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Ranciere vs. Honneth FIGHT NIGHT // 45 · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

• 0:10
  You know what that intro music means, Good evening, Welcome to theory,
• 0:15
  fight night, or whatever time day it is for you, more accurately,
• 0:20
  this kind of political theory fight night, which is what happens when you let
• 0:24
  Victor choose. Thanks very much at least some like edge lordy post structuralists for
• 0:30
  you to enjoy. Yeah, this is our actually of the fight nights.
• 0:35
  This is our third Jacques in a row. I didn't even realize that the
• 0:41
  last two featured Jacques Darida, and while I was taking my notes for this
• 0:47
  episode, I just wanted to give a shout out to the og Jacques.
• 0:53
  This is, of course Brian Jacques, who first inspired my reading of fantasy
• 1:00
  in the broadest sense, which I continue to this day. Do you guys
• 1:03
  know who that is? No idea? Who that is? The guy I
• 1:07
  wrote? Yeah, I never read the books. I watched the show for
• 1:11
  a couple seasons, never really got into it though. Never old my childhood
• 1:18
  in the nineties with books and TV shows. Yeah, they were great.
• 1:23
  It's an Arthurian anthropomorphic mice. But as a nine year old I can remember
• 1:33
  crying twice or for two reasons, at least one because they didn't have any
• 1:38
  friends. And two because Martin the Warrior, who is a mouse, his
• 1:44
  girlfriend mouse got killed by a slave owning weasel, and then he had to
• 1:49
  leave all of his friends. So yes, I felt great empathy to the
• 1:53
  point of tears for a fictional sword wielding mouse. And isn't it tragic irony
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  that the interests by which you cope with having no friends also that which guarantees
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  that you will not have any friends in the future. By virtue of those
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  interests, we're friends. Yeah, I feel that unlike medieval animal farm fiction,
• 2:20
  we we here do not feel that strange women in ponds handing out swords
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  is a basis for a system of government. That's critical way to wrap in
• 2:30
  a bunch of pop culture references into a singular hole. There was that are
• 2:34
  something become a narcosyndicalist? Is that the idea we must learn from the mice?
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  Chomsky? I don't know. Can you relate Chomsky to this? I
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  guess uh, Hobermause and Honeth are probably very aware of Chomsky and the grammar.
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  We haven't even actually said what we're doing today now? Who is brawling
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  here? Who is brawling? It is fight night on one side of the
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  screen. Player one, insert coin Jacques Sierre, so our third jock of
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  the mentioned in the hour, and insert coin player to Axel Honith. And
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  you might be asking, who the hell is that? Well, Victor is
• 3:13
  going to tell you again he picked this episode. Don't worry, someone else
• 3:17
  will be picking next week. Did you hate this this much? Bills?
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  Well, I I didn't know who he was, but I felt like I
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  was reading hober Moss, And sure enough when I checked, he was supervised
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  by Hobermas. And at least I know that he has one thing in common
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  with Habermas, and that he was born ostensibly, born into this world to
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  lose debates. Because Habermas, as you know, was handily defeated by Gottamer
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  lu Min Fukut. And I don't know if Rawls beat him or not.
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  Of course I wouldn't, I wouldn't have read that one. But I feel
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  like he was carrying on the tradition here. I don't know anybody who thinks
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  that Godemer won that debate. I agree that he won that. Deretus seems
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  to have won the debate against him, even he seemed to concede that.
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  But it's also it's also has kind of gone downhill since some of the Nazi
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  connections came up. I was just going to say, it's worth also stressing
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  that in this case, like the verses is a very direct verses, it's
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  actually in a book like published, which is like specifically framed as like a
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  debate between the two thinkers, which made it, Uh, I guess kind
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  of easy for us to because they had There's even a section in the book
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  where they're going back and forth on certain points. So I thought that made
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  for interesting reading in my opinion at least, And I thought there was enough
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  post structuralism and stuff, and Roncier was interesting enough that I was hoping that
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  you guys would still find it interesting. Yeah, I shouldn't pick on you,
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  because it's also all about recognition, and we've constantly, it feels like,
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  brought up the dialectic of recognition. So this is the dialectic of recognition
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  as a foundation for politics, which is Haneth's view. Yeah, is that
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  how what's pronounced Hanes? I don't know, I hear han I think who
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  knows? Eric? You know German? Would do you say a Hohneth?
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  I don't know, So it's does he have an Umlau on his own,
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  then it's probably Haneth. Yeah, so I mean so I can explain.
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  I mean you just said he was supervised by Harmas. But yeah, he's
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  a political theorist too, is like does come from that lineage of critical theory
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  via Habermas. So in that case isn't really critical theory or true critical theory
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  because and he tends to come down more on the liberal side, and he
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  grounds a lot of his political thought on this kind of dialectic of recognition.
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  He wants to ground like justice claims on this idea that there's these spheres of
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  recognition that he kind of aligns up with a Hegelian dialectic of recognition of sort
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  of how the subject develops through being recognized by others. And he kind of
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  infers from that and makes his own version of that and tries to say that
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  justice claims are grounded on like a lack of being recognized and or in other
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  words, that the subjectivity of the of the citizens in this political state haven't
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  sufficiently developed or our suffers some deficit in a sphere of recognition. And he
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  said basically says like justice claims and emancipatory struggles are really just struggles for recognition
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  based on those dialectics. If you want to know something funny, pills,
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  You're not the only one who found his work a little bit bland. So
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  back in twenty fourteen, Axelhonath wrote actually a pretty good book called Freedom's Right
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  that I quite enjoy and I'll probably draw some arguments for when discussing this.
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  But he released a book just two years later called The Idea of Socialism,
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  where he said the number one accusation leveled at this book was it was boring,
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  not particularly radical, and didn't say anything interesting. So I wrote this
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  book The Idea of Socialism, to just say no, no, no,
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  no, no, I am actually like radical enough. You know. We
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  can ressuscitate this socialist ideal in like the twenty you know, and that'll be
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  kind of hit and different, right, So don't worry. He seems to
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  have some anxiety about this as well. As a third generation Frankfurt schooler.
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  You got to get back to that radical core. I love how it's like
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  a valid critique now that your book is boring and so that somehow indicts your
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  theory. I mean, even Kan wrote that about his own critique when he
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  wrote the prolegomena. After the first critique he said, this is like long,
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  dense, boring tract that nobody's going to read. And he said that
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  about himself. Well, like Freedom's Right is a good book. And I
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  think one of the arguments that he kind of rehearsed here about the importance of
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  social or civic freedom as it's sometimes called, is actually extremely important and legitimate.
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  As a critic critique of right, Hegelian's right, Hegalianism, And it's
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  worth doating that. One of the things that Hanneth and the others did that
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  I think was genuinely innovative is in the nineteen eighties, Haigel was kind of
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  going through one of his periodic and y'res as kind of an enemy on the
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  left. Starting in the nineteen nineties, you had these kind of center left
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  figures like Hawk, like Sayla Benabee, like Charles Taylor, probably most prominently
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  in his book essay The Politics of Recognition, that kind of resuscitated his reputation
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  and tried to use him to advocate for multicultural, pluralistic, broadly social democratic
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  policies. Right and Hannah is very much in that school. But as Buffalows
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  have said, a lot of people don't find his kind of tolerant, multicultural
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  democratic social democracy all that interesting, so he seems to be trying to move
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  in a bit more of a radical direction recently, you know, this resuscitation
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  of the idea of socialism and workplace democracy in I guess for our audience to
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  help you locate Haneth. He is the current fourth generation leader of the Institute
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  for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, which is housed and originally known as
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  the Frankfurt School. So after Horrkheimer, somebody took over. Who was it
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  was? It wasn't marcuso was. I think there was a of like a
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  a period where they were all in America after Horckheimer, kind of in the
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  nineteen thirty is what happened is they all had to flee Nazi Germany, and
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  it was actually Eric fromm who was able to get them an appointment at Columbia's
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  actually kind of an interesting story because what happened is from was originally the only
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  person who got an appointment at Columbia, and his condition for them accepting him
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  was they had to bring the whole institution along, and originally Columbia said,
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  no, we didn't want to bring all these German guys. But from was
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  so hot at that point that eventually he got his way, and so everybody
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  kind of transitioned over there. Wait, if they were at Columbia, why
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  were they all living in Cali. I don't know. I imagine that they
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  stayed there for a little while and then they transitioned outwards afterwards. I also
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  don't imagine that there was really a big expectation that they spent a lot of
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  time teaching. You know, it seemed like Adorno and Horkheimer wanted to spend
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  as little time there as possible, from judging by their writing. And then
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  and then after this sort of period of exile, they came back and the
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  third way was headed by Jurgen Habermass, who is who became extremely old,
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  as people do over time. And then at the guy took over, which
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  Honeth. Yeah, and I mean Honeth is no spring chicken himself, but
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  Honeth is the fourth sort of the leader of the fourth wave of the Frankfurt
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  School, becoming ever more liberal each wave and to the other side of the
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  debate. I was also surprised to learn that Roncier is still alive, giving
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  that he has I mean, I don't know this at all, but I
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  assume that he has the vices of most franch academics, and I was surprised.
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  But he's, I don't know, must be in his mid eighties because
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  he was kicking it with altus Air and Darida in the sixties already. So
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  I'm a bit of a roncier head out of practice, I should say,
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  out of practice Roncier head. But as some of our listeners actually most probably
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  do not know, I have a degree in art. And when artists want
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  to read a philosopher, they've they've picked something that says esthetics on it and
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  that's short. So because it's short and because it says aesthetics on it,
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  Roncier's Politics of Aesthetics is commonly read by artists, also commonly misread by artists
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  because they have a little bit of a difficult time reading typically. So I
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  learned this book a few times during art theory course, which book the Politics
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  of Aesthetics? Oh yeah, So do you want to give a rundown then
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  of what? So? I already said that Hannas tries to ground his political
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  theory on recognition and dialectic of recognition, kind of like I think what Hannas
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  is also doing is which he gets criticized relentlessly by Roncier for of like trying
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  to develop a thick account of subjectivity, because like he appeals to categories like
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  suffering, he appeals to categories like recognition, and there's another category like the
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  opposition between the individual and the community kind of thing. Well that too,
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  the opposition between the individual and the community. But also like these spheares of
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  recognition, I'll also have to do with like the health of subjectivity and how
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  well it functions. So he has kind of like a psychoanalytic, a psychological
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  account of like subjectivity and how you know, their ability to participate in these
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  various spheres of society ultimately are like the ways that you can make justice and
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  normative claims, And I think Roncier comes at it from a very different perspective
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  obviously, So I don't know if I'm also I will admit that I'm actually
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  a fan of both of these thinkers. I think I probably come down a
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  little bit more on the side of Rancier, at least in this specific text.
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  But I think that they both make mistakes, and they both make good
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  points in this But I don't know pills if you want you As the self
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  described roncier heads, what does he ground his politics on? Well, he
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  I mean, the easiest way to describe him is as a deconstructionist. But
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  he makes a politics of esthetics in the sense that you need or that in
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  politics, at least in capitalism, you don't really have a choice to you
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  don't have a chance to reorganize sense. And he means sense in like the
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  contient sense of sense, sense perception, where if you're some sort of artist,
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  and not specifically artists, right when, you have a broader sense of
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  aesthetics here, but a formal rearrangement of the material world, either through poetry
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  or art or some kind of some kind of reorganization of material organization allows you
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  to reorganize the world sensually in some way. Aesthetics isn't like a theory of
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  beauty anymore. In a lot of these modern texts, it has that broader
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  meaning of sense experience, like esthetic meaning the opposite of anesthetic when you don't
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  feel anything right right. And the idea is that like in capitalism, if
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  you don't have capital, you don't have political power, but everybody has esthetic
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  power, like anyone has the capacity to uh, you know, write write
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  poetry for example, So a radical politics in that sense. And then for
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  him politics is always deconstructive. I think he says all politics is insurrectionary for
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  me. And this is one of the things that Haneth just kind of it.
