Rough Theory

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Category Archives: Philosophy of History

Flights of Fancy

5 Comments Posted by on May 13, 2007

While I have been distracted from serious writing, a beautiful cross-blog discussion has broken out, provoked by an unlikely source: Zizek’s ill-conceived review of 300. In many significant respects, this cross-blog discussion shares some concerns with the discussion of apocalypticism from earlier this year – and, once again, I find myself intervening at an extreme tangent that does not directly address the discussion’s explicit concerns. For a sense of what other people are actually talking about, I’d suggest starting with Daniel’s recent post from Antigram, which gathers together a good selection of the most recent set of links en route to its own substantive contribution. In this piece, I’ll pick up on bits and pieces from various contributors without, however, trying to place these in the context of the original discussion.

I’ve been watching with particular interest the contributions of Steve Shaviro at The Pinocchio Theory, who has been unfolding a challenging series of posts revolving around the question of how to conceptualise negation and affirmation. I’d like to explore this series of posts in some detail here – with apologies for the inevitable crudeness with which I’ll no doubt translate Steve’s concerns, and in the hope that he will not mind my appropriation of his work for my own idiosyncratic purposes here. I should note in advance that I will outline Shaviro’s position in greater detail than I “need” for the specific point I’m trying to make in this post – I’ve done this because, time permitting, I hope to return to Steve’s specific vision of “obliqueness”, and his critique of common concepts of negation and affirmation, in a later post and, for economy, wanted to outline the main lines of his argument in one consolidated place. This means, however, that I must ask readers’ forbearance for a certain extravagance of detail below.

Shaviro begins by questioning what he takes to be the form of negation deployed in Zizek’s work, arguing that Zizek appears to understand negation as a kind of mirror opposition or direct reversal of the positions he seeks to criticise. Shaviro argues that this approach remains bound to the very forms of thought it seeks to criticise, caught in a dichotomy that unites it with its object of critique:

There is something drearily reactive about always trying to prove that the opposite of what everyone else thinks is really correct. It’s an elitist gesture of trumpeting one’s own independence from the (alleged) common herd; but at the same time, it reveals a morbid dependence upon, or concern with, the very majority opinions that one pretends to scorn. If all you are doing is inverting common opinion, that is the clearest sign possible that you are utterly dependent upon such common opinion: it motivates and governs your every gesture. That is why you need so badly to negate it. Zizek totally depends upon the well-meaning, right-thinking liberal ideology that he sets out to frustrate and contradict at every turn. His own ideas remain parasitic upon those of the postmodern, multicultural consensus that he claims to upset.

Zizek, unlike the free-market economists and evolutionary theorists, justifies his contrianism in Hegelian terms; he’s performing the negation of the negation, or something like that. But this is exactly Deleuze’s Nietzschean point, that a critique grounded in negation is an utterly impoverished and reactive one. Zizek’s favorite rhetorical formulas all always of the order of: “it might seem that x; but in fact is not the exact opposite of x really the case?” Zizek always fails to imagine the possibility of a thought that would move obliquely to common opinion, rather than merely being its mirror reversal; and that is why I find him, ultimately, to be so limited and reductive.

Shaviro thus suggests that a more fundamental critique would require a move beyond a concept of negation that simply inverts its opposite, and thereby takes up the opposing pole in a dichotomy that leaves negation inextricably bound with what it criticises. Instead, Shaviro points to the potential for a kind of critique that moves obliquely in relation to its object – a concept to which he then returns in the following post.

In this next post, Shaviro aims the concept of an oblique criticism, not just against Zizekian negation, but also against Deleuzian affirmation. Here and in the next post, Shaviro wields Deleuze against Deleuze, arguing that Deleuze in places suggests a problematic image of affirmation as a simple inversion of negation:

Deleuze himself is at his least convincing when, as in the early Nietzsche book, he seeks to expel the negative, converting it to affirmation, via a process that itself seems just as ‘dialectical’ as anything ever dreamed up by the epigones of Hegel (the negative magically turns into the positive, when it goes to the extreme of what it can do, and becomes “active destruction”). Affirmation is at best a merely ethical stance; it doesn’t work either as an aesthetics or as a politics. And at its worst, affirmation is just as hideously and insidiously new-agey happy-faced as k-punk says.

