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Category Archives: Critical Theory

Apropos of Nothing

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on January 6, 2007

I’ve been struggling for the past several weeks to work out how to explain the existence of a particular problem. I’m not there yet, but am stuck in a way that made me hope that writing might help shake things up a bit. I thought I’d post around the issue, focussing on some thoughts provoked by reading David Bloor’s (1976) Knowledge and Social Imagery, which among other things sets out the principles underlying the “strong programme” in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Aside from trying to get my thoughts moving in a productive direction, this post foreshadows a tangent the reading group may undertake in the new year, when we’ve discussed incorporating an arc on the sociology of knowledge, and also picks up on a few of the themes that have emerged in the ongoing conversation between this blog and Larval Subjects, for those who have been following that conversational arc.

In Bloor’s account, the strong programme seeks to develop a sociology of scientific knowledge with the following attributes:

1. It would be causal, that is, concerned with the conditions that bring about belief or states of knowledge. Naturally there will be other types of causes apart from social ones which will co-operate in bringing about belief.

2. It would be impartial with respect to truth and falsity, rationality or irrationality, success or failure. Both sides of these dichotomies will require explanation.

3. It would be symmetrical in its style of explanation. The same types of cause would explain, say, true and false beliefs.

4. It would be reflexive. In principle its patterns of explanation would have to be applicable to sociology itself. Like the requirement of symmetry this is a response to the need to seek for general explanations. It is an obvious requirement of principle because otherwise sociology would be a standing refutation of its own theories. (pp. 4-5)

In terms more commonly used on this blog, the strong programme commits itself to an immanent, historical and self-reflexive account of scientific knowledge, and thus shares some common interests with critical theory as I generally define the concept here. The strong programme is thus critical – as I also am – of approaches that seek to explain scientific errors in historical and sociological terms, while behaving as though scientific truths are not similarly subject to historical and sociological analysis. It aims itself at approaches that (tacitly or explicitly) behave as though errors arise from artificial historical and sociological distortions of an underlying natural truth, while the recognition of truth – whenever it might occur – requires no explanation, as though truth itself were a causal factor in bringing its own recognition into being…

At the same time, the strong programme’s commitment to a particular vision of historical causation – and a related lack of attention to questions of how one might use an immanent analysis to ground non-relativistic standards for assessing historically-available forms of perception and thought – differentiates this approach from critical theory in ways that ultimately, I suspect, would undermine the strong programme’s ability to achieve its own ideal of self-reflexivity. For present purposes, though, I want to leave aside this issue – which I suspect would require a fairly elaborate argument, and which in any event I might not be ready to discuss adequately at this point – to focus on a more overt, surface-level problem for self-reflexivity within Bloor’s account.

Bloor argues that the view that truth requires no sociological explanation derives from an – often tacit – teleological conception of knowledge, one in which truth drives toward its own historical realisation, such that historical and sociological analysis is required only for those causal factors that impede this teleological drive. Bloor asks:

What can it mean to say that nothing makes people do or believe things which are rational or correct? Why in that case does the behaviour take place at all? What prompts the internal and correct functioning of an intellectual activity if the search for causes is only deemed appropriate in the case of irrationality or error? The theory that tacitly underlies these ideas is a goal-directed or teleological vision of knowledge and rationality… (pp. 7-8)

Bloor opposes this teleological model to what he calls the “causal model” characteristic of the strong programme. Where the teleological model, Bloor argues, confines historical analysis to a “sociology of error”, the strong programme seeks a form of sociological analysis capable of understanding both “true” and “false” forms of knowledge as the products of similar causal forces:

How does this [teleological] model of knowledge relate to the tenets of the strong programme? Clearly it violates them in a number of serious ways. It relinquishes a thorough-going causal orientation. Causes can only be located for error. Thus the sociology of knowledge is confined to the sociology of error. In addition it violates the requirements of symmetry and impartiality. A prior evaluation of the truth or rationality of a belief is called for before it can be decided whether it is to be counted as self-explanatory or whether a causal theory is needed. There is no doubt that if the teleological model is true then the strong programme is false. (pp. 8-9)

What I find most intriguing about Bloor’s analysis, however – particularly with reference to the ideal of self-reflexivity – is how he concludes this section. For much of this discussion, Bloor has set up a clear opposition between the teleological model and the strong programme. His account suffers somewhat from how it stands poised on the Weberian abyss of uncertainty over how, having defined the two models clearly, and established that both can be regarded as internally consistent, it might justify the choice of one above the other (Bloor suggests, in the end, that “methodological considerations” might drive the choice of one above the other (p. 9) – an explicit position clearly weaker than the tacit passion he manifestly feels about the issue). For present purposes, I’ll pass over this problem to focus on a different issue: the quite extraordinary pulled punch that Bloor throws in the conclusion to this section, where he suddenly and unaccountably mentions that, in spite of his prior critique of the teleological model, he must nevertheless acknowledge that the strong programme still retains some of the teleological model’s core assumptions. I’ll quote Bloor’s own words at some length, to provide the context for his comments:

If explanation is allowed to hinge on prior evaluations then the causal processes that are thought to operate in the world will come to reflect the pattern of these evaluations. Causal processes will be made to etch out the pattern of perceived error, throwing into relief the shape of truth and rationality. Nature will take on a moral significance, endorsing and embodying truth and right. Those who indulge their tendencies to offer asymmetrical explanations will thus have every opportunity to represent as natural what they take for granted. It is an ideal recipe for turning one’s gaze away from one’s own society, values and beliefs and attending only to deviations from them.

Care is needed not to overstate this point, for the strong programme does exactly the same thing in certain respects. It is also based on values, for example: the desire for generality of a specific kind and for a conception of the natural world as morally empty and neutral. So it too insists on giving nature a certain role with respect to morality, albeit of a negative kind. That means it too represents as natural what it takes for granted.

