Terence Blake has more on Harman on Caputo. He asks: does Caputo out-Latour Harman? The answer? Yes and no.
I'd turn it around a bit and go further. Harman more or less attempts to out-Latour Latour himself - see the Prince and the Wolf, for example. When Latour expresses bafflement at Harman's iteration of his ideas Harman is entirely unperturbed. In that sense isn't Harman's Latour - let's call that Hartour - a very Modern (or perhaps postmodern, small difference) version of those ideas? The objections of the author qua informant (or author qua authority in the postmodern version) are largely without consequence. Objections are not the kind of 'objects' that object oriented philosophy is sensitive to (c.f. Latour and his debt to Garfinkel and ethnomethodology).
I'd have no problem whatsoever with Hartour if Harman just admitted that it's his own particular translation/deformation of Latour's work and that it serves as a foil to the development of his own philosophy - which is what the Prince of Networks is all about, the first half sets up Hartour as both a stepping stone and a straw man (a stepping man? a straw stone?) to be ascended and then overturned. In and of itself there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever. But Prince of Networks is written and promoted like its an authentic account of the corpus itself, like a quasi-textbook, which is shameless.
On the subject of Caputo, I think that he is certainly right that Latour is not as different from Derrida as he'd like to think ("anxiety of influence", yes; I'd also say 'Oedipal reflex', something that most philosophers are guilty of!), however as philosophical predecessors go I honestly don't think Derrida would crack the top ten (Latour's a well read chap and a bricoleur of the highest quality). To suggest that Latour's philosophy is basically just Derrida in different words is pretty much BS. In fact isn't it intrinsic to Latour's philosophy from the very beginning that nothing is contained in anything else in potentia? From irreductions (as I recall it): 'Nothing is, by itself reducible or irreducible to anything else. To say something is to say it in other words, that is to translate.' Even if Caputo was right Latour still needed to do that work of translation. It can't have been done for him, not in Latour's own terms, anyway.
Of course, Caputo is the proverbial man with a hammer: to him everything looks like a Derrida! Perhaps the really unacknowledgeable trauma for Caputo is that Derrida wasn't a supremely original ubermenschen either. Their ideas are similar in some ways but that may have less to do with Latour's massive debt to Derrida than the fact that they both read Nietzsche.
Showing posts with label Derrida. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Derrida. Show all posts
Sunday, 20 October 2013
Saturday, 19 October 2013
Caputo on Latour; Messianic Realism vs. Realism in the Present
dmf posted a good article from John Caputo on Derrida's 'hyper-realism' over on the aime-group blog. It basically reinforces what I thought before (conveniently, for my ego). If Derrida is a 'realist' then he only fulfils the absolute bare minimum condition for that status - not hyper-realism so much as hypo-realism. He identifies something like a 'desire for the thing itself despite the impossibility such a meeting'. Yes, it's true that his entire corpus can be understood as being about that. But if that's realism of any sort it's the absolute bare minimum ('love of the world') - he doesn't go beyond that to try and say something else of the world or produce something else in the world in spite of the impossibility of the absolute, fully present meeting of the subject and the thing itself (other than that our 'love' of the 'impossible' compels us to live through the impossible - which is saying almost nothing).
Indeed, Caputo's very fixation on the thing itself goes to show how Latour has moved away from this tradition; beings of REP are not things themselves, no mode can claim that title. However, we are no more estranged from REP than we are from anything else, we just have to learn to speak in the correct way, to articulate ourselves competently. That's a pretty fundamental metaphysical difference. 'Loving' things themselves might stop one being a Berkeleyan but little more than that. Take Kant, strip out the transcendental, replace it with some linguistics, add a quasi-Freudian desire for the unachievable object and you have something pretty close to Derrida's 'realist' position.
In short, 'love of things' is not enough! Messianic realism is barely realism at all. Latour gives us reality, gives us presence here and now and distinguishes between many ways of being present, being made present, being kept present, being kept in the present (i.e. being kept in existence). It's not perfect but it's progress.
I must add that from what people have been saying on other blogs John Caputo is a nice, generous kind of guy. I still think he's very wrong, though!
Indeed, Caputo's very fixation on the thing itself goes to show how Latour has moved away from this tradition; beings of REP are not things themselves, no mode can claim that title. However, we are no more estranged from REP than we are from anything else, we just have to learn to speak in the correct way, to articulate ourselves competently. That's a pretty fundamental metaphysical difference. 'Loving' things themselves might stop one being a Berkeleyan but little more than that. Take Kant, strip out the transcendental, replace it with some linguistics, add a quasi-Freudian desire for the unachievable object and you have something pretty close to Derrida's 'realist' position.
...the thing itself always eludes our grasp, always gives the slip to the net of signifiers in which our desire had hoped to catch it up.Latour follows in this vein inasmuch as he rejects Modern absolutisms, of course, but surely he would have to reply: 'things only slip away and elude our grasp if our institutions fail, if our networks degrade, if they are shocked beyond our ability to maintain them.' That's a pretty fundamental difference too. Deconstruction does good work inasmuch as it detaches signifiers from having any essential or pre-given relation to signifieds and then demonstrates the impossibility of structures of signifiers, taken in isolation, having any final, fixed configuration that would be free from flux and contradiction. In that sense it opens the door, as I said before, to Latour's relativist (as in relationist) theories of truth - and it is in this respect that Latour is wrong to distance himself from deconstruction so radically - however it by no means anticipates them, much less does Derrida 'get there first.'
In short, 'love of things' is not enough! Messianic realism is barely realism at all. Latour gives us reality, gives us presence here and now and distinguishes between many ways of being present, being made present, being kept present, being kept in the present (i.e. being kept in existence). It's not perfect but it's progress.
I must add that from what people have been saying on other blogs John Caputo is a nice, generous kind of guy. I still think he's very wrong, though!
Monday, 11 March 2013
Latour, fieldwork and philosophy; A defence of (radical) empiricism
Forgive me, kind reader. I've been reading Kurt Vonnegut this evening and therefore feel compelled to write a little bit like I'm a 'writer.' Much of what follows is correspondingly pretentious.
