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The Slow Hegelians

8 Comments Posted by on January 31, 2007

Okay – time to disabuse Sinthome of the notion that I have a clue when it comes to reading Hegel… 😉

I had promised some time ago to write something on the Introduction to Phenomenology. Many of the points I’ll make here have come up in other ways by now, as the reading group discussion has moved along while my writing has tarried… I write them here to consolidate the points I’ve been making in scattered form – and in the (almost certainly vain) hope that, eventually, I’ll write posts like this on other sections of the text. I should note at the outset that it has grown quite late here while I have been working on this text and, while I’ve commented on the Introduction as a whole, I’ve decided that editing this is beyond the limits of my wakefulness at the moment… ;-P Apologies in advance for the range of detail (and, no doubt, big picture) errors that weren’t caught as a result.

Hegel begins with an argument whose elegance lies, in no small part, in its obviousness – shocking us with the retroactive impact of asking how this point could ever have been overlooked. Hegel first notes the infinite regress involved in trying to ground philosophical investigation on the question of how thinking subjects can know they have accurately grasped objective reality:

It is natural to suppose that, before philosophy enters upon its subject proper – namely, the actual knowledge of what truly is – it is necessary to come first to an understanding concerning knowledge, which is looked upon as the instrument by which to take possession of the Absolute, or the means through which to get a sight of it. The apprehension seems legitimate, on the one hand that there may be many kinds of knowledge, among which one might be better adapted than another for the attainment of our purpose – and thus a wrong choice is possible; on the other hand again that, since knowing is a faculty of a definite kind and with a determinate range, without the more precise determination of its nature and limits we might take hold on clouds of error instead of the heaven of truth.

This apprehensiveness is sure to pass even into the conviction that the whole enterprise which sets out to secure for consciousness by means of knowledge what exists per se, is in its very nature absurd; and that between knowledge and the Absolute there lies a boundary which completely cuts off the one from the other. For if knowledge is the instrument by which to get possession of absolute Reality, the suggestion immediately occurs that the application of an instrument to anything does not leave it as it is for itself, but rather entails in the process, and has in view, a moulding and alteration of it. Or, again, if knowledge is not an instrument which we actively employ, but a kind of passive medium through which the light of truth reaches us, then here, too, we do not receive it as it is in itself, but as it is through and in this medium. In either case we employ a means which immediately brings about the very opposite of its own end; or, rather, the absurdity lies in making use of any means at all. (73)

He then argues that, once we ask ourselves how to bridge the subject-object divide, we have already smuggled in a set of unstated assumptions about the nature of knowledge and its object that themselves are open to contention:

…the fear of falling into error… presupposes something, indeed a great deal, as truth, and supports its scruples and consequences on what should itself be examined beforehand to see whether it is truth. It starts with ideas of knowledge as an instrument, and as a medium; and presupposes a distinction of ourselves from this knowledge. More especially it takes for granted that the Absolute stands on one side and that knowledge on the other side, by itself and cut off from the Absolute, is still something real; in other words, that knowledge, which, by being outside the Absolute, is certainly also outside truth, is nevertheless true – a position which, while calling itself fear of error, makes itself known rather as fear of the truth. (74)

What an extraordinary puzzle! Why, indeed, should we assume that subjects and objects are separated, and that knowledge must therefore be (explicitly or tacitly) visualised as an instrument or a medium bridging a divide? Why start our reflections so late in the piece, with so much already presupposed and thereby left doxic? Is this the only way in which such a thing could be conceptualised? What difference might it make, to conceptualise the issue in a fundamentally different way?

Hegel next seems to run dismissively through various attempts to overcome the irritation caused by the initial assumption of subject-object dualism, gesturing quickly to the ways in which they reproduce – or simply mystify – the same underlying problem (75-76). Interestingly, though, he uses this series of rapidfire dismissals to develop a contrast between these common styles of criticism, and the form of argument required for scientific thought. In Hegel’s account, scientific thought cannot engage in this kind of dismissive critique, which simply rejects the validity of a competing form of thought. Hegel associates this form of dismissive critique with approaches that assert subject-object dualism – and argues that the movement beyond such a dualism requires the development of a new concept of critique. In Hegel’s words:

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

The requirement to develop this new form of critique is what drives Hegel toward phenomenology (76).

