Would Wittgenstein get a joke?

According to Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein once said that it might be possible to produce a well-constructed philosophical text comprised entirely of jokes. But is there ground in his work to support such a claim?

Wittgenstein says in his Philosophical Investigations that actions, so far, they follow a rule, must be grounded in intersubjective experience. Rules cannot explain actions, because we can always make coincide an action with an arbitrary rule. In the context of language, to understand means to know how to play a particular game, a language game. Now, the only way to show that I understand a game is by playing it. The other players will confirm or deny that I understand the game if I play like them. To understand seems to demand full agreement. Errors, failures, and inconsistencies would lead to nonsense.

Psychoanalysis defends the opposite. Truth is subjective and it appears when rules are broken. Lapsus linguae, lapsus calami, denegation, contradiction, inconsistency, and jokes are indexes of the unconscious, which break into regular discourse. A common language and a common order are presupposed, but they bear no truth. On the contrary, they are the place of subjective repression and disappearance. Yes, language games grant meaning. But meaning is not the ultimate possibility of language. If language operates in a single layer, where understanding is reduced to follow shared rules, then there is no space for singularity. There is no private language, but there is also no possibility of expression for singulars. Jokes, on the contrary, float in the middle of meaning and nonsense.

Psychoanalysis claims that nonsense has some type of meaning. Isn’t this a contradiction? Yes, all inconsistencies appearing in language, must be reinterpreted and thus lead to a meaningful transformation, but the unconscious as such does not become conscious. Freud highlighted the relationship between lapsus and jokes. A good joke makes sense. But it surprises as it changes the language game in which it was formulated. A new game is invented in situ. A psychoanalyst frames the sentences of the patient as if they were “jokes”, ironic commentaries, i.e. as having double sense. In terms of Wittgenstein, a joke implies a change of language game. This shows that meaningful experience is not played inside one but across several language games. But what rule are we following here?

A polycontextural world

Science does not begin with an antinomy—binomy—but with an infinitinomy. (Novalis, Allgemeines Brouillon).

 Nobody can fully oppose or subtract to his epoch. He can choose a point of view and contradict it or evade it, but it is not in his hands to cover the whole spectrum of his time. It is not a matter of finitude. The world is not contradictory; it is polycontextural (Günther), i.e. it has multiple valid and simultaneous points of view, not only two. This has serious implications on the meaning of “critical” and “dialectical” thinking. Pluralistic ontologies, logics and political modes of organization are responses to the same historical force. But polycontextural doesn’t mean simply multiple, disseminated or rhizomatic. Multiplicity has no structure. Every set is a structureless collection. Dissemination privileges time over space, displacement over simultaneity. A rhizome is poorly structured; it privileges the local over the local. Polycontextural means both multiple and connected. Or: non-trivially connected.

Sor Juana, the most radical decolonial thinker

In his Allegoric Neptune (Neptuo Alegórico) the Mexican philosopher Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz offered the first decolonial argument. For her, Spain had no originary and legitimate claims on Christianity. The latter was a religion coming from the Far East. The only credit of Spain was to have offered Christ shelter in the Iberic Peninsula. There are no national gods. On the contrary, gods are always foreigners, seeking for a temporary home. But the nun went even further. Not only was Spain’s national religion imported from the Far East. The names of Christ and Mary were already signs of hospitality of older gods. Before Mary, there was Isis. But such as Isis turned into Mary, the Spanish Mary couldn’t be the last goddess. In the New Spain virgin Mary was highly revered. But her figure absorbed the old mother-god of pre-Columbian societies. Mary was, at the same time, Tonanztin. In Puebla you can find a church dedicated to Santa María Tonanzintla. This was no longer the Spanish, but a Mexican Mary-Tonantzin. Her argument was double. On the first hand, she claimed that the very faith of Spain came from foreign gods. On the other, se claimed that once in America, Christ and Mary and God would transform and intermingle with local gods. Being a Christian nun, she relativized the Christian monopoly on religion framing it in a universal history of religion. She relativized the Spanish claims on Christianity. And she said that Christianity would necessarily transform where it was taught or even imposed. This makes Sor Juana probably the most radical decolonial thinker to date.  