What stoked my interest was another post by Terence of Agent Swarm blog fame; this paragraph in particular:
Despite his insinuations to the contrary, Bruno Latour with his compositionism is the direct application of this thought, that he is very familiar with. His talk about his “empirical” research is very misleading and contains overtones of scientistic bravado, as his system is parasitic on these predecessors. He is however a good populariser of good ideas, and his work should be encouraged as long as we do not accept his own contextualisation of his ideas. Latour is vey much an inheritor of Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida and Serres and the intellectual contemporary of Laruelle and Stiegler. It is this that gives his work its superiority over Badiou’s, not any primacy of the empirical over the philosophical.I don't think that Latour ever claims a 'primacy' for the empirical over the philosophical. His field studies aren't just about adding a scientific gloss to concepts he's borrowed (or stolen) from others. I think that misrepresents what he does with his field studies. I agree unreservedly that he's misleadingly coy about his philosophical influences. Indeed, he's self-consciously strategic with who he acknowledges and who he doesn't. He frequently and unabashedly cites Serres and other peers and contemporaries like Haraway, Callon, Greimas, etc. as well as lesser-known old, dead dudes like Whitehead and Souriau. Indeed, he is happy to heap praise on anyone he considers an ally or fellow traveller. For some reason other obviously significant precursors like Deleuze, Foucault and Nietzsche are deemed less than allies and are consequently relegated to scattered, almost accidental footnotes and occasional, almost embarrassed comments in interviews.
On this point I'm reminded of Foucault saying that he hardly ever cited Marx because, at the time that he was writing, everyone was citing Marx at every possible opportunity on any subject -- so Foucault elected not to cite him at all despite his obvious influence! Latour's evasions may be similarly contrarian. More cynically, they may be designed to allow Latour to present himself as more original than he really is. Then again, maybe he just thinks that citing names and dates is boring and a waste of time; an academic pleasantry that, due to his fame and notoriety, he is in a position to skip. I think there's probably an element of truth in all of those explanations.
Regardless, while Latour is clearly "parasitic" on his predecessors (who isn't?) I don't think the title "populariser" quite does him justice -- nor, I repeat, is his 'empiricism' merely about adding a scientific gloss to his inherited ideas. The most valuable thing about Latour, from my point of view, is the way he joins the empirical and the philosophical -- far from these terms being in competition they, under his penmanship, become profoundly harmonious. In fact, one of the main criticisms I have of his more recent work is that it is not empirical enough. He was fastidiously anthropological when it came to science, engineering, law, etc. but largely abandoned the practice when it came to thinking about politics -- little more than offhand anecdotes creep into his political writings. Consequently, I found his 'Politics of Nature' to be the weakest of all his books -- abstract, verbose and fanciful in a manner disappointingly unlike what came before it. ('We Have Never Been Modern' was similarly abstract and general but since it wasn't modal in its focus and because it was considerably more concise it worked much better, I think.)
Probably my favourite essay of his, and certainly the best example of the empirical/philosophical complex that I'm talking about, is what I think (from memory) is the second chapter of Pandora's Hope, the essay on 'Circulating Reference'. Is the story that Latour tells -- that of following some soil scientists and botanists in their journey from the heat, humidity and creepy-crawlies of the Brazilian rainforest through all their scientific translations back to the laboratories, running water and journal articles of cosy old France -- a mere gloss on the philosophical content? Is it simply an elaborate, science-tinted vehicle for making his point? I don't think that it is.
Certainly, the fact that these ideas were based on firsthand research and not simply on sitting down and thinking hard about stuff he'd read doesn't necessarily make them 'better' -- but to dismiss the empirical process through which the ideas were derived as indicating nothing more than a loosely shrouded scientism is shortsighted; in fact it misses the point. Every philosophical idea derives from some kind of practical process -- whether it's trekking through the forests of Bavaria, slouching over a writing desk in a musty Cambridge office, or clumsily wandering about in a laboratory. Every philosophical utterance is an embodied utterance, an utterance with a backstory, a genesis -- the result of a radically empirical flow of experience (James is another influence that Latour has no shame in citing, which is good since Latour's empiricism is really just an actor-network-ised version of James').
Most philosophers believe that reading, walking and talking to like-minded others constitutes a sufficient process for the productive stewing of ideas. Latour, contrariwise, has found fieldwork among the different people his philosophies comment on (the practitioners of his various modes of truth) to be considerably more fecund than guessing at the particularities of their lives from a distance. I don't find it hard to see why.
It isn't a case of 'empirical, therefore scientific, therefore better' -- it's much more interesting than that. I mean, would the poor guy have spent all those months and years painstakingly note taking, conversation starting and archive trawling just to score a few Brownie points for being 'scientific'? The interesting point is that, in what I think are his best works, the distinction between the empirical and the philosophical if it doesn't quite disappear then at least becomes considerably blurred. I think it's much more likely that it is his anthropological process in combination with his philosophical and theological education that has resulted in the ideas he claims as his own (however unpaid his dues may be). And this, I think, is an object lesson not just for how we interpret his work but also in how we think about thinking in general.
To my mind the really pertinent questions are not 'Why do fieldwork?' but rather 'Why don't more philosophers do fieldwork?' Why don't more philosophers realise that secondary sources aren't good enough? Why aren't the social sciences and empirically-inclined humanities given the time of day in philosophical discourse (unlike their Natural brethren)? Why is intellectual hermeticism still thought to be a valid thought process? The notion of the cloistered, hermetic genius is an evocative image, though it is one unburdened by any kind of actual existence. Newton, for one, consciously promoted himself as such an isolated, neutral, disinterested-but-brilliant figure; historians like Simon Schaffer have shown that he, like all great men of letters, was a formidable network-builder.
Frankly, I think the burden of justification is on those who don't look very closely into the lives and issues on which they pass judgement. It isn't the empiricist who needs to justify himself.
I don't think the epistemic authority deriving from doing empirical research is at all necessary to explain why Latour does such research. However, I do think that, in many cases, actually going out and talking to people, reading primary sources and producing an original study of a situation does accord an analyst a degree of authority over and above those who simply read books and take others at their word with regard to how things work. Take the old-school, pre-Bloor and pre-Latour historians and philosophers of science -- all those Whiggish dinosaurs who thought that they could infer all they needed to know about the practice of science from its results, on the one hand, and the casual testimony of its off-duty practitioners, on the other. Latour and others showed this supposition to be laughably inadequate. When intensively observed scientists' practices appeared to function quite differently from how they were supposed to according to tradition, dogma and folklore. When anthropologists actually took the time to watch these tribespeople in action they found that the prevailing explanations proffered by their more naive and doting commentators were wholly inadequate since they were largely oblivious to what stands out as the most remarkable characteristic of scientific research, when observed by an anthropologically trained outsider: that facts are constructed, often astonishingly well.
I'm perfectly happy to say that these empiricists have greater epistemic authority by dint of their efforts, compared the idleness of their rationalist predecessors who merely inferred the details of their subjects from the ideological predispositions to which subjects and observers were all privy and upon which all agreed -- specifically, that Science was all about disinterestedly uncovering Truth and discarding Fiction.
