Rough Theory

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Monthly Archives: December 2007

Preparing for Fragmentation

2 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on December 20, 2007

So in February I’ll be presenting to the Hegel Summer School, an event that has been taking place for the past ten years, and that brings together activists and academics to discuss specific themes in contemporary critical theory. The format involves a sort of casual introductory event the evening before the formal presentations, at which presenters and other participants can meet one another in a less structured setting, and then two days of presentations and discussions – only four presenters, with half a day devoted to each presentation (one hour for the presentation, a break for tea, and then something like ninety minutes for discussion). The aim is to allow enough time, and an appropriate format, to make it possible for the presenters to demystify some of the theoretical material often sequestered off in academic spaces, and also to make it possible for all participants to engage in meaningful discussion about the possible connections or disconnects between “academic” theory and other forms of politically engaged practice.

This year’s theme is “Solidarity or Community? Philosophy and Antidotes to Fragmentation”. The title of my presentation is intended to be “Fighting for what we mean: Reflections on the unfinished project of critical theory” – which sounds very interesting, except that I haven’t written the presentation yet, so we’ll see if I can live up to my own title… ;-P My rough intention is to outline the idea of an immanent reflexive critical theory (in the sense I tend to use on the blog) then, given the traditional Hegelian orientation of this event, discuss how understanding a little bit about Hegel, and Marx’s relationship to Hegel, can help us appropriate Marx in a meaningful way to connect a critical theory to potentials for mobilisation. I then want to spend much of my time on the question of why it can be structurally difficult to “fight for what we mean” – using this theme to say a bit about how I understand Marx’s take on potentials for misrecognition “built in” to the reproduction of capital. I’m slightly concerned that this may not hit directly enough on the “solidarity or community” theme, so I may need to find room somehow to explain the ways in which the whole question of social fragmentation and integration is a pivot point on which political economy (and then, later, sociology) turns – such that both Hegel and Marx are trying to provide a different sort of response to this problem than the political economists were intending to do. Given that I’m two months away from presenting, I still have a great deal to work out, in terms of what I want to say, and how I plan to say it…

At any rate: so why am I writing about this now, you might ask? Well, the presenters have been asked to recommend some short, accessible, topical readings that can be recommended to participants who want a bit of specific background prior to attending the event. I need to put some recommendations together soon, and I’m simply drawing a blank on what might be useful. Some selections from the first chapter of Capital probably make some sense, but offhand nothing else is coming to mind. So I thought I would toss the concept out, in case something immediately springs to anyone else’s mind. If I’m understanding correctly, the idea is that the readings should prime participants to engage more actively with the presentations, by giving background, or clarifying terms, or providing an example of the sorts of theory discussed, or similar. I’m open to suggestions 🙂

Events, Fetish, Political Economy, Reading, Self-Reflexivity

The Man Behind the Curtain

5 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on December 20, 2007

So the other day, I was blaming Joseph Kugelmass for the fact that I now can’t think of Hegel’s discussion of sense-certainty without associating to Spaceballs. I will have to blame myself, however, for the fact that the section on Force and Understanding causes me to think of The Wizard of Oz. My only excuse is that this association surely seems inevitable, given how the previous chapter provides a narrative that consciousness is propelled into Understanding via its confrontation with the whirling maelstrom that results when it seeks certainty through Perception, while this chapter closes with a scene in which consciousness finally steps behind the curtain of appearance – to realise that it was itself behind the curtain all along. Random associations aside, let’s see if I can make some sense of at least a small slice of this material.

I’ve discussed with Alexei in the comments to another post, how difficult I find this chapter in particular to read. I think this problem derives partially from how much time I’ve spent recently on the first chapter of Capital. As I mentioned in the previous post on Perception, Marx opens Capital roughly where Hegel begins the section on Perception, and then moves on to spend the bulk of the rest of the first chapter discussing themes that Hegel addresses in the chapter on Force and Understanding (along with some gestures to material Hegel includes in his material on Self-Consciousness). Marx’s argument about the fetish therefore involves an intricate, tacit metacommentary on Hegel’s approach to similar themes – and, as a consequence, my recent work, trying to tease out the nature of Marx’s argument, seems to be creating a fair amount of “interference”, as I now go back now to try to make sense of these parts of Hegel.

My work on Marx can’t be the only thing causing problems for me, however, as I’ve been procrastinating on writing about Hegel’s discussion of Force and Understanding for longer than I’ve been working intensively on the first chapter of Capital. Even though I generally find Hegel’s voicing clearer than Marx’s – in the sense that Hegel is generally more explicit about the perspective from which he is speaking at any given time – something about this particular section seems to blink in and out of focus for me. Hegel seems to me to loop several times in this section back through the shapes of consciousness he has discussed in earlier sections, without always clearly delineating these retrospective moments from the discussion of moments distinctive to Understanding – and sometimes without clearly delineating all of these things from the “for us” perspective he intends the reader of the text to adopt. As a result, I think I have a handle on the overarching argument, but many smaller-scale moves don’t seem to be falling neatly into place for me. Whether this is an intrinsic problem with this section or, as seems more likely, an intrinsic problem with me, every time I sit down to write on this material, I end up putting the text aside, deciding that I’m not yet sufficiently comfortable with my grasp of the material to write on it at any length. This post therefore represents an attempt to break through this long-standing logjam – without claiming that I’ve somehow achieved a breakthrough in terms of the clarity with which I now apprehend the text. Corrections are therefore most welcome.

