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Category Archives: Conversations

All the World’s a Stage – And We Merely Players?

7 Comments Posted by on February 3, 2008

scene from As You Like ItSinthome from Larval Subjects has a very nice post up today, reviewing and improvising around Kenneth Burke’s A Grammar of Motives. Sinthome appropriates Burke’s work to discuss questions relating to how different theoretical and philosophical approaches thematise the relationship of agency and context, showing how Burke’s system can be useful in grasping the emphases of differing approaches:

Burke proposes five broad categories (his pentad) to discuss motives: Scene, act, agent, agency, purpose. Acts are done in a scene, by an agent, often with some particular tool or means (agency), for the sake of some end. By Scene Burke is thus referring to the background or setting of an action. Agents, of course, are those doing the action. Acts are the acts done. Agency is the means by which it is done (a tool, speech, one’s body, and so on). And purpose is that for the sake of which the action is done. It is necessary to emphasize that these terms are extremely broad. Scene, for example, could be language as when talked about Lacan in the context of how the subject is formed in the field of the Other. However, language can be an act or agency in other contexts. Similarly, when Lucretius claims that everything is composed of combinations of indivisible atoms falling in the void, he is talking about scene. When Marx talks about conditions of production he is talking about scene. When Freud talks about drives and the unconscious he is talking about scene. When a religious person talks about God’s plan he is talking about scene. All of these are competing visions of scene. When Walter Ong talks about how the technology of writing transforms the nature of thought, he is talking about how an agency transforms the agent that uses it. Yet in another context, when Foucault or Kuhn talks about the impersonal murmur of language in which we find ourselves thrown, writing, archival texts, are no longer agencies, but are scenes.

Burke’s pentad is of interest in that it allows us to see, a bit more clearly, where the philosophy is placing its emphasis. For example, Sartre, Husserl, Kant, and so on, would be philosophies of the agent. The agent is placed front and center and other elements fall into the background. Most contemporary philosophies in French theory place emphasis on the scene, as in the case of Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault, and many variants of Marxist thought and critical theory. More recently we’ve begun to see philosophies of the act, as in the case of Badiou or Zizek. And so on.

For Sinthome, the real interest in Burke’s work doesn’t lie so much in its classificatory potentials, however, as in the ways in which the classification makes it possible to grasp limitations or blindspots in particular forms of theory. Sinthome explores this issue with reference to limitations in theories that over-emphasise scene:

whether we’re talking about Foucault’s difficulties in explaining how counter-power arises from power, difficulties among the “linguistic idealists” in explaining how it is possible to think anything new if we are products of language, Frankfurt school theorists who endlessly ape the questions “how could this be thought at such and such a particular time?” or self-reflexive questions about “how the critic is able to adopt a critical stances when that critic is itself embedded within the system?” and so on. These are problems that emerge specifically when the scenic element takes over as the overdetermining instance of motives or when scene is the ultimate explanans for everything else. Thus we say that agents are formed within scenes or situations (whether scene be understood as language, power, economics, social fields, etc), and that as products of scenes acts can only arise from scenes and return to scenes. Put differently, under this view it is impossible for an act to exceed the way in which it is structured by situations, for the act is a descendant of the scene just as the son is a descendant of the father (and is said to thereby share the father’s characteristics).

What is prohibited, it would seem, is the introduction of something new into the situation… Something that would transform the configuration of the situation or scene itself. What is required, it would seem, is the thought of an act unconditioned by scenes.

Sinthome moves from here to a discussion of the act – the possibility of a performance that might depart the text of the scene.

This post is interesting and rich in its own right, and the original contains much more than I have reproduced here: readers should follow up at Larval Subjects. Sinthome’s post reminded me, though, of several issues on which I haven’t written anywhere near enough, or with sufficient clarity, here, and which I’m sure lead to (my own!!) recurrent misrepresentations of my theoretical positions, particularly with reference to concepts like immanence and reflexivity. One of these issues I raised in a comment at Larval Subjects (still in moderation at the moment), which I’ll reproduce here as the context relates to some of what I’ve begun to write in the thesis-related posts on Marx. In a very rough way, this comment thematises two issues on which I plan to do much more writing:

(1) the issue that the relationship of “agency” and “scene” may not be able to be posed abstractly – that this relationship itself may be produced or change over time; and

(2) the issue that Marx adopts a methodology that involves unfolding potentials for agency immanently from within its object, not as a general methodology, but as a specific substantive claim about the determinate characteristics of capitalism. This specific substantive claim does not require a denial of the possibility for other sorts of agency that might operate in a capitalist or other context.

Although all of the thesis-related material on Marx talks to some degree about how Marx understands the relationship between forms of subjectivity and forms of “objectivity”, I do have a chapter planned down the track on Marx’s very strange thematisation of the reproduction of capital as a play, in which social actors adopt roles – performing and thereby gaining practical experience with certain dispositions, without these roles, however, determining which empirical social actors will perform them, or dictating that social actors who do perform them are thereby reduced to these roles, or predeciding how the dispositions associated with a particular role relate to dispositions that arise in other ways: in Brandomian terms, there’s a lot of “messy retail business” happening in this aspect of Marx’s theory. But that’s a topic for a different post, when I can develop the concepts much more adequately.

For the moment, I wanted to reproduce over here the comment I’ve written at Larval Subjects, which addresses points one and two above, albeit in a very truncated fashion – storing the comment over here will hopefully prod me to come back to this issue more adequately over the coming months. My comment hangs off the quotation from Sinthome’s post with which this passage begins:

Frankfurt school theorists who endlessly ape the questions “how could this be thought at such and such a particular time?” or self-reflexive questions about “how the critic is able to adopt a critical stances when that critic is itself embedded within the system?”

