Anti-Dionysius

            In contemporary capitalism, the commodification of value reaches even (especially) the anti-thesis of capitalism. Our revolutionaries are not those instigating in labor unions or schools but the leading figures of capitalism itself. Disruptive action and revolutionary methodology is taken seriously as the practice of innovative capitalism. The struggle against hegemonic discourse and authoritarian life now takes the shape of an affirmation. Through intimacy with death, life blossoms. The dawn after a long day is not free of the toils from whence it arises.  The term ‘leading figure of capitalism’ ought not point to the established structures of globalized finance, but the closely-related yet still vanguard force of the techno-solution, which is governed only by what works, not by what is in its essence oriented towards the preservation of the whole for the sake of which it is born. Incorrigibility is a candid virtue in the land of endless growth.

Enemy of Fiction : A Philosopher's View

I just realized how polemical Searle's treatment of fictional discourse is.

"Why bother?" (332)

The attitude: imagination has its own territory, reality has its own territory, and never shall the twain meet. 

He seems to fall on tolerating ( hence excluding) fiction because

 a) it can at times ally with 'reality' by working for its health
 b) let loose its own energies in a more or less productively 

Polemical in the sense used by Carl Schmitt I should add.


Here's a relevant section:

Searle: "In the case of realistic or naturalistic fiction, the author will refer to real places and events intermingling these references with the fictional references, thus making it possible to treat the fictional story as an extension of our existing knowledge."(331)

The 'intermingling' of references implies that the realm of 'real' people, places, events is distinct from the realm of fiction. I suggest the precisely because such an intermingling is possible, demonstrably so, and has presumably been so for at least a long while, the distinction between 'real' and 'fiction' is perhaps the real fiction, ad infinitum. There is no meaningful break between the vertical connections and the horizontal conventions.

I have to get back to revising my final essay, so this is all I'll write for now but I'd love to return to this fore a more-comprehensive review of Searle's polemics and what it suggests about the relationship between philosophy and fiction.

Edit:


Does this mean:

Philosophy can no longer ( could it really ever?) ask the questions which refuse to die. Where have these questions gone now that philosophy no longer is a home for them? Literature  (poetry) - where they gather and -  live.

Liars

Liars cannot be champagne socialists, they are appetizer anarchists.

Are your feelings YOUR feelings?

Large-scale study on Facebook from 2013

"We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues."

" it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s nothing intrinsically evil about the idea that large corporations might be trying to manipulate your experience and behavior. Everybody you interact with–including every one of your friends, family, and colleagues–is constantly trying to manipulate your behavior in various ways. … So the meaningful question is not whether people are trying to manipulate your experience and behavior, but whether they’re trying to manipulate you in a way that aligns with or contradicts your own best interests."

Contentious claim. There's no denying it, a tremendous power is available to the arbitrators of these communities - those who decide what you see and - feel.

Source:
http://technosociology.org/?p=1627

Colbert and Satire

I don't it's directly relevant to The Wolf of Wall Street, but I thought a lot about the coverage of #CancelColbert after our discussion on satire. Prior to the outbreak of #CancelColbert, someone on The Colbert Report's media team tweeted: "I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever." In response, activist and writer Suey Park to tweeted, "The Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals has decided to call for #CancelColbert. Trend it," which ignited an uproar in the Twittersphere.

Anyway, I found two articles that critiqued the satire of The Colbert Report, both of them analyzing the discomfort and possible dangers–if that's the right word– of satire. Below are some relevant quotes.

Jay Caspian Kang writes:

"If I were to predict which minority group the writers of a show like “The Colbert Report” would choose for an edgy, epithet-laden parody, I’d grimace and prepare myself for some joke about rice, karate, or broken English. The resulting discomfort has nothing to do with the intentions of the joke or the political views of the people laughing at it. Even when you want to be in on the joke—and you understand, intellectually, that you are not the one being ridiculed—it’s hard not to wonder why these jokes always come at the expense of those least likely to protest."

