Philip R. Conway

@prconway.bsky.social

2150 Followers 6349 Following

This is the stealth in action. The Home Office does not have to say “stop recruiting from Pakistan”. It sets a threshold, and risk-averse institutions retreat from high-refusal markets pre-emptively to protect their rating, pausing recruitment, raising deposits, and bringing forward deadlines. The state designs the incentive, universities perform the cut, applicants in Lahore or Lagos never learn that a door closed, because formally it never did.
Garfield looking at the picture of himself with a red “banned” sign over it, saying “huh, I wonder who that’s for.“
for all his crowd-pleasing charm, it was not Reagan’s actorly smoothness as such that, for Massumi, constituted his political style. What made Reagan remarkable, as he unfolded through the 1980s, was precisely his corporeal and communicative incoherence. Just like Trump (and not unlike George W. Bush before him), Reagan was regularly mocked for his inability to string a sentence together, or to follow through a single thought for more than a moment. He mixed up film scripts with real events, whether for rhetorical expedience or because he genuinely didn’t see the difference. He was a shambles, a mess, a crumbling multiplicity. And yet, all around him was that aura – that sure, unshakeable sense of confidence, suffused with an idiocy that, if anything, helped him to remain above the fray of his administration’s increasingly well-documented crimes.10 When Reagan spoke, Massumi suggests, he did not so much communicate meanings as he embodied a succession of images, like the movements of a mime artist – hints and suggestions, decomposed in such a way that his audience (or those who mattered) would follow them through to their own conclusions. In other words, Reagan’s aphasic dysfunction, his self-assured fecklessness, is precisely what made him an effective President. Not so much a presence as an ‘incipience,’ he embodied an opening from which ambient potentialities could make their ingress
Full page advert taking out in the Wall Street Journal by Palantir, titled “You’re being sold in AI future where you’re obsolete or relevant. We see it differently.“
Whereas some see it as their right to feel good, others stare into the abyss. Faced with our collective ‘matter of earthly survival’, it seems clear that the former impulse, however relatable, is a bubble that must sometimes be burst. We, who are likely to read a text such as this, come in many epistemological shapes and forms. Nevertheless, the production of knowledge, however conceived (and however self-important this may seem), must be prepared to upset undeserved innocence. This is particularly true for knowledge-workers of the negative—and here I may speak of a ‘we’ more specific: we critical thinkers, critical theorists, and critical pedagogues; we who work with what is wrong with the world, as if it were our timber. Our habits are well known. Whether faced with the sneering or the sanguine, we negate. We assure the world what is not so, and insist that it could be otherwise. And, it is true, the abyss sometimes stares back into us (Nietzsche 2002 [1886], secs 146, 69). Our practice issues us a challenge: to take that part of ourselves that wants to scream in despair and to make something meaningful of it. At times, we may do this in hushed and bookish tones. And, at times, we may express ourselves more forcefully. Our colleagues may prefer that we speak, instead, in plainer terms, more in keeping with the liberal democratic virtues of trust, sincerity, and progressive, collaborative
entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. The ethos of militant negativity—professionalised and professed across the lush campuses of the modern academy—has, the story goes, through its very success, shot itself in the foot. (Latour 2004, 225–227) Though consonant with the popular discourse concerning ‘post-truth’ in the years since 2016, these arguments were very much informed by their own moment. The lecture of April 2003, being given just two weeks after the United States and its allies invaded Iraq, Latour’s first point of reference is to the conspiracy theories surrounding the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. In his small village in Bourbonnais, neighbours reproach him as naïve for not realizing that Mossad and the CIA were behind it. Closer to home, professionally, Jean Baudrillard—‘a marshal of critique’ who always knew how to épater les bourgeois—cynically attributes the event to the self-destructive logic of capitalism itself (Latour 2004, 228).
The parochial planetary The future is terrifying. It has been this way for some time. But terror is unevenly distributed. Myself, I must say that I feel such enviro-existential dread only when there seems to be no other choice. It’s a little like death. We all know that it’s coming for all of us; that it is the one true certainty, the thing that gives our fleeting gasps of life meaning. But it’s difficult to hold on to that when shopping for groceries or figuring out how to get home when the trains aren’t running. But this is a parochial perspective. The UK heatwave of July 2022 will, in a planet-historical context, be less than a footnote (see Figure 66.1). Indeed, it was a ‘UK’ event only in most chauvinistically blinkered terms. In Tunis, temperatures topped 48 degrees Celsius, breaking a forty-year record, while in Shanghai, where records have been kept since 1873, thermometers reached an unprecedented 40.9 degrees Celsius. For Iran, in late June, the number is a mind-boggling 52.2 degrees Celsius (Le Page 2022; Pratt and Stevens 2022).