But, and this is the key point for me, this superiority comes not from being grounded in practical experience as opposed to abstract ratiocination -- this classical opposition of empiricism and rationalism is false because it opposes two variants of a common problematic: subjectivism. On the contrary, I think it can be claimed that the evidentialist ethic enacted by the practice of fieldwork leads to a general qualitative improvement in philosophical discourse because it extends the radically empirical flows of experience, the practical processes that generate the philosophical discourse. The processes that philosophers generally enact so as to generate their ideas -- sitting, staring, reading, writing, walking, talking to other philosophers -- are not invalidated by this general empirical commitment but they are shown to be relatively disconnected from the world on which they comment in a way that is not necessarily disastrous but is demonstrably unnecessary.
In other words, fieldwork deepens a philosopher's attachment to that on which they commentate morally, socially and epistemically. It broadens the attachments, the connections, the radical flows, which they both ride and channel. Doing fieldwork (of whatever kind) allows a thinker to be surprised and perturbed in their trajectory by a greater array of facts, theories and knowledges than they would bump into otherwise. It pluralises their journey and thus their philosophy -- but, importantly, it does so in a fashion with specific pertinence to what they're thinking about. It's not about 'broadening horizons' by learning a new language or 'expanding your mind' by dropping acid or some-such. It's about delving more deeply into the world so as to synthesise and criticise philosophical abstractions from within it rather than above it -- the latter being a fool's errand.
In a sense, every philosopher does 'fieldwork' because every act of ratiocination is an empirical -- i.e. experiential -- phenomenon. The question is, then, not so much whether to do 'fieldwork' but rather what fieldwork is germane to the topic at hand. Far too many philosophers think themselves above the humdrum, humid, detail-cluttered world of the merely empirical. They are all fools. (It's worth mentioning parenthetically that, from what I know of him, Feyerabend, for one, was no such fool. Of course if I was being fair I might have to say the same of Kant, who was prolific in all the sciences of his day, and many others besides; but I'm not being fair I'm being polemical, so ... whatever!)
Rationalists -- those who believe that ratiocination is anything but a much variegated element in the flow of experience; that it transcends the "great blooming, buzzing confusion" out of which we all clutchingly piece together a world -- simply abstract from the flows they embody and translate in order to make it seem that their utterances are sui generis -- that their thoughts are more original than they would otherwise seem. Then again, that is somewhat reminiscent of what Latour does by not stating his influences in full. Oh well, none are innocent! Or, as Kurt might say, so it goes.
[Addendum:
In response to the above Terence replies:
Philip of Circling Squares ... seems to be criticising me, despite the fact that I agree with nearly everything he says and have said similar things in various blog posts. I think he is right about what he calls “fieldwork” and I share his desire for philosophers to indulge in more “empirical research” conceived broadly. My quibble is that sometimes Latour slides between this more general sense, where a philosopher like Deleuze can be considered to do (conceptual, affective, perceptual, political, and yes why not? religious) fieldwork and a more limited sense in which Latour has done fieldwork but not Deleuze, Badiou, Lyotard and Serres. My quarrel is with the diplomatic caricature of himself that Latour secretes, consciously or not, and that interferes with the part of his message that I like and wish to help publicise.
I'm sorry if I misunderstood or misrepresented what you were saying. Hopefully the tone was not too objectionable. When I wrote “I’m not being fair I’m being polemical” I meant it! I was dimly aware that your Feyerabendian predilections might actually chime with some of what I was saying, the post I referred to just seemed to be saying something different. My mistake.
I completely agree with the portrayal of Latour as a wily, Machiavellian diplomat rather than the mild, polite, self-consciously constructive diplomat he pretends to be. As I wrote in a follow-up post, he always has to be read as a scheming polemicist rather than a scholarly essayist; everything’s performative with him. A key element of his performance is his citation — or non-citation — of influences. This rhetorical style can be a little annoying at times but it does seem to be intrinsic to his thought — practicing what he preaches, essentially. Bah, philosophers!]
Monday, 13 September 2010
Derrida, "9/11" and discourse analysis
Ian Bogost has written a blog post on Derrida's take on '9/11' and Graham Harman commented on it on his own blog. Both, unsurprisingly perhaps!, are rather nonplussed by it.
Bogost writes:
This much is to be deplored and, I am sad to report, in my native academic discipline (international relations - the discipline meant to study such events) such linguistic idealism is becoming more and more widespread. However, having said all of that, it is very far from being a majority or even mainstream view - the hardcore of IR as with political science generally is fairly conventional reductive positivism. The mainstream remains utterly incapable of allowing for analysis of the symbolic dimensions of political violence in anything approaching a sophisticated manner. They remain stuck in a reductive analysis of what is called the "distribution of capabilities" - i.e. what war making resources different states have in relation to neighbouring states. The health of the academic discourse is not great.
For this reason I would stress the importance of not dismissing Derrida's point of view tout court (I don't think Bogost or Harman are arguing for this but it deserves iterating nevertheless). His narrowness of vision should not detract from the importance of linguistic/semiotic analysis in situations such as this. Yes, there is more to geopolitical events than their interpellating symbolisation but this aspect is nevertheless crucial and cannot be dismissed.
This, to change the topic slightly, is why I don't agree with, for instance, Manuel DeLanda (but Harman and others have more or less said the same at other times) who says that the 'linguistic turn' was the "worst possible turn" that the humanities or social sciences could have taken. For the most part, the 'linguistic turn' has made a positive and beneficial impact on IR precisely because of its prior impoverishment - an upcoming IR scholar was previously limited to a choice between behaviouralism and positivism; now they have more interesting options. Nevertheless, I've not seen a particularly original 'poststructural' or 'hermeneutic' IR text for some years now - the vein that was once rich is spent. Which is why it is necessary to develop a social ontology that keeps the benefits the linguistic turn allowed (including the kinds of analysis that Derrida was prone to) but at the same time allows analysis of non-linguistic elements of political reality. Such an ontology would, by allowing for all analytical aspects to shine through, improve upon the idealist discourse analyses, not detract from them.
If we needed any more evidence of the importance of this sort of analysis, take the so-called 'Ground Zero Mega Mosque' (which is none of those things). It is a complete fabrication - absolute nonsense from beginning to end. Yet, it has been staggeringly powerful. We need to understand how such linguistic fabrications can be put together. Derrida's form of analysis therefore has an important place. Yet, if we were successful at formulating the new social ontology suggested above, we would not only have to analyse the construction of this fabrication linguistically but also analyse the networks of media outlets reproducing this lie, the financiers buying politicians to reproduce their racist views for short term political gains and the emotional, material and economic status of the desperate, disenfranchised people who, having seen all that they thought solid melt into air over the past few years, cling to whatever nonsensical, simplistic, all-encompassing explanation they can find (i.e. racism - it's the Muslims not the capitalists!).