What may be said, however, is that the strong programme possesses a certain kind of moral neutrality, namely the same kind as we have learned to associate with all the other sciences. It also imposes on itself the need for the same kind of generality as other sciences. It would be a betrayal of those values, of the approach of empirical science, to choose to adopt the teleological view. Obviously these are not reasons which could compel anyone to adopt the causal view. For some they may be precisely the reasons that would incline them to reject causality and adopt asymmetrical, teleological conceptions. But these points do make clear the ramifications of the choice and expose those values that are going to inform the approach to knowledge. From this type of confrontation, then, the sociology of knowledge can proceed, if it so chooses, without let or hindrance. (pp. 9-10 italics and bold text mine)

What an extraordinary concession! And from a theoretical approach that puts forward an ideal of self-reflexivity! Bloor is here saying that his approach relies on an explicit, but ungrounded, concept of nature as its normative standpoint – that this concept will remain ungrounded – and, moreover, is a central normative concept structuring, not only the sociological technique, but the object to which that technique will be applied: scientific knowledge! Bloor has here, in my opinion, gone well beyond declaring that the strong programme will not be able to achieve its self-reflexive ideal: he has conceded that a significant dimension of his object of study will forever remain beyond his analytical reach… I find this nothing short of astonishing – although, to be fair, I think that many approaches tacitly fall into exactly this position, but lack the honesty and clarity with which Bloor acknowledges the problem, and for which he should be commended.

Bloor’s defense of this remnant of nature at the core of his analytic approach deserves further attention. While acknowledging that his approach does rely on a concept of nature, Bloor suggests that this concept is rendered less problematic because it is “morally empty and neutral” and “of a negative kind”. Interestingly, this morally negative, empty and neutral concept still functions as a normative standard: it is used to assess and reject other understandings of nature that are judged to be less empty, neutral and negative. Bloor doesn’t appear to perceive a contradiction between describing his concept of nature as “morally neutral” while also deploying it to make normative judgments. Bloor’s “neutral” concept of nature apparently also drives specifically toward the search for “general” knowledge – a concept of knowledge whose qualitative specificity would not seem, in an intuitive sense, to be empty, neutral or negative in its implications, but which here is mentioned in passing as though it possesses an obvious compatibility with notions of what nature ought to be like, when stripped of its positive moral attributes and reduced to an absence, a lack, a negativity…

It may be very difficult for me to express why I find this position so significant. I have a long-standing interest in the ways in which critical values in recent history are so often articulated as negations – as what remains, once all qualitative attributes are stripped away – as voids. The concept of nature Bloor uses above; the common narrative of “secularisation”; the Weberian notion of “disenchantment”: all of these approaches, and many others besides, tacitly or explicitly position themselves as speaking from the standpoint of an absence: they focus attention on what is qualitative, specific, historical and social, while treating the alternative as nothing more than what remains when those qualitative, specific, historical and social trappings have been stripped away. The negative itself is conceptualised as pure absence, pure lack – and therefore seems not to be in need of explanation, at least not of an explanation that would seek to account for its particular qualitative character. This remains the case even when, as above, quite specific qualitative attributes are explicitly ascribed to the negative – such as the determinate quality of capturing what is general or universal in experience.

One of the questions I am trying to figure out how to ask – so that it then becomes easier to consider what type of answer might be adequate to the question – is how we might understand the history and the sociology of what presents itself to our perception as an absence. How can we denaturalise what appears to our experience as nothing more than what remains, when everything artificial has been stripped away? How do we grasp the determinate positivity of what we experience as a negation?

My intuition is that this will prove to be a multifaceted historical problem, necessitating that we come to terms with the constitution of a complex historical context that simultaneously: (1) casts certain specific forms of social practice – concrete institutions and cultural forms and social practices – as social, as artificial human creations with an identifiable history and a sociology – and thereby gives us unprecedented historical access to concepts like “social context”, while also (2) generating another layer of social context that, although just as much the product of historically-specific social practice, has a very different qualitative character: not sharing many of the attributes we have taught ourselves to perceive as social, it is therefore plausibly perceived, when contrasted to more concrete elements of our social context, as nonsocial – it provides, in fact, an experiential basis that renders intuitively plausible some of our dominant conceptual models for nonsocial environments.

Such an historical experience, I would suggest, has the potential to react back on our perceptions of physical nature – shaping our expectations about the sorts of knowledge we expect to find, and the sorts of experiences which we will recognise as generative of meaningful and relevant knowledge about the natural world. I would therefore expect an approach focussed on understanding such a complex historical context to lead to a very different kind of sociology of scientific knowledge than an approach that – like Bloor’s – holds at its centre, unquestioned, a form of perception constitutive of the phenomenon it hopes to explain.

To be fair to Bloor, he does try to provide a type of self-reflexive account of why there might be key forms of perception at the core of scientific thought that are not readily subject to interpretation: he does so by appealing to Durkheim’s analysis of the sacred – arguing that all societies hold sacred certain fundamental concepts derived from the organisation of social life, and that scientific concepts hold this status in our social world (ch. 3). This form of argument is potentially useful in foregrounding the notion that perceptions of the natural world might relate in some qualitatively specific way to our experience of the social world. It also, though, tacitly treats all societies the same – reaching for the “generality” of explanation that Bloor takes to be a “morally neutral” standpoint for his analysis – and therefore doesn’t explore the potential that doxic concepts might actually become so for different reasons, and perhaps in qualitatively distinctive ways, in different forms of social life.