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  He just goes, I don't get it. I think he says something
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  like, I'm sure there's an argument here, but I couldn't find it.
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  So here's three possible options for what Roncierra means. But yeah, if you
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  if you know Dari Da well as as we we kind of do, then
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  that's That's the approach that Roncier takes to politics, is that if you operate
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  from the center out, or we might say is from the top down,
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  then it isn't politics because of politics of maintained the center is the opposite of
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  doing politics. So if you're maintaining something as it stands, then you're doing
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  nothing. Thus you have no power. Thus you are not a political actor
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  at that point, right, And I think, like the we'll go ahead
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  our Eric. I was just going to say, he has some very interesting
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  ways he defines these terms. Things he says about politics, like for him,
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  for him, what politics actually implies is a kind of equality, right,
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  because he says things like like a king who has a divine mandate to
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  rule, that's not politics. Or a bureaucracy or a bureaucracy of experts,
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  let's say, who have this mandate to rule based on their greater knowledge of
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  things. That's not politics either, because a political system implies that the government
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  is at least ruling on behalf of those who have no power to make decisions,
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  rather than the claim that this group of people has the authorization to make
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  decisions, so they are the ones in charge. So he the reason he
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  defines politics as kind of insurrectionary or political action as insurrectionaries because he has this
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  sort of definition of politics that immediately excludes anything that's an anti democratic from being
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  called politics at all. Yeah, politics can only occur where the rulers do
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  not have the right to rule, which means that their rulership is always in
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  question. I mean, I found it interesting, but I mean the politics
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  is originally I mean, he does quote Aristotle, but Aristotle also talks about
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  politics as centered on the police the city. I don't know how that ties
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  in, but it seems like he's got a very kind of idiosyncratic way of
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  defining politics. Yeah, well, it was my understanding that he defines politics
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  like so there's he makes this distinction between the police and politics. Right,
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  So, the politics are any moments that that interrupt or create a rupture in
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  the police. And what he means by the police is all the like business's
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  usual norms that exist in society are just like maintaining their own inner logic and
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  like the nothing changes hegemony. And so for him, that's why, like
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  even elections in a liberal democracy aren't politics, they're actually the police, because
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  all of those elections are just like the same thing happening. There's nothing new
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  going on here. It's just like another permutation of like the existing sensible world
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  understanding of it and everything. All the forces that maintain that business's usual sense
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  of the world is what he calls the police and not politics. Can't have
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  politics in that politics is the only when that actually gets uptured somehow. By
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  like that we start to change how we perceive or think about. Uh,
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  these kinds of values, they're reconfiguring, they're reconfigured in some new way.
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  And then uh so that's in that sense, that's another sense in which his
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  definition of politics is insurrectionary because it can only actually occur when the sort of
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  business as usual, that's my kind of understanding term that I'm using, is
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  interrupted and disrupted somehow to make space for something else to emerge, which well,
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  then subsequently I don't think he says it in this text, but he
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  does in other texts. It's gonna, uh, it's only going to be
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  momentary. This, I think Roncier is in this tradition. There's a couple
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  others in his field of thought who also think about politics as the moment of
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  politics. Right, it's like this momentary rupture, and then there's a reconfiguration
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  of the police. Yeah, there's a reconfiguration of the police, and then
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  there's a new police order that thens differ. Maybe it's better, but we're
• 19:00
  not going to make a value judgment about it. But it's not politics.
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  As soon as things are back to a norm, it's not politics anymore.
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  That's my I wanted to say that I personally found this debate broadly to be
• 19:11
  very very tedious, not because they didn't say interesting things, but because there
• 19:15
  was a lot of talking past one another, and I think both of them
• 19:18
  didn't really say anything that really amounted to anything of great gravitas. Right,
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  Roncierra took a fairly common post structuralist position, which is that this fixation that
• 19:27
  normal political theorists take on locating centers of power and criticizing them and then trying
• 19:33
  to talk about countervailing centers of power has a kind of intellectualist prejudice to it,
• 19:37
  because it allows the intellectual to speak about where power comes from and where
• 19:41
  it should be situated. And I think that that's absolutely an accusation you can
• 19:45
  make against talentath right. And I do like this idea, as any hippie
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  does, of kind of narrative eyes in politics by not privileging one source of
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  discourse over another, but allowing people to speak of their esthetic experiences and the
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  kind of odd sense that Eric was talking about and leaving things open to continuous
• 20:03
  interrogation. Right. But you know, in terms of what that would mean
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  concretely, I think find that the answer very very thin. None of that
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  he claims. I think rightly that this doesn't lead to relativism, as it
• 20:14
  doesn't. But I do think that we need to assume the burdens of moral
• 20:18
  judgment at some point and point out that not all narratives are equal. Right.
• 20:21
  I could sit here listening to an alt right personality all day long.
• 20:25
  He can articulate why it is that he suffered a great deal at the hands
• 20:27
  of this minority and this woman, and she broke up with him, and
• 20:30
  what a bit is she. But I have very little interest in granting that
• 20:33
  any kind of political legitimacy. Right, Yeah, Well, you're shifting the
• 20:37
  terms of the debate by saying that because he doesn't give institutional examples or doesn't
• 20:42
  want institutional examples, that means that it's a thin account of democracy, because
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  that's not what his purpose is. And we should say, I should say,
• 20:52
  go back to Rouncier's coming up in the French academy where he fits there.
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  He was a studied under Altuser, I believe, and then split with
• 21:03
  Altoser quite us because Altoser's Altaser's revolutionary idea was that first we're going to have
• 21:11
  an intellectual vanguard that's going to come up with all the ideas for the revolution.
• 21:17
  And the point is, I mean underlying that is the proletariat, the
• 21:21
  working class. They're too stupid to be able to, you know, lead
• 21:25
  an uprising themselves. And Roncierra took great offense to this idea and said,
• 21:30
  like all the the effective revolutions that we can ever point to are always spontaneous.
• 21:36
  The intellectuals theorize it after it's done, which again back to what we
• 21:41
  talked about at the very beginning. Why he writes on the politics of esthetics
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  is that in esthetics everybody is equal politically. If we want to talk about
• 21:52
  politics in the sense that you're making it right here, then not everybody's equal.
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  Then if you more or less, if you have money or can get
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  access to money and backers, then you can have a political life. But
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  in the esthetic life, everybody potentially has a life, and that's where we
• 22:10
  see mass, mass uprisings. What do you mean by what do you mean
• 22:14
  by aesthetics is inherently equal? I'm not sure I follow because for him that
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  has to do with the sense common common sense. Everyone has a contribution to
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  common sense, and particular particular to him is through art. Somebody is qualified.
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  Nobody is qualified to rule, is another way I think he puts.
• 22:41
  Everyone's equally not qualified to rule. Is that kind of the idea? Yeah,
• 22:44
  more or less. That's why he says the one principle of politics is
• 22:48
  always equality. So if equality is not on the table, then politics is
• 22:52
  also not on the table, right, because something like a meritocracy, right
• 22:59
  wherein the best people are supposed to rule, right, then you're getting away
• 23:02
  from that idea. Or again with like a monarchy with a divine mandate,
• 23:06
  right you get then you're getting away from that because they're the only ones qualified
• 23:08
  to rule. Yeah, every single every single police order is premised on an
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  exclusion, is like an important point that I think Roncier makes. So,
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  like any any sort of like sensible business as usual structure of the world where
• 23:21
  we're like, these are our values, it's always going to be excluding some
• 23:23
  group or someone, and the police or that being a political moment is when
• 23:29
  those excluded will come in interrupt that police order. But sorry, yeah,
• 23:33
  we should say also, just because we're going to keep using the term throughout
• 23:36
  the episode, police doesn't mean like what we think of as cops. Police
• 23:41
  is like the state. Well it's not just the state, though, isn't
• 23:45
  it like also the dominant values of society too. Yeah, I guess you
• 23:48
  could say the whole not just theeological state apparatuses, but the ideological state apparatuses
• 23:55
  as well. It's kind of a discursive and practice the whole consensus that goes
• 24:02
  on, and the idea is to sort of form a break with that consensus
• 24:06
  with political action. Good way of putting it, introduce previously excluded voices into
• 24:12
  the conversation, and then there's this sort of circle of then it kind of
• 24:18
  becomes normalized again and you fall back into the police state. That's what kind
• 24:22
  of what I got out of it. But it's important to note that Ron
• 24:23
  Sierra is also an archivist. So he did loads and loads of work in
• 24:30
  the nineteen seventies in the archives looking at the history of the French working class
• 24:36
  movements and reading the works of French working class people who participated in various kinds
• 24:42
  of political action and discourse as well. So he draws quite a bit.
• 24:47
  It's not like it's all kind of groundless theory as we might think of it.
• 24:52
  It's it's grounded in some careful analysis of some actual historical stuff as well,
• 24:57
  So he's not less historical in his orientation than the Frankfurt scholars would be.
• 25:04
  Well, this is what I wanted to say, though, I think
• 25:07
  again the reason for this kind of dispute that Pills is highlighting is again a
• 25:11
  kind of methodological one, right, and that they're coming out things from two
• 25:15
  very different perspectives. And the tradition of French aesthetics kind of colored by French
• 25:18
  Marxism and the revolutionary tradition and the tradition of a kind of political science,
• 25:22
  the appropriation of Frankfurt School themes that you see circle like Harbromas and others.
