Fuck Theory

Lectures for the End of the World

presented at Postmasters Gallery, New York

December 2016

Lecture 1

Take a deep breath.

I mean it. That wasnt a metaphor.

Take a deep breath.

Now exhale.

OK.

To resist, to fight, to struggle in the coming weeks, months, and years will mean first and
foremost to be conscious. Not just to exist, not just to respond or react, but to be aware.
To think. And to think means to make new connections; to revisit assumptions; to break
existing patterns.

When I say to think, I dont just mean to burn calories with your brain. Thinking is to
incidental mental activity as Going somewhere is to moving. One wears you out but
gets you nowhere; the other brings you closer to where you want to be. And the
difference between thinking and the constant flux of ordinary mental activity is habit.

Habit isnt a bad thing. In fact, its so endemic to human nature that I dont even think
we can apply a value judgment to it as such. You cant help but form habits. Its how
youre built. What would be the point of passing judgment on something that cant and
doesnt change? This is what I call ethics from necessity.

We become habituated to certain associations, to certain connections, to certain facts

that come to seem self-evident. We become habituated to sensations; theres honestly
not a single thrill I can think of that doesnt become less thrilling the more often you do
it. Our body becomes habituated to particular pathways, particular sequences of action,
particular postures and poses. That face you never realize youre always making in
pictures? Thats a habit. We become habituated to certain constraints, to certain
regulations, to certain limitations. As a child, you find rules perplexing. As a teenager
and young adult, you chafe under them. As you age, you mostly stop thinking about

them. Thats what habit means. It means that at a certain point, nobody needs to tell
you that putting your hand in fire is dangerous. Youre just used to not doing it. The
most deeply ingrained habit of all is the habit of belief those assertions and ideas that
you take so deeply for granted that you come to assume they are valid regardless of
your belief in them. Truth is also a habit, a philosophical habit. Truth is the habit of
assuming that if you can convince enough people that what you believe is important
enough, theyll start making it a habit, too. But I digress. Well come back to Plato later.

The thing is, what if some of the facts youve mistaken for truth are just habits? Habits
of belief? Habits of ideology? What if there are other ways to get to the same place?
What if there are totally other places you didnt even realize you want to be? And what
if the reason you didnt know those places existed was because the people who
explained to you the place you already are had a vested interest in keeping you there?

Im starting from two simple grounding assumptions:

First, that what Im calling thinking requires awareness and presence that is equally in
the mind and in the body, and that bad habits that inhibit thinking are both in mind and
in body.

And second, that the operation of mind and body run absolutely parallel, and that
consciousness is situated at the nexus of mind and body, so that in the flux of intertwined
perceptions and ideas its impossible to distinguish absolutely between conditions and
habits that improve the functioning of the mind and conditions and habits that improve
the functioning of the body.

This is why I literally made you start by actually taking a deep breath, rather than just
thinking about past experiences of deep breaths and pretending that the effect is the
same: because thinking happens under opportune conditions, and while we cant will
thought into being, we can strive to create improved conditions for it.

And since both what we call mind and what we call body benefit from these improved
conditions, it is neither productive nor rational to insist on distinguishing between the
two when it comes to creating or assessing those conditions. We can take it for granted
that a living person requires certain material conditions both for eating or shitting and for
building a complex dialectical argument. We can argue for those conditions, we can
advocate for them and insist on their necessity, without opposing mind and body or
prioritizing one over the other. And I would argue further that the bad habits that inure
us to our own disadvantage and inculcate in us the tendency not to act in our own best
interests are equally bad habits of mind and of body, whether its what you read or what
you eat or how much money youre habituated to making a year. But fixing your posture
is easier than fixing the world, so why not start there?