So, I agree with Bogost that '9/11' is 'more than a question of language.' Certainly, it is also 'more than a question of politics' for those directly affected too. The personal, emotional trauma of those who lost friends, colleagues and loved ones cannot be reduced to 'politics' - much less to the wafer thin politics of linguistic idealism. Yet, the political dimension can hardly be subtracted. Being British and fairly anti-social, I've only ever met one person I know to have been directly affected by the WTC attacks. Yet '9/11' qua symbol, 9/11' qua history changing event affects my life and the lives of millions all over the world who had no direct connection with the events at all. The day was not just a day; to quote one commentator:
For all the flaws of the linguistic turn, it provides a way to understand how this happens. I think that is valuable.
Bogost writes:
the "event" (see, I can use scare quotes too) seems to me to invite reflection on so much more than just "this question of language," as Derrida calls it. And more than just "this question of politics," too.Harman remarks (in reference to the so-called "Derrida wars"):
this isn’t what realism looks like.Well, quite. Derrida is only willing to talk about the events grouped under the moniker '9/11' in terms of the moniker itself. This much is true. He doesn't recognise the larger geopolitical realities - material and symbolic alike - that extend beyond the formation of the day qua symbol.
This much is to be deplored and, I am sad to report, in my native academic discipline (international relations - the discipline meant to study such events) such linguistic idealism is becoming more and more widespread. However, having said all of that, it is very far from being a majority or even mainstream view - the hardcore of IR as with political science generally is fairly conventional reductive positivism. The mainstream remains utterly incapable of allowing for analysis of the symbolic dimensions of political violence in anything approaching a sophisticated manner. They remain stuck in a reductive analysis of what is called the "distribution of capabilities" - i.e. what war making resources different states have in relation to neighbouring states. The health of the academic discourse is not great.
For this reason I would stress the importance of not dismissing Derrida's point of view tout court (I don't think Bogost or Harman are arguing for this but it deserves iterating nevertheless). His narrowness of vision should not detract from the importance of linguistic/semiotic analysis in situations such as this. Yes, there is more to geopolitical events than their interpellating symbolisation but this aspect is nevertheless crucial and cannot be dismissed.
This, to change the topic slightly, is why I don't agree with, for instance, Manuel DeLanda (but Harman and others have more or less said the same at other times) who says that the 'linguistic turn' was the "worst possible turn" that the humanities or social sciences could have taken. For the most part, the 'linguistic turn' has made a positive and beneficial impact on IR precisely because of its prior impoverishment - an upcoming IR scholar was previously limited to a choice between behaviouralism and positivism; now they have more interesting options. Nevertheless, I've not seen a particularly original 'poststructural' or 'hermeneutic' IR text for some years now - the vein that was once rich is spent. Which is why it is necessary to develop a social ontology that keeps the benefits the linguistic turn allowed (including the kinds of analysis that Derrida was prone to) but at the same time allows analysis of non-linguistic elements of political reality. Such an ontology would, by allowing for all analytical aspects to shine through, improve upon the idealist discourse analyses, not detract from them.
If we needed any more evidence of the importance of this sort of analysis, take the so-called 'Ground Zero Mega Mosque' (which is none of those things). It is a complete fabrication - absolute nonsense from beginning to end. Yet, it has been staggeringly powerful. We need to understand how such linguistic fabrications can be put together. Derrida's form of analysis therefore has an important place. Yet, if we were successful at formulating the new social ontology suggested above, we would not only have to analyse the construction of this fabrication linguistically but also analyse the networks of media outlets reproducing this lie, the financiers buying politicians to reproduce their racist views for short term political gains and the emotional, material and economic status of the desperate, disenfranchised people who, having seen all that they thought solid melt into air over the past few years, cling to whatever nonsensical, simplistic, all-encompassing explanation they can find (i.e. racism - it's the Muslims not the capitalists!).
So, I agree with Bogost that '9/11' is 'more than a question of language.' Certainly, it is also 'more than a question of politics' for those directly affected too. The personal, emotional trauma of those who lost friends, colleagues and loved ones cannot be reduced to 'politics' - much less to the wafer thin politics of linguistic idealism. Yet, the political dimension can hardly be subtracted. Being British and fairly anti-social, I've only ever met one person I know to have been directly affected by the WTC attacks. Yet '9/11' qua symbol, 9/11' qua history changing event affects my life and the lives of millions all over the world who had no direct connection with the events at all. The day was not just a day; to quote one commentator:
As with Sarajevo in1914, Pearl Harbor in1941, and Berlin in1989, 9/11 is presented by pundits of diverse political hues as being a transformational moment where the fabric of history was violently torn.More than a day, it punctuates 'our' history - indeed it makes 'us' 'us'; it generates the very notion of a shared history. What is more political than that?
For all the flaws of the linguistic turn, it provides a way to understand how this happens. I think that is valuable.
Friday, 20 August 2010
Two realisms
@ John (post 7)
Well, you can 'prove' anything with contextualism so, yes, my point is conceptual in that regard but I think that it makes sense.
To put it a little more precisely: it seems to me that there are two variants of 'realism' to be recognised and they often become conflated. This point can be demonstrated by quoting Levi from above:
"Nothing is completely present, there is no transcendental signified."
One variant of realism would agree with this statement, one wouldn't. The former, I would argue, has taken on board, knowingly or otherwise, the kind of arguments that Derrida and his associates have been making for the past forty years -- taken on board, understood and moved on. The latter still believe in the 'really real' beneath all the mess, superstition and unreality. This is quite a big difference.
Many of the critics of the sort of realism that Levi and Graham are proposing immediately assume that they are attempting to insert some sort of transcendental signified back into the discussion -- to get 'back' to the 'really real' beneath all the sludge and detritus of sense perception. (I must admit, this was the conclusion I initially and ignorantly jumped to.) This is rather far from the truth!
Perhaps my view is a little skewed coming much more from political theory than philosophy -- in political theory 'realism' has for a very long time been the exclusive province of rock-kickers and table-thumpers, desperate to beat their opponents into submission. Levi, Graham et al. are, thankfully, a bit above that and the difference between this old, rather vulgar, foundationalist realism and what is going on now deserves recognition.
Many 'realists' in political theory talk about going 'back' to realism, the implication being that 'yes, yes, all that stuff about signifiers and whatnot is very interesting and all but lets get back to what we were doing before -- talking about reality'. The new realism isn't going 'back' it is going in its own direction, which I, for one, am pleased about.
