Theory

Over at An Un-canny Ontology, Nate has a great post up splicing object-oriented ontology (and my onticology in particular) with Burke’s rhetorical theory. Nate believes that four aspects of Burke’s pentad mesh well with OOO (agent, act, scene, and agency), whereas the fifth, purpose, fits uneasily. I’m of two minds here. First, it’s entirely possible that things like purpose are unique to the human and the animal. That is, nothing in OOO forbids attributing unique powers or capacities to certain objects. Second, I confess that I have a deep rooted suspicion of teleological concepts and thus find Burke’s fifth element in the pentad to be the least interesting.

A good deal of this suspicion comes from my background in biology and autopoietic theory. Within a Darwinistic framework, “adaptation” (a horribly misleading term) has nothing to do with purpose or a goal. Adaptations take place not because entities strive to survive in an environment, but through random variation and natural selection. Organisms “adapt” not to fit with their environment, but because some “random” mutations proved favorable in a particular environment. Insofar as these mutations prove favorable, they increase the likelihood of reproducing and thereby passing on their genes.

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The case is similar with autopoietic systems. Autopoietic systems are not teleological, but rather function in such a way as to reproduce themselves. Consider, for example, how Luhmann analyzes social systems (which I count as objects) and, in particular, the news media as analyzed in The Reality of the Mass Media. Luhmann treats social systems as communication systems. Their substantiality consists in ongoing communications. Initially we might believe that the function of the news media it to, well, report the news. We might therefore be outraged by all the tripe and fluff we encounter in contemporary news reporting (especially in the United States). However, under Luhmann’s analysis, insofar as the mass media is an autopoietic system, its sole “purpose” is to reproduce itself across time. This entails that the news perpetually faces the question of how to get to the next communication so as to maintain its existence. How does the news media produce new communications so as to continue existing as a system?

There is little here in the way of a purpose such as reporting. Rather, the issue is one of producing new communications. A number of salient features become intelligible when the news media is understood in this way. In recent news, it has become increasingly customary to present opposing points of view, represented by so-called “experts”. Moreover, it will be noted that local news is often pervaded by stories of a moral nature, reporting things like various crimes, various crises such as obesity epidemics, etc., etc., etc. The person that begins with the premise that the purpose of the news is to report rather than reproduce itself will very likely be horrified by these trends (and I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t be). However, from the standpoint of the operational closure of the news system, the issue is one of how to reproduce itself. The focus on controversial topics and the presentation of opposing points of view allows for maximal autopoiesis because conflict generates more communication and subsequent communications. Moreover, perhaps one of the so-called experts will say something significant and controversial as Sarah Palin tends to do, creating a controversy, thereby generating reporting for days on in. The case is similar with the morality tales that make up the local news. These morality tales revolving around theft, child abuse, murder, adultery, etc., generate all sorts of commentary by both the so-called experts and the audience in the form of letters to the editor. Those letters to the editor can, in their turn, generate further communications.

In the blogosphere we can discern similar autopoietic phenomena. If the success of a blog post is measured in terms of the number of comments it generates and the manner in which it gets cross-posted, then my most successful blog posts are not my highly technical posts, but rather those which are either a) of a personal nature speaking about my life, my daughter, career woes, etc., or b) those that generate the most controversy. Here the aim is not consensus or agreement– and note, I’m not talking about the purpose of my posts (I don’t set out to create controversies and generally find them to be draining and unpleasant), but rather the communication system itself that transcends me (i.e., I’m only a node in a larger-scale object or system) –but to produce ongoing communications. Objects pop into being and pass out of being. If controversial or personal posts are the most effective in generating autopoiesis or the reproduction of a social system, then this is because everyone can add their own two cents. We can talk about our own personal lives, our shared traumas and despairs, or we can go meta and talk about how offensive a particular rhetoric and claim is. As a result, communications are produced and a certain substance comes into being for a time.

