Rough Theory

Theory In The Rough

Category Archives: Conversations

Hit and Run

2 Comments Posted by on November 24, 2006

Just after I completed my BA, I spent some time officially doing research in Paris, and unofficially wandering fairly randomly around Europe. One of my random wanders took me to Berlin, where I unexpectedly ran into a university friend when both of us approached the same ice cream vendor in Alexanderplatz. Neither had known the other was in the city, and the odds of this chance encounter seemed sufficiently remote that we decided it was fated that we spend our remaining time in Berlin together. For the rest of the day, we visited various places and collected other people before finally heading back to someone’s apartment late in the evening.

Somehow, along the way, we got into a vigorous discussion of some aspect of medieval theology. I lagged a bit behind the others, as I was still wearing a heavy backpack, and had become a bit out of breath from talking. As our group crossed a street, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that a car had run the light and was bearing down on us. The rest of the group was safely out of range, but it occurred to me that I might be in a bit of strife, and so I jumped forward to get out of the way. I cleared the car for the most part, although some protruberance on the back of my pack was hit, making a noise all out of proportion to the force of the impact.

Since I had been aware that something like this was unfolding, I just kept talking – there was, after all, an important theological nuance that needed explaining… From my friends’ point of view, however, the situation looked a bit more alarming: they felt the wind from a car rushing past at high speed, heard an awful noise, and saw me fly forward – all more-or-less simultaneous events, as far as they could tell. And, of course, there I was, like nothing had happened, still droning on about some bit of arcane trivia. They thought I had been struck by the car and was in shock. They would not be persuaded that I was okay, but instead forced me to surrender my backpack and sit down. It was only with some difficulty that I convinced them that they didn’t have to take me straight to hospital. (I probably could have lent more credibility to my case if I had stopped trying to return to whatever theological issue was so obsessing me at the time…) I’m not sure I ever convinced them that I wasn’t concussed.

I was just sitting down intending to return to a few dropped threads from the discussion of fantasy and critique, when this story flashed to mind. I think I’m worried that online discussions carry something of a tacit expiry date – an expectation that, beyond a certain, fairly short, point in time, one won’t have to worry about getting back into the thought-space of an old post. And particularly in a case like this, where I first cited illness and then pushed the discussion aside in order to write a couple of mongrel speeches, it may be a bit uncouth to pick up a conversational thread. But I do have this tendency to keep talking…

As it is, I have only scattered thoughts, which I’m not sure I can articulate clearly at present in any event. I’ll raise them here as bookmarks and placeholders for later development. First, there is something that I like – that I need to think more about, in order to tease out what appeals – in Sinthome’s presentation of the concept of traversing fantasy as a process, among other things, of surrendering the notion of emancipation as a final, achievable, static endpoint (apologies for what is almost certainly a terrible presentation of this point – I usually get there in the end, but I am often inexcusably clumsy with new concepts at the outset). I suspect that I like this discussion because I’ve been worrying that I use phrases that suggest I think of the standpoint of critique in terms of the identification of some kind of overarching and determinate endpoint, when this is actually not how I think of this concept at all – I’m not sure my words express my thoughts… I worry also that I sometimes suggest that I view critique as a kind of “totality-eye-view” when, again, this isn’t how I think about what I’m trying to express.

I’ve been very irritated with myself, on re-reading some of the things I’ve written recently on the blog (and, for that matter, in my first presentation this week), because I’ve emphasised the importance of recognising specific views as partial – which by itself I think is accurate enough – but I’ve done this in a way that leaves open the interpretation that I somehow think that I (or some other critic) will then come along and speak with the voice of the “whole” – or that an ideal course of action somehow reflects the most overarching and dominant historical trend or structural pattern within a society. I don’t think this at all – but I need to learn better lessons from the kinds of critiques I write about other people: I need to ask for what I actually wish…

At the same time, I can’t quite go along with either Sinthome’s valorisation of the margins, or with the suggested vision of critique as an essentially random event that “comes to pierce a hole in the totalizing, static structure of knowledge”. I need to be cautious here: there would actually be ways to define and interpret the concept of the “margins”, and the concept of critique as expressive of essential contingency, that could be compatible with what I think – it’s just that, without careful qualification, I think the underlying metaphors are deeply misleading. I don’t perceive our current society or culture as a “totalizing, static structure of knowledge” – but as a conflictual whole, in whose conflicts we can then begin to understand the social and historical irritations that provoke the slow burn, as well as the occasional dramatic eruption, of critical sensibilities. At the same time, I’m not sure that I believe we can best conceptualise our social context in terms of “margins” and core – although of course there are groups that are scarred in a more brutal and direct way by existing forms of injustice. I’m reluctant, however, to see in this scarring a privileged critical insight: it might be simple justice if this were to be the case, but I’m not convinced that it is historically or psychologically plausible – again, unless one defines marginality in an unusual way that lies in tension with the standard imagery suggested by the term…