Okay. Since this section, I think, loops back through points from the previous two sections, a few words on what binds these sections to one another might make a useful starting point. These three sections – on sense-certainty, perception, and understanding – each unfold within a space where consciousness takes its object to be something outside itself, which consciousness regards as separated from its own process of experience or apprehension. The “for us” of the text – the perspective meant to express the point of view of the reader, which Hegel will also sometimes refer to as the position that remains implicit for whatever shape of consciousness is being analysed at a given point in the text – is meant to grasp, throughout, that what consciousness takes to be distinct entities – an object, a process of apprehension, and a medium connecting the two – are simply moments of the same dynamic process that assumes these particular forms. This dynamic movement uniting these moments, however, is not yet apparent to the shapes of consciousness being analysed here. In each section, Hegel therefore tries to show, both how the moments in a dynamic process could present themselves to consciousness in the inadequate configuration analysed in that section, and also how consciousness’ own confrontation with the immanent limitations of such inadequate configurations, could drive it closer and closer to the “for us” of this text.

While Hegel traces a development of consciousness through each section, in each of these initial developments, consciousness fails to recognise its own implicatedness in the development of its object: consciousness takes its object to be a thing outside itself – as something essential, on which certainty can be grounded, and to which consciousness is opposed as inessential. The qualitative character of that “thing” – of the object – shifts with each stage, and consciousness along with it. But only when consciousness finally transcends Understanding does it confront the truth that it has all along been its own object – that what had previously presented themselves as opposed extremes (subject/object, being-for-self/being-for-other, form/content, etc.) had been moments in the same dynamic process.

Each section therefore tells a story of consciousness running up against immanent limits that it then transcends, while still preserving insights achieved via the confrontation with the impasse being overcome. Thus the search for sense-certainty, which attempts to achieve certainty through immersion in some particular “this” that is “meant”, leads consciousness to the realisation that such immersion aims implicitly at its opposite: universality emerges as the immanent truth of sense experience, and consciousness steps back from identifying certainty with some particular that is “meant”. Perception, which takes up from this insight, entails a search for certainty via the apprehension of universals conditioned by sense experience. This search in turn also leads, not to certainty, but to a perpetual restless movement that points consciousness toward the need for inherent universals not conditioned by sense perception. Understanding then takes over from this point, and searches for supersensible universals. Yet Understanding also reconstitutes, on this higher level, the problematic divide between consciousness and its object – taking unconditioned universals still as an object apart from consciousness. Understanding thus results in another unstable and restless configuration, which will drive immanently toward its own transcendence in the recognition by consciousness of its implicatedness in its object – in Self-Consciousness. The section on Understanding explores how such a transcendence unfolds.

Hegel has a great deal of fun with Understanding – positioning the gratification consciousness receives from it as a form of unintentional and misrecognised intellectual onanism. The reader – a voyeur looking in on Understanding’s distinctive pleasures – is meant to recognise that consciousness is enjoying itself in this activity – however much consciousness may protest that it engages in chaste contemplation of some external object, discerned with great effort through the veil of sense perception:

Understanding has, indeed, eo ipso, done away with its own untruth and the untruth in its object. What has thereby come to view is the notion of the truth as implicit inherent truth, which is not yet notion, or lacks a consciously explicit existence for itself (Fürsichseyn), and is something which understanding allows to have its way without knowing itself in it. (133)

And:

This process or necessity is, however, in this form, still a necessity and a process of understanding, or the process as such is not the object of understanding; instead, understanding has as its objects in that process positive and negative electricity, distance, velocity, force of attraction, and a thousand other things–objects which make up the content of the moments of the process. It is just for that reason that there is so much satisfaction in explanation, because consciousness being there, if we may use such an expression, in direct communion with itself, enjoys itself only. No doubt it there seems to be occupied with something else, but in point of fact it is busied all the while merely with itself. (163)

The question then becomes how consciousness can move through the experiences Understanding provides, to achieve the explicit realisation of its own implicatedness in its object. Hegel’s argument here is complex, and I am certain I won’t come close to doing it justice. He begins by stage whispering that the unconditioned universal – although achieved through the negation of perception – has the positive significance of establishing the unity of existence-for-self and existence-for-other, which, for Hegel, involves a unity of form and content. Through Understanding, however, consciousness cannot fully grasp this unity, because it still takes the unconditioned universal as its object – as an extreme opposed to itself. As a consequence, a distinction of form and content is reconstituted in Understanding. The remainder of the chapter explores the permutations of this form/content distinction, in order to unfold an account of how this distinction should finally be overcome.

Hegel first discusses Force (for us) as a dynamic process comprised of a movement through moments of dispersion into independent elements, which Hegel calls the Expression of Force, and moments of withdrawal back into unity, which Hegel calls Force proper. Understanding initially holds Force and its Expression in immediate unity – taking the distinction between these moments to exist only in thought. Yet these distinctions obtain objective existence in the movement of the interaction between Force and its Expression – for Force, understood as the inner, inherent being of things, lying behind the random flux of perceptual experience, must express itself, and this expression presents itself to consciousness initially as the interaction of two forces – one an inciting or attracting force that draws out the inner essential being of the other, enabling this inner being to be expressed. Yet to describe the interaction in this way is to adopt a one-sided perspective, for the interaction is reciprocal: each of the two forces serves as the inciting force that allows the inner essence of the other to be expressed and, in turn, expresses its own inner essence in response to the other’s incitement. This interaction between Force and its Other therefore involves a reciprocity or tautology that drives toward the realisation that these “two” forces are really one and the same – that force has no existence apart from its expression; that form and content are unified; that what are taken as distinct forces are moments of a dynamic unity.

