Rough Theory

My day is very cluttered, and I doubt I’ll have time to write anything substantive for the blog today, but I wanted to point readers who might have been following the ongoing conversation between this blog and Larval Subjects, to Sinthome’s latest response.

I’ll confess that I got a bit of a fright, seeing the title of the post – which is “Rough Theory – The Surly Edition”… ;-P On what I must confess is a bit of a “drive by” reading of this post, though, it looks as though Sinthome is, not surprisingly, already very familiar with the ground I was trying to cover in yesterday’s post – and has offered some useful suggestions for further thought on the issue. I’ll also confirm that my intention – in all exchanges of this kind – is essentially collaborative: I regard the stakes as too important, and the task as too difficult, to approach the issue as anything other than a process of collective learning…

When I next have time, I’ll try to situate myself more explicitly in relation to some of the literatures Sinthome references in this latest post.

One of the things that has been most characteristic of my theoretical work over the past several years has been the fact that I seem to devote the most time, not to answering questions, and not even to asking them – but to trying to communicate that a particular kind of question exists. I have a sense that, in addition to the familiar sorts of questions we are used to asking, there is another category of question that too often remains unasked or, if asked, is often asked incompletely, or without a clearly expressed relationship to fairly central political and philosophical problems.

Looking back over the most recent exchange with Sinthome – at the questions I was trying to ask, and then at how Sinthome, quite reasonably and thoughtfully, sought to respond – I have a familiar sinking sensation that I have failed yet again to ask my own question… I would expect that the end result, from Sinthome’s perspective and from the perspective of readers of this conversation, would be a perception that we might be talking past one another – or, more specifically, confusion as to why I seem to keep speaking as though Sinthome has not responded to my question. I am thinking specifically of the moment within this exchange where, in response to my questions about historical and material conditions for knowledge, Sinthome replies:

However, everything changes once we recognize that the subject itself is caught up in these networks of relations, and it becomes possible to see knowledge as an ontological result of a process of individuation (here and here and here and here). To try to put the point a bit more clearly, knowledge must be seen as resulting from the milieu in which it is individuated, or its field of engagement. I take it that this responds to your remarks about material and historical conditions. If this is ontological rather than epistemological, then this is because there is no further being in-itself beyond these interactions and relations that would be a true object of knowledge. None of this is to suggest that I am a Hegelian or that I follow him in all the claims he makes. I do find, however, that the Doctrine of Essence in the Science of Logic, is a model of clear thinking (though not clear writing), and of great interest to anyone committed to relational ontology and fatigued by ineffectual epistemic critiques.

Consequently, my proposal is that rather than asking which is the right form of knowledge or claiming that there is no knowledge, we instead look at how knowledges are individuated and produced in a specific field of relations. This would also amount to a theory of learning rather than a theory of representing. Of course, this raises significant questions with regard to the Enlightenment project of critique and demystification that I have not yet worked through. (italics mine)

So, Sinthome has explicitly attempted to reply to my questions about how we should understand historical conditions of possibility for knowledge – and, what’s more, I agree with much if not all of the content of Sinthome’s response. Yet, in my reply this morning, there I am, still lecturing pedantically about the need to deploy historical and sociological perspectives – as though Sinthome had rejected this suggestion. In what way do I find Sinthome’s answer unsatisfying? What am I on about, if not the sorts of things Sinthome has already addressed? ;-P

The problem isn’t with Sinthome’s reading of my questions – this is the point where I routinely get myself into trouble and, to paraphrase the old joke, the only consistent thing in all my poor communications is me… I think I routinely run into this problem, in part, because the questions I’m asking are actually quite unprofound – they are, in a sense, far less sophisticated than the questions Sinthome has tried to answer (and enormously less sophisticated than the wonderful questions Sinthome explores in the writings on individuation, linked in the quoted passage above). I worry – constantly – that I’m being quite misguided in fixating on particular kinds of questions: that everyone just might be thinking – well, you can’t mean that, because that would just be too ridiculous – and so they substitute something more sophisticated as a matter of simple politeness, grounded in their incredulity that anyone would ask what I’m actually asking… Nevertheless, I can’t seem to shake the questions, or the sense that they might tell us something useful. So I’ll make one further attempt, hopefully clearer than the previous ones… To do this, I want to take a very, very quick look, not at the content of Sinthome’s work on individuation, but the form.