Hegel flags that his phenomenological account will not seem to be science at all, but instead will resemble a pathway followed by natural consciousness in the movement toward true knowledge (77-78). Hegel makes an interesting distinction here: he notes that he is not reaching for something approximating a conventional notion of a subject progressing through radical doubt and out the other side to certainty; nor, he argues, is he seeking some kind of commitment from the subject’s personal consciousness to examine everything for itself, rather than accepting any claims on authority (78). Hegel’s text suggests here that both of these forms of scepticism are insufficient, because both share an assumption that knowledge could be established at the level of an atomised, individual thinking subject. Hegel argues that science, by contrast, properly directs its scepticism toward an intersubjective universe of knowledge. Again in Hegel’s words:

Scepticism, directed to the whole compass of phenomenal consciousness, on the contrary, makes mind for the first time qualified to test what truth is; since it brings about a despair regarding what are called natural views, thoughts, and opinions, which it is matter of indifference to call personal or belonging to others, and with which the consciousness, that proceeds straight away to criticize and test, is still filled and hampered, thus being, as a matter of fact, incapable of what it wants to undertake. (78 – italics mine)

Thus directed to an intersubjective universe of collectively shared forms of perception and thought, critique takes on a new form: examining the relationships of forms of thought to one another – in Hegel’s terms:

The completeness of the forms of unreal consciousness will be brought about precisely through the necessity of the advance and the necessity of their connection with one another. (79)

Hegel suggests that the styles of dismissive critique he outlined above can be seen, in light of this kind of analysis, as one-sided – as manifestations of the negative dimension of a process that, in its entirety, is not solely negative. Grasping the process as a whole provides a means of understanding the plausibility of specific forms of thought, while also retaining the ability to criticise those forms of thought as incomplete (79). Here Hegel introduces the concept of a determinate negation, as the means through which science, having reached despair by directing scepticism against the intersubjective universe of knowledge, then finds a path beyond scepticism:

For this view is scepticism, which always sees in the result only pure nothingness, and abstracts from the fact that this nothing is determinate, is the nothing of that out of which it comes as a result. Nothing, however, is only, in fact, the true result, when taken as the nothing of what it comes from; it is thus itself a determinate nothing, and has a content. The scepticism which ends with the abstraction “nothing” or “emptiness” can advance from this not a step farther, but must wait and see whether there is possibly anything new offered, and what that is – in order to cast it into the same abysmal void. When once, on the other hand, the result is apprehended, as it truly is, as determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen; and in negation the transition is made by which the progress through the complete succession of forms comes about of itself. (79-80)

Perfectly clear, no? ;-P

Hegel next moves to an intriguing passage that poses the question – a pivotal one, in terms of interpretations of Hegel’s system – of when this process of moving in and through negation would come to a culmination. Hegel’s text here reads ambiguously to me. Initially, the text seems to suggest that such a culmination exists, by proposing:

The terminus is at that point where knowledge is no longer compelled to go beyond itself, where it finds its own self, and the notion corresponds to the object and the object to the notion. The progress towards this goal consequently is without a halt, and at no earlier stage is satisfaction to be found. (80)

The text then goes on to distinguish non-conscious life from consciousness, a distinction that hinges on the intrinsic restlessness of consciousness – the ways in which consciousness intrinsically transcends what is limited, and drives itself beyond various attempts to settle into a static position (80). It is unclear, at this point in the text, whether this restlessness is meant only to drive consciousness to the “terminus”, at which point it can stop. Since the concept of a determinate negation suggests that the “terminus” may itself involve an appreciation of dynamic relationships, this question may not be the right one to ask. In any event, for present purposes, I’ll bracket this issue for future consideration.

Throughout these sections on determinate negation, Hegel has stressed the conflict between the form and the content of his argument – pointing out that his text operates “by way of preliminary” (79) or “provisionally and in general” (81). He next moves on to more explicit reflections on methodology – first addressing the objection that, in fact, L Magee did raise quite strenuously when we met to discuss the early sections of this text: that philosophical exposition must necessarily require the very sort of a priori standards that this exposition claims it has set out to criticise. Hegel first notes this objection – and then argues, as he did at the beginning to the Introduction, that this stance ultimately drives back into radical scepticism:

This exposition, viewed as a process of relating science to phenomenal knowledge, and as an inquiry and critical examination into the reality of knowing, does not seem able to be effected without some presupposition which is laid down as an ultimate criterion. For an examination consists in applying an accepted standard, and, on the final agreement or disagreement therewith of what is tested, deciding whether the latter is right or wrong; and the standard in general, and so science, were this the criterion, is thereby accepted as the essence or inherently real. But here, where science first appears on the scene, neither science nor any sort of standard has justified itself as the essence or ultimate reality; and without this no examination seems able to be instituted.

He then tacitly suggests that the sceptical dilemma that many take to be inherent in the nature of philosophical argument, itself appears to presuppose consciousness as the act of an atomised, individual thinking subject. Against this tacit position, he points to consciousness as a phenomenon that always already presents itself as a dynamic movement through a series of relationships. In Hegel’s words:

Consciousness, we find, distinguishes from itself something, to which at the same time it relates itself; or, to use the current expression, there is something for consciousness; and the determinate form of this process of relating, or of there being something for a consciousness, is knowledge. (82)

Hegel then offers just a glimpse of how he will use this relational concept of consciousness to make sense of the competing form of perception expressed in the notion of a subject-object dualism. He suggests:

But from this being for another we distinguish being in itself or per se; what is related to knowledge is likewise distinguished from it, and posited as something outside this relation; the aspect of being per se or in itself is called Truth. (82)

So, in a very preliminary way, Hegel has suggested that forms of perception and thought can arise that mistake aspects or dimensions of a dynamic procession of relationships for the entirety. These forms of perception and thought can be criticised with reference to the more comprehensive perspective grounded in awareness of the overarching relationships – a form of critique that, nevertheless, does not abstractly reject the forms of thought being criticised, but simply demonstrates them to be plausible, but incomplete, attempts at truth.

