Rough Theory

Theory In The Rough

Category Archives: Drafts

Transforming Communication

10 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on December 7, 2007

I’ve cut and pasted the ASCP conference paper on Habermas and Brandom below the fold, for those interested. The process of preparing for this paper has been interesting, among other things, in shaking out certain “what the hell is going on there?” questions that L Magee and I both share in relation to Brandom’s work – while these questions, and our debates around them prior to the presentation, led us to recast slightly what we said at this event, the material posted below the fold doesn’t clearly indicate those areas where we have open and active questions about Brandom’s project: when both of us are back in Melbourne, we’ll hopefully have time to put a few of those issues up on the blog, through some follow-up posts on Making It Explicit.

This particular talk hugged very close to the terms of a debate between Habermas and Brandom, and also provided a lot of background information that might not be as useful to folks who regularly read things here. Some of this background material – particularly on Brandom – suffers from code switching problems: those are my fault, as I wrote those sections of the piece, and so I’ll apologise for trampling all over Brandom’s vocabulary (and, likely, his framework as well).

We are actually intending to develop a more polished and rigorous article out of this, so critical comments and questions would be extremely helpful, for those who have an interest in this sort of material. (Note that, as we had a generous 40 minute allocation for speaking, the piece is somewhat long!) Read more of this post

Critical Theory, Dialogue, Drafts, Events, Linguistics, Reading Group, Self-Reflexivity

Modernities Conference Talk

27 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on November 22, 2007

Too tired to post anything substantive tonight. I’ve posted the conference talk to the Modernities: Radicalism, Reflexivity, Realities conference below the fold, for the curious.

A few folks at the conference also asked where they could find the background material that lies behind the reading of Marx hinted at in the conference paper. In case anyone drops by, the back posts on the first chapter of Capital are listed immediately below (although I’m in the process of consolidating all this into something shorter and a bit more linear than in the think-out-loud material posted to the blog thus far):

Fragment on Textual Strategy in Capital

Reflections on the “Greatest Difficulty”

Nature and Society

Value and Abstract Labour as Real Abstractions

An Aside on the Fetish

Human Labour in the Abstract

An Aside on the Category of Capital

Value and Its Form – from Deduction to Dialectic

Subjects, Objects and Things In Between

Not Knowing Where to Have It

Cartesian Fragment

Relativism, Absolutes, and the Present as History

Random Metatheory

The Universal as Particular

Many thanks to folks who showed up to lend their support when I was presenting. For folks who weren’t there, but have been reading the blog regularly, I’m not certain that the materials below the fold will add much you haven’t seen. In some ways, I find conference talks more limited than the blog – the writing feels much less nuanced, even though it is probably a bit better organised than most of what I typically write here… Note that what I say at the event is never quite identical to what I write beforehand; in this case, though, it’s likely to be fairly close… Read more of this post

Abstraction, Critical Theory, Critique, Drafts, Events, Negations, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity, Transformation

Now You Tell Me…

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on January 24, 2007

So the battered and bruised remnant of the Reading Group met today, ostensibly to discuss Hegel but, in practice, to discuss pretty much everything but… Somehow the conversation turned to my “project”, and to notions of “historical universals”, which was a formulation I was experimenting with some months back, in a paper the Reading Group members sneaked in to watch me present (I’ve posted the actual talk, as well as my own overview critique of this paper, previously). The Reading Group members were very polite at the time, of course, huddling in the shadows at the back of the conference room, all smiles and encouragement. It’s taken me until now to get some feedback on what they were really thinking – from L Magee, who admitted today:

You know, when you were first discussing your work, and you were talking about these “historical universals”, I thought, you know – what an insane thing to do!

LM assures me that this is meant in the most complimentary sense, as a testimony to my willingness to toss myself at a challenging problem, rather than to the fundamental ludicrousness of my intellectual project… ;-P I assured LM that this was not the first time someone had called my work insane… ;-P

Drafts, Reading Group

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

Talking the Talk

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

I won’t blog today about the other papers at the Governments and Communities in Partnership conference – I’ve sketched some notes on some interesting convergent themes, but I’ll try to sum those up in a post tomorrow. I did want to post a copy of the talk I delivered below the fold – the talk is significantly shorter than the paper, but also significantly longer than a standard blog post, so be warned…

Some funny things from the session where I delivered my paper: first, the members of my reading group, evidently put out that my paper prevented our regular Monday lunchtime meeting, invaded the session (if by “invaded” you understand “slipped into the back and sat in the most shadowy corner of the conference room, from which they promptly slipped back out once I had finished speaking”).