Sinthome’s work on individuation tackles the problem of how we might escape from a subject-object dualism, while still retaining the ability to speak in a meaningful way about the relationships between subjectivity and objectivty (I should note that I am being very sloppy with my language here – this is not how Sinthome would express this problematic – I’ll ask forebearance on this issue because my “target” in this analysis is not actually how we can best understand individuation, but instead something more abstract: I’m trying to illustrate something about the habits of thought into which most of us – including myself – tend to fall when we seek to resolve this kind of philosophical dichotomy). Sinthome tackles this problem on two fronts across different posts: the primary front is conceptual/philosophical – asking: how can we arrive at better concepts, better and clearer ways of thinking, which will relieve us from the conceptual errors and limitations intrinsic once we posit an ontological opposition between subjects and objects?; a significant secondary front is empiricist/scientific – asking: what does current research into empirical phenomena related to individuation suggest to us about how we should conceptualise the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity?

Sinthome’s thought on these questions is subtle and sophisticated, and I wish to be very clear that I am not trying to criticise any substantive points put forward in Sinthome’s posts. What I wish to ask, though, is whether the kind of reflection Sinthome carries out here might in its own practice remain bound to a subject-object divide: whether the practice of thinking through this issue, as carried out in these posts, is consistent with the express goal of the posts, which is to develop a system that transcends subject-object dualism.

I find this point maddeningly difficult to express, so I blame no one but myself if my point seems completely opaque… I’ll try to unpack this a bit more clearly… The habit we tend to fall into when putting forward new approaches – whether in philosophy or science or any other field where we believe we are making novel claims – is to treat our own insights as discoveries. This habit manifests itself in different ways. One is the tendency to treat opposing positions as the products of poor reasoning, and our own positions, by contrast, as the products of a better, clearer, more precise reasoning process. Another is the tendency to point to novel empirical facts, and to behave as though these empirical novelties have motivated (or justified) the emergence of new concepts.

In drawing attention to these common means of explaining the rise of new concepts, I am obviously not seeking to criticise precise reasoning, or to argue against philosophical reflection on the natural world. I am, though, asking whether the form that philosophical argument takes, when it appeals to subjective error or objective empirical novelty, can be understood to be adequate when the content or purpose of philosophical reflection strives to overturn the subject-object dualism. Perhaps we need to be seeking a form of philosophical exposition that is more adequate to the content it seeks to express. I regard this as an epistemological task – where epistemology is understood as, to borrow a phrase from Sinthome, a “theory of learning”, rather than as itself a project grounded in the subject-object divide. And I think that Hegel – and, for that matter, Marx – by focussing their attention on self-reflexivity, have highlighted the need to find a philosophical path through this labyrinth.

I don’t think I’ve made my point particularly well – and of course the point itself may simply be wrong. But my reaction to Sinthome’s initial response was, essentially, that the content was amazing – but that this content remains inconsistent with the form, with the internal mechanics or operation or expression of the philosophical approach. So, Sinthome tells me, as a matter of content – as a stance – that we must “recognize that the subject itself is caught up in these networks of relations” – and then offers some terms and concepts that will help express this perception. But I don’t see the philosophical approach itself expressing its own status of being caught up in a network of relations – explaining self-reflexively how it does not stand outside of the ontology it describes – and therefore how one can, within some specific network of relations, have learned the determinate lessons this philosophical approach has to teach us.