In parallel with his critique of Zizek, Shaviro suggests that this vision of affirmation hugs too close to what it seeks to transform. Once again, Shaviro points to the possibility for oblique criticism – for criticism that would somehow step outside the plane of current social configurations, rather than aligning itself with some specific position on that plane. Shaviro argues that only through such an oblique positioning can critique hope to develop new alternatives – to be a creative force. In the final post in this series, Shaviro then develops this point through a brilliant dissection of the opposing meanings of negation that flow from different readings of Hegel by Deleuze (via Kojeve) and by the Frankfurt School.

Shaviro here makes a quite beautiful argument about the ways in which Hegel’s concept of negation is understood in opposing ways in these two traditions – a move that does not, however, prevent the two traditions from arriving ultimately at a very similar set of critical concepts:

So the Adorno/Marcuse version of negativity is really rather different from the negativity that Deleuze rejects — they come out of very different ways of reading Hegel, and they refer to very different processes. Deleuze rejects the Kojeve/Hegel view of negativity as the proper form of production; but the negativity of Adorno and Marcuse is not a form of production or of labor; to the contrary, it is something that resists the capitalist world’s relentless drive to production. (This role of negativity as resistance corresponds to the Body without Organs in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought: the BwO is their attempt to think non-production or anti-production in an alternative way to that of negativity).

Shaviro next moves to a discussion of the ways in which Zizek combines – inappropriately, in Shaviro’s view – elements from these two very different appropriations of Hegel. Shaviro here points to what he sees as an unresolvable tension between Zizek’s Lacanian metaphysics and his desire for the category of negation to operate as a historical-social-political category:

Now, Zizek’s negative, I think, fuses elements of both of the strains that I have just described. Via Lacan, Zizek goes back to Kojeve’s labor of the negative, which Lacan transforms into the idea that desire equals lack. But Zizek, unlike Lacan, also wants this negative to work socially/historically/politically in the ways that Adorno and Marcuse want it to, as something that disrupts and subverts the facade of “false totality” and “affirmative culture” we are faced with today. Both of these strands come out of Hegel, but do they really fit together?

I am inclined to think that they do not. Because, once you have defined desire as lack, you are committed to a whole metaphysics of (economic) scarcity and (psychological) unfulfillment. These end up being conceived (as they are by Zizek) as bedrock conditions that will exist in any social formation whatsoever; anything that says otherwise is condemned as delusive fantasy, as a denial of the fundamental antagonism of the Real, or a denial of the knot of castration, or what have you.

Now, I tend to be as leery as anyone of utopian thought (at least, insofar as “utopian” means a vision of static perfection, without any sort of tension or difficulty or dissatisfaction — the actual use of the idea of “utopia,” in a theorist like Ernst Bloch, is actually much more complex than this). But I think that Zizek’s militant anti-utopianism goes further than this, and that it makes difficult, or impossible, the very sort of negativity, with its critical and transformative function, that we find in Adorno and Marcuse. This is why — as per the discussions on this blog, and others, over the last week or so, in regard to Zizek’s reading of 300 — the only negativity Zizek can think of in the current political context is a fetishization of “discipline” and “sacrifice” in opposition to the alleged hegemony, in our neoliberal culture, of “hedonistic permissivity [sic]”. For all Marcuse’s criticisms of the pseudo-satisfactions of consumer society, and even for all his advocacy of a dose of straightforward political repression in order to oppose the “repressive tolerance” and “repressive desublimation” of American bourgeois society — for all of this, I cannot imagine Marcuse finding the jouissance that Zizek does in discipline and sacrifice. This is because he has a more sharply honed vision of Hegelian negativity than Zizek does.

From here, Shaviro returns to Deleuze, completing the critique he began in the previous post, and arguing that Deleuze ultimately moves away from conceptualising the critique of negation as a move to affirmation. Shaviro develops this point through a discussion of the relationship between Deleuze’s work and certain Kantian concepts, arguing for a vision of desires as productive – and of lack as a consequence of the counter-production of the society in which desires are invested. Shaviro then unfolds an example of the ways in which such counter-production might unfold in a capitalist context, in a critique again aimed at Zizek’s attempt to conceptualise capitalism in terms of hedonism, which could then be “negated” via the valorisation of discipline:

Capitalism, for instance, creates abundance on an unprecedented scale. But capitalism also needs to produce lack — to deny that very abundance it produces to the very people who produce it — in order to perpetuate itself, since its entire logic (what Deleuze and Guattari call its “axiomatics”) is grounded in the notion of perpetual competition over perpetually scarce resources. That a tiny capitalist class thus gets to appropriate the surplus that is taken away from everyone else is only a sort of side-benefit; it’s what happens when the supreme goal of a society is capital accumulation rather than expenditure or even just pleasure. This is also why consumer society, no matter how vehemently it exhorts us to spend money, or to “enjoy,” is never so fully hedonistic as Zizek seems to think.