I suspect we’re stuck with being “insiders” – but insiders whose critical relationship with our own context can itself be taken as evidence that the context is not terribly unified. Then the question becomes how to position critique in relation to that disunited whole – a task that, I suspect, won’t involve taking the perspective of the whole, but also won’t involve taking the perspective of any one part (I would tend to follow Adorno in seeing the parts as scarred by the whole in which they have arisen). I suspect I’m talking about something like a process of becoming aware of the potentials suggested by the ways in which various parts interact to reproduce a conflictual whole – an awareness that can then give us a clearer sense of contingency and the potential for transformation… Regardless, I need to get to the point where I’m not using language that implies that some kind of historicised equivalent to a “view from nowhere” might be my understanding of a standpoint of critique… I need better words for expressing what I mean… And, evidently, I don’t seem inclined to stop talking until I find them… ;-P

Conversations, Critical Theory

Long Division

2 Comments Posted by on November 20, 2006

So I said I would wait until I finished my marking to continue my conversation with Sinthome about fantasy, desire and the standpoint of critique in Sinthome’s appropriation of Lacan. I lied. Marking still looms – and then the preparation of two presentations after that… But I’ll reply briefly nevertheless… ;-P

Sinthome’s full response is available at Larval Subjects, and focusses on responding to my question about whether Lacan’s approach requires some kind of reference to a pre-symbolic realm that functions as a potential standpoint of critique. Sinthome argues that the concept of a “remainder” does not require any appeal to a pre-symbolic reality but, instead, should be conceptualised in terms of:

a twist, distortion, or ripple in the symbolic that isn’t a hold-over from a mythological pre-symbolic past (how could such a past fail to be mythological, given that we can only approach the world through language?), and that results from operations in the symbolic itself

I am certainly much more comfortable with this concept than I would be with an appeal to the pre-symbolic (and, of course, we all know that our primary objective in selecting a critical theory should be the preservation of my personal comfort… ;-P). But I have a further question, which relates essentially to how far this notion of critique can carry us, if our goal is to analyse potentials for political action. The notion that the operation of the symbolic carries its own internal tensions might ground the possibility for critique in a very abstract way – the possibility for humans to look beyond any particular social configuration and seek some kind of alternative, for example. Can it, though, get us any closer to understanding the rise and fall of any specific form of critique – a critique that expresses particular qualitative ideals, for example, or that organises itself in specific social movements?

I should note, of course, that this question won’t “connect” in any meaningful way, if someone isn’t interested in this sort of historically-specific analysis – it’s not an intrinsic problem for any theoretical tradition that it doesn’t do something that it doesn’t seek to do… But since I have a personal interest in understanding the rise and fall of specific intellectual and social movements at particular times – and since I see this interest as at least potentially useful for political practice – I’m always on the hunt for how a particular tradition can, and cannot, cast light on this kind of question.

So I guess my updated question is: granting this reading of Lacan, is there some way that this tradition then moves – either in Lacan’s work or in the work of his successors – to a more historically specified level? This question actually links back indirectly to the question I asked previously about the metaphoric connections between this description of desire, and Marx’s description of value: how does this tradition account for its own historical emergence? Presumably, if something about the operation of the symbolic creates this “overhang” – this nonencompassed remainder – this would have always been the case, since the symbolic is an intrinsic element of human thought. Why, then, have we only come to articulate this potential, in this way, at this time? Would a better understanding of this issue, perhaps, allow us to tease out clearer relationships between what might be genuinely transhistorical and grounded in something like “human potential”, and what might be the determinate potentials of our own time and place?

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History

Some Scattered Questions on Fantasy

1 Comment Posted by on November 18, 2006

Sinthome over at Larval Subjects has been engaged in an extended series of reflections on fantasy, desire and the orientation to political practice. Since I have only the most passing exposure to the tradition from which Sinthome writes, the chances of my misunderstanding the aim of these posts is somewhat high – nevertheless, I thought I’d pick up on a few of my associations while reading, without making a strong claim that these associations necessarily reflect accurately on the underlying text… For purposes of this post, I’ll focus on the first entry in this series – I may be able to discuss the others at a later time.