Sinthome rightly criticises relativist approaches for positioning the theorist in a position where, by devaluing all knowledge, the theorist can maintain “an imaginary illusion of mastery” – I think this is absolutely correct, and an extremely important point. But I also think that this risk is not specific to relativist approaches: I believe it applies to any theory that is not self-reflexive, whether relativist or absolutist in form. If we cannot locate our learning – if we cannot explain how the very networks in which we are embedded have whispered to us of their existence – only very recently, since we must acknowledge that the concepts, at least, are new, even if we want to assert that the ontology is not – and have thus helped us in some specifiable way to become aware of our ontological embeddedness – then, whatever our best intentions and explicit disclaimers, we are performatively placing ourselves outside the networks we are claiming to analyse. I would regard lack of self-reflection as a form of assertion of illusory mastery, and it is precisely this situation that I am trying to avoid.

My sense is that, any time we are trying to make new philosophical claims within a framework that seeks to overcome the subject-object divide, the criterion of self-reflection can be met only by an historical theory. By the term “historical theory”, I don’t mean a theory that simply leaves a space – like a black box – into which historical contingency, context, or a similar concept can flow – a theory that asserts as a stance that history is important. I mean a theory that can explain how its specific insights – which are self-evidently achieved at a specific moment in time – have become for determinate reasons easier to think at that moment.

I should note that, although I recognise Sinthome’s concerns about the way in which historicisation has traditionally been pressed into the service of relativism, I do not believe that this traditional relationship is also a logical one. I would suggest that identifying the historical origins of a concept does not, simply by dint of historicising that concept, necessarily limit the applicability of that concept to the historical moment in which that concept has arisen. I won’t develop this argument here (and may not be ready to elaborate a fully adequate argument, in any event), but my hunch is that we can get from a self-reflexive historical theory to a reconstructed understanding of the sorts of claims we traditionally wish to make, for example, when thinking of natural science. But I’ll leave this issue for a future post… I think it’s a bit more intuitive to grasp how this kind of historicisation can sensitise us to ways in which ideas might resonate at particular moments – and therefore make a useful contribution to non-relativist scepticism – to what I tend to call critical agnosticism in evaluating scientific and philosophical claims. I think, in other words, that there is a fairly direct connection between such an historical theory, and what Sinthome has called “the Enlightenment project of critique and demystification” – I think we can get from here to there… But I’m certain that this last point is far too compressed even to communicate the gestalt of what I suspect we can do…

But I’ll stop here – writing about these concepts always leaves me with the simultaneous sensation that I am being profoundly basic – discussing things that surely everyone must already know, but have left behind for good reasons I’m too simple to see – and at the same time that the whole thing is simply too complex, and that I am completely inadequate to hold the relevant concepts in my mind or to think at the requisite level… I’ll hope that this rather primitive approach to the issue might at least provide a useful foil – and I’ll apologise in advance if the topic is so off the mark that it does not provide conceptual traction…

[Note: image modified from Tarquin’s original, available from Wikipedia, and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. For full license details, please see the image’s Wikipedia page.]

Sinthome at Larval Subjects has taken a somewhat ill-formed question of mine, and woven it into a beautiful series of reflections on a vital philosophical project. My schedule is unfortunately crashing down around me as I type, so I don’t have time this morning to write a response that could stand on its own: readers interested in following this latest iteration of this conversation should begin at Larval Subjects, where Sinthome’s post replicates, and then responds to, a set of questions I originally posed via email. To pick up very quickly and inadequately a few hanging points (note that, since this is more a comment than a stand-alone post, I’ll write here in comment style, addressing the points directly to Sinthome):

(1) First of points of similarity between the two projects:

In terms of the worry expressed at the beginning of your response over whether this project might be “absurd”, or at the end over whether you’ve adequately demonstrated the importance of the project: these might be issues for certain kinds of public writing – I’m not sure. Nothing in my original email, however, was intended to call into question whether your ontological stance is important – I accept this as read.