• 25:27
  So one of the things that you find with French aesthetic theory, and I
• 25:32
  think actually Bagio does a lot better at expressing these kinds of points than Rossierre
• 25:36
  does in this essay is this fixation on the idea of a real politics of
• 25:40
  the event, as he calls it, right, that's revolutionary, where everything
• 25:45
  genuinely comes under contestation, and where previously excluded groups that weren't able to participate
• 25:49
  in the routine holies of their country are actually incorporated because the legitimation of the
• 25:56
  system breaks down and everything comes under question. Right. And this is very
• 26:00
  much something that I think derives from their revolutionary history, right, and the
• 26:03
  kind of estheticization of the French Revolution seventeen eighty nine, the almost every French
• 26:07
  thinker tends to engage in right for everyone else in the world who's not French,
• 26:12
  right, like someone like Axelhuneth. The question almost immediately becomes Okay,
• 26:17
  there's this moment of radical inclusion delegitimation that occurs. That's actually extremely productive because
• 26:22
  now you can ask political questions that you weren't able to before. But how
• 26:26
  are you going to cash that out practically? And this is a very serious
• 26:30
  problem, right because after the revolution is gone and you tear things down,
• 26:33
  year one is established, you need to build something in its place. And
• 26:37
  the problem with that is every kind of political system that we've devised thus far
• 26:41
  inherently, as Ronciaer points it in coloroporates exclusions into its very makeup. Right,
• 26:45
  even the kind of radical social democracy or socialist democracy that someone like Kna
• 26:49
  would want to put forward right now is predicated on a kind of exclusion and
• 26:52
  the exclusion of citizen and non citizen. Which is why I think Roncier is
• 26:56
  right to bring up how difficult it has been for France to incorporate people like
• 27:00
  the Algerians into the polity, right, But it's not clear how it is
• 27:03
  that you can overcome that, and I think it's right to actually raise that
• 27:06
  question the way that he does. On it right, which is, look,
• 27:10
  you know, if you want to more participatory political system, you can't
• 27:14
  just estheticize that. It's going to take really difficult technical questions involve very difficult
• 27:18
  questions about who gets to participate in what way, through what institutions, in
• 27:22
  what time, through what kind of mechanisms, most of which are really not
• 27:26
  all that esthetically interesting because frankly they're fairly practical questions that most theorists find pretty
• 27:33
  boring. Well, aesthetics in practice would be kind of tightly linked in this
• 27:37
  case, wouldn't it be. You have sort of senses meaning, which links
• 27:41
  to knowledge and epistemology, and then you have sense as perception, which links
• 27:48
  to everyday existence, which is kind of Roncier's the reason Roncier has this play
• 27:52
  on disagreement, which you have a disagreement between like what you know and what
• 28:00
  the how the world actually appears to you in a practical kind of everyday since
• 28:04
  Yeah, I mean, the one criticism that i'd really raise of Haneth the
• 28:07
  sorry Victor, I'll let you know that is that he's really he remains like
• 28:11
  a lot of these left Agalians are the kind of center left a galions,
• 28:14
  people like Taylor, benabeeb and Hana. He's attracted to this idea of organic
• 28:19
  metaphors for society and politics right that you see Hegel espouse in the Philosophy of
• 28:26
  Right that society is best conceived as an organism. It functions well when it
• 28:29
  incorporates everybody under certain egalitarian terms, yes, but qualified egalitarian terms. And
• 28:36
  if these break down, what you're going to see is disruption, chaos,
• 28:40
  and the misfunctioning or the malfunctioning of the social organism. And the usual left
• 28:45
  Agalleian argument rather like he's saying, is that the way to solve this is
• 28:48
  more democracy, more recognition for groups that have previously been excluded, and more
• 28:53
  participatory forms of politics, all of which I like, right, But I
• 28:56
  do think that you could raise a legitimate Rascian which is that by normalizing social
• 29:02
  conflict, by incorporating it into a kind of social organism like the nation state
• 29:07
  structure that Hans remains attracted to, you also kind of blent the edge of
• 29:11
  some of these radical disparities that we see in society by neutering them. And
• 29:17
  this is a you just perpetuate them, because every creating a center and just
• 29:22
  what you're doing. Now asking give me the practical solutions, which Eric is
• 29:26
  right to point out they are aesthetic. Give me the practical solutions is necessarily
• 29:30
  going to be part of that hegemony. The point that runs Here is making
• 29:37
  is that it's never done. So when your goal is equality, your teilos
• 29:42
  of your society is equality, then that's never done because that's a goal that's
• 29:48
  irreconcilable with reality. But you can always do something. Sure, But what
• 29:52
  I'm saying is that ultimately there are practical questions you can ask, even about
• 29:56
  something like equality. Right. There's a very good book by TM Scanlong where
• 30:00
  you ask the quality of what right equality can be measured along a huge number
• 30:03
  of different metrics, right, Yeah, And I think that's what around here
• 30:06
  is saying. You can have resources, resources, abilities, opportunities, equality
• 30:11
  of outcome, equality of equality of punishment, like we talked about in our
• 30:15
  last episode. So the whole thing is to keep that thing at the center
• 30:18
  of politics, and that is, for Runts here, the censer of politics.
• 30:22
  So you you're kind of blunting the actual critique by saying, well,
• 30:25
  it's thin because he doesn't give me a practical outlook or a practical model.
• 30:30
  For what society should look like, because that's not the point, Okay,
• 30:33
  But it is then though, in my opinion, right, because I know
• 30:36
  you think that, yeah, but I'm right, so it give me a
• 30:37
  second. And the reason is that these kind of practical political questions are actually
• 30:42
  what most everyday politics are about. Right, Like, when we're talking about
• 30:45
  something, let's go to Eric's example, should we have a formally equal mayor
• 30:48
  ouptocracy or should we have a more substantively equal social democracy? Right? These
• 30:53
  are very technical questions that will involve a great deal of highly specified considerations about
• 30:59
  how to organize the economy, how to readers should be goods, what kind
• 31:02
  of institutions we should create, both at the macro and the micro level,
• 31:06
  most of which are frankly pretty boring, right, the things that policymakers are
• 31:08
  more concerned with rather than political theories. But they are absolutely essential to actually
• 31:12
  answering this question in a meaningful way, right, and to just to ctesize
• 31:17
  them by saying, well, we're going to end the c postpon on this
• 31:19
  by saying that this is continuous negotiation. I agree that that's true, right,
• 31:23
  But at some point we also have to discern the burdens of moral judgment
• 31:26
  and say that this is what equality is going to look like, as instantiated
• 31:30
  in our political community right now, and to try to make it as inclusive
• 31:34
  and eas egalitarian as possible, and to specify what that would actually entail at
• 31:38
  any given place at any given time. I'll give a very good example before
• 31:41
  you to give an example. Now, you're just glossing this and not addressing
• 31:45
  why he's bringing this idea up in the first place, which is to counter
• 31:49
  the idea of recognition as the foundation of politics. Yeah, but I've already
• 31:52
  said I don't agree with that. Okay, Well, then you're making an
• 31:56
  extraneous argument to the text. Sorry, and that's to cut you off.
• 32:00
  But we have to stay on point here. If the issue is that you
• 32:05
  cannot demand of someone they assemble a model politic for you, when politics is
• 32:13
  something that accounts for juridical judgments in order to displace them, because those judgments
• 32:19
  are always going to displace particular action. Yeah, I mean, isn't the
• 32:24
  idea that, like, you lay out those blueprints for the best kind of
• 32:28
  society, right, And you've already in that sense divorced them from practice because
• 32:31
  you've said what we should be doing, and these are the steps we need
• 32:35
  to follow. And you've already excluded so many people from this discourse because you're
• 32:39
  having this sort of expert argument about what is the best sort of society and
• 32:45
  there's all these technical questions, which implies that normal people can't answer these technical
• 32:50
  questions. And what you're really doing is getting at the disagreement between how are
• 32:53
  we supposed to be normative? How do we make normative claims? What are
• 32:58
  their proper place? Do they come before or the sensible every day or do
• 33:01
  they sort of follow from it? As Roncier would say, I mean,
• 33:05
  the normative is one of the central points of disagreement here. Like any question
• 33:12
  how should society be? What should we do? Like give me the next
• 33:17
  step the practical solution to this problem. All of these are normative questions.
• 33:22
  And if you just say, well, that's what we need, that's what
• 33:23
  we need, then you're just exactly glossing over Roncier's entire like a huge pillar
• 33:29
  of his critique of all of this. Well, I wanted to I've been
• 33:32
  I've been wanting to say something, okay for a little while, and I
• 33:35
  think what you just said, Eric touches on exactly what I wanted to say,
• 33:37
  which is, to me, it seemed like it was hard to tell
• 33:40
  with Roncier whether he was really offering anything normative or if it was really just
• 33:46
  descriptive, right, because in a way, it seems like he's just describing
• 33:50
  and redefining what politics, what the everyday, what the institutional ideological structures are,
• 33:57
  what those moments are, but he's not saying anything about like how things
• 34:00
  should be. And I mean so but then he like and I think that
• 34:05
  my issue with him is that it seems like he's trying to smuggle in normativity
• 34:07
  with but like avoiding saying it. And and you know, I think that
• 34:10
  it can be located. They always do that. Yeah, of course they
• 34:14
  always do that, but and like, so hold on, let me finish
• 34:16
  here. So it's located, I think in I mean, we talk about
• 34:20
  exclusion, right, So, like I think that from a Roncierian perspective,
• 34:22
  they get to you know, and I mean, I like rounds here,
• 34:25
  but I think that that it does kind of enable a certain kind of broad
• 34:30
  and like kind of affectively satisfying stance where you get to be like, well,
• 34:37
  we're just worried about exclusion, and it's like but without actually saying that
• 34:39
  exclusion matters. And it seems to me that like there's certain kinds Like so
• 34:44
  when he makes the claim that like every single police order in that case,
• 34:46
  the ideological institutional structure is premised on some kind of an exclusion, but again
• 34:52
  he remains apparently neutral on whether or not that's a good or bad thing.
• 34:57
  And it seems to me that like we want some exclusions, right, Like
• 34:59
  we I want an exclusion of I don't know, white nationalists, we want
• 35:02
  an exclusion of certain things. So like, yeah, like exclusion, of
• 35:06
  course it's premised. But that's what I mean by there's like an ambiguity.
• 35:09
  I mean, maybe it's not amigas. Maybe he's just offering a descriptive account
• 35:13
  and like that's what matters. And in which case, if it's descriptive,
• 35:15
  then it's then it's not. Then maybe it's not even a criticism to say
• 35:19
  he's not offering a normative account, because ultimately that he's just trying to give
• 35:22
  a description of politics. But at the same time, when he talks about
• 35:25
  like it's an it's an eruption and an exemplification of like equality of excluded people
• 35:30
  rearing their head disrupting. It sounds very like heroic and normative. So anyway,
• 35:37
  that's that was just like the sort of like oscillating back and forth between
• 35:40
  as I was reading it, between being like this is normative, it's not
• 35:44
  normative, and you know, he even says somewhere like I think it's like
• 35:47
  when he's responding to of course he's always responding to to Hanas about normativity.
• 35:52
  I think it's on page one, nineteen one twenty, right, and he's
• 35:53
  like, you know, it's not that we base things on or we're trying
• 35:59
  to have a political eruption that's based on trying to generate new recognition or address
• 36:05
  certain kinds of pathologies in people's lack of recognition. But he says, but
• 36:10
  people do it in order to construct another world, right, to create a
• 36:15
  new space. And he uses the example of Rosa Parks right, like she
• 36:17
  didn't sit on a particular place on the bus because she was suffering. This
• 36:22
  is about suffering, but because she just was wanted to create a different kind
• 36:29
  of world. And I felt that this was a very strange and ambiguous claim
• 36:31
  to just be like, well, it's not premised on some kind of suffering.
• 36:36
  It's really just imagining a new world, and that to me seems like
• 36:39
  either smuggling in normativity or just being shifty and not admitting what your actual commitments
• 36:45
  are. So I don't know that was yeah, I mean, I see
• 36:47
  why you say that. But it's his account of politics and his idiosyncratic version
• 36:53
  of it that makes him push back on that because politics is spontaneous, that
• 37:00
  is, it can't be determined. So if Rosa Parks sat at the front
• 37:04
  of the bus because she was I don't know, you know, suffering from
• 37:07
  a lack of respect or a lack of recognition, then the story is just
• 37:13
  that she got fed up and so did politics as a result. But that's
• 37:17
  not spontaneous. Then that's like dialectical. But spontaneous politics or insurrectionary politics performs
• 37:27
  the political act for the world they want to create, not because of what's
• 37:30
  happening in this one, and that's the important distinction there. I want to
• 37:35
  follow this up by just giving an example of actually something that many of the
• 37:38
  Frankfurt schoolers have started to talk about third fourth generations frank for schoolers talk about
• 37:43
  that's actually indicatory of how it is that this can be carried out at the
• 37:45
  kind of micro political lens. So just you know, an answer to kind
• 37:49
  of Eric's question, I don't think like Conneth is saying that experts should kind
• 37:52
  of resolve these questions. What he's saying is that they're technical questions that are
• 37:54
  best answered democratically. Right. In fact, he's very critical of Hegel precisely
• 37:59
  for actually assuming that we should have a bureaucratic universal class that assumes it has
• 38:02
  the kind of answers to these questions and it's going to manage them on behalf
• 38:06
  of society. And he thinks that's wrong, and he insists on that in
• 38:08
  this party. Yeah, and I think he's very critical of Leninism for exactly
• 38:13
  that reason. Right. But what I mean by the fact that you can't
• 38:15
  avoid the burdens of moral judgment and determining the kind of forms that inclusion and
• 38:19
  exclusion will take is that oftentimes the kind of practicality of these questions has to
• 38:24
  be answered in some way shape our form, and it's not always clear what
• 38:28
  the answer is going to be, and approaching them purely from an aesthetic level
• 38:31
  loses some of the brain that appears when we try to tackle these things in
• 38:34
  their concreteness. And one example I'll give that a lot of attention to was
• 38:37
  given was in Canada in twenty fifteen Loyola versus Quebec. Has anyone here heard
• 38:43
  of this case? That's Supreme Court? Nay, okay. So it's a
• 38:45
  big case that concerns how to actually recognize religious majority minorities in Canada in the
• 38:51
  education system. And one of the things that the court had to ask was
• 38:54
  what would it mean to have the most inclusive kind of education system at the
• 38:59
  primary level. Does it mean that you teach that religion is all false,
• 39:02
  right, and she's a purely secular kind of religious education. While some people
• 39:06
  would say that that's extremely discriminatory towards people who have religious beliefs, right,
• 39:09
  do you teach that all religions are equal? Right? People say, well,
• 39:14
  that could also be discriminatory because if I teach that all religions are equal,
• 39:16
  but I hold to a concrete religious viewpoint, like I'm a Roman Catholic
• 39:20
  in this case, then teaching me that my religion is just the same as
• 39:22
  someone else kind of discriminates men gets me in a certain sense, right.