Setting this aside, I believe that Burke overstates the purposive nature of instruments and technologies. A careful investigation of the history of technology would reveal, I believe, that purpose does not precede the production of many instruments and technologies, but rather follows the production of many instruments and technologies. In other words, in many instances, things are invented first and we only subsequently find a purpose or use for them. Here I’m reminded of the spectacle of my daughter with paper towel rolls, turning them into pirate spy glasses. “Argghhh Mate!”, she cries with delight as she closes her eye that looks through the tube while keeping her eye outside the tube open. She’s three. In this connection, we can talk about something like a “techno-sphere” that is not unlike an Amazonian eco-system. Just as speciation takes place in such a system as a consequence of certain selective pressures issuing from other organisms, certain instruments and forms of technology come into being because niches open up as a result of relations between existing technologies. Only later is their purpose found.

Here “A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans” in Latour’s Pandora’s Hope is indispensable reading. There Latour shows how nonhuman agencies actually create new goals for us. Unlike Burke who proceeds from a pre-existing human purpose to its embodiment in a technology or an instrument, Latour shows how a number of nonhuman actors actually generate purposes for us in such a way as to shift our own goals. I did not come to the internet with the purpose of blogging or participating on email lists (when I still did), but rather the internet created this new purpose in me. Likewise, the automobile can create the goal of Sunday drives, roadside picnics, and leisurely drives through beautiful, ancient Southern grave yards. In these cases, the goal did not pre-exist the nonhuman agent. This is one of the primary senses in which nonhuman objects can be genuine agents or actors. In rhetorical terms, we can speak of these nonhumans as persuading humans and creating identifications. Here the order of things does not go from human intention to passive object, but rather from active object to human intentions. This is one of the reasons I believe that McLuhan is so significant. While McLuhan describes media as extensions of man, there’s a very real sense in which these nonhuman agents transform the human.

In response to my recent post on correlationism, Alex Reid raises a number of critical questions. Alex begins by remarking that,

I’m interested in that final line: “only when you abandon the thesis that any entity constructs another entity that your position is deserving of the title of realism.” This post focuses on issues of symbolic behavior, so I understand this statement in that context as meaning that objects are not constructed through their relation to humans and language. However, if a chemist says water is constructed of hydrogen and oxygen, does she become a correlationist? Perhaps the answer is to say that such a statement isn’t the whole story. That is, water may be H2O but it is also demonstrates characteristics in excess of those attributable to hydrogen and oxygen on their own (e.g. it can fill a swimming pool). Of course those characteristics are also dependent on water’s relations with other objects. Water can’t fill a pool without gravity (or a pool).

The term “construction” is bound, I think, to be misleading. There are two senses in which the term “construction” is used in these discussions. On the one hand, there is the somewhat rare Latourian sense, where we’re literally talking about things being built. When Latour talks about construction he is talking about the composition of something out of heterogeneous materials. For example, the building of a bridge. On the other hand, the most common usage of the term construction in the humanities today is that of social construction. Generally the thesis here is that things are constructed by either language or social forces.

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I have no objections to the first sense of construction, and therefore have no objections to Alex’s question about H20. Objects can be and are built out of other objects. Indeed, object-oriented ontology argues, as in the case of Harman’s memorable phrase, that objects are wrapped within objects that are wrapped within objects and so on. What, then, is the dividing line between this first sense of construction and that of social construction? H20, even when built by scientists in a laboratory, has independent existence. When H20 comes into existence out of hydrogen and oxygen it is a genuine actor in the world, independent of the scientists that built it.

By contrast, the subtext of discussions about social construction is always that the entities that are socially constructed have no existence independent of the social forces or language that constructed these entities. Compare the way engineers talk about their constructions and the way the social theorist talks about their constructions. The engineer speaks with pride at the ability of her construction to survive her and trace a path throughout the world that is independent of her actions. By contrast, the social theorist tends to speak of constructions with a sneer. Lurking in the background is always the thesis that x is just a construction. Here the term construction is used in a sense entirely opposite that of the scientist and the engineer. The engineers of the Hadron super-collidor are proud of their construction, its ingenuity, and its ability to stand. By contrast, the social theorist uses the term “construction” as short-hand for a strategy of debunking that denies the reality of the thing.