It is worth noting here – and this point brings me to my initial interest in writing on this series – how Shaviro ends each post. In the first post, Shaviro leaves us, essentially, with the declaration of an impasse – with the statement that Zizek’s limitations are symptomatic of our current, collective inability to think beyond our present moment:

Zizek’s theories are little more than yet another demonstration, or symptom, of the situation that he himself has pointed to: the fact that, in the current climate, we find it difficult to imagine any alternative to capitalism; that in fact we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Zizek’s thought itself is one more demonstration of our current blockage of imagination.

By the second post, Shaviro has moved beyond this declaration of an impasse, and begun asking how we might move forward – disavowing that he might, individually, know how to break through the impasse, but suggesting that a breakthrough might nevertheless be possible for someone to think:

It’s not that I have any solutions to offer (I am essentially clueless), and a prospective solution will most likely have nothing whatsoever to do with Nietzschean/Deleuzian affirmation. But isn’t there something wrong, and painfully constricted, with Zizek’s fantasy of negativity and terror as the only riposte to Hardt/Negri’s implausible utopianism? Isn’t this a situation where we most need to move obliquely? Isn’t the problem, perhaps, that both negativity and obliqueness strike us as little more than clever advertising slogans? (”obey your thirst”; “think different”). I’m all to aware that we have reached the point where positivity and affirmation are all too comfortably ensconced in the business schools; but negativity (whether in ZIzek’s version, or that of Adorno, or that of the Situationists) is ensconced there also.

So the solution is ?????

By the final post, Shaviro is still asking, but the question has begun to gain some specificity, some determinacy – to point, perhaps, toward a solution of a specific kind. Moreover, Shaviro assumes an active relationship to the problem – even venturing to suggest a starting point for thinking through to a solution:

The remaining question, for me, is this. If we accept, as I think we should, Deleuze’s critique of Hegelian negativity in the forms of desire-as-lack and the Kojevian labor-of-the-negative, to what extent can we still deploy negativity in the Adorno and Marcuse sense? I think that this is possible — which is also to say that the Frankfurt School’s version of Hegel can be reconciled with Kant in a way that Kojeve’s version of Hegel cannot — but the way of doing this is still something that needs to be worked out. (And, though I know that my current tendency to drag Whitehead into everything must be wearying to some people, I can’t help wondering if Whitehead’s logic of relations — which is very different from Hegel’s logic — isn’t a good place to start).

So in the course of a brief space of time, we’ve moved from the declaration of an impasse, to a set of fairly targeted questions about how to move forward, to a fairly clear programmatic outline of some key issues that need to be resolved – and even a proposal for a starting point. The movement of the posts themselves, I would suggest, implies that perhaps we are not so much at an impasse, but at a moment when, tacitly, we can sense that an impasse is verging on breaking down. In this respect, perhaps it isn’t an accident that two of the sprawling cross-blog discussions in recent months – this one, and the earlier discussion of apocalypticism – should both have revolved around the issue of how certain forms of perception and thought might be symptomatic of an impasse and of failure to imagine alternatives to present organisations of social life – perhaps we should ask: have such symptoms become so visible, so irritating, precisely because they are the symptoms of an outgoing configuration – precisely because we have tacitly already sensed the subtle force of an emergent imagination, now seeking articulation?

Suggestions of such articulations are not found solely in the rapidly growing determinacy of Shaviro’s posts, but across the conversation, as discussants from a wide range of perspectives each, in slightly different ways, challenge approaches that adopt a passive stance toward the present context. Joseph Kugelmass thus rejects the concept of radicalism and seeks a politics that moves past “dramatic gestures of alienation”. Daniel from Antigram demands a shift from declarations of values to a focus on material forces. Sinthome from Larval Subjects has been progressively unfolding a powerful series of posts – too numerous to cite or summarise adequately here – sketching the contours of a vibrant materialist theory, and demanding, in relation to the current discussion, that we attend seriously to the question of the impact of the forms of social transformation for which we advocate – a position whose charge reflects a sense that our advocacy could engender real world results:

When I hear calls to give up enjoyment such as they are issuing from Jodi Dean or Zizek, I hear the thesis that somehow social change should consist in rendering our living conditions even more intolerable than they currently are. Why is this a form of social transformation that anyone should desire? To put it in crude and less than trendy-jargonistic terms, if social transformation does not lead to better work and living conditions, better, more equitable, more just, more satisfying, and more meaningful ways of relating to one another, more freedom to pursue our desires and cultivate ourselves, why should these forms of social transformation be desired at all?

I am being very gestural here, and I want to be careful not to overgeneralise from these discussions or overstate their common elements. Nevertheless, I think it may be worthwhile to keep in view the question of what such discussions might mean – to ask why such conversations and debates might be happening now, and what they might generate into the future. Regular readers will know that I have long been fascinated with the issue of whether Minerva’s owl must always fly at dusk – with the problem of whether we can engage in a critique that is not simply backward looking or critical of what we want to abolish – but that also captures and provides us with a forward-looking critical orientation in relation to what we are trying to create. Discussions like this – where the shortcomings of an earlier form of theoretical or political orientation appear to come suddenly and intuitively into view – therefore always pique my interest. They make me think of Marx talking about how we only set ourselves problems we can solve – that problems don’t appear as problems until their solution lurks within our grasp, frustrating us with its non-realisation – or about Benjamin arguing that we only envy what we could, potentially, have possessed. Is it possible that recent expressions of frustration with our collective lack of imagination, with our inability to conceptualise alternatives, themselves already attest to certain imagined alternatives just beginning to find articulation?

If so, then it may be important to pay particularly close attention to the sorts of alternatives and starting points that are being articulated in discussions such as this – not simply in the blogosphere, of course, but in more mainstream forms of discussion as well. The temptation in moments of transition is be backward looking – to direct our fresh insights and sensibilities at those forms of thought or practice that we want to reject: we often experience ourselves to be in direct conflict with the targets of our critique, because they seem to be (and often are) constraining the realisation of whatever we are trying to bring into being. And such conflicts can be important. But – and here I think Shaviro’s notion of obliqueness offers a crucially important concept – such conflicts, fought solely on the plane of what we are seeking to abolish, can also distract us from whatever it is that we are in the process of creating. It is often simply easier to criticise the shortcomings of a moment we are leaving behind, than to grasp the contours of the moment we are in the process of generating. Both, however, can be important to the realisation of emancipatory goals.

One question central to my own work is whether and how it might become possible to be self-reflexive in our critiques – to adopt a critical stance toward what is emergent, as well as toward what we want to change. My instinct is that a first step in this self-reflexive process is to take seriously our own criticisms as generative dimensions of our context – to recognise that, by offering a critique or expressing frustration with existing forms of thought and practice, we are already suggesting that a break with those forms of thought and practice has been made, and then to set about investigating the nature of that rupture. The question is then whether we can tease out the implications of such a notion of self-reflexivity well enough that, to speak fancifully, it becomes possible to launch Minerva’s owl into the dawn of whatever we are now creating, or whether the owl of Minerva flies always and only at dusk.

But it’s well past dusk here – and I don’t want still to be writing this post when dawn rolls around. I’ll leave things here for now, and hopefully find the time later in the week to pick up on some of the other important dimensions of Shaviro’s posts.

Conversations, Critical Theory, Negations, Philosophy of History, Political Economy

Counter-Factual Immanence

21 Comments Posted by on April 22, 2007

One of the questions that comes up often in the reading group discussion of my project is why I don’t simply treat core concepts like immanence and self-reflexivity as something like a prioris – as posited starting points, from which the other theoretical moves can then be derived. Everyone involved in the reading group discussion presumably understands the logical contradiction involved in doing this: immanence posits that there is no “outside” to context, and therefore logically rules out the existence of “objective” grounds from which other trusted propositions can then be derived; self-reflexivity follows from immanence, and posits that the theorist remains embedded within the context they are analysing.

Both of these positions carry implications for the form of a theoretical argument, as well as for its content: to be consistent with the principles of immanence and self-reflexivity, the theorist must find the analytical categories that apply to a context, within that context itself. This is sometimes phrased in the form “categories of subjectivity are also categories of objectivity”: the theoretical categories in terms of which the theorist apprehends a context, are generated by the determinate properties of the context itself. Treating concepts like immanence or self-reflexivity as a prioris is an intrinsically asymmetrical approach, which deploys theoretical concepts whose determinate relationship to the context they grasp has not been explained. This asymmetrical move is therefore a performative contradiction, undermining the very concepts whose importance it seeks to assert.

The reading group understands, I think, what’s at stake on this logical level. Their question is, more along the lines of: who cares? ;-P Is there any practical significance to avoiding this kind of performative contradiction? Any purpose served other than a kind of pedantic desire for comprehensiveness and consistency? This is a fair question. To answer it, I may need to take a step back, and talk a bit about the special problems posed by notions of immanence and self-reflexivity for critical theory, in the specific circumstance in which critique understands itself as a determinate negation.

First to run through a few quick and somewhat simplified descriptions of ways theories can position themselves in relation to context. Descriptive or positive theories take context as a “given” and either perceive the context as essentially static, or as transforming itself in a necessary direction. The analytical categories expressed by such a theory can be understood – immanently and self-reflexively – as forms of subjectivity related to either the reproduction or the non-random transformation of the context.

Descriptive theories that adopt principles of immanence and self-reflexivity are generally normatively relativistic – tacitly retaining the notion that normative stances require a non-immanent standpoint – an “outside” from which societies can be judged – and thus viewing normative judgements as a necessary casualty of the move to immanent theory. It’s not unusual for individual theorists to embrace this relativistic understanding of immanent theory, but to produce theories with a strong normative “charge” – Weber is the obvious example. In terms of the reading group’s recent selections, Bloor might be another. Such theories tacitly break with the immanent frame – voicing a critical perspective for which the theoretical analysis of society does not account.

I always find myself wondering why theorists committed to principles of immanence and self-reflexivity don’t pay more attention to these sorts of normative “charges” in their own work: assuming the normative perspective is not a purely individual one – assuming that it resonates to some degree with others – then the presence of critical norms is a marker of complexity and nonidentity within the context. If the theory cannot account for the existence of such norms, then the context has not yet been adequately grasped: in these circumstances, I think the theorist should foreground the unexplained normative charge of their own approach, and ask how their understanding of context would need to transform, to accommodate the recognition that this context also generates such critical normative ideals… This problem, of course, does not exist for theoretical approaches that are content to embrace the context as a nonconflictual totality, which is itself then perceived as a normative ideal.

Positive theories can have a normative charge, and can therefore be non-relativistic. The normative standpoint, though, is derived from the theory’s affirmation of what exists or what is in the process of being generated by a context. The context itself – generally understood either as a non-contradictory entity, or as a conflictual entity whose contradictions will necessarily be resolved in a particular way – provides a normative standpoint. The most widely-known example of a positive theory with a critical normative charge would be the variant of Marxism that viewed the forces of production as exemplars and motivators for critical forms of perception and thought against which other dimensions of the social context could be found wanting. Other positive theories have pointed to the direction of the historical process, or to the perspective offered by society as a whole, as providing normative standpoints from the perspective of which other, more partial or more backward-looking, dimensions of social practice might be judged. The normative standards provided by positive theories take the form of asking whether particular practices or beliefs are adequate to enable some privileged existing institution, social group or trend to realise itself more fully. The realisation or achievement of a specific substantive endpoint would thus be the goal of this form of critique.

In terms of the reading group’s recent selections, some elements of Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia experiment with articulating this form of normative standard – pointing to the historical process as a sort of normative benchmark, and suggesting that forms of thought and practice can be judged by their adequacy to the dominant historical trend of the moment. Mannheim thus suggests (in some sections – the text as a whole is, I believe, somewhat contradictory) that forms of thought and practice that fall behind – but also forms of thought and practice that point ahead – can be criticised for not embodying fully the potentials of their historical moment.

Such positive theories have suffered over the course of the 20th century for many reasons – not least of which is the historical disappointment that set in, as it was recognised that the targets of early Marxist theory could be overcome, without the result being emancipatory – that the institutions of private property and the market could be superceded by conscious planning, without greater freedom resulting as the intrinsic and inevitable counterpart of this transformation. The concept of critical theory in its Frankfurt School sense emerged through these theorists’ confrontation with this historical experience, as they began to wrestle with the notion of what immanent and self-reflexive critique might mean, if it did not entail the alignment of critical ideals with some existent or trending element within the context. Their question of how to conceptualise critique as determinate negation – determinate in the sense of being in some way immanent to a particular context, and negative in the sense of not expressing the standpoint of some privileged element or totality – proved a complex and vexing one.

In terms of the reading group’s recent selections, Adorno’s contributions to The Positivist Dispute – which revolve around the notion of how certain things can be “real” or “objective”, without thereby being “facts” – are orbiting around this question. Adorno asks, in effect, how we can render immanent Popper’s understanding of science as an ever-restless “critical tradition”, how we can understand the forms of subjectivity Popper expresses, but in a self-reflexive way, by grasping the associated forms of perception and thought in their determinate relation to a specific context. Adorno argues, in effect, that the sort of restless critical perspective Popper identifies with science – which Popper frames as an intrinsically counter-factual ideal that could never be achieved – suggests the existence of something counter-factual about the context itself. Adorno then criticises Popper (I’ll leave aside for present purposes whether this critique is correct) for denying the possibility that something non-factual might also be “objective” – a criticism that hits home, for Adorno, precisely because Popper shares a largely compatible vision of the critical process as a form of negation – missing only the analysis of why even this type of eternally restless and counter-factual critique is not a pure negation, but a determinate one – one that can be analysed immanently and self-reflexively in its relation to a specific context.

Adorno suggests that, for such a counter-factual critical ideal to seem plausible, something counter-factual must exist – not only as some kind of subjective ideal or conceptual abstraction, but as an “objectivity” in our shared context. In some sense, this objectivity itself must be something that cannot be characterised or captured purely in terms of “facts” and “givens” – our context must have something intrinsically counter-factual about it, which this vision of critique then expresses. Yet how to capture, how to grasp, the reality or objectivity of a counter-factual? Adorno suggests that dialectics is required – and yet, in this and other writing, also suggests that dialectics is no longer adequate to this task: the critique of Popper thus crashes into the very point where the first generation Frankfurt School theorists themselves ran aground. For this generation – armed primarily with conceptual tools related to concepts of class domination – never quite grasps, conceptually, what it nevertheless also argues must exist: something restless, ceaseless, churning through time, at the very heart of our context – something that can dispense with concrete social institutions and practices – something that is itself a kind of “real” counter-factual – a counter-factual that instantiates itself through transformations of concrete social institutions in time. The first generation Frankfurt School theorists mean, but can never quite get their theories to say – to grasp – how a particular vision of critique can be inspired immanently by such a restless context, with its intrinsic, but ever-shifting, contradictions between what has been factually realised, and the counter-factual restlessness that smashes through all such realisations in the end. They thus never quite fulfil their own self-reflexive standard. This failure itself points to how this tradition fails to grasp the determinate character of the context – a pessimistic impasse that the first-generation Frankfurt School theorists acknowledge, but never overcome.

Habermas sees, and then recoils from, this precipe, seeking his counter-factuals elsewhere, on firmer ground – I’ve criticised his position in detail elsewhere, and won’t revisit the issue here. The reading group may look at his work later in the year, and can discuss the pros and cons of his approach at that time, if it seems appropriate to revisit this issue.

For present purposes, and in conclusion, I want to step back a bit from the sort of sketchy (and necessarily oversimplified) intellectual history I’ve tossed out above, to return to the reading group question that motivated this post: why not simply posit the standards of immanence and self-reflexivity as arbitrary ideals – as axioms, if you will – and move on from there? Leaving aside pedantic and purist concerns with logical consistency, what would be the “payoff” from trying to “close the loop” by exploring how these ideals themselves might be consistently grasped?