Hegel uses his analysis of force to unfold a distinction between force as substance, and the true inner being of things. The play of forces now becomes the realm of Appearance – which Hegel positions as a development of the negative, in the form of a restless process of moments turning into their opposites, but with a positive content: the universal – here, however, positioned in the form of the object existing per se, with truth conceptualised as the inner being of the object. This true inner being, however, is taken to exist in a mediated relationship to consciousness, which can directly access only the realm of appearance. Understanding thus seeks to pierce the play of forces in order to discern the stable background that is now taken to be real and true – but also taken to be a negation of sensible world, such that the object of consciousness has come to be a supersensible realm lying beyond the sensuous world of appearance.

(A very quick aside: readers of the series on the first chapter of Capital may already have recognised that these are more or less the same moves Marx makes when analysing the category of Value – which he presents as a category of a supersensible realm that cannot be detected by immediate empirical observation, as a category that necessarily expresses itself in the Form of Value (exchange value), as something that appears initially to be a distinction in thought, but then is realised in the form of universal laws that emerge from the apparently random flux of the process of exchange, etc. Marx deploys the discussion in Capital to overtly similar effect to Hegel’s analysis here – embedding a kind of “Kantian” sensibility in his analysis of the reproduction of capital – while also tacitly offering a metacommentary on Hegel’s work as a buried subtext.)

Consciousness, in Understanding, takes the world of appearance as a mediation between itself and the inner being of things. The inner world, posited here as something beyond consciousness, presents itself as empty and inaccessible to knowledge. Hegel gestures in passing at approaches that stop at this point – accepting this barren “beyond” as the necessary limit of consciousness. He argues that such approaches fail to recognise that this barrenness derives from consciousness’ taking inherent being as an object outside itself – starting from the position that the inner, true realm is devoid of objective reality (and thus supersensible), and holding the position that it is also devoid of consciousness – leaving only a void that tosses consciousness necessarily back into the phenomenal realm of appearance. For Hegel, this conclusion follows, however, only if we remain bound to Understanding.

Hegel counterposes the position that the supersensible arises only in and through the realm of appearance, such that the play of forces in the realm of appearance, the flux of the sensible realm, is the mediation through which the supersensible inner world is generated. The realm of appearance thus fills what, to Understanding, presents itself as a void, by establishing an inner world through which the sensible world is transcended. At the same time, consciousness, as itself a moment in this dynamic process, is not walled off from an inner being intrinsically beyond itself, but is rather already implicated in its object.

As I write this section, with the text sitting beside me, open, but untouched, this chapter has spontaneously separated itself from the spine, and slithered out of the book and onto the floor: the entire section on Force and Understanding – and only the section on Force and Understanding – has now self-excised from my copy of the Phenomenology. I’m wondering how to interpret this. The silent unweaving of Spirit? Regardless, it’s getting late, and I need to stop for the night – unfortunately at what is probably a slightly misleading juncture (even assuming I haven’t been massively misreading Hegel’s voicing to this point). Worse, I have left myself still to write on the parts of this section that I find most difficult. Still, it would undoubtedly lead to worse results, for me to try to write on this text even later into the night… Apologies if I should have made this decision much earlier than this…

Note that, while my various posts on Phenomenology are working notes, written with long gaps in between and without a strong guiding thread linking the posts, this post does draw on some points developed in earlier posts on the section on Perception and Sense-Certainty. A compilation of links to other occasional posts on Phenomenology are listed in this post.

Abstraction, Contradiction, Critical Theory, Empiricism, Fetish, Negations, Political Economy, Reading Group, Self-Reflexivity

Grundlegung on Brandom

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on December 19, 2007

Tom from Grundlegung has an excellent post up on Brandom, exploring the issue of what tools Brandom might provide for threading through the discussion of freedom and objectivity. Tom frames the problem in the following way:

So, if freedom implies some spontaneous contribution from the agent and objectivity implies some receptive constraint upon the agent, we ought to be able to tell a story that neatly reconciles them both. The goal is to be able to demonstrate two main things. Firstly, that the authority that the agent has over themselves is not problematically curtailed by the authority exercised over it by things other than itself. Secondly, that the rational constraint upon the agent imposed by others and the world at large is not threatened by the special role that the agent has in determining the normative standards it is beholden to. In short, we want to show how it is not contradictory to suppose that the agent is both genuinely self-directing and genuinely externally directed.

Thus, we have a relatively abstract problem concerning the compatibility of spontaneity and receptivity that is motivated by a story about freedom and objectivity.

Tom goes on to provide a very nice precis of Brandom’s analytical moves – one that goes into more detail, and comes at Brandom from a different angle, than we were able to do in the recent presentation – relating the work back to Tom’s core question on freedom and objectivity:

To recapitulate, Brandom wants to tell a story that explains what contentful language is in terms of the practical capacity of agents to follow conceptual norms. However, this is not simply a narrowly linguistic matter because these conceptual norms determine what it is to judge and act correctly (in co-operation with higher-level conceptual norms that they themselves are subject to). While Brandom’s account remains on a formal level, in that it does not address what he calls the messy ‘retail’ content of particular norms and simply describes their abstract structural relation to semantic content in general, it nonetheless develops an understanding of many of the general features of these norms. As such, his work has a wide application to issues relating to conceptual normativity in the round. As we shall go on to see, this is why it bears upon freedom and objectivity.