As well, I am not clear that Bloor has given us greater clarity by telling us that key forms of scientific perception are treated as “sacred” in our society: when Durkheim uses this concept, he maps specific relationships between qualitatively specified perceptions of nature, and qualitatively specified stratifications and institutionalised practices within particular societies. Bloor doesn’t offer an equivalent analysis for our social world to account for our equation of “nature” with “morally neutral”, “negative” and “general”. Without this kind of determinate analysis, I’m uncertain whether his application of the concept of the “sacred” to modern science casts greater light on our central question – or just restates that question in other words…

At the same time, I’m also concerned about the centrality Bloor accords to causation as the definitive target of historical and sociological analysis. I’m concerned first in the sense that the pride of place accorded to causation, particularly when combined with the emphasis on causes that are general in nature, seems to understate the descriptive and analytical task that motivates any search for causes: the search for causes is integrally bound with how we construct the object of our analysis – and qualitatively divergent visions of causation might be required to understand the creation and reproduction of different kinds of historical objects. Second, I’m concerned at the mechanistic and lockstep understanding of causation suggested by elements of Bloor’s text – as expressed, for example, in his discussions of how his approach might be able to derive predictive laws of historical development (pp. 15-19). If I’m correct about the complex and layered character of our historical context, this kind of mechanistic vision of historical causation might prove insufficiently nuanced to allow us to grasp what I intuitively suspect is an unusually dynamic and fluid social context, with complex feedback loops between mutually constitutive, but loosely coupled, forms of historical agency and constraint.

But I should also say that I’ve read Bloor’s book very, very quickly, so the chances of my missing central aspects of his argument are somewhat high, and I’m very happy to be corrected on these gestural critiques…

All of this – as with everything else I seem to be writing these days – is terribly underdeveloped, and almost certainly able to be thought in better ways… I’ve posted this only because I’ve felt recently like I’ve been spinning my wheels on this issue without achieving any forward movement, and my hope is that a post – of however mediocre quality – might get things moving on my end. Apologies for the draftiness of the work…

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Reading Group, Sociology of Knowledge

Determinate Peregrinations

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

Just wanted to post a pointer to a conversation over at Larval Subjects, where Sinthome has posted a lovely piece titled “Forcing the Event”, which discusses how to conceptualise dramatic historical transformations and revolutionary moments.

Critical theory – to the extent that it attempts to remain within an immanent, non-metaphysical explanatory framework – faces an unusual conceptual challenge: how to explain how social creatures, conceptualised as embedded within their context, can come to be critical of the context in which they are embedded, and can direct these critical sensibilities into conscious political practice that transforms the context itself.

The discussion at Larval Subjects revolves around this issue – talking about limitations in common attempts to understand historical context and causation, and asking whether there might be better ways of conceptualising both, if we want to understand the potential for transformation as some kind of determinate negation, rather than as an essentially random break with history. Although the discussion is motivated by a shared interest in problems related to immanence and critique, many of the issues discussed would also be relevant for those interested in how to conceptualise historical context and causation in a more general sense.

My own contributions – which were probably a bit long for polite posting on someone else’s blog (sorry Sinthome!) – should probably be described as speculative, but I’ve still found the discussion extremely productive, and wanted to place a pointer here, for any readers who might otherwise miss the exchange.

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History

The Weakness of Strong Ties

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on December 25, 2006

The issue of how bounded our personal and professional networks can be, and how this affects our ability to empathise and communicate across networks, seems to be in the academic air a bit at the moment – perhaps because so many conferences are both reconstituting and – hopefully – stretching established networks a bit this time of year.

Sinthome from Larval Subjects wrote an extended reflection on the elements of perception and thought that structure our individual and collective receptiveness to communication with those who don’t share similar identifications, and asked about the possibility for effective political discussion, given this predisposition not to be able to hear the potential logic of competing views. The result of communities organised around shared identifications, Sinthome suggests, is a strange combination of absolutism in thought, and extreme relativism in practice, resulting from the failure of all groups to acknowledge a sufficient common universe of referrents to enable productive cross-group discussion. Sinthome argues:

It is not that someone has deviously adopted a philosophical position of postmodernism wherein there is no ultimate reality, but rather that we are living in a postmodern situation. When I argue with my friend that is a staunch supporter of the war, we literally live in different realities or “universes of reference” by virtue of how our subjectivities are structured transferentially. For this reason, we are unable to use “actual reality” to decide the truth or falsity of contested propositions. Rather, our universes of reference (hence the plural) have become self-referential by virtue of what we recognize as a credible authority….

Grounds become matters of individual preferences and the savvy consumer shops around for those grounds that most suit his taste. I get my news from NPR and dismiss FOX, while you get your news from FOX and dismiss NPR. This is one of the meanings of Lacan’s aphorism that the big Other does not exist. What seems different today is that where before this truth was largely unconscious and repressed such that we at least pretended that there was a consistent and shared Other, today we seem conscious of this. I am not at all sure what is to be done. I hardly find it to be something that should be celebrated or that is a happy thesis.

While more optimistic in its conclusions, Gavin from Real Climate points to somewhat similar issues in a piece today on the necessity – and the limitations – of trusted peer networks for scientists trying to manage the often overwhelming amount of new research in their fields. Gavin argues:

It used to be that one could go to a meeting like this and get a wide overview of the work being done much more efficiently (and speedily) than reading the journals. However, that is clearly no longer true. And of course, we can’t keep up with all the relevant journal articies in the wider field either, and so how do scientists manage?

Basically, it’s tough! Everyone in the field generally decides that there are some technical areas that aren’t worth (for them) getting too deep into, and so they tend to ignore the technical literature on that topic. For myself, I draw the line at carbon isotope studies and anything older than the last glacial period in paleoclimate (with a couple of exceptions). Review papers and high profile articles are useful and read more often, but even they can be too technical if they’re not right in your field. But, given how multi-disciplinary climate science is, there are always going to be technical issues outside your field that you are going to need to know more about.

To deal with that, most sucessful scientists develop networks of ‘trusted’ sources – people you know and get along with, but who are specialists in different areas (dynamics, radiation, land surfaces, aerosols, deep time paleo etc.) and who you can just call up and ask for the bottom line. They can point you directly to the key paper related to your question or give you the unofficial ‘buzz’ about some new high profile paper. You don’t expect to agree with them all the time – we scientists are quite naturally contrarian (in a good way!) – but this is generally an efficient short cut to understanding what the most serious/interesting issues are.