Use and exchange value: Jevons, Marx and mathematics

Economics emerged as an autonomous science in 19th century. The founders were ambivalent with respect to the real nature of their field. It belonged on the one hand to moral and political philosophy. But the phenomena it was concerned with were all numeric: price, stock, revenue, interest, growth. We can find numbers in Ricardo, Smith and Marx, but the real problems of economy were highly philosophical. Numbers were raw materials to be morally and politically interpreted. Their theory of value conduced necessarily to class awareness. Jevons, father of the neoclassical approach attempted to fully mathematize economic phenomena. Together with the marginalist approach, mathematization completely erased the political dimension of economy. However, he was right in pointing out that a central issue in economics was to explain the transit from quality to quantity, from subjective valuation, expressed in intensities or at least ordinally, to objective prices expressed in real numbers. He was aware of the advances in non-Euclidian geometry and even polemized with Helmholtz about it. This is crucial, because since Gauss and Riemann, a space is prior to its parametrization. In other words, different metrics are possible on the same space. It is a matter of decision, according to the mathematical operations we need. Fundamental structures can be very basic and abstract. One of the most important problems in 20th century mathematics was algebraic topology. It allowed us to capture information from topological spaces through algebraic objects. Topological spaces are continuous and have no metric attached to them. Algebraic objects are discrete structures, defined by certain operations. An algebraic structure like a ring allows us to capture information about the holes of a topological space (like a torus). This is an example of mapping, but among different mathematical objects. In any case, the goal consists in reading an object through another. But this doesn’t mean that we capture the essence of any object. The other issue is the relationship global-local. Non-Euclidian spaces can be locally considered Euclidian. This has an obvious impact in the difference between micro and macroeconomics.   

 When we apply mathematics to real economic phenomena, we must decide which features we want to capture. The real question is thus: what do we capture when we jump from desire to objective price, from quantity to quality? Years later, the Cambridge controversy on the nature of capital faced another mathematical problem: that of counting. “Capital” is a complex entity. To be able to measure it, we need to individuate its components and assign them a value expressed in price terms. But this is what we wanted to explain in the first place: how price is determined by factors of production. The issue at stake is the same: there is a secret mathematical rule that makes counting and certain operations possible. But this rule is never explicit. We end up with Marx again: commodities in our times have both a use and an exchange value, they are inseparable; and yet there is no natural rule to go from one to the other. How much corresponds to the capitalist is decided, not mathematically deduced.   

Lyotard as a Kantian; Hegel as a post-postmodernist

Lyotard’s claim that postmodernism starts with a fundamental incredulity towards “metanarratives” is a repetition of Kant’s claim on the impossibility of metaphysics. Kant’s prohibition of a philosophical system and the necessary regionalization of reason is not post but radically modern. Hegel does not represent the culmination of modernity, but an attempt to revive metaphysics within modernity. Hegel is not a classical metaphysician; his “system” is neither deduced from a first principle, like in Spinoza, nor submitted to an all-encompassing logical principle, like Leibniz. His system is closer to a big patching of motives. “Dialectics” is more a work of weaving than a logical machine. But isn’t Hegel the thinker of totality par excellence? Sure. But his totality is no longer monotonic. It is closer to what Fernando Zalamea calls a “sheaf”, i.e. a global space made of patches of local regions. Global space is articulated by local intersections of the patches, not by a constant all-embracing principle. This is the real task of postmodernism, to articulate a non-monotonic totality, to link different “language games”. Lyotard gives up on such an attempt. He considers totality a modern motive. He accepts the archipelago of language games announced by Wittgenstein. Hegel’s work is not an example of a metaphysical Pangaea, prior to the dissemination of truth. On the contrary, Hegel’s work is a reconstruction of a totality emerging from the fragments of experience.  This shows Hegel as a response to postmodernism.