Along the way, Tom gives an excellent synopsis of the key distinctions Brandom uses to unfold from social practice, the possibility of commitments that could be recognised to react back on social practice, and spends time analysing Brandom’s critique of approaches that rely on the standpoint of the community, and his “I-thou” alternative – all excellent material, some of which we’ve begun to touch on briefly here in the comments to various threads, but which Tom treats in a much more systematic and distilled (and therefore coherent!!) way than I’ve been able to unfold here. Tom then mobilises this discussion to draw together the following summary of Brandom’s overarching intent:

Brandom wants us to understand freedom in general as a form of rational self-constraint. His model is one whereby we are autonomously bound by norms by actively undertaking a commitment to them. This account of autonomy is used to explain how conceptual norms come to bind us, since in using concepts by making moves in reason-governed games we choose to undertake the commitments that specify the content of those concepts. However, he thinks that it is only the normative force that we introduce as individuals by binding ourselves. The content – to what rather than whether we are bound – is not up to us though. This content is determined through a complex process of negotiations with one’s fellows and is tracked by the deontic scorekeeping that agents must be able to engage in so as to enter the game of giving and asking for reasons. Features of this deontic scorekeeping also explain objectivity, or how our normative attitudes of taking certain uses of concepts to be correct are answerable to attitude-transcendent facts. This is because it introduces the permanent possibility of making a distinction between ascriptions of what one takes to be the case and ascriptions specifying the objects that determine whether one is correct.

Tom moves on from this analysis of Brandom’s project, to offer his own critical reaction in conclusion. These critical comments and questions are very rich, and I’d rather refer the reader back to the original, than attempt to summarise them here : go read! (And, to Tom: I’ll hopefully find the time in the next few days to ask some proper questions over at your site – apologies that this pointer is the best I can carve time for right now…)

Conversations, Critical Theory, Self-Reflexivity

Coffee and Spirit

9 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on December 17, 2007

So, in a flashback to last summer, I’ve been working on Hegel in the coffee shop. My habit when working on a difficult text is to photocopy or print out the section on which I’m intending to write, so that I can scribble over the text and in the margins, while working up how I want to characterise the argument. I also, though, carry the entire text with me in book form, so that I can flip around in sections I haven’t printed out (and I often scribble on this text too – I just try not to obliterate it with notes in the same way I do with my printouts).

So I’m at a table, printouts scattered all around me, scribbling madly on one page, and with the book sitting neglected in an outside corner of this chaos, when an older couple wanders in. I can see them staring at me – this isn’t unusual, and it’s probably somewhat inevitable to attract some attention when sprawling papers all over a table in a public space. After a few minutes, the gentleman wanders over: “Excuse me, could I borrow your book?”

Looking up, “Uh… sure.” I figured that he must know the text, but he volunteered, “I was curious what this was, because I’ve never seen the word ‘phenomenology’ before”. I volunteered a three-word suggestion for contextualising the term, and he said, “Could I take this back to our table for a bit?” I said sure, figuring he’d have a quick flip through and then bring it back.

Instead – and this was just unspeakably cute – he pulled his chair over beside his partner’s, and they sat there for a good forty-five minutes, reading through bits of the preface, pausing often to share impressions. I couldn’t hear much – the coffee shop plays music, and they were speaking quietly. I caught isolated words and phrases – “Oh! It’s philosophy!”… “Nature”… “Science”… “This isn’t easy…” They kept at it, long enough that I stopped trying to eavesdrop and went back to my own reading. Finally, the man wandered back over, somewhat regretfully returning the text: “That’s some difficult stuff!”

Given the lack of progress I feel I’m making, in trying to decide how to write on the section on Force and Understanding, I’m inclined to agree…

Coffee, Overheard, Reading, Writing

And While I’m Talking about Hegel

22 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on December 14, 2007

I also wanted to toss up one quotation from the concluding passages to Hegel’s Introduction to the Phenomenology – with apologies that I’m too tired to explain right now why I think this quote is interesting in relation to the discussion that has been taking place between myself, L Magee, and Andrew Montin, over how Brandom conceptualises “objectivity” (or, perhaps, how Habermas takes Brandom to conceptualise “objectivity”). To avoid possible misunderstandings, I will note briefly, that, in saying the quote is “interesting” in relation to these ongoing discussions, I don’t mean to imply that I think the quote resolves any aspect of this discussion in anyone’s favour. What caught my attention was more that I think Hegel gestures here toward a certain terrain on which Habermas is likely positioning at least some of Brandom’s statements. To me, at least, this leaves standing our open question as to how valid it might be to read Brandom as “Hegelian” in this respect. Since this is likely a somewhat internalist discussion to many readers (even LM and Andrew may wonder why I’m reproducing this quotation, given that I’m not explaining my reasoning), and this quotation is long and will be reproduced without background or commentary, I’ll tuck the quote below the fold. Read more of this post

Conversations, Critique, Negations, Self-Reflexivity

Perception

3 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on December 14, 2007

Some aspects of the recent discussion of Brandom have led me to read a bit more of Brandom’s interpretation of Hegel, which has led me in turn to think again about some dropped tangents from last summer’s reading group discussion of Phenomenology. I had meant to write much more on Phenomenology than I was able to do at the time, but have instead largely incorporated the stray thoughts that emerged from that reading, into some of the work I’ve been doing on Marx. Marx, of course, was directly engaging with the Science of Logic, rather than with the Phenomenology, when he was writing Capital – one of the reasons I’ve been so gestural and, in a sense, sloppy when pointing Marx’s strategy back to Hegel’s work, has been my awareness that it would make more sense, and be more intuitively persuasive, in terms of Marx’s own statements about his work, to raise these sorts of claims about textual and analytical strategy in relation to a discussion of the Logic. Fortunately, I seem to have conned a few stray souls who will be trapped in Melbourne over the holidays into working through the Logic with me – perhaps now creating the beginnings of a tradition of summer Hegel reading, but in all events instituting something more immediately practical for me than it likely will be for the other participants… ;-P