It is, of course, at meetings like AGU that these networks become established and are nutured, and which is why, despite the difficulties, people come back year after year (though personally, I only go every few years). At this year’s meeting we got a lot of feedback about RealClimate, and a surprisingly common theme was the extent to which we are becoming part of these networks. That is both gratifying and slightly worrying – such responsibility!

However, there are dangers in having everyone tuned in to the same ‘network’ – it can lead to a certain rigidity in what is being thought important. As an illustration, when going between meetings in Europe and the US, you tend to see that ‘issues’ and ‘buzz’ are often completely distinct on either side of the Atlantic – a function of mostly non-intersecting networks. Fortunately, there are frequent contacts across the divide which leads to substantial cross-fertilization of ideas.

The Dead Weight of Tradition

1 Comment Posted by N Pepperell on December 22, 2006

Below the fold is just a bit of archived work – a piece that’s seven or eight years old now. I’m posting it here mainly for my own convenience, although it might hold curiosity value for a few other people. The piece was an attempt, essentially, to think out loud on the subject of how far you could stretch a Marxian theoretical framework, if your primary interest was understanding potentially critical intellectual trends in a non-reductive way… It was also, though this may be harder to discern from a straight read of this text without familiarity with my later formal writing, the beginnings of an attempt to loosen certain conceptual categories from a Marxian framework, to experiment with the beginnings of a different vocabulary and thought-space. The text is therefore quite dated, but I’ll be revisiting some of the underlying questions and problems over the next several months and, in preparation, I wanted to remind myself of, and create an accessible archive for, some of my past gestures at these issues. If anyone intends to click through, also a warning that the piece, even with its apparatus stripped, is rather long… Read more of this post

Critical Theory, Drafts, Philosophy of History, Political Economy

Fragment of a Conversation on Immanence

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on December 22, 2006

Yesterday’s conversation is still percolating along at Larval Subjects. I wanted to cross-post here the most recent comment I’ve made (minus its chatty introduction), mainly because these are issues – in a very condensed form – I’ve been meaning to take up here, in part because they gesture toward how I might think about addressing some of the questions Nick has recently raised on this blog.

I’m somewhat hesitant about the duplicated post because it risks a situation where, for example, someone offers a quite fundamental critique over at Larval Subjects (or here) that doesn’t flow through to the cross post (including, perhaps, the points that Discard and Sinthome have already made in the original thread – it may be that my suggestions have, in a sense, already been fundamentally undermined…). I’d strongly suggest that readers interested in the topic consult the original thread, as the position I’m outlining here does not reflect any kind of achieved consensus in the overarching conversation (and the post may make more sense, as well, with the original context in view)…

Note that, because this was written as a comment, and I haven’t edited it for re-posting here, the style is more appropriate for a comment than for a stand-alone post…

[Updated to note that, because this discussion is continuing in some detail, readers actually are much better off, I think, reading the discussion in its original location, where they can assess my comments in light of critiques and questions that Sinthome has posed.]

***

There may be more and less abstract concepts of immanence at work in the broader discussion we’ve been having. In your most recent post, you’re using “immanence” in the way I would generally use “materalism” – as an assertion of the non-necessity of appealing to transcendent explanations. (“Materialism” having been one of those words that has been historically flattened, such that the reflex assumption seems to be for people to gloss it as an assertion about economic caussation, rather than an assertion about secular causation…) I have no problem with the strategic notion of using “immanence” in place of “materialism” or “secularism” as a strategy in discussion – or just as a term perhaps more likely to be understood, because it’s not so freighted with history.

My point has been that there is something specifically and deeply inconsistent with asserting a concept of immanence as a stance. I think the move to materialism/immanence entails an obligation to explain how we have become aware that our world can be conceptualised in this way – that we do not need the hypothesis of transcendence – and also how particular immanent dimensions of our world render it plausible for people to jump to the conclusion that a subject-object divide exists.

If we are also historical materialists – if we believe that the nature of our social world has changed over time, and that some of the concepts we are trying to explain have a historical dimension – then this points in the direction, I think, of explaining how something about the practices and habits of thought constitutive of our social world suggests both the subject-object dualism, and the possibility to arrive at concepts like “historical materialism” or a historically-oriented notion of immanence…

If we don’t believe there is evidence for historical shifts, then we could perhaps explain the concept of immanence, and the perception of a subject-object divide, with reference to more timeless concepts (this is, in fact, a very common move in scientific texts that want to explain, e.g., aspects of ethics or morality – to put forward an argument that something in our makeup as biological creatures causes us to perceive and think about the world in specific ways). If we find evidence of meaningful historical change persuasive, however, this avenue is not open to us.

If we still want to assert the hypothesis of immanence in these circumstances, I think the form of the argument would have the structure of: (1) pointing to some specific dimensions of our historical environment that have suggested to us the possibility of immanence; (2) pointing to some specific dimensions of our world that have suggested the existence of a subject-object divide (a divide that, among other things, makes conceptually available to us the constellation of standards for “objectivity” – e.g., that something be reproducable across history); (3) recognising the historically-generated character of our notions of “objectivity” – such that we recognise the way in which any evaluative standards related to this concept must themselves be understood as standards for us; and (4) examining aspects of our historical environment – including concepts like “immanance” whose historical resonance we have already attempted to explain within our theoretical approach – to see whether we might be able to test the validity of these concepts for the analysis of other historical periods.

It is in this sense, in the discussion with Nick for example, that I have suggested that it might be possible, from within a “historical materialist” framework, still link to more conventional notions of truth claims – reconfigured by our recognition that these are lessons we have taught ourselves, concepts for which we have “primed” ourselves, for specific reasons, at a specific moment in time. But concepts which then become provisionally available for us to wield as hypotheses about other human societies, the natural world, etc.

This same orientation might react back against the sort of the discussion we’ve been having about religion and subjective experience. (Some of what I’ve been trying to do in this particular thread is to experiment with whether and how we can be robust with the assertion you made – and with which I agree – at I Cite: that ultimately we have no means to evaluate someone’s subjective experiences, to assess the authenticity of those experiences, when that person asserts that authenticity…)

So, the historical generation of the concept and practice of a “subject” (an individual subject, in this case, although an analysis of collective subjects can also be carried out) also releases concepts – of authenticity, for example – that can then potentially be applied validly, when reconfigured as historical concepts.