Matters, however, are complicated here. OOO does not deny that there are “social constructions”. After all, all entities relate to one another through translations and therefore every entity grasps other entities in its own unique way. Moreover, there are entities like the United States or the German soccer team that can only come into existence with a strong linguistic dimension. However, even in these instances, construction is closer to the engineer’s sense of the word than the social theorist’s. Think of all the work that it takes, for example, to keep an entity like the United States in existence. OOO’s point is that this is not the only way that entities exist, or even the most common type of being.

Alex goes on to remark that,

…setting aside the entire question of language, to what extent does one imagine an object’s characteristics as being intrinsic to the object and to what extent are those characteristics emergent in the object’s relation/exposure to other objects? It would seem here that one might suggest that the virtual potentiality of any object is wrapped up within it. However I would think objects are in continual flux, becoming other, becoming different objects with different potentials.

In other words, it isn’t the objects v. language that interests me. In trying to develop a realist rhetoric or discourse; the question for me is the relationship between object and process.

Here I have a great deal of difficulty understanding Alex’s remarks. If I’m reading Alex correctly, he’s deploying a code, distinction, or schema that sorts theories of being into those that are without time and that treat being as fixed and unchanging and those that conceive the world as dynamic, processual, and characterized by becoming. Objects are then sorted into the first category and are then contrasted with ontologies of becoming. Here I think Alex’s comments are important as they are reflective of one possible reason the concept of object might be the favorite whipping boy of Continental theory. What we have here is the ancient debate over being and becoming.

What I don’t understand is why objects are conceived as fixed and static. Nothing in our experience seems to suggest such a characterization of objects. Objects become, they decay, they evolve, and so on. This is one of the reasons I characterize objects as split-objects. I argue that objects have a virtual dimension that I refer to as “virtual proper being” and an actual dimension that I refer to as “local manifestation”. Virtual proper being refers to the powers and capacities of an object, what it can do, its potentialities. I refer to this as proper being to distinguish it from the qualities of an object. By contrast, local manifestation refers to the actualized qualities of an object. Local manifestation is what an object becomes under particular circumstances as a function of the relations an object enter into. Alex can check out a concrete example of this distinction in action in my post “The Mug Blues“. The point here is that the qualities of an object are variable and changing with changing circumstances such that the virtual proper being of an object is always in excess of any actuality. Every object harbors potentialities and powers in excess whatever happens to be actual in it at a given point in time.

In addition to this, I argue that objects are dynamic systems. Here I draw heavily on the autopoietic theory of Niklas Luhmann. Not only do objects relate to the world selectively insofar as they are operationally closed, but they are dynamic and evolving systems that change as a result of how they’re perturbed by their environment. In this respect, it’s very difficult to see how objects are static and fixed.

Alex goes on to remark that,

…the rhetorical (and compositional) challenge isn’t to develop a discourse that reveals the real but rather one that allows us to speak in new ways about the world, to see new possibilities, to develop new relations (with both human and non-human others), and maybe invent a way of living (which is maybe humanocentric but given our impact on the planet, maybe not).

OOO is not an ontology that seeks to “reveal the real”. This would be a correspondence model of truth, which OOO rejects. The reason for this rejection is simple: Because objects translate one another there can be no question of a correspondence between how an object encounters another object and what that other object is. There’s always a disadequation between objects. This follows directly from the thesis of withdrawal and Graham’s concept of sensuous objects (not to be confused with sensations). In this regard, I distinguish between epistemological realisms and ontological realisms. Epistemological realisms wish to argue that discourse and perception is a mirror of the world as it is. Ontological realisms refuse to reduce objects to constructions in the socio-linguistic sense of the word. OOO rejects epistemological realisms, while maintaining an ontological realism.

