Keywords

I have not been able to update the blog with new essays for the past several weeks, in large part because I was writing a four-part lecture series that I delivered in March, and I have been writing a couple of book proposals that I have begun to shop around. With those large projects now behind me, my plan is to get back into the regular practice of writing each week. Thank you for your patience with me, and thank you always for reading.

I am extremely ambivalent about systematic projects. This comes about, in part, because during my graduate studies I spent a long time learning various forms of systematic theology, and prior to that I spent most of my time working with thinkers in the Hegelian and post-Hegelian line (Feuerbach, Marx, Benjamin, Habermas, etc), and they were all busy with systematic projects.

To be clear: I don’t think systematic projects are good for their own sake. I don’t think that they ever actually accomplish the kind of totality to which they aspire. I have read enough Gödel and Derrida to understand that the incompleteness of any set is an unavoidable and irreducible fact of the existence of that set.

So imagine my surprise when I realized, after years of thinking and taking notes and conecting intellectual dots, that I discovered that I was working on a systematic project of my own. This was not an intention, mind you. It arose instead because, as I wrote more and more about these disparate islands of my ideas, I kept noticing that what I thought were isolated projects kept becoming entwined and interconnected.

There is only positive good that I can imagine ever arising from a systematic project: It offers the reader an opportunity for consistent vocabulary. I mean this in the most serious way. whenever I have the opportunity to lecture on Hannah Arendt, I usually start my remarks by noting to the audience that she was most decidedly not a systematic thinker—by which I mean that you can go from one of her books to the next and see that she is using the same terms, but in wildly different ways. Each of her projects is its own hermetic whole, with its own distinct vocabulary and logic. That makes it difficult to proceed when you want to make a claim like, “Arendt says politics means X…” She may use a term one way in one work, and use a different term (or the same term, but with a different meaning) in the next work.

For better or worse, I want readers to be able to engage at any point with my written and published ideas, and discover an overall consistency. Now, I realize I won’t be able to do this perfectly, but I have spent a lot of time (on the way to this point, where books are coming out, and I am writing a lot of journal articles and essays) trying to figure out what I actually mean, and this has yielded a collection of terms that have achieved a kind of stability across my works.

So what follows is the beginning of a list of these terms, and what i mean whan I use them. Many of them are common terms that I am using in uncommon ways. Others, occasionally, are neologisms, or they are obscure or technical language that I am trying to bring into currency within my thought.

I realize this might not be of interest ot very many people. That’s fair. However, it is my hope that—assuming my readership might grow over time (a fella can dream)—that this list will serve as a useful resource, and might eventually be expanded.

I draw the idea of keywords from the social theorist and literary critic Raymond Williams. His book of the same name, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, has been an indispensable work for me in navigating the social sciences. So, if you want a better version of what I am attempting here, look to Williams.

Economics is an orientation toward the future where all variable outcomes are as controlled as possible to yield predetermined results. The economic realm here is understood to be a realm governed by the logics of fatality and teleology.

Similar to politics, I use the term “economics” in a somewhat peculiar fashion. I recognize that the usual meaning of the term focuses on markets and finance. Following the thinking of Hannah Arendt, however, we can reframe a binary between the economic and the political. In broad strokes, the political is the realm of natality and open futures, whereas the economic is the realm of fatality and predetermined outcomes.

The metaphor for the economic realm is a factory. Raw materials go in on one end, and the processes yield a set number of expected products. We have now arranged our entire society to operate on this model, the fatality model, where every future is predicted (and therefore not actually a future, but a reproduction of our imaginations here in the present, or worse, a reproduction of some aspect of the past).

In our present age, failure may be the only truly revolutionary act. Failure is the logic of natality rendered in material form.

The chief thinker who helps us understand failure in our present situation is Jack Halberstam. In particular, his book The Queer Art of Failure makes the case that the way forward into life comes from a failure to reproduce the current cultures of death and destruction.

We can read Halberstam’s notion of queer failure in parallel with the language of Pope Francis that we are in transition from an “epoch of change” into an “epochal change.” The epoch of change is a material extension of economic logics, in that the social structures are constrained and well-defined. The epoch of change is teleological, governed by fatality, in that the “masters” of the epoch have a vested interest in the production of certain future outcomes. In this sense, the epoch of change is an anti-human endeavor, in that it only allows certain humans to express themselves in their full humanity.

Under such conditions, to affirm the full humanity of all breathing persons in this time and in this place would entail a fundamental rupture in the system itself. This means that we fail to play our role as victims, as slaves, as alienated labor, and instead embrace the natal queerness of undefined and flourishing wild life.

Fatality is the logic of controlled futures. The opposite of natality.

When we engage in (or are captured by) fatal logics, then we are caught up in what Ross Douthat once referred to as “the truth seeking that is the work of capitalism.” Let’s unpack that: Capitalism “seeks truth” by blocking out all alternatives (literally—think of the words of Margaret Thatcher, quoted by Mark Fisher, “there is no alternative” to capitalist realism). From this narrowed set of possibilities, the ones with excess resources put those resources to work creating the outcome they want to see in the world.