I’ve thought a great deal more, personally, about the ramifications for this approach for bodies of thought like the natural sciences, than I have about this approach for understandings of subjective identity. But I suspect that the resonance of quite important political values – the ideals of respect and non-coercive communication, for example, that you mention in your post – can be historicised in this way.

I suspect – but this isn’t a strong or important point to me, on a personal level – that our historical experience of subjecitivity might also leave a reservoir of something like “non-generalisable, authentic personal experience”, to which people could refer in accounting for, e.g, religious experience, experience of personal relationships, and other meaningful experiences whose generalisability to others cannot be assumed, but whose importance to a given individual can nevertheless be asserted with reference to ideals and normative standards (like Habermas’ notion of authenticity) that are generally understood…

Within this framework, the concept of immanence or “historical materialism” does remain a hypothesis or theory, I think – but in something like the way the theory of evolution remains a theory: not as some kind of expression of scepticism about the limits of what we can possibly know, but as an expression that we have developed the theory through an attempt to interpret our experiences after extended reflection. The theory may become extremely powerful, to the degree that it becomes difficult to conceive how its central tenets would ever be challenged – but there is a value, I think, to retaining an in principle agnosticism and tentative openness to the possibility that an alternative, more powerful theory is always in principle possible. (That, and I don’t personally think anyone has done enough serious and systematic work within this framework that we can afford to treat this as a well-established and foundational theory at the present moment in time…)

I realise this is all very condensed… I’m just trying to give a better sense of why I tend to intervene when you try to assert as a stance something that I think needs to be explained as something we have learned – that represents a hard-won historical insight.

Conversations, Critical Theory, Math and Science, Philosophy of History, Political Economy

Dialectic and Dialogue

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on December 21, 2006

While I’m stealing thoughts from other blogs, I just wanted to draw attention to this lovely characterisation of philosophy, from Sinthome at Larval Subjects:

Philosophy has been the ongoing dialectic between the philosopher and the sophist, where the sophist demonstrates the manner in which the confident philosopher nonetheless falls prey to undemonstrated claims and assumptions, and the philosopher responds to the sophist, taking these assumptions into account and showing how truth is possible within their scope. For instance, today we find ourselves embroiled in how a pure beginning is possible, given that thought, knowledge, and subjectivity is thoroughly pervaded by culture which cannot itself be grounded. That’s the sophists position, advanced by thinkers such as Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Quine, Davidson, Rorty, sometimes Heidegger, and others. The philosopher that would respond to this has not yet arisen, though there are promising glimmers in Deleuze and Badiou.

The context for this comment, in a “writ large” sense, is a sprawling blog brawl over the political significance of religious fundamentalism, into which I’ve occasionally been tossing somewhat irrelevant and over-abstract theoretical points… ;-P In the post that contains the quoted passage, Sinthome reworks one of my theoretical interventions in a much more coherent and precise way than I originally formulated it, and then moves far beyond my gestural starting point, putting forward a vision – a proposal? – for a philosophical and political culture in which “one’s grounds be grounds that the other too can discover for themselves” – a vision I wholeheartedly embrace.

I need more time to work out what I think about where Sinthome has taken this at a more detailed level (and, for that matter, how committed I want to be to my own original comment, as I was writing it, in a sense, to ease myself into thinking through the religious implications of the theoretical framework we’ve been roadtesting for the past several weeks…). I thought, though, that there was something very beautiful in Sinthome’s formulation – even if I later decide I want to qualify this image of the history of philosophy (at present, I find myself drawn to the formulation, even though my historicist impulses are straining mightily to kick in)… ;-P For the moment, I’ll rest with just pointing to the discussion, for those interested…

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

We Hold These Truths to Be Historical…

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on December 21, 2006

The always wonderful Language Log has a post up today that might be of interest to readers who have been tracking the reading group foray into the debate between Chomsky, Hauser & Fitch and Pinker & Jackendoff. Marc Hauser has written a recent work on the relationship between morality and the linguistic faculty, titled Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. Language Log quotes Hauser from a recent interview:

I argue that we are endowed with a moral faculty that delivers judgments of right and wrong based on unconsciously operative and inaccessible principles of action. The theory posits a universal moral grammar, built into the brains of all humans. The grammar is a set of principles that operate on the basis of the causes and consequences of action. Thus, in the same way that we are endowed with a language faculty that consists of a universal toolkit for building possible languages, we are also endowed with a moral faculty that consists of a universal toolkit for building possible moral systems.

By grammar I simply mean a set of principles or computations for generating judgments of right and wrong. These principles are unconscious and inaccessible. What I mean by unconscious is different from the Freudian unconscious. It is not only that we make moral judgments intuitively, and without consciously reflecting upon the principles, but that even if we tried to uncover those principles we wouldn’t be able to, as they are tucked away in the mind’s library of knowledge. Access comes from deep, scholarly investigation.

The full Language Log post places Hauser’s work in a broader intellectual and historical context – well worth a read.

On a personal level, I’m always interested in how tempting it clearly is for people to try to ground specific political and ethical ideals this way. In this week’s reading group discussion, for those who were there, this is the kind of thing I was referring to when I mentioned “making the jump to nature” as a common strategy for trying to ground a standpoint of critique – arguing that your ideals derive from some ahistorical source like language, human physiology, experience of the natural environment, etc. This is a surprisingly common strategy – surprising in the sense that the object of analysis – the specific political/ethical ideals theorists claim to derive from this approach – are often demonstrably historically specific.

