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The best thing you are likely to read about the Supreme Court affirmative action decision — or rather the response to it — is Freddie’s take. Two points strike me as especially important: first, that the whole kerfuffle is a distraction from any actually meaningful racial politics in this country, since a candidate who has to go to Columbia or Amherst rather than Harvard is not exactly a victim; and second, that there’s a massive media freakout about this because so many people in our media are the products of elite universities. Several decades ago, when most journalists attended mediocre universities or, often enough, were not even college educated, we would have had a chance to have this story like this presented with some fresh, clear, well-seasoned perspective. But our journalists haven’t had any of that commodity on hand for a long, long time.
I reject the widespread idea that Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy is based on an « ontology of difference ». The only book where he seems to propound such an ontology is in DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION, and in the very next book LOGIC OF SENSE « difference » plays next to no role. « Difference » is a mask for multiplicity.
This idea of difference as being only one (and temporary) instantantiation of multiplicity is explicated in many places on my blog and in my various articles, but it can be found specifically set out here:
https://www.academia.edu/11652059/LARUELLE_AND_DELEUZE_from_difference_to_multiplicity
It would be a mistake to concludee that Deleuze progressed from differentialism to pluralism Guattari’s influence. The conceptual evolution involved is more complex than that.
First we must remark that Deleuze was already a pluralist before DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION (1968), the adhesion to pluralism is very clear in his NIETZSCHE AND PHILOSOPHY (1962), and straight after in LOGIC OF SENSE (1969).
In other words, far from being the key to Deleuze’s thought DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION is the exception, in which Deleuze takes on the « mask » of difference to speak to the contemporary conceptual conjuncture influenced by structuralism and to inflect it towards pluralism.
Note: I put « mask » in scare-quotes because it is more than a disguise on the same conceptual level, as if it were a case of a simple reformulation in the terms of the current vocabulary. It is rather a question of a difference in conceptual level, the ontology of difference is just one instantiation of Deleuze’s pluralist meta-ontology (as is the ontology of desiring machines) which progressively fades away in the chapters of A THOUSAND PLATEAUS, in favour of an ontology of « assemblages ».
My analysis here differs from that set out by Laruelle in his book PHILOSOPHIES OF DIFFERENCE (1986). As I have argued elsewhere on this blog Laruelle comes rather late to the game, propounding post festum his « critical introduction » of philosophies of difference at a moment when all the major thinkers of difference had already long abandoned it.
My second objection to Laruelle on this Deleuzian strand is that he misreads the status of difference in Deleuze, seeing it as the ultimate ontological concept whereas it is the provisional instantiation of a pluralist meta-ontology implemented for intervening in a specific conjuncture, and not to be inflated into a systemic ground.
Deleuze talks about the primacy of multiplicities in all his major works, and about difference in only one. In my reconstruction I call Deleuze’s overarching research programme a pluralist meta-ontology. One of the key traits of pluralism in this sense is diachronicity (the ontology evolves over time and varies over contexts, what Deleuze calls « heterogenesis), another is porosity (the existence of semantic or structural incommensurabilities does not exclude pragmatic interactions, which Deleuze calls « encounters » or « dialogues ».
It is on the basis of this model that I think « difference » is far less important for Deleuze than commonly believed, and that is embodies a low degree of ontological pluralism.
For some wider context, my original paper (from 1980): https://www.academia.edu/42083394/PLURALIST_FLEXI_ONTOLOGY_Deleuze_Lyotard_Serres_Feyerabend_
In 1980 after spending six months in Paris attending Deleuze and Foucault’s seminars, and interviewing Serres and Lyotard, I returned to Sydney and gave a paper synthesising my impressions. In particular I set out my idea of a common meta-ontology of pluralism (that I called « flexi-ontology » at the time, to highlight the diachronic aspect).
It was on the basis of this wider research programme that I elaborated my blog Agent Swarm, and I was pleased to see that Bruno Latour underwent a meta-ontological turn that confirmed my prior hypotheses, asking what is the recommended dose of ontological pluralism?, and distinguishing different levels of dose:
It is interesting in this context to see that Deleuze in 1989 played with the idea of grouping his published works not in chronological order, but rather in an order that we could call « thematic », but that is better described in the light of the distinctions made above between meta-ontology, instantiations, and degrees of ontological pluralism, that in Deleuzian terms we could call degrees of deterritorialisation.
In David Lapoujade’s introduction to DESERT ISLANDS, he cites the divisions that Deleuze envisions for his bibliography:
« I. From Hume to Bergson / II. Classical Studies / III. Nietzschean Studies / IV. Critical and Clinical / V. Esthetics / VI. Cinema Studies / VII. Contemporary Studies / VIII. The Logic of Sense / IX. Anti-Oedipus / X. Difference and Repetition / XI. A Thousand Plateaus »
I am indebted to Alexander Boyd who, citing this classification, posed the question of the logic behind the last four divisions.
In terms of the analysis I have been developing one could see Deleuze’s grouping as corresponding to an order of increasing degrees of deterritorialisation, or of ontological pluralism.
From this point of view, LOGIC OF SENSE is the odd-one-out, as it relies on psychoanalysis (content), series (method), surfaces (metaphysics). ANTI-OEDIPUS constitutes a rupture with all three.
Nonetheless ANTI-OEDIPUS is itself over-engaged in the agon with psychoanalysis and does not make explicit the new image of thought. Deleuze in his new preface to the American edition of DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION makes it clear that over and above the ontology of difference is the « liberation of thought from the images that imprison it ».
This new pluralist practice of thought is described and analysed in Chapter 3 of DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION, but is only partially instantiated in that book. The concrete instantiation of a new image of thought in a variety of domains is finally accomplished in A THOUSAND PLATEAUS.
This is why Deleuze claims that the key chapter in DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION is Chapter Three on the image of thought (and not the chapters on repetition and difference), that this chapter is « the most necessary and the most concrete » and that it serves as the best introduction to the books that follow.
terenceblake
I just submitted a letter opposing the so-called California Journalism Preservation Act that is now going through the Senate. Here’s what I said (I’ll skip the opening paragraph with my journalistic bona fides):
Like other well-intentioned media regulation, the CJPA will result in a raft of unintended and damaging consequences. I fear it will support the bottom lines of the rapacious hedge funds and billionaires who are milking California’s once-great newspapers for cash flow without concern for the information needs of California’s communities. I have seen that first-hand, for I was once a member of the digital advisory board for Alden Capital’s Digital First, owner of the Bay Area News Group. For them, any income from any source is fungible and I doubt any money from CJPA will go to actually strengthening journalism.
The best hope for local journalism is not the old newspaper industry and its lobbyists who seek protectionism. It will come instead from startups, some not-for-profit, some tiny, that serve local communities. These are the kinds of journalists we teach in the Entrepreneurial Journalism program I started at my school. These entrepreneurial journalists will not benefit from CJPA and their ventures could be locked out by this nonmarket intervention favoring incumbent competitors. From a policy perspective, I would like to see how California could encourage new competition, not stifle it. I concur with the April letter from LION publishers.
More important, the CJPA and other legislation like it violates the First Amendment and breaks the internet. Links are speech. Editorial choice is speech. No publisher, no platform, no one should be forced to link or not link to content — especially the kinds of extremist content that is ruining American democracy and that could benefit from the CJPA by giving them an opening to force platforms to carry their noxious speech.
Note well that the objects of this legislation, Facebook and Google, would be well within their rights to stop promoting news if forced to pay for the privilege of linking to it. When Spain passed its link tax, Google News pulled out of the country and both publishers and citizens suffered for years as a result. Meta has just announced that it will pull news off its platforms in Canada as a result of its Bill C-18. News is frankly of little value to the platforms. Facebook has said that less than four percent of its content relates to news, Google not much more. Neither makes money from news.
The CJPA could accomplish precisely the opposite of its goal by assuring that less news gets to Californians than today. The just-released Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford makes clear that more than ever, citizens start their news journeys not with news brands but end up there via social media and search:
Across markets, only around a fifth of respondents (22%) now say they prefer to start their news journeys with a website or app — that’s down 10 percentage points since 2018…. Younger groups everywhere are showing a weaker connection with news brands’ own websites and apps than previous cohorts — preferring to access news via side-door routes such as social media, search, or mobile aggregators.
Tremendous value accrues to publishers from platforms’ links. By lobbying against the internet platforms that benefit them, news publishers are cutting off their noses to spite their faces, and this legislation hands them the knife.
In a prescient 1998 paper from Santa Monica’s RAND Corporation, “The Information Age and the Printing Press: Looking Backward to See Ahead,” James Dewar argued persuasively for “a) keeping the Internet unregulated, and b) taking a much more experimental approach to information policy. Societies who regulated the printing press suffered and continue to suffer today in comparison with those who didn’t.” In my new book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I agree with his conclusion.
I fear that California, its media industry, its journalists, its communities, and its citizens will suffer with the passage of the CJPA.
The post California’s protectionist legislation appeared first on BuzzMachine.
I attended a show-cause hearing for two attorneys and their firm who submitted nonexistent citations and then entirely fictitious cases manufactured by ChatGPT to federal court, and then tried to blame the machine. “This case is Schadenfreude for any lawyer,” said the attorneys’ attorney, misusing a word as ChatGPT might. “There but for the grace of God go I…. Lawyers have always had difficulty with new technology.”
