The Party Machine - By Ed Hobson

The Party Machine

Policy is being written according to prejudice.

I started philosophy with the question; what is knowledge, and how do we get at it? Whether we believe there are objective facts, or all knowledge is culturally dependent, we are all (apparently) attempting to grasp at the truth like a cat batting at a light bulb. Truth is commonly perceived as one of the universal goods; truth, justice and the American way, and so on, and much like the words freedom and democracy, and like a slackened drum it’s lost a lot of its potency and meaning through use and abuse, and can now be seen to mean or be interpreted as anything, including where power is applied, in the political arena.

To my ears, not a day goes by where a politician of some sort makes a statement in courageous defiance of the best objective knowledge humanity has, the past, to cling to their own prejudice. Whether they are being “tough on drugs” despite the complete failure of Prohibition in the 20’s; doing “what needs to be done” about the economy in wilful ignorance of everything that happened in the 30’s, or beating the drum for war with Iran forgetting that there is a rather prescient comparative case in our more recent history. Occupying a space in which their importance and position guarantees them credibility enough to shroud their numerous irrationality.

Such is the way statesmen have been separated from the people since the very inception of politics. If you watch the world’s most successful reality TV show, or The News, one can barely imagine that these people are actually anything other than semi-fictional characters, and when they are encouraged to become more relatable, it just seems unbecoming, weird and out of character; almost a different category of human whose concerns are completely divorced from the mainstream. I imagine being a politician must be like living in a bunker, or a very well heeled commune, who somehow have to guess what the people on the outside want them to do. So having little to no idea what that is, the gap is filled by the conventional discourse du jour, one that reads: Austerity is Expansionary; Iran has the bomb and Drugs are bad, mm’kay, no matter the evidence to the contrary, which will never get through to them anyway.

Though we may all have been guilty of this sort of thing before. The argumentative theory of reasoning, if I may go back to the original question of “what is knowledge and how do we get to it?” has it that we can’t really find an answer. This is because, according to the argumentative theory of reasoning, we didn’t start asking questions and looking for answers to gain knowledge and find universal truths, we did so to gain authority and superiority over others. If this holds, then everything that has ever been said about reason and rational thinking by Plato or Descartes was actually an elaborate trolling manoeuvre by evolution. After thousands of years sitting around campfires arguing about various things, our tendency toward great logical fallacies regardless of verisimilitude has worked arm in arm with our other powerful drive, to triumph, thus keeping it firmly ingrained into our minds.

The architects of this theory are two academics of philosophy, called Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier. The arguments they present for this theory are that we are good at arguing, and reason helps us argue; reasoning evolved so we could argue collectively, and we are good at that; and that since reasoning evolved so we could argue with others, we are biased in our search for arguments and have little interest in arguments that advance our opponents views of the world, or those that refute our own. We’re all guilty of advancing our own points of view regardless of any other evidence, and so are our politicians.

This raises many questions. If we all hold a confirmation bias toward our own side, does that explain why democracy is so widespread? Could it be because there are enough people to argue for it regardless of any objective faults it may have? Will socialists or conservatives eventually go extinct by simply being less numerous or less forceful? What else might we have dismissed simply because it conflicted with our own dearly held beliefs? Was somebody, somewhere once in possession of the perfect form of government, only to have the idea trampled on by mass thinking, or by those who simply presented their argument better; a perfect physical form, adorned with a burlap sack?

This confirmation bias makes itself all the more plausible when, for example U.S Senator Marco Rubio and Former Governor Mitt Romney say on the record that Barack Obama is making the economy worse when there are signs of recovery that is if not stellar then at least steady. So, finally resorting to the question I can already telegraph is coming through this page or screen, “What Are We To Do?” Well, If in a democracy all we can do is elect people who will only govern toward their own prejudices then we could simply replace our politicians with a gaggle of bureaucrats who would simply preside over the day to day running of the nation a la Belgium, but that would be boring, so here’s another idea.

Replace the floor of the House of Commons with a giant super computer with access to all the objective knowledge humanity has in its fleeting disposal. Then replace all politicians with professional actors, whose scripts are written by the finest up and coming writers in the land. They would do all the things politicians normally do, such as making public speeches, getting embroiled in scandals, and going on Question Time. The omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent House of Commons super computer would write policy based on the facts, resulting in legislation that genuinely reflects the way the world is, and while it’s plugging away tirelessly on behalf the good people of Britain, elections continue as normal. That way we are able to root for our favourite characters, follow their intermittent rising and falling, cheer their triumphs and obsess over their failures, revel in electoral victory for our side and swear in defeat, with no real accountability and thus, no responsibility. Plus ça change.