Hegel then moves through a beautiful, fluid, rapidfire sketch of one example of how the same moment within a dynamic procession of relationships might plausibly be characterised in different ways, depending on the perspective from which those experiences are viewed, which plausibly brings into view different dimensions of the overarching dynamic context (83-85). This kind of analysis – involving rapid shifts of perspective that require thorough and precise attention from the reader at all moments, in order to track which viewpoint Hegel has identified as the current perspective from which the relevant relationship within the dynamic process is being viewed – recurs throughout Phenomenology, and is a major factor in making the text so difficult to read, in spite of the fact that Hegel is rigorously specific in flagging the perspective whose viewpoint he is expressing at any given point in the text. At this point in the presentation, Hegel uses his analysis to suggest that subjects and objects are moments in an overarching dynamic relationship – ways in which that relationship can be perceived, when viewed from specific perspectives. He then concludes his response to those who suggest that philosophy must take the form of an examination of a priori standards:

Consequently we do not require to bring standards with us, nor to apply our fancies and thoughts in the inquiry; and just by leaving these aside we are enabled to treat and discuss the subject as it actually is in itself and for itself, as it is in its complete reality. (84)

Next follows a wickedly dense series of passages on self-reflexivity and experience that reads to me as delightfully corrosive (85-89). As I read them (and I should note that these passages stretch the limits of my understanding of this text – I find them extraordinarily difficult to parse, so I would greatly appreciate corrective readings here), these passages attempt to provide an alternative to the conventional notion that our experience of the objective world causes consciousness to correct its understanding of that world – to reject falsehoods as new truths are discovered. Hegel here seems to be suggesting that the conventional view behaves as though our current perception of objectivity is always brought into being – caused – by objectivity itself, while at the same time behaving as though all of our old perceptions of objectivity – the ones that we claim to have overcome through experience – are “mere” falsehoods. In a passage that reminds me of Marx’s criticism that the political economists always speak as though “there has been history, but there no longer is any” – or, for that matter, of the “strong programme” in the sociology of scientific knowledge – Hegel argues that the ability to have new experiences, and to interpret those experiences in specific ways, itself already implies a prior transformation of consciousness:

But it usually seems that we learn by experience the untruth of our first notion by appealing to some other object which we may happen to find casually and externally; so that, in general, what we have is merely the bare and simple apprehension of what is in and for itself. On the view given above, however, the new object is seen to have come about by a transformation or conversion of consciousness itself. This way of looking at the matter is our doing, what we contribute… (87)

I find this passage quite extraordinary – not least because the position it seems to express remains so controversial in the present. At the same time, however, Hegel’s text here contains echoes of a strong developmental understanding of how such a transformation of consciousness must unfold – as though such transformations have a necessary directionality to them, and build always in a cumulative fashion. He thus continues the passage quoted above:

…by its means the series of experiences through which consciousness passes is lifted into a scientifically-constituted sequence, but this does not exist for the consciousness we contemplate and consider. We have here, however, the same sort of circumstance, again, of which we spoke a short time ago when dealing with the relation of this opposition to scepticism, viz. that the result which at any time comes about in the case of an untrue mode of knowledge cannot possibly collapse into an empty nothing, but must necessarily be taken as the negation of that of which it is a result – a result which contains what truth the preceeding mode of knowledge has in it. In the present instance the position takes this form: since what at first appeared as object is reduced, when it passes into consciousness, to what knowledge takes it to be, and the implicit nature, the real in itself, becomes what this entity per se, is for consciousness; this latter is the new object, whereupon there appears also a new mode or embodiment of consciousness, of which the essence is something other than that of the preceeding mode. It is this circumstance which carries forward the whole succession of the modes or attitudes of consciousness in their own necessity. It is only this necessity, this origination of the new object – which offers itself to consciousness without consciousness itself knowing how it comes by it – that to us, who watch the process, is to be seen going on, so to say, behind its back. Thereby there enters into its process a moment of being per se, or of being for us, which is not expressly presented to that consciousness which is in the grip of experience itself. (87)

What to do with such a passage? There is so much within it – particularly the emphasis on the way in which “discoveries” (scientific, social theoretic, etc.) present themselves as “obvious” and “commonsensical” to those caught up within them – that resonates so strongly with how I would approach such things. But how strongly does Hegel intend his developmental language? How does he understand the concept of “necessity”? These questions are recurrent in the reading group discussion of this text, and I have no settled answer for such questions myself – I have no choice for the moment but to bracket them for later consideration.

