Rough Theory

Theory In The Rough

Category Archives: Critical Theory

Immediate Reactions

12 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on March 14, 2007

Sinthome at Larval Subjects has written a couple of responses to my recent post on real abstractions. My current response to the most recent is, I suspect, trapped in the same Akismet queue that seems also to be holding up some legitimate comments over here lately (incidentally, people should email me if they notice posts not getting through, as this will help me collect them from the spam bucket more quickly…). In the off chance that the post has disappeared entirely into the ether, I wanted to cross-post here – but, since this was written as a comment and therefore relies on the context to which it responds, you should really read Sinthome’s post first:

Just a quick note on my end, as well 🙂

Sense-perception jumped out at me in this passage for a different reason, I suspect, than it may have seemed: what interested me was that, in these couple of sentences, Deleuze and Guattari appear to assume that Marx’s point would have been to criticise notions of sense-perception, by arguing that sense perception needs to be placed back into a context of various mediations. I am contesting their reading of Marx, rather than making any arguments about what they themselves think – and I am doing this, not because I particularly care what Marx “really meant”, but because there are implications for how we understand the emergence of critical subjectivities.

What it seemed to me that this quotation might have missed (and, again, I don’t know the context, so I’m not making this as a strong claim, but just explaining what prompted me to write on the topic) is that, for Marx, the historical emergence of a form of subjectivity that could look at a product like wheat and see it as a product – as a thing, as an object potentially devoid of any particular intrinsic social determination essential to itself – is not a standpoint being criticised, but actually a dimension of Marx’s own standpoint of critique. I need to be careful here: Marx will try to historicise everything, so in that sense any form of subjectivity he discusses will be an object of critique in that he will attempt to historicise it. But he is not, I am suggesting, trying to criticise the notion of looking at an object, and seeing something potentially free of social determinations – he is not offering a critique of immediacy (in this sort of comment) from the standpoint of advocating a perspective that captures mediation more clearly. (Again: I need to be very cautious, because of course Marx does also focus on mediations – I am trying to draw attention to something very specific here.)

For Marx, the emergence of a form of subjectivity that can potentially see products as secular goods – as things that are not intrinsically bound together with some particular means of production – is actually integral to his attempt to establish that a transformation of the relations of production is possible. If this form of subjectivity were not widespread – if this notion weren’t intuitively plausible to people on a mass scale, then the task of transformation would be much more difficult, as it could look as though you could only advocate transforming the relationship of production, at the expense of the results of production – material wealth, mastery over nature, etc. (One can criticise Marx for valorising these things, but this issue is beyond the scope for this comment.)

So my reaction to the Deleuze and Guattari passage was that, to me, it seemed to be suggesting that Marx was saying something like: we really need to get past this form of immediacy that causes us to see wheat as a thing, and instead see it as, what it is, a product of a specific form of production – critical subjectivity consist in becoming more aware, more conscious, of the determinate processes that brought this particular object into being. Whereas I take Marx to be saying something more like: there are emancipatory potentials contained within the fact that we can look at this object – this wheat – and not associate it intrinsically with the specific processes that brought it into being. Because we can look on this product this way, we are open to the potential that its production might have taken a very different form. Now that we are open to this potential, we can reflect on what that different form ought to be. This might have been more difficult for us, if we saw the wheat as intrinsically embedded in some specific network of social relations.

Now of course, in the terms in which you were speaking in your original post, Marx is actually still very interested in mediation – and he does try to show how this specific kind of secular perception, this ability to perceive and experience objects as potentially devoid of social determinations, as not intrinsically socialised – as itself a product of a very specific social context. When he tries to analyse that context, he is of course offering an analysis of what you would term (as I would, as well) social mediations.

This is why my reaction focussed on these particular two sentences from Deleuze and Guattari (and were aimed at the reading of Marx, never at their theory in any broader sense) – and why I didn’t then focus on any other aspects of your post.

I would contest that this kind of analysis – understanding critical forms of subjectivity – is not pressing. I think there have been dire consequences for social movements that have resulted from not being sufficiently aware of the context they inhabit, and therefore engaging in practices whose consequences might have been easier to foresee, had a more adequate analysis been available to them. I see my work as working toward something that would be useful in this way. But perhaps I’m wrong. 😉

I worry a bit, though, that when we venture into this topic, you have several times pushed in this direction, as though I am somehow driving the discussion away from practical concerns, or raising questions that, for some reason, somehow intrinsically can’t be answered. It’s obviously up to you how you’d like to engage, but I am actually trying to answer such questions, believe they can be answered – at least to a better degree than they have been to date – and think these are questions worth worrying about, rather than shrugging off and dismissing. This doesn’t mean that such questions need to occupy everyone’s work – there is division of labour in theory as in other things. But I’ll contest the suggestion that the questions aren’t pressing. 😉

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy

Gesturing at a History of the Immediate

5 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on March 12, 2007

Sinthome from Larval Subjects has this annoyingly productive knack for writing things that won’t leave my thoughts, that provoke me to cast back on unresolved problems that are quite central in my own work – destabilising and reactivating those problems once again, and thus prompting me to write responses even when I have other commitments to meet. (If anyone needs to know how to reach me during this interlude while I’m dead, you all know whom to ask… ;-P) Sinthome’s recent writings on, for want of a better term, the phenomenology of stupidity have been nagging away, teasing me with a constellation of concepts I can’t quite bring into focus, but which have something to do with the theoretical standards of immanence and self-reflexivity, the need to historicise this kind of analysis, and the concept of a real abstraction. Since I can’t grasp the constellation (I gather from a recent discussion over at Acephalous that I’m not alone in this…), I thought I’d tug at one of the threads – that connected to the concept of a real abstraction – and see what thoughts I could begin to shake loose as a result.

In the recent post “Immediacy, Mediation, and Stupidity”, Sinthome develops an earlier set of reflections that seek to understand something about the emergence of critical forms of subjectivity, by exploring what it means to judge a form of subjectivity as being in error, once we have committed to an immanent and self-reflexive theoretical framework. I won’t here go into detail about why an immanent and self-reflexive framework transforms the terms in which one analyses error – Sinthome touches on the issue in the posts cited above, and this issue has been discussed a number of times in the conversation that has criss-crossed these blogs over the past several months. I will note that Sinthome’s main focus in these posts is categorial, rather than causal (although causal questions also figure): Sinthome is asking how we can grasp or understand what would constitute error (and, therefore, how we can grasp or understand the normative ideals in the name of which we would make such judgments), when we no longer have recourse to the option of appealing to an outside standpoint from which thought can look down from the lofty heights of some transcendent reality. How can thought that remains necessarily embedded in the context it seeks to criticise, understand and justify the possibility for its own critique?