Sinthome begins by distinguishing two understandings of the relationship between “fantasy” and “desire”. One understanding, which Sinthome rejects, posits desire to be somehow anterior to fantasy – an understanding that drives an ontological wedge between desire and its manifestation in fantasy, and that risks the perception that desire is more “real” or more “natural” than the “artificial” or “arbitrary” fantasy in which it happens to become manifest. The other, which Sinthome presents as characteristic of Lacanian thought, sees desire and its mode of expression in fantasy as intrinsically and necessarily connected: desire is a substance that is always already embedded in some specific mode of appearance in fantasy, and therefore cannot meaningfully distilled out and considered as separately existing entity. And yet, at the same time, desire is promiscuous, mobile, restless – it must have an embodiment in some determinate fantasy and cannot exist outside of such an embodiment, but any particular embodiment is contingent and dispensable. Desire itself therefore has no intrinsic endpoint, but fantasy serves, at least temporarily, to channel desire toward particular ends.

Sinthome then moves to what I would describe (probably oversimplistically) as a discussion of the ways in which social context participates in the production of particular fantasies – channeling desire in specific ways, and situating desire for specific objects into an overarching intersubjective framework of social significance. This invocation of the social, however, is followed by a set of what seem to be more trans-social claims – including particularly claims (which, to my ears, have a sort of social contract resonance) relating to the individual’s inevitable sacrifice of happiness for the sake of entering into society: so, the individual must enter into relations with a specific and particular social, which could presumably be analysed for its own idiosyncratic demands on individual behaviour, but in the background remains the notion of an experience or an awareness of something like presocialised happiness. As Sinthome expresses it:

Freud makes exactly this point in Civilization and its Discontents, when he speaks of the unhappiness we experience as a result of being members of society. If the individual continuously bites at the bit of the social, then this is because the individual sees the social as having stolen his happiness despite the fact that he couldn’t exist at all without this collective.

However, despite the fact that I sacrifice some of my happiness in entering into society, bits of this enjoyment continue to persist in fractured forms. In short, there is a remainder that the symbolic cannot quite integrate, that always escapes, that functions as excessive waste. It is, in fact, this remainder that ties me to the social in the first place since my enjoyment of this remainder functions as the motive of my identification

Sinthome then relates the persistence of this “remainder” to the possibility for critique, arguing, if I’m understanding correctly, that the remainder retains the residue of a presymbolic realm from which the symbolic realm is necessarily constructed. The symbolic realm – including fantasy as desire expressed in symbolic form – therefore necessarily drags along in its wake its own “outside”. Sinthome then points toward the possibility of “traversing the fantasy” – a concept developed much more fully in Sinthome’s other posts, and which I will therefore leave aside here, other than to note that, as I understand it, the intention is to point to the possibility for a subject to break the process of identification with particular objects in a transformative way.

To shift from my, undoubtedly somewhat crude, attempt to capture what Sinthome is saying, into some of my reactions to this framework: I’m struck first, of course, by the resonance with other forms of thought. Lacan would have been aware, of course, that this conceptualisation of the relationship between desire and fantasy is essentially identical to Marx’s discussion of value: value being a pattern of social practice that has no existence separate from its physical manifestation in goods in their movement through the process of production and exchange – that can promiscuously attach itself to different specific objects, but that must necessarily, for Marx, retain some sort of physical frame, etc.

The description of the relationship between desire and fantasy is too similar not to have been intended. The question is, what do we make of that similarity? Is the claim that capitalism somehow manifests a deep psychological pattern more completely than other societies, but that the psychological pattern would have existed in any event? Is the claim that this psychological dynamic is structured at a deep level by capitalism, such that it might not have characterised human existence in other societies? Is the claim that capitalism has made certain conceptual metaphors available to us, and so we’re now experimenting with applying some of those concepts metaphorically to psychological processes – and may have some empirical or interpretive hits and misses in the process? Is the claim that Marx stumbled across some metaphors that are fairly accurate as descriptions of human psychology, but foolishly misapplied them to an analysis of a social system? etc. None of these questions, I should note, necessarily leads into a critique – I’m not worried about whether traditions are “original” – I’m just genuinely curious, when any body of thought borrows so much from or so closely parallels another, how the relationship between the two is understood.

I am more nervous, and in a more critical direction, about the notion of a presymbolic residue – particularly as I get the sense that this residue may be being invoked as a possible locus of critique. I am very conscious that I am likely to be misunderstanding the strategic role of this concept (although I have some passing exposure to this tradition, my background is very primitive, so I’m essentially relying on first impressions…), but I’m not really sure why else you would “need” to posit the existence of such a “remainder” within the framework of a theoretical system that does aim at some level of political critique. If you restrict the tradition to therapeutic contexts, then there might be other strategic motives, but I take part of the point of this series of posts to be reflection on the relationship between this framework and the possibility for transformative political practice. Sinthome, I should also note, uses the subsequent posts in this series precisely to drive toward a clearer distinction between the use of this framework in therapeutic contexts, and its appropriation for political practice, so my questions may not be relevant for Sinthome’s own thought. I suppose my question (and my nervousness) relates more to the appropriation of these concepts as a framework for understanding political practice, and I’m working off of Sinthome’s posts as a way of easing myself into my unease with this tradition – with the caveat that my misgivings might fade once I understand more…

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History

Fragments on Critical Spaces and Times

8 Comments Posted by on November 10, 2006

I seem to be writing a lot of posts lately that contain concepts that I’m not quite ready to express fully – this will be another of “those” posts, I’m afraid.

