Rough Theory

Theory In The Rough

Category Archives: Philosophy of History

Two Wrongs? Or the Opposite of an Opposite?

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on January 16, 2007

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decoding the Subject

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on January 15, 2007

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History

On “Lordship and Bondage”

4 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on January 15, 2007

NPepperell has brought in the new year with a wonderful series of introductory posts to our reading group’s current voyage to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit – while all I’ve brought back was this crappy t-shirt… In some attempt to remedy the one-sidedness of this discussion, I will post something on our most recent reading, on the section titled Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage. As Hegel says in introduction: “Self-consciousness… exists only in being acknowledged” (178). Please bear in mind that as with all of our reading group posts, conciseness is not a sin we could be easily accused of… Read more of this post

Philosophy of History, Reading Group

Hegel and Marks

5 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on January 11, 2007

So LMagee and I met yesterday for our second discussion on Hegel. Two posts will be forthcoming from this discussion – one from me, on some elements of the argumentative structure of the first several sections of Phenomenology, and one from LM, who will comment specifically on the lordship and bondage discussion. I think that both of us intend our posts more in the spirit of notes-in-progress than of polished commentary, since we would both like to revisit these sections from the standpoint of having worked our way through the piece as a whole. Ideally, I should post my piece, followed by LM’s. In practice, this may not happen, as I’m trying to finish some marking, and there’s something absolutely surreal in moving back and forth between assessing first-year undergraduate work, and trying to make sense of Hegel… I don’t think the order of posting will have a serious effect on anyone’s ability to follow the discussion, since the posts will of course be written by people approaching the text from two different directions, and since my comments will be more about the form of the argument than its contents.

The form of the argument did occupy much of our discussion yesterday, with LM feeling the triadic structure of the text was an arbitrary imposition on the content being analysed, and therefore inclined to perceive the text as a series of deductions from a problematic premise. My suggestion was that the form of argument was not, strictly speaking, deductive – since the whole point of an immanent approach would be to justify the point of departure in the course of the analysis, rather than rely on a “ground” that sits essentially outside the analysis. I understand the triadic structure as something like a fractal – an underlying structure whose existence is demonstrated again and again at various levels of abstraction, where the argument moves by suggesting that, without an understanding of this structure, it becomes impossible to make sense of many phenomena. If this has been done successfully, a competing theoretical approach cannot simply attack the “ground”, as it might attack a first principle – it must instead demonstrate that it can unfold an analysis without reference to the same structure, while still making sense of as many phenomena as the approach being criticised. We went back and forth on this issue in our discussion, and LM followed up afterward, eventually emailing the link to the Hegel article at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (which, I have to admit, I still haven’t read, so I’m not sure if this link was meant to point to a refutation of my position ;-P). LM did, though, gradually warm to Hegel’s triadic structure in the course of evening researches, first emailing the following from the Stanford article:

Hegel’s logical triads are often regarded as expressions of an artificial and functionless formalism, but it should be remembered that in the later nineteenth century, no less a logician than Charles Sanders Peirce came to a similar idea about the fundamentally *trinary* structure of the categories of thought.

And then later, with what I take to be both chagrin and pride:

I have to note with some irony that my thesis table of contents *happens* to have nine chapters, coincidentally structured as three sets of three… Great minds…

These aftershocks aside, I have to say that the discussion was an extremely enjoyable one – there’s something deliciously surreal about reading individual sentences from this text, and trying to make sense of what the hell is being said, while in a mundane environment that keeps tossing you back into an everyday context where you wonder what people in neighbouring tables must be thinking, when you read out – and what’s more seem engaged by – passages like:

The Here pointed out, which I keep hold of, is likewise a this Here which, in fact, is not this Here, but a Before and Behind, an Above and Below, a Right and Left. The Above is itself likewise this manifold otherness–above, below, etc. The Here, which was to be pointed out, disappears in other Heres, and these disappear similarly. What is pointed out, held fast, and is permanents a negative This, which only is so when the Heres are taken as they should be, but therein cancel one another; it is a simple complex of many Heres. The Here that is “meant” would be the point. But it is not: rather, when it is pointed out as being, as having existence, that very act of pointing out proves to be not immediate knowledge, but a process, a movement from the Here “meant” through a plurality of Heres to the universal Here, which is a simple plurality of Heres, just as day is a simple plurality of Nows. (108)