Well, you can 'prove' anything with contextualism so, yes, my point is conceptual in that regard but I think that it makes sense.
To put it a little more precisely: it seems to me that there are two variants of 'realism' to be recognised and they often become conflated. This point can be demonstrated by quoting Levi from above:
"Nothing is completely present, there is no transcendental signified."
One variant of realism would agree with this statement, one wouldn't. The former, I would argue, has taken on board, knowingly or otherwise, the kind of arguments that Derrida and his associates have been making for the past forty years -- taken on board, understood and moved on. The latter still believe in the 'really real' beneath all the mess, superstition and unreality. This is quite a big difference.
Many of the critics of the sort of realism that Levi and Graham are proposing immediately assume that they are attempting to insert some sort of transcendental signified back into the discussion -- to get 'back' to the 'really real' beneath all the sludge and detritus of sense perception. (I must admit, this was the conclusion I initially and ignorantly jumped to.) This is rather far from the truth!
Perhaps my view is a little skewed coming much more from political theory than philosophy -- in political theory 'realism' has for a very long time been the exclusive province of rock-kickers and table-thumpers, desperate to beat their opponents into submission. Levi, Graham et al. are, thankfully, a bit above that and the difference between this old, rather vulgar, foundationalist realism and what is going on now deserves recognition.
Many 'realists' in political theory talk about going 'back' to realism, the implication being that 'yes, yes, all that stuff about signifiers and whatnot is very interesting and all but lets get back to what we were doing before -- talking about reality'. The new realism isn't going 'back' it is going in its own direction, which I, for one, am pleased about.
Thursday, 19 August 2010
Derrida again.
Nothing is completely present, there is no transcendental signified. Isn’t this above all what deconstruction is asking for and isn’t this a move beyond metaphysics as the metaphysics of presence? Isn’t this precisely a world without ultimate arche that would ground everything else and from which everything would originate, and without terms that are fully present and self-identical?
Something that has become quite plain from this debate is that when you say ‘realist’ (especially when coupled with ‘substance’!) a lot of people immediately hear contained within that term ‘unmediated, full, infallible, rational, foundational presence’ — which is unfortunate… It throws the proverbial baby out with the bathwater somewhat (i.e. it ditches all metaphysics so as to ditch metaphysics qua foundationalism).
The way Levi describes his own relationship with J.D. it would make sense to describe OOO as ‘post-Derridean’ in the sense that the main lessons of his work have been taken on board and are accepted but, some decades after deconstruction first broke onto the scene, is (refreshingly) no longer bound to Derrida’s method, his vocabulary or his goals.
re: "Realism is de rigueur" (pt. 2)
Thanks for the reading suggestion (G. Bennington “Not Half No End”), I’ll check it out.
[I]n the spirit of OOP, why not talk about the object (i.e. Derrida) and not your linguistic mediation of the object (i.e. the “tradition”?)
Is Derrida more of an ‘object’ than ‘the tradition’? Of course there is Derrida and then there is “Derrida” (just as in Latour’s Pasteurization of France there is Pasteur (the man) and “Pasteur” (the myth, the legend, the ‘genius’)).
It is difficult to disentangle these two things but certainly both were objects or collections of objects. Derrida is dead so he’s not much of an object anymore!
As for his texts, they remain objects but very much in the plural, translated into many different languages and printed thousands of times. Never mind the fact that they are intertextually related and cannot be understood qua philosophy texts outside of that relationality.
But aside from that, if you mean that I should just talk about the real Derrida rather than what I was taught about him (perhaps erroneously) then I must say that my impression upon reading him was that while he was ambiguously realist in his interviews, in his other texts he was straightforwardly anti-realist.
Derrida was extremely lucid in his interviews and rather difficult everywhere else and I suspect many of the citations arguing for his ‘realism’ came from the interviews rather than his other texts as there he let himself use declarative sentences.
But I must be clear: I am no Derrida expert — not even close, so I am not claiming any interpretative authority whatsoever. My point is more that if Levi and others take Derrida to be an anti-realist they are, in this respect, fully in agreement with the vast majority of the secondary literature on J.D.. Where they differ is that Levi and others think anti-realism is a bad thing and most Derrideans don’t.
This jars with the Derridean side of this ‘debate’ which broadly takes the line: ‘how can you think he is anti-realist? he obviously is a realist, just look at A, B, C, D…’. Well, it isn’t at all that obvious; if it was then fewer people would have made this mistake (if that is what it is).
My question therefore is: if Derrida was a realist why have so many people come to the opposite conclusion? Everybody is perfectly entitled to argue that he is a realist but I would like to hear why it is that so many intelligent people have made the mistake of thinking he isn’t (if it is a mistake).
It may well be that he has said anti-realist things and realist things at different times and in different texts. This seems most plausible. In this case we should ask if there is enough realism in Derrida for him to be usefully taken as a realist philosopher. That would seem to be the more pertinent debate.
Tuesday, 17 August 2010
re: "Realism is de rigueur"
Certainly I was not taught this particular version of J.D. in grad school. To quote (verbatim) the professor who taught discourse analysis: “language relates only to language”. (Pretty unambiguous!) Perhaps I was misinformed by an oaf who knew nothing? Or perhaps, and I find this rather more plausible, I was taught the overwhelming, mainstream view present in every textbook and seminar syllabus I’ve ever seen. Perhaps this is why whenever anyone in the class was so naive as to suggest that human perception is impacted by non-human objects in fashions irreducible to individual or collective discursive representations of those objects they were swatted down with disdain?
So, why is it only now that the ‘real’ (i.e. ‘realist’) Derrida is there for all to see, so obvious and self-evident? For all those who consider Derrida to be a realist: great! But the first thing you have to do is to explain why almost everybody who has ever read Derrida has gotten the opposite impression.
Secondly: Does language relate to more than language? If there is no REFERENCE between words and worlds (nobody here is arguing that) then is there RELATION between words and worlds and, more importantly, are there worlds even without words?
Tuesday, 10 August 2010
Derrida et al.
The Derrida debate:
For some obscure and possibly pathological reason this debate recalls to my mind a cliché often found in car adverts:
"It's all the car you'll ever need..."
Is deconstruction "all the [philosophy] you'll ever need"? Can anyone make that claim of any philosophical position or any one thinker? If so that pretty much precludes the claim to be a philosopher. Yet a great many people (and I am not necessarily including anyone in this debate in this generalisation) seem to think that deconstruction is 'all the car you'll ever need' and that we should pretty much just stop looking for anything else. The only legitimate task ahead is to iron out the creases in the theory and get on with 'destroying in slow motion', as Latour likes to say. (For anyone who thinks this is an invalid generalisation I know a notable professor of political theory who has said pretty much exactly this to me in the past; I have no reason to believe that it is an isolated belief -- in fact I expect the contrary.)