A realist rhetoric would minimally be two things: First, a realist rhetoric would not focus on speech and writing alone. There would, of course, be a place for the analysis of content or the semiotic in a realist rhetoric, it just wouldn’t be the whole story. Here I believe the recent work of rhetorician Scott Barnett of Clemson is exemplary. Barnett wishes to develop an object-oriented rhetoric. If I understand his review of Harman’s Tool-Being and Guerrilla Metaphysics, this would involve expanding the domain of what rhetoric analyzes, taking into account the role played by nonhuman actors in rhetorical settings. Rather than simply analyzing the content of speech and writing and how it persuades or, in Burkean terms, creates identifications, such a rhetoric would also have a robust place for nonhuman factors such as settings, technologies, communications and writing technologies, etc. It would treat these as genuine actors or agents that play a key role in the rhetorical. In terms of Burke’s pentad, these nonhuman actors wouldn’t merely be scenic elements, nor would they merely be agencies. They would be genuine agents.

In his pentad, Burke tends to reserve act and agent for the domain of humans, while he places nonhuman actors in the domain of agencies or mere tools or instruments used by humans or in the scene (given that I’m strongly anti-teleological in my own thought, I set aside purpose altogether). An OOR would treat nonhuman objects as genuine agents capable of acts. In many cases, humans would be agencies of nonhuman objects just as Marx readily observed with respect to the factory where humans become parts or gears of a machine, or, as I argued in a recent post, where grass has used humans as a part of its reproductive organs. The point is not that humans are passive agencies and objects are active agents. The issue here is not one of simple inversion. Rather, the point is that what counts as an agent is far broader than the category of the human and animal.

In response to the same post, BB asks:

You have probably already answered this questionany times, but if you have patience for one more time I would be grateful: how do you account for the division of the world into discrete objects, which seems to be a linguistic division? In other words, just talking about objects seems to take for granted that the world is full of already-distinguished objects, but aren’t there lots of different possible ways one could distinguish objects?

In my view, BB’s reasoning here doesn’t follow from his premises. BB seems to be moving from the premise that because we distinguish objects in many ways, objects must not exist and instead we just have a number of linguistically constructed objects. Hjelmslev gives a memorable example of this in his Prolegomena to a Theory of Language. There he notes that English distinguishes between green, blue, gray, and brown (which are qualities or local manifestations, not objects), while Welsh only distinguishes between gwyrdd, glas, and llwyd (53). Likewise, Danish only distinguishes between trae and skov, while German distinguishes between Baum, Holz, and Wald, and French distinguishes between arbre, bois, and foret (54). In the case of German and French, bois is a broader category than Holz and Wald is a broader category than the French foret.

It would thus seem to follow as a matter of course that entities are linguistically constructed insofar as the linguistic evidence shows clearly that languages cut up the world in different ways. However, while I have no intention of denying that language cuts up the world in different ways, it does not follow from this that language dictates what is and what is not. OOO does not tell us a priori what entities exist, but only that if something exists then it must be an object and that if it is an object it must have such and such structural properties. The determination of whether or not something is an entity requires inquiry. Moreover, language cannot here be treated as a guide for precisely the reasons that BB suggests. Moreover, in any inquiry we run the risk of letting language dictate what is and is not. In short, we can fall into error. However, it doesn’t follow from this that somehow language makes entities what they are. Flesh eating bacteria will still eat your flesh even if you call them demonic curses.

A friend of mine and reader of The Democracy of Objects recently expressed displeasure over the harsh treatment I give to Lacan over the thesis that “the universe is the flower of rhetoric.”. My friend’s rejoinder was that Lacan maintains a place for the real and is merely pointing out that we must relate to the world through language. This point is so fundamental and so basic that nothing about what motivates the new realisms can be understood without understanding it. The new realisms are not charging correlationisms with not believing in and independent real. With the exception of Berkeley who claimed that being is perception and Hegel who claimed the identity of substance and subject, such a thesis is exceedingly rare. Rather, correlationisms argue that we can only speak of the being of beings in terms of our modes of access to beings. In this regard, Lacan is an arche-correlationist. What Lacan teaches is that we cannot speak of being as such, but only of signfiers that express beings. Indeed, Lacan repeatedly refers to any reference to the pre-symbolic as mythological and Zizek refers to the idea of the real apart from the symbolic and the subject as a fetishistic illusion. While Lacan clearly endorses the existence of a real apart from language (and is therefore Kantian), Zizek goes all the way with Hegel’s absolute idealism. Both positions are correlationisms.