• 39:27
  And then other people have said, well, we should just have private schools
• 39:30
  for all of different religious denominations, and everyone should be taught that their religion
• 39:35
  is right within that silo. Right. This is a very difficult question to
• 39:38
  answer, and it's not clear what the most inclusive form of education would be.
• 39:43
  But that was learned on the streets. Yeah, exactly, and it's
• 39:45
  not worth noting. This is something that Rossier also pays attention to, since
• 39:47
  it's a big issue. Quebecca's are sorry France as well, where the kind
• 39:52
  of secularist laste that discriminate against Islam by teaching that really there is no God
• 39:55
  and at least he has no place in the classrooms is extremely controversial, right,
• 40:00
  But there's no getting a way around the question of trying to devise an
• 40:01
  education system that's more inclusive by purely aestheticizing it. You have to a certain
• 40:07
  point ask yourself, what's the kind of education or pedagogical model that would be
• 40:10
  most inclusive? And I think the way to settle that circa both Roncier and
• 40:15
  Hanna would be democratically. Right, you keep using aestheticizing diminutively, which makes
• 40:22
  me think that you don't understand it. No, I'm not saying that there's
• 40:25
  anything wrong with aestheticizing something. I'm saying that estheticizing something in the way that
• 40:30
  Roncier does has its place when it comes to talking about how it is that
• 40:32
  we should include different voices that have been excluded for a very long period of
• 40:37
  time and not presume certain kind of intellectual authority to speak on behalf of others.
• 40:42
  Mean, but I do think that once we move beyond estheticization into the
• 40:45
  realm of political theory, which is what Haunta does, that's a realm where
• 40:47
  we have to start making practical judgments about, for instance, what I'm going
• 40:52
  back to our soft before, what kind of pedagological model is the most inclusive
• 40:54
  one? Yeah, but you want to answer that, And Roncier doesn't want
• 40:59
  to answer that, because Roncierra wants the people to answer that when they come
• 41:02
  into conflict with the state. But you want to answer that for the state
• 41:06
  for Roncier. Now, no, no, I don't, And I've made
• 41:08
  that I want this to be answered democratically, right, But I'm saying that
• 41:12
  there has to be an answer. Right. Maybe I'm wrong here, but
• 41:15
  my general take from what Roncier was trying to do is almost reverse the direction,
• 41:20
  like not start with the normative claims, but rather have the normative claims
• 41:23
  follow from the aesthetic. Because when you think about esthetics, right, it's
• 41:29
  not that there isn't normative claims in aesthetic. Aestheticizing something doesn't imply that you
• 41:35
  are getting rid of all of the normative claims in your discourse, right,
• 41:39
  Because when you think aesthetics, even if we're not talking about a theory of
• 41:44
  beauty as what most people think of as aesthetics, you're thinking of aesthetics as
• 41:47
  a theory of perception, about how perception works, about what sorts of objects
• 41:52
  we should regard as admirable and what sorts of objects we should regard as not
• 41:57
  so admirable. Right, And these are the sorts of things that are imagined
• 42:00
  in say, literary worlds, which is why he refers to literature like in
• 42:06
  Search of Lost Time and is in as a part of a political argument,
• 42:09
  which seems very strange, right, But that's how what he's doing. He's
• 42:13
  grounding normative claims in an aesthetic understanding, as opposed to in a social sciences
• 42:21
  and social philosophical understanding, which generally starts with ethics, which has its own
• 42:25
  kind of normative claims. And then if you go into the logic and the
• 42:30
  sciences, they have their own sorts of normative claims as well. Like,
• 42:34
  we're not talking about what Benjamine called the estheticization of politics, which is exemplified
• 42:38
  by films like The Triumph of the Will, which just completely knocks morality straight
• 42:44
  out of politics. We're talking we're still kind of talking here about the politicization
• 42:49
  of esthetics, as Benyamine would call it, which is to make sorts of
• 42:53
  normative claims about aesthetics. But obviously we have to be careful, and Roncier
• 42:58
  brings us up. Right, when the working class people wanted to get into
• 43:02
  art and writing poetry and things like that, right, the normative assumption in
• 43:07
  that case was that they should be writing about things they know, like you
• 43:12
  know, I don't know, living in the slums, or doing their jobs,
• 43:15
  yeah, painting their work better. They wanted to appropriate bourgeois themes,
• 43:19
  noble themes, romantic themes that seem proper to a different section of society,
• 43:23
  and that in itself has an implicit normative claim. But we're just not starting
• 43:29
  with the normative. You know, you forget normative norma is a carpenter's square.
• 43:34
  And a Carpenter's square implies a kind of ratio. So what we're dealing
• 43:37
  with whenever we're talking about normativity is rationality. What is the legitimacy of claims
• 43:45
  to one rationality or multiple rationalities in our political discussions? So all that stuff
• 43:52
  can't just be ignored when we're saying we're estheticizing something, because it's not that
• 43:55
  simple. When I assume, I mean, this is my just by take,
• 44:00
  it could be wrong. When we're dealing with someone like Roncier, who's
• 44:04
  probably not the class clown. I think he's a pretty smart guy. He's
• 44:07
  probably thought of these things, right yeah, So I mean, wait,
• 44:09
  wait, wait, we we're way too headyche right now. I just need
• 44:12
  to at least get a crux that we can all talk about, And that's
• 44:16
  a good one to start on. Is what we're talking about when we're talking
• 44:19
  about aesthetics. For Roncier, when we say we're dealing with the sensible,
• 44:23
  it's not really in a phenomenological sense, but it's also not separate from that.
• 44:28
  But I think the closest thing would be common sense. So Roncier's big
• 44:32
  idea is that we can change common sense and that it's not only the powerful
• 44:37
  that change common sense. You can be a cobbler and be able to access
• 44:44
  reform shape common sense, and not just yours, but like communally. So
• 44:51
  we're trying to get to a politics of the common sense, which means how
• 44:54
  do these things get generalized or normalized and then how do you make them democratic
• 44:59
  an equal? So that's like square one. Anyway someone else want to take
• 45:02
  it away, I feel like I feel like we may have lost a lot
• 45:07
  of people. So if you can try to build out from that, I
• 45:09
  mean so, I mean, I really wanted to push on this idea of
• 45:15
  grounding like the because to me, the most or at least I thought one
• 45:19
  at least one of the more interesting disagreements, and maybe the central one is
• 45:22
  like what we've been talking about in terms of normativity, and like I take
• 45:27
  Eric's point about like the locating it in that estheticization doesn't mean you know,
• 45:34
  like some sort of like like radically divorced from normative like ideal. But I
• 45:38
  think, you know, for me, the difficulty I have with Roncier,
• 45:45
  even though I agree with his analysis, like I actually think he's right about
• 45:49
  his what I take to be his descriptive project, which is exactly what Pill's
• 45:53
  described. That like, there's a that he's describing the process by which common
• 45:59
  sense, which includes the sensible, and it includes what earlier we described as
• 46:02
  you know, the ideological and institutional structures of the of the everyday, and
• 46:07
  nois the way that those things get ruptured and changed and reconfig reconfigured in these
• 46:13
  like moments of rupture. I think that that's compelling and accurate, and I
• 46:15
  feel like that seems intuitive to me. But I think that, you know,
• 46:21
  there's a part where Roncier is disagreeing with Hanes's claim that for him,
• 46:24
  it's about recognition. He says on page one nineteen, you know, for
• 46:29
  me, it's quite dangerous to propound this idea of a kind of normativity defined
• 46:34
  in terms of the good relation to yourself. It generates an idea of a
• 46:38
  struggle for recognition as a kind of reaction against a state of frustration. And
• 46:43
  I thought that, so this is basically Haneth's claim, I guess, is
• 46:45
  that like these political struggles are grounded in some kind of feeling like we're we're
• 46:53
  not fitting into some broader structure, and there's some sort of state of frustration.
• 46:57
  This is at least Roncier giving haness. But later, as I was
• 47:00
  saying earlier, right, he says it's people don't struggle because they're trying to
• 47:05
  address some state of frustration in themselves. They struggle, and he says on
• 47:08
  page one twenty to construct another world or and then that's when he uses the
• 47:14
  Rosa Parks example, And I guess, like, that's the part where I
• 47:16
  feel like it feels thin to me. Reconfiguration of the sensible like what it
• 47:22
  feels, And it's like, it feels thin, and it also feels like,
• 47:25
  well, is why would we care about construct constructing another world? It's
• 47:30
  like, is that good? But he refuses to say why we would want
• 47:31
  to construct another world? He's like, no, no, there's no He's
• 47:36
  like, there's no state of frustration with ourselves. That's dangerous to say that.
• 47:39
  But we just want to construct another world because that's what we do when
• 47:44
  we rupture the political so like, but surely he wants to Surely Rosa Parks
• 47:49
  wants a different world because it's frustrating to live in a world where black people
• 47:52
  have to sit at the back of the bus like it does. It seems
• 47:54
  wrong to me to be like that has nothing to do with like like any
• 47:59
  state of did have a very strong critique there, I think of Roncier,
• 48:02
  because Roncier didn't want to like start with the idea of suffering. And for
• 48:07
  Hannath it acts as like a bridge right between like political discourse and what you
• 48:15
  were saying about, you know, this idea of having an incomplete and a
• 48:19
  complete self, I guess, or sort of things matching up with the self.
• 48:22
  And you said, yeah, Hannath accused, if Roncier wants to eject
• 48:27
  this idea of starting with struggle or at least use with suffering, or at
• 48:32
  least using it as a bridge between the sort of what does he call it,
• 48:37
  like the individual and pathologies versus the political he says, you owe you
• 48:44
  owe us. Then an explanation about what is the driving force behind your ideas?
• 48:47
  Right, it's not desire for equality, because Roncier already said no,
• 48:52
  that's just the definition of politics. That's not a desire and it's so,
• 48:55
  and then but it doesn't start with suffering because suffering is a negative, reactionary
• 49:00
  thing. So then like, what the hell is it, Roncie, And
• 49:04
  then he just says it's it's it's you want to create a better world,
• 49:07
  but why or a different world? Not even better? That's too normative.
• 49:09
  It's just trying to create, and it's like, what do you mean?