This may sound counter-intuitive, but this is precisely what the first generation Frankfurt School theorists don’t do. They are responding to a situation in which the ideals of a particular kind of Marxism – socialised means of production, centralised state planning, etc. – appear to have been realised, only to reveal that it is historically quite possible to “realise” such things, without this carrying any emancipatory consequences in its wake. They therefore become intensely critical of theories of “scene” – in the sense that the reduction of agency to “scene” becomes, for them, the target of their critique. What they don’t do, however, is make the assumption that the reduction of agent to scene is a simple theoretical or conceptual illusion. In other words, they historicise the question of the production of agency, rejecting the assumption that the conditions of possibility for, or the nature of, agency should always be thought in the same way.

In this, perhaps without realising it, they were pointing back to Marx, whose development of an immanent critique of capitalism was not predicated on a metaphysical claim about the relationship of scene, agency, etc., but was instead a thematisation of certain specific potentials for certain sorts of agency that arise within this social configuration. What often gets overlooked in readings of Capital is the very explicit discussion of contingency and of phenomena that specifically cannot be theorised – such things are all over the text, explicitly labelled as such. The distinctiveness of capitalism, for Marx, lies in that its process of reproduction involves certain sorts of “necessity” than can be theorised: like the Frankfurt School after him, Marx takes this “necessity” as the target of his critique, and also does not believe that it will drive toward any automatic emancipatory overcoming of the social form. He does, though, think that a grasp of the ways in which this necessity is produced can say something about potentials for agency now.

I take Marx to be doing something odd with notions of immanence and reflexivity – with a methodology associated with these concepts that, in key respects, he borrows (with critical amendments) from Hegel: I do not take him to be endorsing the position that critique must account for itself immanently and reflexively as some sort of general methodological principle – I suspect he would take that as an indefensible metaphysical claim (certainly I know that I would take it as an indefensible metaphysical claim). What I think he is saying, in adopting an immanent and reflexive methodology in order to discuss capitalism, is that this particular object has strange properties – that the object is produced such that key characteristics, including certain potentials for agency, will be overlooked if its process of reproduction isn’t thematised through an immanent analysis that draws out those particular potentials – because, for determinate reasons that are specific to this object, another form of analysis is very likely to naturalise the object in ways that obscure potentials for transformation.

In this sense, Marx is repurposing Hegel’s notion of a “science”, and the methodology that accompanies this notion, to a very different effect and with a very different set of premises – not least with the goal of addressing possible challenges that his own theoretical approach is “utopian”. Marx is aware that the naturalisation of a social context can take a number of forms – most not as naive as the simple claim that things have, e.g., always been this way. Many forms of naturalisation understand the historicity or the contingency of the context, but assert, e.g., various forms of technical justification that things must be reproduced as they are: large populations require it, complexity requires it, post-traditional sociality requires it, etc. The reason Marx offers an immanent critique, in my reading, is not that he denies that agency could possibly arise in some way unpredictable with reference to the “scene” provided by the reproduction of capital, but that an immanent approach allows him to refute these forms of naturalisation, by demonstrating very clearly that the transformations that represent his critical ideals, involve the appropriation of moments that are currently produced in the process of the reproduction of capital. The notions of immanence and reflexivity in Marx’s work, I think, are aimed here, rather than directed to the question of how agency can or cannot arise in some prohibitive sense.

With reference to this question, it’s interesting that, when Marx decides to compare Epicurean to Democritean philosophy in his student work, what draws him to Epicurus is, in no small part, Marx’s criticism of the determinism of the other approach – something that Marx rejects as being a sign of the one-sidedness of the theory. These early interests should perhaps be a caution to approaches that want to read Marx as a theorist of the determination by the base…

Conversations, Critical Theory, Metatheory, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity, Transformation

Passing Class

2 Comments Posted by on January 30, 2008

I have been somewhat saddened to see the turn taken by at least one small part of the discussion started by Dr. Crazy at Reassigned Time, whose thoughtful post on why she teaches literature elicited what I took at first to be a more lighthearted critique from Joseph Kugelmass – perhaps I mistook the tone: it had been a long day, and I was overtired from writing. Unfortunately, this has turned into a more heated conflict – one I probably ought to stay out of, since I am buried in work right now. In fairness to Dr. Crazy, though, and since when I wrote my previous post, I wouldn’t have realised the need to be clearer where I stand in relation to the substantive issues in what has now become a more serious dispute, I thought I should at least go on record. Readers may be more interested in following up directly with the posts at Reassigned Time (here and here) and the Kugelmass Episodes (here and here). There is also a very good discussion percolating away over at Acephalous.

Some of the heat in this dispute has revolved around a matter of cross-blog etiquette – around the question of whether Dr. Crazy’s post, written in a personal voice developed to communicate with an established community of readers, and intended to voice a personal perspective and individual motivations, was an appropriate target for a more abstract and philosophical form of engagement. More substantively, the debate has revolved around issues of social class and the role of higher education in enabling students to achieve higher socioeconomic status – and, most controversially, teaching students to “pass” in class contexts other than the ones in which they grew up. Dr. Crazy’s original post suggested that one – one among many, but still one – of her goals in teaching literature was the following:

To give students a vocabulary for discussing things that are complex, which is ultimately about socializing them to talk, think, and feel in ways that allow them to be upwardly mobile. Most of my students do not come from families that discuss books over dinner – or art, or advances in science, etc. If they don’t learn how to have conversations about these things, they face a disadvantage when they leave college and enter the broader world. (I should say, I think this may be one of the most compelling arguments for the humanities in the context of higher education at my kind of institution, as it doesn’t matter what degree one has if one can’t hobnob with people from higher class backgrounds when one is done.)

In his original post, the discussion that followed in the comments, and now a new post, Joseph has been objecting with increasing volume to this point. He finds in this comment a patronisation that, to be honest, I can’t hear myself – perhaps my own class background is a bit too similar to those of the students Dr. Crazy discusses – and I have, of course, written previously about my reaction to colleagues who occasionally believe that there is something elitist in trying to help students learn to open the doors that can sometimes be opened only through certain “academic” ways of knowing.