In the current post, Sinthome suggests that an answer for this question might lie in the distinction between forms of thought that focus on the immediate, and forms of thought that seek to bring mediations to light. Sinthome equates the focus on the immediate with abstract thought, defined as thought that confuses a part for the whole. Dialectical thought, by contrast, seeks to undermine such abstractions by resituating perception such that the concrete network of mediations comes more clearly into view. Sinthome illustrates this issue by quoting the following passage from Delueze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus:

Let us remember once again one of Marx’s caveats: we cannot tell from the mere taste of wheat who grew it; the product gives us no hint as to the system and the relations of production. The product appears to be all the more specific, incredibly specific and readily describable, the more closely the theoretician relates it to ideal forms of causation, comprehension, or expression, rather than to the real process of production on which it depends. (AO, 24)

When I was reading Sinthome’s post, this quote jarred me and threw me out of the text. The thought “real abstraction!” flashed into my head, and I’ve been trying ever since to disentangle the significance of that association. What I’d like to do here is see if I can tease out some of the thoughts underlying my reaction – with the strong caveat that what I’m writing here is a reflection on this quotation alone – I don’t have the background to comment on Deleuze and Guattari’s work in any broader sense. So I’ll ask some forbearance here, as my intention is not to comment on what these authors might think in some general sense, but simply to explore a few of the implications of this specific passage, to see where they might lead.

I think the reason for my sort of lightening flash reaction to the text is that – again, solely in terms of the internal logic of this small collection of sentences – the problem of immediacy is here posed as a problem of how sense perception is inadequate or works to confuse us: the taste of the wheat gives us no clues; if we attend only to the evidence of our senses, then, it is plausible – if also criticisable – that we should not stumble across the various social mediations that have led to the production of this wheat, have carried it to our tables, have caused us to perceive it as something to be used for food rather than for some other purpose, etc. Tacitly, the properly critical perspective here lies in focussing our attention, not on the abstracted physical properties of the thing that we are consuming, but on the complex network of social relationships that has enabled this sense perception to take place. Marx is cited unproblematically as the inspiration for this insight.

I can hardly question that Marx sought to draw our vision to social relations. I’ve often felt, however, that common readings of Marx – including the one suggested in these sentences – turn him into far more of an unmasking-and-debunking theorist than I read him to be, and thus fail to capture the ways in which his theory attempts to embrace and seize, rather than unmask and reject, forms of subjectivity that he regarded as generated by capitalism, but in alienated form. As an unmasking-and-debunking theorist, Marx might have sought to do no more than draw our attention to the (unjust) social relations that underlay the production of goods then laundered by the market. As a critical theorist concerned with appropriating Hegel in materialist guise, however, Marx might be interested in something else entirely – without, of course, losing sight of the injustice he also wanted to criticise.

A critical theoretic approach would require that Marx ground his own critical standpoint – that he account for the forms of critical subjectivity manifest in his own critique – using the same categories and the same analytical strategies he directs at the society he criticises. We would presumably agree that Marx understood himself to be presenting a materialist theory – and that materialism functions as a normative ideal within his approach, as a standard against which Marx criticises the mystifications underlying other approaches. Yet what could be more “materialist” than this perception of wheat in terms of its immediate physical properties – this image of objects shorn of their embeddedness in social relationships and moral valences, open for examination by our senses, either directly or as amplified by technology? This issue becomes confused by the more recent flattening of the concept of “materialism” as though it pertains to something specifically economic – and therefore somehow should naturally direct our thoughts to social relations of production. In Marx, I would suggest, the concept still carries both a mixture of this later meaning, and its earlier sense of “secular” and “scientific” thinking – and would thus be somewhat aligned with the tendency to explore the “material” world, understood as a “demystified” and “rationalised” world, shorn of anthropomorphic projections.

Marx’s materialism suggests that things might not be as simple as Deleuze and Guattari imply. If Marx were to point to an object like wheat, and note that social relations cannot be deduced from it, perhaps there is a more complex sense in which such an observation might figure in Marx’s work: perhaps he might also be asking how he can justify the use of “materialist” concepts, within his own self-reflexive and immanent approach. Perhaps he might be seeking to meet the criteria of self-reflexivity (and of immanence or materialism itself) by posing the problem of how it came to pass that we exist in a society that can perceive and think in materialist terms, a society for which notions like sense perception might be appear to be the most basic, the most “natural”, way of perceiving the world – a society whose inhabitants can observe wheat and not immediately think things like: “Yes of course: I recognise this substance: it may only be lawfully consumed by persons of this caste, when prepared in this way, and at this time. It may only be produced by persons of that sort, using these traditional techniques, and with the proper ritual performances.”

I am suggesting, in other words, that Deleuze and Guattari might be here confusing a problem Marx was attempting to solve, with a debunking statement about an illusion that they position Marx as trying to move past. Ironically, at least in the few sentences quoted above, Deleuze and Guattari may even themselves be participating in the phenomenon Marx is trying to problematise and make available to investigation: they appear to take for granted that sense perception should be a form of immediacy, and therefore carries an inherent risk of obscuring the potential to perceive more mediated forms. Marx, I am suggesting, is more interested in a prior question: how does something like sense perception, or the notion of objects shorn from their embeddedness in a network of social relations – in other words, the constellation of concepts we association with “materialism” – ever come to be experienced as “immediate” in the first place?

What Marx is directly critical of, I would suggest, is not the fact that we should perceive the world in materialist terms – he takes materialism as one of the standpoints of his critique, and presumably believes that this form of subjectivity, which arose in alienated form under capitalism, is one of those forms of subjectivity worth preserving and translating into a more emancipated society. He is, however, critical of the tendency in political economy, the natural sciences, and other fields to take materialism for granted – to act as though “there used to be history, but there no longer is any” – to understand materialist forms of perception and thought in terms of a “stripping away” of social relations from some underlying “nature”.