• 49:12
  And that's where I think that's good in itself, right, that's where he's
• 49:15
  sneaking in. That's where they sneak in the normativity, Right, that's where
• 49:16
  the yeah, I know you love this sneaking in thing sounds very nefarious,
• 49:23
  conspiratorial. But normativity does not need to be universalizable. They're not trying to
• 49:30
  avoid it for that reason, like equality is not universalizable because it's always going
• 49:37
  to become a new status quo, a new police. But oh look look,
• 49:42
  the reason that it can't be normative as a first step is just like
• 49:45
  all our other favorite French pimps, they don't want hagel. So if you
• 49:52
  ever start by going Rosa Parks sat at the front of the bus in order
• 49:58
  to move history forward, well now fuck politics is history again? So Roncirian
• 50:04
  politics is not historical. It's spontaneous. So certain people, I guess here
• 50:10
  one of them are gonna want the why in advance, why are we doing
• 50:14
  this? So if your personal answer is we should do this because it's right,
• 50:22
  then you're probably a dialectician. But if your personal answer is something more
• 50:25
  along the lines of I want to seize upon a moment where I can bear
• 50:29
  out my will and creativity in the world, then you may be a Roncirian
• 50:34
  whose critique of the police in this sense is similar to the Nietzschean critique of
• 50:38
  Heglari. You want to account if you want of how it is that a
• 50:42
  lot of these people bridge the gap between aesthetics and politics. It's not particularly
• 50:45
  sophisticated, and the best iteration of it is given in Habermas's late book,
• 50:50
  Truth and Justification I think is the name of it. But one of the
• 50:52
  things that they point out's late book late book. Yeah, it's from two
• 50:58
  thousand and one, Truth and Justifications. Oh, I'm sorry, I thought
• 51:01
  you meant the late Habermas's book, or like the book died. Yeah,
• 51:05
  that was like, I didn't know. I'm expecting it any day now it's
• 51:08
  going to happen. He's actually just releasing a fourteen hundred page book that apparently
• 51:14
  is actually much more Marxist in its orientation than he's been since the nineteen seventies.
• 51:17
  So, just like Hanna seems to have felt the sting of not being
• 51:20
  radical enough. Harber Moss has seemed to decided that he's not radical enough at
• 51:23
  this point. They're done getting kicked around by podcasts. Yeah, exactly,
• 51:27
  he's too much of a square. So he's kind of responding to that.
• 51:30
  Actually, igorhok Abroad pointed south. He apparently wrote an email to Igor saying
• 51:34
  that my new book is going to be more radical than my lost But anyway,
• 51:37
  that the kind of argument that we got people make it. The kind
• 51:40
  of argument that these people make very simply is that esthetics constitutes a kind of
• 51:44
  cultural life world. And it's a very Higelian idea from people which people draw
• 51:47
  grammars, symbols and images that they reconfigure and rearticulate in order to demand recognition
• 51:54
  both from other people, from state institutions and from various other are kinds of
• 52:00
  cultural forces in society, right, And there's an indefinite quality to this because,
• 52:04
  of course, just like the cultural world of aesthetics is endlessly rich,
• 52:07
  so too will people reconfigure the symbols, grammars and so on in endlessly various
• 52:12
  different ways. And there's a democratic dimension to this because the argument that most
• 52:15
  of them will put forward is that rather like what ross Hara is doing,
• 52:20
  we should consider the different ways that people reassemble their grammars and aesthetic images from
• 52:24
  an egalitarian perspective and not try to privilege one over the other. Right,
• 52:30
  except that becomes really difficult because, of course, at some point you need
• 52:31
  to start to ask yourself, well, how do is it that we take
• 52:35
  these kind of demands from recognize and translate them into political practice. So one
• 52:39
  of the examples given by Shila Bennebee, for example, at length, is
• 52:44
  she'll point out that a lot of Marxists criticize the notion of human rights right
• 52:46
  by saying human rights is just a bourgeois notion. Anytime you codify rights in
• 52:51
  the law, inevitably the state's going to be the one that decides what those
• 52:52
  rights are. So we should just abandon talk of rights full sale right.
• 52:57
  But Bena, people say, actually, people have been able to use the
• 52:59
  brand rights in a lot of very interesting ways, sometimes for extremely revolutionary causes.
• 53:05
  If you think about the French Revolution and the demand for the universal rights
• 53:08
  of men, per se right, and this shows you that you can take
• 53:12
  the grammar of an estheticized concept like let right and employ it for democratic and
• 53:16
  even radical purposes without interpolating it in a system of control and power. And
• 53:21
  the problem is how to actually create a kind of social order that allows people
• 53:28
  to do that on an indefinite basis, while still providing them with the minimal
• 53:34
  series of concrete institutions that's necessary to do that, and also a high level
• 53:39
  of material equality, since if they're not actually materially capable of engaging in these
• 53:44
  kinds of projects, then they're not going to be able to do so,
• 53:46
  since most of them are going to be sitting there toiling away for capitalists day
• 53:51
  in and day out, rather than engaging in these kinds of acpecivic participation and
• 53:54
  rearticulation. So there is a kind of link between aesthetics and between politics that
• 54:00
  they draw that's relatively sophisticated. Again, Howardmas's account is better than hanis a
• 54:05
  lot better than hanis. Frankly, I think it's really problematic in a lot
• 54:08
  of ways, right, But I think that the reason why it is that
• 54:14
  maybe Pills and I were having an argument is that I'm not trying to dismiss
• 54:16
  aesthetics. Neither is haunteth right. The disagreement seems to lie on how it
• 54:22
  is that you take from Hone's pspective, I think would be how do you
• 54:24
  take the resources in an aestheticized life world and translate that into some kind of
• 54:29
  praxis right democratic practice. So one connection that I can bring up based on
• 54:36
  what Magic said this aesthetics to politics bridge is the individual and how the individual
• 54:44
  gets rights and how the individual gets recognized. So for Haunteth, he's very
• 54:50
  concerned with being recognized or the subject being recognized, and Roncierra kind of goes,
• 54:55
  oh, yeah, well, the state recognizes you. It it's just
• 55:00
  going to call you. It recognizes you as a colonial subject if you're in
• 55:04
  Algeria, and a citizen if you're born in France. So for Roncier,
• 55:07
  it's not that the state doesn't recognize you, it's that the state turns you
• 55:12
  in the kind of individual that gets recognized and then you're unequal. So I
• 55:17
  wondered what you guys thought about this debate about the individual, because this is
• 55:22
  one thing we've talked a lot about on this podcast in terms of identity,
• 55:27
  whereas Roncier is like, we don't want identity to be the normative bearer of
• 55:31
  rights. We want something else, something discursive, whereas Hanness it almost seems
• 55:36
  like he wants to deny it. Yeah, so you want to talk about
• 55:38
  that a little bit. Well, yeah, I mean so I think that
• 55:43
  I think that Roncier's interpretation of what Hanta us up to. And actually I
• 55:47
  wrote my like major paper for my master's in philosophy about Hanneth and Rawls,
• 55:52
  so I know Hanne's pretty well, and I know that he is not only
• 55:55
  concerned with how the individual is recognized by the state, but also this broader
• 56:00
  sense of the norms that I think. I think there's actually overlap in what
• 56:06
  what Roncier means by the police, meaning like all the ways in which the
• 56:09
  everydanis is you know, maintained ideologically but also institutionally, and that's why Hanneth
• 56:16
  has these three spheres of recognition, which we can take issue with, but
• 56:20
  like you know, he is very much concerned with also just like how your
• 56:24
  your identity gets formed, not in terms of I mean, of course,
• 56:28
  the state's always going to have some sort of effect, but also like you're
• 56:32
  the everyday way in which you sort of interact with people at the level of
• 56:36
  what you might call cultural value patterns. And I think that Hannith is concerned
• 56:42
  with changing those and he wants to ground them in a kind of normativity of
• 56:45
  like subjective development, right and and and what he calls or what you know,
• 56:52
  this kind of good relation to yourself. He wants to locate that in
• 56:57
  like this Hegelian dialectical account of subjectives subject development. Yeah, we call that
• 57:01
  the dialectic of recognition on here, right right, right, yeah, the
• 57:06
  dialectic of recognition. So and I think that the problem that I think Roncier
• 57:12
  has is he doesn't really care about any of that, it seems, or
• 57:16
  doesn't want to talk about it specifically. He just wants to like issue the
• 57:20
  whole conversation of the individual and just wants to talk about, you know,
• 57:24
  vague things Like I was criticizing him earlier for just saying, well, people
• 57:29
  do these things. They rupture the existing orders to create a new world,
• 57:34
  construct something new, and it's like, but doesn't want to say whether or
• 57:36
  not that's good. And then the other thing that I would say says,
• 57:38
  you know, bring something new into the world. Yeah, it's just just
• 57:42
  just because I guess that's intrinsically good or something, But I don't know.
• 57:45
  I mean, but of course they would never want to say that, or
• 57:46
  I don't want to speak of Deluze. But at least here for Roncier.
• 57:50
  But I think there was a really interesting debate where Hanneth responds to something Roncier
• 57:54
  says with saying, well, why can't we change society? Like why does
• 58:00
  it have to be? And maybe he was misreading around Sier here a little
• 58:02
  bit, but he was basically asking, like, why do these changes to
• 58:06
  the existing what round Cier calls the police order have to only take place in
• 58:10
  the context of this rupture? Right, Like why can't you work within the
• 58:15
  system to like slowly erode on some understanding of identity? And I don't know,
• 58:21
  we could think of the example of like something like transgender identity or something.
• 58:24
  It's like there's an I think there's I think at least there's an interesting
• 58:28
  question about like, you know, what happens that now there's like more recognition
• 58:34
  for transgender in the everyday culture today than there's ever been. Was that the
• 58:37
  result of a rupture? Or is that just a continuation of the already existing
• 58:40
  logic of our neroliberal context? Right? But the but the results from the
• 58:46
  perspective of being a transgender person is likely positive, But like, was that
• 58:52
  a change. I'd be curious what you guys think. Was that a change
• 58:55
  in the configuration of the police, or was that some sort of an all
• 59:00
  re existing logic being being the logic of it being extended to its natural conclusion.
• 59:05
  Doesn't seem like that can happen for Ron Sierra. This is one of
• 59:07
  those those points that might put the radicals off of Honith though, because I
• 59:12
  think what you're getting at is his idea that instead of the whole like political
• 59:16
  intervention and the suspension of the political order, he was talking about, well,
• 59:21
  why can't we have like an internal internal struggle where we reappropriate and reinterpret
• 59:27
  certain normative values, like I don't know what you think of? Like he
• 59:30
  talks, he gives us one example of the housewife, and that's that's his
• 59:35
  example of somebody trying to like shirk off an identity that's being imposed on them
• 59:42
  and sort of reinterpret their possible role in politics or in society. And then
• 59:47
  he talks about this idea of yeah, re like reinterpreting normative values like I
• 59:54
  get, I don't know, we live in a profit driven society. Could
• 59:57
  we reinterpret that? And he says you know, this is this is what
• 1:00:00
  we might have traditionally called reform, and then all the revolutionaries go oh fuck,
• 1:00:07
  yeah exactly exactly. But I think, but I think to be charitable
• 1:00:09
  to to Hanis, I think that his point is exactly what you said,
• 1:00:13
  But I don't. I don't think, at least I don't think in that
• 1:00:15
  response he was denying that it's possible to also have these changes occur exactly as
• 1:00:20
  Ron Seer says, but it's doing with the struggle, Yeah, exactly.