What I have tried to suggest – very incompletely – above is that, if the concepts of immanence of self-reflexivity are valid, then these concepts actually provide important substantive clues about the nature of our context – about what our context is. This means, among other things, that our inability to grasp such concepts – to relate them in some determinate way to our understanding of what the context is – provides an important feedback mechanism – a form of theoretical double-entry bookkeeping ;-P – to let us know that we may have another think coming, that we may need to go back to the drawing board to see what we’ve overlooked – or at least to follow the first generation Frankfurt School theorists in acknowledging openly the existence of an impasse we don’t currently know how to resolve.

At the same time, certain kinds of ideals – and I would include immanence, self-reflexivity and determinate negation specifically here – suggest that our context might contain some very peculiar qualitative characteristics. Among other things, the existence of such ideals suggests – as I’ve hinted above – that the context may be peculiarly layered, generative of a restless pattern of social practice and thought capable of tossing aside and rending asunder any institutionally embodied forms of social practice – while also embedded within, and existing nowhere other, than in those same institutionally embodied forms of social practice: such a vision of social context suggests that the contradiction between is and ought should be understood as introjected into the heart of all concrete social institutions, rather than between some institutions and others, or between totality and moment. It suggests, in other words, that something like a practical counter-factual is operative in what Adorno would call an “objective” sense – that counter-factual visions of critical tradition do not arise simply as conceptual ideals, but express something that we also do in our collective practice. It also suggests some more complicated things (you weren’t thinking we had reached the complicated stuff yet, were you? ;-P) about the historicisation of history – about whether immanence itself must be understood as something achieved, and therefore as something not true, or not true in the same way, of earlier historical periods. Similar arguments can be made for self-reflexivity.

So my position would be that the inability to deploy concepts like immanence and self-reflexivity symmetrically is a sign that something has not been adequately understood about the context and about these ideals. This failure of understanding can have practical consequences for individuals and movements trying to achieve specific goals, who may be blindsided by the unanticipated character of a context whose contours are – I have been suggesting – by no means fully defined by the sorts of concrete social institutions and practices that we all find it intuitive and easy to see.

Much critique targets the concrete – as do most movements – and perceive it as liberatory when the concrete dimensions of a social context prove vulnerable to political action. Criticisms and struggles against concrete institutions and practices can of course be pivotal, and nothing in my approach would diminish the importance of political action around such targets.

At the same time, the nonsymmetrical nature of such critiques – which aim themselves at concrete institutions, without also understanding why such institutions might be vulnerable – leaves us poised to reproduce, endlessly, the more abstract, restless, and counter-factual dimensions of our social context, without even being aware that these exist. As a consequence, we close off conscious deliberation on this practical counter-factual, confusing it – as I’ve begun to hint in various posts on the determinateness of “nothing” – with a pure negative, with what remains when everything determinate has been stripped away. I am trying to call attention to the determinate characteristics of what is often taken to be a pure negation, to demonstrate the practical basis for what is often taken to be a conceptual abstraction – and thus, potentially, to open up a realm for conscious action that is currently walled away. And all of this, unfortunately, lands me in a position where I don’t think I can slice through the Gordian knot presented by my theoretical categories – however tempting this might sometimes be – by framing them as axiomatic starting points: I suspect this would precisely and specifically direct attention away from where it is most required… But perhaps the reading group members or others will have a different view.

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

The Matter of Madness

5 Comments Posted by on April 19, 2007

A few days ago, Sinthome from Larval Subjects wrote a beautiful reflection on the capacity to desire difference, which led Joseph Kugelmass to offer an intriguing response, which prompted both Sinthome and me to ask for more information. Joseph has now provided this, in a post over the Kugelmass Episodes – Sinthome has responded, and I’ve tossed in comments at both sites… I thought it might be time to post a pointer over here.

The original post in this conversation was Sinthome’s “I Think You’re All Lunatics”, which offers a series of meditations around the theme:

Of course I can say abstractly that I desire difference, that I aim for difference, that I would like to promote difference. But the simple fact that I, for the most part, encounter each and every person that I talk to as being mad reveals, I think, the truth. I confuse the symptoms of others– or better yet, the sinthomes of others, their unique way of getting jouissance –with insanity. I am confusing difference with madness.

Joseph’s response included a series of lines that piqued both Sinthome’s interest and my own:

I hope for a common project of sanity emerging from a common recognition of one’s own madness. A madness that lacks even the distinction of being individual, being one’s own possession.