The judge, P. Kevin Castel, would have none of it. At the end of the two-hour hearing in which he meticulously and patiently questioned each of the attorneys, he said it is “not fair to pick apart people’s words,” but he noted that the actions of the lawyers were “repeatedly described as a mistake.” The mistake might have been the first submission with its nonexistent citations. But “that is the beginning of the narrative, not the end,” as again and again the attorneys failed to do their work, to follow through once the fiction was called to their attention by opposing counsel and the court, to even Google the cases ChatGPT manufactured to verify their existence, let alone to read what “gibberish” — in the judge’s description—ChatGPT fabricated. And ultimately, they failed to fully take responsibility for their own actions.
Over and over again, Steven Schwartz, the attorney who used ChatGPT to do his work, testified to the court that “I just never could imagine that ChatGPT would fabricate cases…. It never occurred to me that it would be making up cases.” He thought it was a search engine — a “super search engine.” And search engines can be trusted, yes? Technology can’t be wrong, right?
Now it’s true that one may fault some large language models’ creators for giving people the impression that generative AI is credible when we know it is not — and especially Microsoft for later connecting ChatGPT with its search engine, Bing, no doubt misleading more people. But Judge Castel’s point stands: It was the lawyer’s responsibility — to themselves, their client, the court, and truth itself — to check the machine’s work. This is not a tale of technology’s failures but of humans’, as most are.
Technology got blamed for much this day. Lawyers faulted their legal search engine, Fastcase, for not giving this personal-injury firm, accustomed to state courts, access to federal cases (a billing screwup). They blamed Microsoft Word for their cut-and-paste of a bolloxed notorization. In a lovely Gutenberg-era moment, Judge Castel questioned them about the odd mix of fonts — Times Roman and something sans serif — in the fake cases, and the lawyer blamed that, too, on computer cut-and-paste. The lawyers’ lawyer said that with ChatGPT, Schwartz “was playing with live ammo. He didn’t know because technology lied to him.” When Schwartz went back to ChatGPT to “find” the cases, “it doubled down. It kept lying to him.” It made them up out of digital ether. “The world now knows about the dangers of ChatGPT,” the lawyers’ lawyer said. “The court has done its job warning the public of these risks.” The judge interrupted: “I did not set out to do that.” For the issue here is not the machine, it is the men who used it.
The courtroom was jammed, sending some to an overflow courtroom to listen. There were some reporters there, whose presence the lawyers noted as they lamented their public humiliation. The room was also filled with young, dark-suited law students and legal interns. I hope they listened well to the judge (and I hope the journalists did, too) about the real obligations of truth.
ChatGPT is designed to tell you what you want it to say. It is a personal propaganda machine that strings together words to satisfy the ear, with no expectation that it is right. Kevin Roose of The New York Times asked ChatGPT to reveal a dark soul and he was then shocked and disturbed when it did just what he had requested. Same for attorney Schwartz. In his questioning of the lawyer, the judge noted this important nuance: Schwartz did not ask ChatGPT for explanation and case law regarding the somewhat arcane — especially to a personal-injury lawyer usually practicing in state courts — issues of bankruptcy, statutes of limitation, and international treaties in this case of an airline passenger’s knee and an errant snack cart. “You were not asking ChatGPT for an objective analysis,” the judge said. Instead, Schwartz admitted, he asked ChatGPT to give him cases that would bolster his argument. Then, when doubted about the existence of the cases by opposing counsel and judge, he went back to ChatGPT and it produced the cases for him, gibberish and all. And in a flash of apparent incredulity, when he asked ChatGPT “are the other cases you provided fake?”, it responded as he doubtless hoped: “No, the other cases I provided are real.” It instructed that they could be found on reputible legal databases such as LexisNexis and Westlaw, which Schwartz did not consult. The machine did as it was told; the lawyer did not. “It followed your command,” noted the judge. “ChatGPT was not supplementing your research. It was your research.”
Schwartz gave a choked-up apology to the court and his colleagues and his opponents, though as the judge pointedly remarked, he left out of that litany his own ill-served client. Schwartz took responsibility for using the machine to do his work but did not take responsibility for the work he did not do to verify the meaningless strings of words it spat out.
I have some empathy for Schwartz and his colleagues, for they will likely be a long-time punchline in jokes about the firm of Nebbish, Nebbish, & Luddite and the perils of technological progress. All its associates are now undergoing continuing legal education courses in the proper use of artificial intelligence (and there are lots of them already). Schwartz has the ill luck of being the hapless pioneer who came upon this new tool when it was three months in the world, and was merely the first to find a new way to screw up. His lawyers argued to the judge that he and his colleagues should not be sanctioned because they did not operate in bad faith. The judge has taken the case under advisement, but I suspect he might not agree, given their negligence to follow through when their work was doubted.
I also have some anthropomorphic sympathy for ChatGPT, as it is a wronged party in this case: wronged by the lawyers and their blame, wronged by the media and their misrepresentations, wronged by the companies — Microsoft especially — that are trying to tell users just what Schwartz wrongly assumed: that ChatGPT is a search engine that can supply facts. It can’t. It supplies credible-sounding — but not credible — language. That is what it is designed to do. That is what it does, quite amazingly. Its misuse is not its fault.
I have come to believe that journalists should stay away from ChatGPT, et al., for creating that commodity we call content. Yes, AI has long been used to produce stories from structured and limited data: sports games and financial results. That works well, for in these cases, stories are just another form of data visualization. Generative AI is something else again. It picks any word in the language to place after another word based not on facts but on probability. I have said that I do see uses for this technology in journalism: expanding literacy, helping people who are intimidated by writing and illustration to tell their own stories rather than having them extracted and exploited by journalists, for example. We should study and test this technology in our field. We should learn about what it can and cannot do with experience, rather than misrepresenting its capabilities or perils in our reporting. But we must not have it do our work for us.
Besides, the world already has more than enough content. The last thing we need is a machine that spits out yet more. What the world needs from journalism is research, reporting, service, solutions, accountability, empathy, context, history, humanity. I dare tell my journalism students who are learning to write stories that writing stories is not their job; it is merely a useful skill. Their job as journalists is to serve communities and that begins with listening and speaking with people, not machines.
Image: Lady Justice casts off her scale for the machine, by DreamStudio
The post ChatGPT goes to court appeared first on BuzzMachine.
Live-blogging la lecture du « nouveau » livre de Michel Foucault
PARADOXE DE (LA MORT DE) L’AUTEUR
La publication aujourd’hui, « maintenant » en mai 2023, d’un manuscrit écrit en 1966 est une entreprise paradoxale, surtout lorsque le livre est de Michel Foucault, qui proclamait à la fois la « mort de l’auteur » et affirmait son autorité auctoriale en interdisant toute publication « posthume ».
Après la publication posthume de CONFESSIONS DE LA CHAIR, nous avons maintenant le plaisir de pouvoir lire une nouvelle publication, d’un manuscrit inédit et pratiquement achevé de Michel Foucault, ce qui constitue une contribution majeure à la publication progressive des parerga et paralipomena de Foucault.
PARADOX DU « MAINTENANT »
Un livre « nouveau », âgé de 57 ans – c’est un paradoxe. Le livre lui-même réfléchit sur le « paradoxe du maintenant » et doit être lu à la lumière de cette réflexion. Comme de nombreux travaux interrogeant les limites de l’actualité de la pensée, nous courons le danger de nous perdre dans les labyrinthes de l’auto-réflexion. C’est ce que nous sommes invités à faire en lisant ce livre, nous perdre, nous égarer dans l’espace. L’espace conceptuel (au sens que Deleuze et Guattari donne au concept dans QU’EST-CE QUE LA PHILOSOPHIE ?) est autoréférentiel. Si vous n’êtes pas « perdu », vous ne comprenez pas.
Les premiers mots de DISCOURS PHILOSOPHIQUE font référence au « maintenant » :
« Depuis quelques temps déjà ».
Foucault ne commence pas son livre par un geste fondateur, un point absolu de rupture, mais il s’inscrit dans un devenir en cours, qui sépare constamment le passé (des archives) du présent (des mutations). Il continuera à diviser ce « maintenant » (plus proche de la fission de l’atome que du coupage des cheveux en quatre) dans le reste de l’argumentation du livre.. Donc pour le moment, nous ne savons pas dans quel « maintenant » Foucault situe son livre.
Cette division du maintenant commence déjà dans la deuxième partie de la phrase:
« Depuis quelque temps déjà – est-ce depuis Nietzsche ? plus récemment encore ? »
Note : Foucault, dans cette première phrase, utilise l’une des nombreuses façons de se référer au « maintenant ». Il n’utilise pas le mot « maintenant », qu’il analysera plus tard en détail, mais un mode d’expression plus complexe connotant la continuité plutôt qu’un simple « point » dans le temps.
« Déjà » ici est utilisé en conjonction avec « depuis » et un verbe au présent parfait, donc le sens est d’une durée indéfinie jusqu’au présent inclus. Il s’agit d’un cas d’aspect parfait. Foucault poursuit dans le chapitre 2 en analysant les différentes emplois de « maintenant » dans les différents modes de discours (scientifique, littéraire, philosophique, ordinaire), s’appuyant sur les analyses de Jakobson et Benveniste.