Pull back your shoulders and take a deep breath. Now youre thinking about your
posture. See how that works? Habit and thinking are different extremes on the sliding
scale of consciousness, but both kinds of activity happen under conditions and within a
set of concrete relations that are both in the mind and in the body. All of which is to say,
Im a Spinozist and not a Cartesian, and in no way do I take for granted the facile
opposition of body and mind that aligns rationality with dispassionate logic and
irrationality with corporeal emotion. In fact, I dont really think there is such a thing as
irrationality, except under specific and generally pathological conditions. What is at
stake in the present moment is precisely the correlation of ideas and emotions; we stand
witness to a time in which habitual biases and habits of prejudice are irrupting into social
and physical movements that are all too literal. We gain nothing at the present moment,
neither conceptually nor politically, from disconnecting the mind and the body, or
assuming that intellection can in any way rise above or otherwise afford to ignore the
material conditions within which it takes place. That fantasy is over.

Im not trying to convince you that what I call thinking is good and what I call habit
is bad; Ive already observed that forming habits is part of human nature. Im making
the much more limited claim that what I call bad habits are an inhibition to what I call
good thinking. And while Im at it, Ill throw in the argument that debating the muchbelabored opposition between theory and praxis is a ridiculous waste of time that only
people who have the privilege of choosing not to engage in praxis can afford to indulge.
If our goal becomes to act in such a way as to obtain those conditions which naturally

facilitate both thinking and doing, there is no reason to oppose the two or privilege one
over the other, much less to waste time debating them.

In case I have so far been too subtle, let me say clearly that in the present time and under
the present danger, to fight for clarity of thought, to insist on reflexivity and rigor, to value
scholarship and commitment to intellectual activity, is to fight for life itself: I dont give
a shit how many times you watched Moulin Rouge or read Wuthering Heights; nobody
writes better books without health insurance. To fight for thinking and for intellectual
rigor is to fight for a higher standard of living, for better, cheaper, health care, and for the
redistribution of wealth and resources. Under that banner, the range of action that can
contribute to the cause is virtually endless and disparate in both scale and complexity.
But whats important to grasp here, whats absolutely vital to understand, is that if you
arent alive, youre definitely not thinking or reading. Dont believe the postmodern hype
about the relativism of ethics: the fact that, you know, existing is a precondition of pretty
much every other value means that life can form a pretty solid bedrock for a politics of
affirmation. Among the bad habits we must shed is the ridiculous notion that we have
no way of knowing what actually matters. Dont be silly. We know what matters. What
we cant figure out is how to negotiate the intricate web of depressive, anxious policing
that hinders us from effectively working towards it. But maybe taking a deep breath
once in a while is a good way of reminding yourself that youre still alive.

At this point, it might be worth saying a word about anxiety, and specifically about the
difference between anxiety and fear.

Fear is a sensation experienced in response to a specific situation or condition; anxiety

is a sensation experienced in response to a generalized or imagined worry. My
insurance doesnt cover chemo, so if this lump I feel is cancer Im fucked is fear. So
many terrible things could happen! is anxiety. There isnt a unilateral divide between
them, because the difference has to do with our perception of our actual situation, which
is often erroneous or biased.

The crucial thing to remember, at this point: What many of us are currently responding
to is primarily anxiety. To say that were responding to anxiety isnt to say that were
being irrational; it isnt to say that we are fantasizing; it isnt to say that we are being
unrealistic. It is simply to say that what many of us is responding to, in this particular
window of time before the January 2017 inauguration, is primarily the idea of things that
might happen rather than specific social or environmental stimuli.

This is important for two reasons. First, because remembering that you are worried about
what might happen can help calm you down enough to think clearly about your actual
situation. And second, because in these deadly times it is important to prioritize the
needs and vulnerabilities of those who are afraid over those who are anxious. Some
people are looking around and seeing a new regime of horror and oppression. But many,

many people are looking around and seeing an intensification or simply a continuation
of conditions they have been living under for a long, long time.

Now that weve established some parameters, I want to make a simple but expansive
assertion: the fundamental epistemological problem of recent intellectual history, the
worst of the bad habits that have encumbered thought and culminated in the farcical
ideological-theoretical mire of the current moment, has been a privileging of
contradiction over contrariety.