Joe raises more serious concerns about the issue of helping students learn to “pass”. Joe worries that this concept: already expresses a devaluation of working class culture; could easily lead students to adopt middle class ideals – including, perhaps, the ideology that social outcomes derive solely from personal effort – in an uncritical way; is unrealistic, in the sense that academic contexts are unlikely to provide an adequate ability to advance socially, and even more unlikely to equip students with a sufficiently robust “habitus” to blend seamlessly into middle class culture; and could constitute a form of policing or gatekeeping:

Etiquette has two faces: it is a form of courtesy, and also a form of policing. Passing is both empowerment and entrapment. If passing was of vital importance to a particular student population, so much so that it became a primary lens for their whole educational experience, I could imagine building a wonderful literature course around it. It would, like any course, perform its share of socialization, and it would comprehend the desire to pass as other, but it would not settle the matter comfortably. That cannot happen until the injustice itself has passed.

It’s difficult for me to know what to say to all this, perhaps because my own background gets in the way. I’m unclear what the “output” would be from Joe’s approach – what pedagogical principles are being advocated. Injustice is not going to pass during the term. Most of us are engaged in the problem of how to teach now, with the students who exist before us, with the backgrounds they have, in a world that has existing power relations that students must navigate, unjust or not. These are conditions not of our choosing – or theirs. Hic Rhodus, hic salta. This is where we must make our leap.

Something about the whole exchange reminded me of an interview Marx gave late in life. He listed the goals of the International Society – universal male suffrage, health and safety regulations, freedom of assembly, legislation by the people, etc. The reporter, obviously expecting a more radical programme, said:

“But,” I said, “socialists generally look upon the transformation of the means of labor into the common property of society as the grand climax of the movement.”

Marx replied:

“Yes; we say that this will be the outcome of the movement, but it will be a question of time, of education, and the institution of higher social status.”

Conversations, Teaching, Transformation

Demanding Literature

4 Comments Posted by on January 27, 2008

Joseph Kugelmass has tagged me (cross-post at The Valve) to respond to a meme, explaining: Why do you teach literature?

I feel guilty about being tagged for this meme for several reasons. First, thinking of responding causes me to look back over my shoulder guiltily at Claude, whose own tag still somehow eludes me.

Second… perhaps a delicate matter… I… er… don’t teach literature – at least in the sense implied by the posts I’ve read thus far in the discussion, and by Joe’s tag itself, which mentions hoping to hear reflections about the value of teaching in the humanities… I am instead a lurker and reader of the blogs of those who teach literature and the humanities, parasitic on this community for intellectual stimulation, while I myself study and teach… sundry fields – often of the sort that would fall on the “social science” side of the line. As my lurking and, perhaps, writing habits indicate, I don’t place much stock in the social science/humanities divide, and don’t affiliate myself in a strong sense with any particular discipline. I’m nevertheless conscious that, unlike the other respondents to this meme, I have never formally taught a literature course (what happens informally… well, that’s another matter…).

Third, this meme has attracted some truly fantastic responses already, originating in the reflections posted at Reassigned Time, being born as a meme at Free Exchange on Campus, and then viralling its memetic tendrils through Citizen of Somewhere Else, A White Bear, and other sites, no doubt due to increase greatly in number in the near future. Very good discussions have broken out around these posts, and both the original posts and the comments are well worth a read. [Updated to add: Free Exchange on Campus is now maintaining a running archive of contributions.]

Fragonard The ReaderThese earlier posts, and those spiralling out from them, open onto a number of interesting questions about how we engage students with complex materials. Dr. Crazy from Reassigned Time opens the discussion with a reaction against an MLA panel whose justifications for teaching literature appeared too closely bound to the student populations and teaching loads of elite universities:

Those who make claims about why we teach literature often teach very little and teach to a very specific sort of student population; those who talk about trends in the discipline often have very little connection to the vast majority of practitioners within the discipline.

And then suggests the following reasons for teaching literature to a much more diverse range of students, in conditions in which much teaching follows a “consumer model of education”:

– to inspire curiosity;
– to disrupt the consumer model of education;
– to insist on complexity and fine distinctions for understanding the world;
– to give students a vocabulary for discussing things that are complex, which is ultimately about socializing them to talk, think, and feel in ways that allow them to be upwardly mobile; and
– to offer students a break from the other demands on their lives.

The Constructivist, from Citizen of Somewhere Else, discovers analogies between the teaching of literature and the coaching of golf, focussing on cultivating readers who are more attentive to themselves and to texts. The coaching metaphors allow The Constructivist to talk about the important limits of pedagogy:

I’m not trying to indoctrinate my students into what I consider to be the one best way of swinging a club, playing a hole, and thinking your way around a course. Sure, I’ll demonstrate a few shots, show them clips of how various golfers have played a given hole, and give them advice on playing a particular course. But I can’t play the game for them. What I can do is to try to give all my students the tools and the opportunities to practice making their own decisions on how, when, and why to play the game. Because I know from experience that each round of golf is different, even when played on the same course by the same person, I take for granted that every person is going to have their own experience on each reading of a literary text. That doesn’t mean they designed the course; it just means they’re following a fairly unique path around it. And it’s worth their time and effort to keep track of their path, compare it to others’, and reflect on the similarities and differences, not just to modify their techniques and strategies for the next round, but to get a better sense of the range of experiences and emotions golf offers, as well.

This limit, reflected upon, becomes a realm of possibility, a means for students to become aware of the intrinsically social character of our encounter with literature:

Reading is not just the personal and individual and private process of experiencing a text, it is also the social and collective and public process of sharing one’s experiences with others.