By Ed Hobson

Politics and Power - by Mark Dawson

Politics and Power

When Charles Bukowski was asked ‘Why don’t you ever write about politics and world affairs?’ his response was; ‘What for? Like, what’s new? --- everybody knows the bacon is burning’.

When we talk of politics and power, this is not in reference to physical power (energy transference), it is in reference to the power of influence. We have to assume that if we are considering the objects of both power and politics we must initially assume that they are one and the same; showing a figurative, and symbolic likeness. Through this mirror-like naming of things we do away with the real; it is the plague of the logically, visual-biased mind, as outlined by McLuhan, that leaves us with concepts minus percepts.

Post-modern philosophers believed that power developed from a decentralised point. As such, does power really exist or is it a simulacra? In Simulacra, that of the naming of things, assigns it a sign value, but Baudrillard stated that a mirrored sign cannot hold value. The mirroring of the rhetorical sign, through mass-media, has transferred our attention away from the signs of power and politics and therefore these signs have no link towards the ground or its centralisation. Therefore, what are power and politics but the appearance of capital in the form of desire and demand; the end of the obliged sign where there is no monopoly but only duopoly?

It could be argued that power and politics do not just exist in centralised signs such as the House of Commons, The White House, the politician, the bank etc, but in all situations of subjective analyses. Chomsky and Baudrillard would argue that this takes form in private duopolistic media as transference. In subjective analysis both the signifier and the signified lose their connection to the ground when they are reproduced and duplicated. A monopoly can be mirrored but a duopoly is more problematic, and may not be possible.

Who really knows what power is (in the political sense), do we fall back to Heidegger? He stated that power is held in standing-reserve. If so, who or what possesses the greatest standing- reserve of duplicating methodology; that which brings-forth a sign incarnated in apathy. This is, in essence, political power; the reproduction of the mundane, the comfort of the known. And who doesn’t like crispy bacon?

Here, we return to Bukowski. If power and politics are ‘the bacon’, as he refers to it, then how does it burn? Does it burn in clouds of atomic smoke or diatribes that facilitate standing-reserve as force without action. How can the concept of power and politics be tackled if we cannot first locate its source, describe where it came from, or how it exists. We could adopt a more structuralist approach, one that observes power and politics as being facilitated through capital, influence and closed association. As Marx stated ‘Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.’ However, the sign of utility has been duplicated and regressed into the form of fashion, the sign value par excellence, beyond the point of retrieving utility as value.

Merton said that media dialogue leads to nothing but a form of narcotising dysfunction; the replacement of knowledge for action. Knowledge is not action yet we are left with a conundrum in the taking of action; where does power lie? Is it centralised or decentralised? Can it be challenged, and if so how? Should we challenge it and what would be the purpose in doing so? We know that the bacon is burning but as we discuss the how’s and why’s of the situation, nothing changes. Therefore we, as Bukowski did, return to his answer: ‘What for? Like, what new?’

This attitude is a reaction to the counter-productivity of action, the narcotising dysfunction within modern society. Therefore, if our actions have no worth, we may just as well, as Bukowski chose to, adopt an attitude of apathy. As such, who better to conclude this article than Bukowski himself:

“Now if you'll forgive me, dear readers, I'll get back to the whores and the horses and the booze, while there's time. if these contain death, then, to me, it seems far less offensive to be responsible for your own death than the other kind which is brought to you fringed with phrases of Freedom and Democracy and Humanity and/or any of all that Bullshit. first post, 12:30. first drink, now. and the whores will always be around. Clara, Penny, Alice, Jo- eeny, meeney, miney, mo”

by Mark Dawson

Sophist’s World

It is commonly considered that knowledge is power. The argument goes something like this. The more you know the more you are able to control and predict events. The more you are able to control events the more power you must have. Now I will not disagree completely with this line of thought. It is obvious that knowledge does give you some power. However I am going to argue that there is another skill that can give you even more power than knowledge, and that is the power to persuade.

