Rough Theory

Theory In The Rough

Yearly Archives: 2007

Sociology and Psychology

10 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on January 17, 2007

Earlier today, I was curious about some aspects of a discussion taking place at I Cite, which itself referred to discussions at K-Punk and Poetix, and which revolves loosely around questions of apocalypticism. Since I’m still easing myself into the thought-space of these blogs, I wasn’t confident that I was understanding the theoretical context for the discussion, and so I drew Sinthome’s attention to the discussion with a few questions, which then led to a very nice post over at Larval Subjects on how we might use a psychoanalytic framework to interpret apocalyptic fantasies manifest in various contexts. I wanted here to pick up a few threads from Sinthome’s post – hoping that it’s not too rude first to draw someone else into a discussion, and only then decide to jump in myself… Perhaps it will minimise my rudeness somewhat, that I intend to write this post at a slight tangent to the original discussion, and to focus, not so much on apocalypticism, as on the importance of psychological theory to the project of critical theory.

In my writings thus far – both on this blog, and in more formal contexts – I have tended to focus heavily on how critical theory can provide an historically immanent and self-reflexive account of the forms of subjectivity it wishes to criticise, as well as the forms of subjectivity expressed in its own critical ideals. I’ve adopted this emphasis because I find that many critical theoretic approaches – including some that would describe themselves as self-reflexive, immanent critiques – seem to struggle to conceptualise critical ideals in a thoroughly historical and immanent way. From my perspective, this failure places such approaches – often quite unintentionally – into a non-reflexive position that, from the standpoint of a more consistent historical theory, can be shown to mystify elements of our social context that are generative of critical ideals. While this criticism may sound somewhat abstract and scholastic, I believe it has some profound implications for critical theory’s ability to connect with social and intellectual movements “on the ground” – a stance that, admittedly, I am far from having grounded adequately in my writings thus far.

As I have focussed on these issues, however, I have remained aware that simply establishing the historicity or the social grounding of critical forms of subjectivity is only part of the task. Such a critical historical analysis can take us to a certain point: it can help us understand the forms of subjectivity – including critical forms of subjectivity – that are historically plausible at specific times and – crucially for political practice – it can help us understand the relationships that connect these forms of subjectivity in specific ways to elements of our social context that we experience and articulate as forms of “objectivity”. From here, though, the path to be followed by critical theory becomes much more complex, because it is from this point that we have to ask ourselves whether we intend just to understand the world, or also to change it.

This question, I should note, is less acute for theoretical approaches that believe that critique speaks with the voice of the future – that critical ideals are simply giving voice to the way in which history would trend in any event. For approaches that reject this position and believe that subjectivity matters – that desired political outcomes will not be achieved through some kind of automatic and “objective” movement of history – some kind of psychological theory is, I suspect, required to complete the project of critical theory. The resultant critical theory would thus deploy both sociological and psychological theory to understand the possible, likely or probable actions of subjects whose actions constitute, and are conditioned by, a particular field of historical potentials.

The most basic kind of psychological theory – a theory whose specifically psychological character is often not recognised as such – is the simple faith that bringing truth to light itself has a transformative power – that if you teach it, or reveal it, they will act. This psychological theory is in some respects quite pervasive – grounded in a (tacit or explicit) belief that wrong acts are the result of error, and the correction of error (or the achievement of self understanding, or similar ideal) will therefore result in correct action. An element of this theory probably underlies most visions of critique, even if most contemporary critical theories would qualify and limit their belief in the power of truth to various degrees.

A number of more explicit psychological theories have been developed to account for those cases in which “truth” has been brought to light – and yet the anticipated transformative effect has not taken place. These theories – of “ideology”, “false conciousness” and the like – are quite varied: at some point, I should go through them more systematically on the blog. For present purposes, since the topic of apocalyptic fantasy started me on this tangent, I will explore only one: Adorno’s proposal for how a critical psychology might complement a critical sociology in making sense of the appeal of social movements that seem oriented specifically to destruction.

Since Sinthome’s post provided the immediate spark for these reflections, I’ll briefly draw attention to some elements of that post to get us underway. Sinthome begins by citing examples of apocalyptic fantasies from a wide range of contexts, and then asks how we should understand this phenomenon. I’ll quote Sinthome’s analysis at some length:

…the psychoanalytic approach suggests that we ask how our desire is imbricated with these particular representations or scenarios and enjoins us to analyze how our thought collectively arrives at these visions to present rather than others. How is it that we are to account for the omnipresence of these scenarios in popular imagination… An omnipresence so great that it even filters down into the most intimate recesses of erotic fantasy as presented in the consulting room? In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud presents an interesting take on how we’re to understand anxiety dreams such as the death of a loved one. There Freud writes that,

Another group of dreams which may be described as typical are those containing the death of some loved relative – for instance, of a parent, of a brother or sister, or of a child. Two classes of such dreams must at once be distinguished: those in which the dreamer is unaffected by grief, so that on awakening he is astonished at his lack of feeling, and those in which the dreamer feels deeply pained by the death and may even weep bitterly in his sleep.

We need not consider dreams of the first of these classes, for they have no claim to be regarded as ‘typical’. If we analyse them, we find that they have some meaning other than their apparent one, and that they are intended to conceal some other wish. Such was the dream of the aunt who saw her sister’s only son lying in his coffin (p. 152). It did not mean that she wished her little nephew dead; as we have seen, it merely concealed a wish to see a particular person of whom she was fond and whom she had not met for a long time – a person whom she had once before met after a similarly long interval beside the coffin of another nephew. This wish, which was the true content of the dream, gave no occasion for grief, and no grief, therefore, was felt in the dream (SE 4, 248).