Getting late on my end, so I’ll bring this discussion to a close by just quoting Hegel’s concluding passage, which provides an overview vision of Hegel’s critical standpoint – a standpoint grounded in the perspective provided by the awareness of the dynamic relational process in which consciousness is embedded:

In pressing forward to its true form of existence, consciousness will come to a point at which it lays aside its semblance of being hampered with what is foreign to it, with what is only for it and exists as an other; it will reach a position where appearance becomes identified with essence, where, in consequence, its exposition coincides with just this very point, this very stage of the science proper of mind. And, finally, when it grasps this its own essence, it will connote the nature of absolute knowledge itself. (89)

LM has been pressing me on the issue of what such a critical standpoint means, whether this specific kind of standpoint is intrinsic to an immanent approach, and whether I can sever a notion of an immanent critical standpoint from the implied notions of totality and developmental process implied in some parts of Hegel’s text. The issue of what Hegel means will, I think, have to wait close readings of later sections of this text – and the issue of whether anyone can make good on the notion of articulating immanent critical standpoints that do not rely on a totality-eye view will likely have to await my own and others’ later theoretical work. I pose these questions here, though, as important issues to bracket and return to, as we continue moving forward through this text.

Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Reading Group

Apocalypticism as Mechanical Solidarity

3 Comments Posted by on January 29, 2007

Who knew that there would be such interest in the apocalypse? ;-P

Asking some forbearance for yet another update on how the conversation on apocalypticism continues to percolate across even more blogs, I wanted to post a pointer to Joseph Kugelmass’ thoughtful and provocative reflections, which have been posted to The Valve (as well as to his own site, The Kugelmass Episodes, for those who prefer a cozier venue). Joe’s posts jump off from the earlier cross-blog discussion of how to interpret contemporary apocalypticism, but develop along lines suggested in Joe’s ongoing series of critical reflections on contemporary ethics and aethetics.

Joe’s most recent interventions have been posted in two parts:

“The Poem and the Apocalypse, Part One: Destructive Fantasies” (or, at KE)- which revisits the cross-blog discussion, offers its own analysis of types of apocalyptic fantasy, and draws particular attention to the phenomenon Joe calls “thin slicing” – the instrumental and selective mobilisation of symbolically charged evidence directed to ideological ends, and predicated on the assumption that social connection necessarily requires agreement and sameness; and

“The Poem and the Apocalypse, Part Two: Children of Men and Frank O’Hara’s Personism” (or, at KE) – which moves from an analysis of Cuaron’s Children of Men to an analysis of O’Hara’s Personism, in order to unfold a series of reflections on the potential for a vision of social connection that transcends instrumentalist “thin slicing”.

I’ll apologise to Joe for flattening the content considerably in this synopsis – Joe’s posts, and the subsequent discussion, are worth reading in full to get a proper feel for the points in contention.

Updated 30 January: Yet more apocalypse! High Low & in between has added a fourth installment to the apocalyptic sublimity series of posts on the apocalypticism discussion, with yet another good summary of the cross-blog discussion as well as fresh original observations, while Sinthome has posted the conference presentation inspired by the blog discussion at Larval Subjects.

And now, update-on-the-update, we have our very own carnival… er… sort of: the Unofficial Carnival of the Blogocalypse, assembled by The Constructivist at the group blog Mostly Harmless.

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

Immanently Yours…

3 Comments Posted by on January 29, 2007

The wealth of material supplied by N Pepperell acts as a sure caution to intrepid guests, not to overstep their mark by way of tongue-in-cheek introductions and open-ended questions – particularly leading into holidays of national fervour… Not only does this lead to an avoidance of patriotic duty – long afternoons, barbeques and cricket under these antipodean skies – it ensures guilt-laden indigestion as well, as the reader attempts to sift through the subtle responses provided. All this, despite the assurances to the contrary from their author, made through various comments of fatigue, vagueness, distractedness and an invariably heavy workload… The embarrassment of riches which followed is all the more generous in consequence.


The intricate nature of the responses have suggested further comment to an already lengthy post would make comprehension difficult – so I’ve created a separate post with the first question and response below. I’ve followed with some additional comments in blue.

L Magee: What motivates the aim to develop an immanent theory over a transcendental one? Why must a critical position show itself to be explained in the same terms as what it criticises? Why not, for instance, posit God, nature or something else as a normative ideal against which to measure a particular historical moment or social situation?