One quick terminological point, basically to translate between the vocabularies used across the two blogs, which might otherwise be a source of some confusion: when you say you are critical of “epistemology”, you mean, essentially, what I have tried to express in criticising what I have tended to call “unmasking and debunking critiques”. I have made essentially identical criticisms across a variety of writings of the relativism/absolutism, subject/object, etc. dichotomies, and agree that it’s essential to stop falling back into these kinds of polarisation, if we are to make sense of anything important, philosophically or politically.

I also agree that Hegel is an incredibly useful source to mine for concepts on how to do this – concepts that, I also agree, do not have to remain bound up in Hegel’s overarching theoretical or normative framework.

My reaction to your rejection of the term “epistemology” is a bit similar to how I understood your reaction to Scott Eric Kaufman’s decision to reject the term “theory”: it feels as though there’s an unnecessary (and potentially counterproductive) conflation of the term “epistemology” with a particular way of approaching epistemology. That said, I’m not picky about terminology – if you think the term “epistemology” has been irrevocably tainted by association with failed approaches, by all means choose another term (I’ve done this myself, where I’ve felt that the weight of history has made it unfortunately impossible to use an otherwise perfectly salient term).

My concern is simply that we not lose sight of epistemological questions – which I don’t believe are reducible to the problematic “how do we bridge the subject-object divide” style questions, which I think you rightly reject (and I’d absolutely agree that reflection on this properly begins with Hegel, although of course it won’t end there…). We still, though, need a way of talking about how we understand the insight that underlies your alternative ontology – as well as a means to make explicit whatever links we believe we have to the Enlightenment project. I think of these as essentially epistemological questions, whatever name we decide to use.

(2) In terms of points of potential difference (although, in saying this, I need to indicate that I see the points I’m making here as essentially additive, rather than critical – my instinct is that these might be steps that are perhaps also required for the project as you’ve outlined it, rather than points that would compel any kind of fundamental reconsideration of the project itself):

My main question, if I can figure out a way to say this, is whether it is adequate to treat this as solely a problem within philosophy – such that you can resolve it solely by positing an alternative philosophical discourse, without connection with history or sociology. If you were engaged in contemplative philosophy, I’d leave this aside. My sense, though, is that you are acutely concerned with the connections between philosophy and practice – whether political or therapeutic – with philosophy as a discipline that in some sense speaks to the potential for transformation.

My instinct is that, once you go here, some reaches toward sociology and history can actually save some headaches – and may, perhaps, be the only way (at least, they are the only way I can currently see) that might resolve some of your worries about how to reconstitute the Enlightenment project of demystification and critique. I won’t be able to explain this very well here, but my instinct is that – post Freud and Marx, as you said in one of your earlier posts – it may no longer be available to us to treat philosophical errors as mere errors in thinking. They may also be errors in thinking, but we may need to get a sense of how the errors themselves, while not predetermined or inevitable in any way, are nevertheless also not random: that we can understand, historically and sociologically, why people might find it tempting to make errors like this at the present moment in time. By the same token, we can also begin to understand, historically and sociologically, why it’s also available to practice to push beyond these errors – how our historical experiences, if we reflect on them and pay attention to their implications, suggest the practical, as well as the conceptual, falseness of common philosophical formulations.

Following this route, I think, can provide us with a new way of thinking about the relationship between historicisation and critique, such that historicisation comes to be understood as a way of holding our time in thought, of using the things we have taught ourselves are possible in order to open ourselves to a realm of determinate contingency – not the Benjaminian leap into the “free” air of history, but the political drive informed by what philosophical reflection can show us about the potentials we have constituted through social practices that have unfolded in a specific time.

Apologies for the inadequacy of this response – I will enjoy coming back to this later, when my schedule is not so nightmarish. A bit of bad timing, as I’m just coming off of a couple of relatively clear weeks, into a couple of horrible ones…

Sinthome has posted a brief response and promissory note to my last round of comments. I’m conscious that Sinthome will take up the issue in greater detail at a later point, but am also conscious of the nightmare schedule I have looming just around the corner – I’ll hope Sinthome will excuse me for tossing a few more questions into the discussion at this point, while I know I still have a bit of clear time.