Foucault construit une grammaire énonciative des différents types de discours, mais malheureusement il n’incorpore pas dans son analyse une considération explicite de l’aspect perfectif (un mode qui a des utilisations philosophiquement importantes dans le discours de Foucault lui-même).
Pour Foucault, la périodisation de ce « maintenant » est peu claire, et pour situer sa différence il est obligé de remonter aux Grecs anciens, et encore plus loin, en se référant aux « arts millénaires », ce qui renvoient aux chamans, remontant même avant les Égyptiens, avant de revenir à aujourd’hui.
PARADOXE DE LA PHILOSOPHIE : contre les essences
Dans LE DISCOURS PHILOSOPHIQUE, Foucault pose explicitement la question « qu’est-ce que la philosophie? » et y répond de manière provisoire. Pour ma part, je vais tenter de produire une lecture « naïve » ou non universitaire du livre. Un bon livre compagnon à garder à l’esprit est QU’EST-CE QUE LA PHILOSOPHIE? de Deleuze et Guattari, qui traite des problèmes similaires.
QU’EST-CE QUE LA PHILOSOPHIE? a été publié en 1991 (il y a 32 ans) et le livre fait explicitement référence aux idées de Foucault des années 1960, sans citer LE DISCOURS PHILOSOPHIQUE, encore inédit à l’époque. La comparaison des deux œuvres peut nous donner nous donner une aide précieuse pour saisir de la problématique de Foucault.
Foucault avait 40 ans lorsqu’il a rédigé son livre, Deleuze et Guattari avaient la soixantaine lorsqu’ils ont publié le leur.
Pour nous, le « nouveau » livre de Foucault, tout comme celui de Deleuze et Guattari (hélas !), appartient à l’époque précédente et à son archive. Ou plutôt, ils appartiennent au sous-ensemble de l’archive indiqué par Deleuze et Guattari contenant la « bibliographie » de la question:
« Peut-être ne peut-on poser la question Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? que tard, quand vient la vieillesse, et l’heure de parler concrètement. En fait, la bibliographie est très mince. »
Bien sûr, la « question » Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? est une plaisanterie, c’est un paradoxe. « Qu’est-ce que X ? » semble chercher une essence, alors que Deleuze et Guattari, tout comme Foucault, rejetaient l’essentialisme au profit d’une approche casuistique – il n’y a pas de question et réponse générale, mais seulement un ensemble ouvert de cas et de circonstances.
Nous verrons comment Foucault traite cette distinction entre « la voie royale de la philosophie » et la voie mineure d’une non-philosophie qui serait co-originelle avec cette image royale de la pensée dans le deuxième paragraphe.
PARADOXE DE L’ÂGE : senex vs puer
Nous avons vu que l’incipit de QU’EST-CE QUE LA PHILOSOPHIE? comporte un paradoxe et nous renvoie aux cas concrets:
« Peut-être ne peut-on poser la question Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? que tard, quand vient la vieillesse, et l’heure de parler concrètement. En fait, la bibliographie est très mince. »
On peut voir dans ce texte de Deleuze et Guattari leur manière à eux de déployer la distinction senex/puer : le puer fait, le senex réfléchit.
Comme le souligne James Hillman, cette distinction ne doit pas être entendu litéralement, de manière chronologique. Senex et puer sont des personnages conceptuels exprimant des phases ou des moments qui traversent toute la vie. Ainsi, nous ne pouvons pas opposer facilement le vieux et le jeune.
Je suppose que l’on peut qualifier le Foucault qui écrit LE DISCOURS PHILOSOPHIQUE, comme étant d’âge moyen, ni jeune ni vieux, au milieu de la vie.
Le mot clé n’est pas « l’âge », mais « le milieu », entre-deux, là où les choses poussent (selon Deleuze et Guattari). Foucault se trouve au milieu, entre les livres d’action culminant avec LES MOTS ET LES CHOSES et le livre de réflexion L’ARCHÉOLOGIE DU SAVOIR. Le milieu est l’endroit où les choses poussent, où les événement se passe, où le nouveau émerge. Aucun âge requis.
PARADOXE DE L’AUTO-DIAGNOSTIC : une entreprise risquée
La bibliographie de la question « qu’est-ce que la philosophie? » a depuis lors grandi, et nous avons de nombreux nouveaux ouvrages à ajouter, des livres par Badiou, Lyotard, Laruelle, Latour, Stiegler, etc. Mon blog est consacré à la discussion de ces œuvres, et je peux dire en toute vérité que je me suis posé la question toute ma vie.
Je lirai donc Foucault comme il ne pouvait pas se lire lui-même, à la lumière de tous ces autres travaux, essayant de lui donner une actualité différente de celle qu’il prétendait ne pas connaître, mais seulement diagnostiquer, et ainsi se diagnostiquer lui-même avec elle.
PARADOXE DE LA DIVINATION : la philosophie est (aussi) une non-philosophie
Foucault commence sous le signe de Nietzsche (mais c’est déjà un signe interrogatif) :
« Depuis quelque temps déjà – est-ce depuis Nietzsche? plus récemment encore? –, la philosophie a reçu en partage une tâche qui lui n’était jusqu’ici point familière: celle de diagnostiquer ».
Ceci est la première phrase du livre, et nous pouvons déjà y deviner beaucoup. Il affirmera ensuite que le philosophe a toujours été tant soit peu « voyant » ou « devin ». C’est ainsi, en étant nous-mêmes devins, que nous pouvons lire Foucault philosophiquement.
En d’autres termes: pour lire philosophiquement, il faut aussi lire non-philosophiquement.
Il y a la philosophie en tant que modèle de pensée, ce que Foucault appelle, dans le paragraphe suivant, la « voie royale », pour la caractériser en termes de sa volonté de fonder ou d’achever la connaissance, d’énoncer l’être ou l’homme » (deuxième paragraphe).
Il y a aussi la philosophie en tant qu’art divinatoire, pratique médicale, tâche exégétique. La philosophie en tant que diagnostic par opposition à la philosophie en tant que fondement. « La » philosophie a été les deux activités, depuis le début: fonder et totaliser, et deviner et diagnostiquer. A la fois systématique et casuistique, philosophie et non-philosophie.
PARADOXE DU « NIETZSCHÉISME »: diagnostic sans mal et sans remède
Nous pouvons donc deviner que la référence foucaldienne à Friedrich Nietzsche devra être élargie et complexifiée, et que le concept de « diagnostic » devra être déconstruit, en le libérant du modèle médical qui le lie à la découverte d’une maladie et à la proposition d’un remède.
Ce manuscrit a été écrit en 1966, l’année de publication des Écrits de Jacques Lacan. La psychanalyse des années 50 et 60 s’était affranchie du modèle médical du diagnostic et du traitement, ainsi que du fantasme médical d’une « guérison » entendu comme un retour à la normale.
Dans ce contexte, Foucault affirme la priorité généalogique de Nietzsche dans la déconstruction du modèle médical tout en validant la communalité d’une cause partagée. Foucault ne mentionne pas la psychanalyse, il est déjà trop déterritorialisé pour cela, mais cette cause commune consistant à nous libérer de l’image médicale de la pensée est un exemple de ce que Foucault appellera un peu plus tard, au début du chapitre 2, « l’isochronie » par opposition à la synchronie.
PARADOXE DU MOMENT (PARTAGÉ): isochronie vs synchronie
L’œuvre de Foucault se déroule sur une grande partie de la même période que celle de Lacan, et chacun a une place importante dans la culture commune contemporaine. De ce point de vue, les deux œuvres sont synchrones.
Cependant, « l’isochronie » concerne un autre aspect du discours philosophique, « le « moment » même où elle se déploie » (Le Discours Philosophique, page 22). Cette déconstruction de l’image médicale de la pensée, partagée par de nombreux autres (comme Ivan Illich, James Hillman), est ce qui unit Foucault et Lacan dans une cause commune de l’époque. C’est en tant que tels qu’ils sont « isochrones ».
Quelque chose est en train de changer dans la culture commune, une mutation se prépare, sans quoi les penseurs contemporains ne pourraient pas penser ce qu’ils pensent, et Lacan et Foucault en font partie. La relation de l’homme ordinaire à l’inconscient, au corps, à la médecine et à la philosophie change, et le modèle médical, dans sa forme traditionnelle, se dissout.
PARADOXE DE LA PROPHÉTIE: le « maintenant » est à venir
Foucault commence son manuscrit ici, en anticipant implicitement, « déjà » – dans le présent, les devenirs émergent de mai 68. Il commence donc par nouer la question « qu’est-ce que la philosophie? » à une question peut-être plus large « qu’est-ce que le diagnostic? ».
La tâche de la philosophie serait de diagnostiquer dans le présent ce qui désormais appartient au passé, et ce qui déjà participe à l’avenir. C’est ce que Foucault appelle à la fin du deuxième paragraphe la tâche de « prophétiser l’instant ».
terenceblake
Live-blogging reading PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE, the new book by Michel Foucault.
In the preceding post I began to discuss the different modes French has of referring to the « now » as they are deployed in Foucault’s text. To do this I employ the terms of the sort of enunciative grammar, based on his knowledge of Jakobson and Benveniste, that Foucault uses in Chapter 2 to sketch the grammar of the different discourses (scientific, literary, philosophical, ordinary) that he analyses, in terms of their differing relation to the « now » (and also to the « I » and the « here »).