• 1:00:22
  But his point was just like, but it seems strange to be like,
• 1:00:25
  that's the only time it can change, not to say that those things don't
• 1:00:30
  change, not to say that, but to say that that is not political
• 1:00:35
  action. Like if you're already at the point where women can vote and where
• 1:00:39
  transgender people are recognized by the state, that's because a lot of people have
• 1:00:45
  already done the esthetic work of changing common sense, and those people did the
• 1:00:50
  politics. Well. Here, though, I think it's really important to know,
• 1:00:52
  well, okay, I want to talk more about that in a second
• 1:00:54
  book came out. I think it's really important to know the different traditions in
• 1:00:59
  which sorry, which rounds here and hawnth are operating right. In the kind
• 1:01:04
  of context of the German Frankft School, particularly a third generation Frankfurt School theory,
• 1:01:07
  Hannah Rehtt becomes an extremely major figure, and she still is with people
• 1:01:10
  like Hannathan Bennebee right. And one of the things that Hannah read foregrounds in
• 1:01:15
  all of her work that they all pick up on is that the only thing
• 1:01:19
  worse than having a state oppress you is not having a state that's willing to
• 1:01:23
  oppress you, right, being completely excluded from the political community and having no
• 1:01:29
  rights that anybody is willing to guarantee. Right. So I think Hanneth would
• 1:01:31
  argue that demands for recognition on behalf of legal institutions and demands for rights for
• 1:01:37
  your cultural group are a necessary but not sufficient condition for the coint of more
• 1:01:40
  radical forms of political agitation that you're arguing. And the example you could point
• 1:01:45
  to would be something like Algerian's in France, right, which round sas should
• 1:01:49
  be aware of right. Any of them would probably much prefer to be recognized
• 1:01:53
  in official religion by the French state, with all the compromises that are entailed
• 1:01:58
  with that, rather than being treated essentially as they as though they don't belong
• 1:02:01
  in France. Uh, and they're just going to eternally be othered in that
• 1:02:06
  kind of civic context, and at its apex, this is going to lead
• 1:02:08
  to demands that they go home, like Marine and the Panes saying that short.
• 1:02:16
  Okay, SOS version of that will be out next week. So yeah,
• 1:02:21
  you were saying, like the systemic logic, I really I'm still I
• 1:02:24
  still want to pick up on this point that Pills made earlier is the thing
• 1:02:28
  that Roncier is interested in. So I guess, like you know, because
• 1:02:30
  originally I framed it as sort of like a question. So the example of
• 1:02:34
  like transgender or like changes in the recognitional economy of society that happened from within
• 1:02:40
  the logic. I was I pose the question, right, so would that
• 1:02:45
  just not qualify as an actual change an interruption in the police, or or
• 1:02:51
  would it be would you conceptualize it that way? So I guess, based
• 1:02:53
  on what you said Pills, the answer would be like no, because it's
• 1:02:55
  actually just a continuation of the systemic logic. Right, because like the expansion
• 1:03:00
  of like transgender rights or other things that's just fitting into the logic, the
• 1:03:05
  systemic logic of the society. We live in it's not an authentic rupture,
• 1:03:09
  Yeah, but not the same thing saying like the Declaration for the Rights of
• 1:03:14
  Women is based formally on the Declaration of the Rights of men. Therefore it
• 1:03:19
  is just based on the sort of formal, formal logic of something that's already
• 1:03:24
  a kind of normative principle. He talks about love in the same way.
• 1:03:29
  Kind of Wilson craft, she was actually pretty original. But look, when
• 1:03:34
  when you're at the point especially of legal recognition, that is of police state
• 1:03:39
  interpolation, then at that point, yes, that is just a continuation of
• 1:03:45
  the police state. But the question is how did we get there, and
• 1:03:50
  what political acts did it take to get there? How did it get to
• 1:03:53
  be common sense that women should have the right to vote, the suffragettes,
• 1:04:00
  that they were the political actors there. Police state is still good to police.
• 1:04:04
  So when it comes to transgender recognition, now in the same way,
• 1:04:09
  if the laws change to recognize them, then that means that politics is over
• 1:04:15
  and that politics has been you know, fifty years in the making of work
• 1:04:19
  by activists, by artists, by people who broke the stone wall sixties.
• 1:04:28
  Yeah, by transgender people who came out in spite of the risk of ostracism
• 1:04:32
  and probably violence in a lot of cases. So they risk their safety and
• 1:04:36
  well being because that is the better world. And that act of coming out
• 1:04:44
  to society in the face of a lot of bad shit that's gonna get thrown
• 1:04:47
  your way and happened to you, that is the political act. So when
• 1:04:51
  you're at the point where fucking Justin Trudeau is wearing a transgender pin on TV,
• 1:04:57
  then you know politics has long been over at that point, right.
• 1:05:00
  I think that I don't think that. I think that fits no hold on.
• 1:05:03
  I think that fits with with what with you know, I think Hannith
• 1:05:06
  would just say, well, yeah, of course, I mean those acts
• 1:05:11
  so the acts themselves are political moments right when it's dangerous because it's and that
• 1:05:15
  is leading to like a reconfiguration of the of the common sense that with which
• 1:05:19
  people perceive transgender people, which then makes it possible for the stage to change,
• 1:05:25
  is what you're saying, because of those actual concrete acts that were dangerous
• 1:05:30
  in that moment. Okay, Yeah, I think that I think that makes
• 1:05:33
  sense, and I think that Hannis would still make room for that, But
• 1:05:36
  I think what he would say would be like the reason that those acts matter
• 1:05:40
  is because of like a recognitional demand that is motivating them, because they got
• 1:05:45
  rights in the end. So Hanes's like, Okay, it's good, they
• 1:05:47
  got rights in the end, now they're recognized. Well, it's not just
• 1:05:49
  about rights, it's about but I'm sorry you keep saying that. No,
• 1:05:55
  but you see no, but it's not just respected. But I think that
• 1:05:57
  it's the exact same thing. Like implicit in haneth is a concern with a
• 1:06:01
  change in the common sense values that were required, that those acts required.
• 1:06:08
  And the reason why it matters to have like regular people see transgender people as
• 1:06:13
  different because before obviously when they had to do those political acts and come out
• 1:06:16
  and be you know, at risk, that was because people the common sense
• 1:06:20
  was such that it looked down or marginalized transgender people much more than it still
• 1:06:26
  does now. But the reason that Hannith would would support that it's not because
• 1:06:31
  of rights. But he's actually concerned with those common senses. The common sense
• 1:06:35
  is the thing that makes better recognitional economy possible. Well, I didn't get
• 1:06:40
  from this reading though. I think the problem is that these these examples is
• 1:06:44
  they can both appropriate them with their conceptual apparatuses, right, Honeth can say,
• 1:06:49
  now, that's an example of someone completing and becoming recognized and moving towards
• 1:06:56
  this concept of freedom that he is. Ron Sierre can say, no,
• 1:06:59
  that's actually someone subjectivizing outside of like the identity circuit and moving towards a concept
• 1:07:04
  of equality. They can both take the examples and run them through their system
• 1:07:09
  and account for them in different ways. That both sound pretty cogent to me.
• 1:07:15
  But then the problem then becomes something on a theoretical conceptual level if they
• 1:07:18
  can both just do this very easily whenever an example real quick, though pills
• 1:07:25
  real quick. So you're right that it's not specifically in this text the way
• 1:07:28
  that I stated it, but it is implied because it's concerned about is about
• 1:07:30
  the self relationship and all the conditions that lead to a healthy self relationship,
• 1:07:35
  which would include the common sense of society. He fleshes that out more in
• 1:07:43
  like his other works. But you're right that it wasn't stated the way that
• 1:07:45
  I did in this text, but that's all implied by his dialectic of recognition
• 1:07:51
  for Hana. All right, well, it sounds good. I'd be a
• 1:07:54
  little less hostile if you stated it that way instead of being like, hey,
• 1:07:58
  you guys did it the job, Rosa Parks, you did what I
• 1:08:03
  now say you should have. But then, what's with Roncier just saying that,
• 1:08:09
  like not wanting to admit that, like constructing another world is good for
• 1:08:13
  a reason, Like that's just weird to me. Can you point me to
• 1:08:15
  the reference? Maybe, so it's page one twenty one, nineteen one twenty
• 1:08:19
  when he's when Ron's here is responding to the idea where he's it's it's actually
• 1:08:24
  like kind of like bottom quarter. He says, it's quite dangerous to propound
• 1:08:29
  the idea of a kind of normativity to find in terms of a good relationship
• 1:08:31
  to yourself. And then he goes on to talk about a female candidate running
• 1:08:35
  for office because she did it, not because she was frustrated and had a
• 1:08:40
  bad relationship with her relation to herself, but because she wanted to construct another
• 1:08:45
  world. And then he says, Rosa Parks also, right, she sat
• 1:08:47
  there not because she was tired after a day of work. It was because
• 1:08:54
  of her right inkling that this on the right is about something we have not
• 1:08:58
  explained yet, which is ron serious concept of the partition of the sensible.
• 1:09:01
  I think, yeah, that's important linked to that like totally, and we
• 1:09:06
  haven't gone over it yet and I don't think I can explain it. I
• 1:09:11
  also wanted to point out that I think there's an important sense in which we
• 1:09:14
  also have to acknowledge that the granting of rights bias state or another institution can
• 1:09:17
  sometimes preceded changes in the census communis. And this is something we talk a
• 1:09:21
  lot about in the social legal literature, Right, do changes in the law
• 1:09:25
  reflect changes in culture? Are? Do changes of culture reflect changes in law?
• 1:09:29
  And actually, there's been a lot of apeirical research done on the subject,
• 1:09:30
  and it turns out it's a lot more complicated than just assuming cultural changes
• 1:09:34
  precede legal changes. So, for instance, in a lot of countries,
• 1:09:38
  attitudes towards homosexuality were uniformly pretty negative on behalf of the majority of people until
• 1:09:43
  there was a legal change permitting it, after which people's minds just changed,
• 1:09:47
  right, they said, well, if the law says it's okay, then
• 1:09:49
  it must be okay. There are similar eperical examples that can preferred trained to
• 1:09:54
  drug use, similar laws that pertain to abortion use, and probably the most
• 1:09:59
  prominent example aside from the LGBTQ one is the death penalty. Most people supported
• 1:10:02
  the death penalty until their states prohibited it, right, So I do think
• 1:10:06
  it's actually possible to grant people like groups' rights and a lot of activists debandness
• 1:10:11
  even in the face of public pressures and the sense of communists, and then
• 1:10:14
  hope that there are going to be transitions in the broader culture afterwards, right,
• 1:10:17
  and invisioning the word and the Aristotelian and the entomist sense of like,
• 1:10:26
  of like being able to make like cognitive judgments about objects that share similar qualities.
• 1:10:31
  So that's what sensus communists means. I don't think it doesn't mean common
• 1:10:35
  sense like we say today. No, Yeah, I'm using it in the
• 1:10:39
  kind of colloquial sense that we were talking about it earlier on right. But
• 1:10:43
  the basic idea is that at Latin for it's fun. I knew what you
• 1:10:48
  meant, and I thought it was cool. And then Eric Kimmen was like,
• 1:10:50
  yeah, said in the Latin says, hey, I'm using common sense
• 1:10:57
  in the sort of pseudo pragmatist sense of American philosophy. I enjoyed. I
• 1:11:01
  enjoyed that. The reason I think it's important, though, is to Victor's
• 1:11:03
  point. Right. If take somebody like to take the civil rights movement right
• 1:11:06
  in the American South, the civil rights movement was extremely unpopular in the American
• 1:11:11
  South, and it was only typidly popular in the American North. Right.
• 1:11:15
  Nowadays, it's granted this kind of almost hagiograg hagiographic status in American culture,
• 1:11:20
  right, But that's not the way it was at the time, right.
• 1:11:24
  And one of the things that's important to remember is that it took a lot
• 1:11:27
  of activists putting pressures on political leads to grant rights to people of color before
• 1:11:31
  society was willing to change. Right. So sometimes I get a little bit
• 1:11:35
  wary of this kind of argument that we need to wait for cultural changes to
• 1:11:41
  lead to the granting of rights. I don't think so. I don't think
• 1:11:45
  that's what Ritzi are saying, right, I'm just kind of cautioning that.