One of the recurring themes in our conversation to date has been whether critique – understood as the theorisation of the potential for political action oriented to social transformation – needs the concept of an “outside”. Sinthome’s most recent response clarifies the strategic significance of wanting to identify an “outside”:

when advancing the thesis that no form of domination ever completely subsumes the dominated, I am specifically thinking of historicism and Foucaultian power structures. With regard to historicism, I am objecting to the common thesis that everything is determined by its historical context, such that nothing new can appear that isn’t already saturated by this context. With regard to Foucault (perhaps one could add Butler), I have in mind the thesis that all social relations are determined by structures of power. Foucault, of course, complicates this with his thesis that all structures of power produce their own resistence; yet these structures of resistance are nonetheless part and parcel of the field of power. Consequently I suppose I am asking whether an outside is possible.

This is what I would have suspected: the conviction that critique must be founded on something “outside” social context generally does derive from the perceptions that:

(1) the social context is essentially “one dimensional” – that it generates solely those forms of practice and subjectivity reproduce the current form of social life in some kind of static loop or linear pattern; and

(2) socialisation should be conceptualised in terms of “power” – a concept which, in spite of Foucault’s best efforts – tends to be wielded as an essentially “negative” concept, flattening the notion of socialisation into the notion of constraint, prohibition or domination, and therefore orienting the concept of socialisation to the reproduction of the existing social order.

I think that Sinthome is correct both in pointing to Foucault’s efforts to turn the concept of “power” into something more potentially productive and creative, and in concluding that, even in Foucault’s own work, this concept in practice functions rather similarly to Weber’s notion of the “iron cage”. If Foucault had wanted to take seriously the notion of power as a productive, as well as a constraining, force in socialisation, you would have expected him to wed his analysis of qualitative transformations in kinds of power, with an analysis of how these qualitative shifts are also associated with the emergence of historically specific practices and subjectivities driving toward specific kinds of freedom. Such an analytical strategy could have made it possible for Foucault then to explain his own critical standpoint immanently, by indicating how it reflects the potentials of a given historical moment.

Instead, in practice, Foucault’s analyses of power often fall back into something like an unmasking and debunking form of critique. The standpoint from which Foucault makes these unmasking and debunking moves is generally not clarified. Instead, when Foucault does speak explicitly about his critical standpoint, he often does something rather similar to what Sinthome has also been doing in recent posts: he talks about how moving “outside” our current time, and examining the alternative potentials expressed in different historical moments, equips us to think differently about the present. Foucault’s own practice therefore reinforces the sense that he has not successfully conceptualised power as more than a negative constraint. (Note: I am far from an expert in Foucault’s work, so I am happy to be persuaded that he uses more sophisticated strategies in specific writings – from my point of view, this would simply mean that Foucault at some point more fully expresses the potentials I believe do lurk in some of his concepts, but which he often doesn’t seem to follow to their critical conclusions.)

I am sympathetic with Sinthome’s reaction to this closed, static, reproduction-oriented notion of socialisation: I think it is extremely difficult, within such a framework, to make sense of the possibility for political action aimed at transformation, and therefore to render “rational” the theorist’s critical voice. My question is more about whether Sinthome’s rejection of this notion is fundamental enough: to me, it seems as though searches for the “outside” essentially accept the underlying vision of socialisation promoted by historicist theories, and then go hunting about for some way to account for the fact that critical sentiments still do become manifest in social and intellectual movements – that, as Galileo is purported to have said, “still, it moves”… My sense is that a more fundamental critique is likely possible: that the problem may lie at a more basic level, in the essential poverty of thinking about our social context as a one-dimensional entity, and in restricting our notion of socialisation to a process mediated by “power”, which in turn is understood as an essentially negative, prohibitive force that drives solely toward social reproduction.