In the first sentence Foucault uses another mode of reference to the now: « hitherto » (« jusqu’ici », literally « up to here »). The full sentence reads:
« For some time now – is it since Nietzsche? or even more recently? – philosophy has been allotted a task with which it was hitherto [NB: one could also translate this as « up to now »] totally unfamiliar: to diagnose ».
It is interesting to point out these markers of the « now », as this first chapter ends on a reference to the present. To give a definition of the present
« the philosopher must say quite simply 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑠. Not being, nor the things themselves…But what there is, with neither recoil nor distance, in the very instant that he is speaking ».
It is to be noted that the expression « in the very instant » refers, once again but differently, to the « now » or the moment of enunciation.
Diagnosis, for Foucault, is an ontological speech act. To diagnose is to say what there is (not what is, or what exists) in the instant of enunciation.
This tying together, in the first sentence, of philosophy, diagnosis and the now in an enuciative knot will become the key to an ontology of the present at the conclusion of the first chapter.
terenceblake
Comment et pourquoi philosopher aujourd’hui? Quel rapport peut-on établir entre notre actualité et l »inactuel des monuments (petits et grands) noétiques édifiés par les penseurs qui nous ont précédés. Plus particulièrement, est-ce que les grands penseurs de la deuxième moitié du 20ième siècle sont encore nos contemporains, capables d’informer et de vivifier notre pensée? ou sont-ils précisément des monuments historiquement datés et dépassés, à peine moins éloignés de nos vies que les grecs anciens?
Ces questions de posent avec encore plus de vivacité suite à la publication récente d’un manuscrit inédit de Michel Foucault : DISCOURS PHILOSOPHIQUE (texte établi par Daniele Lorenzini et Orazio Irrera, sous la direction de François Ewald – paru chez Gallimard/Seuil/EHESS, le 12 mai 2023.
Le manuscrit date de 1966, il a été écrit après LES MOTS ET LES CHOSES, publié en 1966, et avant la publication de L’ARCHÉOLOGIE DU SAVOIR en 1969. Comme on peut le voir en parcourant la table des matières, et comme la datation de l’écriture le suggère, ce « nouveau » livre constitue le pont parfait entre ces deux œuvres établies.
De surcroît, suivant mon fil rouge du rapport entre l’actuel et l’inactuel, qui constitue aussi un des thèmes majeurs du livre, je tenterai d’arguer que ce nouveau livre publié à titre posthume a une valeur bien plus grande que la simple nostalgie qu’on peut ressentir devant un monument perdu, retrouvé, restauré et enfin dévoilé aux yeux d’un public pieux? (pour ne pas dire crédule, mais est-ce qu’on y « croit » aujourd’hui?).
Les méditations de Michel Foucault contenues dans Le Discours Philosophiques sont en puissance, et peut-être aussi en acte pour le lecteur sérieux et naïf, « intempestives », et peuvent donc être utiles pour nous aujourd’hui, alors que nous sommes confrontés à un mouvement de révision réactionnaire (Domenico Losurdo, Jan Rehmann) en théorie, qui tente une fois de plus de liquider l’héritage des grands penseurs post-nietzschéens français inspirateurs et héritiers d’un mai ’68 de la pensée (et non d’une « pensée ’68 » fabriquée de toutes pièces par les liquidateurs des générations précédentes).
« LE DISCOURS PHILOSOPHIQUE de Michel Foucault pourrait bien être l’équivalent dans son œuvre de QU’EST-CE QUE LA PHILOSOPHIE ? de Deleuze et Guattari, car nous savons d’après les propres dits de Foucault que son travail est philosophique, en ce qu’il se place dans le domaine de l’histoire des idées, mais n’est pas lui-même un travail d’historien.
En tant que tel, le nouveau livre ne devrait pas être lu uniquement historiquement, comme un document historique fournissant le lien manquant entre LES MOTS ET LES CHOSES et L’ARCHÉOLOGIE DU SAVOIR, mais aussi philosophiquement, en termes de clarification de notre présent et d’ouverture de nouvelles lignes pour la recherche et la vie à venir.
En tant que tel, le livre est à la fois une contribution à une archive datée et dépassée et un catalyseur potentiel pour la pensée future. En bref, je demande au livre de se diagnostiquer et de se soigner lui-même, selon les deux mouvements que Foucault attribue à la philosophie actuelle dans le premier chapitre :
Il convient de noter que QU’EST-CE QUE LA PHILOSOPHIE? de Deleuze et Guattari est un livre non pas de « guérison », mais de souci de soi, et soin de la pensée. « Penser c’est panser » nous disait Bernard Stiegler, en s’inspirant des œuvres de Foucault et de Deleuze et Guattari.
QU’EST-CE QUE LA PHILOSOPHIE? commence, après une introduction situant son intervention dans l’état actuel de la question, avec un ensemble plutôt structuraliste de démarcations (entre la philosophie, l’art et la science) et se termine par une typologie poststructuraliste d’œuvres violant ces démarcations.
Le nouveau livre de Foucault, LE DISCOURS PHILOSOPHIQUE, trace un mouvement semblable. Il commence, après avoir établi une typologie du regard philosophique, avec une analyse des démarcations qui séparent le discours philosophique de trois autres instances – les discours littéraires, scientifiques et « ordinaires ». Il se termine avec le constat d’un fait nouveau, la constitution d’un « archive intégrale », et à partir de cette nouvelle donne l’émergence de la « discursivité » comme forme ontologique transversale aux distinctions et démarcations des époques précédentes de la pensée.
terenceblake
Je viens de regarder le nouvel épisode de Planète B – émission très intéressant qui noue spéculation SF et réflexion politique tout en augmentant notre PAL avec maintes références à des œuvres essentielles pour nourrir nos pensées et affects.
Cette vidéo (épisode 7) contient un entretien d’une trentaine de minutes avec Alain Damasio. Par un hasard du calendrier (mais est-ce un hasard? on verra plus loin comment l’actualité rend possible de telles rencontres) le nouveau livre inédit de Michel Foucault, Le Discours Philosophique, est sorti le même jour.
Dans ce billet, je vais tenter de considérer les deux documents, livre et vidéo, ensemble.
Le premier chapitre du livre de Foucault contient une réflexion sur la notion de la philosophie comme pratique de « diagnostiquer » le présent comme foyer d’une « actualité » qui est à la fois déjà là et à venir.
Diagnostiquer l’actualité, en philosophie ou en SF, c’est une fonction noétique partagée par beaucoup de créateurs et d’activistes contemporains. Foucault consacre un chapitre à l’analyse de cette fonction, à la fois millénaire et très moderne, pour cerner sa mutation récente.
Dans son premier chapitre, Foucault argue que la fonction de diagnostic spéculatif aujourd’hui diffère de ces avatars précédents en ce qu’elle sort du modèle médical classique curatif (trouver le mal/proposer le remède), pour devenir une activité de constat et de « dire ce qu’il y a ». Non pas déceler et guérir, mais constater. Rendre perceptibles, non pas un état de choses, mais des mouvements et des tendances en cours.
Alain Damasio argue, pour sa part, que l’écrivain de science fiction reçoit en partage cette même tâche, de diagnostiquer le présent. C’est ici que je trouve l’autocritique de Damasio illuminant. Dans son retour réflexif sur œuvre Damasio fait usage de concepts foucaldiens tirés d’une phase ultérieure de la pensée de Foucault pour situer sa propre évolution intellectuelle et artistique concernant la conception du fonctionnement du pouvoir et sa figuration dans la SF.
Selon Damasio, dans son roman La Zone du Dehors (1999), il restait encore prisonnier d’une conception transcendante, « pyramidale », centralisée, du pouvoir, alors que que 20 ans plus tard, dans Les Furtifs (2019), il avait assimilé la leçon foucaldienne de l’immanence du pouvoir dans une réticulation « plane », dispersive et omniprésente. Son propos est riche et lui permet des développements stimulants, mais ce qui m’intéresse ici c’est le regard rétroactif que ce déploiement de concepts et figurations tirés du Foucault des années 70 permet, et son utilité pour éclaircir les analyses du Foucault des années 60, càd pour les diagnostiquer.
Grâce à cette boucle de rétroaction, on peut voir que cette distinction entre modèle transcendante et image immanente est déjà à l’œuvre dans le « nouveau » livre de Foucault, dont le manuscrit a été rédigé en 1966.
Ce qui est en jeu dans le Chapitre 1 du livre Le Discours Philosophique est la déconstruction d’une conception transcendante de la fonction diagnostique (regard surplombant, logique binaire bien/mal, guérison par rétablissement normatif) et le dégagement progressif d’une conception immanente (regard participant dans un champ divisé et mouvant, sans logique du mal ni pratique de guérison normative).
Dans le cas de ces deux auteurs on constate leur convergence sur un point de renversement récent. Le philosophe, tout comme l’écrivain, ne s’engage pas à partir d’une discipline (philosophique, artistique) transcendante mais crée (philosophiquement, artistiquement) à partir d’un engagement immanent. Les rapports entre engagement et création se sont inversés.