The self-reflexivity of Marx’s approach won’t allow him to posit his own normative ideals as somehow natural or immediately given, while he treats other forms of thought as artificial social constructs. Instead, he must somehow try to understand how his own ideals are also socially constructed – and, in his work, he time and again comments on the special historical irony of a society whose own unique form of social construction should take on the appearance of being nothing more than pure biological or organimistic reality, stripped of all contingent and artificial social determinations. For Marx, this poses a unique historical puzzle of why the determinate form of social mediation in our society should necessarily cloak itself in the appearance of this particular kind of immediacy – of why our specific and unique “social” should generate a self-perception that articulates its (unrecognised) sociality in terms of categories like immediate sense perception. This, I would suggest, is the problem Marx is trying to solve – and not simply so that he can criticise the political economists for not paying history its due, but so that he can ground his own standpoint of critique.

I suspect Marx’s solution to this puzzle is not quite mine – and, in any event, I have articulated this response in terms of Marx’s work more because he was already haunting the Deleuze and Guattari quotation, rather than because we owe any special obeisance to his critical theory. Nevertheless, I would suggest that Marx does pose the problem particularly well, and – very gesturally here – that I suspect the solution to this problem would involve the concept of a real abstraction. If other societies might look on wheat and see something in which we might immediately recognise a dense network of concrete social relations, detailing who produces, how, for whom, and why, and we look on wheat and see an object we experience as being devoid of such concrete social relations, the issue is not that our perceptions are less “socialised” than those of other human communities that look on the world in a different way. The issue is that we have been socialised into a context in which, at some level of social practice, we enact a genuine indifference to networks of concrete social relations. Our ability to perceive the world “materialistically”, to develop ideals related to forms of perception that might not be bound together in any particular kind of social relation, itself points to some level of social practice at which we are in practice indifferent to such relations – at which we treat such relations as contingent, arbitrary, dispensable. This level of social practice, I would suggest, enacts a real abstraction – not a transcendental illusion haunting thought as such, but a form of collective behaviour focussed (nonconsciously) on enacting a social context that transcends more concrete social practices, that relativises those concrete practices and makes them appear – as they are in fact demonstrated to be in our social practice – artificial human creations. When we look on objects and see objects – material things that we can meaningfully interpret in light of our sense perceptions – we are exploring our world through the unique lens provided by our own enacted, collective, practical indifference to more concrete forms of social relations, extrapolating the potential for a form of perception that views such concrete relations as radically contingent and artificial. This is a real abstraction.

From this standpoint, the options with which Deleuze and Guattari present us above are both too immediate. Their quotation criticises the tendency to privilege sense perception, against the standpoint provided by concrete social relations. I would suggest that a more adequate critique would first explain why it might be possible to privilege sense perception in this way – why, in spite of appearances, something more than biological (asocial) perception is at issue here – how what we perceive as “sense” perception is social through and through, to its most abstract formulations. At the same time, a more adequate perspective would recognise that concrete social relations might not be the sole standpoint for critique – or even, in some circumstances, a desirable standpoint of critique – but should themselves be understood as only a moment in quite complex social context that simultaneously generates, and relativises, such concrete relations. And, finally, a more adequate perspective might ask: in what senses is it good to be aware of concrete social relations? How have we perhaps been liberated in some senses by the possibility of not being aware of such things? We are presumably children enough of our time to find something liberatory about the notion that our wheat need not be grown under certain ritualised conditions, for example – can we perhaps differentiate this “secular” perspective as a normative ideal from the alienated conditions in which it arose, wedded as it was to a horrific social indifference to the gruesome conditions in which production can sometimes take place? This kind of process – of brushing history against the grain, in Benjamin’s sense, or recognising what we owe to the time that has birthed us as critics, while also reflecting critically on the ways in which that time stands in the way of its own best potential – is what would be involved, I suggest, in developing a more adequate self-reflexive critical theory of contemporary society.

This is all terribly incomplete, of course – even with reference to the narrow issue of coming to terms with “materialism” or “immanence” as a theoretical ideal, much more work is required, as there are more substantive claims buried within these concepts than just indifference to concrete social relations, and I haven’t even adequately grounded the bits and pieces to which I’ve gestured above. Some day perhaps I’ll become adequate to my own questions… I’ll also apologise once again for taking this one isolated quotation from Deleuze and Guattari, and using it as the springboard for critical reflections – I am acutely aware that isolated passages rarely represent the thoughts of any theorist, and my intention here was simply to take the quotation as a jumping off point, rather than to cast aspersions in any broader sense. I should also perhaps mention that Sinthome is also banned (if China can do it, so can I) from writing anything else interesting, until I’ve gotten through more of my own work…

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy

Immediate Concerns

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on March 11, 2007

I have so many substantive things I want to write at the moment – particularly in response to some fantastic ideas raised over at Larval Subjects, as Sinthome continues to reflect on how we can make normative judgments about particular forms of thought, within an immanent and self-reflexive theoretical framework that does not allow us to point those judgments back to notions of cognitive failure or “mere” errors of thinking. Sinthome reflects particularly on the issue of mediation and abstraction – where abstraction is understood as the collapse of mediation through a kind of reductive identification of a part with the whole. Sinthome counterposes a vision of dialectical thought as a process of revealing mediations – and the ways in which those mediations can come to be hidden inside the various forms of immediateness within which they appear. Sinthome concludes with a reminder of why it is not simply an “academic” matter, whether we should perceive objects abstractly or in their network of mediations, but instead an issue integral to political practice:

I’ve always had a certain fondness for Bergson’s theory of the perception-image. For Bergson, perception is possible action. Put more forcefully, I perceive that which is within my power to act upon. Bergson refers to it as “virtual action”. Consequently, Bergson speaks of increasing and decreasing powers of my body. My perception is a coordination between the action of the body and the world that gives itself to that body, as if in a reflected mirror. Here, of course, Bergson discovers in his own way the thesis of the identity of subject and object developed by Hegel in the Phenomenology.

In this connection it could be said that the question of the relation between the immediate and the mediate takes on a special urgency. For the question of what is given as immediate is a question of that upon which one can act or that which one can affect and be affected by. As such, the question of overcoming stupidity is also, not surprisingly, a question of acting well… Which has little or nothing to do with being well behaved.

va then follows Sinthome’s post with the question of who, within the sort of theoretical framework Sinthome outlines, is understood to educate sensibilities, perceptions or desires – or, in words more often used around these parts, how we should understand the standpoint of critique within this kind of immanent approach. Sinthome’s response points back to the long-standing cross-blog discussion of critical sensibilities, and picks up particularly on themes relating to the different types of theorisation that may be required, to make sense of different aspects of the emergence of critical subjectivities. I then pick up on this constellation of issues briefly and programmatically, in a comment I’d very much like to develop in greater detail here in the near future.