N Pepperell: This is one of the questions that Hegel alludes to early on in Phenomenology: the idea that, if you just start off saying “I’m going to do an immanent theory – unlike all those dogmatists who posit a priori stances”, etc. – you’ve basically just demonstrated that you’re a dogmatist too… ;-P To be consistent, the position of immanence actually has to fall out of the theoretical argument itself – so that, really, you can only know that an immanent position is the best “standpoint”, as the result of a (fairly elaborate) argument, that would try to show that you can only make sense of certain important things if you work from an immanent standpoint.

So a stylistically or presentationally consistent immanent theory wouldn’t declare itself as such, but would just unfold an argument through the categories available within a particular context, gradually unfolding its analysis so that it becomes clear that a concept such as immanence is actually required to make sense of all the categories. Hegel – quite rightly – doesn’t trust his readers to “get” that kind of argument, so he adopts a kind of bifurcated presentational strategy, where some elements are quite consistently immanently voiced, while other elements are full of, effectively, stage whispers and stage directions – hints to the reader about what he intends to do, so the reader won’t lose patience or become confused at the strategic intent of the sections that are more immanently voiced.

So, to address your question more directly: there is no way to make an a priori case that a critical position must account for itself using the same kinds of analytical categories that it uses to make sense of its environment. It’s entirely possible to posit God, physical nature, human nature, or similar as a normative standpoint – and, in fact, when I’m discussing these issues in a context where I can’t unfold a lengthy argument about the value of immanent theory (where, as a matter of practicality, I effectively have to assert immanence and ask my interlocutors to “trust me on this one”… ;-P), I’ll almost always mention that, if people are happy positing a God, or nature, or some other transcendental standpoint, then they won’t have to answer the sorts of questions I think I have to answer. If I have an opportunity to discuss the issue over a longer period of time, I’ll then explain why I think appeals to transcendental standpoints provide particularly poor means of answering certain kinds of questions – but it generally takes longer to make this kind of case, than it does just to set out – dogmatically, as Hegel would say – that certain specific standards of proof and argument begin to apply, once you begin operating within an immanent framework.

What begins to motivate thinking about an immanent theory, in a contemporary social theoretic context, is usually a recognition that the object of analysis – social institutions, normative ideals, collective practices, etc. – has actually changed over time. The point of a non-immanent concept is, generally, that it can be universal or timeless or transcend contexts. When you try to use a non-immanent concept to explain something that changes over time (and people do this all the time, of course) the form of reasoning is necessarily reductive – you are dismissing or deliberately ignoring qualitatively specific elements of your object, in order to assimilate that object into something more generic. This form of reductionist reasoning is quite valid – and quite useful – for many practical purposes, so I would have no blanket criticism that would rule out the use of reductive forms of thought for all purposes.

This kind of reduction, though, tends to be associated with ontological, rather than with simply pragmatic, claims: so, people perceive that the universal or general elements to which an object is reduced are the “essence” of that object, while other elements are less essential. You then get questions about how one can decide what’s essential, and what is mere appearance – and this often leads into a kind of scepticism we’ve discussed in the reading group in relation to Weber: the feeling that, really, there is no standpoint from which one could make a decision on such things, so the choice is essentially arbitrary (or pragmatic). So one of the things Hegel, for example, is trying to do is to make the case that, actually, things aren’t anywhere near as arbitrary as they seem – that it’s not an accident that we experience some choices as arbitrary, but that this experience doesn’t actually mean that things are random. I’m not saying this very clearly – and I know I’ve promised to post on this issue (Sarapen mentioned the other day that, where his blog used to be the thing he did to procrastinate on his work, he has now reached the point where he finds himself procrastinating on his blog – I think I’m at that point, as well… ;-P). But for the moment I want to leave this kind of philosophy-eye view of the problem to one side, since your question was really about critical theory specifically, and why immanence is particularly important in that context.

First, of course, there are critical theoretic approaches that aren’t immanent: that, for example, criticise existing society against a notion of human nature – or, for that matter, against religious ideals. So, in a sense, when I toss around the term “critical theory” in a casual way, I’m using it as an informal shorthand for a particular kind of critical theory: specifically, a theory that operates in a secular framework (which is more or less what “materialism” means, in its original sense), and that also tends to think that at least the historically specific elements of contemporary societies and contemporary forms of subjectivity must be explained in historical and social terms. One core goal of this kind of critical theory is to provide a secular explanation for an object of analysis that changes over time. If the object changes, and yet we try to explain the object with reference to categories that are themselves understood to be timeless or transcendent, then we know from the outset that we’re engaging in a form of reduction – specifically, a form of reduction that will abstract away from whatever changes. The problem is, since we’re talking about critical theory here – theory oriented to exploring what might make change possible – it’s not terribly helpful to engage in a form of analysis that abstracts away from whatever is temporally specific… So, since the object of analysis is perceived as an historical object, and the goal of the analysis is to cast light on further potentials for historical change, there’s a need for the categories of analysis themselves to be historical categories – otherwise, it’s a bit difficult to see how the theory can grasp the things it claims to want to understand…