No doubt this woman experienced some guilt for her desire for this man and therefore preferred to dream her nephew dead as an alibi of seeing him once again, rather than directly facing her desire. Could not a similar phenomenon be at work in apocalyptic scenarios?… In short, Freud’s point is that we should look at horrifying manifest content such as this as enabling the fulfillment of some wish. My thesis here would be that whenever confronted with some horrifying scenario that troubles the analysand’s minds or dreams, the analyst should treat it like a material conditional or “if/then” statement, seeking to determine what repressed wish or desire might become possible for the analysand were the scenario to occur (e.g., being fired would allow the analysand to pursue his true desire, the loss of a limb would allow the analysand to finally escape her father’s desire for her to play violin, etc.).

Here, perhaps, would be the key to apocalyptic fantasies: They represent clothed or disguised utopian longings for a different order of social relations, such that this alternative order would only become possible were all of society to collapse.

It speaks to Sinthome’s gentleness and optimism that the inspiration for this analysis is derived from what Freud labels “atypical” examples of dreams of death. While quoting enough to alert the reader to the existence of another interpretive direction, Sinthome unfolds an interpretation solely from that category of dreams that Freud says “we need not consider”, and elides direct reference to those dreams Freud regarded as more “typical”, namely:

It is otherwise with those dreams in which the death of a beloved relative is imagined, and in which a painful affect is felt. These signify, as their content tells us, the wish that the person in question might die…

Sinthome thus expresses the hope that apocalyptic fantasies manifest a desire for something other than their explicit content – something more than the desire for destruction and death. I raise this point, not to hold up Freud’s text against Sinthome’s appropriation – for we have no obligation for interpretive fidelity to Freud’s work and, in any event, even Freud’s “typical” examples contain permutations that might be amenable to Sinthome’s appropriation (Freud suggests that “typical” dreams can manifest historical content, for example – ephemeral wishes once felt, but long since rejected, etc.) – but because I think it provides a good frame for understanding Adorno’s very different attempt to merge psychoanalytic theory with sociology in the service of critique. If Freud offers two interpretive paths, one of which Sinthome has followed in the hopes that apocalyptic fantasy might signify a nonmanifest content – a longing for transcendence – we can understand Adorno’s work as an attempt to reflect seriously on the second path – on the possibility that certain mass movements might genuinely desire to achieve what their fantasies express: destruction and death.

Adorno’s argument (if I can use this term for someone so committed to avoiding linear, developmental analytical forms) is complex – and not necessarily in ways that are productive for theoretical reflection by those not committed to Adorno’s own framework. For present purposes, I won’t attempt to outline Adorno’s interpretation in any comprehensive way, but will instead comment on just a few elements within a single text: Adorno’s “Sociology and Psychology”, published in the New Left Review in two parts, in Nov-Dec, 1967, and Jan-Feb 1968.

Adorno begins this text with a rejection of the concept of objective historical laws, and suggests – as I have suggested above – that this rejection implies the need to supplement a critical sociological theory with a critical psychology. Much of the article then revolves around two interrelated, aphoristically unfolded, arguments: first, a critique of other attempts to merge sociology and psychology, with particular focus on Talcott Parsons, but with frequent sideswipes at many other theoretical traditions; and second, an often scathing critique of Freud and of various psychoanalytic traditions, in the service of an attempt to appropriate Freudian categories in a more historicised and critical form. Adorno’s arguments are often brilliant and provocative, and I will try to revisit them in appropriate detail in another post. For present purposes, however, I want only to isolate out a couple of points that seem – to me, at least – to have potentially broader relevance for theoretical reflection on the psychological undercurrents of mass movements.

What I find particularly interesting and disturbing in this text is the very simple and, once stated, obvious question that motivates Adorno’s analysis: what might happen, psychologically, to individuals who possess critical sensibilities in circumstances in which those individuals are too frightened or overwhelmed to act?

Adorno unfolds an extraordinarily pessmistic analysis in response to this question, focussing on the strain placed on an ego whose reality testing abilities enable it to discover both the potential for transformation – and thus the non-necessity, the non-doxic character, of sacrifices imposed on the individual within this form of social life – and the isolation and impotence of the individual to bring such a transformation about. Adorno argues – and I won’t elaborate on his analysis here – that much of what Freud took to be innate psychological structure derives, instead, from the violence of socialisation into such a context, from the scars inflicted by the ego on itself when, confronted with its own powerlessness, it responds by repressing conscious awareness of potentials for transformation, and driving emancipatory impulses into the unconscious realm.

Adorno suggests that several consequences follow from this form of socialisation: a brittleness and attenuation of the ego, which renders it easier for the ego itself to be overwhelmed by infantile and irrational impulses; the presence of unusually strong barriers separating the unconscious from other dimensions of psychic life, which has the effect of “freezing” the unconscious in an infantile state, and undermining the ability to sublimate infantile desires; and – because on some level the awareness of transformative potentials persists – an unconscious reservoir of rage at the unnecessary sacrifices imposed by an unjust society. All of these things, Adorno suggests, encourage susceptibility to forms of mass mobilisation that are directed specifically against the realisation of potentials for transformation, and that tap into impulses to destroy others (particularly members of vulnerable minorities whose social exclusion can be misrecognised as unmerited freedom from hated social constraints) as well as desires for self-destruction.

Adorno’s account thus suggests that widespread desires for destruction or self-destruction might be “typical” – particularly in moments when individual powerlessness comes to be experienced as particularly acute. While fuelled in some sense by an experience of transformative potentials, these destructive desires are not, within Adorno’s framework, masks for utopian longing, but blind rage and pain at sacrifices unjustly imposed – a rage and pain that, as I’ve discussed here before, can sometimes try to “rationalise” its own sacrifices through the destructive imposition of equivalent sacrifices on others.

