New APPS

I’ve been working out some of the context for Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence and why it might matter for a reading of Marx (one, two, three).  Last time, I looked at Althusser’s 1950 (anonymously published) critique of the use of Hegel in understanding Marx, an essay that seems to be particularly aggrieved by Hyppolite’s work of the late 1940s.  Here I want to turn to the offending Hyppolite essays, since one might want to know what Hyppolite said that was so horrible as to occasion such an acerbic response. Let’s look at a few things: (a) The line Althusser seems most bothered by – the “revision” to which Marx may be subject; (b) an instrumentalization of the proletariat; (c) Hyppolite’s priority on alienation in Marx, and (d) Hyppolite’s musings about the will to power.   I’ll look at the first two of these here, and the second pair next time.

All of these should be read against a background where Hyppolite leans into the Hegelian background of Marx; the essay on Capital begins by noting that “in order to understand Capital it is absolutely necessary to consult Marx’s philosophical works prior to his economic studies. Marx’s work presupposes an underlying philosophy whose various elements are not easily reconstructed” including Hegel and, sometimes in tension with Hegel and Darwin (Studies on Marx and Hegel, 126). And again:

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I’m working out a thread (part 1, part 2) suggesting that that Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence (1953), which reads Hegel through the Logic and not the Phenomenology, and thereby pushes a non-humanist reading of Hegel, mattered for the French reading of Marx, which hinged on whether Marx inherited humanism or anthropology from Hegel.  I then looked at the Soviet part of that equation, and how Stalinism required the rejection of Hegel, even as Stalin himself repressed (missed entirely?) the importance of Hegel to his own understanding of dialectics.  Here I want to continue this rather elaborate project of context-setting and say something about how this plays out in France in the person of Althusser.

Althusser’s anti-Hegelianism in the 1960s is well known and represents the gymnastics necessary to retain an anti-Hegelian view while also discrediting Stalinism, which became important after Krushchev’s destalinization program, which began with a speech in 1956.  In “Contradiction and Overdetermination” (1962) Althusser refers to Hegel’s understanding of supersession [= Aufhebung].  For Hegel, Althusser complains, “the survival of the past as the ‘superseded’ (aufgehoen) is simply reduced to the modality of a memory, which, furthermore, is merely the inverse of (that is, the same thing as) an anticipation” (For Marx, 115; I’m removing his constant italicization). 

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Last time, I started a thread on Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence (1953) and its non-humanist reading of Hegel, and how that bears on Marx interpretation.  The first step was to set some context, since Marx interpretation is always perilous, and was especially so during the 1950s, given the political demands of the French Communist Party (PCF), which were largely set by the Soviets and Stalinism.  What that meant in 1953 was to be anti-Hegelian.  I illustrated this with a passage from a speech by Georgi Zhdanov on the history of philosophy that showed both the anti-Hegelianism and the Stalinist provenance.  I promised three explanatory notes, and delivered one, which was about the selectivity of the Stalin/Zhdanov reading suppression of Hegel, which required some calisthenics around Lenin’s own engagement with Hegel.

This time, I’ll add a couple of more thoughts to situate the Zhdanov line.  To recall, he is criticizing a history of philosophy book for not emphasizing the radicality of Marx with regard to his predecessors.  Zhdanov says:

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One of Monday’s Supreme Court rulings, Chatrie v. U.S., has flown under the radar, but I think it’s a potentially important privacy case.  The case concerns the police practice of geofenced searches, in which the police would map out an area, usually a specified radius around a crime scene, and demand all of the cellphone location history data of everyone who was in that space over a given time period. The question before the court was whether this practice constituted a search under the 4^th Amendment.  The answer was yes (and predictably so, imo), but the opinions offer a really interesting window into competing understandings of privacy and how that interacts with Third Party doctrine, which essentially says that you have no remaining privacy interest in information that you have voluntarily disclosed to a third party (like an Internet platform).  The majority opinion, authored by Justice Kagan, Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence, and Justice Alito’s dissent offer three different underlying theories of the handling the data: as tech regulation (Kagan), as contract (Alito) and as property (Gorsuch).

First, the basic case.  Justice Kagan explains:

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In the US at least, as far as I can tell, Jean Hyppolite is largely unknown outside of specialists in 20c French thought and Hegel.  Hyppolite is best-known here for his influential Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which appeared in 1946-7.  In 1953, however, he published Logic and Existence (L&E), which took on Hegel’s Logic and which reframed how one should read Hegel. At the end of L&E, Hyppolite says:

“The leading difficulty of Hegelianism is the relation of the Phenomenology and the Logic. Today we would speak of anthropology and ontology. The one studies the properly human reflection, the other the absolute reflection that passes through man” (189)

When L&E appeared, in 1953, this difficulty mattered a lot for the interpretation of Marx, which is my interest here, because the question of Marx’s humanism (or not) was a live one.  Those who said Marx was humanist usually read him through Hegel and his early works like the 1844 Manuscripts.  For its part, the French Communist Party (PCF) had forcefully rejected the study of Hegel and the relevance of Hegel to Marx, substantially because of the humanist implications of Hegel (as routed especially through Feuerbach), the very ones that Hyppolite associates with the Phenomenology and not the Logic.  As I will (eventually, not this time) note, Hyppolite proposes a radically non-anthropological Hegel in L&E, though he generally reads Marx as a humanist.

