Anyone who wants to change the world is a kind of entrepreneur. (So we may need to rethink enthusiasm). Usually not a profit-seeking one, but I think it makes little difference. The differences between for-profit and non-profit corporations or organizations (in fact, these words are synonyms) are, first, that the non-profit is driven my its mission and seeks money for it, while a successful for-profit corporation has a mission but it has been vetted to make sure money can be made from it. Both need money to stay alive. The non-profit also is typically dependent on donations, which usually come from for-profit companies or wealth donors. Wealthy people try to change the world by investing money. They do so typically in ways that solve real problems or address real needs. All that differs is the direction of the arrow between the closely identified projects and profit-making opportunities. The question certainly is not whether this or that act of intervention in the world is good or bad in consequentialist terms (that is, in terms of its effects, which can be predicted and anticipated but not knowing). Decision theory with its use of probabilities expresses the logic of decision-making in situations of a risk society such as ours. There are situations and problems; desires and needs; opportunities, expectations, and hopes, all of which are forms of managed possibility. We know that the future exists today only in prefigured possibilities and likelihoods or probabilities. The financial capitalism that is structurally predominant in the world economy today takes this to a new height. The 2007-08 financial crisis was one consequence of the failure of anyone to manage this economy, a problem which remains unaddressed. It goes well beyond irresponsibility mortgage lending and borrowing. Especially when this financialized neoliberal capitalism is dependent on debt and borrowing. The privatization of financing for higher education has played a major role in this. To return, “changing the world.” This idea assumes a paradigm of which the skeptical problematic introduced by Descartes, the founded of modern philosophy, is a form. The idea is that there are subjects on one side who encounters objects on the other, and because subjectivity is essential consciousness and cognitive (and has become more so of course because most modern professions require a special education conferring both disciplinary socialization and particular discourses and cognitively apprehensible strategies). And then we “relate” to the world. Reach out and touch someone.” This very idea presupposes solipsism, transforms it into a moral or psychological condition (such as loneliness) and present as a cure something as tangible and objectifiable as a commodity. Commodiites are objects. The idea of the inseperability in some sense of self and world (think of them as poles in a continuous fabric and not as discrete objects) that is indicated in Heidegger’s notion of Being-in-the-world” is something to which commodity logic is alien. Commodities are out there; you can look at them. If they have an originary erotics, it would be things that extend outward rather than places that extend inward. (It is because women qua beautiful objects and images are both like commodities and paradigmatically objects for the gaze of admiring men that they figure for men in this way, though not necessarily for themselves or other women). Anyway, changing the world assumes first that something like the world can be the object of my action. Of course it cannot be. In fact, we can doubt whether anything like “the world” exists, but certainly if it does I am in it and not outside and my substance comes from it. It is as if the author is spoken or written by, or inscribed in, the text rather text by author. So what do we do instead? Change “Being”? Renounce interfering with anything identifiably outside ourselves? If we do not want to Change It All, would that mean the end and irrelevance of the modern idea of revolution? If not, we surely would have to think of it differently, and vanguard parties seeking to wrest control of the state apparatus are likely not the only notion that is obsolete now. In Judaism there is the notion of “tikkun olam.” Unfortunately, it means both perfecting the world and healing it. But it would not be anti-Jewish to say that ancient and medieval concepts in Hebrew no less than Greek or Latin may well be problematic. Some might then say we must tikkun our tikkun in a gesture that is reflexive or somehow “dialectical.” We know the liberal social scientists often sought to take account of their own positions as a scientist and perhaps one from a particular culture in the hope that power is mitigated when it is self-aware, and the idea of reflexive self-awareness goes back at least to Velasquez’s Las Meninas and other baroque artworks — including Shakespeare — which ought to cause us some skepticism on this point. For my money, art in particular and thinking in general are the two things that innovate our world most remarkably. I am not sure what the logic is whereby thinking changes itself or its reference or its interlocutors or anything, or if that is the right way to think about thinking. Maybe Heidegger is right that it is more departure than development (as in Hegel) and happens because of something like a revelatory capacity. I doubt we understand that idea as well as we should. Badiou might be right to speak not of revelation, which inevitably makes reference somehow to something already there, and just not thematized or conceptualized in the fullest possible way, but of construction. Truths for Badiou are constructed. This happens because the participants are moved by their experience of an event, and if an event were an appearance of an essence (not quite who Badiou thinks of it), the essence would be an it-self (which in a way Badiou’s originary “inconsistent multiplicity” is — I have argued its connection to the possibility of the event in a paper that will be on my blog when translated), it would be an appearance that is wholly different from previous manifestation that are or can be considered of the same thing or substance.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 22:30:52 +0000
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