This is the economic structure of fatality, and the fatal structure of economics. The wild genius of people creating new things together must be suppressed precisely because it cannot be properly monetized or mediated. Folks experiencing rest or joy or reaching a point where they can say “this is enough, I’ve earned enough, I have enough”—these human milestones are treated as terroristic threats to the system of endless reproduction of the present.

The fatal logics at work here are materialized in the “death culture” that Saint Pope John Paul II warned us about in Evangelium Vitae: “This culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency. Looking at the situation from this point of view, it is possible to speak in a certain sense of a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favoured tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated. In this way a kind of ‘conspiracy against life’ is unleashed” (para. 12).

Fatality is the “conspiracy against life” materialized in the form of capitalist economics.

Natality is the logic of open, uncontrolled futures. The opposite of fatality.

I first was introduced to this term by Jennifer Banks, in her book by the same name, Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth. Banks, in turn, draws the idea from a number of philosophers and social thinkers, most particularly from Hannah Arendt.

As Banks reflects on Arendt’s approach to natality, she writes, “Birth was political because it was connected to the human, creative capacity for action. Each action is a little rebirth; it is haphazard, unprecedented, spontaneous, and surprising. It sets in motion a series of events and other actions we cannot foresee. Action is therefore risky; it is subject to human mistakenness, and it can go wrong. It is messy and inherently plural; we act together, not alone” (45).

The logics of economics are fundamentally about fatality, in that they are all about minimizing this sort of human risk. If one wishes to make profits above all, then it is especially good to be able to control the future to yield the outcomes that are favorable to profit. As a result, we have built our entire culture around the elimination of unexpected outcomes.

As Arendt would remind us, however, this has come at the expense of our deepest human connections. A predicted future is actually no future at all, but rather an endless repetition of the present (see the work of Mark Fisher in this regard, especially his reflections on “capitalist realism” and “pre-corporation,” which I have dealt with a little bit here and here).

Natality is not revolutionary in the contemporary sense of that term, because even our revolutions these days involve aiming at a determined future. Rather, following the insights of the late Pope Francis, we might imagine that natality is connected to what he referred to as the “epochal change,” where we are not simply engaged in the reform of the existing social relations, but we are instead confronted with unimaginable possibilities that open up entirely new social relations.

In this manner, from the aspects of the present world, natality must always be associated with failure, in that producing a new world and a new set of possibilities entails the failure to reproduce the old world and the previous set of possibilities.

Oikos is a Greek word for “home.” When I use it in my thinking, I’m trying to indicate any of a number of “homelike” relations between persons. Not just families, but chosen families.

As has been often mentioned, oikos is the root of our English words economy and ecology. There is a danger of reading these terms backwards into oikos, to color our understanding. I’m trying to resist that, but I’m not always successful.

For me, an oikos points me to non-utopian social arrangements, where all the participants are comrades in trying to survive and flourish. Let me unpack that. When comrades are gathered to try to have a meaningful and flourishing life, they begin with the reality of limitation. There are no infinite resources (again, this is not a utopian or aspirational arrangement, no version of Ayn Rand’s fantasies of “just imagine an engine that runs forever without fuel”). When resources are infinite, nobody ever has to learn to negotiate or compromise. But the limitations of the real world mean that we have to learn these skills, if we are truly committed to the flourishing of all within the oikos (as opposed to letting some in the landscape suffer and die for the comfort of others, in which case we have a kind of theater of relationship).

This means that the participants in an oikos are going to have to negotiate (and continue negotiating) in order for the resources that are available can be used for the flourishing of everyone involved. That’s going to be annoying and inefficient, and those aspects are irreducible to the process, because to prioritize efficiency over interruption is to introduce a “culture of death” into the oikos (see e.g. Evangelium Vitae para. 12)

So an oikos pushes us to economy, where teleology, planning, and determined futures reign. Some are sacrificed so that others might thrive. But it also offers us ecology, where all are part of the whole, and the suffering of some poisons the whole. So oikos, in my thinking, is a neutral concept. It is about groups maneuvering with limited resources without utopian illusions.

The perversion of the oikos, where the comrade relation is given over to the profit relation, moves social relations toward oikarchy (the framework of racialized capitalism, exploitation, and these “cultures of death”). Conversely, when we take seriously the comrade relation, and commit to working out the flourishing of all within the oikos as best we can, in a continuing way, we move from the exclusionary, fatality-centered oikarchy toward the open, welcoming, natality-centered oikoplenary.

Oikarchy is a portmanteau of oikos and hierarchy. This is the predominant understanding of the oikos relation in our current thought: the assertion that, because resources are limited, we don’t have to negotiate with each other. Rather, we simply need to arrange social space so cdrtain inconvenient people are starved and left to die over time (the organized abandonment at the heart of violence).

Household relations can become poisoned by addiction, violence, dishonesty, or a willingness to let certain others suffer for our comfort. Most contemporary forms of social arrangement are configured in such a way that these pathologies become the determinative factors. Just as in a household where all the social relations become conformed around a parent’s alcoholism (meaning that the goods that could be negotiated toward universal flourishing are instead diverted to the service of an addiction), in oikarchies we can observe that certain subgroups assert their dominance over resources at the expense of the flourishing of the whole.