It is an odd sort of 'end of history' movement and it cropped up around the same time that Francis Fukuyama revived that tired old Hegelian trope (and for probably very similar reasons). Fukuyama declared the end of history for geopolitics; Derrida, if you believe the hype, declared it for philosophy and literary and social theory alike. Strident rightists and confused leftists have this in common. I think this says a lot.
I have nothing against Derrida, only against Derrideans. He was a first rate philosopher but a limited one. If he can be said to be a great philosopher that greatness surely comes from an unsurpassed and probably unsurpassable attention to detail and a close concentration on a handful of very particular problems. For this he should be celebrated.
He is not, however, all the car I will ever need; nor is his work all that useful for what I am interested in right now. The problem is that his work has achieved such a hegemony that I have to prove that he is not relevant to my work than the other way around. The burden of proof with regard to his ir/relevance is on me, as far as far as past supervisors and many of my peers are concerned. This too says a lot, I think.
For some obscure and possibly pathological reason this debate recalls to my mind a cliché often found in car adverts:
"It's all the car you'll ever need..."
Is deconstruction "all the [philosophy] you'll ever need"? Can anyone make that claim of any philosophical position or any one thinker? If so that pretty much precludes the claim to be a philosopher. Yet a great many people (and I am not necessarily including anyone in this debate in this generalisation) seem to think that deconstruction is 'all the car you'll ever need' and that we should pretty much just stop looking for anything else. The only legitimate task ahead is to iron out the creases in the theory and get on with 'destroying in slow motion', as Latour likes to say. (For anyone who thinks this is an invalid generalisation I know a notable professor of political theory who has said pretty much exactly this to me in the past; I have no reason to believe that it is an isolated belief -- in fact I expect the contrary.)
It is an odd sort of 'end of history' movement and it cropped up around the same time that Francis Fukuyama revived that tired old Hegelian trope (and for probably very similar reasons). Fukuyama declared the end of history for geopolitics; Derrida, if you believe the hype, declared it for philosophy and literary and social theory alike. Strident rightists and confused leftists have this in common. I think this says a lot.
I have nothing against Derrida, only against Derrideans. He was a first rate philosopher but a limited one. If he can be said to be a great philosopher that greatness surely comes from an unsurpassed and probably unsurpassable attention to detail and a close concentration on a handful of very particular problems. For this he should be celebrated.
He is not, however, all the car I will ever need; nor is his work all that useful for what I am interested in right now. The problem is that his work has achieved such a hegemony that I have to prove that he is not relevant to my work than the other way around. The burden of proof with regard to his ir/relevance is on me, as far as far as past supervisors and many of my peers are concerned. This too says a lot, I think.
Friday, 4 December 2009
re: Hegemonies
Response to: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/hegemonies
I'm really glad you posted this post because, having been a reader for a few weeks now, I think it really clarifies where I would agree and disagree with your position – and as luck would have it, it is precisely the sort of disagreement I have with just about everyone at the moment (on both/all sides of the argument), philosophically I mean.
Basically, as I understand it, you are arguing against the position (let us, for argument's sake call it 'postie-ism') that, allegedly, reduces everything to 'textuality' – that is, says that language is the be all and end all; language is the ‘really real’; all that materiality is just a product of discourse, of ideas. This is the typical critique of postie positions and it is one a great deal of their writings reinforce by, I would wholeheartedly agree, emanating from cultural studies and literature departments that would dearly love to see the whole world as one giant intertext and adopt the ‘sacred texts’ (/’sacred cows’) of postie-ism as writ (that is to say, unreflexively and uncritically). However, I believe that it is an over-simplistic and, if not 'incorrect', then certainly disagreeable characterisation.
I think a good place to explain what I mean is Derrida's most (mis)quoted phrase "il n'y a pas de hors-texte", usually translated into English as "there is nothing outside the text". From this sentence alone one would surely draw the conclusion that you have – that everything is to be reduced to textuality; that textuality is 'the really real'. However, my Francophone friends inform me that this is a bad translation that loses much of the sense of the original. The phrase is often translated, conversely, as "there is no outside-the-text". At first glance this may appear to say basically the same thing. I believe that this is a big mistake.
The clearest way I can articulate this point (in my own mind at least) is through William James. In his epic work 'Psychology' James describes a hypothetical baby's perception of the world as "one great blooming, buzzing confusion" – in other words, at that stage in a baby's physical and cultural development it cannot perceive anything of what is around it as we would understand it. It must be just flashes of colours and sounds and textures and abstract patterns with no way of assembling the stimuli into any kind of coherent 'reality'. Of course, we can never know how a baby 'sees' the world; it is pure speculation – but this is allowed in these parts, isn't it?...
Taking this as a thought experiment let us suppose (with every sci-fi series ever – see 'Dollhouse' for a good recent example) that one were to take a fully formed adult and wipe away all trace of enculturation and make them a tabula rasa (of course this is an impossible Cartesian manoeuvre, epigenetics alone shows biology and culture to be irreversibly interwoven, but lets just pretend). Would this person then not be like James's baby? Would ‘reality’ then not be "one great blooming, buzzing confusion"? Just textures and colours with no way of understanding it -- effectively no way of establishing a 'self' or a 'reality' at all? It is not that the external world no longer exists – I can still see this poor brain-washed person; I can still make out his form, his limbs, the colour of his hair, etc. – it is that, from this particular, ‘brain-washed’ subject position no knowledge of the world can ever be said to properly exist; ‘reality’ is thus only my ‘property’, not his. This is an extreme thought experiment but it, I believe, holds for less extreme examples too. To put it simply, language is always already ‘there’ (and, by consequence, ‘there’ is always already ‘here’).
All of which is a longwinded way of saying that we can know nothing of anything without enculturation. Of course this was probably never in doubt – who could deny this?
Further, then, it is my contention that the postie attitude towards language follows much this same formula – it is not that language is the totality; language simply cannot be dispensed with. My favourite way of putting this is that it is ‘necessary but insufficient’ (as is so much in life).
Of course this brings to the foreground the most important issue. The above discussion to which I am responding fails to say what 'language' is. Of course this seems like common sense. This is language. And so is this. And this. Yet where do we stop? Is body language language? Is emotion language? Is volition (in the psychological sense)?