That said, I don’t actually believe most approaches to critical theory have come terribly close to this ideal. I think that many approaches – including some that set out with a strong commitment to producing a thoroughly historical theory – in practice only apply their historical sensibilities to half the equation: they’re happy to historicise the thing they want to criticise; considerably less happy to historicise the ideals in the name of which they criticise that thing. Tacit notions of nature (including quite complex notions of historically-emergent nature) tend to be the actual grounds for the normative standpoints of most critical theories. In this sense, they fall short of the Hegelian ideal and are arguably not terribly consistent with their own stated argumentative standards. More importantly, though, this one-sidedness (I personally think) tends to lead to a lack of appreciation for the generative role played by our current context as an incubator for progressive ideals and practices – which can both drive theories into a more pessmistic direction (more on this in response to your question below), as well as leading to positions that the current context would need to be smashed, rather than preserved through the fulfillment of the potentials it has generated…

I should also mention that a consistent immanent approach to critical theory can’t just assert as a stance, e.g., that a secular theory is the way to go, or that historical objects must be apprehended historically, or any of the other stage direction sorts of positions I’ve mentioned in passing above: a fully consistent immanent critical theory would have to explain these forms of subjectivity just as it explains its other critical ideals (for these concepts do function as normative ideals, grounding critical judgments of other intellectual – and social – movements). The problem is, of course, that it’s presentationally impossible to keep all of these conceptual balls in the air at one time – you can’t always be offering the meta-analysis of how each term you use has been properly grounded, etc. You’d never actually get around to saying anything… ;-P So my approach has been to use a combination of stage directions, combined with a very open and explicit acknowledgement that, in a particular text or conversation, I’m not actually providing sufficient justification to persuade anyone not already tempted by the framework I’m outlining. Then, depending on the concept, I might be able to point to some other work that has carried out some kind of grounding in a more adequate form, or I might need to say that this is work that remains to be done. There is a necessary caveat emptor warning that needs to accompany presentations of this kind of theory, at this point – unless someone is prepared to believe that Hegel or Marx has adequately carried out an immanent explanation to their satisfaction…

L Magee: The concept of immanence is certainly clarified here – thank you. I’m interested in following up on several implications for an immanent critique in what you’ve described. Firstly, it seems that it would be necessary to follow Hegel in demonstrating immanence – not in terms of the categories, and certainly not in terms of the result, but in how the critique would unfold, from a range of dogmatic “immanently voiced” positions through to its conclusions. The form of this critique is necessarily a difficult one for someone to follow, who is “not already tempted by the framework” – sympathetic perhaps in virtue of the result, the reputation of the thinker, the necessity to master his or her thought, and so on. Contrastingly, the normal form of an argument – take certain principles as a priori and proceed from there – is much easier (perhaps because of our collective early schooling in deductive reasoning, but still…). Of course, it should be more difficult to demonstrate that the “certain principles” are themselves not ahistorical truths but grounded in a particular history, that so are other principles of other arguments, including those of the current argument. However this is a lot of work for anyone to do before even getting to the meat of the argument, and seems to cede ground, as a rhetorical strategy, to a so-called transcendental critique, made on the basis of God, human nature, etc.. So long as your “interlocutors” will “trust [you] on this”, that’s fine – but I wonder in other contexts how an immanent critique could ever convince anyone not, as you say, predisposed beforehand? Indeed I wonder whether this difficulty results in a convenient and pragmatic reduction from immanence precisely to the very sort of positions being critiqued, ensuring a new form of “high-brow” vs “low-brow” version of any successful immanent critique – a cognoscenti who understand and interpret the critique into a set of dogmatic statements for those who can’t or won’t follow it. Granted, this is a less of a problem for the critique itself, and more of a problem for how to interpret and respond to it.

Secondly, I think your comments about “work” are telling in this regard – a critique is in this sense less a point of view taken in relation to a particular object, but an ongoing work into how particular points of view get to be taken with regard to an object at given times. As work, it can build on previous work, refine it, augment it, critique it and so on, according to the historical conditions which permit certain aspects of the work become more (and less) clear. In turn, later work may perform the same set of operations, with the assumption there are always “workers” sympathetic to this form of critique. It is at this juncture that I would see the distinction between the “philosophy eye-view” and “critical theory”; philosophy, at least classically (and also in its modern mode of formal logic), has great trouble reconciling its temporal contingency – why these thoughts, at this time? – with the universals it seeks to deliver. Conversely critical theory has the problem of explaining how the historical itself is anything more than a category dreamt up a at a given moment in history, as likely to likely to disappear once its utility has been exhausted. (Of course this dichotomy leads some to the apparently implausible, if highly praiseworthy, project of historical universals…). The notion of “work” as either the production of final account of some particular problem, or a continued effort towards a critique of a given idea or institution in terms of its historical traces presents, at least to me, a useful one for conceptualising these positions.