I wanted to pick up, in a brief and not quite adequate way, on two comments made on other blogs, because I think they each suggest important issues to be taken into account when thinking about the construction of a critical theory. The first is a comment made by belledame222 in an ongoing discussion at The Kugelmass Episodes. Belledame criticises the somewhat widespread tendency to equate “the margins” with “critical standpoint”:

One of the other main radical feminist bloggers, Heart, actually calls her space “The Margins.” i think there is this idea, you know, that freedom exists in the margins precisely because they -are- the margins.

trouble is, if you’re really making claims for revolutionary transformation, sooner or later you’re going to have to figure out a way to move from margin to center (as bell hooks once put it).

otherwise you’re just basically huddling together and licking wounds, telling comforting stories to each other, it seems to me.

To belledame’s concerns, I would add that this vision of critique – that you need somehow to be “outside” what you’re criticising in order to achieve critical distance – can:

(1) be morally underdetermined: some very undesirable movements can also be marginalised – and it may, in fact, be a very important political goal to make sure that some movements remain marginalised – and that other political movements become so… Valorising “the margins” by dint of their marginality often disguises the fact that we tacitly mean “our” margins: that we have a quite specific set of normative ideals that we assume are part of the “package” of marginality. Personally, I would rather develop critical concepts that express those normative ideals directly, rather than bundling them in with an overarching (and, for reasons discussed below, perhaps not even intrinsically connected) category like “marginality”. Otherwise, we risk getting what we asked for, rather than what we wished for – a fate suffered by many well-intentioned social and political movements…

(2) flatten the “core”: the move to margins (like the move to human nature, the appeal to theology or other ways of getting “outside” our social context) operates on the assumption that our social context is fundamentally one-dimensional: that tensions and conflicts might exist on the perimeters, or between our social context and something that we perceive as fundamentally different, but not as integral aspects of a single, conflicted social form. I appreciate that this is, to some degree, an “empirical” question, but I think it’s important not to reject out of hand the possibility of our social world as a contradictory entity – in whose contradictions we can perhaps begin to recognise some of the historical irritants that provoke us to dream that better things are possible. We may not need to be “outside” or on the “margins” to achieve critical distance.

These issues are connected, in ways I’m not sure I’m ready to express, to an issue raised by sinthome at Larval Subjects yesterday. The US election outcome leads sinthome to reflect on the need to recognise how rapidly historical transformation can sometimes be achieved:

I’m still in a bit of shock as to what happened last night. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not expecting momentous changes or for Democrats to suddenly begin acting like genuine progressives. Yet this still is a ray of hope…. it is the hope produced in discerning that rhetoric alone does not win the day or create reality. That is, occurances like this remind me that things are possible… They rescue me from my Adorno-esque pessimism.

A few months ago I would not have believed this possible and I find that this experience of change significantly calls into question a number of my theoretical axioms (I’ve been working through these shifts in theory for a number of weeks on this blog). How is it that forms of social configuration that seem like iron can so quickly dissipate like so much morning mist? The Mayans had a thriving culture that suddenly disappeared. They didn’t disappear as a result of some natural catastrophe (as far as we know) or through depleting natural resources. No doubt the Mayans believed their culture and state to be eternal. Yet it disappeared. How does such surprising and sudden change take place? It seems to me that good social theory help us to see the contingency of the present state of things, that there are other possibilities, that other collectives, subjects, and ways of feeling are possible. Just as psychonalysis allows the analysand to overcome the closure of their universe of desiring, discovering new possibilities where they never before thought they were possible, good social theory creates possibilities where before only the iron laws of historical necessity and power were discerned. Good social theory reminds us of the essential fragility and finitude of the power relations holding together a particular type of collective.

I reserve judgment on the Mayans ;-P, but I think that modern history does demonstrate that quite dramatic and rapid historical transformations – of institutional structures, customs, forms of thought – are possible (it is conceivable that such rapid changes are, in some ways, more possible than incrementalist ones, if we’re talking about achieving fundamental transformations – but I haven’t thought about this issue sufficiently to try to turn this into a strong claim…). And I agree that it should be a central goal for critical theory to cast light on why and how this happens – and that this goal sits in tension with approaches that emphasise “iron laws of historical necessity”.