I’ll stop here (it’s getting very late on my end and, in any event, I’ve probably said as much as I can on Adorno without diving into the murky depths…) with just one final point of clarification to avert possible confusion: the structure of this post, ending as it does with Adorno’s account, may suggest that I approve of his interpretation. In reality, I’m actually quite critical of this dimension of Adorno’s work. Specifically (and I can’t fully develop this point here, as I haven’t explored the issue sufficiently above), Adorno uses this appropriation of psychoanalytic theory, among other things, to account for certain qualitative characteristics of forms of subjectivity that I think can be explained far more easily via sociological analysis. As well, there is a certain element to Adorno’s reworking of Freud that – for all its scathing criticisms – is a bit too literal and loyal, such that the analysis at its core likely requires Freud’s psychodynamic structures to be more “material” than I suspect they’re regarded even within most psychoanalytic traditions. Although I’ve outlined a few elements of Adorno’s analysis above in order to give a sense of what he is trying to do, I’m not particularly drawn to the actual contents of his psychological theory.

I am, however, drawn to his question – the question of whether the experience of living in a society that suggests the potential for its own transformation might, under certain historical circumstances, render likely the emergence of abstractly destructive sensibilities.

At the same time, I am cautious of elements in Sinthome’s post – of how quickly the interpretation jumps from the claim (which the Freud quotation already reveals as somewhat contentious) that manifest fantasies of destruction might have some kind of non-destructive latent content, to the even more contentious claim that the specific latent content might be utopian in character. (I want to be very careful here, as I’m aware that Sinthome was writing an off-the-cuff conversational piece – and with some provocation from me, at that – and I don’t want to criticise the post as though it had been intended to represent a fully developed theory.)

I am, however, drawn to way in which Sinthome’s approach captures the intersubjective character of what we generally experience and articulate as individual and subjective experience – avoiding Adorno’s reduction to a materialistically conceived notion of psychological “structures”, and opening the potential to analyse the ways in which our intersubjective interactions can enable us to rearticulate even the forms of trauma to which Adorno calls attention, while opening a way beyond the pessimism intrinsic to Adorno’s approach.

I’m unfortunately not in the position of offering a personal sense of how I would tackle these issues – a side effect of my focus on the sociological side of the equation. I do, though, think the underlying issue of the role of psychological theory within critical theory is an important one, which I should revisit with much greater regularity than I’ve done here thus far… For the moment, though, I’ll give the topic – and myself – a bit of a rest… ;-P

Updated to add: Sinthome has responded over at Larval Subjects, with some important qualifications to my analysis, which then leads me – as a novelty – to try to explain what I actually mean. ;-P I’m not sure I do a better job over there than I did here, but perhaps in all this circling around my point, I’ll eventually uncover what that point might be… ;-P

Conversations, Critical Theory, Psychology

Two Wrongs? Or the Opposite of an Opposite?

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on January 16, 2007

Note: This post originated as a comment on LMagee’s post on Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage” discussion, but grew too long to post directly as a comment, so I’ve lifted it here… Following the convention in these discussions, quotations and references are taken from the source text here, problematic as that might be…

***

Okay. What to do with this passage… Perhaps perversely, I’m inclined to read this section as a critical text – as something concerned with setting out what I would tend to call a standpoint of critique to ground the normative evaluation of the social relationship being described. Of course, within Hegel’s framework, critique is never abstractly negative – it never moves through the simple and direct rejection of what is being criticised. Instead, critique moves, in the first instance, precisely through a recognition of the necessity of what it criticises. Critique thus first seeks to make sense of its target – to move beyond the object of critique by first grasping it, and then demonstrating how that object is inadequate to a certain standard (generally, a standard that can understood to be immanently implied by the object itself, so that the target of critique can be criticised for the way in which it fails to achieve its own goals…).

On one level, of course, this critical dimension of Hegel’s text is quite clear and explicit (inasmuch as one is ever safe using these particular words to describe Hegel…). The discussion of lordship and bondage in a narrow sense is situated within a longer series of reflections on self-consciousness, which centre on the need for acknowledgement or recognition by another self-consciousness, and which outline what is intended, I think, to be a normative ideal of uncoerced mutual recognition. Hegel describes this normative ideal of recognition in the following terms:

Self-consciousness has before it another self-consciousness; it has come outside itself. This has a double significance. First it has lost its own self, since it finds itself as an other being; secondly, it has thereby sublated that other, for it does not regard the other as essentially real, but sees its own self in the other.

It must cancel this other. To do so is the sublation of that first double meaning, and it therefore a second double meaning. First, it must set itself to sublate the other independent being, in order thereby to become certain of itself as true being, secondly, it thereupon proceeds to sublate its own self, for this other is itself.

This sublation in a double sense of its otherness in a double sense is at the same time a return in a double sense to its self. For, firstly, through sublation, it gets back itself, because it becomes one with itself again through the cancelling of its otherness; but secondly, it likewise gives otherness back again to the other self-consciousness, for it was aware of being in the other, it cancels this its own being in the other and thus lets the other again go free.

This process of self-consciousness in relation to another self-consciousness has in this manner been represented as the action of one alone. But this action on the part of the one has itself the double significance of being at once its own action and the action of that other as well. For the other is likewise independent, shut up within itself, and there is nothing in it which is not there through itself. The first does not have the object before it only in the passive form characteristic primarily of the object of desire, but as an object existing independently of itself, over which therefore it has no power to do anything for its own behalf, if that object does not per se do what the first does to it. The process then is absolutely the double process of both self-consciousnesses. Each sees the other as the same as itself; each itself does what it demands on the part of the other, and for that reason does what it does, only so far as the other does the same. Action from one side only would be useless, because what is to happen can only be brought about by means of both. (179-182)

My temptation is to take the passage above as a sort of preliminary determination of a critical ideal – an ideal pointing to the potential for mutual intersubjective recognition. This ideal then provides a critical standpoint against which the forms of intersubjectivity outlined in the subsequent passages can then be assessed, to determine how well they enable the potentials for such mutual recognition to be expressed. Having set out this ideal, Hegel next moves from the ideal to an analysis of specific forms of intersubjectivity – with the intent, I believe, of evaluating these forms of intersubjectivity against the critical standard he has articulated. He flags this move in the text:

Consciousness finds that it immediately is and is not another consciousness, as also that this other is for itself only when it cancels itself as existing for itself, and had self-existence only in the self-existence of the other. Each is the mediating term to the other, through which each mediates and unites itself with itself; and each is to itself and to the other an immediate self existing reality, which, at the same time, exists thus for itself only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.