A technical glitch meant that the session began ten minutes late, which ordinarily wouldn’t have had much of an effect. This conference has been designed, though, to allow people to swap and change between concurrent sessions – so people could, for example, attend paper 1 from one session, and leave when that paper was done, being reasonably sure that paper 2 from another session would begin promptly on time. This meant that the entirety of the ten-minute delay had to come out of the first presentation, which, as luck would have it, was mine.

This had two impacts on my presentation: first, there was no time for questions afterward (this was likely a good thing, as my piece was so abstract, compared to the other papers I saw at the conference, that I’m reasonably certain no one would have had any questions to ask…) – instead, people were directed by the facilitator to my blog. The facilitator had evidently followed a footnote in the paper back here, and found it very striking that I would post work online – particularly work that I have specifically posted because I believe it needs additional revision. Before, during and after the panel session, she made a point of telling me how surprised she was at the “openness” of it all.

The second impact was that, contrary to my normal practice, I actually had to read the talk I had written, to make sure that I kept strictly to an allocated time substantially shorter than what I had expected. I hate reading talks, and I generally feel strongest and most comfortable giving ad-lib presentations. But, given the complexity of what I was trying to cover, the fundamental strangeness of my talk for this venue, and the time constraints, it seemed the best thing to do at the time…

The side effect is that the talk below is reasonably close to what I actually said, and provides a decent simplified and potted version of the full-length paper. I’ll give advance warning that this talk contains no footnotes or literature references, as the talk was not distributed at the conference, and I would expect readers to consult the published version of the paper for this purpose. Read more of this post

Blogging, Critical Theory, Drafts, Events, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Reading Group

Governments and Communities Conference

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on September 24, 2006

For the next few days, I’ll be at a Melbourne University Centre for Public Policy conference, ambitiously titled Governments and Communities in Partnership: From Theory to Practice. I’ve mentioned previously that the paper I’ll be delivering there doesn’t exactly meet the ambitious “from theory to practice” goal posed in the conference title. Looking back over my paper to try to figure out how to speak to it at the conference, I notice with some amusement that the introduction to the paper follows the form: “Have you heard about this really interesting and important question? Yeah – that one – the one this conference is supposed to be about? Yeah – I agree – that question is just absolutely fascinating… But I’m not going to discuss that question here.” I then spend my allocated 8000 words, not even answering a different question, but instead just trying to figure out a good question to ask…

For any local readers who might be at the conference, my panel is on Monday afternoon at 1:45 – PM Workshop 8: Perspectives on Communities. I approach this panel presentation with some trepidation, as I appear to be the first paper off the rank and, strangely, don’t seem to say anything about communities… I’m not even completely sure I offer something that could properly be called a perspective… We’ll hope those in attendance don’t have high expectations that the first paper in their panel will actually have what one might call a… connection to the ostensible topic…

My intention is to blog a bit over the next few days about things I hear and read from the conference (best laid plans and all of that…).

The conference program is available online.

Drafts, Events

On Not Hearing Myself Think

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on September 3, 2006

I’ve declared defeat on the draft conference paper posted below – one intended for the upcoming Melbourne Centre for Public Policy/OECD conference with the ambitious title: Governments and Communities in Partnership: from Theory to Practice. I think it’s safe to say I dove head first into the theory-practice chasm on this one – over progressive drafts, the original “practice” elements of this paper have gotten slimmer and slimmer, until now they’ve finally been completely effaced, and I’m left with an exclusively theoretical piece on Habermas, Rorty, Marx and… wait for it… Aristotle…

Some weeks ago, when the paper needed to go in for review prior to acceptance for the conference, I got to the point that I completely couldn’t hear my “voice” in the paper any more. I knew what was wrong with the paper, but I could no longer hear the cadence of the language from sentence to sentence – which usually doesn’t bode well for revising. I figured the paper was at a sufficient state for reader review, and so I sent it off, hoping that a few weeks’ break and some incisive critical commentary from the review process would drive me to make the necessary changes. Unfortunately, the main interaction I had with the reviewers was over the title (lest you get the wrong idea, the title currently on the piece is the one they finally accepted – so my original proposals were actually worse than the present rather awful title). And I’m still not hearing my voice in the paper… So I’ve given up and submitted it in its present state, hoping that I’ll get an opportunity to revise again before conference proceedings are formally published…

My current critical sense of the paper is that it suffers from three main problems:

(1) I drive full speed off a cliff at the end. Not much I can say to redeem this – it is what it is. Basically, I needed about thirty books to adequately express what I wanted to say at the conclusion to this paper, and I had only a few hundred words at my disposal. I knew this limitation going in, so the resulting moments of terror I’ll feel about this at the conference will have been well and truly earned.