But first I have a toddler to take to the aquarium, and lectures to write, and a host of other… more immediate… concerns…

Conversations, Critical Theory

The Little Picture

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on March 4, 2007

Sinthome over at Larval Subjects has been posting a series of reflections on the relationship between Lacan and Deleuze & Guattari – revisiting what were apparently some of the foundational irritations that led to the creation of Larval Subjects. The most recent post also gestures toward some of the issues Sinthome and I have been discussing over the past several months, and includes a particularly interesting set of quotations from Deleuze and Guattari, revolving around the issue of the ways in which “overarching” social structures that are often conceptualised as being “macrological” in character can equally be conceptualised as “micrological” – as structures of family life and everyday interaction. Sinthome then suggests that this simultaneously macrological and micrological character of social structuration raises some potentially interesting questions for how we should understand the emergence of critical sensibilities, and how we should conceptualise potentials for structural transformation.

My schedule is unfortunately awful at the moment, and so I won’t be able to take up these issues substantively – most likely for several weeks. But the basic issue of pointing to the ways in which social structures permeate micrological contexts is one that has interested me for quite some time. When I used to teach on Marx, in a period in which my students were likely already to be familiar with a form of Marxism that focussed on macrosociological conceptions of structural constraints (essentially confusing finance capital with social structure, but no point in diving into minutiae…), I used to collect stories of micrological examples of forms of perception and thought that I could use to demonstrate that the reproduction of a social structure (the “cause” of a social structure, in some sense) could operate on a very wide range of scales, effected through institutions and practices one wouldn’t necessarily consider if social structure were being conceptualised as an intrinsically and exclusively macrological entity. One of my favourite stories was something that I witnessed one day when I was walking home from teaching. I found myself at a streetlight behind a precocious kindergartner and his mum, who seemed to be returning home from what had apparently been some kind of event led by a local historian at the child’s school.

Flushed with excitement, the young boy recounted the event, and then breathlessly declared: “When I grow up, I want to be a historian!”

A long paused received this statement and, while the boy looked up curious, waiting for his mum’s response, one could almost hear the mother calculating furiously in her head – the costs of university tuition, balanced against the probability of future employment and income in such a field… No: things didn’t look good… Eventually, the mother guardedly offered, “You know, when you grow up… You want to get a job you can enjoy. A job that is meaningful and that you like to do. That’s really important. But… You know… You also want to make money…”

I found this wickedly delightful – could one find a more concise lesson in the difference between use value and exchange value? And yet this lesson was taught on the street corner in a mundane domestic interaction far removed from the sorts of settings social theorists often consider, when talking about the reproduction of social structure… How many other such interactions must be taking place, in how many other street corners, shops, kitchens and schools, refracting and reproducing a quite abstract structure of perception and thought?

The passages Sinthome quotes from Deleuze and Guattari seem informed by a similar appreciation for micrological reproduction of social structures as mediated by the family – a process in which socialisation means something more than just the rearing of a child in the context of the intimate dynamics of the household, but is also a process of socialisation into a much broader context. Sinthome then asks what implications this form of socialisation within the household might have, for the ways in which we come to be affectively attached to, or repelled by, dimensions of our broader social context. Excellent questions – I’d very much like to take them up in relation to some aspects of Adorno’s writings on similar issues, but at the moment I sadly don’t have the time. I do, though, expect these and related questions will recur as the discussion moves along… For the moment, I’ll just point folks over to the Larval Subjects post, which also leads on to some interesting discussion in the commentary, spiraling out in a wide range of directions from the concerns of the original post.

Conversations, Critical Theory, Overheard

Placeholders on Conscience and Consciousness

12 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on March 2, 2007

I’m much too tired to attempt a serious post on the topic that interests me at the moment, but I’ve been trying to recapture a bit of equilibrium from a chaotic schedule by wrestling with Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. So many questions for me in this text… What does Adorno believe can be transcended, and what is intrinsic to thought? What is the historical register of the argument here? Is the underlying argument about the distortions of conceptual thought fundamentally a “psychological” one – such that the qualitative characteristics of universalisation and of identitarian impulses are understood as necessary scar imprinted on thought by defense mechanisms?

I go back and forth on these questions, although my suspicions point me in particular directions – directions that suggest tensions within Adorno’s thought. I believe the underlying explanation for what Adorno regards as the qualitative characteristics in conceptual thought – for universalism and identitarian thinking – is psychological: that Adorno ultimately sees these qualities as the traces of a defense mechanism at work, as the signs of thought scarred by fear and denial. The historical register for the operation of these defense mechanisms appears to be very long – occasionally, Adorno gestures at something that might resemble the advent of capitalism, but often at civilisation as such – and sometimes even at something more ahistorical:

The system by which the sovereign Spirit thought to transfigure itself has its Ur-history in that which is pre-intellectual, in the animal life of the species. Predators are hungry; the pounce onto the prey is difficult, often dangerous. The animal needs, as it were, additional impulses in order to dare this. These fuse with the displeasure [Unlust] of hunger into rage at the victim, whose expression is designed to terrify and weaken the latter. During the progression to humanity this is rationalized through projection. The animal rationale [French: rational animal] which is hungry for its opponent, already the fortunate owner of a super-ego, must have a reason. The more completely that what it does follows the law of self-preservation, the less it may confess the primacy of this to itself and others; otherwise its laboriously achieved status as a zoon politikon [Greek: political animal] loses, as modern German puts it, credibility. The life-form to be devoured must be evil. This anthropological schemata has been sublimated all the way into epistemology. In idealism – most obviously in Fichte – the ideology unconsciously rules that the non-Ego, l’autrui [French: the others], finally everything reminiscent of nature, is inferior, so that the unity of the thought bent on preserving itself may gobble it up, thus consoled. This justifies its principle as much as it increases the desire. The system is the Spirit turned belly, rage the signature of each and every idealism; it distorts even Kant’s humanity, dispelling the nimbus of that which is higher and more noble in which this knew how to clothe itself. The opinion of the person in the middle is the sibling of contempt for human beings: to let nothing go undisputed. The sublime inexorability of moral law was of a piece with such rationalized rage at the non-identical, and even the liberal Hegel was no better, when he walled off the superiority of the bad conscience, from those who demurred from the speculative concept, the hypostasis of the Spirit. (ND 35-36)

I’ve always been drawn to Adorno’s focus on rage – and particularly to his recurrent concern with understanding how rage comes to be directed specifically toward the powerless and the weak. I think this is a pivotal question, and I suspect it would be very difficult to answer without the appropriation of some kind of psychodynamic theory. I am also drawn toward Adorno’s suggestion that historically constituted potentials for transformation constitute a conscience – a reservoir of recognition that other and more is possible, and moreover a recognition that cannot be avoided, although it can certainly be denied. For Adorno, there is a price to pay for this denial, and this price does not fall exclusively on those most visibly disadvantaged by current social arrangements.