Still, turning back to Phenomenology as I have been over the past couple of days, it’s easy to be struck once again by certain similarities connecting the concerns and style of this text, with the sorts of moves Marx makes in Capital. I’ve been looking back particularly at the sections on Perception and Force & Understanding. It feels somewhat strange now, reading these sections, which have shaped the sorts of claims I’m making about Capital and which in particular sensitised me to the sorts of subtle textual cues that hint at the different perspectives or voices being expressed in particular moments of Marx’s text, to see now how this reading of Capital then reacts back and distances me from Hegel’s text in turn. I don’t intend specifically to develop this line of thought here, but I did want to take the opportunity to toss up a few scattered notes on these sections, while I’m thinking about them – I’ll start tonight with the section on Perception, and hopefully follow up soon on the section on Force and Understanding – although, given that I’ve promised to write on these sections before, this may be a somewhat tenuous offer… ;-P

The section on Perception takes over from the discussion of sense-certainty (Joseph Kugelmass has ensured that I will never be able to think of Hegel’s sense-certainty discussion without thinking of Spaceballs – I’m not sure whether to thank or criticise Joe for this apparently indelible association), which sought to demonstrate that a shape of consciousness that understands itself to be bound to sensuous immediacy – bound to “the This” – instead expresses its direct opposite: universality. I’ve discussed how this argument unfolds in greater detail previously.

Perception, by constrast, starts with the universal – but a universal it experiences in terms of two moments that are immediately distinguished from one another: a universal “I”, confronting a universal “object”. In one of his many stage whispers designed to keep readers from losing themselves in the shape of consciousness being analysed at particular stages in the text, Hegel reminds his readers that “for us”, looking at perception from a standpoint not immanent to perception itself, the “I” and its “object” exist in a logically necessitated relation, and represent two different forms in which the same process can appear, depending on whether this process is viewed from the perspective of pointing out and indicating (the “I” or process of perceiving), or whether this process is viewed from the perspective of a “simple fact” (the ”object” perceived). “We” grasp the essence of perception to be the universal as principle, and “we” see that perception fails to grasp the logical necessity that connects the “I” to the “object” as different moments or perspectives of the same process. Perception, however, sees the “I” and the “object” as only contingently related, and thus parcels out the distinction between essential and nonessential between these moments, treating the moments as indifferent to one another – and, in terms of the shape of consciousness analysed here, initially taking the “object” to be essential, and indifferent to whether it is perceived or not by the “I”, while the “I” is taken to be inessential and variable – more contingent than the object it perceives.

Hopefully readers will forgive me the tangent that this is where Marx starts Capital: with objects that present themselves as “things” “outside us”, whose material properties we can “discover” over time. These material properties are associated with use value, which presents itself as the invariant – in Hegel’s terms, the “essential” – substance of wealth, regardless of that wealth’s social form. That social form is contingent, nonessential, and historically variable – the “I” that understands itself to be only contingently and accidentally related to the material “object”.

Marx opens Capital in this way, I would suggest, to express that he has set himself a problem analogous to Hegel’s: how can we grasp the necessity that underlies this apparent contingency? How can we understand the intrinsic interconnectedness of this particular kind of “I” – the sort of consciousness whose self-understanding is expressed at the beginning of Capital – and the particular kind of “object” to which that “I” addresses itself – a material world that is understood as intrinsically disenchanted and indifferent to human perception? What sort of process involves the constitutions of such “I’s” and such “objects” as moments in its dynamic unfolding?

Okay. Back to Hegel. Hegel needs to unfold the “for us” of the text from within the categories available to the shapes of consciousness being analysed: otherwise, his own analysis would be applied to its object from the “outside” – it would be only contingently connected, rather than expressing a logical necessity that justifies Hegel’s approach as more than one among many possible duelling assertions, each dogmatically claiming superior access to some privileged perspective that stands outside what is being analysed. Hegel’s notion of science is bound together with his advocacy of this kind of argument:

For science cannot simply reject a form of knowledge which is not true, and treat this as the common view of things, and then assure us that itself is an entirely different kind of knowledge, and holds the other to be of no account at all; nor can it appeal to the fact that in this other there are presages of a better. By giving that assurance it would declare its force and value to lie in its bare existence; but the untrue knowledge appeals likewise to the fact that it is, and assures us that to it science is nothing. One barren assurance, however, is of just as much value as another. Still less can science appeal to presages of the better, which are to be found present in untrue knowledge and are there pointing the way toward science; for it would, on the one hand, be appealing again in the same way to a merely existent fact; and, on the other, it would be appealing to itself, to the way in which it exists in untrue knowledge, i.e. to a bad form of its own existence, to its appearance, rather than to its real and true nature (an und für sich) . For this reason we shall here undertake the exposition of knowledge as a phenomenon. (76)

Instead, Hegel wants to demonstrate the logical necessity, the intrinsic interconnectedness, of the shapes of consciousness he analyses, such that his own position emerges as a determinate negation, rather than an abstract or sceptical rejection, of what he criticises:

The completeness of the forms of unreal consciousness will be brought about precisely through the necessity of the advance and the necessity of their connection with one another. To make this comprehensible we may remark, by way of preliminary, that the exposition of untrue consciousness in its untruth is not merely a negative process. Such a one-sided view of it is what the natural consciousness generally adopts; and a knowledge, which makes one-sidedness its essence, is one of those shapes assumed by incomplete consciousness which falls into the course of the inquiry itself and will come before us there. [Note: Hegel is self-conscious here that his form of presentation is not adequate to the analytical principles he is, as a service to the reader, outlining here, and he therefore flags very explicitly that he does not intend to exempt, even the programmatic sorts of statements he makes here, from the sort of analysis he is calling for in this passage.] For this view is scepticism, which always sees in the result only pure nothingness, and abstracts from the fact that this nothing is determinate, is the nothing of that out of which it comes as a result. Nothing, however, is only, in fact, the true result, when taken as the nothing of what it comes from; it is thus itself a determinate nothing, and has a content. The scepticism which ends with the abstraction “nothing” or “emptiness” can advance from this not a step farther, but must wait and see whether there is possibly anything new offered, and what that is – in order to cast it into the same abysmal void. When once, on the other hand, the result is apprehended, as it truly is, as determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen; and in the negation the transition is made by which the progress through the complete succession of forms comes about of itself. (79)