The Necessity of Being Negative Critique and Care in the Anthropocene Philip Conway The new normal It’s July 2022 and the all-time temperature record for the town where I live has just been smashed by a full 5 degrees Celsius. Records tumble like dominoes all across Europe as air from the Sahara surges northwards—a climate event decades ahead of schedule. I’m at the train station, waiting to travel the one stop home. The platform is packed with pale men in Hawaiian shirts, headed south. The announcer tells us that all trains have been cancelled and that travel should be avoided. At first, no one pays any attention. After the third attempt, the crowd slowly slopes off. I take an Uber home—with a little guilt, given recent revelations about the company (Davies et al. 2022). The driver is blasting Capitol FM. It’s giving me a headache, but I figurethey’re entitled to enjoy their workspace. Between banging summertunes, the sunnily upbeat DJ opines that they don’t really find it that hot, and that ‘you’ll always get a positive outlook here at Capitol FM’, especially on a ‘proper summer’s day’ such as this one. In the chill of an air-conditioned car, we speed past road workers wearing full-length protective clothing, toiling in 36 degrees Celsius heat. Near London, grass fires are lapping at the M25—a mere microcosm of blazes raging elsewhere. Conservative contrarians gleefully mock all these ‘snowflakes’ (such as meteorologists at the Met Office) who, they say, are pushing heatwave hysteria (Horton 2022). People won’t shut up about 1976 (the go-to year for hot-weather nostalgia). BBC News runs a story on ice cream sales. Part of me wants to scream. To rant and rave. To damn, denounce, critique. But, instead, I sit there, in the air-conditioned car, until I say ‘Yeah, just on the corner there. Perfect’.
Cover of the book “One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.”
Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have achieved independence with respect to society and to have brought it into submission. The independence of the executive comes through clearly when its head no longer needs ingenuity, its army no longer needs glory, and its bureaucracy no longer needs moral authority in order to justify itself. The state machine has established itself so firmly vis-d-uis commercial life that the head of the Society of 10 December provides sufficient leadership, a soldier of fortune swooping down from abroad, elevated to leadership by a drunken soldiery that he bought with grub and drink and at which he has to go on chucking sausages. Hence the shamefaced despair, the feeling of terrible humiliation, degradation, which weighs down upon France and suffocates her. France feels dishonoured. Just as under Napoleon there was scarcely any pretext for freedom, so under the second Bonaparte there was no longer any pretext for servitude.
Cover of “The Invention of Modern Science,” Isabelle Stengers.
All this was achieved by heavy reliance on the human factor. Ardour, devotion, ingenuity, and improvisation account for Israel's development more than the flow of money from World Jewry, important and essential as this haa been. And Israel could apply these skills to Africa, while the Africans felt they could receive them. When Mr. Obedemah, one-time Minister in Nkrumah's cabinet~ was asked by Mrs Heir, at that time Israel's Foreign Minister, why he came to Israel, the reply was: " Because I have a lot to learn here-. And when asked how many times he intended to come in the future, he said: "As long as I shall have something to learn" . "And afterwards 7" " I shall not come any more." This answer renects Africa's real attitude towards Israel as a living laboratory for development studies. There they could receive real and practicable solutions for their problems. Everything in Israel was reached by a trial-and-error method to suit the conditions of a small, poor country.
such technics of insinuation both exploit and exacerbate mass anxieties, while affirming a tantalising hearth of patriotic belonging to which the deserving citizen is at once entitled and yet denied by forces of pollution and sedition.
Just like Peale’s self-help, Rufo’s reactionary affect theory is proudly unsophisticated and blissfully unconcerned with self-reflection. As a convinced conservative, Rufo has no shame in presuming himself to be the thinking, patriarchal head of a flock of inarticulate laypeople legitimately though fecklessly driven, as they are, by their emotional reactions to what they ‘can feel in their bones’ is happening to their world. In this, he is unexceptional – just one ideologist and ideologue amongst many. Likewise, as with most moral panics, CRT has quickly fallen from favour as the crisis du jour, being replaced by anti-trans bigotry, which, in turn, augurs a coming campaign to reverse gay rights and acceptance of queer people generally, as well as a continued assault on higher education. 28 Nevertheless, however unserious his anti-intellectual intellectualism, the subject disposition that Rufo embodies should be taken seriously. Slick, seasoned, consummately well-connected, but also young, clean-cut and father to a multi-racial
It took years for liberal America to come to terms with Trump’s one-size-fits-all style: Never apologise, never back down. When you are attacked, attack. Truth is whatever you say, legitimacy is whatever you can get away with. Above all, and under whatever circumstance, be noticed.
It is not difficult to trace a line from Peale’s prose to Trump’s presidency. Indeed, ‘[y]ou need be defeated only if you are willing to be’ might as well be its epitaph. However, this connection runs deeper than mentorship and mantras. Trump was, in some respects, an exceptional President. His self-absorption, vulgarity and immunity to pragmatism are something to which it is difficult to find genuine parallel, at least within the USA. Nevertheless, Trump excelled at that task so crucial to presidential politics in the mass media age: he reflected back, to an electorallysignificant tranche of the population, an image of what the average person should aspire to in order to authentically belong to that society. The fact that one half of the country could not wrap its head around this charismatic identification only made it more potent.