Libidinal economy

When the West gave up on Marx it tried to save it through Freud. The critique of pollical economy survived as critique of ideology, and this turned into socioanalysis. Socioanalysis needed a subject to work upon. Psychoanalysis replaced society for “the subject”. The economic dimension lost its material reference and was translated into an economy of desire. The materiality of human existence as well as its structural character was built anew in and as language. Finally, material economy was substituted by a so-called libidinal economy. This displacement was fully justified. Freud’s oeuvre constantly frames libido and desire in economics terms. This is no surprise. He was shortly preceded by the birth of  the Austrian school of economics. He studied in a conservative empire, where a new formulation of economics was taking shape to counter communism. This new school opposed the objective explanation of the source of value, held by classical political economy. For them value is the result of the amount of labor it contains. Austrian economics offered a subjective theory of value and methodological individualism. The change is not minor: they claimed that the source of value is desire. But they knew nothing about desire. They had no idea about subjectivism. They could have developed a more solid theory had they read something of classical German philosophy.

But they hated the German tradition, especially the so-called historicist school, represented by figures like Schmoller. A key figure in Austrian economics, Carl Menger, attacked Schmoller virulently which meant, mutatis mutandis, an attack to right-wing Hegelianism. Later he and the whole Austrian school would direct their criticisms to Marx and left-wing Hegelianism too. They went no further. But the real continuation of the economic problematic discovered by the Austrian school can be followed in Freud. He showed, without knowing it, that economy was already structuring the psychic apparatus. Freud’s “libidinal economy” is the proper elaboration of “desire” as the source of value. It is also proof that the subject of capitalism not only introjected economy in his soul but that it turned his existence into a market. Freud was no economist and he relied basically on anthropology to bridge his methodological individualism with his interests in society in general. What remained to be done was to bridge social and material with libidinal economics.   

The pastoral work of the new right

The new right lifted the weight the postmodernists imposed on the heart of the world. They are the new priests selling indulgencies to the sinners of the now vanishing world. Postmodernists inherited criticism from modernity but sank it in pessimism. They spoke of climate change but said it was too late. They spoke of social domination but gave up on the idea of liberation. They spoke of the dangers of technology but just stared at it. In sum, they lived the end of times, pointing at the “West” as the ultimate guilty and distributing a quota of guilt on everyone. This is what Sloterdijk named cynical reason: the spirit of modernity deprived of strength and projects. But we are leaving those times behind. The new right is here to absolve the old enemies of modernity and Enlightment. The new right is not cynical. It just wiped out every human problem as if it didn’t exist. There is no problem in discriminating migrants or women. It’s fine to hate gays. It’s good to cheer for seeing people die. Climate change does not exist. Hit your woman, exploit coal, bomb all the brown people. Feel no guilt for that. Now you are free…

The promised Frankenstein

Intelligence without will and a body is lifeless, a sophisticated calculator. Life, on the contrary, is blind, stupid will. The alchemists of Silicon Valley know this. The intricated vine of AI will meet the vine of biotechnology. Life is already open to design through ADN and molecular intervention. Computers constitute our magnificent tool for calculation and modelling. But the link between both is neuroscience, our wet computer, intelligent life. When neuroscience, biotechnology and AI meet the new Frankenstein will be ready to be assembled. The result, however, won’t be different from Shelley’s novel.

The French Revolution is woke

The French Revolution is woke now. This is the new alt-right catechism. Equality is for the weak. Fraternity for gays. Liberty, a useless old word.