Rorty famously said that a number of philosophical problems are never really solved, but rather we just cease asking these questions. No philosopher has yet refuted the solipsist, nor has anyone ever refuted Berkeley. If you’re worried about how we can escape language perhaps you should just stop asking the question and move on. More importantly, you should attend to the methodological consequences that follow from a gesture like Lacan’s. If it is the signifier that falls into the marked space of your distinction, you’ll only ever be able to talk about talk and indicate signs and signifiers. The differences made by light bulbs, fiber optic cables, climate change, and cane toads will be invisible to you and you’ll be awash in texts, believing that these things exhaust the really real.

Anyone who knows me also knows that I’ve learned a lot from Lacan and wish to retain a rich place for talk about talk and the analysis of texts. However, Lacanianism and it’s linguistic idealist cousins needs to be castrated. We need forms of theory and practice capable of both talking about talk, signs, the signifier, narrative, and discourse capable of indicating the non-semiotic and approaching the non-semiotic on its own terms as best we can. Absent this we are missing a massive dimension as to why our social world is as it is. If your first instinct is to talk about talk, text, narrative, signifier, and discourse, it’s likely you’re a correlationist. If you speak of the real as resistance or a twist in the symbolic, it’s likely you’re a correlationist. What we need is a realist rhetoric. For me, it’s not so much Kant that is the enemy, but the linguistic and semiotic turn. I wish to retain a place for these things, but to overcome the hegemony they currently have in the world of Continental theory. Reference to the real does not a realism make. It is only when you abandon the thesis that any entity constructs another entity that your position is deserving of the title of realism.

Below I’ve posted a talk by Tim Morton discussing what he calls the “beautiful soul syndrome” and outlining a bit of his dark ecology. On the surface of things it seems that my position and Morton’s are quite far apart. After all, Morton is the author of The Ecological Thought which argues for the interdependence of all things, whereas us object-oriented ontologists argue that objects are withdrawn from all relations. Morton and I are currently working through these differences. In a number of respects, as paradoxical as it may sound, my advocacy of the withdrawal thesis is designed precisely to think the sort of ecological relations Tim wishes to think. Let me explain.

Ecological and dialectical thought has worked hard to draw our attention to the relational. In many respects, the central enemy of ecological thought could be said to be what Hegel called “abstract thinking“. The abstract thought, Hegel argues, is the thought that divorces entities from their relations and placements in a whole. This leads to a truncated and partial conception of being. Dialectical and ecological thought has struggled mightily against this tendency, seeking to demonstrate both the interdependence of phenomena and our implication within this web of relations or what Morton calls “the mesh”. Only in this way, it is argued, can we understand the impact of our actions on the environment. Given the stakes of these issues– our very existence is bound up with them –it comes as no surprise that the dialectically and ecologically inclined get touchy when the primacy of relations is questioned.

In this regard, object-oriented ontology is likely to appear as a reactionary retrograde move, for in its thesis that objects are autonomous and withdrawn it appears to divorce objects from their relations, turning us away from an investigation of systemic relations and interdependences and diminishing our ability to articulate the manner in which entities are implicated in one another. This, however, strikes me as a superficial understanding of what object-oriented ontology is up to.

Within the framework of my onticology, the distinction between virtual proper being and local manifestation draws our attention to what takes place when relations between beings emerge. There are not two terms here, but three terms: Virtual proper being, local manifestation, and exo-relations. Virtual proper being refers to the powers and capacities of an object. These powers and capacities are always withdrawn, they are never present in what Harman calls “sensuous objects”, and they are always in excess of any of their local manifestations. Local manifestation refers to the actualized qualities of an object. In biological terms we could think of local manifestation as the phenotype of an object. Exo-relations are relations of exteriority between objects. Exo-relations play a key role in the production of local manifestations, determining, in many respects, the phenotype that a withdrawn object will come to embody in the world. In other words, the concept of exo-relations draws our attention to what happens to objects when they enter into a mesh of objects or what I call a “regime of attraction”. This concept invites us to be attentive to how contexts play a key role in accounting for why objects take the form they take.