Critical theorists like Habermas (who also tries to ground democratic values in language – although via the speech act tradition, rather than the Chomskyan one) at least recognise that this poses a theoretical problem, and therefore explicitly try to address how ideals that derive from something historically invariant, should nevertheless come to be expressed explicitly only very recently in historical time. Many theorists, however, don’t seem to recognise that this kind of jump to nature implies the need for any kind of supplemental historical theory, and therefore leave hanging the question of why no one became aware of specific ideals at some earlier point in time. (Personally, I prefer to avoid the whole problem by providing an historically specific explanation for historically specific ideals, but that’s another matter…)

I haven’t read Hauser’s work, of course, and he may well focus only on ideals or values that have a more transhistorical resonance. On this blog, I concentrate on understanding the rise and perpetuation of historically-specific political and ethical ideals because I am specifically trying to understand what is distinctive about recent history. Occasionally – probably because I don’t always contextualise the motives for my work clearly enough – my project gets interpreted more broadly, as though I’m making a strong ontological claim about the relative importance of, say, socialisation versus natural endowment – as though I’m intervening in a direct way into a kind of nature-nurture debate. I should perhaps take this opportunity to clarify that I see nature-nurture style debates as beside the point for my work: I have no difficulty being open to the concept that our forms of perception and thought might also be determined – perhaps even predominantly determined – by factors that are not historically or socially specific.

My difficulty arises only when someone tries to explain phenomena that are demonstrably socially and historically specific, with reference to purported causal factors that themselves are not… I have no specific knowledge of whether Hauser does this – although, given that the Language Log describes his work as “a Chomskyean interpretation of (some aspects of) John Rawls’ 1971 A Theory of Justice“, I suspect there is at least a risk that he does… Perhaps the reading group will take a look at some future point…

Cognitive Science, Critical Theory, Linguistics, Links, Philosophy of History, Reading Group

At Least I’m Consistent…

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on December 20, 2006

My day might have had a serene beginning, but it went rapidly downhill from there… ;-P Trying to regain focus this evening, I stumbled across some rather old notes I had taken, and was struck (again, evidently…) by a quotation from William Morris’ A Dream of John Ball:

I pondered all these things… how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name…

In my notes I glossed this quotation: Within a social context that shapes political struggle into this form, the goal of critical theory is to make possible a different kind of politics – one in which progressive social movements understand their own context well enough to orient political practice to genuinely emancipatory goals. In a dynamic social context, only an analysis of dynamic structures can help social movements learn to fight for what they mean – instead of discovering, after the fact, that they were the unwitting agents of domination in this dynamic form.

Critical Theory, Philosophy of History

Hegel on the Beach

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on December 18, 2006

Lovely reading group meeting today – except that I talked too much – enough that my throat is now actually sore… The discussion revolved mainly around the issue of standpoints of critique – why the notion of a standpoint is particularly important for secular critical theories, why certain theoretical approaches still rely on tacit concepts of nature or on metaphyical concepts to ground their critical standpoints, and how much, specifically, a critical standpoint should (or can) attempt to explain… We spilled well and truly beyond our brief (which was only to discuss the remainder of Derrida’s Limited Inc) – which is one of the reasons I talked so much, as I was the proxy voice in this discussion for a sweeping tradition of German critical theory (we’ll see whether this comes back to haunt me when the group actually reads some of this material themselves). LMagee will introduce the formal online discussion at some point in the near future.

For those wondering whether the reading group would now go into hiatus with the summer holidays approaching, the answer is no: we will be meeting next week for one final gesture at cognitive science before people scatter for the holidays. As mentioned previously, we’ll look at Lakoff’s Metaphors We Live By, and then at the recent debate between Pinker and Lakoff. LMagee intends to toss my gestural comments on Lakoff’s political writings into the mix, as well (perhaps to see how I presently compare with this past iteration of myself… ;-P).

LMagee and I will then be left to our own devices in Melbourne’s January heat, and have decided that a bit of Hegel on the beach might be nice. We’ll be working our way through Phenomenology of Spirit, on some random and eratic schedule to be determined, no doubt, by how successfully we resist a range of summer temptations…

Cognitive Science, Critical Theory, Linguistics, Philosophy of History, Politics, Reading Group

Vertigo

4 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on December 16, 2006

Okay, in the last round of the conversation between this blog and Larval Subjects, we discussed (and, I think, agreed?) that the rejection of subject-object dualism carries some very specific logical implications for philosophical argument. As is usually the case, Sinthome expressed my argument far better than I had done:

It seems to me that what N.Pepperell is groping for is the expression “performative contradiction”. That is, in suggesting that there is a conflict between the content of my post and the form of my post, the suggestion seems to be that at the level of content, the ontological claims being advanced say one thing, while the form in which these claims are advanced say quite another. It would be here that all the issues of self-reflexivity emerge, for if my claims about individuation hit the mark, then 1) an onto-epistemological theory of individuation must account for how it itself came to be individuated. To put this point a bit differently, my meditations on these issues perhaps suffer the old joke of a man alone in a room asked by a passing traveller whether anyone is there and responding “no”, thereby missing the obvious fact that he is there. I am “counting myself out” of the very thing I am talking about, and thus suggesting a transcendence that the content of my post forbids. 2) The nature of critique with regard to other epistemologies and ontologies is significantly transformed as one can no longer say that they are simply mistaken– which would simply be another variant of the subject/object divide, i.e., the thesis that the world has been erroneously represented –but must instead tell some sort of story as to how these onto-epistemologies came to be individuated.

And:

If I am understanding N.P. correctly, then s/he is referring to the habit of thought that continues to evaluate things other than itself in terms of the subject/object divide, while nonetheless having purported to reject this representational conception of the world. Thus, for instance, Deleuze argues that we must shift from a theory of knowledge to a theory of learning throughout Difference and Repetition, and must examine things in terms of how they come to be individuated or produced rather than how they are to be truly represented, and then proceeds to denounce Hegel, Kant, Plato, and others as getting it wrong without applying these very principles to their thought.