Trump, the fungus

Trump is the fungus, his cabinet, the mycelium eating the falling world. Trump is the “rotter”, nothing but putrefaction and decay. Will a new order come out? It depends on the dormant seeds…

Political theology as translation

Political theology is the grounding of politics in theology. It is further the unidirectional translation of the latter into the former. Carl Schmitt claim that the fundamental concepts of Western politics were essentially secularized theological terms. This idea is not alien to Marx and Weber. They both saw the links between theology and the social order, both in the political and the economic order. But there remains a central ambiguity in all three thinkers: what is the operation involved in the transit from theology to politics. For Marx capitalism is the last attempt of theology to order society. Politics is the space of real praxis, where all theology is negated. But theology is negated because it is actualized, realized, verwrklicht. For Weber religion shapes capitalism, but at the cost of its own decay. There is a spiritual dimension of capitalism, a “subjectivity” behind its entrepreneurial thrive. But religion immolates in this transit for the new society will live in a disenchanted world. Schmitt recognizes the Marxist promise and Weber’s warning on the twilight of religion. But he knows that politics can never constitute a fully autonomous domain. Secularization was completely misunderstood. Schmitt’s lesson is that secularization was not an event, but a constant process of translation. Theology is the source; politics is the realm of actualization. This is why a “critique of religion” cannot suffice. It is not about showing that in reality all politics is religion in disguise. Political theology is quite different from direct domination of religious ideas, or domination in the name of religion. It requires a precise translation. First, a selection from the religious corpus, the source. Then, a selection of the political domain, the target. Finally, the proper translation. This last step is the most important; it must retain the power of religion, but the common language of politics; it must retain the glory of the former and execute the power proper of the latter.

Reason is not rationalization

It is hard to explain how we came to believe that reason was equal to rationalization and control. Rationalization means nothing but self-deceit, a construction made to protect our ego. It is a Nietzschean-Freudian thesis. Control means that reason is equivalent to science, science to technology, and technology to absolute planification and order. Reason meant a fable, a poor construction to avoid the deep contradictions of human existence. Reason came to be synonymous with pacification, neutralization, order, and hierarchy. According to Nietzsche this was Plato’s invention, a domestication of the tragic existence lived by ancient Greeks. At least in The Birth of Tragedy.   

But it is easy to show that the opposite view is more consistent. The tragic world does not admit conflict. There is only fate and grandeur or feebleness to accept it. Conflict is only a subjective epiphenomenon. Praxis is not at stake. There is no seek of truth. On the contrary, for Plato there is conflict because there is truth. In other words, there is conflict because I can deceit myself, because there is error and because there is evil. Without the possibility of truth and error, and good and bad, there is no real conflict, only a fake dramatization of existence.

 Plato goes even further. Not only does he claim truth to be at stake in our discourses. He also claims that truth is never simple, that it has a paradoxical core. Boris Groys claims brilliantly in The communist postscript that all the major exercises in rationalism involve some form of paradox. Indeed, this is the case in the noble “dialectical” tradition, including at least Plato, Nicholas of Kues, Agustin, Descartes, German classical philosophers like Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling, and Marx. Philosophy, metaphysics and rationalism as systems of simplification of life, control of nature and society, and concealment of the dramas of life simply does not hold. Simplification and repression have always been on the side of governs and their ideologues. Even scientists were more simple-minded than most great theologians. The so-called “deconstruction of the history of metaphysics” tends to be more a projection into history of contemporary problems.

The future as ideological category: or why the third was the future of the first world

How we address the future is a political discussion. Cultural nihilism declares the fight definitively lost. It confuses critical pessimism with moral and intellectual defeat. It celebrates the apocalypse through an aesthetization of his decadent life. The ruling class doesn’t speak of the future. It decides to center in the present of administered life and its conflicts. Its tasks consist in defending that present life is the best possible world. Future belongs to revolutionaries, from left and right. They must ensure that the best is yet to come.