Finally, I wonder how an immanent critique might proceed without the sort of underlying metaphor or model of organic growth which Hegel uses. This metaphor is at the heart of the Phenomenology, which explains apparent oppositions as evolving moments in the organism – Spirit – under study. Under other critiques, this metaphor itself is heavily historicised – your talk, for instance, describes “capitalism as a form of social life that perpetuates pressures for economic growth” [my emphasis]. What seems to underly this is the idea that capitalism understands itself as naturalised, as a form of organism destinated to grow (via economic rather than biological means). For Hegel’s critique, the result nicely ties up with eventual maturing of the object; if criticism removes or replaces this metaphor, it has to devise other means for delivering its result – not as the product of organic growth, necessarily, but by some other process. What else, if anything, can be used to explain social and ideological movement and change? How does critique avoid, on the one hand, being entrenched in the back-and-forth movement of dogmatic inquiry, and on the other, repeating the progression towards some sort of holistic teleological meta-critique?

I realise both the initial and subsequent questions are somewhat presumptuous and out-of-order, given the context from which they spring (and the time it takes to provide any meaningful reply…). They are in part an attempt to grapple with how to interpret Hegel in a modern context, and an effort to bring to the fore the difficulties I have with understanding other modern interpretations – including those suggested at in these posts. So, some apologies in advance with the naivety in which these thoughts are voiced – truly, not those of one in any sort of “commanding position”. They of course do not demand or expect, either, the rich kinds of responses brought forth previously…

Critical Theory, Dialogue, Philosophy of History, Reading Group

Euthyphro Goes to Frankfurt: A Reading Group Q&A

1 Comment Posted by on January 26, 2007

L Magee:

As mentioned earlier, the last tattered shreds of the Reading Group met in its new habitual abode. Gone are the sunny and airy vistas, the stainless steel surfaces, the brusque and athletic efficiency of service common to our former culinary haunts; replaced instead by various forms of infernal howling and dark lustful depravity. N Pepperell, it has to be said, led the way from easy-going but undoubtedly false Consciousness to our current position, wallowing in the deep recesses of self-reflexive Hegelian turpitude, in the dank bowels of our revered institution. But I – and I think back upon it with some regret – was an equally willing accomplice…

Turning to matters of barely greater relevance, N Pepperell and I, in mutual shock and fatigue with our respective workloads, quickly gave up any meaningful discussion of such trivialities as the actual text of Hegel – though, to be sure, our respective texts were for one brief moment brought out on the table, perhaps in the vain hope that they would be collected with our plates – and instead sought solace in a broad discussion of a number of concepts which have circled around our discussions, and indeed this blog, without ever quite becoming clear to me. Accordingly I placed myself in the position of the (barely feigned) naive student, and proceeded to interrogate the master…

One of N Pepperell’s ambitious – I won’t say “insane” – preoccupations seems to me to be the attempt to develop a historical, self-reflexive and immanent critical theory, drawing on Marx, Weber and Adorno, among others. In the nicest possible terms, I asked N Pepperell to clarify what exactly this might mean… What followed was a discussion which certainly brought me to moments of clarity at the time – but in the intervening passage of a day, has somewhat receded into the conceptual fog which usually surround such concepts for me. In an attempt to regain what has been lost, I will place a number of questions which I raised below the fold, to which N Pepperell may respond with the usual insight and perspicacity… If the following appears to be a crude form of interview, all the more audacious for being located on the interviewee’s own blog, I apologise in advance – this seemed the most useful way to capture the flavour of the conversation (without, hopefully, all of my customary circumlocutions).

N Pepperell:

I find myself fretting over the change that our new venue seems to have wrought in L Magee, my steadfast companion in many a past intellectual journey – now inadvertantly embarked with me on what, certainly from LM’s description, appears to have become a journey of a more spiritual sort. I find myself disconcerted by the way in which LM’s thoughts now turn so effortlessly, and dwell with such ease, on images of “dank bowels”… And was LM always so preoccupied with the “athletic efficiency” of the staff at our previous venue? Has LM’s gaze always lingered so longingly on the stainless steel? Have our new quarters only brought such lurking thoughts to the surface? Or instilled them anew?

I am tempted, if that is the right term, to defend my choice of venue – to ask LM what could possibly be more uplifting than to conduct our conversations (as we do each week) before a gigantic mural of the Garden of Eden, the better to inspire us to resist the infernal temptations that surround us. I hesitate, though, in the awareness that such a statement might cause LM to examine the mural more closely, to recognise that its interpretation of the scene contains certain… unconventional elements… Perhaps I should have thought more on this, as a possible causal factor for our more unconventional experiences of late. If, as I often say, subjects are the subjects of their objects, then what subjectivities are nurtured in such a place? Worse still, I have recently been drawn into consulting on elements of the environment itself – slowly transforming our meeting place into an externalised manifestation of my own alienated thoughts… Best leave this point aside, then, and not mention it to LM…

Better, instead, to search for some other form of spiritual renewal. Perhaps LM’s spirit might find itself refreshed by some kind of dialogue in the light and clarity of virtual space?