This pure conception of recognition, of duplication of self-consciousness within its unity, we must now consider in the way its process appears for self-consciousness. (184-185 – bold text mine)

Where Hegel goes next, as I read the text, is to an analysis of various forms of intersubjectivity – each of which, I think, he analyses in order to measure them against his “pure conception” – his critical ideal – of the potential for mutual recognition.

He begins by analysing a form of intersubjectivity that reads, to me, a bit like a Hobbesian state of nature: a form of “intersubjectivity” in which subjects confront one another essentially outside the realms of established social (intersubjective) relationships. I read Hegel here as trying, essentially, to embed this conception of the state of nature within his framework – reframing the concept of the war of all against all, within his own account of how self-consciousness attempts to achieve self-certainty. Hegel thus interprets the forms of subjectivity expressed in the war of all against all as attempts by self-consciousness to affirm its own existence by risking its own life, and by trying to annihilate the life of the other – both of which Hegel interprets as attempts by self-consciousness to assert its lack of dependence on life – its potential to exist even outside of and beyond life. In these passages, Hegel seeks to make sense of this form of intersubjectivty within his system, while also judging it as a failed attempt, as attempt that could never have achieved its aim:

This trial by death, however, cancels both the truth which was to result from it, and therewith the certainty of self altogether. For just as life is the natural “position” consciousness, independence without absolute negativity, so death is the natural “negation” of consciousness, negation without independence, which thus remains without the requisite significance of actual recognition. Through death, doubtless, there has arisen the certainty that both did stake their life, and held it lightly both in their own case and in the case of the other; but that is not for those who underwent this struggle. They cancel their consciousness which had its place in this alien element of natural existence; in other words, they cancel themselves and are sublated as terms or extremes seeking to have existence on their own account. But along with this there vanishes from the play of change the essential moment, viz. that of breaking up into extremes with opposite characteristics; and the middle term collapses into a lifeless unity which is broken up into lifeless extremes, merely existent and not opposed. And the two do not mutually give and receive one another back from each other through consciousness; they let one another go quite indifferently, like things. Their act is abstract negation, not the negation characteristic of consciousness, which cancels in such a way that it preserves and maintains what is sublated, and thereby survives its being sublated. (188 – italics mine)

So the goal here, as I read it, is to understand a particular form of subjectivity – to position that form of subjectivity with a theoretical system, so that it becomes clear this theoretical system can grasp that form of subjectivity in its qualitative specificity, without abstracting or generalising those qualitative characteristics away, as would be the case if the specific form of subjectivity were merely grouped into some higher and more formal category – while also making a clear judgment that this form of subjectivity, while comprehensible, can also be criticised for its inadequacy to its aims.

I take the same strategy to be in play, as the discussion moves more directly into the topic of lordship and bondage: I think that the intention is to hold this form of intersubjectivity (and the forms of subjectivity associated with it) up to critique, where critique will follow the same form of showing that this form of intersubjectivity can be comprehended, but is also inadequate to what it intends to achieve.

Hegel suggests that the attempt to affirm self-consciousness through the war of all against all, while inadequate to its aims, nevertheless led to the achievement of an historical insight: the insight that life, as well as “pure” self-consciousness, is essential to self-consciousness (83). What follows the achievement of this insight is the emergence of a new form of intersubjectivity – expressed in the lordship and bondage relationship – that Hegel characterises as an attempt to distribute different aspects of self-consciousness across hierarchical social roles. In Hegel’s account, this new form of intersubjectivity appears to create a situation in which the Master achieves recognition – and therefore self-certainty – through the subordination of the bondsman. Hegel argues, however, that the essential inequality of the relationship undermines the Master’s ability to achieve any genuine self-certainty:

But for recognition proper there is needed the moment that what the master does to the other he should also do to himself, and what the bondsman does to himself, he should do to other also. On that account a form of recognition has arisen that is one sided and unequal. (191)

This one-sided and unequal form of recognition Hegel then judges as inadequate – immanently – because “this object does not correspond to its notion” (192).

Hegel then moves from analysing bondage as it appears in its relationship to lordship, to analysing the form of self-consciousness generated by bondage, as it is “in and for itself” (194). Here Hegel moves into a complex discussion of how the formative experience of fear on the one hand, and service on the other, generate the historical conditions of possibility for an awareness that desire can be restrained and directed into the transformation of nature. In Hegel’s account, this combination of fear and service transforms the nature of desire, making it possible for the bondsman to become aware of “having and being a ‘mind of his own'” through the externalisation of self in the purposive transformation of nature (196).