I suspect we can do more than this – that we can reconceptualise the nature of our social context – taking into account our empirical experience of the existence of specific kinds of critical sensibilities, and of the emergence of particular types of social movements – and ask ourselves what kind of understanding of socialisation would be required to make sense of what experientially appears to be a contradictory whole, a form of social life that does tend to reproduce certain patterns of social practice, but that also tends to generate recurrent political pressures for specific kinds of freedom.

I should note that this is separate from, as it were, the empirical question of whether there might be an “outside” – whether there might be aspects of human behaviour that can be understood to be untouched by socialisation. I don’t actually have a dog in this fight – it may in fact be the case that such a thing exists. My quarrel is only with the perception that this question is more than empirical – that it is freighted with some kind of deep political significance, such that if we can’t find the “outside”, we will be condemned to the deepest, dankest corner of Weber’s iron cage for the rest of eternity. I don’t think this is a necessary fear.

I feel very similarly about positions that try to locate political potentials in human nature. We may very well be able to explain very interesting things with reference to the concept of human nature, but I don’t think we need to do this, to explain the potential for critique and for political action in our present moment in time. I’d rather explore the question of what might be intrinsic to human nature without freighting the investigation with the belief that the possibility for political action hinges on the outcome. I think this makes for questionable science, and very vulnerable political theory, and that the causes of science and of politics are better served by recognising that these are not intrinsically and necessarily related issues…

I’ve been meaning for some days to pick up a few of the threads from Sinthome’s recent posts on identity and critique. Picking up these threads now, of course, is fraught with danger, as I might trigger the Lacan-filter my fellow reading group members have threatened to install. {As I wrote this sentence, a fire alarm went off in my building, dislodging me not only from my office, but from the coffee shop to which I often retreat to write… Can one think critical thoughts in an alien coffee shop? We’ll see… Is the reading group behind this dislocation? I have my suspicions…}

I’ll focus most of my attention here on Sinthome’s haunting and brilliant discussion of the psychological consequences (causes?) of engaging with the potential for fundamental transformation, as sketched in the post titled “Enlightenment and Opening Possibilities”. Before I move to this topic, though, I’ll say just a few things on the more recent post on “The Diacritical Production of Identity” – if only to explain why I focus my commentary on the earlier of what, I gather, were written as two interrelated posts on the concept of the diacritical construction of identity.

In the post on “The Diacritical Production of Identity”, Sinthome tackles several elements of Lacan’s thought that are often cited as particularly controversial – the use of mathematical metaphors, the concept of the woman as the symptom of the man, etc. Sinthome traverses these elements of Lacan’s thought lightly, bracketing problematic readings, while teasing out a reading productive for critique. My question – and the reason I won’t write at length on this topic here – is whether these elements of Lacan’s thought, even read for their highest critical potential, ever move beyond being a very elaborate theoretical justification for what, at base, I suspect is a fairly noncontroversial ontological claim: that no form of domination (or, for that matter, freedom) ever fully succeeds in subsuming all aspects of consciousness or practice.

I’ve never found this claim controversial and – I confess this may be a fundamental conceptual failure on my part – I haven’t yet understood how any of the various theoretical elaborations of this claim contribute more to critical practice than the simple empirical experience of nonsubsumption ever could? I’m not so much critical of the theoretical framework, as I am uncertain whether this is really a battle that needs to be fought… Does theoretical reflection on this kind of abstract contingency give us any greater insight into the potentials for specific kinds of political action, in the particular contexts in which we must now act?

For this specific question, Sinthome’s earlier post seems much more productive. The motivating question for this post comes at the end:

What, then, today would it mean to repeat the Enlightenment, in an age following Freud and Marx?

Sinthome prepares the reader for this question with a discussion of the ways in which various Enlightenment thinkers used the inspiration provided by their reading of classical antiquity to leap outside of their time – to gain critical distance that then allowed them to react back upon and transform their own historical moment. Sinthome treats this appropriation of history with critical empathy – acknowledging that the Enlightenment interpretation of classical antiquity was probably “wrong” in its various factual particulars, but also arguing that this creative misinterpretation was enormously productive for specifically revolutionary thought. In Sinthome’s account, the myth of antiquity constructed by the Enlightenment thinkers allowed them to produce their own ground – a ground from the standpoint of which they could then reach out and tranform their own historical moment. Sinthome challenges us: can we do something similar now – perhaps by negotiating our own creative historical relationship with our idealised vision of the Enlightenment itself?