Ecologists and dialectical thinkers are quite right to draw our attention to the relational, however I think they’re on shaky ground both at the level of both ontology and ecological practice when they argue that objects are their relations. Ontologically, because a great deal of ecological thought advocates the thesis that relations are always internal to objects– i.e., that nature is a harmonious and relational whole –they find themselves caught in something of a pragmatic contradiction. The ecologist (not Morton) wishes to say that being is this mesh of internal relations, while simultaneously arguing that the intervention of foreign objects disrupts this order (e.g., the introduction of the cane toad into the eco-system of northern Australia or the burning of fossil fuels).

Here it is entirely appropriate to ask the following question: What are the conditions under which the ecological can be disrupted? The only possible answer to this question is if relations are external to objects. It must be possible for objects to enter into new relations and for them to be separated from other objects if the disruption of collectives is to be possible. Indeed, without something like this autonomy from relations it is impossible to think Darwin’s strange hypothesis. Without something like the externality of relations how are we to think speciation through geographical drift? Without something like the externality of relations, how are we to think the role played by the intervention of actors foreign to a collective such as what is currently taking place with the cane toad or what occurred when a large asteroid hit the earth millions of years ago?

To my thinking, what really interests ecologists and dialectical thinkers is not internal relations, but rather the exteriority of relations in which local manifestations are produced through contingent, aleatory, and external relations. At the level of practice, it will be noted that ecotheorists are extremely attentive to relations of exteriority and the local manifestations these produce. When, for example, ecotheorists analyze drilling for natural gas through a process known as “fracking”, what interests them is the production of new phenotypes and local manifestations in streams, fish, wildlife, water supplies, and human bodies (the cancers and neurological disorders such drilling is currently causing on a massive scale throughout the United States). The entire premise of such an ecological analysis is that objects are withdrawn. Howso? Precisely because such an analysis is premised on the possibility of the carpentry of objects (Graham’s gorgeous expression) being otherwise; or, in my terminology, objects undergoing different local manifestations.

Here we encounter the importance of this line of thought for practice. While I hate this analogy, there are a number of respects in which object-oriented ontology amounts to good book keeping or accounting. What onticology refuses is the reduction of entities to their local manifestations. Entities can always be manifested differently under different conditions. There is thus an emancipatory dimension to this thought. Because objects cannot be equated with their actuality or local manifestation, because they are always in excess of their local manifestations, it is possible to create other worlds and other ways of living. Where “the environment” is surreptitiously unified and treated as a harmonious whole we are led to a sort of tragic view of the world where it is impossible to change anything because everything is treated as internally interrelated and interdependent. This is what Morton calls “over-thereism”. Nature is treated as a unified whole that is “over there”, outside of us, rather than something that we’re entangled in.

Throughout Morton’s thought, I think, it’s possible to sense a tension. On the one hand, Morton wants to emphasize the synchronic or interdependence of things. Yet on the other hand, he emphasizes the diachronic, the developmental, and the manner in which entities are “strange strangers”. The concept of strange strangers refers to the manner in which entities are withdrawn or the manner in which they can never simply be reduced to their actualizations. By contrast, the diachrony that Morton emphasizes already departs substantially from Saussurean and even Derridean diachrony/deferral. Where Saussurean diachrony is strictly guided by synchrony, Darwinian diachrony is punctuated by events, contingencies, arrivals of outsiders, encounters with strange strangers that push development in entirely new and surprising directions. In other words, it is a diachrony of interacting withdrawn objects that forge relations but which cannot be said to be relational through and through. Such is the diachrony of OOO, where the carpentry is always a work and a becoming, generating of new objects and where the sensuous manifestations of objects are always a contingent surprise.