The question then becomes whether Hegel, having established the necessity of the experience of bondage as a formative moment in the constitution of self-consciousness, intends to suggest that the form of intersubjectivity that gave rise to this formative experience remains essential. Does Hegel believe, in other words, that a social context characterised by class domination continues to be necessary – such that his theoretical system then serves as a rationalisation for such domination by offering the bondsmen the consolation that, in spite of appearances, this social arrangement is better for them than for the Master…

Hegel’s text, I believe, suggests that he does not believe this form of intersubjectivity must – or should – be preserved. Instead, the text suggests (at least to this point – I’ll want to revisit this passage again, from the standpoint of the work as a whole) that he accords the master-bondsman form of intersubjectivity the same status that he accorded the form of intersubjectivity expressed in the war of all against all: that he regards it as a constitutive moment for the realisation of self-consciousness, in that it leads to the historical achievement of a particular insight about self-consciousness, but that he also regards this form of intersubjectivity as, in itself, a failed attempt to achieve self certainty. He flags this, I believe, at the conclusion to the section on lordship and bondage, by setting up an explicit contrast between a vision of the kind of freedom that could be achieved by intersubjective relationships grounded on mutual recognition, and an inferior vision of freedom that “does not get beyond the attitude of bondage” (196). Hegel argues:

For this reflexion into self the two moments, fear and service in general, as also that of formative activity, are necessary: and at the same time both must exist in a universal manner. Without the discipline of service and obedience, fear remains formal and does not spread over the whole reality of existence. Without the formative activity shaping the thing, fear remains inward and mute, and consciousness does not become objective for itself. Should consciousness shape and form the thing without the initial state of absolute fear, then it has a merely vain and futile “mind of its own”; for its form of negativity is not negativity per se, and hence its formative activity cannot furnish the consciousness of itself as essentially real. If it has endured not absolute fear, but merely some slight anxiety, the negative reality has remained internal to it, its substance has not been through and through infected thereby. Since the entire content of its natural consciousness has not tottered and shaken, it is still inherently a determinate mode of being; having a “mind of its own” is simply stubbornness, a type of freedom which does not get beyond the attitude of bondage. As little as the pure form can become its essential nature, so little is that form, considered as extending over particulars, a universal formative activity, an absolute notion; it is rather a piece of cleverness, which has mastery within a certain range, but not over the universal power nor over the entire objective reality. (196)

Is this formative experience of fear and service, though, something Hegel sees as essential only as a moment in the process of historical development? Or does he see it as something that must be reconstituted historically, even within a society predicated on a very different form of intersubjectivity? My sense – because this would be consistent with what seems to be Hegel’s notion of transcendence as a process whereby something is both cancelled and preserved, as well as from more direct flags within his text – is that he does not believe that the original historical conditions for generating an insight must be replicated, in order for the insight itself to be preserved within the new form of intersubjectivity that has transcended the old. The form of intersubjectivity characteristic of the lordship and bondage, for example, does not replicate the specific form of social relationship (intersubjectivity) characteristic of the war of all against all; it does, however, reconstitute – in a different way – a means of achieving the same fundamental insight that self-consciousness requires life (although in the new form of intersubjectivity, this insight is preserved unequally – not available to the master). My sense would be that a new society, founded, along the lines suggested by Hegel’s critical ideal, on forms of intersubjectivity predicated on mutual recognition, would, in Hegel’s view, preserve the insights historically achieved through the experience of lordship and bondage, without the replication of the historical conditions or social hierarchies through which such insights were generated…

But my laptop battery is flashing an angry red warning signal at me – further discussion will need to await a moment when I am more… plugged in… ;-P

Critical Theory, Negations, Philosophy of History, Reading Group, Self-Reflexivity

Decoding the Subject

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on January 15, 2007

I’m having one of my periodic difficulties posting over at Larval Subjects, but wanted to respond to a particularly important post Sinthome has written, titled “Recoding the Social”. Since what I have pasted below was originally written as a comment, rather than as a self-contained piece, it’s best to read the original post first, and then this response.

My response, I should note, is not intended as a critique of Sinthome’s post (although my comment may well suffer from some significant misunderstandings, given that I am writing about a theoretical tradition with which I am relatively unfamiliar, and responding in this sense to content I’ve received second or third hand…). Instead, I am intending to draw attention to some elements of Sinthome’s recent work that I think are particularly important, and too often overlooked, in attempts to construct critical theories. Note that Sinthome’s post explores a number of important and substantial issues that I do not canvass in this response.

***

I’ll have to apologise in advance, as I don’t have the time to develop this point in proper detail. What I wanted to do was to pick up on a couple of small elements within your post, and try to think them together. You begin with, I think, a quite important point about the way in which theoretical work – whether in the context of analysis, or in the context of critique – involves essentially trying to make some sense of the phenomena with which we’re confronted, by asking, in your words:

What must the subject be like for this to be possible?

What I want to do here is draw attention to something about the subject – the critical subject – that seems often overlooked in social theoretic discussions, but that seems to me to bear a strong importance for another question you have asked here – a question I also think is vitally important:

what renders an individual susceptible to an event in the first place?

I think you are quite right to ask whether, given the hypothesis that social relations can be defined in ordinary time, so to speak, by what you have called the encyclopaedia (by what I might tend to call a particular network of concrete social relations), we are then in a very difficult position when it comes to explaining how individuals might possess the potential to become subjects – or, as you have expressed the point:

if the regime of the encyclopaedia is as total as Badiou and Ranciere suggest, if the encyclopaedia is organized precisely around disavowing the possibility of anything that isn’t counted, then what are the conditions of possibility under which a subject might be produced at all.

You then move on to discuss the notion that our situatedness in any context is never complete – I’ll come back to this point. What I wanted to point out first, not because I think it’s something that you have missed (I take your points as, in a sense, assuming my own – I just want to take the opportunity to spell something out very explicitly here), but because it seems to be something both glaringly visible, and yet often missed in formulations such as those you quote from Badiou and Ranciere: if the encyclopaedia were complete, surely we would not be able to name it as such. Surely the fact that we are engaged in critical discourse already gives the lie to claims – even if these claims understanding themselves to be critical – that, as you have paraphrased it:

The order of knowledge or the police presents itself as a natural order, as a world in which everything has a proper place, function, and identity.