Motivated by his concept of critique, Hegel shifts from the “for us” of his commentary on perception, to the question of what can be unfolded immanently from perception itself. He determines perception initially as a shape of consciousness that starts from the opposition between the “object” and the “I”, taking the “object” to be essential and indifferent to its perception, and the “I” to be insubstantial, inconstant, and inessential. In Hegel’s account, perception provides the determinate negation of sense-certainty, expressing sensuous, immediate universals that escaped expression in sense-certainty, which, confined to pointing to some immediate particular that is “meant”, instead managed only to express the negation of immediate particulars – the “most universal of all possible things”.

In perception, however, the “object” shows itself to be mediated by presenting itself as a “thing with many properties”. Here, and not in sense-certainty, sense knowledge can be expressed – not in the form of apprehension of an immediate particular, but instead in the perception of sensuous, immediate universals: the determinate properties an object possesses. Perception, in Hegel’s account, understands each property possessed by an “object” to be only self-related and indifferent to other properties. These properties are in turn differentiated from what Hegel calls “pure self-relation” – “Thinghood” – as a “medium” within which these properties coexist without affecting one another. Perception thus retains and repositions the “Here” and the “Now” discussed originally under the perspective of sense-certainty, as a medium for sensible properties – as a “Thing”.

Hegel next argues that, if determinate properties were truly as indifferent to one another as they are taken to be in this initial perspective, these properties would actually be indeterminate – properties become determinate and distinguishable from one another, not from residing indifferent to one another within the simple unifying medium of “Thinghood”, but instead as properties positioned in relation to other properties as their opposites. This relation of opposites, however, falls outside the simple unifying medium of “Thinghood”, pointing to a different sort of unity – a “repelling”, excluding unity, a moment of negation – which Hegel calls the “One”.

Hegel hints in various passages that more is to be said – but not at this point in the analysis (remembering, again, that he seeks to unfold his points immanently from perspectives available at each moment in his analysis). At this point in the text, he determines the “Thing” – the “object” of perception – in terms of three mutually-determining perspectives: a “universality, passive and indifferent” that unites constituent elements or “matters”; a simple negation that excludes opposite properties; and the multiplicity of properties, in relation to the first two moments. Hegel slides among these three immanently-unfolded perspectives, examining how the “Thing” is constituted in perception:

Taking the aspect that these differences belong to a “medium” indifferent to what is within it, they are themselves universal, they are related merely to themselves and do not affect each other. Taking, however, the other aspect, that they belong to the negative unity, they at the same time mutually exclude one another; but do no necessarily in the shape of properties that have a separate existence apart from the “also” connecting them. The sensuous universality, the immediate unity of positive being and negative exclusion, is only then a property, when oneness and pure universality are evolved from it and distinguished from one another, and when that sensuous universality combines these with one another. Only after this relation of the unity to those pure essential moments is effected, is the “Thing” complete. (115)

Hegel argues that consciousness is perceptual, to the extent that it takes this “Thing” as its object, and assumes an attitude of pure apprehension. Having thus unpacked moments of perception, with reference to perspectives on the “object” (or the “simple fact” perceived), he then moves to an analysis of perception viewed from the perspective of the “I” (or the process of perceiving).

In Hegel’s account, the “I” of perception directs itself to this complex “object”, assuming that truth can be found in the apprehension of the object. The “I” takes its “object” to be essential, but takes itself to be variable and non-essential – it takes its own relation to the “object” to be a contingent happening, and therefore worries that it might perceive the “object” wrongly and deceive itself as to the nature of the object. Perception takes the criterion of truth to be selfsameness – correspondence with an “object” that is taken to be selfsame. Any perceived nonidentity of the object is interpreted as due to a flaw in the process of perception – a flaw in the contingent perceiving “I” – not as something that might express a nonidentity of the “object”. Yet Hegel has just determined the “object” as nonidentical – as immanently pointing to multiple perspectives across which consciousness will therefore necessarily slide in the process of perception. The result of the apprehension of such an object is therefore not the fixed knowledge that the “I” of perception expected to find, but rather a restless movement around a circuit that nowhere provides a stable ground. Hegel then rapidly sketches the path followed by consciousness on confronting this circuit, first taking into itself – into the perceiving “I” – characteristics it had previously attributed to the “object”, and then taking as its object the process it had previously divided into the separate moments of the “object” and the “I”, and then attempting to secure the identity of the “object” by allocating the object’s contradictory moments to different things.

Hegel argues that each of these perspectives fails to secure the desired non-contradictory and selfsame “object”, but rather points necessarily back toward the perceptual object’s essentially relational character: the attempt to posit an object whose essential nature lies in what that object is “for itself”, indifferent to the process of perception, is undermined by the ways in which the form of universality associated with the perceptual object is conditioned by its derivation from sense knowledge, which introduces an intrinsic nonidentity that sits in tension with the reach of perception toward universality. As in his discussion of sense-certainty, Hegel follows the reach, rather than the grasp, of perception, arguing that the whirling restlessness characteristic of the movement of perceptual consciousness points to the necessity to transcend perception, in search of “unconditioned absolute universality”. In this way, perception immanently points beyond itself – to understanding.