In her piece, Michelle Medina contends:

"While its often noted that comedy is a vehicle for change; it also works to facilitate stagnation.  Humor acts as a catharsis for many people’s internalized prejudices that can’t be freely expressed in ‘polite society’ but can be expressed in the socially acceptable medium of laughter (‘because we didn’t mean it’)."

Securities Fraud

After reading about Belfort, I looked up the different kinds of scams lumped under securities fraud. What surprised me was that insider trading, Ponzi schemes, and corporate fraud (like setting up dummy corporations, or publishing false reports) are lumped together with Belfort's "pump and dump" scheme. This is interesting because it seems to me that the latter falls onto a spectrum of lies, lie-like statements, and exaggerations that are considered acceptable in the context of sales, marketing, and advertising. Something like a insider trading, on the other hand, falls under another category entirely, and has no more benign variant.

There is some dissonance in the economic and legal framework we use to describe lying as it relates to making money, because there needs to be some arbitrary line to demarcate how much exaggeration is acceptable in selling something. Belfort's lies are prosecuted as fraud, right alongside lies that seem to be in a very different category, like Bernie Madoff's lies. What does it say about our system of classifying economic lies when the highest form of success is being able to sell something (oftentimes through exaggeration), but exaggerating a bit too much means being relegated to the same bin as Ponzi schemers?

Something else I was thinking about is what a stock price represents, and to what extent Belfort's scheme was a lie, under the concept of economic lie that is prevalent in our society. Unlike Madoff's lies, where investors were lied to about how much return they were getting, Belfort lies only in the positive statements he makes about the companies. The price of the stock itself is not a lie - that is, the phrases "overvalued stock" or "manipulated stock prices" are not meaningful, because the financial construct of tradable securities inherently incorporates an element of what we consider a kind of lie. Specifically, with any security you have the ability to lie about how valuable you think it is based on the value, volume, rate, and time at which you trade.

Lie Detection

I came across an interesting website for a company that claims to be able to do accurate lie detection using MRIs, mainly contracting legal and governmental work. I think this claim is pretty far-fetched, but there are a lot of ethical and legal implications if or when this technology becomes viable. The polygraph test, which is the most prevalent kind of lie detection in use, has certainly raised plenty of legal issues without ever maturing into a technology that is any good at actually detecting lies.

We've talked a lot in this class about the different kinds of lie, and I wonder if there are any differences in the brain between different classes of lies (the most prominent difference would probably be between lies that are self-deceptive and lies that deceive others). However, the publications that the company's website references are about ten years old and there hasn't been too much interest in the area for the past few years. Coupled with their failures in getting fMRI evidence admitted into courts, and the obvious problems with real-world application when a lie-detection apparatus involves a gigantic magnet, it would be interesting to see what level of genuine confidence the founders of these companies possess in their technology by subjecting them to their own lie-detection processes.

The company:
No Lie MRI

One of their references:
Classifying spatial patterns of brain activity with machine learning methods: application to lie detection

A good review of the state of the art and its implications on law, society, and ethics:
Functional MRI-based lie detection: scientific and societal challenges

(You might need to be on the UC network to view the papers)

La société du spectacle

Guy Debord wrote The Society of the Spectacle in 1967 (you can find an online version here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm) only a year before the well-known May 1968 protests in Paris. It was very much in the 'spirit' of the time, i believe.

I first came to know about this book two years ago, after seeing it referenced in Martin Jay's Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in 20th Century France. I was at the time interested in how what counts as real came to change as philosophy and science developed in Modern Europe. 

It is of course important to think about sight and seeing and images in any discussion of 'lying'. The false image is among the origins of the lie. We often use visual metaphors, for instance, in discussing what we regard as false (apparent vs. true).

I don't know if Debord is a very helpful theorist in the context of this class, but I know that he was probably an influence on Foucault and many other prominent thinkers. If we're to think about lying in connection with power, and this is important in the case of Jordan Belfort in particular, it might be useful to give Debord a read. So I'll quote a few of the theses that I found interesting down below, and hopefully it'll be interesting to you all as well. 