In the film Training day we find that famous quote, that’s its not “what you know, it’s what you can prove.” The reason why knowledge alone is not enough is because we are social beings. It was argued all the way back in Ancient Greece by Socrates that power is increased in number, that even the strongest man, can not defeat fifty average ones. This view can also been seen in Marx's call for solidarity. Now if we accept that man is stronger in a group than on his own, individual knowledge is not enough. You need the skill in order to persuade and convince others of your knowledge. Let me give you an example, a scientist discovers a way to cure pancreatic cancer. He discovers the cure on his own in the laboratory. The next day he is struck dumb and blind. He has no way to convince anyone else that he discovered that cure. He has the knowledge still, however it is useless. This example should show you that the power comes not from knowledge itself but from being able to show and convince others of this knowledge.

Now ever since Plato the act of persuasion has had a bad reputation. It has been seen as something sinister. However persuasion is basically communication. We often judge things for the way they are able to communicate things to us. Another example may be this. A woman discovers a code that can tell us the origin of the Universe. Now this code is so complex that only she can understand it. She has no previous reputation in the scientific world, and can only be judged by this code. If nobody else can understand it, then it has failed. She will not be taken seriously and thus her power will be diminished.

We need not see rhetoric as something scary. It is not a form of magic. Even the most trained sophist cannot convince you of just anything. Persuasion relies on plausibility. The greatest way to gain this plausibility is through using tools that people can understand. The most used tools are things such as logic and empirical data. If an idea does not have support from these tools then it will lack plausibility and will thus not be able to convince.

So my argument is thus. Real power rests in the ability to convince others of what you know. It’s about what you can prove. Prove up to the level that others are satisfied. This is because with persuasion, you are able to convey knowledge on a practical level. In fact, only knowledge that can be socially proven do we consider knowledge. Thus if we are to consider knowledge to be power, we must have the ability to persuade others of our knowledge. Thus persuasion must give us more power. Thus real power lies in persuading others that you have knowledge, not simply in the knowledge itself.

Lloyd Duddridge

Spinoza on emotions, self-preservation and our being

Emotions: pesky little things aren’t they? Some bring joy; others anguish, with a whole host of different feelings betwixt the two. Think of the first time you fell in love, or got a present you really wanted, or passed an exam or driving test. Now, think of a saddening event. Thence, think of how you felt before and after. A whole host of emotions plague us, day in day out: to be torn in all directions is the natural human condition.

For a certain Mr Baruch de Spinoza, who believed that we are all defined through a non-religious God who ultimately controls all things in the universe, emotions are beautiful, logical things. This is because God is defined by logic: he is self-causing and his essence is this self-causation – he must thus continue to produce things to continue to exist. Logical, no? If we are thus created by a logical God, and so is everything else – every imaginable thing: plants, cars, muscles, thoughts, pens and paper, musings and eyebrow raises – emotions, too, are logical. ‘Emotions can be treated and explained through logic, as if they were geometry’, to paraphrase the good man. 

Power of acting; definition of emotions

How though, do we get to this idea? What, first of all, is an emotion? Spinoza tells us in the following statement to define it as the modes of a body by which the body’s ability to act is increased or decreased, the perceptions of these and the resultant reaction. 

Let us take the following example to understand Spinoza’s idea better: I am punched in the face. I see it coming, I feel it – my face feels it and my mind registers it simultaneously. I now stumble back: I cannot act, or be, as well as I could before the punch. I feel anger – my power of acting, of moving, of doing anything, may be better than before, but still not as good as before I was punched. Emotions cannot be controlled by us, says Spinoza – they are logically defined.

Spinoza gives us two base emotions, upon which all others are constructed: joy and sadness. It is through emotions that we can see how the environment is working for us. Emotions are the link between our inner state and the outer world. We can only find our ‘power of acting’ indirectly through the emotions – it can never be grasped directly.

We constantly desire to maintain a joyous, happy state – as everyone, of course, likes to be happy. We thus attempt to repel things that will have the ability to make our power of acting decrease – be it a sad event in our lives, an argument with somebody or a punch in the face; we always strive for the happier ones, as these give us a bit more ‘oomph’ and confidence.

Conatus

The notion of the ‘power of acting’, Spinoza takes yet a step further. Spinoza notes that we all have a certain drive within us: a desire and striving to stay alive. As we are all ultimately created by God, and he, as noted above, must necessarily create to keep existing, he leaves a little imprint of his power in all things, including humans: the desire to survive, the power of self-preservation at whatever cost. This power, he coins as the term ‘Conatus’.

The Conatus is in all things: it can be as obvious as someone running at us with a knife and us fleeing, or as abstract as an electron figuratively turning away from a proton or neutron. Self-preservation is what makes us, us. We do not want to be destroyed, hence we run – this is at our very being.