A White Bear comments on the need to break through her students’ orientation to texts as commodities, noting students’ tendencies to analyse texts as though reflecting on their potential mass audience commercial appeal, at the expense even of registering their own personal likes and dislikes:

To teach students to approach literature (and language and culture in general) as analysts, with a sense of history, and tools, and expertise, is to give them the power to think as individuals in the face of a large and difficult set of problems. It offers them a way out of obsessing about consensus and marketability. It leads them past the narcissism of personal taste. It makes them ask why things are the way they are and how they got that way. Who benefits? Who suffers? To read and think clearly is to see authors, characters, and even other possible readers not as an undifferentiated mass with spending power or cultural capital, but as individuals, with specific, often conflicting, desires and needs. Reading literature analytically is about making necessary distinctions and prudent, fruitful comparisons, maintaining difference where there is difference, and spotting a false note or an obfuscation for what it fails to represent.

Her post also offers the one-sentence version of this argument:

I teach literature in a desperate plea to my students not to be suckers.

Joseph Kugelmass offers some critical reflections on Dr. Crazy’s original post, pointing to a potential tension within the list above, between moments that attempt to disrupt the consumer model of education, and moments that would seem in some ways to reinforce the core assumptions of that model. Joe searches for a means to cultivate, through literature, a “social and empathic curiosity” through a pedagogical practice that aims explicitly to be impractical in both an economic and (narrowly understood) political sense, aimed squarely at any form of instrumentalisation of the teaching of literature. Joe seeks to open doors: his students must walk through them on their own. At the same time, he playfully appropriates A White Bear’s concept of “the sucker” to suggest the sort of disjoint he wants to achieve through this technique – knocking his students just slightly out of kilter with the straight plane of an instrumentally-oriented world:

A White Bear writes, very wittily, that she teaches in order to plead with her students not to be suckers. I do love the salty, healthy skepticism that aesthetic training provides. Nonetheless, I have to admit that most often books make readers look like suckers. They bore their friends with the details of character and plot. They buy tributary, explanatory books with annotations or critical essays. They name various things after books or parts of books, including cats, computers, and their personas on the Internet. Whenever a reader is acting most naturally, minus the solemnizing accessories of a leather chair and a study, she looks like a dreamer, a fool, or both. Yes, that’s what I teach. It’s not always dignified, but it’s irreplaceable.

These are wonderful reflections, and I’m unsure that I would find much to add, even if I were not a student of sundry fields, who spends much of my time teaching social science methodology and economics – with the occasional foray into planning theory as the closest approach to humanities subjects (and here under heavy duress to suppress the connections I do make to the humanities). Yet the concerns raised in the posts above do resonate for me – and not simply abstractly, but as matters of direct pedagogical urgency.

chimeraOne of the things I find myself thinking about often is a strange tension in at least the local variant of the consumer model of education. Courses should be “practical” – shouldn’t stray too far or fast from what is necessary to equip students for the professional demands of their careers. This position is justified with reference to the claim that the students are the consumers, and their demand drives toward greater and greater practicality and professional relevance for their coursework. This rationale, however, is a chimera. When students – undergraduate students – come to us, they do not know what their professions will demand of them, what it means for coursework to be “practical” in a professionally-relevant sense. They also don’t know what professions exist – or what sorts of work might be possible within the professions they have heard something about – and thus what sorts of “practices” might be relevant, somewhere, somewhen, in some professional space. They also don’t know what university is – what university “ought” to be. And they don’t know what they are – or what they might become, as possibilities are opened for them through their encounters with one another, with teachers, with texts, at university.

They learn the answers – or, perhaps more accurately, the boundaries or limits on the acceptable types of answers – largely from us. From their encounters with marketing materials, recruitment staff, orientation, the courses we require – and the courses we allow them to choose. We create our own consumers – whose constructed demands we then somehow manage to position as forces that exist outside of us, forms of domination to which we must comply. Of course, we don’t create our own consumers in a vacuum – given my own work, I can’t help but be aware of the pressures on students and universities alike to instrumentalise education in the service of employability, accountability, direct applicability in some professional sphere. When we start inflecting these complex structural pressures, however, in terms of some rhetoric of “consumer choice” – as though we are reacting to a “given” presented by the autonomous decisions of our students – we greatly diminish our appreciation for our own institutional agency in constituting, and in failing to engage critically with, certain forms of “demand”.

My classes, generally, are hard. They involve a great deal of reading and writing. The texts are not easy. The concepts are difficult. The students are often initially extremely sceptical, having been socialised (not least by their university experiences) to be distrustful of anything too “academic”. This reaction, though, isn’t fixed and frozen, as suggested by the model of “consumer driven” education. The course itself transforms the nature of student expectations and demands – not for all students, of course, but for a significant number. How much more might this be possible – and how many new and interesting “demands” might our “consumers” place upon us – if more opportunities for such exploration were built in to the curriculum? I’m not sure if this exactly answers the question posed, but these concerns certainly do shape how I teach – which is with an eye to opening possibilities that students could not otherwise encounter, outside the confrontation with difficult material, taught in a way that attempts to demystify this difficulty, and in the process show students something about themselves and their world that they could not have dreamt without at least a bit of… philosophy…

Okay. I think I’m supposed to tag people now… ;-P Not sure whom to tap. Nate, Wildly, the folks at Perverse Egalitarianism (do you count as more than one? or do you get out of this entirely, since you write so often and so well on pedagogical issues?), ZaPaper, and – can I tap someone who doesn’t have a blog? – would perhaps rob be willing to comment on this?

[Note: images from Wikipedia, with original sources linked above.]

