Your seminar idea is a really good one. I'm instantly entertaining some way of collaborating on that, but of course I am, at the same time, stretched too thin already. Nevertheless, we must talk! For now, I want to add some thinkers. First, I was happy you pointed out the fact that the kind of bureaucracy in question is modern. Because of the ways that word gets used though, which makes even Descartes modern, I especially like Scott's use of "high modern." I also like how you bring McLuhan into this – he is essential!
What really connects all these thinkers for me is that they are all post left or post Marxist. They are radical thinkers who had no home in the old left, and to some extent on the new left either (though much of the new left, at least in theory, was just post leftism maintaining certain old commitments while trying to figure out the new situation). Some of them became thinkers of the new left, whereas others, like Burnham, became key figures in neoconservativism. Andre Gorz remained some kind of left, but he is heavily influenced by Foucault and Ehrenreich, the latter of which is also essential for the PMC critique. (His Farewell to the Working Class is an absolute must for this whole line of thought.) What characterizes the new left, for thinkers like Ehrenreich and Gorz, is that they never gave up on large scale structural emancipation as the goal, while simultaneously becoming thoroughly disenchanted with existing radical movements. The realization that capital and state can no longer be addressed as separate entities, much less set against one another, thanks to the managerial and professional elite apparatuses of control, definitely gets them onto the list here. Perhaps because Ehrenreich and Gorz remained left they felt a need to critique the left more than thinkers like Illich or Burnham who, after a point, really didn't need to. But that makes them all the more useful, at least for me, since leftists are so over-represented in theory circles – whether one identifies as left or not, the presuppositional matrices we think with, which are so easy to take for granted, are only really brought into the light by thinkers who deliberately challenge them.
As for others who belong on the list, Weber, Luhmann, and Bourdieu are essential for thinking bureaucracy and state. Marcuse, D&G, and Baudrillard all have a role to play too (the latter especially for thinking post-Marxian McLuhanism taken to its logical cybernetic control society conclusion). As for what to do about the problem, or as to the Landian question about whether anything human will make it into the near future, I think we need Levinas, Jaspers, and Arendt. All three of whom, as well as Foucault and Bourdieu, wouldn't have achieved what they did without some serious time spent with Heidegger.
My short-hand for grouping all the thinkers has not been sociology from below, because I think "below vs above" is one of those political commitments worth bracketing (along with "revolution vs reform"), but has, since 2020, been something I just call "the post left reader" because I like to imagine someone took essential writings for people burning out on radical leftism and combined all of those divergent yet overlapping currents into a useful anthology! I just don't use that term publicly because it got monopolized by some podcasters who are by all counts anti-intellectual and theoretical dead ends.
Wow, I wasn't expecting something this detailed. Thanks for taking the time to write something out. Btw, I was actually thinking about talking with you about piloting something like this at TU, so let's talk privately about that more.
I agree with your angle on these thinkers as "post-left," with almost all of them serving as internal critics or gadflies to actually existing Leftist movements. This cashes out into figures like Foucault, Illich, and Lasch being coded as "Right" by folks on the Left today, even though these thinkers supported radical social and economic change, and also took as their lodestar a pursuit of new forms of human freedom.
They don't fit comfortable on either side of the spectrum because they remained committed to actual material change, and want to reveal the symbolic play of elite society as so much rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. They also oppose some orthodoxies which run deeply in our cultural psyche, such as a believe in continual progress, or the unlimited good of the advance of science, or the state's role as expanded security apparatus. Ultimately, I believe that these thinkers make themselves illegible because they believe in the need for imagination and experimentation, and thus they maintain that the outcome cannot be known ahead of time. They are trying to maintain an openness over and against the prodigious pressure from the human mind and human society to close off that ludic process of discovery.
I'm unaware of Gorz, but will need to check out the book you recommended. I also agree with the inclusion of Weber, Luhmann, and Bourdieau, although I'm less versed in their work. They would need to be a part of the expanded reading list for course prep. McLuhan recently entered this mix for me as well -- I think you could read McLuhan's philosophy as a strange mediation of Lacan and Deleuze, but that's something I need to keep noodling on.