D’où le côté parfois tortueux des réflexions en boucle: diagnostiquer le « diagnostic », être contemporain de sa contemporanéité sans y coïncider, sans y être « synchrone ». Selon la formule de Foucault, la tâche serait d’être isochrone, sans être synchrone.
En conclusion, pour parler du contemporain il faut être à la fois clair et tortueux. Hier j’étais en train de lire le livre inédit de Michel Foucault, Le Discours Philosophique, et j’ai regardé l’interview avec Alain Damasio. Chacun me semblait éclaircir l’autre, créant ainsi des étincelles noétiques, que j’ai essayé de capturer ici. J’espère que mon propre diagnostic a été plus clair que tortueux.
terenceblake
Live-blogging reading PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE, the new book by Michel Foucault.
PARADOX OF THE (DEATH OF THE) AUTHOR
Publishing today, « now » in 2023, a manuscript written in 1966 is a paradoxical enterprise, especially when the book is by Michel Foucault, who both proclaimed the « death of the author » and asserted his authorial authority by forbidding any « posthumous » publications. After the posthumous publication of CONFESSIONS OF THE FLESH we now have the delight of a new publication of a virtually complete manuscript of Michel Foucault, a major new contribution to to the ongoing publication of Foucault’s parerga and paralipomena.
PARADOX OF THE NOW
A « new » book, 57 years old – a paradox. The book itself reflects on the « paradox of the now », and must be read in the light of this reflection. As with many works interrogating the limits of thought’s actuality we are in danger of being « lost in the self-reflection » (in the words of https://twitter.com/ConejoCapital). This is what we are invited to do in reading this book, to lose ourselves, to be lost in space. Conceptual space (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of concept, in tWHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?) is self-referential. If you’re not « lost », you’re not understanding.
The first words of PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE involve a reference to the « now »:
« Depuis quelques temps déjà » – « For some time now ».
Foucault does not begin in some foundational gesture, some absolute point of rupture, but inserts himself into an ongoing becoming. He will go on to split this « now » (more splitting the atom than splitting hairs) in the rest of the book’s argument, so for the moment we are unsure in which « now » Foucault is situating his book.
This splitting of the now begins already in the second part of the sentence:
« Depuis quelque temps déjà – est-ce depuis Nietzsche? plus récemment encore?«
« For some time now – is it since Nietzsche? or even more recently?«
Note: Foucault in this first sentence uses one of the many modes of referring to « now ». He does not use the French word « maintenant » (« now »), which he will later analyse in detail, but a more complex mode of expression connoting continuity rather than a simple « point » in time.
« Déjà » in isolation is usually translated as « already », but here it is used in conjunction with « depuis » and a verb in the present perfect, so the sense is of an indefinite duration up to and including the present. This is a case of the perfective aspect. Foucault goes on in Chapter 2 to analyse the different uses of the « now » (« maintenant ») in the different modes of discourse (scientific, literary, philosophical, ordinary), drawing on the analyses of Jakobson and Benveniste. Foucault thus constructs an enunciative grammar of the different discourses, but unfortunately he does not include an explicit consideration of the perfective aspect (a mode that has philosophically important uses in Foucault’s own discourse) in his analysis.
For Foucault the periodisation of this « now » is unclear, and he will have to go back not only to the ancient Greeks but even earlier, referring to the « age-old arts » (« les arts millénaires« ) harking back beyond even the Egyptians to the shamans, before coming back to today.
PARADOX OF PHILOSOPHY: against essences
In PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE Foucault is explicitly asking, and tentatively answering, the question « what is philosophy? ». I will be attempting a « naive » or non-scholarly reading of the book. A good companion book to keep in mind is Deleuze and Guattari’s WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?
WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? was published in 1991 (32 years ago) and explicitly refers to Foucault’s ideas from the 1960s, without citing the unpublished PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE, but giving us precious insight into Foucault’s problematic. Foucault was 40 years old when he wrote his book, Deleuze and Guattari were in their 60s.
For us, Foucault’s « new » book, like Deleuze and Guattari »s (alas!), belongs to the preceding epoch, and to its archive. Or rather they belong to the sub-archive indicated by Deleuze and Guattari containing the « bibliography » of the question. Of course, the « question » is a joke, a paradox. « What is X? » seems to ask for an essence, when Deleuze and Guattari, like Foucault, reject essentialism in favour of a casuistic – there is no general question and answer, but an open ensemble of cases and circumstances.
We shall see this distinction between the « royal road of philosophy » and a seeming non-philosophy co-originary with the royal image of thought in the second paragraph.
PARADOX OF AGE: senex vs puer
The Incipit to WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY reads:
« Perhaps one can pose the question What is philosophy? only late, when old age comes, and the hour to speak concretely. In fact, the bibliography is very slim ».
This is Deleuze and Guattari’s version of the senex/puer distinction: the puer does, the senex reflects.
As James Hillman points out, this distinction is not to be taken chronologically, senex and puer are phases or moments that run through all of life. So we cannot contrast old and young so easily. I suppose we can call the Foucault of PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE middle-aged.
The operative word is not « age » but « middle », where things grow (according to D&G). Foucault is in the middle, between the « doing » books culminating in THE ORDER OF THINGS and the reflecting book THE ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE. The middle is where things happen. No required age.
PARADOX OF SELF-DIAGNOSIS: a risky enterprise
The bibliography of the question « what is philosophy? » has grown since then, and we have many new works to add, by Badiou, Lyotard, Laruelle, Latour, Stiegler etc. My blog Agent Swarm has been devoted to discussing these works, and I can truthfully say I have been asking the question all my life.
So I will be reading Foucault as he could not read himself, in the light of all these other works, trying to give him a different actuality to the one that he did not claim to know, but only to diagnose, and so to diagnose himself with it.
PARADOX OF DIVINATION: philosophy is (also) non-philosophy
Foucault begins under the sign of Nietzsche (but it is already an interrogative sign):
« For some time now – is it since Nietzsche? or even more recently? – philosophy has been allotted a task with which it was hitherto totally unfamiliar: to diagnose » (my translation).
This is the first sentence of the book, and we can already divine much. He will go on to affirm that the philosopher has always been something of a « seer » or a « diviner » (« devin » in French). So this is how we can read Foucault philosophically. Another way of saying this is that to read philosophically one needs to read non-philosophically.
There is philosophy as model of thought, what Foucault calls, in the next paragraph, the « royal road », characterising it in its concern for founding or completing knowledge, enouncing being or man » (2nd paragraph).
There is also philosophy as a divinatory art, a medical practice, an exegetical task. Philosophy as grounding vs philosophy as diagnosis. Philosophy has been both, from the beginning, philosophical grounding and non-philosophical divining and diagnosing.
PARADOX OF DIAGNOSIS: diagnosis without illness and without cure
We can divine then that the reference to Nietzsche will have to be expanded and complexified, and the concept of « diagnosis » will have to be deconstructed, freeing it from the medical model that ties it to discovering an illness and to proposing a cure.
This text was written in 1966, in the year of publication of Lacan’s Écrits. Psychoanalysis in the 50s and 60s had freed itself from the medical model of diagnosis and treatment and from the medical fantasy of a « cure » as a return to normal.
In this context, Foucault is affirming the genealogical priority of Nietzsche in the deconstruction of the medical model at the same time as he is endorsing the commonality of a shared cause. Foucault does not mention psychoanalysis, he is already too deterritorialised for that, but this common cause of freeing us from the medical image of thought is an example of what Foucault a little later, at the beginning of Chapter 2, calls « isochrony » as opposed to synchrony.
PARADOX OF THE (SHARED) MOMENT: synchrony vs isochrony
Foucault’s work takes place over much of the same time period as Lacan’s, and each is an important part of the shared contemporary culture. In that sense they are synchronous.
However, « isochrony » concerns something else, « the very « moment » in which it unfolds » (Le discours philosophique, 22, my translation). This deconstruction of the medical image of thought, shared by many others (e.g. Ivan Illich, James Hillman) is what unites Foucault and Lacan in a common cause of the epoch, and as such they are « isochronous ».
Something is changing in the culture, without which they could not think what they think, and Lacan and Foucault are part of it. People’s relation to the unconscious , to medecine, and to philosophy is changing, and the medical model, in its traditional form, is dissolving.
Foucault begins his manuscript here, already « prophetising » (his word) in the present the becomings of May ’68. Foucault begins by knotting the question « what is philosophy? » to the wider question « what is diagnosis? »
terenceblake
« It is curious how the objections people make are retardants. When you are trying to swim in a river people attach balls and chains to your ankles: have you thought of this? what do you make of that? are you really coherent? don’t you see the contradiction? Also, how sweet it is never to answer ».
This quote is translated from the first of the « missing » passages of Deleuze and Guattari’s RHIZOME (which was first published in 1976 as a separate book, and then in 1980, substantially modified, as the Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus).
For the rest of this passage, which goes on to discuss « reflection » (the practice of returning to a previous work instead of thinking things forward) see:
RHIZOME the missing paragraph – text and translation (ii)
This passage describes only one type of objections, but does not cover all cases. Deleuze and Guattari are exceeding their own image of thought in presenting as a generality what would better be described casuistically. There is no « essence » of objections.
A more positive image of objections could be given in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms. One would have to make of an objection an « encounter », irradiating one’s conversational partner with particles of light or waves of intensity rather than impeding them with « balls and chains ».