To put it more simply, contradiction is an opposition between this and not-this. Only
one of the two can obtain at once; only one of two contradictory statements can be true.
True and false is itself an example of a contradiction, because something can only
be one or the other; there is no intermediate state. A contrariety, on the other hand, is
an opposition between two poles that cover a spectrum or difference of degrees. A
single entity your body, say can be a little of both at once. Hot and cold are an
example of contrary terms. Theres an intermediate stage, which is what we generally
call room temperature in English, an expression which itself betrays a long history of
habituation, given the range of geographic locations humans tend to nest. Basically, any
opposition that you can slot into a Goldilocks and the Three Bears kind of parable is a
contrariety. If youre someone who thinks true and false is a meaningful distinction,

you are also someone who consciously or implicitly assumes theres no middle bear
between false and true.

So again, my initial assertion:

the fundamental epistemological problem of recent

intellectual history has been a privileging of contradiction over contrariety. Personally, I

would go further and suggest that with three or four possible exceptions, every apparent
contradiction can in fact be resolved into one or more contrarieties. If you really, really
think about it, theres a middle bear in almost every situation. It exceeds the boundary
of the present lecture to argue whether or not metaphysically speaking contradiction is
a real thing; but whether it is a real thing or not, we have certainly treated it like one, for
a long time, and to an extent that without hyperbole can be said to have brought about
the death of millions.

When I say that the privileging of contradiction over contrariety has been the fundamental
epistemological problem of recent intellectual history, you can understand both recent
and history as broadly as you like. Also intellectual, for that matter. The most
immediate conceptual battleground of my assertion is the convoluted, fractured domain
we call theory, that odd, mostly mid-20th-century French assortment of semiunderstood ideas that for a certain stratum of the expensively-educated populace has
either largely replaced or heavily inflected any traditional notion of philosophy, politics,
activity, and responsibility, and in the process had an enormous impact on creative and
artistic activity of virtually every stripe. Whether its the trans-historical condition that
Derrida called differance, the absurd circumlocutions of the phenomenologists, or the

absurdly reductive oppositions of more recent queer theory, we have everywhere

become accustomed to settling for easy contradictions and sweeping categories where
in fact sustained analysis detects only gradations of difference and subtle movements.
The supreme irony of contemporary theory is the shallow and automated manner in
which its calls for refined, careful analysis have been implemented, i.e., poorly. The
simplest evidence of this is the way the lamentable absence of productive, generative
concepts in recent theory: since the middle of the 20th century, most intellectual activity
in the humanities has revolved around some form of critique. But critique, as I will
explore at greater length in the next lecture, is fundamentally a project of contradiction:
to critique is to respond to a particular thing, and to situated your response or reaction
in either rhetorical or dialectical opposition to that thing. So that the problems of
contemporary theory, I think, are simply a newer instance of a much more fundamental
tension.

I hope youll forgive me at this point if I delve into the history of philosophy for a few
minutes to narrate some less recent developments. It might not hurt to step away from
the present for a bit.

In Plato, we only find one kind of dialectical distinction: contradiction, the sole engine
of Platos Socratic dialogue. The reason Plato kept spinning around in circles like that
wasnt because of the trace of the dissemination of the differance of the logos; it was

simply because he had no mode of argumentation that didnt operate on an either/or

basis. His dialectical toolkit only had one kind of screwdriver in it, but anyone who has
ever truly lived knows theres more than one way of screwing. Some things seem clearcut. Some things are kind of in-between. Thats life. The first systematic philosopher
to elaborate a system based on this pretty self-evident realization was Platos erstwhile
lover and later rival, Aristotle, who insists on the distinction between contradiction and
contrariety throughout his corpus, from the introductory works on logic to the elaborate
argumentation of the Metaphysics, making clear the centrality of this distinction to every
aspect of inquiry and experience. This insistence is the reason I call Aristotle, not Plato,
the father of Western metaphysics and the reason I find Derridas claim of a uniform logic
that extends from Plato to Freud simply incompatible with the textual history of
Western philosophy.