Excellent work Matthew, and I think you are right that these thinkers are identifying something that aligns with "biopolitics" as Foucault describes. For me, they are suggesting our world is increasing a Kafka novel like "The Trial" (more than Orwell or Huxley, though obviously there is truth to both), where we are all a Josef K under a system and law that nobody can fully articulate, that has "top-down causal" influence over us all without direct force, and that nobody can directly locate. We might associate it with a system that can "inwardly range us" like Rodrigues is in Silence, as you so brilliantly described in your book. Our rationality, freedom, values...are increasingly "always already" framed on a horizon that sets the range of their possibilities, which gives us a possibility of movement to thus make us feel like we have agency, but that agency is pre-framed. At the same time, humans without "pre-framing" can go mad, but that very truth of the human condition can then legitimacy the Law (of Kafka). This is our tragedy, but what might we see anew if we see it clearly? Anything? Everything? Anyway, great work as always Matthew!
I'm glad you brought up Kafka, because I think that The Trial would be essential reading for any understanding of bureaucracy and managerialism. I'd pair it with the essays in Graeber's The Utopia of Rules. There is much more to excavate here! Thanks for your comment!
I haven't read them all as much as I would have liked to, but they definitely do form a sort of nexus and anyone who is in the center of their venn diagram is almost guaranteed to be worthy of serious engagement
I think the subject is interesting, but you've not said why you want to do this — what anyone is going to get out of it. I need to have some idea of what problems — intellectual or practical — it would solve or opportunities it would seize.
Thanks so much for your constructive feedback, Nicholas! This initial post was trying to inchoately gesture at something I'm seeing that I didn't see others talking about, but I'm also doing some ongoing work in private to clarify these things for myself. I'm hoping to make some progress on that with my presentation about Ivan Illich and "school brain" at TUCON 2024 (https://samsara.substack.com/p/ill-be-presenting-at-tucon-2024)
What is your interest in the subject? Are there particular problems in this realm that you find yourself interested in?
It's hard for me to even start. Let me throw some thoughts in your direction. I like your term 'school brain' and I think you're defs onto something. But at least from where I'm coming from (I'm an old guy — 67 at last count), I'm wondering if your critique of school brain isn't a new, more refined kind of school brain itself.
Reading your provocation for your session at TUCON 2024, I like the premise. But why not quote Paul Graham's essay "The Lesson to Unlearn". https://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html
I remember reading that and thinking that he'd put it all so simply. He'd made it all as clear as day to anyone with the instinct to see what he's getting at. And once one sees it, then, if one is serious, one tries to learn the lesson — in the way one shapes one's values and one's life.
There's very little more to say that needs theoretical elaboration. Because the rest of the insight to be gained is not theoretical. It's a matter of practice. Now as someone who thinks their own practice has, for many years, been shaped by the idea (which I'd glommed onto in some form long before encountering Graham articulating it), one does gain some deeper theoretical insight along the way, but it's not really available as pure theory — it is reflection in thought as one moves through time and learns a little more as experience of life and of one's attempts to live one's own life — beyond 'school brain' — accumulates.
Imagining that one can learn much from 'theorists' of this idea of how to live and how to think seems perverse to me. It is as if they are 'authorities' in the way in which Newton and Einstein really are authorities in physics. I don't think human experience is at all like that. But of course our schools in all their forms would like it to be now wouldn't they? ;) They are, in fact, pretty much predicated on that proposition.
Anyway, hopefully I've conveyed my misgivings, if you'd like to discuss it by teleconference, it might be fun — you can email me on ngruen at Gmail.
Oh — and can you point me to the part of Illich you're referencing. I'm fond of Illich (and hope — and expect — to get through life without reading Lacan ;)
Thanks for taking the time to respond, Nicholas! I'm in wholehearted agreement with you (and Paul Graham!) that the insight of "oh, education is not learning" can be grasped in a moment, like a flash of lightning. Once that insight has arrived, its theoretical elaboration is probably does more harm than good. All that remains is to begin to live again, to "work with intuition" as Nishida says.
I don't think that what the thinkers I've identified in this piece are doing is exactly trying to over-theorize this experience though. I see them as trying to investigate the negative subjective and objective effects which are produced by the bureaucratic structure. Because, these do have objective qualities to them, we create and re-create them day by day, and they also create outcomes in the world. So, I think they deserve being subjected to a critical analysis, one which will open our eyes to the contingent and plastic nature of the world we take for granted.
I would note though, jumping off an anecdote in Paul Graham's piece, that even if someone doesn't care about grades and only cares about learning, they can still get captured by school brain. I was more like this -- never studied for tests, always got good grades, but didn't care, and was consequently not the top student when I graduate from high school. However, I had been captured by a different game, one that I was playing in and through school, almost like a side quest, which was that of academic theology. Once you get hooked into a community of a particular theoretical discourse (for me, theology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis have been the primary ones) that community's values and archetypes can take hold of you, and I see that its own interesting expression of school brain.
Thanks for sharing your email -- I'll reach out, and we can chat more!
"I had been captured by a different game, one that I was playing in and through school, almost like a side quest, which was that of academic theology. Once you get hooked into a community of a particular theoretical discourse (for me, theology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis have been the primary ones) that community's values and archetypes can take hold of you, and I see that its own interesting expression of school brain."
I have come to think of the disciplines as exploiting this vulnerability in the human brain. Most useful thinking takes in structuring ideas from disciplines and then interprets them in a specific context. But academia's version of this is just "applied this" and "applied that". And the process of application is also one that has been subjected to the disciplinary straightjacket. So the process of really engaging with the ideas, doesn't happen. When the ideas are very well suited to their material — as with classical physics for instance — there are few big problems.
But in the world of thought this is very rare. Almost all really useful thinking is some creative response to the ideas in the zeitgeist together with some taste for difficulty and rigour in finding a way to interpret them fruitfully in some specific context.
That goes completely unthought.
Meanwhile counterfeit metaphysics abounds — as I argued here.
Great work. I think Adorno‘s thinking on „the managed/administrated world“ could also be interesting for this. There is a radio interview with him and Horkheimer on this topic on YouTube „die verwaltete Welt oder: die Krise des Individuums“ (with English subtitles)
Your seminar idea is a really good one. I'm instantly entertaining some way of collaborating on that, but of course I am, at the same time, stretched too thin already. Nevertheless, we must talk! For now, I want to add some thinkers. First, I was happy you pointed out the fact that the kind of bureaucracy in question is modern. Because of the ways that word gets used though, which makes even Descartes modern, I especially like Scott's use of "high modern." I also like how you bring McLuhan into this – he is essential!
What really connects all these thinkers for me is that they are all post left or post Marxist. They are radical thinkers who had no home in the old left, and to some extent on the new left either (though much of the new left, at least in theory, was just post leftism maintaining certain old commitments while trying to figure out the new situation). Some of them became thinkers of the new left, whereas others, like Burnham, became key figures in neoconservativism. Andre Gorz remained some kind of left, but he is heavily influenced by Foucault and Ehrenreich, the latter of which is also essential for the PMC critique. (His Farewell to the Working Class is an absolute must for this whole line of thought.) What characterizes the new left, for thinkers like Ehrenreich and Gorz, is that they never gave up on large scale structural emancipation as the goal, while simultaneously becoming thoroughly disenchanted with existing radical movements. The realization that capital and state can no longer be addressed as separate entities, much less set against one another, thanks to the managerial and professional elite apparatuses of control, definitely gets them onto the list here. Perhaps because Ehrenreich and Gorz remained left they felt a need to critique the left more than thinkers like Illich or Burnham who, after a point, really didn't need to. But that makes them all the more useful, at least for me, since leftists are so over-represented in theory circles – whether one identifies as left or not, the presuppositional matrices we think with, which are so easy to take for granted, are only really brought into the light by thinkers who deliberately challenge them.
As for others who belong on the list, Weber, Luhmann, and Bourdieu are essential for thinking bureaucracy and state. Marcuse, D&G, and Baudrillard all have a role to play too (the latter especially for thinking post-Marxian McLuhanism taken to its logical cybernetic control society conclusion). As for what to do about the problem, or as to the Landian question about whether anything human will make it into the near future, I think we need Levinas, Jaspers, and Arendt. All three of whom, as well as Foucault and Bourdieu, wouldn't have achieved what they did without some serious time spent with Heidegger.