As the mind and body are simultaneously aware of each other through perceptions of the outside world (as one hits the body, the mind registers it and vice versa) and as the body cannot come into contact with something that would destroy it, neither then, can the mind. This means that the mind cannot think of anything that would destroy it: it cannot comprehend or even have a vague notion of death. To have a vague notion of death, would equate to its feeling of death through the body and it cannot do this, for if it had felt that, it would, by definition, be dead and thus unthinking. As a result, for Spinoza – the mind can only feel incredible highs and the depths of sadness, but nothing beyond that: death is not an option.

A few questions...

This also means that suicide is not an option – how is this explained? Spinoza would say that we can be killed, but only through an external cause, from an outside object. The mind would have no idea that we would die if someone stabs us: it would only sense threat. Can suicide ever exist in a Spinozian world?

Spinoza goes on to elaborate on every conceivable emotion in over 40 pages, all based upon the base emotions of happiness and sadness. Is it right to say that these are the basic emotions that we all feel?

Spinoza says that our basic desire for self-preservation makes us who we are. Is there not more to us than this?

Joe Sturdy

Disappearing Act - By Tara Silverthorn

Disappearing Act

As a performing art, dance is often talked about as an ephemeral form. It disappears before your very eyes. From the perspective of both audience and performer, it can vanish as quickly as it has been conceived, making it almost impossible to be fully realised in representative terms. This ephemeral quality is present in the performing arts in general, although dance and movement (as I wish to discuss it here) is unique in that it is a silent art form. It does not always have the safety net of spoken language to support or facilitate meaning and, differently to mime, does not by default use descriptive body language. For a dance to happen, only three key elements are required: time, space and body. The inherent involvement of the body on some level means that the potential for densely-layered and highly subjective generation of meanings – or intertexts – in the act is almost infinite.

As a dance performer, I have too often encountered and felt baffled by having gone on stage, done my stuff and come off feeling like I had very little idea what just happened. The piece escaped me, slipped through my fingers like water. As an audience member of contemporary theatre dance, a similar experience can occur: the movement happens and is gone the instant you have seen it. One feels only to have perceived it. Meaning can be hard to grasp and interpretation can transform before it has even had the chance to solidify. This experience can be alienating if one is seeking narrative and does not find it, if one is seeking something solid, unambiguous and clearly coded. In our bombarding society of advertising, commerce and image production, something which has no apparent usage or instantly discernable message can be coldly received and discarded as having no measurable productive value. I propose that it is precisely this ‘non-sense’ that makes the art of dance and its ephemeral nature peculiar, wondrous and ‘useful’. 

Despite the fiction of the theatrical situation, the body is real. It is corpo-real – earthly, worldly, human. In fact, ever in a state of flux and transformation, it is both the most and least consistent thing we have in our lives. It is a place of contradictions; at once the mysterious and concrete site of communication, at once reliable and faulty, at once universal and culturally shaped. It is the interface between us and the world we belong to and create. We all have it. We all are it. The Cartesian notion of body-mind dualism, established in the 17th Century by René Descartes, paints a picture of the body as separate to the mind – the body as base, the mind as rational, creating a clear hierarchy of mind over body. This perspective, which is still prevalent in (actually, seems to be incorporated into) western thinking, undermines the possibility of a much more integrated, whole and globally intelligent being, in relationship with its environment and others in a far more tangible, sensate and yet less ‘intelligible’ way. In this sense, we underestimate ourselves. Acknowledging the innate intelligence of the whole body – ‘body’ including the mind and ‘mind’ being considered as something not only isolated and encapsulated in the brain – just might begin to reconnect us on a deeper level with what makes us human. 

To be engaged in movement – the act of dancing or watching dance – is potentially to be paying attention or giving importance in that very moment to qualities which capitalism does not allow time for, so which are not necessarily valued in our contemporary neo-liberal society. Among these ‘under-productive’ qualities, for example, might be perceptive intuition; sensitivity (becoming sensate); engagement with process, rather than product-based goals; and becoming (moving, changing), as opposed to being (or asserting a fixed identity). Live movement and its disappearance intrinsically embrace the possibility of change. This is not to suggest that dancing is devoid of striving, or without desire - for expertise, for pleasure, for ‘doing it well’. These are all the motivations which move movement, allowing something to be communicated with as much clarity as possible, which subsequently lets people in to what they are seeing.  