Conversations, Political Economy, Professional Life, Teaching

Let It Be

1 Comment Posted by on January 23, 2008

I had hoped to write a post tonight for the Science of Logic reading group on the first part of the discussion on Being. Unfortunately, I find myself in one of those vampiric states where, every time I try to sleep, I bounce back up again with something I feel I must jot down for the chapter I’m working on. This has built up an enormous sleep deficit, and I simply don’t feel I can write anything coherent until I’ve slept a bit more 🙂

I was, though, intensely enjoying the discussion of this section started by Alexei’s reflections over at Now-Times. There is some first-rate commentary from Alexei and Daniel around how to understand the relation between the Phenomenology and the Logic, as well as some material I wish I were awake enough to take up adequately here, around the “necessity” of the particular beginning Hegel uses in the Logic. Among many other fantastic points in this exchange, I am particularly interested in Daniel’s claim that:

For if the true starting-point of the Logic is not “merely” an abstract concept, but is our own thought of the abstract concept, then we can take a different tack on Hegel’s comment in ss98 of the Logic that “all that is present is simply the resolve, which can also be regarded as arbitrary, that we propose to consider thought as such.” We don’t have to start with “Being”! We can start anywhere, but regardless of where we choose to start, we can only end our inquiry into thought by canvassing the entire system of Logical categories. Thus the choice of a “starting point” is arbitrary; the only part of the beginning that is important as a beginning is the fact that (wherever we are starting off at), we are aiming to consider thought, here (as opposed to considering biology, or history, or sociology, or physics, or psychology, or some other such topic). So the “invocation of Being” here is just — an aesthetically pleasing way to start the book.

My own interpretation of the same passage isn’t quite the same (not that this should necessarily be seen as significant, as my reading of the text is very provisional). My impulse, though, is to think that it’s significant here that Hegel says the beginning can be regarded as arbitrary: my temptation is to take this phrasing as quite deliberate, and to read this is saying something like “sure, it may seem arbitrary now – but this doesn’t mean it actually is arbitrary”. I take it more that the non-arbitrariness of the beginning won’t be visible until the system as a whole has been developed – until that point, it may in fact look as though you could as well begin anywhere else. Hegel periodically challenges those who suggest that they could achieve something similar, from a different start, to go ahead and try 🙂 (apologies – much too tired at the moment, or I would look up an example). So I think more is at stake here for Hegel than simple “aesthetics” (although I do agree with Daniel’s more general point about grasping this as a consideration of thought, which therefore intrinsically confronts the issue of how to consider something that is also carrying out that process of consideration…).

Nevertheless, I think Daniel is onto something – although my instinct was to see it as something of a tension in the work, rather than to take literally the statement about the arbitrariness of the starting point. I drew attention to a strange distinction Hegel makes in par. 102:

The essential requirement for the science of logic is not so much that the beginning be a pure immediacy, but rather that the whole of the science be within itself a circle in which the first is also the last and the last is also the first.

Hegel moves immediately from here, back to a defence of the claim that being must be the beginning, but there is a tacit disjoint here between the methodology and its content – a disjoint that I find interesting, in light of some of Hegel’s other methodological suggestions.

Much too tired to say anything of substance, but I did want to draw readers’ attention to a very good discussion-in-progress. While I’m at it, I also want to put in a plug for Daniel’s SOH-Dan blog – which I just discovered via this exchange, and which is a fantastic site, with some rich material up on Hegel, Brandom, McDowell and others – the site should be of great interest to readers here who haven’t yet discovered it.

Conversations, Links, Logic, Reading Group

Science of Logic Reading Group: To Be or Not To Be

10 Comments Posted by on January 22, 2008

So the in-person reading group on Hegel’s Science of Logic is meeting again on Thursday, having decided last week to slow our pace a bit, and move more slowly through the Doctrine of Being. This week, we will be discussing Chapter 1, Being (and, you know, Nothing…), and we’ll trundle along at a chapter per week through this section, and then decide whether we want to maintain this pace, or speed things along.

The online discussion since last week has been driven by the exceptional efforts of Alexei at Now-Times, who has written a series of posts that have moved from the first preface through to the section on Being, exploring connections between Phenomenology and the Logic along the way. This is fantastic stuff, to which I want to respond substantively – after I get my next chapter out of the way (with high hopes that this won’t be the monster that the previous one has proven to be). I will, though, try to write something tomorrow on one particular aspect of the discussion of Being – something that I find important (wait for it!) for what Marx is doing in Capital. (I promise to be less one-note in my writing soon – at the moment, I am enjoying precious and rare uninterrupted writing time, and am hording as much of it as possible for the thesis.)

Joining the Fray:

Anyone reading on who would like to contribute some material to the online discussion, but who would like a bit of background on the reading group first, can find some here. Note that, for whatever reason, I’m not finding pingbacks all that reliable lately, so, if you do write something, and I don’t pick up on it here, please email me to let me know.

Online texts of Science of Logic can be found:

In English: from MIA

In German: from Project Gutenberg

Posts so far in the online discussion:

Prefaces

What in the hell… is the spirit of practicality?, what in the hell…, Nate, on the first Preface

What in the hell… happens next?!, what in the hell…, Nate, on the second Preface

Opening Discussions, Rough Theory, N. Pepperell, on the first Preface and a fragment of the Second

Preparing for Being, Now-Times, Alexei, commentary on the other contributions on the first Preface

Masters and Slaves, Now-Times, Alexei, commentary on the second Preface, with reference to the issue of emancipatory possibilities

Transformative Negativity, against the Abstract Ought, Now-Times, Alexei, continuation of post above, with specific reference to the ethical import of Hegel’s approach, and with comparisons between Phenomenology and Logic

Introduction

Hegel’s Science of Logic: Introduction, Perverse Egalitarianism, Mikhail Emelianov

Introduction (Some More Random Observations), Perverse Egalitarianism, Mikhail Emelianov

Being

With What Must the New Year Begin? – Rough Theory, N. Pepperell, on “With What Must the Science Begin” (Note that I’ve reprised this material in the conference paper here – the paper covers a lot of ground on Marx and also on Hegel’s Phenomenology, but the section on the method of the Logic is more accurate and complete than the material in the original post from which it was redrafted.)