If we can make such a comment, with critical intent, then the comment is itself a contradiction: we are already seeing through the false veneer of nature we are claiming characterises the encyclopaedia. We are, however, failing to ask ourselves what you have rightly defined as the motivating question of analysis – what also, I think, should be the motivating question of critique: What must the subject be like for this to be possible?

The existence of critique tells us something about the subject – something that critical theory needs, I think, to keep quite firmly in focus. If we are also operating from a standpoint of immanence, than the existence of critique also tells us something about the object – and here I can loop back to your point, which is that the object itself must possess “weak and symptomatic points within the symbolic edifice wherein which it might be possible to force an event and precipitate subjects in Badiou’s sense of the word”.

You have formulated your points in the context of a transcendental framework. I am open to the possibility that such a framework exists, but you also know that I am interested in the issue of why such critical thoughts – the ability to see past and to contest the naturalness of the encyclopaedia – emerge historically from a particular moment. To me, this historicity is another issue we must engage, when we ask “What must the subject be like for this to be possible?” – and, immanently, what must the object be like, as well…

But these points can’t be developed here, and in any event my goal with this comment was mainly to draw attention to this strange self-contradictory element within so many approaches to critique: that critique consists in criticising the doxic character of particular systems of social relations, without realising that the act of critique itself must mean that something more complicated than mere doxa is afoot… Somehow, the theorist has stepped outside of the frame – not in your approach, which I see as trying to think through these issues in a more self-reflexive way – but in the works perhaps of some of the theorists you cite.

I should note, of course, that I am interpreting these theorists at one (arguably more than one…) remove, so I am happy to be corrected if I have misunderstood their approaches (in a sense, nothing would be more likely). Certainly, though, in my own field and with work with which I am more familiar, such self-contradictions seem very common – enough to make it seem worthwhile to draw attention to how deceptively crucial is the question on which your post pivots: What must the subject be like for this to be possible?

Updated to add: this conversation continues over at Larval Subjects, where Sinthome has added a few thoughts in a new post, and where I now seem to be able to comment normally. Best to read the discussion over there, but I’ll still paste my response here, as a placeholder for something I should (at some point) pick up on this blog in more detail:

Just very quickly, I wanted to pick up on your formulation at the end:

Either critique is already itself a product of what I’m here calling the encyclopaedia (I’m more inclined to adopt N.Pepperell’s language of “concrete social networks”), or the subject is never completely interpellated by the system of social relations in which its enmeshed.

There is a third option: that our social context is not exhausted by concrete social networks, but should instead be conceptualised as something more like the movement of a more abstract, dynamic social context through a series of more concrete social institutions and practices (which we sometimes mistake for context as such).

This kind of complex context would also generate a situation in which, as you put it, “the subject is never completely enmeshed” in its concrete social networks (and also, for that matter, never completely enmeshed in its more abstract context) – without necessitating a transcendental leap outside of context…

But this is, of course, also a placemarker… 😉

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History

On “Lordship and Bondage”

4 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on January 15, 2007

NPepperell has brought in the new year with a wonderful series of introductory posts to our reading group’s current voyage to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit – while all I’ve brought back was this crappy t-shirt… In some attempt to remedy the one-sidedness of this discussion, I will post something on our most recent reading, on the section titled Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage. As Hegel says in introduction: “Self-consciousness… exists only in being acknowledged” (178). Please bear in mind that as with all of our reading group posts, conciseness is not a sin we could be easily accused of… Read more of this post

Philosophy of History, Reading Group

Just In Time

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on January 14, 2007

I have a specific order of attack when I encounter a new blog. I’m generally drawn there by a link from somewhere or other, so I’ll start wherever that link lands me. If something about the voice of that post piques my interest, I’ll then go back to the beginning – to the very first post in the archive – to see how and why the blog started. If that beginning is intriguing, promising, or puzzling, I’ll then work my way forward through the archives from there, trying to capture a sense of the milestones through which that blog author discovered their “voice”. Sometimes, of course, this voice is there from the beginning – as seems to be the case for a blog I stumbled across today: Doing Justice, whose first post captures several issues I think are important, not just in relation to blogging, but in relation to critical theory:

Many people who blog on law-related topics are quick and smart (and, I’m guessing, male). I am smart, but I am not quick. By the time I’m aware that an issue is “hot” it has been so thoroughly examined by all the usual suspects that there seems nothing left to say about it. And yet, as I rattle through the archives trying to catch up with what was said last week, I’m often left feeling that discussions crystalize prematurely. Issues become defined and sides are taken before some important or, at least, peculiar, facets have been allowed to emerge. My comment that might have sent the conversation in an interesting (to me) direction after the first hour or two no longer seems to have any relevance by the end of the day. Maybe I never understood what the conversation was about, but maybe I did and my failure to speak up allowed a door to be shut that would have been better left open.

The post concludes: “So, this blog. I’ll go ahead and comment, secure in the knowledge that no one will hear me.” Since I read new blogs backwards, I have no idea whether the author still feels this way. But the juxtaposition of the post content, with the way in which the post resonated for me when I read it today, caused me to think about how, for all the speed and rapid shifts of attention that get so much attention in analyses of the blogosphere, what is perhaps most striking about the medium is actually the way in which it sediments these rapidfire discursive movements, ossifying discussions after history has left them behind, and preserving ephemeral thoughts for future reflection. If by chance the tumult prevents you from being heard when the topic was fresh, the thought remains, ready to be recaptured when, perhaps, it is no longer too new to hear…

Blogging, Critical Theory, Current Events, Links, Reading

Delay and Delurk

4 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on January 13, 2007

LMagee and I are currently competing to see who can read Hegel most slowly. We have a side bet going on how much of our other work can be derailed by our attempt to make the least progress in this regard… I think, though, that LM might be cheating in our little competition. In our most recent round of emails, I commented:

I was just looking over some of the Hegel, and thinking how much clearer the text seems, when I’m not actually reading it at the time…

And LM responded:

Hegel seems clearest to me when it’s back on the bookshelf, frankly…

I call foul: eyes must actually have been on text for it to count as reading Hegel slowly!!! Also, you seem to be getting a suspicious amount of other work done!!!