 The ascending bourgeoise and the global powers it produced were revolutionary. Powers that shook the old world-order. It waved the flag of progress. For progress to be attested we need a “before-and-after” structure. The West needed a story of triumph, a rise from ape to man and from man to God. But to ensure its power it required a comparison between primitive and evolved societies. This language was slightly refined. First, we spoke of the “first” and the “third” world, second, from “developed” and “underdeveloped” nations. The main idea was this: the former should see in the latter their prehistory; reciprocally, the latter should see in the former their future. Of course, there was too the romantic, inverted version of the myth of progress. Namely, where the ancients were supposed to be wise and in balance with nature and neighbors, while the moderns would be corrupt for having forgotten their origins.

 What we see now, however, is that undeveloped nations were not the past of modern capitalist societies. Arjun Appadurai has significantly contributed in reflecting on the role of “past” and “present” in society and economics. On the contrary, the third world was in many respects the future of the first world. Religious fundamentalism, autocracies, pauperization, political purges, censorship, corruption, are not phenomena of banana republics, they are the seen mor and more in developed countries, especially the US. The truth is that the underdeveloped world was never premodern or precapitalist. It represented only the ugly face of modern capitalism. The ugly and pretty face of world order will continue to displace, showing how the masters of the future sink in the despicable present they created.                

20. Communism rides on bicycle

Contrary to the romantic critique of technology we should remember Ivan Illich and his subtle thought. For him, technology is far from assuring control and order in nature and human life. What we call control is always linted to small space. Time, space and complex interactions complicate the desired effect of every invention. Illich underscore the “paradox” of technology, where it led to its exact opposite if certain threshold is surpassed. Take a car for instance. It is machine designed to accelerate our bodies to reach bigger distances in the same amount of time. Indeed, humans walk regularly at 4 or 6 km/hr. A car can reach 200 km/hr. However, in the concrete space of the city, this is impossible because of its infrastructure. Let’s assume that this implies despite all an improvement in speed.

 However, if we add more cars to the equation, we will find a new problem: traffic jams. As traffic grows in big cities, the possible speed decreases dramatically. Finally, in the rush hours, the average speed may be 10 to 15 km/hr. This still represents an advantage over walking. But the speed is easily beaten using bicycles. Additionally, the problems of pollution, deadly accidents and noise are completely avoided. The problem is not the presence or absence of technology, the control or spontaneity it brings with it, but the threshold. He claims thus that in communism the means of transportation wouldn’t be cars or feet but bicycles.

Romantic critique of technology

The critique of capitalism is by no means a phenomenon limited to the left. Lukacs identified a “romantic” critique of capitalism inspired by European intellectuals skeptical or disenchanted with the bourgeoisie. They called for a return to Christian values or to Greek premodernity. However, what Lukacs misses is that the conservatives never addressed capitalism as such. Their criticism was supposed to be more fundamental, more spiritual than economic. Romanticism can be antimetaphysical, antimodern, antiliberal, but very rarely anticapitalist. The very term was supposed to be superficial, without any value in the spiritual history of the West. Romantic philosophy evolved into a critique of technology and reclaimed the powers of life. Life should be spontaneous, creative, originary; while technology was supposed to be a form of domination, control and prevision. The error was double: First, life was reduced to a pure abstract power, alien to form, determination and complexity. Second, technology was seen as the absolute disposition of being to calculation (Heidegger), the absolute control of subjectivity (Foucault) or the codification of life (Deleuze).

While the first mistake led to serious misunderstandings with science, the second led to serious misunderstandings with politics. They world was seen as pure arbitrariness, contingency and facticity. “Possibility” was considered the only trascendens. All rule, form, and order were considered a form of prison, a fall from the paradise of indetermination, a capture in determination. The truth is that the effective world, called an “ontic” sphere, was deprived of its own forces. Only life and being could be creative, not individuals and beings. A hate for the current and present world progressively turned the back of thought to actuality in search of some strange “event”. The second mistake was due to poor observation. Nowhere did technology achieve control without disastrous side effects. Oil-powered machines led to pollution. Massive machine-driven agriculture led to soil exhaustion. Nuclear power led to catastrophes like Chernobyl and Fukushima. How can we talk of control and domination over nature when “side-effects” surpass every achievement?