The problem with « objections » is that they are profered in terms of a binary logic, making an exclusive use of the disjunctive synthesis and so they stop the process. A paraconsistent practice of objections is not ruled out, as it makes an inclusive use of the disjunctive synthesis.
This logical point, concerning different uses of the disjunctive synthesis, underlies Deleuze and Guattari »s reserves about « objections » and their repeated condemnation of « discussion ».
Deleuze and Guattari did in fact talk to, and argue with, each other in a dialogical practice they called « conversation » in contradistinction to « discussion ». Deleuze published a book with Claire Parnet called DIALOGUES, and the conditions for, and obstacles to, dialogue are articulated at the same time as they are exemplified in this book.
For more on the question of objections in relation to the missing paragraph in RHIZOME see:
terenceblake
Ben Smith picked just the right title for his saga of BuzzFeed, Gawker, and The Huffington Post: Traffic (though in the end, he credits the able sensationalist Michael Wolff with the choice). For what Ben chronicles is both the apotheosis and the end of the age of mass media and its obsessive quest for audience attention, for scale, for circulation, ratings, page views, unique users, eyeballs and engagement.
Most everything I write these days — my upcoming books The Gutenberg Parenthesis in June and a next book, an elegy to the magazine in November, and another that I’m working on about the internet — is in the end about the death of the mass, a passing I celebrate. I write in The Gutenberg Parenthesis:
The mass is the child and creation of media, a descendant of Gutenberg, the ultimate extension of treating the public as object — as audience rather than participant. It was the mechanization and industrialization of print with the steam-powered press and Linotype — exploding the circulation of daily newspapers from an average of 4,000 in the late nineteenth century to hundreds of thousands and millions in the next — that brought scale to media. With broadcast, the mass became all-encompassing. Mass is the defining business model of pre-internet capitalism: making as many identical widgets to sell to as many identical people as possible. Content becomes a commodity to attract the attention of the audience, who themselves are sold as a commodity. In the mass, everything and everyone is commodified.
Ben and the anti-heroes of his tale — BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, HuffPost founder Arianna Huffington, investor Kenny Lerer, and a complete dramatis personae of the early players in pure-play digital media — were really no different from the Hearsts, Pulitzers, Newhouses, Luces, Greeleys, Bennetts, Sarnoffs, Paleys, and, yes, Murdochs, the moguls of mass media’s mechanized, industrialized, and corporate age who built their empires on traffic. The only difference, really, was that the digital moguls had new ways to hunt their prey: social, SEO, clickbait, data, listicles, and snark.
Ben tells the story so very well; he is an admirable writer and reporter. His narrative whizzes by like a local train on the express tracks. And it rings true. I had a seat myself on this ride. I was a friend of Nick Denton’s and a member of the board of his company before Gawker, Moreover; president of the online division of Advance (Condé Nast + Newhouse Newspapers); a board member for another pure-play, Plastic (a mashup of Suck et al); a proto-blogger; a writer for HuffPost; and a media critic who occasionally got invited to Nick’s parties and argued alongside Elizabeth Spiers at his kitchen table that he needed to open up to comments (maybe it’s all our fault). So I quite enjoyed Traffic. Because memories.
Traffic is worthwhile as a historical document of an as-it-turns-out-brief chapter in media history and as Ben’s own memoir of his rise from Politico blogger to BuzzFeed News editor to New York Times media critic to co-founder of Semafor. I find it interesting that Ben does not try to separate out the work of his newsroom from the click-factory next door. Passing reference is made to the prestige he and Jonah wanted news to bring to the brand, but Ben does not shy away from association with the viral side of the house.
I saw a much greater separation between the two divisions of BuzzFeed — not just reputationally but also in business models. It took me years to understand the foundation of BuzzFeed’s business. My fellow media blatherers would often scold me: “You don’t understand, Jeff,” one said, “BuzzFeed is the first data-driven newsroom.” So what? Every newsroom and every news organization since the 1850s measured itself by its traffic, whether they called it circulation or reach or MAUs.
No, what separated BuzzFeed’s business from the rest was that it did not sell space or time or even audience. It sold a skill: We know how to make our stuff viral, they said to advertisers. We can make your stuff viral. As a business, it (like Vice) was an ad agency with a giant proof-of-concept attached.
There were two problems. The first was that BuzzFeed depended for four-fifths of its distribution on other platforms: BuzzFeed’s own audience took its content to the larger audience where they were, mostly on Facebook, also YouTube and Twitter. That worked fine until it didn’t — until other, less talented copykittens ruined it for them. The same thing happened years earlier to About.com, where The New York Times Company brought me in to consult after its purchase. About.com had answers to questions people asked in Google search, so Google sent them to About.com, where Google sold the ads. It was a beautiful thing, until crappy content farms like Demand Media came and ruined it for them. In a first major ranking overhaul, Google had to downgrade everything that looked like a content farm, including About. Oh, well. (After learning the skills of SEO and waiting too long, The Times Company finally sold About.com; its remnants labor on in Barry Diller’s content farm, DotDash, where the last survivors of Time Inc. and Meredith toil, mostly post-print.)
The same phenomenon struck BuzzFeed, as social networks became overwhelmed with viral crap because, to use Silicon Valley argot, there was no barrier to entry to making clickbait. In Traffic, Ben reviews the history of Eli Pariser’s well-intentioned but ultimately corrupting startup Upworthy, which ruined the internet and all of media with its invention, the you-won’t-believe-what-happened-next headline. The experience of being bombarded with manipulative ploys for attention was bad for users and the social networks had to downgrade it. Also, as Ben reports, they discovered that many people were more apt to share screeds filled with hate and lies than cute kittens. Enter Breitbart.
BuzzFeed’s second problem was that BuzzFeed News had no sustainable business model other than the unsustainable business model of the rest of news. News isn’t, despite the best efforts of headline writers, terribly clickable. In the early days, BuzzFeed didn’t sell banner ads on its own content and even if it had, advertisers don’t much want to be around news because it is not “brand safe.” Therein lies a terrible commentary on marketing and media, but I’ll leave that for another day.
Ben’s book comes out just as BuzzFeed killed News. In the announcement, Jonah confessed to “overinvesting” in it, which is an admirably candid admission that news didn’t have a business model. Sooner or later, the company’s real bosses — owners of its equity — would demand its death. Ben writes: “I’ve come to regret encouraging Jonah to see our news division as a worthy enterprise that shouldn’t be evaluated solely as a business.” Ain’t that the problem with every newsroom? The truth is that BuzzFeed News was a philanthropic gift to the information ecosystem from Jonah and Ben.
Just as Jonah and company believed that Facebook et al had turned on them, they turned on Facebook and Google and Twitter, joining old, incumbent media in arguing that Silicon Valley somehow owed the news industry. For what? For sending them traffic all these years? Ben tells of meeting with the gray eminence of the true evil empire, News Corp., to discuss strategies to squeeze “protection money” (Ben’s words) from technology companies. That, too, is no business model.
Thus the death of BuzzFeed news says much about the fate of journalism today. In Traffic, Ben tells the tale of the greatest single traffic driver in BuzzFeed’s history: The Dress. You know, this one:
At every journalism conference where I took the stage after that, I would ask the journalists in attendance how many of their news organizations wrote a story about The Dress. Every single hand would go up. And what does that say about the state of journalism today? As we whine and wail about losing reporters and editors at the hands of greedy capitalists, we nonetheless waste tremendous journalistic resource rewriting each other for traffic: everyone had to have their own story to get their own Googlejuice and likes and links and ad impressions and pennies from them. No one added anything of value to BuzzFeed’s own story. The story, certainly BuzzFeed would acknowledge, had no particular social value; it did nothing to inform public discourse. It was fun. It got people talking. It took their attention. It generated traffic.
The virus Ben writes about is one that BuzzFeed — and the every news organization on the internet and the internet as a whole — caught from old, coughing mass media: the insatiable hunger for traffic for its own sake. In the book, Nick Denton plays the role of inscrutable (oh, I can attest to that) philosopher. According to Ben, Nick believed that traffic was the key expression of value: “Traffic, to Nick … was something pure. It was an art, not a science. Traffic meant that what you were doing was working.” Yet Nick also knew where traffic could lead. Ben quotes him telling a journalist in 2014: “It’s not jonah himself I hate, but this stage of internet media for which he is so perfectly optimized. I see an image of his cynical smirk — made you click! — every time a stupid buzzfeed listicle pops on Facebook.”
Nick also believed that transparency was the only ethic that really mattered, for the sake of democracy. Add these two premises, traffic and transparency, together and the sex tape that was the McGuffin that brought down Gawker and Nick at the hands of Peter Thiel was perhaps an inevitability. Ben also credits (or blames?) Nick for his own decision to release the Trump dossier to the public on BuzzFeed. (I still think Ben has a credible argument for doing so: It was being talked about in government and in media and we, the public, had the right to judge for ourselves. Or rather, it’s not our right to decide; it’s a responsibility, which will fall on all of us more and more as our old institutions of trust and authority — editing and publishing — falter in the face of the abundance of talk the net enables.)