At the same time, the significant transformations that we have witnessed within the modern era – including many transformations driven by movements that understood themselves as fundamentally revolutionary – can often, in retrospect, be interpreted as achievements that were moving with a broader “wave” of historical transformation – waves whose contours, perhaps, successful movements articulated more clearly than others, or which drove in any event toward complimentary goals… Revolutionary movements often suffer, I believe, from not adequately recognising the dynamic context in which they are operating – a context that may make certain political goals easier to achieve at certain times, that entails that very few political achievements can be regarded as permanent “advances”, and that often punishes movements by rewarding them with what they asked for (which is often the destruction of older social institutions), while depriving them of the free society for which they wished…

My goal here is not to drive toward pessimism. Modernity has constantly irritated us with dreams that more is possible, while also embedding us within an incredibly complex, dynamic, unintentional historical context that provides treacherous footing for conscious political practice. I think we need to develop better theoretical frameworks precisely to understand potentials for conscious political action within such a context – and I think that belledame and sinthome have both hit on some of the concepts we need to move beyond, if we want to work toward a better understanding of the potentials and limitations of particular forms of political practice…

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History

Rants Abroad…

10 Comments Posted by on November 2, 2006

Scott Eric Kaufman continues his analysis of the gender disparity between lurkers and commentators on his blog. I seem to have decided that his discussion would benefit from a rant from me – on differences in gender dynamics between the US and Australia, on why I don’t use my first name when posting (even though I know that anyone who cares can look it up), and on other matters of gender, nationality, and patterns in blog comments…

Blogging, Conversations

Understanding Participation in Blogging Communities

Leave a comment Posted by on October 31, 2006

Scott Eric Kaufman over at Acephalous is gearing up for his MLA panel on blogging and, having asked his regular readers to email or post on their academic or professional backgrounds, has learned some surprising things: specifically, he was startled at how many people were committed enough to the site to email, even though they had never posted publicly, and he was particularly startled at how many of his lurkers are female, given that public posters are largely male. He is currently asking for theories about why people read blogs without posting, and for theories about the causes of the gender disparity between posters and readers.

It’s always an interesting issue, who reads a blog. This blog has always had regular readers who know me in person (it was originally developed to communicate with my somewhat dispersed research group, as well as to keep in touch with people who knew me from when I was working outside the academy). The blog’s origin meant, among other things, that I never had to worry that I was writing for absolutely no one. Along the way, the blog picked up other regular readers – local readers who prefer to drop into my office for a chat, instead of posting; distant and local readers who email their reactions; and the occasional public poster. And then there are the mysterious recurrent IP addresses – people who seem to find it worthwhile to visit, but who haven’t made themselves known in any way.

I’ve already posted a few thoughts over at Acephalous about why I comment on some blogs, and only lurk on others. For me, commenting at someone else’s blog reflects the feeling that it would be an interesting place to have some kind of ongoing discussion – not just in one thread, but in a number of threads over time. I therefore comment on a very small number of blogs – and generally only after lurking for some time, to get a feel for the community and the conventions of discussion. I almost never post one-off, issue-driven comments on any blog, even if I have relevant expertise in a topic – for me, blogging is a medium for ongoing discussion, and a one-off post doesn’t satisfy that interest.

At the same time, I don’t tend ever to become an all-purpose commentator at any blog – I seem to “specialise” the sorts of comments I make, based on the “relationship” I have to that blogging community – and the patterns of my comments often have very little to do with the patterns of my reading: I like Acephalous for many reasons, but am generally particularly struck by Scott’s theoretical, historical and dissertation-related posts. Perversely, however, I almost never contribute to discussions on these kinds of posts – instead, I tend to respond mainly to more “social” threads… At Savage Minds, by contrast, I respond almost exclusively to theoretical posts – and therefore often go long stints without posting, effectively waiting for an appropriate topic to arise. And yet I read the blog regularly, rather than selectively reading only the sorts of posts to which I tend to reply…

In describing my own commenting style, I’m not at all suggesting that I think this is what everyone else does, or should do: I know people who are clear single-issue (or, in most cases, multiple-issue) posters, who will happily join the fray at any blog if they have expertise on a topic, regardless of whether they’ve spent much time lurking in that blogging community. I know others who never, ever post on any blog, although they read far more blogs than I do… Commenting, like blogging itself, serves a range of interests, and falls into a range of styles. Scott is in the process of trying to theorise some of the commenting trends he sees on his blog – if anyone here is an Acephalous lurker, and hasn’t yet noticed the thread, perhaps head over and contribute to the discussion – if, that is, you comment on this sort of thing… ;-P