At any rate, on to Morton’s talk.

Adam Ford writes on the recent inquiry into the police killing of Ian Tomlinson, which resulted in a whitewash of those involved.

For the ruling class, the embarrassment caused by the transparent cover-up of Ian Tomlinson’s police killing was a necessary evil. The alternative was far worse – a very public examination of policing tactics at a time of drastic cutbacks.

But before the storm blows over, the matter is in the media spotlight, and the following facts are incontrovertible:

●     Ian Tomlinson died after being struck and pushed to the ground by PC Simon Harwood.

●     Photos show that Tomlinson had two prior encounters with police that evening.

●     Witnesses claim there had been two police prior assaults on Tomlinson, before he was pushed to the ground during the third encounter.

●     In the wake of Tomlinson’s death, the official Metropolitan Police story was that there had been no physical contact between him and police officers that night.

●     This was shown to be false when members of public submitted their own footage, proving the opposite.

●     Dr. Freddy Patel conducted the first autopsy, and concluded that Tomlinson died of a heart attack, something that would officially absolve the police from culpability.

●     At the request of Tomlinson’s family, Dr. Nat Cary conducted a second autopsy, and concluded that Tomlinson died from an abdominal haemorrhage, which is usually caused by trauma.

●     The findings of a third autopsy were consistent with those of the second.

●     Dr. Patel has been suspended by the Home Office, and is under investigation for allegedly conducting four other autopsies incompetently.

The Crown Prosecution Service’s decision not to take Harwood to court therefore appears to fly in the face of the evidence. Reasonably, it would be for the jury to decide how much weight to grant Dr. Patel’s claims, but the CPS ruled that:

“As the sole medical expert who conducted the first post mortem, Dr. Patel would have to be called at trial as a prosecution witness as to the primary facts. As a result, the CPS would simply not be able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Mr. Tomlinson’s death was caused by PC ‘A’ [Harwood] pushing him to the ground.”

This establishment trick has taken place in plain sight of anyone interested enough to keep up with the story. In the words of George Monbiot, “This is a moment in which the pomp and majesty of the law falls away to reveal a squalid little stitch-up.”

Of course, for many of us, the law has never really had any “pomp and majesty”. Quite apart from the repression meted out to the poor, young, and non-white, anyone who has been on a large-scale protest knows that the kind of treatment Ian Tomlinson received was actually nothing exceptional. It was doubtless just one of many similar cases on the day of the G-20 protests. Indeed, Sergeant Delroy Smellie attacked protester Nicola Fisher at the summit demonstrations, before being cleared by Westminster Magistrates this April, on the basis that it was “reasonable” for Smellie to assume that Fisher was holding a weapon. In fact, she was holding an open carton of orange juice. Explicitly non-violent Climate Campers also found themselves getting baton-charged and trampled.

If a black-clad, mask-wearing demonstrator had been killed, it would have been much easier for the mass media. They would have been painted as an outsider, and their character as well as their body would have been assassinated. This was what happened with Carlo Guiliani, who was killed at the 2001 Genoa protests. But Tomlinson was not even protesting. He was a ‘normal’ passer-by on his way home from his selling newspapers. The most unusual thing about him was the number of children now left fatherless by the killing – nine.

Once again, the idea that police neutrally uphold democratically-decided laws has been exposed as a fiction, and politicians are worried. Former Transport Minister Sadiq Khan told the Question Time audience: “The problem is that for policing to work, it’s got to be done by consent, and the police need to have the confidence of the public for us to have an effective police.”

Similarly, Diane Abbott, the supposedly ‘left’ candidate for the Labour leadership, fretted that: “I now find it very difficult to see how a breakdown in the relationship between the public and our police forces will be avoided.”

Such a breakdown is well underway, and necessary. As anti-police activists Fitwatch commented on the Tomlinson charade:

“It’s time to wake up – these institutions do not exist to protect us but to subjugate us. [...] What is the use of having rights if the state determines when and where we can exercise them? We are given the right to protest when we’re no threat, but refused the right to even assemble when it’s most critical.”