More on subsequent sections as I have time. The posts on Phenomenology were never as organised or gathered into a series as the recent series on Capital has been. I have never aimed to present a coherent narrative on this work, and so the posts are much more scattered, both stylistically and conceptually. For the curious, some compilations of links back to previous Hegel discussions can be found in these older posts.

Abstraction, Contradiction, Critique, Negations, Philosophy of History, Reading Group, Self-Reflexivity

So My Laptop Died…

5 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on December 11, 2007

Well, it didn’t die quite this dramatically – it’s been more a process of slow decline, which reached a certain point of perfection the evening before we presented in Tassie, where the machine simply refused to recharge any more. It adds an interesting, examination-like intensity to conference presentations, knowing that the only tweaks you can make to your talk, must be made within the remaining 90 minutes of your current battery life. It’s entirely possible the laptop gremlins had my best interests in mind – certainly my dead laptop ensured that I got far more sleep, the evening before the presentation, than I think L Magee was able to rationalise with a fully-functional laptop at his disposal.

In any event, traveling back to Melbourne, I had high hopes that the problem would be something simple and inexpensive – maybe the power supply or battery. But no, it’s major – of the sort that it makes more sense to purchase something new, and thus of the sort that causes one to spend an entire evening researching what new toys have come on the market in the intervening years since one has last shopped for a laptop. I think I’ve found what I’m after, and will of course now spend the morning calling around to various places, clarifying ambiguities in specs and such and, if this is successful, no doubt spend the better part of the next couple of days configuring the new machine so that it’s ritualistically prepared for this summer of intensive dissertation writing. I lost no data in the demise of the old laptop, so this is more an opportunity to prune: what from that old machine really needs to be reincarnated in the new?

All of this is by way of saying that my online time has been and will continue to be somewhat limited over the next few days. My backup desktop at the university – a default machine that I inherited with my current office – is bolted to a desk in a position that sits very far back from where I have to sit to type on it, placing the screen an uncomfortable distance from my near-sighted self. And anyone who tried to read along with my response to Andrew Montin’s question yesterday, will also realise that the desktop’s keyboard is prone (at least, when confronting my laptop-conditioned typing reflexes) to duplicating some letters, while omitting others (trust me, I caught far more of these than made their way through to the published comment).

I’d like to write something following up on Andrew’s questions, looking into Brandom’s critique of “I-we” conceptions of the social, his references to history, his appeals to “the theorist” at key points in his argument – and, basically, open up the question of how immanent and reflexive Brandom can actually be seen to be. These were originally the sorts of points with which I had thought of concluding the ASCP presentation, and which, rightly or wrongly, I cut for purposes of time, but which I’d like to raise for discussion here. Andrew has opened these questions himself [er… perhaps I should say: Andrew has asked questions which have reminded me of these questions – perhaps not quite the same thing – certainly from Andrew’s point of view… ;-P], which hopefully suggests we were on the right track, in at least a rough sense, in wanting to raise these issues, in tandem with the vexed question of how Brandom understands “objectivity” and the notion of how our discursive practice opens the space for our “accountability” to dimensions of the world that do not depend on our perception or acknowledgment for their existence. I may wait, though, to write on these things, until I have a keyboard that doesn’t make me feel like I’m stuttering. (Of course, the new laptop keyboard may have its own issues – I therefore hereby blame all errors in my posts for the next several months – the conceptual, as well as the typographical – on whatever machine I happen to be purchasing to replace my sadly-defunct Dell…)

[Note: Image @2006 The Age, URL: http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2006/07/30/470_dell4,0.jpg%5D

Events, Procrastination, Technology, Writing

Hobart Roundup

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on December 8, 2007

The conference just finished, with the final day including: some excellent presentations (as in all other days of the conference); an AGM for the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy, which has existed as an informal organisation for some years, but which is this year incorporating itself as a formal body, which led to some interesting organisational discussions; and a fantastic, provocative closing panel on the future of continental philosophy that, for an interloper like me, was incredibly useful, quite aside from the issues officially being debated, in providing background information on the history and institutional organisation of philosophy in Australian universities.

I found myself sketching a number of notes during the final day in particular, relating to how to explain “what I do” in terms that might be intelligible to other people (of course, this just means that I’ll get back to Melbourne, try to talk to a sociologist, and find that now I’m making no sense to that discipline… ;-P). It’s a funny feature of a conference like this, how much it makes me feel like a sociologist – at the same time as I enjoy and believe that I follow the papers and the discussion, I inevitably find myself wincing at how “sociological” my own material sounds compared to anything else I was hearing. If I were attending a sociology conference, of course, I’d be feeling like a philosopher or an historian… Such is interdisciplinary life…

I was amused to find myself fielding the following questions over and over again at the conference:

First, when people learned we were presenting on Brandom (and assuming the reaction to this wasn’t “who?”), the question was: “Are you presenting on the big book?” Answer: yes, indeed, we read the big book – and, in fact, have also read the “little” book, which, for some currently unreconstructable reason, motivated us to tackle the big book… Unfortunately, I also read what appears to be the unknown book, at least to most folks attending this conference – but only after we had presented our paper (for some reason, this struck me as a logical form of leisure activity after the presentation – don’t ask…). In that book, I found what seems to be a relatively clear answer to some of the questions LM and I had been debating with one another before our presentation, debates which led to much last-minute revising on both our parts, in the hope of being a bit clearer about what we weren’t certain we yet understood. This whole experience suggests to me that, next time around, I should perhaps try to read, not only the “big” book, but indeed all the books, before scoping a presentation topic… ;-P