It was a glorious discussion, which I’m looking forward to continuing online, and when we meet again next week – to talk about Reason…

Philosophy of History, Reading Group

Much Ado About Nothing

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on January 9, 2007

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

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

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

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

Critical Theory, Negations, Philosophy of History, Reading Group

Timelines and Borders of the Interdisciplinary

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on January 7, 2007

LMagee and I have had occasional conversations this past year on the ways in which the interdisciplinary transmission of ideas takes place. One recurrent theme in these conversations has been the issue of time lag – how concepts and works from outside one’s core discipline or sub-discipline are so often appropriated in the form they occupied decades ago, with little appreciation for how subsequent specialist discussion might have transformed a tradition – whether enabling a tradition to address pivotal early critiques, or causing a tradition to be rejected in spite of its early promise. Another recurrent theme has been the issue of marginality – how texts and concepts can sometimes come to have interdisciplinary resonance, and even – in the minds of non-specialists – come to signify a discipline, when that discipline’s own practitioners might regard those texts or concepts as dubious, marginal, dated, or mundane statements of the obvious.

The fact that a disciplinary discussion “moves on” – that specialists are no longer so taken (or may never have been taken) by specific works as are those of us looking into the discipline from the outside – is not automatically grounds for rejecting an interdisciplinary appropriation. It may in fact be that a work is simply more valuable for the thoughts it sparks outside its home ground, that specialists have become jaded through familiarity, that the influence of a foundational work has come to be so taken for granted that its novelty and importance are no longer recognised within its own field – or that, as Sinthome has suggested, pressures driving toward novelty in academic production have created a cottage critical industry that, for all its volume and detail, takes nothing away from the overarching brilliance of an earlier text.

Being unaware of these broader specialist debates becomes more of a problem for interdisciplinary work, however, when people succumb to the temptation, not only to be inspired by a work from another discipline, but to steal some of the aura of that discipline to add a kind of nonconceptual force to their re-presentation of a borrowed idea. LM and I have recently been discussing some examples of this in relation to social science appropriations of quantum mechanics and set theory in particular, where occasional authors have quite selectively appropriated very specific interpretations of highly contested issues within a complex specialist discussion, and presented these appropriations to nonspecialists as “discoveries” – as established and firm bits of factual knowledge or analytical technique. These kinds of “auratic” interdisciplinary appropriations often strike me as attempts to raise the prestige of a claim by exoticising it, removing it from the everyday experience of intended readers and interlocutors, and effectively placing the claim within a black box of inherited authority, in which position it is shielded from critique…

As someone quite committed to interdisciplinary work, I always find myself a bit frightened by the risk of “auratic” appropriations: I don’t think such appropriations are always intentional, or are consistently recognised for what they are, and I want very much to avoid falling into this practice. This is why I so often emphasise the metaphoric nature of concepts I appropriate from other fields, and try to remain tentative and agnostic about extrapolating the significance of empirical work from distantly-related disciplines, assuming that, as in those more familiar disciplines closer to home, exotic fields will also have their intractable debates, their unaccountable fads, and their creative interpretive frameworks that are massively underdetermined by the evidence… Like any tourist, the interdisciplinary researcher needs to take special care not to overlook potential dangers whose existence would loom large to a disciplinary native… At the same time, interdisciplinary travels are the only way that certain kinds of questions can be answered – often, in fact, the only way that certain kinds of questions can be perceived. Fear of what might go wrong therefore must not undermine our willingness to undertake interdiscilinary work. The question becomes, not whether to conduct interdisciplinary work, but how to do so at a high level.

All of this is a very long prolegomenon to mentioning that I am currently reading Manuel DeLanda’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History – which Russ suggested to me some time back, and which I really ought to have read long ago, given that it is an attempt, like my own work, to reason through the philosophical implications of historical experience within a materialist framework. DeLanda’s materialism is of the expansive form associated with the Annales School – seeking to embed human history within a much broader and subtler field of material life than most other “materialist” approaches. DeLanda draws on a very wide range of scientific and social scientific disciplines – mined particularly, I gather, for their insights into potentials for spontaneous self-organisation and “emergence” – as inspiration for his philosophical work, which attempts to understand the implications of complex and nonlinear trajectories he regards as characteristic of material systems and of human history.