Concretion and Appearance, Now-Times, Alexei, reflections on the relationship between appearance and Concept, spanning Phenomenology and Logic

Let It Be, Rough Theory, N. Pepperell, reflection on one aspect of the discussion of the “Concretion and Appearance” discussion at Now-Times

Background and General Comments

Online Resources on Hegel – English, Now-Times, Alexei

Online Resources on Hegel – German, Now-Times, Alexei

The Comfort of Determinism – Perverse Egalitarianism, Mikhail Emelianov, reflections on Kant, Leibniz and Hegel’s desire to erase the distinction between form and content

Conversations, Logic, Reading Group

Off the Main Page

Leave a comment Posted by on January 15, 2008

So Alexei is keeping me distracted with a set of excellent questions on draft work that doesn’t merit such attentions – the conversation, though, is excellent, so I wanted to draw attention to it, for anyone thinking things are inactive around here: I’ve been writing there, rather than starting a new post.

I also wanted to draw attention to two fantastic posts on Brandom, by Tom over at Grundlegung. Tom is working through Making It Explicit, which is causing me some pangs of guilt, as L Magee and I also intend to do this, but are both buried in thesis work. By the time we get around to it, Tom will have, I suspect, written all that is worth discussing on the topic :-). Check out his posts on:

Brandom’s Master Strategy

and

Brandom on Enlightenment and Disenchantment

I’ll try to get something else up here on Hegel in the next couple of days. The in-person reading group in Melbourne will be working through the first section of the doctrine of being. I haven’t decided yet if I will write on this, and then backtrack over the weekend to pick up again on the Prefaces and Introductions that have been discussed online in a fantastic set of posts, with links collected here, or if I will take up the blog discussion first… It may come down to how far behind I am in my reading (!!).

Conversations, Links, Reading Group

Science of Logic Reading Group: Beginnings (Updated and Bounced)

5 Comments Posted by on January 11, 2008

Just another quick update on the Science of Logic reading group. The first in-person group meeting takes place in Melbourne on Thursday, discussing (or beginning to discuss) the Prefaces, Intro, and the section on “With What Must the Science Begin?”.

The online discussion has so far drawn posts from Mikhail Emelianov of Perverse Egalitarianism and Nate from what in the hell…. Anyone else who’d like to contribute is most welcome – just post something and link back here. I’ll periodically assemble links so that people reading along can see who has written what.

To Mikhail and Nate: I’ve been needing to focus on some dissertation-related work this week, but want to pick up on what both of you have written in a post over here, in a few days (perhaps after the in-person reading group meets, when I roll together observations on what happens there, with the things that have come up so far in the online discussion). Apologies that I’m having to do this at a delay.

Anyone wanting more background on the reading group before diving in, can find some here.

Online texts of Logic of Science can be found:

In English: from MIA

In German: from Project Gutenberg

Mikhail and I have been following the convention of quoting from the MIA version in our posts, and using the paragraph numbers from that version for easy reference to those reading on.

Updated to add: I stuffed up the link to Nate’s original post, on the first Preface, so I’ve corrected that (and a conversation has broken out over there, so check it out). I’ve also added a link to Nate’s second post, on the second Preface.

Updated to add: Alexei has written an excellent response to other posts from this first round, and Mikhail has also added some nice reflections on Hegel’s relationship to Kant and Leibniz. I’ve updated the list below to include these links, as well as a link to my own partial reflections on the Prefaces, and bounced the post to the top of the blog again for ease of reference.

Posts so far in the online discussion:

What in the hell… is the spirit of practicality?, what in the hell…, Nate, on the first Preface

What in the hell… happens next?!, what in the hell…, Nate, on the second Preface

Opening Discussions, Rough Theory, N. Pepperell, on the first Preface and a fragment of the Second

Preparing for Being, Now-Times, Alexei, commentary on the other contributions on the first Preface

Second Preface: Masters and Slaves, Now-Times, Alexei, commentary on the second Preface in light of themes from the Phenomenology of Spirit

Hegel’s Science of Logic: Introduction, Perverse Egalitarianism, Mikhail Emelianov

Introduction (Some More Random Observations), Perverse Egalitarianism, Mikhail Emelianov

With What Must the New Year Begin? – Rough Theory, N. Pepperell, on “With What Must the Science Begin”

The Comfort of Determinism – Perverse Egalitarianism, Mikhail Emelianov, reflections on Kant, Leibniz and Hegel’s desire to erase the distinction between form and content

Conversations, Critical Theory, Logic, Reading Group

Science of Logic Reading Group: Opening Discussions

3 Comments Posted by on January 10, 2008

The in-person reading group in Melbourne meets tomorrow to discuss the Prefaces, Introduction, and section on “With What Must the Science Begin” from Hegel’s Science of Logic. Before that meeting, I wanted to contribute at least in a preliminary way to the discussion that has taken place at Perverse Egalitarianism and what in the hell…, in relation to the Prefaces and Introduction. The specific posts are linked below. Alexei from Now-Times, rob from around these and other parts, and perhaps Tom from Grundlegung have each expressed an interest in contributing something to the discussion at some point – and it wouldn’t surprise me if the in-person reading group lingers over these materials for more than a week, or returns to them later. The current post is therefore intended simply as an intervention into an ongoing discussion.

A quick preliminary. In spite of appearances, I generally keep personal things off the blog – just a brief deviation here to say that it’s been a bit of a rough day, in the midst of a rough period, and so what follows may be a bit… rougher theory than usual… 😉 I had wanted to weave a bit around what you folks have written, but am unfortunately a bit internalistic in my writing tonight, and am not making the sorts of explicit connections I would like with your contributions to this discussion. Please know that I am reading, and enjoying the posts very much, and will hopefully be able to pick up on the next round of discussion with more cross-connections, energy, and insight.