What is true, however, is that the odd and often cruel twists of intellectual history
eventually led to a strange fusion of Aristotles logic and cosmology with Platos
epistemology; this odd admixture is what we call Neoplatonism, and it was to be the
dominant philosophical ideology of the post-Roman period. In the later centuries of the
Roman Empire the Platonic concept of truth thus resumed its dominance over
speculative thinking, and from the Neoplatonists it was eagerly seized on by the early
Christian apologists, who needed an orderly set of neat distinctions toot sweet that could
both elaborate why their religion was better than everything else including their Jewish
brethrens but also why their religion posed no threat to the earthly sovereignty of
whatever emperor was threatening to execute them that day. By the time we get to

Augustine, the most important and influential of the early Church fathers, Christian
theology not only had to wage intellectual war against the pagans but also against the
countless early Christian heresies that often swept up entire cities or regions as the
religion consolidated its teachings and practices, while at the same time beginning to
formulate a system of earthly values that would justify features of the later church like
accumulation of wealth and hierarchies of power. All of these active needs on the part
of the nascent Christian church led Augustine to adopt a reductive contradiction-based
philosophy and to praise Plato as the only acceptable pre-Christian philosopher.

If the privileging of contradiction had only been the basic condition of Plato and
Augustine and exerted its influence that way, through the ancient history of philosophy,
it would still have cast a long shadow. Plato was entirely secondary to Aristotle
throughout the Middle Ages, but Augustines binary theology of damnation and salvation
remained and indeed remains the dominant paradigm in the history of European
Christianity.

Unfortunately, the Renaissance led not only to a revival of Greek

architecture but also to the exhumation of Platos corpus from the archives of Byzantium
and his return to Europe.

I do not believe that the return to popularity of the Platonic dialogue, with its singular
mode of dialectical contestation (this or not this) corresponds with the budding
stages of mercantile capitalism entirely by coincidence.

Less than two centuries

afterward, the elaborate, ossified theology of Medieval Catholicism would receive a rude
shock from the reductive, neo-Augustinian Reformation of Martin Luther, with its

rigorous doctrine of salvation by faith alone, restoring Plato and Augustine to their dual
thrones in the European imaginary. Shortly afterward, the Enlightenment saw the end of
Medieval Aristotelianism and its usurpation by Descartes ridiculously simple
oppositions.

I do not think its a coincidence that the Platonic eclecticism of the

Renaissance gave way to the Reformation and the Enlightenment even as the mercantile
power of the Italian city-states gave way to the economic dominance of England, France,
and the Netherlands (note that the only two Catholic powers of the mercantile colonial
era, Portugal and Spain, have produced no major philosophers since the end of Medieval
Scholasticism). It was this same Platonic concept of truth, and this same tendency
towards contradiction and discrete categories that fueled the Victorian mania for
taxonomy, the same categorizing and cataloguing tendency that so fascinated Foucault
and which formed the basis of the legendary first volume of his History of Sexuality.
Linaeuss classification tree for living things, which most of us were probably still taught
in elementary school kingdom, phylum, family, genus, species is a direct descendent
of the Porphyrian Tree, drawn by the late antique Neoplatonist Porphyry to explain
Aristotles Categories. All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

Like Derrida, I think there is a philosophical tendency that can be traced all the way from
the present back to Plato; that tendency is the privileging of contradiction over
contrariety, of the binary logic of eitheror over the sequential, additive logic of
from this to this and back. Unlike Derrida, I absolutely dont consider this tendency to
be continuous since Plato, nor do I think there have been no alternatives to this tendency.
There have been. They have simply been either ignored or minimized, because the

oppositional, negating logic of contradiction is easier and more efficient and thus bettersuited to the increasingly hegemonic interests of relentless, globalizing capitalism. The
historical record, the archive of the history of Western philosophy, simply does not bear
out Derridas claim of a logocentrism that has dominated all thought from Plato to
Freud. Moreover, in taking such a trans-historical condition for granted, we ignore the
very real material forces that have driven and in turn been justified by the various
intellectual projects that have upheld the dominance of contradiction over contrariety,
including Derridas own. I love Derrida; I grew up on Derrida. But we have arrived at a
historical juncture at which Derrida, much like your racist grandparents, can no longer
be excused for his errors simply because hes charming and you love him. The history
of Western thought is not a history of one continuous condition that exerts a relentless
hold over every word. The history of Western thought is a pendulum, swinging from
include to exclusion, from eclecticism to narrow dogmaticism, in response to the
hegemonic pressures of dominant social groups.

