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 By Way of Explication 

What are these essays? These essays are really an experiment. At their heart is a double series. The one series is simply a sequence of essays giving yet another take upon current affairs. The affairs in question in this series was the tempestuous year of 2008 to 2009, when oil prices went sky high, the global banking system ‘collapsed’, America got its first African-American President, and Gordon Brown was Prime Minister of Britain. It was quite a year all things considered. The second series which runs parallel within the essays is ostensibly a formal one which traced a rather partial history of justice from its origins with Plato, through the centuries to Foucault and Deleuze, with the aim of showing how, in Foucault’s words, the past is already always thinking through us, and for us.

  My aim in this conjunction of series was not exactly simple. Merely taking the past of philosophy and using it to warp our understanding of the present was only one part of the process (albeit an important part). At least as important, was the opposite pole in the process. That is, the one that insisted that our understanding of the past, and past thought was always informed by what is occurring in the present. The ideas which I took up, were therefore transformed (I hope) through the medium of events, as new facets were being founded within them. That is, they were made to work and to change our understanding of the present.

  And between these two poles lies in itself rather a complex domain. A domain in which exactly how an idea has changed across the centuries and how we take up that change now, are in a curious tension. The idea always has different things to say, but then so does the event. One is therefore always caught up in a deep conversation where either protagonist (the idea or the event) at some point will turn away and want to do something else.

  It is this ‘doing something else’ that then gives the structure to these essays (originally called ‘Ping Pongs’). That is to say I trace across them all, how ideas in the past, but also events in the past naturally turn to or uncover within themselves other events, other points on the spectrum. Here the critical point is that this turning is not really a dialectic; there is no necessity in discovering that which seems natural. Or perhaps better, that thought might be necessary, but exactly what one uncovers through it is not. But also that other element, the one which one finds one’s mind turning towards, is not an opposite or even the qualifier of the first theory. It is rather a totally separate idea which suddenly subverts the previous one, and pulls it elsewhere. Ideas warp therefore, rather than simply progress. And the aim of this sequence of essays (or stanzas) is as much to trace this warped nature as anything.

  In order to do this, it was clear from fairly early on that the conventional distinction between philosophy and events was not really appropriate in this series. Events create effects, i.e., they create ideas. But more than that, events locate us within their shadow. The French or English or American Revolutions are events whose ripples we still feel, in the same way that we still feel (and read) Ricardo. What is more the interplay of events and ideas was always critical in their dual development, and even more critical in why they matter today. The series therefore deliberately confuses the two together. Events and ideas are treated as different ‘ping pongs’ (stanzas) -  that is, they are treated as points in our understanding of what justice might be, and how it might develop.

  Perhaps the difference between the two needs to be noted here (as it is in effect in the series). Thoughts tend to be ordered. One runs from one to the other thought, as new problems emerge with the old. The role of events though, is rather different. They re-throw thought and force it to sing very very differently. They make it quite otherwise and distinct. They ride it to other places. Events therefore are presented here as an alternative take; - on thought. Bolts from the blue then fall like revolutionary ideas and change everything. That is, occurrences can only become a part in the landscape of our minds if those minds are made different, and sung otherwise than how we might have progressed without this other element falling into them.

  What is more, there are two series of events outlined in the writing of these essays – making them very much a double series: On the one hand there are the events that tumble into history, as places of change, and yet on the other, the events of those turbulent months against which the series was written changing its rim and tempo. To be writing about Ricardo during the week of the banking collapse was some experience. To be writing about the American Revolution in the U.S. election campaign of 2008 was another… Events in the present were therefore directly affecting, (or at least it felt like they were) the events in the past. They were making them ‘other’. Driving them to be otherwise.

  Past and present started to meld and develop together – well they did at five o’ clock in the morning which is always when I wrote these essays.

  How should one read them now that the events which they describe have also faded into history? In a sense these essays are designed to be read any which way. They are arranged in order, (of chronology) and yet there is nothing very sacrosanct in that ordering. They might have gone many different ways and might well say something a little different if one read them in a different order. I hope they do. The point then is to read them just in off moments. Their aim is not to be something one needs to ‘formally study’, but rather to be something that slides into the mind and makes one worry elsewhere and at other times. So then, experiment with the reading, as I had fun with the writing, and see what can be found. This is not to say that they do not work as a formal philosophy text does, starting from the beginning and going ever onwards. It is merely that they are designed to not only to work in that manner.

Well the preface has said more than enough… It is now up to others whether the essays work or not; while it is high time I started to collect my ‘useful concepts’ for the next series.