Beyond this point, though, I find myself reluctant to follow. I’ve remained unconvinced by Adorno’s attempt to extrapolate from his analyses of rage and of bad conscience, into an explanation of the qualitative character of universalism. My hesitation, I think, relates to how I think this approach forces a long historical register, rendering it very difficult to grasp and make sense of qualitative distinctions in forms of thought across time. I believe more historical nuance is possible – and that achieving this level of nuance then makes it possible to think more productively about what might, and what might not, be possible to transcend. But I’ll have to leave this point as nothing more than a placeholder – even if I were more alert, this would not be a position I could develop easily or in a short space.

What I’ve always wondered, though, is whether, if I were to develop this argument, it would react back on those elements within Adorno’s thought that do appeal – whether it makes sense for me to be drawn to Adorno’s arguments about rage and about a sort of Benjaminian historical conscience, while rejecting the arguments about universalism as the product of a defense mechanism geared toward the denial of the potential for transformation… It’s time, I suppose, that I develop my position in sufficient detail that I can begin to resolve some of my own questions…

Critical Theory, Philosophy of History

Readers Anonymous, Or, the Non-Utopian Approach to Text

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on February 28, 2007

It’s been so long since we’ve met to discuss actual readings, rather than just commiserating about our overworked lives, that L Magee recently referred to us as “Readers Anonymous” – but, as promised, with March approaching, we’ll be entering a tangent on the sociology of scientific knowledge – with works carefully chosen to be relevant to various dissertations (in states of greater or lesser virtuality…) floating around the group. The proposed list of readings has already been outlined. We’ll start with Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia next week, and hopefully an online discussion of some sort will follow.

We did have a proto-discussion of the Mannheim today (limited by the fact that some of us have been rudely hording our copies of our shared text, leaving others text-deprived). Unmoored from any detailed textual analysis, our discussion wandered around the concept of “utopia”, and made its way eventually to the issue of locating ideals in any realised political system – whether in the present, or in history. LM asked how any existent system could provide a normative model; I seized the opportunity to discuss my fondness for counter-factuals – and LM expressed a certain downside to my approach:

Well, you know, it’s hard to explain in an everyday sense what it means to hold a non-realisable ideal. It’s just that you know automatically that, well, that’s just gonna take some time to explain…

Hey – do I look like someone who’s pressed for time? ;-P

Critical Theory, Reading Group, Sociology of Knowledge

Images of Redemption

2 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on February 22, 2007

I’ve been wanting for the past several days to pick up on Sinthome’s wonderful post Of the Law as a Veil. In this post, Sinthome reflects on tensions between the Lacanian notion of lack as perhaps constitutive of our experience of intersubjectivity, and critical theoretic appeals to ideals that view lack as historically constituted – as something that can be overcome through social transformation. Sinthome builds toward a fantastic series of questions, left hanging and unresolved:

On the one hand, to what degree is it legitimate to see lack as constitutive in this way? Could this particular form of lack be the result of a historical emergence or development? And if so, how would we go about demonstrating this, without falling into narratives of the fall? On the other hand, supposing that Lacan is right, what would a Marxist informed politics look like that takes this into account.

These questions condense an enormous amount of complex content, and touch on issues that are very much “live” and unresolved for me, to the extent that I don’t actually feel that I have enough distance to comment meaningfully at this point. I’ll tuck a few scattered (and I really, really need to emphasise the “scattered” qualifier here) below the fold – but otherwise just point readers to Sinthome’s far more coherent and productive reflections.

The Self-Reflexive Defense [Updated x 3]

23 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on February 17, 2007

Scott Eric Kaufman has been teasing us for a while now, in various settings, with the fact that he has been working on a piece on the history of theory in the ’70s and ’80s. He has now posted a draft of the piece at Acephalous – shorn, apparently, of its conclusion – and is inviting comments: head on over, if you haven’t already had a look, as the piece is both interesting in its own terms, and also provides the potential for a much more grounded discussion of some of the substantive issues that shoot through the cross-blog “theory wars”.

As always seems to happen with me, my own reaction to this piece is somewhat side on and arguably not terribly relevant to what Scott is trying to do. I liked Scott’s draft: it’s well written and structured, offers a cogent critique of the limitations and distorting effects of a certain form of socialisation into theoretical work, and builds toward recommendations for the creation of new institutional spaces for interdisciplinary exchange oriented toward the testing of theoretical concepts – recommendations that I think are sound and that I would wholehearedly endorse. So on the level of direct and immediate response to the piece, I have very little substantive to add.

Instead, I found myself thinking back on a series of comments Scott made at Long Sunday, in the most recent edition of the “theory wars” debate. In that discussion, Scott gestured toward what I would call his “standpoint of critique” – outlining some normative standards for making judgments about theoretical approaches, and gesturing toward an explanation for how he would “ground” those standards – how he would self-reflexively account for and justify such normative standards, not by relativising them as individual idiosyncracies, but as collectively available forms of critical thought. While reading his draft, I found myself thinking about how it might manifest the positions he outlined in the Long Sunday discussion – and, especially, wondering whether thinking through some of the implications of that standpoint might cast some of the claims he makes in his draft in a slightly different light.

What I’d like to do here is think around a few of these issues very briefly – not with critical intention, but in an exploratory, open-ended way. I should also note that I fully recognise the dangers of trying to pull someone’s theoretical position out of a rapid-fire online debate, so my goal here is not to hold Scott to the positions he outlined in the Long Sunday discussion – I don’t make any assumptions that he regards these gestural comments as the best articulations of his views, or even that I have understood his statements as he intended them. My goal is more to use Scott’s intervention into this recent debate as a convenient touchstone for thinking through some of the issues that arise when we engage in normative judgments of competing theoretical approaches.