The 9th Thesis:

In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.

Thesis 24

The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence. The fetishistic, purely objective appearance of spectacular relations conceals the fact that they are relations among men and classes: a second nature with its fatal laws seems to dominate our environment. But the spectacle is not the necessary product of technical development seen as a natural development. The society of the spectacle is on the contrary the form which chooses its own technical content. If the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of “mass media” which are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to invade society as mere equipment, this equipment is in no way neutral but is the very means suited to its total self-movement. If the social needs of the epoch in which such techniques are developed can only be satisfied through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact among men can no longer take place except through the intermediary of this power of instantaneous communication, it is because this “communication” is essentially unilateral. The concentration of “communication” is thus an accumulation, in the hands of the existing system’s administration, of the means which allow it to carry on this particular administration. The generalized cleavage of the spectacle is inseparable from the modern State, namely from the general form of cleavage within society, the product of the division of social labor and the organ of class domination.

Thesis 43:

Whereas in the primitive phase of capitalist accumulation, “political economy sees in the proletarian only the worker” who must receive the minimum indispensable for the conservation of his labor power, without ever seeing him “in his leisure and humanity,” these ideas of the ruling class are reversed as soon as the production of commodities reaches a level of abundance which requires a surplus of collaboration from the worker. This worker, suddenly redeemed from the total contempt which is clearly shown him by all the varieties of organization and supervision of production, finds himself every day, outside of production and in the guise of a consumer, seemingly treated as an adult, with zealous politeness. At this point the humanism of the commodity takes charge of the worker’s “leisure and humanity,” simply because now political economy can and must dominate these spheres as political economy. Thus the “perfected denial of man” has taken charge of the totality of human existence.

Thesis 44:

The spectacle is a permanent opium war which aims to make people identify goods with commodities and satisfaction with survival that increases according to its own laws. But if consumable survival is something which must always increase, this is because it continues to contain privation. If there is nothing beyond increasing survival, if there is no point where it might stop growing, this is not because it is beyond privation, but because it is enriched privation.

Thesis 56:

The spectacular sham struggles of rival forms of separate power are at the same time real in that they translate the unequal and antagonistic development of the system, the relatively contradictory interests of classes or subdivisions of classes which acknowledge the system and define themselves as participants within its power. Just as the development of the most advanced economy is a clash between some priorities and others, the totalitarian management of the economy by a State bureaucracy and the condition of the countries within the sphere of colonization or semi-colonization are defined by specific peculiarities in the varieties of production and power. These diverse oppositions can be passed off in the spectacle as absolutely distinct forms of society (by means of any number of different criteria). But in actual fact, the truth of the uniqueness of all these specific sectors resides in the universal system that contains them: the unique movement that makes the planet its field, capitalism.

Thesis 198:

Those who denounce the absurdity or the perils of incitement to waste in the society of economic abundance do not understand the purpose of waste. They condemn with ingratitude, in the name of economic rationality, the good irrational guardians without whom the power of this economic rationality would collapse. For example, Boorstin, in L’Image, describes the commercial consumption of the American spectacle but never reaches the concept of spectacle because he thinks he can exempt private life, or the notion of “the honest commodity,” from this disastrous exaggeration. He does not understand that the commodity itself made the laws whose “honest” application leads to the distinct reality of private life and to its subsequent reconquest by the social consumption of images.

Thesis 215:

The spectacle is ideology par excellence, because it exposes and manifests in its fullness the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment, servitude and negation of real life. The spectacle is materially “the expression of the separation and estrangement between man and man.” Through the “new power of fraud,” concentrated at the base of the spectacle in this production, “the new domain of alien beings to whom man is subservient... grows coextensively with the mass of objects.” It is the highest stage of an expansion which has turned need against life. “The need for money is thus the real need produced by political economy, and the only need it produces” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts). The spectacle extends to all social life the principle which Hegel (in the Realphilosophie of Jena) conceives as the principle of money: it is “the life of what is dead, moving within itself.”

I hope some of this is thought-provoking!