I should also note that L Magee seemed somewhat displeased by my efforts to reassure people that the “big” book perhaps wasn’t quite as difficult as it seems on first glance: some first impressions, apparently, are best left undeconstructed… ;-P

The second question we consistently received – more of a startled observation, really – came bursting out when people learned where we’re currently studying: “Really?! I didn’t know they had a philosophy department!” *shuffle shuffle* Yes, well… There might be a reason for that…

Onto other topics:

For those wanting something substantive to read, Nate has a question up at what in the hell…, which relates to how “my” Marx – the Marx I’m claiming becomes an immanent, reflexive critical theorist – maps onto more standard periodisations used in Marx scholarship: assuming that it’s plausible to think of Marx as an immanent reflexive critical theorist (which, I realise, some readers may find to require a bigger leap than others), is this interpretation something that can be plausibly applied to his entire corpus? If not, when did his work begin to express recognisably immanent reflexive characteristics? When did his work most completely express these characteristics? How would this map on to other ways of interpreting the periodisation of Marx’s corpus?

I’m very tired at the moment and, tiredness aside, I’m not sure my answer to this question is as “strong” as it perhaps should be. I’m comfortable reading the first volume of Capital as an immanent reflexive critique in the sense in which I use this term. I see some aspects of Capital as critical of some earlier positions Marx would have held – as a sort of self-diagnosis or self-critique, of what I think Marx comes to characterise as insufficiently historicised positions. So I see him as retaining a great deal from his earlier work, but only by transforming it into a much more historically specified perspective made available immanently within the context he is criticising.

I tend to see the Grundrisse as a major transition point, where Marx shifts to a more explicitly immanent perspective – but I’m not an expert on the evolution of Marx’s thought, and so this is an impressionistic position. There are moments in earlier works that are very consistent with what Marx does in Capital. There are also, just to keep things interesting, moments in Capital that aren’t consistent with what I’m claiming Marx is doing in Capital. I tend to read these moments as eddies in and around a main argumentative current – and to interpret them variously as vestiges of earlier positions (Marx often lifts passages from earlier works into Capital – sometimes, I think, being so fond of a formulation that he doesn’t fully reconsider how it might need to be worked to be adequate to its transplanted context), or incautious polemical statements, or conjunctural passages where Marx seems to have a very specific context in mind, without explicitly marking that context. Of course, it also doesn’t necessarily trouble me that there should be inconsistencies: I’m trying to explore what the work can suggest about a particular potential for theoretical work, rather than claiming perfection or completion in the realisation of this potential.

I haven’t done sufficient work to feel confident about what I think Marx does after publishing the first volume of Capital. I read the second and third volumes as compatible with the way I read volume one, although the incomplete nature of these works means that the sort of careful textual unfolding I’ve been doing with the first volume, wouldn’t be able to proceed in exactly the same way: the form of presentation is muddier, as are a number of substantive theoretical issues. Marx spends his final years doing intensive anthropological studies, and it would be extremely interesting to look into whether any of that reacts back on what he then thought would be required for an adequate critical theory – but this issue remains something that I’m curious about, but have never looked into directly.

Apologies for not being more coherent on this – it’s hitting me as I type how tired I am from the conference. Time, I think, for me to go play in Hobart, and let others say what they think about this question.

Events, Overheard, Political Economy, Professional Life

Transforming Communication

10 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on December 7, 2007

I’ve cut and pasted the ASCP conference paper on Habermas and Brandom below the fold, for those interested. The process of preparing for this paper has been interesting, among other things, in shaking out certain “what the hell is going on there?” questions that L Magee and I both share in relation to Brandom’s work – while these questions, and our debates around them prior to the presentation, led us to recast slightly what we said at this event, the material posted below the fold doesn’t clearly indicate those areas where we have open and active questions about Brandom’s project: when both of us are back in Melbourne, we’ll hopefully have time to put a few of those issues up on the blog, through some follow-up posts on Making It Explicit.

This particular talk hugged very close to the terms of a debate between Habermas and Brandom, and also provided a lot of background information that might not be as useful to folks who regularly read things here. Some of this background material – particularly on Brandom – suffers from code switching problems: those are my fault, as I wrote those sections of the piece, and so I’ll apologise for trampling all over Brandom’s vocabulary (and, likely, his framework as well).

We are actually intending to develop a more polished and rigorous article out of this, so critical comments and questions would be extremely helpful, for those who have an interest in this sort of material. (Note that, as we had a generous 40 minute allocation for speaking, the piece is somewhat long!) Read more of this post

Critical Theory, Dialogue, Drafts, Events, Linguistics, Reading Group, Self-Reflexivity

Change of Scenery

4 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on December 4, 2007

I’m away to Hobart today for the ASCP conference, where L Magee and I are apparently co-presenting something called “Transforming Communication: Habermas and Brandom in Dialogue” – first I’ve heard of it, but then I’m always the last to know…

I’m not sure what the net access situation will be from the conference, so things may be a bit quiet around here until next week. Apologies for not getting something up on Brandom before I left – I will definitely be putting some things up once I’m back.

Just to give folks something new to look at while I’m away, the website design, which has been more or less the same since Rough Theory was first created back in early 2005, has now itself been transformed. The main idea is to make the text more readable – hopefully the new design will at least achieve that. But feel free to let me know if the new look doesn’t work, if you have suggestions for improving the design (any pet peeves you’ve been wishing to mention about the site? here’s your chance!), or if something breaks because of the change. Those who find the whole thing simply unacceptable can use the theme switcher in the right column to shift the site back to its old look.

Wish L Magee and me luck in Tasmania! Take care all.

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