Note that, in trying to reconstruct Scott’s position for purposes of this post, I’ll pull some of Scott’s statements out of the order in which they unfolded in the discussion – Long Sunday doesn’t seem to let me link to individual comments, so apologies if this structure of presentation is a bit confusing for anyone trying to track back to the original context. Apologies, as well, that lack of time on my end doesn’t allow a more adequate discussion of these issues, which are both interesting and important, and deserve a more thorough and adequate treatment than I’ll currently be able to provide.

I want to start by drawing attention to Scott’s delightful response to a critic who complained about Scott’s use of a “historicist gambit” to reach for an outside normative perspective from which to pass judgment on specific kinds of theory. With characteristic cleverness, Scott picked up on the term and wielded it to explain the theoretical strategy underlying his approach:

“Historicist gambit” is a good way to characterize it, only in the chess instead of colloquial sense: I play the Historicist gambit knowing that it’ll require certain sacrifices be made; increase the likelihood of certain positions over others; &c. I play this game because I think it’s what’ll best allow me to “win,” i.e. accurately describe the object before me, be it a poem, novel, intellectual trend, &c. I aware of the price I pay and have accepted to play within the limits I’ve imposed upon myself; in short, I know it’s a gambit and what that entails.

The alternative, in my experience, has been to fetishize immanence and make arguments about the relation of one body of thought to another as if they existed outside institutions, as if theoretical work transpired in a Platonic realm of Ivory Towers (to borrow from Jeff Williams). It doesn’t, and never has. Institutional forces have always existed, always deformed thought, and a proper institutional history accounts for both the interplay of ideas and the context in which that interplay took place. To do the latter, you’re forced to play the Historicist Gambit.

Against another critic who objected that Scott’s version of historicisation was a form of critical “relegation”, Scott demurs:

Not really. It acknowledges the fate of all things to become, you know, historical. Ignoring the longue durée in favor of a radical presentism warps any examination, regardless of the object. Now, the durée here may not actually be all that longue, so to speak, but the principle remains the same.

And, in another exchange, Scott argues that his approach offers a critical standpoint outside of, but relevant to, the theoretical approaches that are the objects of his critique:

You decline to answer your own hypothetical question, mourning a foreclosure without considering the claims you made earlier — namely, that certain groups are constituted by their internal debates…

In other words, this post seems like little more than an attempt by the trees to declare where the forest ends. Which is fine. Always happens. However, the trees need a little humility, need to recognize that those outside the forest may have some insight into where it ends — may, in fact, have a perspective the trees can’t even imagine.

Not fun thoughts, I know, but there’s no escaping them. History will happen to us all, one day.

Wonderful, condensed statements – let’s see if we can unpack at least a few of their implications. I take the last statement to indicate that Scott is, in fact, looking for a standpoint – a position from which a phenomenon can be judged. He seems somewhat uncomfortable with the notion that his standpoint might be a normative one – repeatedly attempting to sidestep this issue by appealing to concepts like the adequacy of his analysis to its object, or some notion of either pragmatic grasp or sober factual accuracy. Personally, I don’t think this sidestep is necessary – trying to locate a standpoint that enables you to see what an object “is”, or to judge a theoretical approach based on whether it grasps a dimension of experience adequately, is simply making a normative judgment with reference to a tacit ideal of truth. The desire to make such judgments is, in my opinion, nothing to be ashamed of – and trying to downplay the intrinsically judgmental aspect of this approach can in my opinion have only negative consequences – both in terms of undermining our own ability consciously to reflect on, and refine, our ideals, and in terms of causing the negative reactions of others – who feel criticised, and rightly – to appear to be unmotivated and unreasonable, when in fact these reactions make perfect sense as responses to the sting of the critique. If, as Scott suggests, this is a game – a strategy – then surely it is a critical one – and we therefore owe it to ourselves and to those we criticise to articulate our own normative standards as explicitly as possible – and to defend those standards by providing a plausible account for why anyone else should embrace them.

It is at this point, though, that Scott’s “game” metaphor – with its tacit Weberian imagery that suggests that other standpoints may be as readily chosen and defended as analytical means, if we have pledged fealty to a different set of substantive ends – begins to appear in tension with the sorts of judgments he seems to want to make. Those judgments seem to involve some notion that things change over time – and that an “adequate” analysis must somehow be able to capture this historical dimension of its object. They involve some notion of self-reflexivity: “history will happen to us all” – a statement that presumably captures the theorist/historian, as well as the object of their analysis, and suggests the need for a self-reflexive application of normative standards and analytical techniques to the person undertaking a critical analysis of theoretical approaches.

Those judgments also seem to involve a notion that there is some context to which a theorist/historian can achieve access that transcends the concrete social relationships embodied in institutions – I say this realising that the claim may sound slightly ironic, as Scott makes strong argumentative claims about the need to locate knowledge within institutions, but I regard this as a position required by Scott’s strong assertion of self-reflexivity: if we’re all caught up in history, and if we reject the notion that thought might bounce off against other thought in some kind of ungrounded Platonic space, then we cannot think or behave – at least if we value consistency – as though our own thought escapes this frame. If we find that we can “see through” or gain some “outside” perspective on the limitations or distortions caused by particular institutions, then this perspective must also somehow be “inside” our historical context in some broader sense – suggesting that there is some position that is both historically embedded, and yet transcendent of particular institutional contexts.

If Scott were asserting incommensurability – if he weren’t expecting for his critique to persuade, to appeal to normative standards others could in principle understand – this self-reflexive standard could be met by some notion of duelling institutional contexts: Scott caught up in his, the objects of his criticism caught up theirs, and Scott’s critical analysis a sort of performance or enactment of his institutional space, rather than something aimed at meaningful and mutual engagement with his interlocutors. I take it, however, that Scott does intend to engage in some form of mutual interaction – and that he does posit, if only very tacitly, the existence of some level of historical context that makes such an engagement plausible.

