This post continues with an earlier one found at http://swexler008.tumblr.com/post/84337559741/reason-risk-subjectivation
I. Negative and positive freedom collapse when risk management brings future into present.
II. “Kantians see the normative basis of morality as derived from the positive freedom of giving and asking for reasons.”
III. Yet normative statuses cannot be so one-sided since their content must “have an authority that is independent of the responsibility that the judger takes for it.”
IV. Hegel suggests instead that “normative statuses such as authority and responsibility are at base social statuses,” i.e., Hegel rejects two autonomy models implied by Kant’s autonomy thesis: the attitude-dependence of “those over whom authority is exercised” and “the attitudes of those exercising authority, the superiors” (since each “construes the reciprocal notions of authority in a one-sided way”). According to Brandom, “Hegel’s social model of reciprocal recognition” defines authority and responsibility as “the products of the attitudes, on the one hand, of those who undertake responsibility and exercise authority, and on the other, of those who hold others responsible and acknowledge their authority.” Hegel’s “clear advance on the traditional obedience model” brings “symmetry of authority and responsibility” but only insofar as “X and Y are identical: when the authoritative one and the responsible one coincide.” Symmetry comes with the collapse of these roles and “at the cost of making it impossible to satisfy the demand of relative independence of normative force and content.”
Normative status = Attitude of X {to undertake responsibility} + Y {to exercise authority} • Attitude of X1 {to hold responsible} + Y1 {to acknowledge authority}
V. Per Lazzarato, are we not now more than ever rationally and morally bound in risk? In debtor-creditor relations? (The Making of the Indebted Man)
VI. That is, “debt implies subjectivation” as the governed are trained to “promise.”
VII. Isn’t this economic relation both “rational” and “ethical” in the Hegelian sense?
VIII. Doesn’t the inferential and material reciprocity in risk management make risk rational and ethical?
IX.Authority and responsibility collapse as risk management makes risk rational and ethical for capital.
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“[A] first implication of recognizing that we are all unique is the paradoxical result that we are therefore fated to need the other if we are to consummate our selves.”
—Michael Holquist, “Introduction: The Architectonics of Answerability”
The Marxist formalist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) argued that the “uniqueness of the self” is “precisely that condition in which the necessity of the other is born” (xxv). This social relation also makes meaning dialogical and pragmatic at the points of acquisition-use.
Orthodox Marxists continue to misread Wittgenstein’s pragmatism as “ludic” poststructuralism or complicit instrumentalism, i.e., as the epistemology underwriting financialization, transnationalism, casualized labor, and standards-based education. Wittgenstein scholars, on the other hand, rarely consider the role of history, politics, and economics in their approach to language and meaning (though Social Epistemology permits the conversation).
Yet Wittgenstein’s pragmatism and Marx’s materialism are not only compatible but integral to a more complete picture of social reality. Marx shows the relations that reify (give institutional and economic life to) the pragmatic moments in meaning-making. Wittgenstein’s pragmatism—the “nonsense” in the showing (vs. stating) of aesthetic and ethical judgments (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) and the language-games in “meaning-as-use” (Philosophical Investigations) is understanding in the immediate, acquisitional sense. Marx’s categories (history, class) cannot “get to” the points of communication and understanding; Wittgenstein spends little time if any defining the context of those events. Marx and Wittgenstein, then, are two very different yet ineffaceable sides of the same coin.
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The “Return to Reason” that drives current epistemology, literariness, and labor is a structural change clarified through the union of pragmatist philosophy of language and materialist cultural theory. Robert Brandom’s rationalistic pragmatism (Between Saying and Doing), for example, sees the normative originating in a reciprocity between rational individuals making inferences, while Maurizio Lazzarato’s recent book, The Making of the Indebted Man, provides the content for the reciprocity: Today’s homo economicus is rationally and morally bound in debtor-creditor relations (“debt implies subjectivation” as the governed are trained to “promise”). Hence, new pragmatisms that define an agent’s judging, understanding, and acting as a response to norms (i.e., “normative functionalism”) require materialist critique for substantive understanding and social change. Pragmatist philosophy of language and materialist cultural theory are necessarily interdependent lest the former be “part of the problem” (i.e., bourgeois radicalism) and the latter reductive (e.g., Marxism alone cannot explain language acquisition and meaning).
The morality that helps naturalize today’s debtor-creditor relations would seem to belie Wittgenstein’s efforts to protect ethics from a totalizing logic, a task that occupied the philosopher for the majority of his professional and personal life. Yet given transnational capital’s reach and the communal-contextual nature of ethics, financial logic has become a universal language game. The pragmatism that joins the early and later Wittgenstein is particularly useful for illuminating how neoliberal subjectivation promotes and suffers the disciplining of labor and concentration of wealth (Harvey et al.). More recent pragmatisms, such as the normative functionalism of Sellars, McDowell, and Brandom, show how late capitalism’s injunction to “reason and risk” makes the debtor-creditor relation a rational and ethical transaction.
[A work in progress.]
STEVEN WEXLER 