Building upon a number of less successful works, such as Faith Is the Answer (1940), and A Guide to Confident Living (1948), Peale’s masterpiece was undoubtedly his 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking. 4 A genre-defining hit, it stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 186 weeks, eventually selling upwards of five million copies. Plain-spoken to the point of affectation, packed with wholesome homilies, down-to-earth anecdotes and constant affirmation of prayer, the text presents a how-to guide for thriving amidst the pressures of white, bourgeois, suburban, patriarchal, post-War American society. Written with the air of the world’s most serene door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, it reads like the prose equivalent of a Norman Rockwell painting (though with a palette less pastel than beige). The book’s message is clear from the start: There are no crises except crises of confidence; no problems except want of the right attitude. Life may, sometimes, be hard, but God places the power within everyone to rise to their appropriate station. In short: ‘You need be defeated only if you are willing to be’ (Power of Positive Thinking, ppix-x).
if all that conservatism, as an actuallyexisting political ideology, had to do was to placate – that is, to quell, secure and reconcile its subjects to given, natural hierarchies – then confidence could be its characteristic affect. However, as the case already introduced should have at least suggested, this is only one aspect of conservatism, an inherently reactive ideology, which cannot simply placate but must also perturb – that is, rouse, antagonise and induce anxiety such that its subjects are mobilised to restore those given, natural hierarchies, which forces of impropriety have perverted. In other words, the affective-ideological constitution of conservatism consists of the interplay of confidence and anxiety, in service of hierarchy
Losing friends and family, obsessively ‘doing his own research,’ posting to his 500 or so Facebook friends, gripped by the latest secret insight, Jensen found that a whole new world sprung up around him. As he told his FBI interrogators, it was like ‘watching a movie’. Each cryptic missive a prophecy: ‘Every time Q said anything, it always came true.’ 1 Except, of course, when it didn’t – the lost election being only the most glaringly mismatched puzzle piece. However, every apparent failure of the saviour-insiders came with a ready-made explanation: You misunderstood because you’re on the outside. You’re not a secret agent, so what can you expect? And now the message boards were ablaze with the theory that the whole thing had been staged by antifa – that this ‘Stop the Steal’ insurrection, which Trump himself had seemed to invite, had been a ‘false flag’. Thus, this self-proclaimed ‘digital soldier’, this (no longer anonymous) anon, sitting in front of the federal agents taking down his confession, was faced with a head-scrambling conundrum. Had he been a patsy for antifa? A dupe of the deep state? Had he thrown away his life for nothing? – But it kind of came and went, and then I was wrong again, wrong again. I’m always wrong again. – What do you think will happen for the inauguration? – I hope it’s an – it’s a rest. I don’t know. I hope – I believe Trump’s still gonna be our President. He’s got something. He’s too confident. He’s got something. He I don’t know
It is crucial, however, not to be consumed by the spectacle, distracted from the interdependency of the parts. It is a familiar cycle: A reactionary says something outrageous, progressives pile on, discourse ensues. Once again, what is true of the Trump cult in general is also true of QAnon in particular: Their aptitude for virality, and their consequent dominance of the attention economy, has depended, in no small part, upon progressive reaction to the reactionary. Typically, this outrage cycle feeds on liberal-progressive moralism – a will to correct, through condemnation. At times, however, it has also been fuelled by liberal-progressive conspiracism – a will to banish, through prosecution. This, indeed, was perhaps Jensen’s most relatable insight: ‘When the news says Russia, I look the other way’. To be sure, it hardly took a paranoiac to suspect, after the 2016 election, that the Trump clan were up to no good. Nevertheless, day after day, night after night, liberals consoled themselves that this rupture in their national self-image was due, as the apparatus of state would surely show (any day now!), to election interference, sex-tape blackmail, or even to Trump himself being, as was repeated constantly, ‘a Russian asset’. In moments of crisis, conspiracies abound. As Stuart Hall et al. put it, speaking of Britain in the early 1970s: Crises must have their causes; causes cannot be structural, public or rational, since they arise in the best, the most civilised, most peaceful and tolerant society on earth — then they must be secret, subversive, irrational, a plot. (1978, p. 320)
Though it may stretch the notion of ‘intellectual’, perhaps to breaking point, we can nevertheless recognize that QAnon’s assemblage of agitator-fantasists really did form an ‘anti-intellectual intelligentsia’ of sorts – a more or less spontaneously generated network of content creators, responding to the demand for ideological sense-making created by Trump’s unexpected accession to the long-vacant position of history-reversing demagogue, coupled with the repressed disappointment of nothing being fundamentally reversed upon that accession. It was that most American of market conditions: a gold rush. Those hitherto at the fringes of social respect could now become celebrities, practically overnight. Those in want of purpose or agency could now become heroes, at the push of a button. There was money in it, too. Such are the affordances of platform capitalism. However, as powerfully as the Trump cult has stitched together the various contradictory elements of its coalition, including those organs of the traditional right desperate to realize their vision of a caesarist ‘unitary executive’ (Garcia-Navarro 2024), a historico-political perspective suggests that it has little chance of resolving the crisis. Rather, it remains trapped within that ‘interregnum’ of which Gramsci also spoke, in which ‘a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’