This tacit view is reflected, I would suggest, in some of the metaphors Scott uses in the Long Sunday debate – where, for example, he criticises those caught up in the trees, from the standpoint of someone standing outside the forest – suggesting that he somehow feels he stands “outside” what he analyses critically – or recognises tacitly that his position might require some notion of a standpoint not caught up in the institutional space that is the object of its critique, to make sense of the form of argument he puts forward. If we combine this notion that there is some standpoint that transcends particular institutions – thus rendering them permeable to our critical gaze – with the notion that all things are historical, and that the theorist/historian are themselves caught up in the same sorts of historical processes they also want to analysis, then we end up with a tacit notion that our critique is unfolding within a somewhat complex historical context: a context that, on the one hand, gives us the ability to perceive certain distorting effects of institutional spaces while, on the other, provides us with access to some standpoint that is not fully encompassed by those same institutional spaces, and from which those institutions could therefore be judged, in ways where the validly of the judgment has at least some potential to be understood by those “inside”. This approach doesn’t mean, however, that the theorist/historian stands outside of history, or of context – history will happen to all of us – but rather that they are applying a perspective offered by one dimension of an overarching historical context, to perceive, make sense of, and judge some of the tendencies visible in a different dimension of that same historical context.

So we find ourselves in the position where critics – and this was manifest in a number of the responses Scott received in the Long Sunday discussion – demand: Historicist! Embed thyself! – and then take the failure to do this as a sign of the invalidity or bad faith of the original critique. My position is that this is a fair call – not in the sense that I take Scott’s critique to be invalid or in bad faith, but in the sense that the historically-embedded, self-reflexive nature of normative ideals invoked by this approach does, in fact, make it incumbent on us to “close the loop” and apply to ourselves the same sorts of analytical strategies we apply to others – and to do this in such a way that we can account for the normative standards to which we appeal. When we fail to close the loop, we appear to be removing ourselves from the frame – asserting a privileged position that others, quite understandably, wonder why they can’t just claim for themselves. If we don’t want this to happen, I suspect we need to eliminate the position – not just by asserting as a stance that such a position doesn’t exist, but by unfolding a more consistent self-reflexive critique that provides us with a more consistent means of grounding our normative judgments.

So… These were the thoughts I carried with me into reading Scott’s draft. I won’t summarise the draft in detail – it is really worth reading in its own right, and I can’t stress strongly enough how metatheoretical issues of the sort I’m raising here really don’t connect in any direct way with this piece, which is an intervention – and an important one – driving toward the creation of cross-disciplinary spaces for theoretical debate. For present purposes, I intend only to isolate out a few specific moments of the draft, in order to pose some questions about what it might look like, what impact it might have, to think this piece in relation to the sorts of normative standards I’ve sketched above.

On one level, Scott presents us with a tragedy of unintended consequences: new publication technologies, which on one level were liberatory for their ability to open up spaces for the discussion of marginalised areas of research, also facilitated the rise of isolated and balkanised intellectual micro-communities that incubated mutually-reinforcing in-group discourses and promoted hyper-specialisation and the growth of sub-sub-disciplines – fragmenting intellectual discourse and undermining the ability to recognise commonalities or to benefit from external critique. This process was further augmented by a canonisation of significant theoretical texts into a series of anthologies that were intended to raise the theoretical sophistication of the field by propagating important critical theoretic concepts. Unfortunately, the impact of such anthologies on pedagogical practice undermined this intended effect, resulting in a form of socialisation into theory as an eclectic and dehistoricised toolkit from which students were encouraged to mix and match ill-fitting conceptual tools. A somewhat more tacit narrative suggests that these technological and pedagogical shifts were spun in these particular directions – with these specific unintended consequences – in partial response to the broader context of the transformation of the academic job market in the 1970s and 1980s.

The consequence, Scott suggests, was a kind of institutionalisation of practically – if not necessarily intellectually – incommensurable micro-communities, alongside a general decline in the institutional and personal capacity to engage in serious and sustained critical debates across theoretical divides. This institutionalisation has progressed to the point where it is difficult to see where such engagements would take place, in the absence of the creation of fundamentally new kinds of institutional environments – a position Scott underscores with a poignant concluding quotation from Vijay Prashad, issuing a clarion call for overcoming the balkanised intellectual micro-communities that have developed in ethnic studies, but relegated to publishing this demand in the specialist Journal of Asian American Studies.

So Scott offers a clear, critical vision, articulated in the form of an historical account of how his object of critique has come to be. He advocates for the creation of new institutional spaces for interdisciplinary exchange – with a tacit nod to the internet as a potential technological enabler. He also puts forward some interesting critical standards – particularly in the form of a concept of “dialectical pluralism”, a strategy in which communities that share very few substantive assumptions might nevertheless benefit from the refinement that comes through the confrontation with fundamentally divergent theoretical and empirical traditions. While Scott uses the vocabulary of “incommensurability” in discussing such communities, he also appeals to a sort of meta-context of communicative ideals – those expressed in the notion that discussion amongst communities ought to take place based on “an aggressive commitment to strong beliefs, weakly held” – that point to a background network of shared norms that are conceptualised, at least potentially, to be comprehensible by, and defensible to, communities that might make claims that are incommensurable on other levels of abstraction.

I’m sympathetic to such ideals. And yet I found myself wondering how Scott might “close the loop” – how he might explain – in terms of the sorts of analytical strategies and concepts in which he unfolds his critique of theoretical eclecticism – the historical ground for the alternative he advocates. He evidently doesn’t believe his position has yet achieved institutional form – this is precisely why he would write a piece such as this, which is clearly conceptualised as an intervention into a still-open field of historical potentials, in which such interventions might be hoped to have an impact on the subsequent course of history. Moreover, his normative standards retain the qualitative distinction between local, concrete contexts – particular intellectual communities – and some kind of overarching set of normative ideals that transcend those local incommensurabilities and ground the potential for some kind of productive cross-communal discussion. Such positions suggest that we understand our historical context to be comprised of more than already-realised institutions, more than concrete and self-constituting communities. What is this “more”, though – and can we conceptualise such a thing while still meeting the standards of thinking that “history will happen to all of us”, and that the theorist/historian therefore cannot be conceptualised as somehow residing outside the frame?

It is here that I began to worry a bit about what might be a small slippage in the draft – a small tension between the unfolding of the critique, and the sorts of normative standards that Scott suggests he might be trying to uphold in the Long Sunday discussion. By failing to analyse his own historical position – to embed himself, as he tries to embed the objects of his critique – Scott risks being, I think, misunderstood in ways that might then undermine receptiveness to his quite important normative goals. Tacitly, this piece suggests an opposition between how it analyses the past – the “fogbank” that resulted from the unfortunate and unintended consequences of technological and pedagogical shifts – and Scott’s own position that, because it is never historicised in the same way, is presented in the text as though it emerges from… clear thinking… As though Scott has somehow reasoned himself out of the dilemmas of an earlier, and now visibly problematic, approach to theory. I found myself wondering whether this argumentative option remains available, once we begin to say things like “history will happen to all of us”. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to talk about the sort of historical shifts that help make Scott’s own critical perspective more plausible, more historically intuitive, at our current moment – so that we can understand our own critique as itself something historically achieved? And wouldn’t this react back, at least a bit, on the critique itself – orienting our enquiry toward reasons that an earlier articulation of theory might have been, in fact, adequate in some specific ways to its own moment – even if, for determinate reasons, it might no longer be adequate to ours.