Blogging, Conversations

Random Thoughts on Privilege and Critique

2 Comments Posted by on October 22, 2006

The changing composition of funding for academic work over the past several decades – with more funding from the private sector, and more funding potentially tied to problematic intellectual property agreements, restrictions on publication or research design, and other commercial arrangements – prompts recurrent debate over the ethical implications of linking academic work to commercial interests. Few people draw a hard line on this issue, insisting, for example, that all forms of private funding are unacceptable, or that private funding arrangements never pose problems for academic integrity. Most of us – myself included – make our own separate peaces, hoping that we can trust ourselves to be guided by some principled logic other than what is most convenient for our research needs at the time… And few of us draw lines in the same places, meaning that the issue of outside funding arrangements provides a reliable source of ongoing debate within the academy.

Every time I become involved in one of these debates, I can’t help but think of Horkheimer’s “Fable of Consistency”, from Dämmerung. I couldn’t get my hands on the original for this post, but I’ll reproduce Martin Jay’s retelling from The Dialectical Imagination:

In the fable, two poor poets are invited to accept a considerable stipend by a tyrannical king who values their work. One is disturbed by the taint on the money. “You are inconsistent,” the other answers. “If you so believe, you must continue to go hungry. He who feels one with the poor, must live like them.” Agreeing, the first poet rejects the king’s offer and proceeds to starve. Shortly thereafter, the other becomes the court poet. Horkheimer finishes his “fairy tale” by cautioning: “Both drew the consequences, and both consequences favored the tyrant. With the general moral prescription of consistency, there seems one condition: it is friendlier to tyrants than to poor poets.”

I love this fable, although I realise that statements like this are often cited in criticisms of the Frankfurt School scholars – that they lived in too much material comfort, too distant from practical political struggles, etc. Nevertheless, I think it can be important to acknowledge that intellectual work involves a level of privilege and a level of distance – and, however disturbing it can be that similar privileges and choices may not be freely available to anyone who wishes to pursue them, access to a certain level of privilege may be integral to critique. When consistent choices “favour the tyrant”, critique may be characterised precisely by its lived inconsistency with emancipatory ideals – a complex subject position that Benjamin also seemed to regard as intrinsic to a reconfigured historical materialism:

Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

Kerim Friedman from Savage Minds has recently been writing his own series of posts about what kinds of knowledge academics produce, reflecting on whether we can regard knowledge as cumulative, on whether anthropological knowledge in particular “matters” for government policy at the present time and, most recently, on whether we hold some responsibility for how our published words might come to be used. In this final post, Kerim cites a passage from Adrienne Rich’s “North American Time” (the original poem is available in full here) relating to the ways in which published words persist, and come to be reappropriated in unanticipated – and sometimes horrific – ways when historical circumstances shift around them:

II
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill

We move but our words stand
become responsible
for more than we intended

and this is verbal privilege.

The poem parallels the Horkheimer fable, the author asking whether our understanding of this privilege – and of our ultimate lack of control over the impact our work will have on the world – should reduce us to silence:

I am writing this in a time
when anything we write
can be used against those we love
where the context is never given
though we try to explain, over and over
For the sake of poetry at least
I need to know these things

And decides that the need to give voice to the potential for change outweighs the costs of speaking.

Conversations, Critical Theory

The First Taste of Freedom

2 Comments Posted by on September 9, 2006

I’ve just been reading a post over at A White Bear’s blog Is there no sin in it? titled “How Do You Measure Sexism?”, analysing, among other things, the process of internalisation of abuse and of gender stereotype. The post is complex, and worth a direct read – I won’t try to summarise it here. Two lines, though, particularly caught my emotions and my thoughts:

It’s not experiencing sexism that hurts. It’s the first taste of freedom from the pressures of sexism that hurts, because suddenly you realize you’ve allowed yourself to be betrayed.

For purposes of comment here, I hope that A White Bear won’t object if I extrapolate from her insight into experiences that extend beyond gender relations. What I want to explore is her notion that the psychological consequence of the first taste of freedom may actually be pain. This point resonates with me, and also reminds me of the dimensions of Adorno’s work I’ve always liked – particularly Adorno’s attempt to demonstrate that transformative political practice was never the inevitable result of the recognition of unfreedom, but that other consequences – including denial and even rage against the prospect of freedom itself – are also psychologically plausible.

Adorno’s work is concerned, among many other things, with understanding why central political expectations of early Marxist theory were never realised. Marxism had predicted a quasi-automatic drive to political emancipation, as the development of technology made possible the conquest of material nature, and as market crises increasingly pushed the development of centralised political institutions for the management of the economy. The Frankfurt School theorists quickly abandoned any faith in such an automatic historical process – the experience of Nazism, Stalinism and “state capitalism” provided, from their standpoint, a fully adequate historical refutation of the notion that centralised economic planning would inevitably be mobilised for political freedom.