(2) I suspect that my vocabulary is a bit scattershot and inconsistent across sections of the paper. Ideally, you want a kind of “object oriented” writing in a piece like this, where each section does its specific job, and passes a clear concept along to the next. I don’t think I’m quite there yet with this piece – but am having trouble revising around it because I need more distance from the paper to be able to “hear” the inconsistencies across sections.

(3) I misrepresent Rorty in the first few paragraphs of his section – focussing on the objectivism/relativism distinction, rather than mind/body dualism, which I think would be a better way “in”. Ironically, I don’t think this mistake has any implications for the critique I make of Rorty’s work – I think the critique still applies. I just make myself look a bit silly with how I describe the philosophical motivations for his work.

There are plenty of other problems: I gesture to heaps of literature, particularly literature critical of Habermas and Rorty – without nailing down specific citations for examples of the kinds of critique I’ve referenced; I gesture to broad swathes of Habermas and Rorty’s work in the citations, rather than narrowing in on specific quotations or easily-identifiable sections of their arguments (some of this is intrinsic, given the level of abstraction with which I’m discussing hundreds of pages of philosophical work, but I’d still like to have done a better job with this); I don’t gesture to the works of other authors who might offer useful takes on these same issues… These sorts of problems, at least, I can hopefully clean up before final publication.

And then there’s the problem of practice… I’m beginning to resign myself to the notion that, when I’m given twenty-odd pages to work with, I’ll write either a theoretical or an empirical piece – it’s just not enough room to combine the two in the peculiar way I want to combine them, for an audience not already somewhat familiar with how I think… This means that I recurrently alternate between writing empirical pieces (like the one I presented to the HDR conference), and having people express confusion about how this relates to my theoretical concepts, or writing theoretical pieces, and having people express confusion over how I’ll ever tie this to empirical work… Maybe I’ll eventually have a eureka moment that reveals to me how to overcome this problem. For the moment, though, if I worry too much about it, I won’t get anything written or presented – I figure it’s best just to accept it…

For anyone who wants to read the current problematic draft, the link is: Grounding the Potential for Transformative Practice

Critical Theory, Drafts, Philosophy of History, Political Economy

Departing the Text

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on March 29, 2006

My research team presented today to the management group of the local Council whose strategic and sustainability planning staff were a major force in putting together the grant application that funds our research, wrote the actual parameters for the individual PhD projects, and continue to provide ongoing funding and practical support for our work. The other Council staff have been less closely involved with the project, and have become increasingly curious about these mysterious researchers who periodically pop out of their archives, only to skuttle away when they have collected a bit more data. Today’s presentation was intended to bring some of these other key staff members up to date on our project.

I actually wrote a presentation for the event. I don’t usually do this, because I don’t like looking away from an audience while I’m speaking to them, and I do like making judgments on the fly about what’s working and what isn’t, and changing the content of what I’m presenting so that I minimise the number of blank or sleepy faces looking back at me. As it turns out, having a written talk didn’t change this much – I think I might have read the first sentence before I… departed the text.

Nevertheless, I thought I’d post the written version of the talk here (I can’t post the version I actually presented, because I have no precise memory of what I said…). This talk is obviously written for a non-academic audience and, since I wrote it, I’ve been trying to decide whether I agree with it, or whether the process of trying to translate what I do into a very different language has sufficiently alterred the meaning that I can’t properly defend the work.

Ironically, the part that I can defend least is the factual description of my PhD project as set out in the grant. Now, this description isn’t wrong: the grant does perceive that planning theory should be seen as a kind of structure-agency standoff. But I personally don’t find this to be the best way to describe the state of the literature and, if I weren’t providing background on the grant to one of our funders, I would probably use a different theoretical frame.

The discussion of the relation of philosophy to practice I do believe – but only if you understand “practice” in a very specific (and somewhat counter-intuitive) way. This problem is magnified by the actual examples of “practical things” I discuss during the talk, which are not, by themselves, the sorts of evidence I would use for the sorts of conclusions I draw during the talk… I also feel a bit of a twinge for not nodding to figures like Hacking and Rorty, to whom I owe a substantial debt for this way of speaking about the relationship between practice and the emergence of new philosophical categories. But I’m also not sure that they would appreciate this level of bastardisation of their ideas…

In any event, the (undelivered) talk is pasted below: Read more of this post

Critical Theory, Drafts, Events, Philosophy of History

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