Scott invokes the phrase “Hegelian seriousness” at key strategic moments throughout his piece. I suppose thoughts of Hegel for me always involve thoughts of determinate negation – and I became curious what form Scott’s critique might take, if it were to take the form of such a negation. Perhaps it would involve an investigation of the way in which theoretical eclecticism might make more intuitive sense during periods of rapid and dramatic transformation – might appeal in ways that make it easier for people to overlook the downsides Scott identifies so well, and might even be justifiable in some senses Scott might not explicitly canvas. Perhaps the fact that we can no longer find it in ourselves to overlook the downsides of such theoretical approaches also tells us something – perhaps it should send us casting about for reasons that we have become so sensitive to a different constellation of problems and of potentials, a constellation that drives us to advocate for a new period of institutional reform. It may be that a dose of “Hegelian seriousness” might react back, at least a bit, on the way in which historicisation is tacitly equated with the study of institutionalisation in some of Scott’s statements, sensitising us to investigate the sorts of irritants that drive dissatisfaction with existing institutions, and motivate the responsiveness to proposals for institutional transformation…

None of which is to suggest that I think all of these issues should be covered in Scott’s article – even if Scott were to agree with this line of questioning, a single article will never juggle all of these issues, and articles written as interventions need to strive for a particular clarity in their advocacy, and can’t be bogged down in the sorts of epistemological and ontological minutiae I’ve been raising here. So I suppose what I’m offering is more on the level of associations around Scott’s piece, wondering what approach might allow such an argument to be made self-reflexively, in a form adequate to the insight that “history will happen to us all”…

Updated: Just wanted to note that Scott has now posted on this subject at The Valve and Acephalous, in case folks should want to follow the discussion around and about those parts. For my part, I have to get back to my day (and night, and all hours in between) job before orange. draws attention once more to my persistent contradictory, procrastinatory nature… ;-P

Updated 19 Feb: Just a quick update to point to Eileen Joy’s thoughtful response to Scott’s piece, posted at the group blog In the Middle (and also at Acephalous). The response is complex, and should be read in its own right. Briefly, Joy contests key aspects of Scott’s analysis of the technological drivers of “balkanisation”, suggests that he may overstate the impact of anthologisation on pedagogical practice, at least at the postgraduate level, and worries that Scott’s normative standpoint tacitly points to a totalising, “disciplinary” and “masculinist”/agonistic ideal of theoretical engagement. Joy suggests that eclecticism could equally – and less problematically – be overcome through deep, specialist immersion in a small number of texts from a chosen theoretical tradition.

And (a bit later in the day) to point to Scott Eric Kaufman’s round-the-web review of responses to his piece.

Updated 21 Feb: And the discussion continues to flow, picked up by Jodi Dean at Long Sunday (cross-posted from I Cite). Jodi picks up on Eileen Joy’s post (which itself continues to provoke an excellent discussion over at In the Middle), and draws attention to the ramifications of this kind of theoretical debate when we expand our frame of reference outside the academy, and consider the real-world political stakes of what could otherwise be confused for a debate over academic turf. Jodi also queries some points Rich Puchalsky has raised in the discussion here about a commitment to incommensurability – arguing that, while Rich’s framing of the issue implies some kind of willed argumentative stance, the core issue is more one of competing ontological claims. Jodi concludes (but folks really should read her post in its entirety):

For me, incommensurability isn’t something one is committed to or not. It’s a description of the world (I prefer the term collapse of symbolic efficiency) that one can try to refute, resolve, deny, or accommodate. Generosity toward incommensurable views or positions is one mode of accommodation. In the political world, this is rarely possible (modus vivendi is one fragile possibility). In the academic world, it is often decided/determined budgetarily, but remains as a site of conflict and contestation–actually, not unlike in the political world. Perhaps, though, conflict over the details, the working through of momentary compromises is not trivial. Perhaps it is a kind of inching forward toward a necessarily impossible and unattainable resolution.

Conversations, Critical Theory, Interdisciplinary, Philosophy of History

Blogocalypse Watch

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on February 3, 2007

Dr Who and Rose contemplate the end of the earth. Posting from me may be a bit quiet for a few days because THE END IS NIGH! Well, actually, because I have to put reading packs together for my courses – but a lot of people apparently believe the end is nigh, which means that, while things are quiet around here, you can all go off and read the latest installments in the cross-blog discussion of why a lot of people believe such things.

Those coming late to this party (it is later than you think…) might want to check out the original pointer to the cross-blog discussion of apocalyptic ideals in contemporary social movements, as well as the update.

Since then, the following links have come to my attention:

First, the ever-thorough High Low & in between is now up to their fifth installment in the apocalyptic sublimity series – this one engaging quite thoroughly with K-Punk’s piece (see below), as well as Sinthome’s conference paper on left and right apocalyptic visions in popular culture – and asking Joseph Kugelmass for more information on the concept of “ideological thin slicing”.

K-Punk has written an excellent analysis of Children of Men.

Gary Sauer-Thompson over at Junk for Code suggests that Leunig might be making witty comments about us, and offers some fresh reflections on apocalyptic sentiments and the experience of the sublime.

Matthew Cheney over at The Mumpsimus likes Joseph Kugelmass’ intervention, but worries that linking the themes of poetry and apocalypticism will drive us back into the old argument about author engagement

And The Constructivist over at Mostly Harmless (love the name of this blog, by the way…) has given our roving apocalyptic voyeurism a formal name – The Blogocalypse – and, having initially proposed a Carnival of the Blogocalypse as a bit of a joke, is now beginning to think it might not be such a bad idea, after all.

Given all this collective effervesence, I’m beginning to think I’ll have to change my mind about Joseph Kugelmass’ protest against the use of apocalyptic narratives to create social bonds: look how many bloggers I’ve met while contemplating our impending doom!

[Note: image @2005 BBC]

Conversations, Critical Theory, Interdisciplinary, Links, Philosophy of History, Psychology, Religion

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