Using Privacy Enhancing Technologies in the real world

I’ve been consistently pleased with my BlackVPN service (see my previous reviews), which allows me to use a variety of VPNs geolocated around the globe and configured with a no logging policy. When connected (through the excellent Viscosity OpenVPN client) I can maintain an encrypted tunnel from my location to a high traffic, high bandwidth server that effectively obfuscates my Internet use, as well as tunnels past any malicious or privacy-impacting middlemen. As I discussed several years ago, Privacy Enhancing Technologies—like VPNs—may be an effective tool in the fight against bad laws (#sopa) and bad corporate policies (#rogers). If you sign up with BlackVPN use my promo code for a free month of service: ZQMCTCX

Foucault's analysis of Cartesian "progress"

In a particularly difficult passage (pages 58 ff) in Order of Things, Foucault argues that Descartes engages in a critique of resemblance (in his Regulae). Instead of the orthodox argument, in which “sixteenth century thought becom[es] troubled as it contemplates itself”, Descartes excludes resemblance as a fundamental experience and primary form of knowledge. Descartes accomplishes this by universalizing the act of comparison in rational thought, thereby giving it its purest form. The challenge is, however, that according to Descartes true knowledge can only arise from intuition (as an act of “pure and attentive intelligence”) linked through deduction, but this excludes comparison almost by definition. Comparison exists in only two forms, but must be reconfigured: the comparison of measurement and of order. Measurement analyzes the world into units that establish relations of equality and inequality. Order analyses elements, the simplest possible that can be found, and arranges differences according to the smallest possible degrees. With Descartes, classical resemblance ceased to be the fundamental category of knowledge, and instead became an analysis of identity and difference.

The “progress” of the method is such that measurement is reduced to serial arrangement (as an act of order), which shows up in differences of degrees of complexity. This analysis progresses from the unit and relations of equality and inequality to an analysis of identity and differences (“differences that can be thought in the order of inferences”). This analysis of identity and difference no longer fulfilled its role in revealing how the world is ordered, since it now progresses according to the “order laid down by thought”. In the 16th century, kinships, resemblances and affinities, which are interwoven with thought, take on a new configuration, which can be summed up as “rationalism” (“if one’s mind is filled with ready-made concepts”). In the classical episteme knowledge was never complete and always open to fresh possibilities, based on similitude. The new system of comparison permits a “complete enumeration” with certain knowledge of identity and differences,  as each point can be necessarily connected to the next. In this new system the action of the mind will no longer draw things together (establishing kinship, affinity, etc.), instead it will act by discriminating (establishing identities and making successive series of connections). Finally, history and science will become separated, because there is no common unit of measurement. Language, thus, is no longer one of the “figurations of the world”, and while it can translate truth if it can, it can no longer be considered the “mark of it”.

Foucault as Heideggerian

From Professor Hubert Dreyfus:

Foucault’s comment on Heidegger in his last interview: For me Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher … My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger.

Currently reading

In a nod to N+1’s excellent semi-regular N1BReading series, I’m going to attempt to detail quick, light, summaries and connections for my current readings. Leibniz’s Monadology

I am re-reading Andrew Feenberg’s excellent Questioning Technology. Going through this book for a second time has caused me to upgrade my opinion of it from masterful to nearly-or-quite-possibly desert island material. Feenberg’s approach—empirically dependent historical and philosophical analyses of technology—doesn’t have the kind of gravitas that I would normally accord to a desert island book, and it is far too light-hearted and readable to be so “serious”, but it did cause me to rethink my political heuristics. Since a re-reading necessitates greater depth and engagement, I’ve decided to read it alongside his Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity (Inside Technology), a collection of essays from the last decade or so. Likewise, Feenberg engages quite regularly with Heidegger, a figure that I’ve been circling around for years now, and never taking straight on, so I’ve finally started seriously reading through Heiddegger’s oeuvre (Basic Writings).

For a soon-to-start reading group we are going through Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Birth to Presence, a collection of Nancy’s essays. Bewildering in rhetorical style (in the somewhat cloying style of Deleuze, Serres, and so on), Nancy tackles metaphysics straight away, and positions himself as a staunch anti-representationalist. Running through his work for a first time evokes many connections and themes, but no solid conclusions. Although he does not mention it, his metaphysics appear to require engagement with Parmenides’ Fragments (especially VII onwards). Annoyingly, Nancy forces the reader in to the depths of not-being, and through sleep and non-consciousness (with evident knowledge on the matter, despite the obvious impossibility of making these claims). Then, Nancy exhumes Descartes’ substance dualism with respect to sleep and dreaming, but never mentions Foucault and Derrida’s spirited debate (History of Madness) on this portion of the Meditations. I’m not confident on my interpretation, however, so I can’t tell if Nancy thinks madness is on the soul or the body. Perhaps it’s neither, given what seems to be a serious rationalist streak in the book, at times echoing Leibniz’s Monadology so loudly that I’ve decided to re-read it as a point of comparison.

Finally, I’ve just completed Siegfried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media, a kind of Kittler-esque exploration of media history. The book excels at being obscure, with foray’s into weird and wild Modern, Renaissance, and Medieval examples of seeing and hearing apparatuses. The scope and breadth of the content makes for a fun but somewhat unforgettable read.

My Open Questions for the Occupy Toronto movement

1. Recognizing that “revolution is in the air,” but that Canadians have not suffered nearly as deeply or rapidly as Americans since the 2008 economic and mortgage meltdown, is the Occupy Toronto movement a show of solidarity? Opportunistic? Long overdue? (It’s no lapse of judgement to recognize that Canada does still have a semi-functional welfare state, yet that doesn’t mean many aren’t still suffering terribly.)
2. Parks and permanent structures have a long history of being integral to free speech (as Judge Brown remarked), but now that eviction has been served (and will surely commence) is “occupation” essential to the movement? How can the momentum continue without occupation?
3. What kinds of micropolitics are available to concerned individuals? Are they as effective?
4. Is it Marxist revolution, or radical democracy? Does it matter, and can it be both?

My worry is that since the 1999 Seattle WTO protests mass, non-violent protests are met with increasingly military oppression. Certainly the optics can be bad (viz. G20 or UC Davis more recently), but the effect rarely rattles the cage of democracy. At this point, are the protestors and the police merely acting out a high-stakes game? A kind of dance?(And in a cruel twist of irony, vindicating increased spending on militarized police weapons.)

The Occupy movement, with its creative appropriation of space, has made unprecedented traction as many (including those that are not young) have joined. The movement is now being met with (predictably) militarized force. What resistance is next? Have we been hemmed in?