It would be an extraordinarily 'thick' definition of language to include all of the above. And this is perhaps where I can pull the rabbit out of the hat and (finally) make my point: the 'text' in Derrida's aphorism is not meant to be taken literally, or at least not as literally as it almost universally has been (by both those faithful and hostile). To say that "there is no outside-the-text" does not mean, therefore, that there is nothing besides language (language defined in any sensible way). It means, I believe, something akin to James's baby: that we can never, ever subtract language from our experiences; that without language ‘reality’ is nothing and therefore language must always have an effect on our perceptions of, well, everything. That language is ‘necessary but insufficient’. Of course we need bodies and those bodies need food and water – this is a given; why would anyone doubt this? The question is whether any of this means anything – indeed, whether any of this can even be comprehended on even the most basic level -- without langauge (or, as it should be clear by now, I would prefer to say 'enculturation' as the 'thick' definition encompassing affect, volition, etc.) Therefore, whether or not objects possess ‘transigent’ and ‘intransigent’ qualities, language can never be legitimately bracketed or set to one side.
From this position, with language being an ever present necessity – the only means by which we can think and certainly the only means by which we can communicate our thoughts, however imperfectly – one must have recourse to transcendental reason to ascertain the ‘really real’. One must somehow pierce this shield of language to get to what is outside of it and then represent this in some clear manner. One must entertain the transcendent; that is, provide a spectacle to cite it, to bring it forth, to make present, in some form, this sublime experience.
In other words, language must possess some quality of Reason by which utterances may be objectively distinguished in terms of truth or [insert your value distinction here]. That’s a whole other story. I’m not going to bore anyone with that now, least of all myself.
A far more coherent and profound description of what I’m trying to say here is offered by Ernesto Laclau in conversation with Roy Bhaskar here:
http://politicaltheology.com/ojs/index.php/JCR/article/viewFile/3611/2272
Here Laclau shows why what I am calling postie-ism (he calls it discourse theory) is not idealist – it is explicitly opposed to idealism. I don’t think Bhaskar really ‘gets it’ but its an interesting exchange.
While I would agree that a great deal of the writings on this postie-ism betray a certain idealism implicitly, if not explicitly, this is because, those that do…well…aren’t very good.
If this is the version of postie-ism that you have left behind recently, Levi, I can see why you did so; its fairly empty of merit as a philosophy goes. Unfortunately I really don’t recognise it; at least not in the major texts. In the multitude of followers, yes, sadly, but this is not an indictment of the whole philosophy.
For what (little) its worth, I see Derrida, despite his status as the archetypical postie-ist poster-boy, as a thinker who does not deny things. He is best read in his deeply ethical, wholly political sense of maintaining the total contingency of discourse and everything else. Everything is ‘to come’. Everything is promised, nothing is wholly delivered and this is fine. All it means is that we can’t take anything for granted and we shouldn’t ever accept being told ‘that’s the way it is’ (Isn’t this the Socratic ideal? Isn’t this why those who teach philosophy teach philosophy?).
The world was no less ‘real’ the day after he published Of Grammatology. The sun was as warm, food tasted the same. He just demonstrated that it needn’t mean the same things all the time. I don’t even see him as that much of a skeptic. If one is to read his interviews he would say much the same (of course its impossible to know if at any moment he is being honest or contrary, but still, its there as a plausible interpretation).
Having said all of that (and golly-gosh, this comment has reached, dare I say it, Levi-esque proportions) I am completely dissatisfied with the prevailing postie-ist positions too. My own personal intellectual project(/hell) is to produce an historical methodology that is consistent theoretically, ethically and politically with deconstruction but notes that it is, in itself, insufficient (there is that phrase again ‘necessary but insufficient’). This is not new. Gayatri Spivak, for one, says that ‘deconstruction cannot found any political project’ (I’m paraphrasing) – deconstruction is therefore, on its own, politically insufficient. Judith Butler (paraphrasing again) says that ‘deconstruction is not a necessary part of any political project’ – it may, therefore, be excluded. It is insufficient and non-necessary; if it is part of a project it cannot exist alone and it need not be a part at all. What ‘idealist’ could maintain this position? Read Butler’s lectures on Spinoza (‘Giving an Account of Oneself’) to see why the idealist label simply doesn’t fit in any way towards (the more brilliantly argued) postie-ist writings; she argues against the opacity of self-knowledge, this refuting any charge of ‘idealism’ (an idealist must presume autonomy and authority over one’s self-perceptions, something which is alleged in Levi’s post above).
Anyhoo, I’ll stop writing now, for the main reason that in the post this morning, I received a fresh, new copy of Meillassoux’s ‘After Finitude’. Also there’s a good chance this will all seem regrettably ignorant to me one day. I hope, soon, to be able to comment on these issues from a position of only partial ignorance rather than total.
Until that halcyon day, a caveat must be added, for my own self-protection:
Of course, I could be wrong.
I'm really glad you posted this post because, having been a reader for a few weeks now, I think it really clarifies where I would agree and disagree with your position – and as luck would have it, it is precisely the sort of disagreement I have with just about everyone at the moment (on both/all sides of the argument), philosophically I mean.
Basically, as I understand it, you are arguing against the position (let us, for argument's sake call it 'postie-ism') that, allegedly, reduces everything to 'textuality' – that is, says that language is the be all and end all; language is the ‘really real’; all that materiality is just a product of discourse, of ideas. This is the typical critique of postie positions and it is one a great deal of their writings reinforce by, I would wholeheartedly agree, emanating from cultural studies and literature departments that would dearly love to see the whole world as one giant intertext and adopt the ‘sacred texts’ (/’sacred cows’) of postie-ism as writ (that is to say, unreflexively and uncritically). However, I believe that it is an over-simplistic and, if not 'incorrect', then certainly disagreeable characterisation.
I think a good place to explain what I mean is Derrida's most (mis)quoted phrase "il n'y a pas de hors-texte", usually translated into English as "there is nothing outside the text". From this sentence alone one would surely draw the conclusion that you have – that everything is to be reduced to textuality; that textuality is 'the really real'. However, my Francophone friends inform me that this is a bad translation that loses much of the sense of the original. The phrase is often translated, conversely, as "there is no outside-the-text". At first glance this may appear to say basically the same thing. I believe that this is a big mistake.
The clearest way I can articulate this point (in my own mind at least) is through William James. In his epic work 'Psychology' James describes a hypothetical baby's perception of the world as "one great blooming, buzzing confusion" – in other words, at that stage in a baby's physical and cultural development it cannot perceive anything of what is around it as we would understand it. It must be just flashes of colours and sounds and textures and abstract patterns with no way of assembling the stimuli into any kind of coherent 'reality'. Of course, we can never know how a baby 'sees' the world; it is pure speculation – but this is allowed in these parts, isn't it?...