This interpretation of historical developments, however, posed some challenges for the Frankfurt School’s early commitment to “critical theory”. Critical theory as a concept relies on the tension between what is possible, and what we actually do. The critical theorist speaks with the voice of this possibility, arguing that a greater range of freedom, of political choice, is possible than our current practice admits. It can be tempting, from this perspective, to treat awareness of the potential for specific kinds of freedom as an unmitigated good – as though this awareness will immediately and automatically result in transformative political practice. The Frankfurt School come to reject the notion that transformative practice results in any automatic way from the knowledge that specific kinds of freedoms are possible. Adorno, however, goes one step farther: he asks whether, under certain historical circumstances, a recognition that certain forms of unfreedom are unncessary, might actually fuel active political mobilisations against emancipatory potentials.

Adorno argues, in effect, that a deep psychological tension can result from the recognition that our actions have involved unnecessary sacrifices – that we can be scarred specifically by our recognition that potentials for greater freedom lie within reach. Adorno argues that this scarring has been constitutive of the “ego”, and offers a multi-faceted critique of Freudian psychoanalytic concepts of the ego in particular, arguing that much psychological theory confuses a psychology scarred by unnecessary sacrifice, with human nature. Adorno suggests that, in the right historical circumstances, this scarring would not prevent transformative political mobilisation. He also argues, however, that, as long as the social and psychological costs of mobilisation remain high, the tension between an awareness of potential freedom, and the reality of sacrifice, can provoke intense rage – rage expressed as a rigid denial of the potential for freedom, and rage directed into mass mobilisations, focussed particularly against those (often marginalised and socially disempowered) groups who seem to have escaped the rigid self-discipline and self-denial required to perpetuate existing forms of unfreedom.

For Adorno, interestingly, it is the intense power of state-mediated forms of capitalism that specifically overwhelms the delicate balancing act required for persons to attain the psychological resources to recognise and tolerate the pain of their recognition that they have engaged in unnecessary self-sacrifice, so that they can then engage in some kind of transformative political practice. His account thus reflects back on the Marxist critique of market capitalism with a sense of painful historical irony – that the institutional organisation of capitalism fought so hard by an earlier generation of Marxist critique, may have held more potential for emancipatory transformation than the institutional organisation of centrally planned production for which Marxists advocated.

At some point soon (it might have to wait for the end of the term), I’ll try to post a draft paper that explores these issues in more detail and provides a clearer grounding in Adorno’s writings.

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Psychology

On Branching Out

Leave a comment Posted by on September 9, 2006

Kerim from Savage Minds has made an interesting post on the need to preserve a space within the academy for “large questions in their entirety”. Among other points, Kerim draws attention to the common advice given to graduate students to focus on narrow specialisations until they are well-established in their academic careers, at which point they can “branch out”. I’ve posted at greater length over at Savage Minds, but I thought I would reproduce part of the exchange here, since I’ve been meaning to mention some of these same issues on this blog. Within my initial response, I commented:

Weber’s view is fairly commonly expressed in advice to graduate students, in my experience – often accompanied with a kind of historical just-so story about how it used to be possible to theorise large issues, but the world has now sadly become too complex… I’ve always felt it contradictory, at best, for academics to say things like this, while continuing to assign classic theory to graduate students: if the world is now too complex for us to develop our own grand theories, surely the ones from the 19th century should now appear hopelessly naive…

I’ve also personally always questioned the notion that students should be apprenticed to narrow specialisation in the theory that, at some later point, they can “branch out”: surely it is more common for us to develop into deeper and more refined versions of what we actually practice, so that an exclusive focus on narrow specialisation will predictably generate experienced and practiced specialists – not big picture theorists… If the “big questions” aren’t somehow there from the beginning, I’m not sure how a lifetime of attention to small questions is supposed to generate them…

Kerim picks up on this, and comments critically on the tendency to teach graduates brief critiques of the principal “big picture” theoretical traditions, a position I second:

What I always think when I hear one of those one-line critiques is something along the lines of “false consciousness is also true”: the really interesting aspect of any critique is precisely that it casts into clear relief how very strange it is, that we have managed to make sense of the world through the theories we create, in spite of their (occasionally large) empirical weaknesses. Critique should be the beginning of the puzzle, not the end – the real trick is to uncover why the theories were plausible, not just to tick off why they are wrong.

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Professional Life, Teaching

Did (I D)o That?