My short-hand for grouping all the thinkers has not been sociology from below, because I think "below vs above" is one of those political commitments worth bracketing (along with "revolution vs reform"), but has, since 2020, been something I just call "the post left reader" because I like to imagine someone took essential writings for people burning out on radical leftism and combined all of those divergent yet overlapping currents into a useful anthology! I just don't use that term publicly because it got monopolized by some podcasters who are by all counts anti-intellectual and theoretical dead ends.
Wow, I wasn't expecting something this detailed. Thanks for taking the time to write something out. Btw, I was actually thinking about talking with you about piloting something like this at TU, so let's talk privately about that more.
I agree with your angle on these thinkers as "post-left," with almost all of them serving as internal critics or gadflies to actually existing Leftist movements. This cashes out into figures like Foucault, Illich, and Lasch being coded as "Right" by folks on the Left today, even though these thinkers supported radical social and economic change, and also took as their lodestar a pursuit of new forms of human freedom.
They don't fit comfortable on either side of the spectrum because they remained committed to actual material change, and want to reveal the symbolic play of elite society as so much rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. They also oppose some orthodoxies which run deeply in our cultural psyche, such as a believe in continual progress, or the unlimited good of the advance of science, or the state's role as expanded security apparatus. Ultimately, I believe that these thinkers make themselves illegible because they believe in the need for imagination and experimentation, and thus they maintain that the outcome cannot be known ahead of time. They are trying to maintain an openness over and against the prodigious pressure from the human mind and human society to close off that ludic process of discovery.
I'm unaware of Gorz, but will need to check out the book you recommended. I also agree with the inclusion of Weber, Luhmann, and Bourdieau, although I'm less versed in their work. They would need to be a part of the expanded reading list for course prep. McLuhan recently entered this mix for me as well -- I think you could read McLuhan's philosophy as a strange mediation of Lacan and Deleuze, but that's something I need to keep noodling on.
We read the entirety of Gorz's Farewell to The Working Class here, while relating it to our research into the PMC, timenergy theory and more. https://youtu.be/uF1Ak8voS5Q?si=tzci-o_JlOwrJ-8_
Oh man, you'll dig Gorz. Also I would love to have that conversation soon.
Sweet! Thanks for the resources. Looking forward to checking it out and talking more.
Excellent work Matthew, and I think you are right that these thinkers are identifying something that aligns with "biopolitics" as Foucault describes. For me, they are suggesting our world is increasing a Kafka novel like "The Trial" (more than Orwell or Huxley, though obviously there is truth to both), where we are all a Josef K under a system and law that nobody can fully articulate, that has "top-down causal" influence over us all without direct force, and that nobody can directly locate. We might associate it with a system that can "inwardly range us" like Rodrigues is in Silence, as you so brilliantly described in your book. Our rationality, freedom, values...are increasingly "always already" framed on a horizon that sets the range of their possibilities, which gives us a possibility of movement to thus make us feel like we have agency, but that agency is pre-framed. At the same time, humans without "pre-framing" can go mad, but that very truth of the human condition can then legitimacy the Law (of Kafka). This is our tragedy, but what might we see anew if we see it clearly? Anything? Everything? Anyway, great work as always Matthew!
I'm glad you brought up Kafka, because I think that The Trial would be essential reading for any understanding of bureaucracy and managerialism. I'd pair it with the essays in Graeber's The Utopia of Rules. There is much more to excavate here! Thanks for your comment!
I haven't read them all as much as I would have liked to, but they definitely do form a sort of nexus and anyone who is in the center of their venn diagram is almost guaranteed to be worthy of serious engagement
I think the subject is interesting, but you've not said why you want to do this — what anyone is going to get out of it. I need to have some idea of what problems — intellectual or practical — it would solve or opportunities it would seize.
Thanks so much for your constructive feedback, Nicholas! This initial post was trying to inchoately gesture at something I'm seeing that I didn't see others talking about, but I'm also doing some ongoing work in private to clarify these things for myself. I'm hoping to make some progress on that with my presentation about Ivan Illich and "school brain" at TUCON 2024 (https://samsara.substack.com/p/ill-be-presenting-at-tucon-2024)
What is your interest in the subject? Are there particular problems in this realm that you find yourself interested in?