The problem in the end is that traffic is a commodity; commodities have no unique value; and commodities in abundance will always decrease in price, toward zero. “Even as the traffic to BuzzFeed, Gawker Media, and other adept digital publishers grew,” Ben writes, “their operators began to feel that they were running on an accelerating treadmill, needing ever more traffic to keep the same dollars flowing in.” Precisely
Traffic is not where the value of the internet lies. No, as I write in The Gutenberg Parenthesis (/plug), the real value of the internet is that it begins to reverse the impact print and mass media have had on public discourse. The internet devalues the notions of content, audience, and traffic in favor of speech. Only it is going to take a long time for society to relearn the conversational skills it has lost and — as with Gutenberg and the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Thirty Years’ War that followed — things will be messy in between.
BuzzFeed, Gawker, The Huffington Post, etc. were not new media at all. They were the last gasp of old media, trying to keep the old ways alive with new tricks. What comes next — what is actually new — has yet to be invented. That is what I care about. That is why I teach.
The post Trafficking in traffic appeared first on BuzzMachine.
1) INTRODUCTION
I am providing a translation of the incipit as reproduced at the end of a pre-publication review of Michel Foucault’s forthcoming book PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE. The review was published online by Philosophy Magazine and discusses the ideas expressed therein chiefly in structuralist-demarcationist terms, given that the book focuses on enouncing the demarcations between philosophy, science, and literature.
This orienting perspective is perfectly normal, but it leaves out Foucault’s struggle with « structuralism » at that time (the manuscript was written between July and October 1966). In his interviews from that period Foucault moves rapidly from endorsing the claim that THE ORDER OF THINGS is structuralist to vehemently denying it. These hesitations exhibit a tension that is implicit not only in Foucault’s texts but in their reception, the tension between structuralism and post-structuralism.
We can see a further tension, closely tied to the first, between articulating the demarcations separating the different types of discourse (philosophy, science, literature) and the coming to the fore (under the epochal condition of the « new mutation ») of a universal (and thus transversal) discursivity conceived as « inexhaustible exteriority » and « element », cf my translation of the table of contents.
I think a change of perspective arises if one asks the question: to what archive does this « new » book/old manuscript belong?
If we read the book as belonging to the « Foucault-archive », then its publication is above all a scholarly « event » in the world of Foucault scholarship, and any discussion of it evidently belongs to the type of discourse that is detached from the « now », reference-oriented discourse.
If we read the book as belonging to the « philosophy-archive », then its publication is a philosophical event, in the sense of an untimely intervention in the « now » and and any discussion of it belongs to lay readers trying to understand the world and the thought of today, sense-oriented discourse.
2) THE INCIPIT
This is my translation of the first two paragraphs of Foucault’s forthcoming book (as reproduced at the end of the review cited above),
Chapter 1 « The Diagnostic » (pp13-14):
« For some time now – is it since Nietzsche? or even more recently? – philosophy has been allotted a task with which it was hitherto totally unfamiliar: to diagnose. To recognise, from a few sensible marks, what is happening. To detect the event raging within the murmuring that we no longer hear, we are so used to it. To say that which gives itself to be seen in what we see every day. To bring to light, all of a sudden, that grey hour where we are. To prophetise the instant.
Is that however such a new function? In wanting to be an enterprise of diagnosis, in devoting itself to such an empirical, fumbling, oblique and diagonal task, it could easily seem that philosophy is wandering away from the royal path that characterised it when it was concerned with founding or completing knowledge, with enouncing being or man. In fact, one could say just as well – or say even more aptly, given our appreciation for such retreats to the origin – that philosophy, in becoming diagnostic discourse, rediscovers its kinship with the age-old arts that taught us how to observe the signs, to interpret them, to reveal the hidden sickness, the unbearable secret, to name that which, majestically, remains silent at the heart of so many confused words. From the depths of the Greek era, philosophy has never renounced its pretention of being, at least to a certain degree, a seer: it has always been somewhat of a doctor and an exegete. Heraclitus and Anaximander taught it to listen to the god’s words, to to decipher the secret of bodies. For rather more than two thousand years philosophers have been reading signs ».
terenceblake
My father died on Saturday, April 8. He lived 97 years. Until struck with COVID, he had never had to stay in a hospital. In the last three months, he mustered all his strength to overcome the virus’ results: internal bleeding, then post-COVID pneumonia, then the side-effects of medication, and finally one more case of pneumonia. I curse the disease and all it does. He passed on peacefully last night after we — his entire family, the five of us — had the blessing of spending his last day with him, affirming our love.
I am writing this only for myself. I’m not writing it for him; he outlived everyone he knew. Neither am I writing it for you; I don’t expect you to read this, for you did not know him. I find such memorials for loved ones, including pets, in social media understandable but difficult, for I never know how to react. I do not expect you to. I simply want to memorialize my father, to leave a trace of his life connected with mine here. As an old newspaperman, I understand the value of the obituary more than the grave.
Darrell V. Jarvis was born in the tiny house on his grandfather’s rocky, dirt-poor farm up the holler behind the Methodist church in Weston, West Virginia. His parents were not much educated, Buck finishing the seventh grade, Vera not a lot more. They worked hard and moved often, following drilling crews to gas fields in West Virginia, Kentucky, and southern Illinois, my father attending eight schools along the way. His parents insisted that he and his brother — my late Uncle Richard, a church musician — attend college. My father graduated from the University of Illinois after completing a first stint of service in the Navy at the end of World War II. At U of I, he met my mother, Joan Welch, the daughter of a country doctor and a nurse in Lewistown, Illinois. They had two children: me and my sister, Cynthia, a Presbyterian minister. We lost our mother almost six years ago.
Darrell studied engineering but didn’t much like it. He preferred people. So, after serving in the Navy again in the Korean War, as a lieutenant on the destroyer USS Renshaw, he moved up as a “peddler” — his word — in the electronic and electrical industries, rising to be a VP of sales. He was on the road constantly, “with an airplane strapped to my backside,” and we moved constantly, from Illinois to Iowa to New Jersey to New York to Illinois and then — after Cindy graduated and I, having also attended eight schools, left the nest — to Seattle, California, and Illinois, then back to New Jersey, and finally to three or four places in Florida. They bought many window treatments.
Our mother was quite shy. Our father was the opposite. They did attract. The joke in the family was that by the time he reached the box office at the movie theater, Darrell would be lifelong friends with whoever was behind and in front of him in line, sharing their stories. Meanwhile, we hid. If they ever make a Mad Men about nice people, my father would be the model: the handsome and charming guy in the gray suit with hat and briefcase, for years puffing a pipe, tending to our suburban lawns, playing golf at every opportunity, going to church, sipping bourbon and later martinis at cocktail parties, voting Republican until Trump. Darrell was middle America.
At age 62, Darrell became the model or cliché of the retired American. He and Joan moved to a town in Florida where you must be 55 years old to live (I so want to write that sitcom). He could golf constantly until he needed to stay near Joan because of the type-1 diabetes he nursed her through for more than 50 years. And his knees gave out.
My parents were wonderful grandparents to our children, Jake and Julia. Oh, how they love their PopPop and Mimi. And oh, how my parents adored my wife, Tammy.
I learned much from my father. He so wanted to teach me golf so we could bond on the course, but after I once hit him in the shin with a driver and he hit me in the head with a stray ball, we gave up. He tried to teach me the handy skills, but while watching me try to build a case for the amplifier for my eighth-grade science-fair project (electronic bongos), he shook his head and declared: “You’re so clumsy you couldn’t stick your finger up your ass with two hands.” He said it with love and laughter as well as exasperation. We gave up that ambition, too.
What I did learn from my father more than anything else was ethics. I saw how he did business. I watched how he treated the staff who worked for him. I listened to him teach me how to deal with office politics: Never lower yourself to their level. I will always be proud of him that when he found himself in a meeting that turned out to be about price-fixing, he got up, protested, and left, risking his career. I tried to learn charm from him — even at the end, his smile and warmth would win over every nurse and aide. I yet wish I could learn to be the father he was.
We tried for years to get him and my mother — then him alone — to move up to be near my sister and us. In the summer of 2021 — fully vaccinated — he caught COVID for the first time in his retirement community and spent 11 days in the hospital and a month in rehab before moving to assisted living. Finally, he agreed to move. Tammy asked him: Why not before? “I’m just stupid,” he said. He came to an assisted living community five miles from our home and said he was living where he should. Thus the perverse blessing of COVID was that it brought him to us for a magnificent year and a half we otherwise would not have had — until it stole him from us. We saw him every day. Sister Cindy would come up with her Scottie, Phoebe, to sit in his lap. My dear Tammy took away all his worries of finance and life; he heeded her. She insisted that we have him over to our house three nights a week, culminating in thrill rides on a ramp after his knees finally gave out and he resorted to a wheelchair. He asked me one day to find him an electric wheelchair and that was a wonder to behold, him hot-rodding to meals and bingo and happy hour, balancing a martini in one hand, steering the wheelchair in the other, miraculously managing not to hit any old ladies.
We love you, Pa.
The post Darrell V. Jarvis, 1926-2023 appeared first on BuzzMachine.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE may well be Foucault’s equivalent to Deleuze and Guattari’s WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?, as we know from Foucault’s own words that his work is philosophical, in that it places itself within the domain of the history of ideas, but is not itself a historian’s work.
