Recognition and Civilization — Stephen Hastings-King

A philosopher and a teacher: Tell us briefly about yourself and your work.

I’m a partner in Pattern Recognition: A Research Collective. Our analytic and political work centers on financialization in Anglophone higher education. Those stories—of trustees and administrators imposing corporate forms of organization and authority, of endowments on the Yale Model with its exposures to private finance instruments, managerialism and denigration of the humanities--- sit inside other patterns characteristic of today’s heteronomy: contemporary finance, private finance in particular (model for today’s oligarchies and other mafia); managerialism (corporate-style top-down command/control ideologies); the debris scattered by neoliberalism, somehow still operative despite the framework’s 50 years of failure (agency theory, for example, and the libertarian pathologies that enabled it and for which it stands). Our work analyzes these patterns. We consult with stakeholder organizations (student, faculty, alumni, staff etc.) to help them understand where they start from, their institutions via mapping out how power and resources are distributed, and to begin thinking about alternatives that might take us beyond all this.

By happenstance, in the coming weeks, Pattern Recognition is relaunching "Recognitions," our publishing platform. Clicking on the link https://patternrecognitionresearch.substack.com/ before that will take you to a collection of some older work

I live in the US, which means neofascism in its various guises feel these days like unavoidable preoccupations. I make short fictions. In these interminable days of Trump 2.0, they’re often satirical. The electronic political culture here is an asteroid belt of stupidity, sectarian and intrusive, upsetting and colonizing: exposure is, in effect, like pulling up a chaise lounge in order to get pelted with rocks even when all you set out by unfolding the lawn-chair was to laugh in order to stave off despair, maybe. I try to maintain a healthy attitude. I aspire to one like Wittgenstein outlines in Philosophical Investigations: I look to “make perspicuous images” (122) so that underlying problems might “dissolve” and “I can stop philosophizing when I want to” (131). But I’m not so optimistic as he was, either about getting to Perspicuity, or the potential benefits of being there.

My academic background is in Modern European History (Cornell, 1999). I’ve researched and published on Socialisme ou Barbarie as well as on the later work of Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort. I still find it generative. Lately, I’ve been thinking about Edgar Morin’s notion of complexity as well. It has long been strange what the various US academic industries pick up on and what they ignore: then The Big Forgetting that opened up with1989-91 swallowed the Left and its history; we have both, and how very fortunate we are.

On a parallel level, my life can be understood as a way of moving through periods of making experimental piano music and others, like this one, of not doing that. It can also be used as a device for arranging certain dinner parties and cooking experiments into pleasing shapes, constellations for example.

What is your understanding of "humour" proper; or, at least, of those features thereof to which you have paid the keenest attention? And how does your work merge with, or is influenced by, your quotidian encounters with a potentially ubiquitous and ambiguous phenomenon such as humour?

I haven’t yet participated in a community of phenomenologists dedicated to using the reductions to nail down the essential predicates that define humor. But I’m available.

In regular life, such as it is, I find lots of things to be funny. Sometimes others find those things to be funny as well. In regular life, puns and goofy voices, riffing and momentum does much of the synchrony work. Laughter is a tell. We keep a notebook in the car in which we record things that make us laugh. It’s also where we keep the list of character names for a conceptual novel shaped by “nomative determinism,” where the action consists in each character performing the characteristic of its name: the whole can be deduced from its premise; writing it down would be as unnecessary as Mozart.

Written sentences are harder. Generally, when I make sentences that I think are funny, I stop fiddling with them—but I only find out what works and what doesn’t when I read for/with other people (readings, cabarets). Most of what I write these days is meant to be read aloud. But I digress.

I think humor is a craft, something that is done or made by treating language as a medium to be played with, by improvising (editing) and (hopefully) arriving at places that surprise (me, who is writing, and hopefully also readers, at least sometimes). Which means humor is in the clinamen, in the swerve of falling atoms. Or maybe, at its core humor is irony, as Kierkegaard talked about it, via Socrates: distances, the production of distances.

Sometimes I think what I’m trying to do is open cracks between elements that appear tightly joined and shoot through them to find or make a differently dimensioned space. Other times I imagine cutting situations and the things people say into them from the air and pasting them up someplace else. These have in common periods of looking through a window, trees and power cables, the latter sometimes with a bird, each time a different one, but always in the same place, singing.

Recently I saw a clip from an interview Trevor Noah did with Questlove, drummer for The Roots, about a book on the history of hip hop that the latter recently published. The history is grouped into five-year intervals, each defined by a dominant recreational drug. Noah said that grouping was genius in the way that stand-up can sometimes be in that it expresses something obvious about the world that no-one had yet seen because no-one had yet said it. It has a particular kind of precision, one that makes people laugh in recognition. Comedy is a form of social theory, and vice versa.

Thinkers as different as Nietzsche, Judith Shklar, and Derrida have argued that cruelty is baffling because, even if we want to eliminate it from human life, it always finds a way to re-emerge therein, almost as if it were part and parcel of the same human life. Has cruelty ever played a significant role in your work's purview, and/or your understanding of social and cultural phenomena?

There is abundant cruelty in the world. I try not to add to it.

Lately, I’ve been bogged down in a manuscript about Neofascism USA. Cruelty is central to its sectarianism. Understanding that sectarianism requires, in part, excavation of the histories that enable it to be, here, as it is, now. I’ve been reading W.E.B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction on the post-Civil War fumbling of possibilities for a great democratic transformation. I’ve never understood this place. Maybe bogged down is self-protection. Maybe looking hard at Neofascism USA is a bad idea: it doesn’t feel good; it’s like getting pelted with rocks. But the compulsion to perspicuity is also a desire to laugh. Ridicule can bring with it a sense of distance and one of being-in-control---and they, in turn, entail a possibility of being able to forget. To go silent, to sputter out. Of course, that wouldn’t change anything else. I keep being bogged down.

Are there two or three works that, when it comes to addressing any of the themes fueling my own philosophical and literary production, you would describe as true "classics" and, therefore, advise the reader of this blog to familiarise themselves with — the way, say, Plato's Republic or Machiavelli's Prince can be said to be "classics" in politics? And are there any works from the past ten years that you would equally recommend?

Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation

JG Ballard, Atrocity Exhibition

Cornelius Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth series.

Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual

Last 10 years:

Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing