Rationality is not maturity
A critical reply to Catherine Liu's Doomscroll Interview
Side note — I recently got a ‘like’ from Catherine Liu on one of my Notes (!!!). For context, I dashed off that note while I was listening to Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method, an eye-opening book which I highly recommend.
After listening to only three episodes of Doomscroll though, I’ve noticed a clear pattern to the questions and themes on the show, two of which interest me enough to spend some time addressing in writing. The first one connects more to the specifics of my own work, but the second opens up a much broader conversation which cannot be fully explored in one post. Hopefully the critical comments in this piece can help spark more fruitful dialogue about what emancipatory politics looks like in the 21st century.
1 — Blaming Foucault
My first comment concerns a thinker who is close to my heart — Michel Foucault. Foucault has profoundly influenced my own social and political theory, and I also regularly write and lecture about his work (as recently as last weekend, in fact). That’s perhaps why I noticed that Vivek Chibber and Catherine Liu explicitly take shots at Foucault in their interviews, arguing that it was Foucault’s emphasis on ‘power is everywhere’ which provided a key impetus for the faux-radical politics of the professional classes which has overtaken most Leftist spaces since the 1980’s.
Chibber and Liu argue that Foucault’s ‘power is everywhere’ theory was used to simultaneously politicize the most microscopic social relations, from pronouns to body language, while also turning power into a boogeyman which lurked everywhere and nowhere all at once. This omnipresence of power disguised the actual mechanisms of power, says Chibber, diverting attention from genuine points of leverage, and instead provided permission to the Left to withdraw from initiatives pushing for changes to economic and political structures of domination. Ultimately, this served to move the arena of struggle into the realm of everyday social relations where activists could style themselves as radicals by agitating for changes at the level of symbols, policy, and discourse, while leaving the basic structure and operation of power largely in tact.
It’s a cruel irony that a theorist of power who was suspicious of identity, language, and scientific knowledge has come to be seen as a key progenitor of the progressive politics championed by the credential professionals whom he had devoted his work to analyzing. Despite (or perhaps, because of?) being one of the most cited theorists in social science research, Foucault’s work and its potential are poorly understood within academic circles, and I think that most of the pop readings of Foucault in the academy fail to learn the lessons his work aimed to teach.
However, the fact that Foucault’s thought could be taken up in the way that Chibber and Liu describe does speak to the need to supplement Foucault with a fuller account of the material conditions of power and freedom. His work provides many useful tools for unmasking how power is exercised today through the professional class’ rhetoric of science, security, and care, but this emphasis meant that his account often emphasized social, linguistic, and psychological tools rather than physical or material tools.
We need to add to Foucault’s analysis of power a philosophy of technology which describes the role of material objects in subjective development, social relations, and political economy. This is why Foucault needs Marx, while Marx also needs Foucault. In my work here at Moloch Theory, I try to develop Foucault’s thought in a direction which is not woke, not liberal, not progressive, and not socialist, (that’s a lot of nots!), and I see Chibber and Liu’s comments as signals that this recovery of Foucault is badly needed today.
2 — Rationality is not maturity
Now that my preoccupation with Foucault has been gotten out of the way, I want to focus on the emphasis which Josh and his guests, particularly Catherine Liu, place on returning to the values of the Enlightenment. In every Doomscroll interview I have watched thus far, Josh at some point asked his guests about where they think the impulse to reject the Enlightenment came from, and whether we should perhaps be arguing for a return to the ideals of the Enlightenment. To me, this seems to be a key point which Josh wants his viewers to consider. He returns to it consistently, and he asks it, I think, because he wants to stir a reconsideration of the Enlightenment project.
In each case that he brings this up, his guests say yes, and critique the frivolous arguments coming from various cultural and literary studies circles which have dismissed the Enlightenment as variously imperialist, patriarchal, heteronormative, white, or simply too exclusionary. Instead, his guests argue, the Enlightenment provided us with the universal ideals of emancipation which made the real social reforms and liberation we enjoy today possible in the first place. Further, we can’t simply ignore the historical fact that it was precisely European modernity which produced the very ideas and ideals which allowed non-Europeans to critique and emancipate themselves from colonialism. To dismiss the entire Enlightenment tradition out of hand is therefore self-defeating, and this rejection in the academy has done great harm to the Left.
Catherine Liu takes up this line of thinking even more emphatically than the other guests, launching into an exposition which hearkens back to the theme of ‘maturity’ which she introduced earlier in the interview. At the start of the interview, she describes contemporary Leftists and their organizational culture as infantile and exhibiting a lack of differentiation which humans must develop as they mature. She compares activists to ‘eggs’ who have a fragile outside and a soft inside, no differentiation or layers of mediation which allow them to move through a world where they encounter difference and have to metabolize contradiction in their social relations.