No sooner had I made such a suggestion, of course, than LM had claimed the position of Socrates: conceptual fog, naive student – believe none of this, dear readers! LM has claimed the commanding position in this discussion – leaving for me nothing but the role of some kind of hapless Euthyphro… Nothing for it, I suppose, but to accept my sad fate… Onward then, to the agora!

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Critical Theory, Dialogue, Philosophy of History, Reading Group

Cliff Notes to the Apocalypse

1 Comment Posted by on January 21, 2007

I had been intending to write something pointing to the various follow-ups to the discussion on apocalyptic social movements that originally started, and has continued, as a kind of conversational flow across various blogs. I discovered this morning, though, that High Low & in between has assembled an extraordinary summary of the discussion – complete with links and annotations of the earlier rounds of the discussion, and a new response to k-punk’s latest post on the subject (which itself takes up points from the discussion between this blog and Larval Subjects). Just wanted to place a pointer to High Low & in between’s overview post here, as it can be difficult to follow a discussion like this, in which a cloud of blogs seems to coalesce around slightly different dimensions of a similar interest.

Updated 28 January: Since we seem to have incoming visitors from The Valve, I just wanted to point, as well, to further thoughts on this topic from Larval Subjects, comments on the original discussion at Smokewriting and philosophical conversations, as well as the conversation still simmering at I Cite. Happy to add other links, if people will make me aware of them.

Meanwhile, for those in a less pessimistic mood, Sinthome from Larval Subjects and I have also continued this discussion along a different fork, exploring potential overlaps between Adorno and Lacan, and continuing our long-term conversation on the project of critical theory. Sinthome’s latest contributions can be found here and here, while my latest is here.

Updated 29 January: Just wanted to post a few more links, first to a post above summarising Joseph Kugelmass’ Valve entries, and then direct links to those entries themselves.

Updated 30 January: Yet more apocalypse! High Low & in between has added a fourth installment to the apocalyptic sublimity series of posts on the apocalypticism discussion, with yet another good summary of the cross-blog discussion as well as fresh original observations, while Sinthome has posted the conference presentation inspired by the blog discussion at Larval Subjects.

And now, update-on-the-update, we have our very own carnival… er… sort of: the Unofficial Carnival of the Blogocalypse, assembled by The Constructivist at the group blog Mostly Harmless.

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

Sociology and Psychology

10 Comments Posted by on January 17, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversations, Critical Theory, Psychology

Two Wrongs? Or the Opposite of an Opposite?

Leave a comment Posted by on January 16, 2007

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decoding the Subject

Leave a comment Posted by on January 15, 2007

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History

Just In Time

Leave a comment Posted by on January 14, 2007

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

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

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

Blogging, Critical Theory, Current Events, Links, Reading

Much Ado About Nothing

Leave a comment Posted by on January 9, 2007

So I’ve been feeling a bit retrospectively mortified for the past few days, over having written a post about nothing… ;-P It was one of those posts that seemed as though, really, it probably should have been kept to myself… But I’m currently feeling a bit better about the issue, having yesterday come across the following passage in Hegel’s Phenomenology (yes, LM, I’m behind in my reading… and writing… but today is devoted to Hegel – I promise…):

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

Lovely passage – with Hegel’s typical concern over how his form of presentation deviates from his content – expressed in his reminder that what he saying here is only “by way of preliminary”. Hegel focusses here (as in the surrounding paragraphs) on distinguishing scepticism from his own critical “scientific” approach. Scepticism figures here as an abstract negation – as a form of rejection that doesn’t comprehend the necessity of what is being rejected, and therefore fails to transcend what it criticises (an error, however, that Hegel characterises as more than a simple mistake – instead, Hegel suggests, this form of thought is immanently plausible, because it reflects a view “natural consciousness generally adopts”). Hegel’s approach, by contrast, seeks a determinate negation, in which critique builds precisely on its understanding of the necessity, and therefore the determinate limitation, of what is being critically transcended – and grasps its own relationship to the object of critique … Where an abstract negation allows no more than an endless chain of sceptical rejections of whatever content is presented to it – and thus remains bound intrinsically to what it rejects – Hegel understands his approach to enable critique to find its ground, and therefore drive toward something more substantive than the “abysmal void” to which scepticism leads.

I’ve made a commitment to write about this week’s Hegel readings at greater length – we’ll see how I go… But I couldn’t resist highlighting this passage in isolation, if only to point out that I’m not the only person trying to make the argument that nothing is, when you think about it, really something… ;-P

Critical Theory, Negations, Philosophy of History, Reading Group

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