Preface to the First Edition

Reading Hegel’s first Preface reminded me of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment – of their concern with how enlightenment contains the immanent risk of collapsing back into myth, as it embarks on a corrosive process of demythologisation and, in its passion to undermine metaphysics, erects a new mythology of the factual, of the “given”, that, ultimately, devours the critical urge of enlightenment itself.

Hegel’s solution would not be one Horkheimer or Adorno would endorse. Still, Hegel here grapples with a similar intuition that there is a dark side to the programme of demythologisation. Hegel can’t restrain his sarcasm when he describes how the enlightenment presents itself as a leap from darkness into newfound clarity:

having got rid of the dark utterances of metaphysics, of the colourless communion of the spirit with itself, outer existence seemed to be transformed into the bright world of flowers – and there are no black flowers, as we know. (3)

black flowerHegel has already outlined the immediate costs of this shift – again in terms that reverberate through Horkheimer and Adorno’s work: the cost of enlightenment is the Kantian sacrifice “that the understanding ought not to go beyond experience” (3). The fear that going beyond the given will entail a lapse back to myth – in Hegel’s terms, the fear that “the cognitive faculty will become a theoretical reason which itself generates nothing but fantasies of the brain” – is linked explicitly in Hegel’s text with the flattening of rationality into instrumental reason:

the cry of modern educationists that the needs of the time demanded attention to immediate requirements, that just as experience was the primary factor for knowledge, so for skill in public and private life, practice and practical training generally were essential and alone necessary, theoretical insight being harmful even (3)

The older metaphysics has not survived this transition. Theology has retreated to the study of historical forms, submerged itself into the platitudes of common sense, or sunk into frank irrationalism. Logic lingers on, but in a hollowed out and instrumental form – a procedure without content, indifferent to substantive truth so long as the proper steps have been followed.

There are gestures here that sound romantic. Hegel notes the loss of those sacrificed by their community so that their lives could be dedicated to contemplation. He talks of blessedness, of temples that have lost their holy of holies. The target of this criticism, however, is one Marx would share: the reduction of all of life to the practical processes involved in securing the means of living. He decries the absence of something that can raise itself above the relentless focus on what is functional. He asks what, after the death of older forms of metaphysics and theology, will hold out the potential for transcendence – for critique.

At this point, however, the text pivots. This corrosive sceptical process is suddenly associated with the birth pangs of a new creative idea. This new idea, Hegel argues, indeed appears attenuated and rigidly formal in comparison with the richness of the old idea. In the moment of transition, rigid formalism reflects the intensity and the fanaticism of the struggle against the fully developed old. This moment, however, is passing – the new idea ready to come into its own. It is now both possible and necessary for the principle of the new idea to be elaborated in systematic form – a prospect that, for Hegel, will overcome dry formalism and allow the new idea to be grasped in its living detail. In Hegel’s words:

In its first manifestation, such an idea usually displays a fanatical hostility toward the entrenched systematisation of the older principle; usually too, it is fearful of losing itself in the ramifications of the particular and again it shuns the labour required for a scientific elaboration of the new principle and in its need for such, it grasps to begin with at an empty formalism. The challenge to elaborate and systematise the material now becomes all the more pressing. There is a period in the culture of an epoch as in the culture of the individual, when the primary concern is the acquisition and assertion of the principle in its undeveloped intensity. But the higher demand is that it should become systematised knowledge. (7)

Here, Hegel moves into the territory that will draw down Adorno’s ire – this move, for Adorno, amounts to an attempt to reconcile in thought, what could only be reconciled in practice: it is not possible to systematise away, what Adorno, following Marx, regards as real contradiction. Better Kant, Adorno at times will argue: at least his work leaves the raw contradiction exposed and unresolved.

Hegel sees his work straddling a transition – from Understanding, to dialectical reason. “Understanding”, Hegel argues, “determines, and seeks to hold the determinations fixed; reason is negative and dialectical, because it resolves the determinations of the understanding into nothing; it is positive because it generates the universal and comprehends the particular therein.” (9) He refers here to a “self-construing method” required for philosophy to become “an objective, demonstrated science” (9) – and points to the Phenomenology of Spirit as an instantiation of this method.

He then connects the Phenomenology to the Logic by arguing that Consciousness is “spirit as a concrete knowing” – intriguingly, a knowing “in which externality is involved” (10). He then argues that the “the development of this object, like the development of all natural and spiritual life, rests solely on the nature of the pure essentialities which constitute the content of logic.” (10) The meaning of this is worth attempting to grasp a bit better as we move through the text.

Preface to the Second Edition (partial comment)

If the first Preface reminds me of Horkheimer and Adorno, the second causes me to think of Brandom – unfortunately an association less provocative in its narrative implications than the one to Dialectic of Enlightenment, used to structure my reflections above. I hear a great deal of Brandom’s Hegel in this text, but I’ll leave this as a fragmentary observation for the moment, perhaps to be picked up if other readers of Brandom have any thoughts.

Hegel begins with a strangely apologetic tone: the task is utterly new – a completely new beginning is required, in order “To exhibit the realm of thought philosophically, that is, in its own immanent activity or what is the same, in its necessary development” (13). Yet there is still a history to this subject. And we should perhaps discuss it. It has, in fact, on some occasions been useful. Hegel diminishes this usefulness – dry bones, he claims, into which his system must breathe life. A resurrection, then, as Mikhail noted in one of his posts on the Introduction – but is there perhaps also a sort of sheepish awareness that this isn’t quite the virgin birth of the new idea?