Thanks for your response Matthew,
It's hard for me to even start. Let me throw some thoughts in your direction. I like your term 'school brain' and I think you're defs onto something. But at least from where I'm coming from (I'm an old guy — 67 at last count), I'm wondering if your critique of school brain isn't a new, more refined kind of school brain itself.
Reading your provocation for your session at TUCON 2024, I like the premise. But why not quote Paul Graham's essay "The Lesson to Unlearn". https://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html
I remember reading that and thinking that he'd put it all so simply. He'd made it all as clear as day to anyone with the instinct to see what he's getting at. And once one sees it, then, if one is serious, one tries to learn the lesson — in the way one shapes one's values and one's life.
There's very little more to say that needs theoretical elaboration. Because the rest of the insight to be gained is not theoretical. It's a matter of practice. Now as someone who thinks their own practice has, for many years, been shaped by the idea (which I'd glommed onto in some form long before encountering Graham articulating it), one does gain some deeper theoretical insight along the way, but it's not really available as pure theory — it is reflection in thought as one moves through time and learns a little more as experience of life and of one's attempts to live one's own life — beyond 'school brain' — accumulates.
Imagining that one can learn much from 'theorists' of this idea of how to live and how to think seems perverse to me. It is as if they are 'authorities' in the way in which Newton and Einstein really are authorities in physics. I don't think human experience is at all like that. But of course our schools in all their forms would like it to be now wouldn't they? ;) They are, in fact, pretty much predicated on that proposition.
Anyway, hopefully I've conveyed my misgivings, if you'd like to discuss it by teleconference, it might be fun — you can email me on ngruen at Gmail.
Oh — and can you point me to the part of Illich you're referencing. I'm fond of Illich (and hope — and expect — to get through life without reading Lacan ;)
Thanks for taking the time to respond, Nicholas! I'm in wholehearted agreement with you (and Paul Graham!) that the insight of "oh, education is not learning" can be grasped in a moment, like a flash of lightning. Once that insight has arrived, its theoretical elaboration is probably does more harm than good. All that remains is to begin to live again, to "work with intuition" as Nishida says.
I don't think that what the thinkers I've identified in this piece are doing is exactly trying to over-theorize this experience though. I see them as trying to investigate the negative subjective and objective effects which are produced by the bureaucratic structure. Because, these do have objective qualities to them, we create and re-create them day by day, and they also create outcomes in the world. So, I think they deserve being subjected to a critical analysis, one which will open our eyes to the contingent and plastic nature of the world we take for granted.
I would note though, jumping off an anecdote in Paul Graham's piece, that even if someone doesn't care about grades and only cares about learning, they can still get captured by school brain. I was more like this -- never studied for tests, always got good grades, but didn't care, and was consequently not the top student when I graduate from high school. However, I had been captured by a different game, one that I was playing in and through school, almost like a side quest, which was that of academic theology. Once you get hooked into a community of a particular theoretical discourse (for me, theology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis have been the primary ones) that community's values and archetypes can take hold of you, and I see that its own interesting expression of school brain.
Thanks for sharing your email -- I'll reach out, and we can chat more!
Yes, interesting observation
"I had been captured by a different game, one that I was playing in and through school, almost like a side quest, which was that of academic theology. Once you get hooked into a community of a particular theoretical discourse (for me, theology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis have been the primary ones) that community's values and archetypes can take hold of you, and I see that its own interesting expression of school brain."
I have come to think of the disciplines as exploiting this vulnerability in the human brain. Most useful thinking takes in structuring ideas from disciplines and then interprets them in a specific context. But academia's version of this is just "applied this" and "applied that". And the process of application is also one that has been subjected to the disciplinary straightjacket. So the process of really engaging with the ideas, doesn't happen. When the ideas are very well suited to their material — as with classical physics for instance — there are few big problems.
But in the world of thought this is very rare. Almost all really useful thinking is some creative response to the ideas in the zeitgeist together with some taste for difficulty and rigour in finding a way to interpret them fruitfully in some specific context.
That goes completely unthought.
Meanwhile counterfeit metaphysics abounds — as I argued here.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-economics-forgot-its-subject-matter
Great work. I think Adorno‘s thinking on „the managed/administrated world“ could also be interesting for this. There is a radio interview with him and Horkheimer on this topic on YouTube „die verwaltete Welt oder: die Krise des Individuums“ (with English subtitles)