Dance artist and choreographer, Deborah Hay, talks about the dancer as a “site for inquiry, i.e. a bodily presence trained in the performance of parallel experiences of perception”. In her mission statement, she expresses the wish to: 

…expand the notion of choreography to include the conditions by which the choreographer transmits a dance to a performer, accounting for the many and often discontinuous threads within a visible and invisible context for beholding now.

                                                                           - Deborah Hay (2011)

Tara Silverthorn

A poem for skeptics - By Ellese Elliott

A poem for skeptics

No word can depict the manifold

In a single living being

No names can imagine Gold

Nor the phenomena of seeing

No sentence could ever grasp

One's inkling of eternity

No language could describe

The meaning of infinity

Our logic renders us static

When we speak of one we love

We may seek refuge within mathematics

But then threatened by philosophy

All our dreams explained away

By the force of the enlightenment

But our science remains a foetus

In the belly of epistemology

A note on the poem:

Epistemology is the section of philosophy dedicated to thinking about knowledge: What it is and how do we obtain it. Episteme was a type of knowledge which was said to be divine or of the Gods and which only the gods could possess, however Protagorus (a pre-socratic philosopher (before Socrates)) pointed out that we can't know what the Gods know because we cannot know anything about the gods. Since then there has been much debate about what we can know for certain. Many philosophers have concluded we can always play the skeptic. To doubt everything including scientific claims as they rest upon a fallacious logic; for example, just because I observe something 'X' amount of times does not therefore mean it is now a golden rule. This form of reason is called induction and was said to have been founded by Aristotle, Plato's student over 2000 years ago. Even now Philosophers debate what we can know for sure and little has changed. The debate continues and will probably continue for some years to come. 

By Ellese Elliott

How to cope with philosophy - By Selim 'Selim' Talat

How to cope with philosophy

Philosophy, perhaps above all other disciplines, requires persistence and determination to cope with. It is easy to put the book down when you get to a word you do not understand; it is easy to give up when it doesn't make sense to you. Some authors probably do wish to confuse their points and make themselves harder to criticise. The pretentious may write in pompous language to make themselves seem more intelligent than they truly are. We just have to live with these bad eggs and search after the philosophers who are writing for the sake of truth.

So, why read it? Why go to the effort of penetrating through the dry skin of a long-dead author when you can absorb the colourful pages of Voom! magazine and pass the time that way? I would not even begin to say that just because something takes more effort to complete it is more worthwhile; trying to cut the grass with a pair of scissors is the long way to go about things and often doesn't go very well. Philosophy, however, is always worth it. Philosophy gets you thinking, whether its thinking about why someone is wrong, or trying to figure out what someone is saying, or scaffolding your own world view by reading someone you agree with - it is worth it. Philosophy is always trying to say something; the author no doubt considers her writing the most relevant and inspiring idea in the world! Take the challenge and meet it head on. 

Philosophy versus Life

The most common way to dismiss philosophy is to try and separate it from the 'real world'. Which real world is this: A world which exists independently of human perception? A world which we can only understand because we have hard-wired into us the means to make order out of chaos? A world which exists only because we perceive it? Make your mind up!

Dismissing philosophy as ivory tower thinking is an easy way to escape engaging with it; an easy way out of it; an easy way to escape challenging oneself! Many times in my personal experience has someone written off philosophy as useless without reasons being given as to why it is so (this is just bad philosophy). Stopping to engage in a dialogue isn't going to prevent you from living the rest of your life - the walls of your house will not fall in and the bailiffs will not tear your high-definition telescreen from the wall because you took ten minutes to ponder whether the mind had an infinite capacity to think or was limited by its experiences!

The last time I checked, being human was very much part of the 'real world'. There may be many explanations offered to you from the sciences, or from the religious perspectives, but no where will you find more clues to what it means to be human than in the humanities. And what is at the apex point of those humanities? 

Ideas be our shield

Finally, ideas are our ultimate shield, more so than any physical armour. It is the triumph of good ideas, alongside our technological advances, that makes the real world liveable. It is easy to be angry at the academic philosopher for being this distant, elite figure, but we must respect these people for the stirling job they do in trying to better humanity, through the incredible medium that is language. Hard graft is not just a question of physicality - working the brain is just as tiring, just as frightening and requires just as much effort.

Philosophy is not the easiest thing to cope with, but it is worth it. We don't like being made to feel stupid, that is why Athens forced Socrates to leave or take his own life. Yet I must insist that we view ourselves with greater modesty than the worst of Athens and challenge ourselves, for the good of ourselves, and treat philosophy with the respect it deserves, and spend more of our lives engaging with it.              

By Selim 'Selim' Talat