• 1:11:47
  So what you're saying, I think what you're saying could be possible, but
• 1:11:53
  would be definitely the exception, not the rule, which is that a politician
• 1:11:58
  could actually do a pull medical act. It could, in theory be possible
• 1:12:02
  according to runs here. Of course, well some great politicians do. I
• 1:12:05
  mean, look at Martin Luther King, right, like Martin Luther King was
• 1:12:09
  such a morally upstanding figure that even in the face of tremendous public opposition,
• 1:12:13
  he was able to enact meaningful change in the United States. Right. And
• 1:12:15
  it's not a politician though, well, political figure, sorry, not a
• 1:12:18
  politician, civil rights activist. Right. It's the same thing for activists against
• 1:12:23
  the death penalty. Right. The death penalty was hugely popular in most countries,
• 1:12:27
  still is in some senses. But they really put a huge amount of
• 1:12:30
  more pressure on state institutions to say that this is a violation of human rights,
• 1:12:34
  and they were successful. I don't think anybody here would be complaining about
• 1:12:38
  that, right. So I think it's sometimes more complicated than just saying we
• 1:12:42
  need changes in kind of cultural attitudes. Sometimes there's things that activists can do
• 1:12:45
  that well, all those those things interlink, right, And I think that's
• 1:12:48
  actually han It's point in his other work that all these things the legal level,
• 1:12:53
  the cultural value patterns level, and then also like the private, like
• 1:12:57
  like our own inter subjective relationships with their loved ones, like all these spheres
• 1:13:00
  of recognition interlink and interact with each other to create like the conditions of of
• 1:13:05
  like of our of a healthy self relationship. I just give an example that
• 1:13:09
  we all know, we should all be familiar with two thousand and four,
• 1:13:11
  game marriage gets decriminalized here in Canada. Most people I knew were pretty homophobic
• 1:13:15
  back in the early two thousands, which is not that long ago, right,
• 1:13:18
  And there's a lot of data to say that most society and most of
• 1:13:21
  Canadian society was pretty homophobic at the time. Nowadays, flash forward fifteen years
• 1:13:26
  later, there was a change of the law, and it proceeded a change
• 1:13:28
  in cultural attitudes because homophobia is now considered just as a kin to racism in
• 1:13:33
  terms of something that's culturally taboo. And thank God for that, right.
• 1:13:38
  So you know, there are examples. Lgbt TQ movement goes back to in
• 1:13:45
  the States the Stonewall riots, and there's a similar event in Toronto actually in
• 1:13:48
  Canada that launched the movement here as well. So they've they've raided all the
• 1:13:56
  Turkish baths and they did the same sort of police suppressive shit they did in
• 1:13:59
  the States in it it kind of congealed the movement. So I mean,
• 1:14:03
  wherever you start that you have your distribution of the sensible, and then you
• 1:14:08
  have a dissensus which is created outside of that. And that's why I think
• 1:14:12
  we can for the police. That's the outcome of this entire discussion ultimately.
• 1:14:17
  Like how he chooses the word the police too, It's funny how he chooses
• 1:14:21
  that word police. It's like meant, it's like design, it's like tailor
• 1:14:26
  made for like for like edge Lord seduction has an aesthetic appeal for activism,
• 1:14:30
  right, But that's why for I think that's why Hannath has such a hard
• 1:14:35
  time dealing with Ron Sierra, because he's like, this guy just redefined politics.
• 1:14:40
  He can't do that, he says, that's something to that effect.
• 1:14:43
  That's my summary. Yeah, well, I mean I agree with you.
• 1:14:45
  I actually thought that Hanna's reactions were pretty bad. Like I thought, I
• 1:14:48
  felt like I had thought a thought of better critiques of rons heier than Hanneth
• 1:14:53
  himself did myself. Yeah, but that's that's like Ron Sierra obviously wants politics
• 1:14:58
  to have nothing to do with the police, or to be undermining of the
• 1:15:04
  police. And it makes sense why that would be a good in general,
• 1:15:10
  not a historical good. I think that needs to be qualified, not a
• 1:15:13
  historical good. But to see you're to see the world reflect you. I
• 1:15:18
  think you have to claim that that's a good because otherwise what would be the
• 1:15:24
  point of doing aesthetics, right, I mean, I don't think that smuggled
• 1:15:27
  in though I think that why maybe it doesn't stay it. I don't know.
• 1:15:30
  I mean there's a couple places like so even on so on one twenty
• 1:15:32
  six, there's another moment when they're talking about suffering, right, and like
• 1:15:35
  Roncieres really insistent on being like, we don't have this point about suffering in
• 1:15:40
  common at all, and he says on uh, you know, he says,
• 1:15:44
  the logic of the police of police to define the wrong on a pathological
• 1:15:48
  basis, it's not necessarily because people are suffering that they act politically. Acting
• 1:15:55
  politically very often comes because some forms of ruptures appear possible. Yeah, like
• 1:16:00
  an opportunity. I just think that that's that's just to me that it's just
• 1:16:04
  like it's all it's almost Yeah, it sounds a bit deterministic. It's just
• 1:16:09
  like just because there's an opportunity, people are gonna take it. I don't
• 1:16:12
  know. And it's just like he doesn't want to admit that that like it
• 1:16:15
  it I mean, I guess it depends on how you define suffering, I
• 1:16:18
  suppose, but I was being like charitable to haunt it and thinking that suffering
• 1:16:23
  has to do with a deficiency and all of these spheres of recognition that include
• 1:16:27
  culture and and common sense and all these things, And it just seems to
• 1:16:30
  me that mostly, I mean, I don't understand how you could say that
• 1:16:34
  people just blindly are like, well, there's an opportunity to change things,
• 1:16:38
  I'm going to take it, but like not have any an like there's nothing
• 1:16:42
  behind it, like like some demand like that. That just seems like very
• 1:16:45
  strange to me. You can see why, you know why. It's like,
• 1:16:49
  if something's determined, then it's not political anymore. If you're just doing
• 1:16:55
  something because you're an instinctless flesh creature bumping into things, then it doesn't matter.
• 1:17:02
  The only thing, the only way that that can matter is if it
• 1:17:05
  can be spontaneous for you. Yeah. I think for Roncier, what moves
• 1:17:11
  equality along as well, in his sense of everyone having equal capacity to participate
• 1:17:15
  in politics, what moves that along is disagreement, whereas with Haneth, what
• 1:17:20
  leads towards freedom and recognition is agreement and consensus. Right, So they have
• 1:17:27
  diametrically opposed views on that, right, and this reproduces a lot of what
• 1:17:32
  was different between Habermass and Lumen a generation before them. Right Like Luman thought
• 1:17:39
  that when consensus emerged, this is when society just dies because nobody there's no
• 1:17:45
  more tension. Right. Whereas what the point of communicative action, which is
• 1:17:50
  Habermass's theory that Honith is now taking over, is forming rational consensus, which
• 1:17:58
  must be based on agreement on normative principles. So if you have that sort
• 1:18:02
  of radical challenge to this, okay, yeah, seeming sensible position, which
• 1:18:06
  produce which forces Roncierra into some pretty saying some like strange things like we've been
• 1:18:12
  pointing out. But it makes sense. You know, if vigilance and not
• 1:18:16
  losing the gains that we've already made is something that requires constant disagreement with what's
• 1:18:21
  going on, then it makes sense to me. I don't know. And
• 1:18:25
  if you want to hear a slaughter of a debate, a slaughter of a
• 1:18:29
  fight night it's Luhmann versus haber Moss, who didn't even know that his pants
• 1:18:33
  were being pulled out from underneath him. I want to say, I think
• 1:18:40
  I think we should take this an opportunity to propose another podcast on Alan and
• 1:18:44
  Bager, actually, because I think victory if you're interested in this kind of
• 1:18:47
  idea of an evental politics or politics of Rusher is it's sometimes called Roncierras is
• 1:18:51
  like reasonably interesting. But but you is really the one who theorizes on this
• 1:18:56
  and systematizes it in their most robust possible way, because you really as describe
• 1:19:00
  these kind of revolutionary moments an ontological significance and like the capital o sense of
• 1:19:05
  the word right, which is that the state always operates to kind of establish
• 1:19:11
  an order of being that it wants, And what constitutes of genuine politics is
• 1:19:15
  the event where the order of being breaks down and you realize that you can
• 1:19:18
  recreate the world. Right, And sure that sounds interesting. It is.
• 1:19:21
  I mean, you can read a little book meta politics on this, but
• 1:19:25
  I think it catches out a lot of what Rancher is getting. We've got
• 1:19:28
  to stick with that versus theme, oh right, if we if we do
• 1:19:30
  bad you and versus we've got to bring in uh de Liz of course Deluz
• 1:19:35
  versus bad you, and then we can tag team in versus Delliz because takes
• 1:19:42
  bad use I really need I need to read de Liz just because why is
• 1:19:45
  it that everyone online loves Dells. It's just it's it's it's Pye far the
• 1:19:48
  most popular eric. I thought you had to leave what's going on? Feel
• 1:19:50
  our street cred fading away? Yeah? No, I must say that's a
• 1:19:55
  pretty uh, it's a pretty deep power move suggesting what our next reading should
• 1:19:59
  be Live on Kudos. I talk about this kind of evental politics or politics
• 1:20:06
  of rupture. I think it's best to always try to find somebody who espouses
• 1:20:10
  the idea in its most coherent possible term. And you keep saying that,
• 1:20:15
  Matt, you haven't you just because you like someone better doesn't mean they are
• 1:20:18
  better. That's true. But I mean I thought I we'd agree with this,
• 1:20:23
  right, no disagreement, No, no, But I think that there's
• 1:20:26
  no doubt that Badge as a systematic philosophy who talks about these things is more
• 1:20:30
  comprehensive than Ross Sierra's, right. I mean, it's not that Ross here
• 1:20:33
  is better or worse. It's just that he incorporates this into a bigger project
• 1:20:38
  than Round Sierra does. And trying to figure out how this evental politics has
• 1:20:44
  become popular in the late twenty first century. I think that it's an arguable
• 1:20:47
  that Begget has played a much bigger role in that than even someone that actually
• 1:20:50
  like round Sier quite a lot. To be honest, I know it sounds
• 1:20:53
  and maybe it doesn't sound like that, but like, of all the edged
• 1:20:55
  lord like political theorists, like he's like my favorite one because because I actually,
• 1:21:00
  to me, because he does all the things that you that you normally
• 1:21:03
  complain. So to be honest with you, the thing the thing that I
• 1:21:06
  really like about Roundcier and like, you know, I think maybe I know
• 1:21:10
  we're maybe we're getting close to the time to end it and the and the
• 1:21:13
  podcast, but you know, the thing that I really like about him is
• 1:21:16
  the claim that like this resistance to the politics has to be momentary and that
• 1:21:24
  there's always going to be reconfiguration of the police order that like you can't have.
• 1:21:28
  And I think the reason I like it is because I first read him
• 1:21:30
  in the context of other people who have this I think, really like cringed
• 1:21:35
  dream about like this kind of perpetual political mobilization where you're always putting pressure always
• 1:21:42
  and they think that oh maybe we can get to like a fully unalienated politics
• 1:21:45
  where there's like direct where we get rid of all the things. And what
• 1:21:48
  I like about Roundcier is I read him at least as saying, well,
• 1:21:51
  that's not really possible. That's never going to be possible, because always spontaneously
• 1:21:57
  we return to some sort of a police order where things get routinized and common
• 1:22:01
  sense becomes smoothed over, and you can only ever achieve these moments. And
• 1:22:06
  that seems right to me. So like, as a kind of a descriptive
• 1:22:09
  account, I really like him, and I think he offers something interesting.