I’m too early in the text to comment meaningfully, but am fascinated by the ambition and scope of the work – and am also enjoying reading an author who attempts to dig deeply into the relationships between philosophical concepts and historical experience. I am also particularly interested in how the work navigates the interdisciplinary minefield I mentioned above – how it might draw inspiration, while avoiding the risk of aura, when the disciplinary appropriations are themselves so multi-faceted, and the object of analysis so complex and vast. I’m eager to dig into the details… If others who have read DeLanda would like to comment, I’d also be interested in learning what different folks have taken away from DeLanda’s work.

Interdisciplinary, Math and Science, Philosophy of History, Social Science

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

Holding Our Thought in Time

3 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on January 1, 2007

So as promised (funny how I seem able to keep certain promises, but not others… ;-P): a bad post on the preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, written to satisfy LM’s infectious tease that suggested this was a new year in need of an appropriately symbolic commemoration…

I probably should tuck the content below the fold, as this post is somewhat long, and I’m not really sure how a post this primitive could spark discussion, even among the two of us still around to workshop this text on Wednesday… (I suppose, from LM’s point of view, this post might at least provide some ammunition to take into that discussion – a compensation for tipping me off about Popper some weeks ago… ;-P) But in this quiet time of the year, and with this post no doubt soon to be overshadowed by the more interesting revisitation of the Derrida-Searle debate in a couple of days, I’ll refrain from trying to hide my undercooked reading… ;-P

Anyone wanting to double-check the context for the passages I quote below, who doesn’t have a copy of Phenomenology ready to hand, can consult one of the many online versions of that text. Quotations and paragraph references below are taken from the version at gwfhegel.org – mainly because that’s the first source I stumbled across – and, for those interested, is formatted for side-by-side display of English and German texts.

Okay. Since I’m extremely unlikely to go beyond the most obvious points in this reading, I’ll try to focus on stating the obvious as clearly as possible (this approach has the beneficial side effect of making it much easier for someone to criticise me, if what I take to be “obvious” is, instead, obviously wrong… ;-P). I’ll also quote quite a lot of Hegel’s own text – if for no other reason than to give a sense for how I’m interpreting specific passages – and perhaps as a small demonstration of how some words, at least, do not seem to speak for themselves… ;-P

Hegel tells us, repeatedly, how to read the preface: we should read it, he instructs, as a performative contradiction. Although Hegel wishes to tip his hand and foreshadow the implications of his approach, he warns us from the first paragraph of the risk that the form of philosophical presentation might be inadequate to its content:

In philosophy, on the other hand, it would at once be felt incongruous were such a method made use of and yet shown by philosophy itself to be incapable of grasping the truth. (1)

He then repeats this admonition periodically throughout the text, worrying that his form might in places appear dogmatic:

When we state the true form of truth to be its scientific character – or, what is the same thing, when it is maintained that truth finds the medium of its existence in notions or conceptions alone – I know that this seems to contradict an idea with all its consequences which makes great pretensions and had gained widespread acceptance and conviction at the present time. A word of explanation concerning this contradiction seems, therefore, not out of place, even though at this stage it can amount to no more than a dogmatic assurance exactly like the view we are opposing. (6 – italics mine)

And stressing in other places that his claims only anticipate the more thorough grounding that needs to follow:

What is here stated describes in effect the essential principle; but cannot stand for more at this stage than an assertion or assurance by way of anticipation. The truth it contains is not to be found in this exposition, which is in part historical in character. (57 – italics mine)

He also flags the kind of presentation that would be required in order to render the form of presentation adequate to its content:

Abolishing the form of the proposition must not take place only in an immediate manner, through the mere content of the proposition. On the contrary, we must give explicit expression to the cancelling process; it must be not only that internal restraining and confining of thought within its own substance; this turning of the conception back into itself has to be expressly brought out and stated. This process, which constitutes what formerly had to be accomplished by proof, is the internal dialectic movement of the proposition itself. This alone is the concrete speculative element, and only the explicit expression of this is a speculative systematic exposition. Qua proposition, the speculative aspect is merely the internal restriction of thought within its own substance where the return of the essential principle into itself is not yet brought out. Hence we often find philosophical expositions referring us to the inner intuition, and thus dispensing with the systematic statement of the dialectical movement of the proposition, which is what we wanted all the while. The proposition ought to express what the truth is: in its essential nature the truth is subject: being so, it is merely the dialectical movement, this self-producing course of activity, maintaining its advance by returning back into itself. In the case of knowledge in other spheres this aspect of expressly stating the internal nature of the content is constituted by proof. When dialectic, however, has been separated from proof, the idea of philosophical demonstration as a matter of fact has vanished altogether. (65 – note that this analysis continues for several subsequent paragraphs that I have chosen not to reproduce here…)

How are we to understand such passages? Why is the form of presentation so important? Why is it so apparently problematic to “cut to the chase” – to state, clearly and directly, the conclusions or principal claims of this approach?