Photojournalist Marc Vallée - himself a victim of police brutality - observed that:

“The chilling thing is that for anyone who is thinking about protesting against the enforced transfer of billions of pounds from the public sector to the private sector due to the Con-Dem government’s austerity measures will encounter the same police units, training, leadership, methodology and intelligence-lead policing.”

At a time when enormous cuts threaten the living standards of millions in the UK and billions around the world, this is a harsh but vital lesson in the brutal reality of the capitalist state.

The media has colluded with self-promoting but marginal Muslim clerics to create a cycle of self-reinforcing myths around the Mohammed cartoons, writes Kenan Malik. The fear of causing offence undermines progressive trends in Islam and strengthens the hand of religious bigots. [Romanian version added]

Lithuania's capital is close to the heart of many different groups and nationalities who have at one time or another called it "home". Better that they unite in their love of the city than fight for isolated fragments of its magical, multi-layered past, writes Tomas Venclova. [English version added]

The neurological turn in recent web criticism exploits "the obsession with anything related to the mind, brain and consciousness". Geert Lovink turns the discussion to the politics of network architecture, exploring connnections between the colonization of real-time and the rise of the national web. [Norwegian version added]

The symbolic Berlin wall toppled on the anniversary of 1989 was historically inaccurate in one important respect: the dominoes were painted on both sides. Unity, clearly, was more important than remembering, writes Jacob Kimvall.

The much anticipated US financial regulatory bill, passed at the end of last month, is a compromise between government regulators and Wall Street, writes George Blecher. As for solving the even more pressing problems of the US economy, the bill offers no new solutions.

"The Hungarian Quarterly" finds self-interest at work in US policy on Hungary; "Osteuropa" says home is not where Jobbik is; "Transit" seeks the better secularism; "Blätter" considers Obama's worst-case climate scenario; "Varlik" enrols at the Nazim Hikmet University; "Akadeemia" reads Wittgenstein and Heisenberg; "Merkur" sees in theatre proof of Germans' cultural citizenship; and "Studija" welcomes the new simplicity in contemporary Latvian painting.

The profound shift of the image of men in western culture has not been sufficiently discussed, writes Walter Hollstein. Misogyny has long been a recognized subject to which the public is continuously re-sensitized; "misandry", however, has yet to be addressed.

"Home is the place one feels attached to culturally and that in a political sense does not repel one. For people like me, home is beginning to cease being home." Laszlo Kornitzer describes the political climate in Hungary after the elections.

Between 1941 and 1989, Hungary's hand-tied politicians were at the mercy of the Great Powers and their struggle for hegemony in Europe. A study of US diplomatic documents shows the extent to which realpolitik determined US policy on Hungarian national independence.

Much of the art of the past twenty years in Latvia has slavishly imitated Soviet artistic trends. However the twenty-first century has seen a welcome return to the "new simplicity": painting and a measure of realism.

The Bologna Process is typical of a new dynamic of inclusion and exclusion in post-national Europe. Not only must the assumption be challenged that access to knowledge can be controlled via monetization, the reforms must also be placed in the context of Europe's selective border regime.

The primary aim of education is to nurture the ability to reflect, to develop new ideas, and to implement these collectively. Cognitive "multilingualism" is the only way to prevent the specialization of knowledge narrowing our horizons to an extent that results in structural irresponsibility.

Universities can regain their legitimacy only through radical democratic restructuring. Countering the brain-drain -- so far the main result of the transnationalization of education -- will only be possible by embarking on a counter-hegemonic process of educational globalization.

A blind drive towards utility characterizes higher education policy in Lithuania. The only remedy on offer for the ongoing brain-drain is based on the logic of the market. Lithuanian universities are steadily going the way of the rest of "common property" after independence.

Jacques Rancière's "utopian rationalism" invokes the possibility of a de-institutionalized autodidacticism that predicates all learning on the basis of the will of those desiring to learn. However it may be that the modern university is antithetical to establishing true equality.