There are too many similarities not to note the parallels between Sinthome’s comments, and Benjamin’s analysis of the relationship of revolutionary movements to the continuum of history. Benjamin offers, I think, a more critically-inflected perspective on the tendency of revolutionary movements to cloak their goals in the mantle of the past:

History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. [Jetztzeit]. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.

Benjamin’s vision is in some respects the inverse of Sinthome’s: where Sinthome sees the creative appropriation of the past as a means for breaking fundamentally with the present – for achieving critical distance in relation to our current moment in time – Benjamin suggests that our elective affinity for particular moments of history may, in fact, be very much motivated (if unconsciously) by present-day concerns. Sinthome and Benjamin both hold that we are not seeing the past for what it really is, but where Sinthome sees an opportunity for achieving critical distance, Benjamin worries about how contemporary fashions undermine and distort even our relationship to history: “even the dead” Benjamin warns, “will not be safe from the enemy if he wins”.

At the same time, though, Benjamin collapses his notion of the social structuration of perception into the concept of class domination – his main concern is how our perceptions of the past are distorted by the way in which they take “place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands”. He then holds out as an alternative, more revolutionary, relationship to history something that sounds rather like a concept that Sinthome canvassed – and that caused me to balk – in an earlier round of this discussion: Sinthome suggested a concept of critique as an event that “comes to pierce a hole in the totalizing, static structure of knowledge”; Benjamin speaks of a “leap in the open air of history”. These tacitly antinomic visions of critique always cause me to wonder: Do we have no alternatives, other than thinking of lockstep social determination, or some form of very abstract anti-determination? Can we not think of concepts that might help us express how Benjamin’s tiger might have scented – and gone hunting for – potentials for transformation? Can we not think of ourselves as fully social creatures, socialised into a context that shouts to us that more is possible – that we are holding ourselves back?

I think it is possible to develop theoretical concepts that would allow us to begin thinking about our socialisation in this way – and that therefore move beyond the theoretical articulation of something like abstract contingency, and into the theoretical articulation of the qualitatively specific ways in which we are socialised to long for more than we permit ourselves to have. I also suspect that concepts like class domination, marginality, and similar terms related to divisions between social groups might not be the easiest route into this alternative concept of critical standpoint – that at least some critical concepts may be more generally socialised within our historical moment than these categories allow us easily to capture.

But these are preliminary thoughts: the question, the project, the concept of critical theory are the more important things. We need to ask ourselves: Do we believe the principal aim of critical theory should be to ground the possibility for an abstractly contingent rupture with our historical moment? Or do we believe that, as creatures of our time, we can use critical theory to equip ourselves to demand our birthrights – to ask for the fuller realisation of the potentials that, unawares, we have constituted in alienated form? Returning to Benjamin, perhaps it is our own, contemporary history that we need to make “citable in all its moments” – perhaps we need to take more seriously the notion that the “kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed”. Perhaps we need to ask what a critical theory might look like, if this were its concept, if these were its grounds.

I’ve left aside in this response what was perhaps the most poignant dimension of Sinthome’s post: a reading of Hume, to draw out the psychological consequences of experiencing oneself achieving critical distance on one’s own time. It’s a beautiful reading – better for people to look at the original, than for me to try to distill it into some pale synopsis. It’s an open question whether it might induce less vertigo, if someone were to understand critical distance as a possibility made available within one’s own moment in time – or perhaps the sense of fundamental isolation would be more intense, because the goal of communicating critical insights might seem tantalisingly close? I’m not prepared even to speculate… Sinthome would be more skilled at this line of interpretation than I am, in any event… I’ll leave the issue of the psychology of critique aside, then, for a future discussion…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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