The answer lies in the kind of critique Hegel seeks to make of competing approaches – a critique that involves embedding conflicting philosophical approaches within an overarching historical vision that seeks to grasp the development of philosophy as an organic process, one in which philosophical systems “contradict” one another in the specific sense of displacing one another over time, but in which each contradictory element still represents a necessary moment within a dynamic unity. Hegel’s approach represents a form – not, I would suggest, the only possible form – of an immanent approach to philosophy – of an attempt to account for how philosophical insight might be grounded without assuming a sharp ontological divide between thinking subjects and objective truth.

From Hegel’s particular understanding of an immanent perspective, static notions of the truth or falsehood of philosophical systems can be criticised with reference to how they obscure our awareness of the historical necessity of particular systems, how they keep us from perceiving particular systems as intrinsic moments within a dynamic historical process whose movement simultaneously presupposes, contradicts, and surpasses superceded forms of philosophical thought. Yet simply asserting such a critique – baldly laying forth this conclusion as a verdict, as a stance – falls behind the very kind of historical insight other approaches are being criticised for lacking. As Hegel notes:

The easiest thing of all is to pass judgments on what has a solid substantial content; it is more difficult to grasp it, and most of all difficult to do both together and produce the systematic exposition of it. (3)

Once philosophy moves to a position that claims itself to be embedded and immanent, the weight of philosophical analysis shifts. The most difficult problem comes to be, not arriving at a conclusion or judgment, but accounting for how that conclusion or judgment becomes immanently available. Understanding the process of philosophical thought immanently – in Hegel’s terms, as a form of mediation, rather than as either a beginning or an endpoint – becomes a central philosophical concern.

In the preface, Hegel thus repeatedly worries that, by flagging what other positions miss – where they fall short – he participates in a form of argument that itself falls afoul of the content of his critique. So Hegel criticises, for example, both sterile formalism – which attempts to categorise experience with reference to external categories that are not immanent to the experience being analysed – and, its mirror image, the attempt to embrace experience directly, in what Hegel calls “unbroken immediacy” (4) – arguing that both approaches fail to ground their judgments, because they neglect the problem of mediation. Yet Hegel is troubled by his presentation of this critique, because its content – the emphasis on immanence and mediation – sits in an awkward contradiction with the form in which the critique is expressed. He therefore struggles against his own text, repeatedly reminding the reader of the work that will need to be done before this critique can be adequately grounded within the framework he intends to unfold. He foregrounds that he must ultimately achieve a more consistent and adequate account of the critiques he can offer here only in the form of promissory notes. Later, via a more adequate exposition, he must pay the bill – by demonstrating how his own position – his ability to perceive the immanent and historical character of philosophical insight, and thus ground his judgments of competing approaches – has itself been immanently achieved.

But this discussion is making me feel that I am failing in my goal of presenting obvious points clearly… ;-P I’ve mentioned in other discussions that I seem to have terrible difficulty expressing this point (which, at its core, also applies to notions of immanence that otherwise share very little with Hegel’s conception)…

Rather than persisting with my lack of clarity on this point, I’ll break the discussion here and, since in a post I lose all hope of covering this text in an adequate way, just quickly gesture at one further issue that might be of interest in the reading group discussion: the peculiar understanding of “science” that serves as a kind of normative ideal for philosophy in this text. Hegel’s concept of “science” – and I won’t go into detail on this issue here, but only flag the point – appears integrally and, in light of subsequent social theory, interestingly bound together with the search for a form of universal that can grasp the particular within itself. “Scientific” thought is thus contrasted, in this text, to forms of thought that invoke more abstract notions of universality – expressed, for example, in abstract formalism, syllogistic logic, or mathematics – approaches that Hegel rejects as models for scientific philosophy because they would involve imposing an extrinsic classificatory system or analytical procedure that, because it is external to experience, could never connect the subject to its object in anything other than an arbitrary way. The concept of “science” seems to align most closely with the study of organic processes and of history – understood in terms of their need to grasp a kind of unfolding, immanent, developmental logic. Philosophy reaches the status of a science, in Hegel’s account, when it ceases to apply external forms of thought instrumentally to what are conceived as distinct and passive objects of analysis, but instead wields analytical categories grasped through the analysis of its own immanent position within an unfolding developmental trajectory.