Taking this as a thought experiment let us suppose (with every sci-fi series ever – see 'Dollhouse' for a good recent example) that one were to take a fully formed adult and wipe away all trace of enculturation and make them a tabula rasa (of course this is an impossible Cartesian manoeuvre, epigenetics alone shows biology and culture to be irreversibly interwoven, but lets just pretend). Would this person then not be like James's baby? Would ‘reality’ then not be "one great blooming, buzzing confusion"? Just textures and colours with no way of understanding it -- effectively no way of establishing a 'self' or a 'reality' at all? It is not that the external world no longer exists – I can still see this poor brain-washed person; I can still make out his form, his limbs, the colour of his hair, etc. – it is that, from this particular, ‘brain-washed’ subject position no knowledge of the world can ever be said to properly exist; ‘reality’ is thus only my ‘property’, not his. This is an extreme thought experiment but it, I believe, holds for less extreme examples too. To put it simply, language is always already ‘there’ (and, by consequence, ‘there’ is always already ‘here’).
All of which is a longwinded way of saying that we can know nothing of anything without enculturation. Of course this was probably never in doubt – who could deny this?
Further, then, it is my contention that the postie attitude towards language follows much this same formula – it is not that language is the totality; language simply cannot be dispensed with. My favourite way of putting this is that it is ‘necessary but insufficient’ (as is so much in life).
Of course this brings to the foreground the most important issue. The above discussion to which I am responding fails to say what 'language' is. Of course this seems like common sense. This is language. And so is this. And this. Yet where do we stop? Is body language language? Is emotion language? Is volition (in the psychological sense)?
It would be an extraordinarily 'thick' definition of language to include all of the above. And this is perhaps where I can pull the rabbit out of the hat and (finally) make my point: the 'text' in Derrida's aphorism is not meant to be taken literally, or at least not as literally as it almost universally has been (by both those faithful and hostile). To say that "there is no outside-the-text" does not mean, therefore, that there is nothing besides language (language defined in any sensible way). It means, I believe, something akin to James's baby: that we can never, ever subtract language from our experiences; that without language ‘reality’ is nothing and therefore language must always have an effect on our perceptions of, well, everything. That language is ‘necessary but insufficient’. Of course we need bodies and those bodies need food and water – this is a given; why would anyone doubt this? The question is whether any of this means anything – indeed, whether any of this can even be comprehended on even the most basic level -- without langauge (or, as it should be clear by now, I would prefer to say 'enculturation' as the 'thick' definition encompassing affect, volition, etc.) Therefore, whether or not objects possess ‘transigent’ and ‘intransigent’ qualities, language can never be legitimately bracketed or set to one side.
From this position, with language being an ever present necessity – the only means by which we can think and certainly the only means by which we can communicate our thoughts, however imperfectly – one must have recourse to transcendental reason to ascertain the ‘really real’. One must somehow pierce this shield of language to get to what is outside of it and then represent this in some clear manner. One must entertain the transcendent; that is, provide a spectacle to cite it, to bring it forth, to make present, in some form, this sublime experience.
In other words, language must possess some quality of Reason by which utterances may be objectively distinguished in terms of truth or [insert your value distinction here]. That’s a whole other story. I’m not going to bore anyone with that now, least of all myself.
A far more coherent and profound description of what I’m trying to say here is offered by Ernesto Laclau in conversation with Roy Bhaskar here:
http://politicaltheology.com/ojs/index.php/JCR/article/viewFile/3611/2272
Here Laclau shows why what I am calling postie-ism (he calls it discourse theory) is not idealist – it is explicitly opposed to idealism. I don’t think Bhaskar really ‘gets it’ but its an interesting exchange.
While I would agree that a great deal of the writings on this postie-ism betray a certain idealism implicitly, if not explicitly, this is because, those that do…well…aren’t very good.
If this is the version of postie-ism that you have left behind recently, Levi, I can see why you did so; its fairly empty of merit as a philosophy goes. Unfortunately I really don’t recognise it; at least not in the major texts. In the multitude of followers, yes, sadly, but this is not an indictment of the whole philosophy.
For what (little) its worth, I see Derrida, despite his status as the archetypical postie-ist poster-boy, as a thinker who does not deny things. He is best read in his deeply ethical, wholly political sense of maintaining the total contingency of discourse and everything else. Everything is ‘to come’. Everything is promised, nothing is wholly delivered and this is fine. All it means is that we can’t take anything for granted and we shouldn’t ever accept being told ‘that’s the way it is’ (Isn’t this the Socratic ideal? Isn’t this why those who teach philosophy teach philosophy?).
The world was no less ‘real’ the day after he published Of Grammatology. The sun was as warm, food tasted the same. He just demonstrated that it needn’t mean the same things all the time. I don’t even see him as that much of a skeptic. If one is to read his interviews he would say much the same (of course its impossible to know if at any moment he is being honest or contrary, but still, its there as a plausible interpretation).
Having said all of that (and golly-gosh, this comment has reached, dare I say it, Levi-esque proportions) I am completely dissatisfied with the prevailing postie-ist positions too. My own personal intellectual project(/hell) is to produce an historical methodology that is consistent theoretically, ethically and politically with deconstruction but notes that it is, in itself, insufficient (there is that phrase again ‘necessary but insufficient’). This is not new. Gayatri Spivak, for one, says that ‘deconstruction cannot found any political project’ (I’m paraphrasing) – deconstruction is therefore, on its own, politically insufficient. Judith Butler (paraphrasing again) says that ‘deconstruction is not a necessary part of any political project’ – it may, therefore, be excluded. It is insufficient and non-necessary; if it is part of a project it cannot exist alone and it need not be a part at all. What ‘idealist’ could maintain this position? Read Butler’s lectures on Spinoza (‘Giving an Account of Oneself’) to see why the idealist label simply doesn’t fit in any way towards (the more brilliantly argued) postie-ist writings; she argues against the opacity of self-knowledge, this refuting any charge of ‘idealism’ (an idealist must presume autonomy and authority over one’s self-perceptions, something which is alleged in Levi’s post above).
Anyhoo, I’ll stop writing now, for the main reason that in the post this morning, I received a fresh, new copy of Meillassoux’s ‘After Finitude’. Also there’s a good chance this will all seem regrettably ignorant to me one day. I hope, soon, to be able to comment on these issues from a position of only partial ignorance rather than total.
Until that halcyon day, a caveat must be added, for my own self-protection:
Of course, I could be wrong.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)