• 1:22:12
  Yeah, I mean Robert dow once said that of all the emotions that have
• 1:22:15
  been most undermestimated by philosophers and in particular political theorists, boredom is the one
• 1:22:20
  that's been paid the least attention to. And what I like round Cfour is
• 1:22:25
  his politics is fundamentally one and that it's committed to an anti boredom. Right,
• 1:22:29
  anytime things get stultified, anytime things get calcified, somebody, you know,
• 1:22:32
  as Pill said, is going to come along and say, this is
• 1:22:35
  an opportunity for me to smash things up and shake it up, to bring
• 1:22:39
  something new into the world. Right, And I think any cadre for the
• 1:22:42
  theorist is always going to have a little bit of sympathy for that. It's
• 1:22:45
  our Benyamine quote, boredom is the songbird that hatches the egg of experience,
• 1:22:48
  and a rustle in the bushes will scare it away. This is a politics
• 1:22:54
  of creativity, and I'm happy that the two politics guys got something out of
• 1:22:59
  it. As often your concern is, well, what do we do?
• 1:23:03
  Tell me, give me the model, give me the structure, give me
• 1:23:05
  the thing. But if the structure is always don't get caught in structure,
• 1:23:11
  then that's a different type of narrativization of the process of politics, which isn't
• 1:23:16
  really political theory anymore. It's kind of a I don't know what you'd call
• 1:23:19
  this, yeah theory. Well, I think I think for me it was
• 1:23:24
  useful. It was useful for me to really think about runs here as offering
• 1:23:29
  a more of a descriptive account like so that's that's the way in which I
• 1:23:32
  find to be like useful because I just think he's I think his description of
• 1:23:38
  how that process occurs, and I think there's a way of even reading history
• 1:23:42
  to be to be pretty consistent with what he talks about like the history of
• 1:23:45
  political struggles. Like, I think there's just a lot to like in what
• 1:23:48
  he's saying about that. But yeah, I mean in terms of who am
• 1:23:51
  I going to go to for like actually adopting some like political convictions, I
• 1:23:57
  mean runs heer to me, it seems very in other that like but but
• 1:24:01
  but but that's but that's not why I like him anyway, So it doesn't
• 1:24:05
  matter. This is the thing I pills, and I started off I kind
• 1:24:09
  of arguing kind of heatedly about this, and this is the thing I do
• 1:24:12
  politics, right, So I've always trying to interpret, how interpret how it
• 1:24:15
  is that this can be incorporated into a kind of more concrete politics. You
• 1:24:17
  write politics, Let's be real, Sorry, you write about politics. Yeah.
• 1:24:21
  Sure, But I mean that's not to say that I don't appreciate the
• 1:24:25
  aesthetic dimension to life a lot, right, And quite frankly, this really
• 1:24:28
  applies to actually these essays, because I thought that Han this essay, even
• 1:24:31
  though I tended to agree with it a little bit more, was really boring.
• 1:24:34
  Right. I just kind of read it and I nearly fell asleep twice
• 1:24:36
  because I'm like, he's just saying this whole thing again, ross Air's essay
• 1:24:40
  was lively and vital and had interesting examples and was written in a pretty chrisp
• 1:24:44
  fashion. So yeah, Hans Hana's essay was a bit of a snooze feast.
• 1:24:48
  Yeah, I admit, Yeah, Hannis was, and he was,
• 1:24:49
  And I also agree with Pills. We had a little exchange in the in
• 1:24:55
  our pill poded Messenger group, and I absolutely agreed with Pills that that Hana
• 1:25:00
  seemed a little bit a thick headed and like didn't really understand some of the
• 1:25:02
  points that Roncier was making, and I was like, this is just a
• 1:25:05
  pretty bad reading of your interlocutor. Well, he also admitted that he said,
• 1:25:09
  I don't I think there must be an argument here, but it might
• 1:25:12
  be one of these three. I'm just not sure which it was. None
• 1:25:15
  of it's true, did you also? Do you guys also pick up on
• 1:25:18
  the fact that it always seemed like Hannis was trying to find, as I
• 1:25:21
  guess a good liberal always tries to find like points of agreement. He was
• 1:25:25
  like, I feel like we agree on this. I feel like we agree
• 1:25:27
  on this, And then Roncier never did that once. He never was like,
• 1:25:30
  I think we agree on a Sometimes It's like always the danger right when
• 1:25:32
  I agree with you, but I actually didn't understand what you said. So
• 1:25:35
  I'm just saying I agree with you to shut down the conversation. That always
• 1:25:40
  seems to be the case. But then you guys noticed there's a there's an
• 1:25:44
  interesting part where Roncier was talking about love, and Hannath picked up on it
• 1:25:48
  and thought it was pretty awesome, and he like, he spoke about it.
• 1:25:53
  I guess this is the transcript of a dialogue at some points, but
• 1:25:56
  yeah, he spoke about it afterwards, saying like that that was a pretty
• 1:26:00
  cool thing. But I didn't totally understand it, but it seemed like a
• 1:26:02
  normative thing that ron Sier was doing. Right. He was saying, like,
• 1:26:05
  this is how love works, not like the Wynnacott sort of love between
• 1:26:11
  a child and a mother, and the mother is the transitional object until the
• 1:26:15
  child learns to love in a socially correct manner. But he's talking about love
• 1:26:21
  as like inherently multiple, as a sort of aesthetic experience of narrowing something down
• 1:26:28
  to an individual and constructing the object of your desire and what like. He
• 1:26:34
  talks about this idea of seeing like a gaggle of girls coming along on the
• 1:26:39
  beach and you sort of fall vaguely in love, but like not with any
• 1:26:44
  one of them in particular, just with like the whole sort of vague scene.
• 1:26:48
  And then as you sort of like the artist who you construct the world
• 1:26:55
  or you construct the object, the one of them eventually sort of fits in
• 1:27:00
  to it. It's like a dialectical process on an aesthetic level. And Hannot
• 1:27:03
  actually seemed to really like that. It was kind of an interesting exchange.
• 1:27:08
  At one point. I liked it. I was just imagining some just perverted
• 1:27:13
  frenchman sitting with his cigarette. He's like safety five five on a beach in
• 1:27:19
  southern France, and there's a bunch of girls walking forward, and he's like,
• 1:27:24
  oh, we could have a creative act together, right, Yeah,
• 1:27:33
  lots of body hair going around. I like French theory for that also,
• 1:27:36
  right, because Victor emt maybe he'll agree with me on this, maybe you
• 1:27:40
  won't. But one of the things that you'll very rarely see political theorists who
• 1:27:43
  aren't Martha nosebomb Uh doing is talking about love. Right at most, you
• 1:27:47
  get civic friendship, right, that's the kind of idea that we're supposed to
• 1:27:49
  imp for this old Aristotelian idea. And it's really nice that French theorists are
• 1:27:54
  a lot more less afraid of tackling those kind of big emotions and politicizing them
• 1:27:59
  and kind of important way, right, because yeah, it's true. But
• 1:28:02
  it's also worth noting that one of Hanna's spheres of recognition is actually like set
• 1:28:09
  over from Winnicott and that sort of psychoanalytic tradition. But love then just sort
• 1:28:13
  of boils down to an intersubjective relationship that we have to learn how to do
• 1:28:17
  right otherwise we become maladapted to social You know who else talks about love?
• 1:28:26
  Jesus has committed us to podcasting about I just thought Roncier's take on love was
• 1:28:33
  much more like rich and aesthetically exciting, and then from there you want to
• 1:28:39
  go, yeah, politics of love, maybe I love. Did you guys
• 1:28:43
  see Roncier's picture on his Wikipedia It's just like him standing in a meadow with
• 1:28:46
  like it's just it's a strange photo. Yeah, it looks like he's reaching
• 1:28:49
  out to the stars or something, or he's super an old man Instagram fail.
• 1:28:56
  He's like he's got what strange it's like he looks a little lost him.
• 1:29:03
  He's got a pretty loose sweater. It's a strange. It's a strange
• 1:29:06
  it. It's like his giant eagles about to come land on his arm again.
• 1:29:10
  He's just cast it out. I mean, let's let's get real.
• 1:29:12
  He's clearly very very high, or at least he's had a couple of bottles
• 1:29:15
  of one. His granddaughter was like, go out into like the meadow,
• 1:29:18
  I'm gonna take a picture of you, and then he kind of drunkenly or
• 1:29:21
  highly stumbled there and she snapped the picture and it's iconic. You know,
• 1:29:25
  that's a true act of love. Or he escaped from his retirement community.
• 1:29:30
  He's Algerian. That kind of brings some of them. Yeah, yeah,
• 1:29:40
  everyone from Algeria is there? All right, guys, shall we wrap it
• 1:29:45
  up? Yeah? I think that was pretty good. Yeah, I made
• 1:29:49
  it through to the end. Sorry for the exchanges of of lectures in some
• 1:29:54
  cases. But I think I think I don't know who. I don't know.
• 1:29:58
  I felt like most of us are. I think who did that?
• 1:30:00
  Who's responsible for that? I I did one? I think Yeah, I'd
• 1:30:05
  say it's very clearly Eric. Can you just shut the fuck up and make
• 1:30:11
  sure he points. Please you love it? You all love it all?
• 1:30:15
  Right? Are we declaring a winner? I mean, I think, I
• 1:30:20
  think, in my opinion, I felt as though they were quality or free.
• 1:30:26
  He matched some blows, but I think that uh, and I also
• 1:30:29
  think that they both kind of talked past each other. But I so,
• 1:30:31
  I don't know. For me, it feels a little bit like a draw
• 1:30:35
  with good points on both sides. I found it. But but Hanneth being
• 1:30:39
  more boring, so maybe I give an edge to a round centrist. I
• 1:30:44
  just Hannith lost because he's a hobber mazi and who showed up to a debate,
• 1:30:49
  So that's a big trying to win a debate. He's trying to reach
• 1:30:53
  consensus on what the right thing to do is right. If he wins the
• 1:30:56
  debate, he loses because he devalues his own commitment. No, the politics
• 1:31:01
  of disagreement, I reassert it here at always. Yeah, I didn't actually
• 1:31:09
  know much about either of them when I came in, but I feel like
• 1:31:12
  my sensibilities match up with Roncier is a little more. Honith did have some
• 1:31:16
  extremely important points and valiant criticisms, but Roncier just had some awesome points about
• 1:31:27
  recognition and love and all the rest of it. So I don't know,
• 1:31:30
  I think I I don't know. But in terms of like who wins and
• 1:31:32
  like what's what's a better basis for addressing injustices? Is it? Is it
• 1:31:38
  ron Sier's theory of equality or or honess theory of recognition? I would I
• 1:31:43
  would say both leave a lot to be desired. Yeah, I'd hesitate to
• 1:31:48
  Claire winner, because while my sympathies lie more with Hanith, I also thought
• 1:31:54
  that like Victory was an extremely boring essay, So I'm unwilling to actually say
• 1:31:59
  that it beats up round Siers because even though I found ron Siers kind of
• 1:32:03
  thin on the specifics, at least I wasn't bored, and I did think
• 1:32:08
  the stuff on love was moving and interesting and important and who doesn't like talking
• 1:32:13
  about you know, allow more people to narrative oar. So I'm actually gonna
• 1:32:17
  give it to you. He is the winner. And next time you want
• 1:32:20
  to pick a political text, we could just read the side of a mayonnaise
• 1:32:26
  bottle. Just the ingredients list would result in the same outcome. Did you
• 1:32:30
  really hate this this much? Pills? Did you really hate it this much,
• 1:32:35
  I gotta be a or I gotta extend the politics of disagreement to your
• 1:32:42
  to your reading choices. Real mayonnaise or salad dressing, sauce, just a
• 1:32:46
  miracle whip chick, straight up miracle whip. Miracle whip. I don't ever,
• 1:32:51
  ever ever talk if you did use that guy? Yeah, well god
• 1:32:56
  yeah later, all right. Fatality