Schelling as a political thinker

In his Ages of the World Schelling writes: the past is known (gewusst), the present is recognized (erkannt), the future is foreseen (geahndet). Further, he claims that the known is narrated (erzählt), that the recognized is exposed or presented (dargestellt), and that the forseen is foretold. This fragment stems from the “middle Schelling”, between the enthusiast of the French Revolution and Enlightenment and the conservative thinker. The ideas presented in the Ages of the World should be thus read as disenchanted politics seeking for refuge in theology. But can we rephrase his words to restitute the evaporating smell of revolution?

 The past is inherited. It is a virtual patrimony received by our predecessor coming from all corners and times. It can only be accessed by history, by stories, narrations, and testimonies. It includes the history of the oppressed together will all the resources we have to do justice to them and to future generations. It is never exhausted by the present.

The present is the world we can call to interrogate, to appear before a judge. The present is systematically exposed to be examined, especially through its tensions, contradictions and failed expectations. The future can only be strived for. It is our horizon of justice, which can only be accessed in the form of utopia. Utopia is also the space for imagination and ideal variation of the possible. History, criticism and utopia from the indissoluble triad of human collective existence.  

Math is not philosophy

German idealism turned classical logic into a speculative method. Logicism tried to ground speculation in mathematical logic. Structuralism speculated with mathematics. First, with combinatorics and finite mathematics. Later, with analysis and topology. Finally, with set theory. The ultimate question is, however, the expressivity that formal languages grant to philosophical concepts. It is vain to claim that “mathematics” or “logic” is the ultimate structure of reality or ontology. There isn’t a single philosophical issue explicitly formulated in formal languages. There is always a philosophical decision in choosing a formal framework and in assigning philosophical to mathematical concepts. To jump from mathematics to philosophy is an act of self-deceit.

The last attachment

In his Stuttgarter private lessons Schelling writes: “We should abandon (verlassen) everything, not only mother and child as it is said, even God, as a mere being (Seiendes)”. We should now extend this phrase to do justice to its spirit. We should abandon every single concept, not only God, but also Being. Being is not only Heidegger’s but also every philosopher’s last attachment.

Our faith in concepts

Let’s call metaphysics the philosophical confidence in the capacity of concepts to grasp the essence of reality. Metaphysics is a faith in the content and structure of concepts. Metaphysics ends with the change of attention in concepts from their content to their use. What does a concept do? How do they work? Metaphysics returns, however, for praxis occupies the old place that contemplation occupied. The subject displaces the “real”. This is the second end of metaphysics: the deconstruction of both the objective (present in the categories) and the subjective content (the practical dimension, will, desire). Metaphysics returns, however, in the form of self-destruction and self-deprecation. It is acknowledged that metaphysics can be neither embraced nor destroyed. But the real problem for us lies elsewhere. Not in the content, not in the use, but in our expectations about concepts. The weight of concepts lies more in the confidence we have in them than in the content. We can borrow an idea of Indian philosophy: what we exhibit time and again is profound attachment to our concepts.  

Love to hate capitalism

We love to hate capitalism. From this phrase we should emphasize the verb “love”. Indeed, it has become not only fashionable but even a pleasure to condemn capitalism… without even bothering to explain it. Many find the world unbearable, especially because they have lost their will. Not to live, but in general. Now, hating capitalism has become for many the only way to sustain their desire. Hating is preferable to indifference. But this may go even further. We decry consumerism, being bombarded by images, living hooked to all sorts of addictions. We claim that beyond this sphere of demands, there is something like pure will or “desire”. But the truth is that this very world we hate may be the only support we have for our desire. We need to hate capitalism so much. But this is precisely they way in which critics fuel capitalism.