N]: «The trouble by my lights is that Davidson’s picture has no room for intuitions in the sense in which Kant is talking about intuitions by the time we get to the Transcendental Deduction in the first Critique—episodes that are themselves cases of our sensory capacities at work, as opposed to being merely caused by operations of our sensory capacities, but which are like beliefs in being actualizations of conceptual capacities and so able, consistently with the basic principles that underlie Davidson’s thinking here, to be rationally and not just causally relevant to our thinking. Davidson has no room for the availability of facts to subjects in their sensory consciousness itself.»
Now that we have considered how there are different levels of conceptualization at work with what a philosopher like Giorgio Agamben would characterize erratically as bare-life (life conceptualized as a merely biological-physiological construct) and the reason why we would rather choose the concept of form of life as it reflects on the complexity, norms, rules and patterns at play, we’d also like to go an extra mile and make an analogy with what marxist philosopher Louis Althusser has to say about the supposed distinction between being-an-individual and being-always a subject of ideology. This is an assumed distinction, because for Althusser one’s own self is already predetermined by a common conceptual ground which is ideologically charged, and in response to Jaeggi’s observations about how state institutions and apparatuses seem not to give shape forms-of-life, Althusser observes, and here I also follow philosopher J.P. Caron’s own upcoming work on this issue (as recently presented under the title of Cognitive Mapping between Althusser and Sellars), how our shared rituals, practices defined through that first-level of normativity that belong to the field of what Sellars has described as pattern-governed linguistic behavior don’t find themselves within a neutral ground.
This meaning that forms-of-life can be and are shaped by institutions, apparatuses. They are not tabula rasa concepts put to practice. They are determined by concrete socioeconomic and historical dispositions which are put through display through that first level of conceptualization i.e. patterns that are enacted within the intersection of capitalism as the production of experience and its modulation by its corresponding jurisdictional apparatuses of enforcement. On this issue, I now quote Althusser:
[Quote O]: «It remains to show, using a few concrete examples, how this whole extraordinary (and simple) machinery functions in its actual, concrete complexity. Why 'simple'? Because the principle of the ideology effect is simple: recognition, subjection, guarantee - the whole centred on subjection. Ideology makes individuals who are always-already subjects (that is, you and me) 'go'. Why 'complex'? Because each subject (you and I) is subjected to several ideologies that are relatively independent, albeit unified under the unity of the State Ideology. For there exist, as we have seen, several Ideological State Apparatuses. Hence each subject (you and I) lives in and under several ideologies at once. Their subjection-effects are 'combined' in each subject's own acts, which are inscribed in practices, regulated by rituals, and so on.»
Here, what is most valuable about Althusser’s observations is that what we have considered in that ground level of the normative, these common sensical enactments become entrapped through the processes of production within capitalism. The worker, the proletarian (a term which would need its own revision and update under our current conditions of socioeconomic oppression, be it the cognitariat or precariat) through the acts embedded in the quotidian, in the spaces of leisure nested within this routine precariously feedback on what could be named the process of production of forms-of-life. About this issue, we can quote Althusser at length again:
[Quote P]: «The proletarian, when his workday is over (the moment he has been waiting for since morning), drops everything, without further ado, when the whistle blows, and heads for the lavatories and lockers. He washes up, changes his clothes, combs his hair, and becomes another man: the one who is going to join the wife and children at home. Once he gets home, he is in a completely different world that has nothing to do with the hell of the factory and its production rhythms. At the same time, however, he finds himself caught up in another ritual, the ritual of the practices and acts (free and voluntary, of course) of familial ideology: his relations with his wife, the kids, neighbours, parents, friends - and on Sundays, still other rituals, those of his fantasies or favourite pastimes (likewise free and voluntary): the weekend in the forest of Fontainebleau or (in a few cases) his little garden in the suburbs, and sport, the telly, radio, God knows what; and then holidays, with still other rituals (fishing, camping, Tourism and Work, People and Culture, God knows what).»
Is there an outside to this always ideologically mediated pattern-governed linguistic behavior? On this question I quote Althusser’s final remarks of his unfinished work on ISA’s:
[Quote Q]: «When nothing is happening, the Ideological State Apparatuses have worked to perfection. When they no longer manage to function, to reproduce the relations of production in the 'consciousness' of all subjects, 'events' happen, as the phrase goes, more or less serious events, as in May, the commencement of a first dress rehearsal. With, at the end, some day or the other, after a long march, the revolution. By way ef a provisional conclusion.»
And of course, here we see premise of a revolution taking place which doesn't lead to a mere quietism in the face of the given, as is usual in the accusations given to Althusser's reading of Marx by his critics. But if we go beyond mere prescriptive functioning of the aforementioned ground-level acting by way of conceptualization, would it be enough? We have to go further and bring forth a provocation that slowly begins to unwind cruelty within ideologically mediated patterning and norm-following.