Languages store forms of thought. German, apparently, stores them exceptionally well (there is a nice discussion on this passage between Nate and Le Colonel Chabert, under Nate’s post on this section). Nate is right to pick up on the complex and strange movements in this paragraph – something about it reminds me of Marx’s discussion of the political economists, value, and Dame Quickly: Hegel seems unable to communicate clearly “where to have it” – what the ontological status of the phenomena he is describing might be. In a few quick sentences, language figures as the bearer of categories – and thus of logic – sometimes clear, sometimes mixed together and confused, but embedded into the deepest recesses of human nature, constitutive, the suggestion is, of human nature. Or is that only formally speaking? Or perhaps supernatural? It depends on the aspect being considered – the relationship held in prominence at that moment in the passage. In any event, we’ll move on quickly to discuss the usefulness of particles, and leave these discussions of language, logic, and human nature behind. While having a good mixture of logical expressions in a natural language is useful, philosophy needs no special vocabulary of its own – because philosophy is not treated, here, as any kind of driving force, but rather as something that mines and systematises a much more general movement in culture:

The advance of culture generally, and of the sciences in particular, gradually brings into use higher relationships of thought, or at least raises them to greater universality and they have thus attracted increased attention. (14)

Philosophy may mine insights from general culture, but it nevertheless contributes something pivotal: it tarries with the familiar, dwells on the taken for granted. What Hegel calls “natural thinking” – impatient – satisfies itself with mere acquaintance with its objects (16). Philosophy, starting with Plato and Aristotle, breaks with this, and begins to open the possibility for a movement from mere acquaintance, to “intelligent apprehension” (17).

Hegel takes an interesting historical and sociological sidestep here. In Aristotle’s voice, he notes that philosophy requires a certain level of material comfort – something available, Aristotle notes, in Egypt due to the specialisation of a priestly class. After a quick interlude back in Hegel’s own voice – which in the structure of the text suggests that it ought to be taken as a gloss on Aristotle’s comment – Hegel is back again to Aristotle, this time talking about the nature of man being bondage, except in the science that is not studied for its utility.

In between these Aristotelian bookends, Hegel shelves a bit of his own content. Adorno rears his head again for me here: I can almost hear Adorno ask – did you see how quickly Hegel moves from Aristotle’s fairly frank discussion of the class basis of philosophical thought, into something that is subtly not a gloss on this concept? Let’s hear what Hegel says in his own words:

As a matter of fact, the need to occupy oneself with pure thought presupposes that the human spirit must already have travelled a long road; it is, one may say, the need of the already satisfied need for the necessities to which it must have attained, the need of a condition free from needs, of abstraction from the material of intuition, imagination, and so on, of the concrete interests of desire, instinct, will, in which material the determinations of thought are veiled and hidden. In the silent regions of thought which has come to itself and communes only with itself, the interests which move the lives of races and individuals are hushed. (18)

The need for material security remains in this passage – but cottoned over, submerged back into one of those mixtures Hegel seems to frown upon, in his discussion of natural languages. “The human spirit” needs to have travelled a long road, Hegel argues, suggesting a somewhat disembodied variant on Aristotle’s theme. Thought freed from need, in Hegel’s version, moves not in the temples of a priestly class, but rather in “the silent regions of thought”.

Hegel moves from here to talk about something like a sociological inversion. For Aristotle, freedom from want, freedom to concern oneself with logic – with something that contemplates thoughts in their abstraction, and thus with no aim to practical utility – seemed to offer a path for humans to reach for something beyond the human, for something outside the cycle of bondage that defined most of human existence. In Hegel’s time, by contrast, logic had become something taught to youth – to persons not ready to join in practical affairs, and thus regarded as having nothing better to do, than contemplate abstractions. This reversal – this modern valorisation of the practical – has reacted back on the teaching of logic itself, reconfiguring it as a means by which children could prepare themselves for more utilitarian ends.

***

It’s gotten very late – I’ll need to break off here, with a great deal of the second Preface left to go, and the Introduction still untouched. My apologies especially to Nate and Mikhail for not having been able to write more – or to draw your pieces more explicitly into what I have already written. Hopefully the whimsical nature of these comments won’t be too irritating – this is how I read, how I work myself into a text, but it’s not necessarily the best way to write about the experience, and it doesn’t exactly generate what one might call considered comments on Hegel (or Adorno, or the other folks I mention in passing), but rather my very raw reaction and association to this text, written more or less as I moved through it tonight – admittedly not on a first read, but very much without any settled or established “reading” I might eventually develop of this text.

Time to sleep… Take care all… 🙂

Conversations, Logic, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Reading Group

Science of Logic Reading Group: Introduction (Updated and Bounced to the Top of the Page!)

5 Comments Posted by on January 5, 2008

Hey! Go to sleep hoping that someone other than me will write something on the Introduction to Hegel’s Science of Logic, wake up, and find that they have! A body could get used to this…

Mikhail Emelianov from Perverse Egalitarianism has gotten us started with some comments on the distinctions Hegel makes between his own approach, and more typical treatments of logic, draws attention to Hegel’s ever-present sensitivity to the relation of form and content, and raises the difficult question of how to understand theological themes in Hegel’s work, with particular reference to recurrent metaphors of redemption and reviving the dead (a favourite theme of mine from Marx, as well).

I’m off to the library for the day, so no detailed comments from my end yet. Just wanted to post the pointer, and get the discussion under way.

Updated 5 Jan: Updated to add that, as promised, Mikhail has supplemented his original post. I hope to pick up on some of Mikhail’s points soon, but just wanted to point folks to the new post for the moment, and bump this thread back to the top of the blog.

Posts so far in the summer Hegel discussion (even if we can’t get you to Australia, Mikhail, I’m formally inducting you into our season… warm thoughts, at least, headed your way from Melbourne…):

Hegel’s Science of Logic: Introduction, Perverse Egalitarianism, Mikhail Emelianov

Introduction (Some More Random Observations), Perverse Egalitarianism, Mikhail Emelianov

With What Must the New Year Begin? – Rough Theory, N. Pepperell, on “With What Must the Science Begin”

Conversations, Critical Theory, Logic, Reading Group, Self-Reflexivity

Grundlegung on Brandom

Leave a comment Posted by on December 19, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversations, Critical Theory, Self-Reflexivity

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