Hegel’s appeal to notions of a developmental logic of history has fallen on unsympathetic times – both in the sense that we are now much more sceptical of whether such a developmental logic could be said to exist, particularly cross-culturally and across the long sweep of human history, and in the sense that we have learned to be wary of claims that aligning ourselves with such a logic would be a desirable moral goal. If, as Hegel suggests, “it is the nature of truth to force its way to recognition when the time comes” (71), then perhaps history has driven us past the moment when we could be seduced by the prospect of philosophy as a project of “holding our time in thought”, or as a project that would entail aligning ourselves with some unfolding logic of history.

At the same time, however, elements of Hegel’s critical perspective continue to resonate: many of us accept, I suspect, the thesis of immanance – and, like Hegel, are then caught up in the logical implications of this thesis for the form of philosophical argument in which we need to engage to be adequate to this insight. Many of us would also value, I suspect, alternatives to empty formalism – and yet also reject the mirror image of formalism, expressed in claims to privileged access to direct revelation. These shared concerns drive us to continue to think about how we might conceptualise subjects as the subjects of their object – and how we might grasp, self-reflexively, the ways in which our own historical experiences have made it possible for us to achieve these insights at this moment in time. We can therefore still recognise key elements of Hegel’s questions in ourselves and in our times.

Perhaps it is possible – and this is the question I would like to suspend in the background as the reading group continues to move through this text – to preserve much of what is valuable from Hegel’s approach, while moving away from the idealism that sees the present time as the culmination of a purposive and meaningful historical trajectory. If we no longer believe that we can – or should – seek to hold our time in thought, perhaps our current goal should be to ask how we might hold our thought in time: how we might best recognise the debts our philosophy owes, not to a long-term, linear form of historical progress that has incrementally generated cumulative knowledge that we can now harvest, but to a complex and contradictory contemporary historical moment whose unintentional insights we may need to appropriate with great caution. Perhaps, as Benjamin suggests, such an appropriation might require:

…a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly. Among medieval theologians it was regarded as the root cause of sadness… The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor… There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

What might it look like to appropriate Hegel within an approach that seeks to brush history against the grain? How might we seek to acknowledge our great debt to our historical experience, while also viewing recent history as both nonrandom and blind? What might it mean to grasp historical patterns, not as something pointing us toward perfection, or as something whose realisation we should seek, but as constitutive moments of a mindless juggernaut that – although devoid of all meaning and intention – has generated the potential for us to break with a particular practice and a specific experience of history? Hegel argues:

…it is not difficult to see that our epoch is a birth-time, and a period of transition. The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things hitherto prevailing, and with the old ways of thinking, and is in the mind to let them all sink into the depths of the past and to set about its own transformation… That it is tottering to its fall is indicated only by symptoms here and there. Frivolity and again ennui, which are spreading in the established order of things, the undefined foreboding of something unknown – all these betoken that there is something else approaching. The gradual crumbling to pieces, which did not alter the general look and aspect of the whole, is interrupted by the sunrise, which, in a flash and at a single stroke, brings to view the form and structure of the new world.(11)

In what senses can our time be experienced and practised as a transition? In what senses can it be experienced and practised as a break? A path into both questions, perhaps, lies in our developing a firmer grasp of what would be required to construct an historically immanent social theory. And this is, perhaps, not an altogether inappropriate task for reflection on a symbolically-laden new year’s eve… 😉

[Note: Klein bottle image reproduced from Wikipedia, where the image has been licensed under a GNU Free Documentation License. For more information, please visit the image’s Wikipedia page.]

Philosophy of History, Reading Group

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.

Rough Theory

Category Archives: Philosophy of History

Two Wrongs? Or the Opposite of an Opposite?

Decoding the Subject

On “Lordship and Bondage”

Hegel and Marks

Much Ado About Nothing

Apropos of Nothing

Determinate Peregrinations

Holding Our Thought in Time

The Weakness of Strong Ties

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories

Meta