In any case, to set some context first. Arriving at the rejection of Hegel had been a process for the PCF (for this history see this paper by Fabrizio Carlino and this one by Serge Wolikow). Starting in the early 1930s, the PCF encouraged work on Marx’s texts; French readings of Marx had initially been receptive to the Hegel connection, using it to help legitimate the idea that Marx should be taken seriously as a philosopher.  Following the rise of Stalinism, references to Hegel became hostile by the end of the decade and engagement with many of Marx’s texts atrophied.

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The judgments of algorithmic systems are often difficult to understand.  The system says you do not qualify for this loan – sorry!  You no longer qualify for x benefit – sorry! Why? Well, that’s just what it says.  And it’s impossibly opaque, for a variety of reasons – the underlying code and data are trade secrets, the decision is made by a neural network with millions of parameters, and so forth.  But suppose you object to the decision, or want to know how to do better?  This is the domain of, among other things, explainable AI (XAI).  XAI is normatively complicated, and I don’t want to get into that debate here.  Here I want to briefly look at a logically prior question: before we get to XAI, is there some sort of a right an explanation?  Is there a moral or legal sense in which the recipients of adverse algorithmic decisions are entitled to some sort of explanation of the basis for that decision in terms that they would understand and either find legitimate or be able to argue against? The particular point I want to make is that we need to think about the abstract right to explanation with reference to the reality of the U.S. legal system.

In a recent paper, Brett Karlan and Henrik Kugelberg argue against the need for a right to an explanation of AI decisions.  They take particular issue with an earlier paper by Kate Vredenburgh, which had argued for a right to an explanation on the grounds that it is necessary to fight back against algorithmic governance.  For the same reasons that the judge or bureaucrat owes you the reason for an adverse decision, so does the judge or bureaucrat using AI.  Using AI shouldn’t relieve them of the responsibility to inform people of the process that was used and how. She explains that “decision-makers are required to provide individuals with rule-based normative explanations and rule-based causal explanations … such explanations are necessary to enable individuals to engage in informed self-advocacy and are tolerably costly.” Normative explanations should say what the rules are and the normative reasons in favor of them; causal explanations are important for agency – they explain “what an agent would have to do to get a desired outcome, in terms of the relevant rules and robust population-level causal generalizations.”

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Forthcoming in Philosophy and Social Criticism; preprint here on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

“Algorithmic governance is sometimes compared to Hobbes’s Leviathan. Here I argue that, while algorithmic governance shares some similarities with the Hobbesian schema, it goes further in its suppression of contestation. To show this, I read Hobbes against Rancière’s reduction of him to a theorist of consensus to make two basic points. First, it is important for Hobbes that laws be public and rationally comprehensible. By contrast, algorithmic governance is notoriously opaque. Second, Hobbes also retains a sense of equity as an appeal against universally applied legal decisions, allowing decisions to be tailored to individual cases. Algorithmic governance does not typically involve equity-based appeal, a point that is especially clear in the context of bureaucratic governance structures, where algorithmic systems generate results that cannot be either understood or appealed. The result in Rancière’s terms is that classificatory, algorithmic systems are even more powerful agents of depoliticization than Leviathan.”

And here’s a little more detail:

“Part 2 develops an account of equity as a historic principle of law.  Part 3 is about Hobbes and focuses on the extent to which he emphasizes the public nature of law and retains an Aristotelian view of equity.  Part 4 turns to algorithmic governance.  I begin with fundamental epistemic differences between Hobbesian and algorithmic thought and outline three fundamental implications of them.  First, the sense in which algorithmic governance is inescapable is different from that in which the Leviathan is inescapable because it is much harder to contest algorithmic decisions.  Second, algorithms are less public because of their opacity.  Third, algorithmic efficiency undermines equitable implementation of policy by shifting the decisionmaking of street-level bureaucrats toward algorithms and away from the exercise of human judgment.  Collectively, these show how the integration of algorithmic processes in government effectively erodes the rule of law features that were prominent even in Hobbes.  Section 5 offers a brief conclusion.  I return to Rancière’s contention that Hobbesian governance produces an outside of those who are equal insofar as they have no part in the Leviathan-state.  Insofar as algorithmic governance is classificatory, and insofar as its classificatory regimes proliferate indefinitely, even for the same person, the classificatory process works against this final vestige of equality and political contestation”

(the parts are named rather than numbered in the final version; this is just a preprint)

Citing a paper by Lisanne Bainbridge from the early 1980s, Carl Hendrick describes a paradox of automation.  Those who automate systems tend to view people as the weak link, and thus replace humans with automation wherever possible.  This leaves a problem:

“The designer who tries to eliminate the operator still leaves the operator to do the tasks which the designer cannot think how to automate. What remains after automation is not a simplified role but an arbitrary residue of the most demanding, most ambiguous, and least supported work in the entire system. The human is not replaced. In other words, the human is paradoxically left with the hardest parts, and given almost no preparation for them”

As he immediately notes:

“Forty years on, Bainbridge’s paper reads less like a historical document than a prophecy. It describes, with an accuracy that might trouble us, exactly what is now happening to knowledge workers across every sector in which AI has taken hold. And it raises, with particular accuracy, a question that education has barely begun to confront.”

Here, I want to pursue the thought that AI changes the architectural constraints on cognitive labor.  I’ll explain what that means after more from Hendrick.

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