Certainly aristocracies and monarchies are visible examples of oikarchies, but it is important to understand that our current forms of democracy (representative, “winner take all” forms where majority and minority parties battle for control) are oikarchies, as well. In their contemporary form, most democracies are in the exclusion business, and will readily sacrifice certain populations to suffering or death if it means that the majority party (or class, or “citizens”) get the majority of benefits.

Even anarchy can be a form of oikarchy. Caveat emptor.

Another portmanteau (this time of oikos and plenary), an oikoplenary is a non-hierarchical network of natal relations that generates power among everyone involved for the achievement of open futures aimed at abundance and flourishing.

Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari championed the concept of “rhizomatic” social structures and arrangements of knowledge, which they contrasted with what they called “arborescent,” or tree-like, social structures and arrangements of knowledge. In this way, rhizomatic models are presented as complements and alternatives to hierarchicacl structures. Instead of a central trunk of knowledge, from which branches and roots subdivide (the tree-like arborescent model), Deleuze and Guattari see the rhizome as functioning more like crabgrass, or a fungal mat.

In the rhizome, there is no beginning point or end point. Wherever one might start is the starting point, wherever one ends up is the end point. But different starting and ending points are possible, in any arrangements across the network.

We take this concept of the rhizome into the oikos to imagine the oikoplenary. In this arrangement, all participants are connected and interactive in ways other than merely hierarchical arrangements. There may be “sandbox hierarchies” at various points, for certain discrete tasks to be accomplished, but these are structurally temporary. Hierarchies in the oikoplenary have an expiration date.

What does the oikoplenary “look like”? That is not a question that has a meaningful answer. It is a wild forest, where different corners bloom, each in their own ways, in extraordinary variety.

In Hannah Arendt’s thought, politics does not have one static definition, but it has some key characteristics: Difference without violence. Communication without coercion. A commitment to natality and building unknown futures together.

It may sound weird to say, but politics is the opposite of narrative. A narrative is the quintessential form of the pre-conceived future. We have a moral obligation, in the end, to choose politics over narrative—though many of us (if not most of us) refuse to accept the burden of this obligation. It is more comfortable to live in stories.

But when we are able to shift to politics, we enter the space of unknown futures. We begin building something together that will not be realized, or even encapsulated, by our limited perspective of the world.

Humans acting together through negotiation and without coercion to build flourishing and abundance within realities of limitation. Power is the materialization of natality.

My notion of power here is undeniably positive, and in this sense I am pushing against the reading of power that follows in the wake of Michel Foucault. The main distinction here (in very broad strokes) is that Foucault imagines power on a continuum with coercion and violence, where violence is perhaps the most visible and extreme form of power.

In contrast, I follow the formulation offered by Hannah Arendt in this regard, that “violence and power are opposites.” As Arendt states it in her book, On Violence, “All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them” (41).

Then, in The Human Condition, Arendt goes on to say, “The only indispensable material factor in the generation of power is the living together of people… And whoever, for whatever reasons, isolates himself and does not partake in such being together, forfeits power and becomes impotent, no matter how great his strength and how valid his reasons” (201).

Power, then, is the unique fruit of uncoerced solidarity, where comrades work together to create the conditions together of abundant and flourishing life, in the midst of material limitations.

Violence is organized abandonment that aims at premature death.

Working with concepts developed by David Hardy and refined by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, this has become my working definition of violence.

Organized abandonment is the practice of removing systemic supports or starving social institutions of the resources they need to do their work. Premature death is a measurable disparity in health outcomes over time. Environmental toxins, denial of insurance claims, excessive stress, and other factors can create conditions where one individual or group suffers and dies at a much faster rate than another individual or group.

One of Gilmore’s most graphic examples of this phenomenon is the development of “special housing units",” or SHUs, in prisons. The SHU is also known as “solitary confinement,” a situation where the imprisoned person is put in a small cell with minimal or no contact with other human beings for up to 23 hours a day, for weeks or months at a time. The United Nations designates such conditions as a form of torture.

In situations where the prisoner cannot be killed outright (as was the case in Germany, where the death penalty was abolished) the government would use extended stays in SHU facilities to create conditions where the prisoner would either take their own life, or succumb to wasting.

The advantage of this sort of definition of violence is twofold. First, it allows us to see forms of violence that extend beyond the visible forms of direct physical attack. Bullying, psychological violence, and systemic denial can be encompassed within this analysis. Second. The correlation to health outcomes allows the violence to be measurable. Those with access to resources and privileges form a control group for health outcomes and life expectancy, against which those who are suffering violence can be directly compared.

It is also important to note that, following the insight of Hannah Arendt, violence here is understood as the opposite of power. In many construals, violence is seen as the most extreme or direct form of power. However, in this understanding, they are inversely coordinated. Where violence increases, power decreases, and vice versa. As Arendt put it, violence can only destroy power, it can never create it.

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