Liu recapitulates this theme to talk about the rationality and scientific method developed in the Enlightenment as the maturity which the Left needs to recover. Her rhetoric very much recalls a past generation of socialists who drew on Marx and Freud to conceptualize the struggle against the dogmatism of religion and religious institutions as integral to the fight against political domination. Liu argues that our capacity to exercise reason is what makes us equal, providing the ground for human rights, and she portrays rationality and empirical science as the evidence of achieving maturity. Reason allows us to think freely, casting off the chains of oppressive thought systems, whether they be political or religious, and science provides a universal method for establishing knowledge about the world.
But I think that Liu’s effusive praise of the products of the Enlightenment as maturity doesn’t display an awareness of the legitimate critiques of Enlightenment rationality which have begun to crop up now that we’re living with the social consequences of the elevation of reason and the scientific method starting in the 17th century. Setting aside the feminist and decolonial critiques of Enlightenment rationality, our times have nonetheless been marked by a growing awareness that rationality simply is not enough for a mature engagement with the world. The ideal of knowledge as rational and empirically verifiable has failed to pan out, and has paradoxically debased us to the level of machines which can be converted into information and processed.
While he’s hardly the only person to have pushed this line of thinking, Slavoj Žižek’s philosophy emphasizes how reason cannot ground itself, and that it remains constitutively incomplete. While this contradictory ground is the basis of the freedom of thought, this also testifies to the non-All of rationality which cannot definitively close on itself to provide universal truth or absolute certainty. Mathematician Kurt Gödell formalized the ultimate limitation of all systems with his incompleteness proofs which demonstrate that every system of thought will produce true statements for which the system cannot provide incontrovertible proof.
Buddhism has also long maintained the futility of the search for the absolute knowledge which rationality holds out, a quest which has been the unique inheritance of the European Enlightenment. Masao Abe of the Kyoto School adapted Buddhist philosophy to argue that Descartes’ cogito ergo sum fell prey to an infinite regress of the speaking ‘I’ trying to grasp ‘I’ spoken about; an argument which Nietzsche also puts forward in the first book of Beyond Good and Evil where he argues that it’s not clear that the ‘I’ is really even where thinking comes from. Upon closer inspection, the ‘I’ or ego’s fantasy about itself as the master of the psychic system falls apart.
In recent years, we’ve also seen the rise of the conversation about ‘meta-rationality,’ that is, what functions beyond rationality to order it. We could state it like this — what rule does one use to apply the rules? Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue brought this question back into mainstream philosophy in the Anglo-American academy, but this insight was never truly lost in the continental stream where thinkers continually struggled with Nietzsche’s critique of rationality as dependent upon values.
If reason is merely a tool, one which cannot generate the certainty and objectivity which it pretends to offer, then reason must find itself at the disposal of some higher and more active force. Nietzsche believed that values were what organized and subordinated reason, for he observed that values cannot be created or arrived at through reason alone (exactly what MacIntyre was highlighting in his emphasis on the incommensurability of ethical systems)— only will can create the values which will use reason to advance themselves.
So, while I welcome the way that Catherine Liu introduces models of human development back into discourses about politics and organization, I think that studying the role of immaturity and maturity in thinking actually pushes us beyond the idolization of reason which we find in the Enlightenment project, leading us into a more skillful understanding of reason’s relation to other human capacities, and its role within the broader system of consciousness.
I guess that after following this second thread out long enough, I now see how my critical comment also relates to my research — the role of maturity and wisdom in knowledge has led me for the past few years into a deeper investigation of the problem of esoteric speech, which itself opens up a critical journey into the failures of modern knowledge. A book on this topic has been gestating in me for a while now, a project which I’ve been informally calling “Our Obscenity,” which explores the danger of ‘open-source mysteries’ and the dharma dysphoria which ideas can induce in unsuspecting students or internetizens when introduced at an inopportune moment or in the wrong way.
In a strange synchronicity, this also intersects Josh Citarella’s own intense interest in radicalization pipelines and the internet dynamics at play in political discourse and identity formation amongst the very online youth today.
… and I think that’s enough for now.
Don’t forget to register for “Introduction to Cybernetic Theory” which I will be co-teaching over at Incite Seminars from July 8 to August 12— it would be great to have you join us as we dig into the role that feedback loops and information technology in shaping the conditions for thinking and acting today. We try to keep the seminar affordable, but if the price is still beyond your reach, email inciteseminarsphila@gmail.com for a solidarity ticket. Regardless of your ability to pay, we would love to have you be a part of the conversation.
Great piece, that, Matthew. I agree pretty strongly with the idea that rationality does not mean maturity, at least not a reductive notion of rationality. You see narrow forms of reason resulting in the justification of systems that dominate, subjugate, and prevent human flourishing. Perhaps this is why there’s a lack of maturity…