8 Comments Posted by on March 26, 2006

Scott Eric Kaufman’s Acephalous blog has been hosting an interesting discussion about intentionality and the unconscious. The immediate provocation for the thread was a particularly unfortunate slip of the tongue by talk show host David Lenihan, who, apparently inadvertantly, used a racial epithet in an on-air discussion of Condoleeza Rice.

The discussion at Acephalous revolves, among other things, around the issue of to what degree a mistake like this should be considered a “Freudian slip” – that is, a slip of the tongue that signifies something meaningful about the speaker – in this case, latent racism.

Several complex issues range through this kind of debate for me. The first is the empirical status of Freudian theory – the question of how difficult it is for any interpretive theory (not just psychoanalysis) to extricate itself from problems of confirmation bias – of examining only those slips of the tongue, for example, that produce meaningful words that are potentially subject to interpretation, while overlooking the various stutterings and mis-steps that don’t appear to produce meaning. The second is the contested issue of whether psychoanalytic approaches have taken seriously the question of what evidence would be required to falsify or force a rethink of core concepts within the theory.

Yet these sorts of empirical questions, which have entered into other discussions of psychoanalytic theory at Acephalous in the past, were not really the core issue at stake in this particular debate. Rather, the major issue seemed to be the way in which the folk appropriation of psychoanalytic theory so often leads to something like a notion of “unconscious intentionality” – so that, once you believe, for example, that this slip of the tongue must be meaningful, and then conclude that the slip must signify a transgressive desire like unconscious racism, you then also judge the person for these unconscious impulses, as if the conscious mind must somehow have been complicit all along, for such unsavoury unconscious impulses to exist.

I tend to think of this issue by analogy with work I do on social structuration. I am interested in broad, pervasive patterns of historical change – in forms of perception, thought and practice that tend to span geographical regions, disciplinary boundaries, and fields of practical activity.

One common way of explaining the existence of patterns of historical change is to invoke a kind of conspiracy theory: to say, in effect, that “natural” or “unconscious” change ought to be random in character, so the existence of a meaningful pattern implies intentionality. Meaningful historical patterns then come to be taken as evidence that, somewhere in the background, some group of persons must be making conscious, deliberate choices to cause the world to become as it is. This mode of reasoning in the social sciences is of course analogous to the concept of Intelligent Design in the natural sciences – both approaches assume that complex patterns cannot arise in the absence of intention. Where Intelligent Design is marginalised in the natural sciences, however, variants of conspiracy theory can often be quite central to some social scientific traditions, in explicit or tacit forms.

I favour an alternative, which focusses on historical patterns as the unintentional consequences of actions that, even if they are consciously undertaken, are intended to produce very different results than what they actually effect. The interesting historical problem then becomes understanding why it should be the case that a non-random pattern should arise, if no one consciously intends to bring that pattern into being.

When examining the social realm, once we conclude that patterns are likely generated without conscious intent, it is fairly clear that there is no “place” where these unconscious social processes reside, other than in the myriad actions of the individuals who inadvertantly reproduce such patterns. When we look at nonconscious patterns that arise from the human mind, we are less sure – and, perhaps as a result, retroject notions of intentionality that could only ever be appropriately applied to conscious behaviour, into a nonconscious realm to which it doesn’t apply.

Ironically, I don’t see Freud as having this particular problem – I think he was quite clear, in his descriptions of the unruly, contradictory, fragmented id, that the logic of the conscious realm should not be applied to nonconscious actions – and, in fact, extrapolated that much suffering resulted precisely from guilt inappropriately experienced in relation to unconscious impulses. It is an interesting question whether, in still maintaining that unconscious impulses could be interpreted – that unconscious behaviours have meaning – Freud might inadvertantly have slipped a bit of the logic of the conscious world back into his analysis of the unconscious. But I won’t make any strong claims on this issue without thinking it through far more thoroughly than I have here…

Regardless, in percolating through popular culture, psychoanalytic concepts have retained the Freudian notion that unconscious desires are meaningful – but taken the unconscious as the cipher for the “true” person, such that inadvertant and unintentional acts are taken to be more fundamental, in some ways, than acts that are consciously chosen. In this respect, folk psychoanalytic categories join up with a phenomenon I blogged about a couple of weeks ago: the tendency, within the liberal economic and political tradition, to regard order that arises spontaneously as more “natural” than order that arises from conscious planning. This suspicion of consciousness is apparently an interesting red thread uniting many otherwise contradictory philosophies…

I’m not sure where this leaves me in terms of the issues discussed in the Acephalous thread. It does, though, sound a precautionary note on the need for theory (social and psychological) to take seriously both the reality of conscious intentions and the potential for non-conscious patterns, rather than reducing one of these phenomena to the level of appearance, in some sort of essence-appearance dichotomy.

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Psychology, Social Science

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