If we can agree, at least provisionally, on the positions outlined above, now it’s time to move on to the difficult questions…

I’ll say at the outset that, because I’ve generally struggled to achieve a shared recognition of the points above, I don’t believe I’ve ever actually managed to get to a point in a discussion where I move into what I’m about to discuss: it’s only once you acknowledge the logical implications for philosophical argument of rejecting subject-object dualism that the following questions then open up more clearly for analysis. Where I at least had some practice failing to communicate what we’ve been discussing over the past few days, I lack even that kind of thwarted experience for discussing the following issues. This means I will now be introducing ideas that have not been tested in any meaningful way – the chances of my overlooking something quite basic are therefore very high. The best suggestion I can make is that readers focus more on the strategy of the positions I sketch below, than on my nascent argument – the important thing is the questions I’m trying to answer – questions that should not themselves be undermined by the inadequacies of my gestures toward an answer.

Two reactions expressed during our last discussion point the way, I think, to where we must next move.

The first was Sinthome’s (in my experience quite normal) reaction to recoil from the perceived implications of this theoretical approach. Sinthome has discussed this reaction previously, and expressed it particularly eloquently in one of the earliest posts on the blog:

The concept of immanence is ultimately very simple, yet it proves very difficult to accept in its implications. To affirm immanence is to affirm that the world is sufficient unto itself, that we need not refer to anything outside of the world to explain the world such as forms, essences, or God, that the world contains its own principles of genesis. As Laplace responded to Napoleon when asked about the role of God in the new physics, “Je n’ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse”. “I have no need of this hypothesis.” What could be more beautiful and affirmative than this simple quip? To affirm immanence is to affirm the world as it gives itself and to deny any transcendent terms that might shackle the world to what a putrifying and decaying subject believes the world ought to be. Those who affirm immanence affirm the existent and its potentialities.

The immediate corollary of immanence is the consequence that “the whole is not” or that there is no whole. This is an ontological rather than epistemological thesis. Suppose we claim that the whole is. What are the conditions under which the whole would be possible? In order that there be a whole, it would be necessary that there be some point outside the whole through which the whole could be surveyed like an astronaut might survey the planet earth. But such a point of survey would be transcendent to the whole or world. Yet we have already affirmed that the world is immanent. Therefore such a point of transcendence does not exist.

Such is the rejoinder to Descartes’ proof for the existence of God….

Despite the joyous and affirmative nature of the concept of immanence (both as a thesis about the world and about situations) there is nonetheless a horror of immanence that even the greatest champions of immanence experience. If immanence is horrifying, then this is because it undermines our ability to refer to a transcendent standard or order that would tell us how to be, how to think, how to desire, and so on. That is, the affirmation of immanence is also the affirmation that “the Other does not exist” (that there is no transcendent rule or standard), or that “there is no Other of the Other” (that there is no point of view from the outside), or that “there is no metalanguage”….

My question, then, is not simply that of how we might assert immanence, but rather how we might affirm all of the anxiety provoking consequences that follow from our assertion of immanence, or the manner in which we come to be cast adrift in the ocean of immanence, without any ultimate compass. Or yet again, how we can endure affirming difference, divergence, and incompossibility so as to find a little order in the world and no longer look to authority, the father, or God as the guarantee of our being.

Sinthome’s concern is that the collapse of subject-object dualism – the surrender of the ability to anchor our being and our ideals in a timeless objectivity – sets us adrift. How do we understand the possibility of ethics, of morality, of meaning when the world is viewed in such a way? If timeless objectivity doesn’t exist, do we need to invent it, in fantastical form?

Nick then raises the further question of whether and how we might be able to relate this altered concept of validity to more conventional understandings of truth claims.

While I want to keep Nick’s question clearly in view, I won’t attempt to address it below. I can say briefly that I suspect there is a way to position a more conventional notion of truth – of scientific truth, for example – within the sort of theoretical approach we all seem to be attempting to develop, by positioning this conventional notion as a kind of socially plausible Newtonian approximation – as a socially-generated ideal sufficient for a very wide array of practical purposes within our shared social context, but which nevertheless falls down when we try to reflect on specific kinds of problems that don’t often arise in everyday experience. In other words, I suspect it is possible to embed conventional understandings of truth within a more overarching theoretical framework. Since I haven’t walked this talk, though, this statement can at best be taken as a sort of tenuous theoretical promissory note…

Sinthome’s question I can at least attempt to address in a very preliminary and schematic way. I fear that my response will be too mundane and too basic… I should note also that my intention is obviously not to “answer” the question, but to suggest a few lines of enquiry that might make it possible for us to work toward a better framework for thinking about these issues.

My impulse is to say that much of the sensation of vertigo experienced when thinking about immanence derives from the common practice of (as discussed in the last round of this exchange) asserting the non-existence of timeless objectivity, without self-reflexively explaining the historical factors that have made this a plausible conclusion – from, in other words, making rather abstract claims about our embeddedness in “context”, without unfolding a determinate analysis of the particular context in which we happen to find ourselves embedded. It is for this reason, as well as for sheer logical coherence, that I think it is so important not to fall into the kind of performative contradiction that is, unfortunately, rampant when these issues are discussed.

My own approach to thinking about our context has been to try to think very carefully (almost certainly not carefully enough, and I would benefit greatly from the kind of critical scrutiny these sorts of conversations can provide) about the historical distinctiveness of “modernity” – an investigation that has led me to focus on how we understand capitalism as an element of our global social context in the modern period. If anyone has read back through the older entries in this blog, they will have seen me make at least gestural rejections of common ways of understanding capitalism – I tend not to be very happy, for example, with attempts to define capitalism in terms of class domination, in terms of the market or in terms of core and periphery. While these are to some degree empirical matters, the reason I engage in these skirmishes is because I understand them to have philosophical stakes: capitalism is, I suspect, our closest candidate for an unconscious global social relation (unconscious in the sense that it has arisen and, in spite of a great deal of conjunctural planning carried out en route, is still largely sustained via social practices that are not consciously seeking to bring the overarching system into being). I further suspect that the unconscious – the alienated – nature of this social relation may be particularly important in understanding certain aspects of the forms of perception and thought associated with capitalist history, but this point is far too complex for me to cover even gesturally here…