At any rate, while I’m getting nothing done slowly, I thought I might as well draw attention to an interesting concept over at Acephalous, where, in honour of “National De-Lurking Week”, Scott has offered to answer any* question from lurkers who will delurk for the occasion. I’m not sure I’m quite so brave, but I still wouldn’t mind hearing from lurkers around these parts – that, or you can all just go ask Scott a question, but mention that you lurk here too… ;-P

*terms and conditions apply.

Blogging, Links, Procrastination, Reading Group

I Bespam You, Kind Soul…

2 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on January 13, 2007

I’ve noticed a new trend in comment spam recently: spammers plaintively begging me not to delete their spam because they need the money. The most recent one reads: “Do not delete it please. I need money urgent” before it then proceeds to advertise acts that are simply not appropriate for a family forum… I’ve decided to call it “bespamming” – and to send it, compassionately, to that same dark void to which I consign all the other spam…

Admin

Hegel and Marks

5 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on January 11, 2007

So LMagee and I met yesterday for our second discussion on Hegel. Two posts will be forthcoming from this discussion – one from me, on some elements of the argumentative structure of the first several sections of Phenomenology, and one from LM, who will comment specifically on the lordship and bondage discussion. I think that both of us intend our posts more in the spirit of notes-in-progress than of polished commentary, since we would both like to revisit these sections from the standpoint of having worked our way through the piece as a whole. Ideally, I should post my piece, followed by LM’s. In practice, this may not happen, as I’m trying to finish some marking, and there’s something absolutely surreal in moving back and forth between assessing first-year undergraduate work, and trying to make sense of Hegel… I don’t think the order of posting will have a serious effect on anyone’s ability to follow the discussion, since the posts will of course be written by people approaching the text from two different directions, and since my comments will be more about the form of the argument than its contents.

The form of the argument did occupy much of our discussion yesterday, with LM feeling the triadic structure of the text was an arbitrary imposition on the content being analysed, and therefore inclined to perceive the text as a series of deductions from a problematic premise. My suggestion was that the form of argument was not, strictly speaking, deductive – since the whole point of an immanent approach would be to justify the point of departure in the course of the analysis, rather than rely on a “ground” that sits essentially outside the analysis. I understand the triadic structure as something like a fractal – an underlying structure whose existence is demonstrated again and again at various levels of abstraction, where the argument moves by suggesting that, without an understanding of this structure, it becomes impossible to make sense of many phenomena. If this has been done successfully, a competing theoretical approach cannot simply attack the “ground”, as it might attack a first principle – it must instead demonstrate that it can unfold an analysis without reference to the same structure, while still making sense of as many phenomena as the approach being criticised. We went back and forth on this issue in our discussion, and LM followed up afterward, eventually emailing the link to the Hegel article at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (which, I have to admit, I still haven’t read, so I’m not sure if this link was meant to point to a refutation of my position ;-P). LM did, though, gradually warm to Hegel’s triadic structure in the course of evening researches, first emailing the following from the Stanford article:

Hegel’s logical triads are often regarded as expressions of an artificial and functionless formalism, but it should be remembered that in the later nineteenth century, no less a logician than Charles Sanders Peirce came to a similar idea about the fundamentally *trinary* structure of the categories of thought.

And then later, with what I take to be both chagrin and pride:

I have to note with some irony that my thesis table of contents *happens* to have nine chapters, coincidentally structured as three sets of three… Great minds…

These aftershocks aside, I have to say that the discussion was an extremely enjoyable one – there’s something deliciously surreal about reading individual sentences from this text, and trying to make sense of what the hell is being said, while in a mundane environment that keeps tossing you back into an everyday context where you wonder what people in neighbouring tables must be thinking, when you read out – and what’s more seem engaged by – passages like:

The Here pointed out, which I keep hold of, is likewise a this Here which, in fact, is not this Here, but a Before and Behind, an Above and Below, a Right and Left. The Above is itself likewise this manifold otherness–above, below, etc. The Here, which was to be pointed out, disappears in other Heres, and these disappear similarly. What is pointed out, held fast, and is permanents a negative This, which only is so when the Heres are taken as they should be, but therein cancel one another; it is a simple complex of many Heres. The Here that is “meant” would be the point. But it is not: rather, when it is pointed out as being, as having existence, that very act of pointing out proves to be not immediate knowledge, but a process, a movement from the Here “meant” through a plurality of Heres to the universal Here, which is a simple plurality of Heres, just as day is a simple plurality of Nows. (108)

It was a glorious discussion, which I’m looking forward to continuing online, and when we meet again next week – to talk about Reason…

Philosophy of History, Reading Group

Do I Have a Theory For You!

4 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on January 10, 2007

A colleague has just asked me to give a lecture to new social science research students, on the grounds that I’m “an expert in theory”, and so should be able to instruct students in the finer points of “how to choose a theory for their research”.

Requests like this, I have to admit, cause all of my inner anarchism to bubble to the surface. I want to deliver the entire lecture in front of a banner that reads: N. Pepperell – EXPERT – in theory. Or insist that students take the theoretical equivalent of one of those online tests of political disposition and bring the results with them to the lecture. Or tell students to ignore theory – don’t worry about it – just forget about it completely.

Oh wait – that last one I will actually do. Because the key isn’t the theory: it’s the question.

The research strategies course as it’s currently offered at my university has a very early section titled something like “positioning yourself on a map of social thought”. The students are terrified by it – and rightly so, because it sounds as though they have to draw this massive timeline: Plato – Descartes – Hegel – !!me!!… Some of the earliest readings tell students that they must identify their epistemological and ontological assumptions before they can do anything else – a demand that predictably causes most students to curl up into tight, self-loathing balls in the corner, regreting that they ever made the decision to undertake a research degree.