The privileging of contradiction over contrariety is absolutely coextensive with the

quantifying logic of capitalism since its early modern incarnation. The socio-political
projects of mercantile colonialism, of ethno-nationalism, and eventually of ethno-fascism
have all been bolstered and justified by ideologies that follow the so-called law of the
excluded middle, the law first formulated by Aristotle that between two contradictory
opposites there is no middle ground. Youre Greek or youre foreign; youre Christian or
youre a pagan; youre white or youre a person of color; youre gay or youre straight;
youre German or youre Jewish; you live or you die. The history of violence is a history

of contradiction and excluded middles. Nobody ever started over a war or organized a
genocide on the basis of Youre a little of this and a little of that, I guess.

The relationship Im describing isnt causal; Im not saying Platonists pushed Plato over
Aristotle because they hated Native Americans and Im not saying that everyone who
makes arguments through contradiction is genocidal; Im simply pointing out that, as the
great philosopher Antonio Gramsci told us long ago, that every social group produces
for itself organically a subset of intellectuals who elaborate its perspective, its needs,
and its goals. This is especially true of ruling classes or socio-political elites who
elaborate intellectual arguments aimed explicitly or implicitly at preserving the status
quo. Its worth looking closely at the reasons certain modes of thinking are preferred by
certain social groups and in certain social formations, and its worth thinking about what
we can learn from a social formation by the intellectual ideologies through which it
organizes its knowledge. Because knowledge, as we know, is biopower.

Because of the nature of ideology, because of the nature of capitalism, because of

human nature, its futile and impractical to draw a non-contradictory distinction between
the habits of the mind and the habits of the body. We engage both in the process of
thinking. You dont think clearly when youre in physical pain; conversely, you might be
inhibited in physical action by an abstract belief. What we should strive to create, what
we should argue for, what we should fight for, is a generally improved condition for living
people, including ourselves. What we should focus on are material conditions, and the
habits that correspond to them. This is not best facilitated by distinguishing the needs

of the mind from the needs of the body, or by distinguishing theory from praxis, or indeed
at all by drawing absolute distinctions. Which is why Im not even going to urge you to
stop making contradictory distinctions. Ill simply ask you to reflect as carefully as you
can on the reason why you might be habituated to arguing through contradiction instead
of contrariety, and what intellectual and ideological interests might be served by the
insistence, in any situation, really, that something absolutely must be one thing or the
other without the possibility of a middle ground. What motivates such an insistence?
This question is absolutely fundamental.

Given the trying times and the ominous title of these lectures, an obscure dialectical
distinction might seem an odd place to start. But thats how fundamentally important
the distinction between contradiction and contrariety is, in my view. Im starting there
not because its some kind of master or ur-distinction for all of philosophy and human
thought; Im starting there because thats precisely the place we seem to run into trouble,
over and over again, everywhere we turn. The more we try to distinguish absolutely
between things, the more we reinforce an epistemology of truth and quantified value that
has, by and large, brought all but a very select few of us nothing but grief. And its there
we should start unraveling the giant shitpile of a mess we currently find ourselves in.

Now that weve laid out in broad strokes the terrain we will be exploring and a few
grounding assumptions, the next session will jump forward from Aristotle to Hegel to
examine a pernicious concept that is both the root of nihilism and the inevitable
consequence of contradictory oppositions: negation. The week after that well meet

Antonio Gramsci and talk a little more about ideology and intellectual activity. But first
well wish you all happy holidays, because this week was just a teaser, and we wont
reconvene until after the break. Have a great evening!