Very, very gesturally, I would suggest that it seems potentially useful – particularly for understanding the historical emergence and spread of particular kinds of political ideals and perceptions of the natural world – to reflect on what is historically distinctive about capitalism. And I do not regard attempts to understand capitalism in terms of class relations, distributional institutions such as the market, or core-periphery relations, as the best ways into what is historically distinct about this global social relation. Perversely, I also tend not to think of capitalism primarily as a form of economy – in the conventional sense where an “economy” is understood as a system for producing and distributing material goods. Capitalism is also a system of production and distribution, but if we restrict our analysis to this dimension of our social lives, my sense is that we risk naturalising some things that could productively be problematised. I don’t want to dig myself too deeply into the trenches here – and, in any event, am probably not ready to do so. But I have found it most productive to try to think of capitalism in terms of a global logic of practice, as a non-linear historical trajectory that is only very, very loosely coupled to the specific array of institutions that reproduce that trajectory at any given moment in time. Like the Lacanian notion of desire, or the Hegelian notion of essence (this is, of course, how I would seek to historicise and embed these concepts – and is also why I asked Sinthome, some weeks back, how Sinthome understands the parallels between Marx’s description of “value” and Lacan’s description of “desire”), my understanding of capitalism is as a social relation – an unconscious human creation, a logic of practice – that never resides separately from a concrete network of institutions and practices, but is capable over time of discarding any particular network of institutions and practices and moving restlessly on to a new concrete configuration, which can nevertheless still meaningfully be characterised as “capitalist” because the underlying historical trajectory continues to be reproduced.

This is of course much too condensed, and also may not be “true”… ;-P Even in this primitive form, though, perhaps certain implications of this definition might be visible? Such an approach provides, I think, a way for us to begin to understand how… non-revolutionary so many revolutionary movements have been: revolutionary practice has generally been targeted at some specific constellation of concrete social institutions (or people…), misrecognising that it is quite possible to destroy any number of concrete institutions while retaining “capitalism”, as long as the underlying logic of practice remains untouched. At the same time, it might provide a way to begin to understand that the potential for change within our social context is actually quite vast – capitalism is compatible with many concrete social arrangements, some much more humane than others…

But I’m becoming too painfully aware of how ridiculous this likely sounds, outlined in this kind of sketchy and ungrounded way here…

To get back to the question of subject-object dualism and relativism: from my perspective of at least trying to think about the implications of a global social relation, many approaches that attempt to embed subjectivity in context, express a vision of context that is too parochial – too local – too concrete. Parochial, local and concrete contexts of course do exist – in attempting to understand capitalism as a global social relation, I am not siding with theoretical approaches that posit the obliteration of the local or the concrete (among other things, if you view the underlying logic of practice as always necessarily inseparable from some concrete institutional expression, it makes no sense to talk about the obliteration of the local – although it can and does make sense to analyse the ways in which local contexts come to be shaped by their dual role, as both locally relevant in specific ways, and as modes of expression of a more global social relation).

But approaches that see context only as a constellation of concrete institutional structures and particular practices, and miss the ways in which these institutional structures and practices might also contribute to replicating a more global logic of practice, often fall prey (as, for example, Rorty does) to fractionalising human communities into mutually incomprehensible social groups with incommensurable values. My response would be that, whatever unique and incommensurable experiences we might have, one of the strange, unintentional historical results of the emergence and perpetuation of capitalism is to provide a (very, very abstract) level of social experience that we all also share. From the point of view of individual experience, this shared level of socialisation is arguably no more or less important than the unique experiences that also shape each of us. However, from a philosophical and historical point of view, the existence of even a very thin slice of shared socialisation might have dramatic implications – among other things, for understanding the historical plausibility of the rise of particular values and ways of perceiving and orienting ourselves toward the social and natural worlds – for grasping the rise, for example, of the scientific project of seeking out what seems “universal” in human or physical nature, or for making sense of the historical emergence of particular kinds of political ideals (without, for example, resorting to the faux historicism of a Habermasian approach, that operates essentially as a claim about the historical realisation of a natural potential) etc. I realise all of this is terribly undercooked – I am just trying here to gesture at what might be the “cash value” of some of the otherwise odd elements of my theoretical approach…

I suspect, as I mentioned above, that we might be able to get from this approach at least to the point where we can defend the claim that we might share a sufficient reservoir of common social experience that we do not need to fear the kind of relativism that would arise if we understood ourselves to be embedded in contexts that have no connection with one another. We can, I suspect, at least get this approach to the point that we could defend the Habermasian-style claim that we are socialised into the ability to understand appeals to particular ideals of truth, goodness and authenticity.

This is not a small thing, I think, but understanding an appeal to a particular ideal, and agreeing with the substance of that appeal, are different things. We might be able to explain the rise of particular kinds of social movements – and perhaps also the receptiveness to the ideals those movements express – via such an approach. The question remains whether we might be able to go beyond this a bit – to point, for example, to any consequences that might arise for movements that deny the potential to realise specific forms of freedom, when those movements are nevertheless socialised into an environment that constantly whispers that such potentials exist. This is one of the problems I’m trying to work on now, in working through Adorno’s quite critical appropriation of Freud. Adorno argues, in effect, that there is a psychological cost to asserting unnecessary domination, in a context where it is no longer plausible to regard a particular form of domination as doxic – a cost that manifests itself in a brittle psychological rigidity and in collective expressions of rage…

But this is far, far too much for this kind of post… I’ve likely succeeded only in making my current stab at this issue look a bit ridiculous… And I may still have left it unclear why I believe – leaving aside all my various specifics about the context in which we reside, all of which may simply be a false start – that an approach that begins with an analysis of a specific context, rather than with claims about context as such, should reduce the sensation of vertigo – if only by perhaps reassuring us that we might well have some common points of reference, even if those reference points cannot be understood as timeless and universal. My position would be that, for most practical purposes, our own immanence does not leave us as unmoored as it seems, when we approach this problem from too abstract a direction…

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy

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