Some students, of course, will come in well-versed in philosophy or intellectual history. They’ll be quite happy to talk about their intellectual progenitors and their epistemological and ontological assumptions. And they still won’t, as a rule, be any closer to understanding how this relates to social science research than their intimidated and demoralised colleagues whom I’m still trying to coax out of their foetal positions.

So I tend to spend the first few weeks of the course teaching against the assigned materials (I don’t, incidentally, disagree with the fact that these materials have been assigned – they’re actually a productive jumping off point for the discussions I like to have at this stage). The overarching goal – but this will generally take the entire course (and, for some students, substantially beyond it) – is to get students to be centred in their questions. From unpacking the assumptions buried in the questions themselves, students can begin to tease out what their ontological and epistemological assumptions are – this takes some guidance, mainly in the form of getting students to see that other kinds of questions are possible. But this can be approached in the first instance immanently to their projects – which can then make it easier for students to understand whether and how more formal theoretical or philosophical training fits into their research process.

By contrast, starting with “theory” abstracted from a substantive question generally manages to convey the impression that choices among theoretical approaches are somehow aesthetic – essentially random and based on researcher preference, rather than having some determinate relationship to the phenomenon needing to be grasped. It also focusses attention away from what students struggle with the most, which is learning how to ask a good question, and then understanding the implications of the questions they have asked…

The strategy I’m advocating here, of course, is not something I would advocate for all students, in all contexts. It is a response to the need to communicate what are actually some fairly sophisticated theoretical skills to social science students who, due to the vagaries of the Australian higher education system, are unlikely to have, or subsequently receive, extensive formal instruction in theory or philosophy. With more time to explore theoretical traditions in detail, or when working with students where a certain theoretical background can be assumed, these issues can be explored at a more abstract level.

Still, there’s something about communicating the stakes of a theory – grasping that seemingly very abstract texts actually generally do understand themselves to be doing something very practical, very important in real-world terms – that remains important even when you have more luxury to explore formal theoretical approaches in greater detail. Theorists are driven by questions of their own – their theoretical choices motivated by the need to grasp the phenomena they are trying to understand, just as the theoretical choices of novice researchers will also need to be. This is something that I find students often struggle to grasp, even when they enjoy “theory” – that theory generally points to something, is wrestling with something, is not simply some kind of abstract symbolic manipulation undertaken for its own sake, or something that sits in a random, extrinsic relation to its object. This is the conceptual terrain I’ll have in mind in preparing the lecture.

I may still ask for that banner, as well…

Courses, Professional Life, Teaching

Blogging Terminable and Interminable

2 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on January 10, 2007

Lots of discussions around and about relating to the temporalities of academic blogging – both in a general sense, in terms of whether overarching trends within the broader field of academic blogging might be normalising some of the diversity of early academic blogs, and in a specific sense, in terms of whether a particular life cycle might be characteristic of academic blogs – whether, for example, individual blogs tend to have a certain lifespan before they close or transform into something more professionalised.

I’ve been involved in discussions at Acephalous and The Kugelmass Episodes, and have been lurking bits and pieces of the discussion surrounding Michael Bérubé’s decision to cease blogging, which extends, as you would expect, across a number of blogs.

It’s a funny thing, the issue of ending a blog. It’s honestly something I didn’t think about, when I started one – not that I assumed I’d keep blogging forever: I just literally didn’t think about the issue. (Nor, to be honest, did I think at the time about the relationship of an individual blog to an overarching context of academic blogs, nor – ironically enough, given that I spend most of my time thinking about other kinds of historical trends – historical trends affecting blogging as a medium.) I have thought of course about taking this blog down on a number of occasions, but I’ve generally perceived my impulses to do this as personal ones. I’ve never related these personal impulses to more general trends – a position on which, of course, I could be mistaken even in relation to my own site, and which I certainly would never assume applies to others, whose blogs could easily be more centrally positioned to be caught up in general trends than mine would ever be, or whose authors might have purposes that depend on specific overarching trends…

Still, I’m hesitant about the various sociology-style theories floating through some of the current discussions (although I’ll confess to offering some of my own from time to time…). My main reaction, I think, is to worry that many discussions reflect the tendency to overgeneralisation that has been so characteristic of analyses of blogging since its advent – blogging as revolutionary, blogging as detrimental, blogging as a fad, blogging as the new mainstream, etc. I guess my question is: why are we so tempted to generalise this medium? Does it need to be one thing? Do its mechanics really dictate a strong and pregiven trajectory for the realisation of its potentials? Do we need a consensus on where “we” are going, with our writing in this form?

These questions probably come across more critically than I mean them. I think what I’m trying to do is just draw attention to the potential that there might be something “sociological” about the tendency to discuss the medium in such generalised terms – to extrapolate so strongly from what the medium might mean to us, or to our small corner of the blogosphere, or to prominent people with whom we have some identification. This sociological phenomenon is potentially worth analysing in its own right – not to criticise or refute it, but just to understand the temptation to engage in it… I don’t have such an analysis ready to hand… I just keep finding myself struck and slightly confused by the search for generality that surfaces periodically in bursts of collective wondering about what “we” mean, engaged in a practice some of us seem very much to want to perceive as possessing shared and essential dynamics… Perhaps such dynamics do exist – this is worth exploring, but I’d like also to suspend alongside this exploration the issue of how our articulations of those dynamics (narratives of decline, professionalisation, structural transformation, etc.) are themselves shaping the dynamics we happen to find…

But it’s been a very long day for me, so I’m probably not writing this in any particularly useful way. Perhaps others will be able to say something more useful – likely are saying things more useful in some of the discussions linked above.

Blogging, Links

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