A Provocation
We can now bring forth an open-ended speculation regarding certain evolutionary models about cognition through the ethological dynamics of predator v. prey that have to do with a counter-normative narrative that could act as an exit to our prescriptive nadir, but first I’d like to return to the problem of the production of experience. In a recent intervention by philosopher Hilan Bensusan, The Underground of Concepts, they insist on the reversal of the McDowellian/Davidsonian issue about sensibilia and experience, remarking that the only way of subversion possible about ideologically mediated patternings and norm-followings is moving beyond the concept and inhabiting the consequences of bare experience by way of Lyotard’s digressions in Economie Libidinale. Here I quote from them:
[Quote R]: «It is experience that not only challenge beliefs but also consolidate them and both this processes are account in terms of beliefs that are composed of concepts in their proper propositional environment only as deception. Concepts alone would not do the job, thinking is thoroughly situated and cannot be deprived of the productive force that comes from something that is not general, that cannot be applied, as a proposition, across the board. To understand Lyotard’s diagnosis in terms of the relevance of experience for thought is also to highlight that experience is a form of production – situated and irreucible to the propositional beliefs that it entails. Experiencing is producing something – while capital is concerned with products of thinking that display the form of beliefs that are general and disconnected from where experience took place, from where something was had in view.»
Following Bensuan's exploration of bare experience, I'd like to then turn to speculating around what I'd previously mentioned about ethology. Following Alain Berthoz’s study The Brain Sense of Movement, I’d like to select the following passages about the Toad’s “decision”, here I quote:
[Quote S]: «The classification of perceptions (for example, of prey or predator) is determined by the repertoire of possible actions (in this case, capture or flight). Hence a further illumination of my proposition, perception is simulation of action. But there is more. We capture first of all with our gaze. To study how mechanisms of gaze control anticipate targets in motion, we constructed a visual game in the laboratory like the ones at a country fair where you have to shoot at a line of ducks or pop multicolored balloons that an air current blows around at random. Despite their simplicity, these games are difficult, which is how the fairgrounds people manage to stay in business. In our experiment, the subject first has to fixate on a spot in the center of a screen on which, from top to bottom, a second spot appears that falls suddenly, like a ball. An auditory signal set off at various moments during the fall instructs the subject to catch the falling target with an ocular saccade. During the 150-odd milliseconds during which the eye remains fixated, the brain estimates the velocity of the target, which moves toward the periphery of the eye. You can do this experiment yourself by focusing on a point in front of you and holding an object in your right hand above the horizontal. Let the object fall, and then try to catch it with your gaze during its fall...»
What is opened up and not explicitly mentioned by Berthoz's controlled experiments about the physiology of brain-eye response when dealing with a predator v prey scenario is that this very scenario is usually considered to be contentless, not even able to reach the level of intuitions without concepts. But, what if we could carefully dissect this example and consider that there is already a first level abstraction of space that takes place in the eye and mind of the predator? To give shape to this speculation I find Reza Negarestani’s insights valuable, which I quote:
[Quote T]: «As the predator registers the presence of its prey, it begins to compute the possible orientation of the prey by way of the saccadic jerk. It then generates the gesture of movement: the muscles are primed and place the predator in a chasing position (or, for that matter, the prey in position of flight). This mobile deviation from the vertical gravitational pull is simultaneously registered and stabilized by the vestibular system of the inner ear, permitting the predator to form a dynamic yet stable chase line (a gesture of an embodied movement in space) to hunt the prey. This chase line, however, is not neutral, for it is the very neurophysiologically enabled abstraction that allows the predator to differentiate itself from its own prey and the surrounding space. In a sense, the escape from the conceptless exteriority of space -the undifferentiated void- requires drawing a neoconceptual abstraction of a line as a chaotic mobile unit. Wandering in space is tantamount to thinking about space (...) But more importantly, making new abstractions of movement coincides with producing new cognitive technologies for navigating space. Such cognitive technologies enable the extraction of various relationships that objects hold in space, and finally, derivate new concepts of space far more elaborate and expansive than the concept of space given to us by our senses.»
The development of cognitive technologies mentioned by Negarestani in the predator v prey scenario implies the following provocation by taking a materialist critique to its own radical means and ends: if we were to make a critique of life-forming as that which grounds the patterns and norms on which mediated intersubjectivity takes place, we would necessarily consider a revisionary ethics that does not try to block the well of irrationality stemming up from supposed cruel practices but rather a radical counter normative ethics that deviates from the origins of cognition as that which is traversed by cruelty by way of necessity. As a disclaimer, this is not a merely nihilist or pessimist picturing of cognition per se but more of a massive task that must take place if we are to reconfigure our own purview of the ethical as that which is not divided between concepts and acts, institutions and subjects, and the ontological and the deontological.
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