As such the new book should not be read only historically, as a historical document providing the missing link between THE ORDER OF THINGS and THE ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE , but also philosophically, in terms of how it clarifies our present and opens up new lines for future research and living.
As such, the book is both a contribution to an outdated archive and a potential catalyst to future-thinking. In short I am asking the book to diagnose and to heal itself, according to the two moves it attributes to philosophy in the first chapter:
It is to be noted that Deleuze and Guattari’s WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? is such a self-healing book. It begins, after an introduction situating its intervention in the current state of the question, with a rather structuralist set of demarcations (between philosophy, art, and science) and ending with a post-structuralist typology of works violating those demarcations.
terenceblake
This is a translation of the summary on the back cover of the forthcoming previously unpublished book by Michel Foucault entitled PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE. Text established by Daniele Lorenzini and Orazio Irrera, under the direction of François Ewald (Gallimard/Seuil/EHESS, May 2023).
« What is philosophy and what is its role today? Between July and October 1966, several months after the publication of THE ORDER OF THINGS, Michel Foucault, in a very carefully written manuscript, that nonetheless he will never publish, proposes his answer to this much discussed question.
Distinguishing himself from those contemporaries who devoted themselves to unveiling the essence of philosophy or to pronouncing its death, Foucault apprehends philosophy , in its materiality, as a discourse whose economy is to be articulated with respect to the other discourses (scientific, fictional, ordinary, religious) which circulate in a given context.
THE PHILOSPHICAL DISCOURSE thus proposes a new manner of doing the history of philosophy, which decenters it from the commentary on the great philosophers. Nietzsche, however, has a special position in this history as he inaugurates a conjuncture in which philosophy becomes an enterprise of diagnosis of the present. From that point philosophy’s role is to enounce, on the basis of the « integral archive », that which constitutes its actuality.
Not only is THE ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, which is devoted to the methodological stakes of such a project, adumbrated in this book, THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE is the only place where Michel Foucault spells out in as much length the ambitions of his intellectual program ».
terenceblake
The invention of atomic energy posed a novel global challenge: could the technology be controlled to avoid destructive uses and an existentially dangerous arms race while permitting the broad sharing of its benefits? From 1944 onwards, scientists, policymakers, and other technical specialists began to confront this challenge and explored policy options for dealing with the impact of nuclear technology. We focus on the years 1944 to 1951 and review this period for lessons for the governance of powerful technologies, and find the following: Radical schemes for international control can get broad support when confronted by existentially dangerous technologies, but this support can be tenuous and cynical. Secrecy is likely to play an important, and perhaps harmful, role. The public sphere may be an important source of influence, both in general and in particular in favor of cooperation, but also one that is manipulable and poorly informed. Technical experts may play a critical role, but need to be politically savvy. Overall, policymaking may look more like “muddling through” than clear-eyed grand strategy. Cooperation may be risky, and there may be many obstacles to success.
That is by Waqar Zaidi and Allan Dafoe, at the Centre for Governance of AI, exactly the kind of work people should be doing.
The post Lessons from the Baruch Plan for Nuclear Weapons appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
But I’ve gotten really disgruntled with the “prestige TV” landscape and am trying to redirect my content consumption accordingly. One thing that makes movies really great in my view is that before they shoot a movie, they write a screenplay and the screenplay has an end. Both the screenwriter and other people have read that screenplay all the way from beginning to end and they’ve tweaked and changed it and gotten it into a position where they are ready to start production. Then after a movie is filmed, the editor and director work with the footage and come up with a complete movie that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. They then ship the movie out, and it’s screened by critics who watch the entire movie before writing their review.
This does not guarantee that every movie that comes out is good. But it does guarantee that if someone tells you “‘The Menu’ is good,” they are evaluating a completed product…
By contrast, TV shows have this quasi-improvisational quality where the showrunners are constantly needing to come up with new balls to toss into the air. In old-fashioned non-prestigious “adventure of the week”-type shows, this actually works fine because the writers are not building up tension or setting unexplored plots in motion. But as serialized TV storytelling has gotten more and more common, we’re more and more often asked to show patience through early episodes or to try to find things intriguing with no ability to know whether any of it will pay off. Creators often have no idea where they’re going with the story.
Back in HBO’s heyday, the tradeoff was that The Sopranos and The Wire got to paint on a giant canvas and tell stories that are just too capacious for the movie format. But eventually networks got tired of spending that kind of money and cut back the sizes of the casts to something more normal for television.
That is from his Friday mailbag ($). The bottom line is that, like Matt, you should watch more movies and less TV.
The post Matt Yglesias on movies vs. TV appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Did printing transform the Ottoman Empire? And what took the Ottomans so long to print? Much of the scholarship surrounding the topic of Ottoman printing, or the occurrence of printing within the Ottoman Empire (1453–1922), is structured around these two related frameworks. In this essay, I argue that these frameworks are ahistorical because they predicate Ottoman printing on the European experience of print. To support this point, I examine the disproportionate role played by certain early modern European accounts of Ottoman printing within Western and Arabic historiography. In particular, I examine the life cycle of scholars’ belief that Ottoman sultans banned printing, which I contrast with extant documentation for the imperial Porte’s stance on printing. I argue that the sources available to scholars today do not support the notion that the sultans banned printing. Rather, they demonstrate that this claim arose from early modern European scholars’ search to articulate their sense of Ottoman inadequacy through explanations for why Ottomans did not print. The history of this particular line of inquiry is significant, I argue, because many scholars continue to probe the issue of why Ottomans did not print. In so doing, they maintain the expectation that print would revolutionize society, even though they have begun questioning the existence of the ban.
That is from Kathryn A. Schwartz, in Print History (jstor). Via Benedikt A.
The post Did Ottoman Sultans ban print? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2. ” Our theory sheds light on the mechanism of disastrous individual decisions in highly institutionalized authoritarian regimes.” With reference to Putin.
3. White House issues update to cost-benefit guidelines. And an EA analysis. And is the best kimchi made in earthenware pots?
4. The gambler who beat roulette (Bloomberg).
5. “Inflation is conflict.” New paper, not exactly my view, but it is not as if previous theories have been entirely successful.
6. Peter Sellars version of St. Matthew’s Passion, with Berlin, is now ungated for Easter.
The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, activated in 1970, has been relatively successful in limiting nuclear proliferation. When it comes to nuclear weapons, it is hard to find good news, but the treaty has acted as one deterrent of many to nation-states acquiring nuclear arms. Of course the treaty works, in large part, because the United States (working with allies) has lots of nuclear weapons, a powerful non-nuclear military, de facto control of SWIFT, and so on. We strongly encourage nations not to go acquiring nuclear weapons — just look at the current sanctions on Iran, noting the policy does not always succeed.
One approach to AI risk is to treat it like nuclear weapons and also their delivery systems. Let the United States get a lead, and then hope the U.S. can (in conjunction with others) enforce “OK enough” norms on the rest of the world.
Another approach to AI risk is to try to enforce a collusive agreement amongst all nations not to proceed with AI development, at least along certain dimensions, or perhaps altogether.
The first of these two options seems obviously better to me. But I am not here to argue that point, at least not today. Conditional on accepting the superiority of the first approach, all the arguments for AI safety are arguments for AI continuationism. (And no, this doesn’t mean building a nuclear submarine without securing the hatch doors.) At least for the United States. In fact I do support a six-month AI pause — for China. Yemen too.
It is a common mode of presentation in AGI circles to present wordy, swirling tomes of multiple concerns about AI risk. If some outside party cannot sufficiently assuage all of those concerns, the writer is left with the intuition that so much is at stake, indeed the very survival of the world, and so we need to “play it safe,” and thus they are lead to measures such as AI pauses and moratoriums.
But that is a non sequitur. The stronger the safety concerns, the stronger the arguments for the “America First” approach. Because that is the better way of managing the risk. Or if somehow you think it is not, that is the main argument you must make and persuade us of.
(Scott Alexander has a new post “Most technologies aren’t races,” but he doesn’t either choose one of the two approaches listed above, nor does he outline a third alternative. Fine if you don’t want to call them “races,” you still have to choose. As a side point, once you consider delivery systems, nuclear weapons are less of a yes/no thing than he suggests. And this postulated take is a view that nobody holds, nor did we practice it with nuclear weapons: “But also, we can’t worry about alignment, because that would be an unacceptable delay when we need to “win” the AI “race”.” On the terminology, Rohit is on target. Furthermore, good points from Erusian. And this claim of Scott’s shows how far apart we are in how we consider institutional and also physical and experimental constraints: “In a fast takeoff, it could be that you go to sleep with China six months ahead of the US, and wake up the next morning with China having fusion, nanotech, and starships.”)
Addendum:
As a side note, if the real issue in the safety debate is “America First” vs. “collusive international agreement to halt development,” who are the actual experts? It is not in general “the AI experts,” rather it is people with experience in and study of:
1. Game theory and collective action
2. International agreements and international relations
3. National security issues and understanding of how government works
4. History, and so on.
There is a striking tendency, amongst AI experts, EA types, AGI writers, and “rationalists” to think they are the experts in this debate. But they are only on some issues, and many of those issues (“new technologies can be quite risky”) are not so contested. And because these individuals do not frame the problem properly, they are doing relatively little to consult what the actual “all things considered” experts think.
The post The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and existential AGI risk appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
FreshRSS 