Joseph elaborates on these comments in his post “We’re All Mad Here”, which reflects, among many other things, on the issue of guilt in critical discourse:

The problem of difference, and the desire for difference, and a feeling of guilt over not desiring difference enough, is not just a Lacanian problem. It is really the major source of guilt and anxiety fueling the majority of postmodern writing, which, taken together, constitutes a canon that has practically no other subject besides self-incriminating, self-ironizing anxiety.

Sinthome picks up on Joseph’s post in “An Episode of the Kugelmass Show”, and asks whether the breakdown of stability or order within our social context has caused a collapse of meaning at the individual level:

There has been a collapse of our sense of who we are as individuals, (the “selfness of our self” as Kierkegaard might say), the orderliness or lawfulness of the world, and of purposes and goals. Or maybe this is just me. I cannot seem to find any fixity for my identity. I am suspicious of any goals I set for myself, suspecting some hidden catch behind them. And the world appears chaotic to me. Where is the joy in schizophrenic processes of desiring-production promised to me by Deleuze and Guattari? Why do I experience this as so anxiety provoking?

I’ve responded at Larval Subjects with some reflections on the different ways in which conventional sociological theory, and critical theory, understands the connection between dynamic, differentiated and complex societies, and the generation of certain forms of dysfunction. And I’ve posted a quick additional thought over at the Kugelmass Episodes on whether the category of “difference” might be understood as normatively underdetermined.

Thought it was high time I posted a pointer to the conversation…

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History

Abstract Gestures

8 Comments Posted by on April 10, 2007

Yesterday I posted a few reflections on an early reading group discussion of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Today my cold exacted its revenge for this burst of productivity, and I have found myself half-dozing, in a fog of a less-than-Hegelian kind, for much of the day. I had intended to write one unified reflection on the entire section on Consciousness, but instead find myself reduced to a few brief thoughts on sense-certainty. Somehow this seems oddly appropriate.

There’s something delightfully playful about this section. On its face, sense-certainty would seem to offer a problem for Hegel’s approach, which seeks a form of philosophy that can grasp things in their determinate specificity: sense-certainty, flushed with the details provided by the immediate encounter of specific subjects with particular objects, would seem to provide access to the richest and most concrete form of knowledge. Surely moving beyond this form of subjectivity could only ever entail a loss of determinate specificity? How does Hegel tackle this problem?

Hegel begins by reminding us that we must engage with this problem immanently, invoking only what is available to sense-certainty itself, unfolding the ways in which sense-certainty is not itself adequate to its own notion, and thus points toward the possibility for a more adequate form of knowledge. His argument takes the form of demonstrating that the true content of sense-certainty is not the immediate experience of boundless qualitative specificity, but instead a particularly impoverished form of mediation and abstraction.

Hegel presents the core of his argument, and explains his presentational strategy, at the outset:

A concrete actual certainty of sense is not merely this pure immediacy, but an example, an instance, of that immediacy. Amongst the innumerable distinctions that here come to light, we find in all cases the fundamental difference–viz. that in sense-experience pure being at once breaks up into the two “thises”, as we have called them, one this as I, and one as object. When we reflect on this distinction, it is seen that neither the one nor the other is merely immediate, merely is in sense-certainty, but is at the same time mediated: I have the certainty through the other, viz. through the actual fact; and this, again, exists in that certainty through an other, viz. through the I.

It is not only we who make this distinction of essential truth and particular example, of essence and instance, immediacy and mediation; we find it in sense-certainty itself, and it has to be taken up in the form in which it exists there, not as we have just determined it. (92-93)

The first sentence already presents the structure of the argument, by drawing a distinction between individual moments of sense-certainty, and “pure immediacy” – a distinction between essence and example. In the final sentence, Hegel defends his argumentative strategy, explaining that, while we could certainly “cut to chase” and conclude that the essence-example distinction should be rejected in favour of a concept of mediation, such a move would breach the immanent frame of the analysis. What is needed is not a critique for us, from our perspective, but instead a critique unfolded from what is given within sense-certainty, which unpacks the elements of sense-certainty to show how this form of subjectivity points immanently to its recognition of the necessity for mediation and negation.

Hegel then moves into his critique, arguing that the essence-example distinction arises immanently within sense-certainty, initially specified as the perception that the object is essential, and exists indifferent to the existence of any perceiving ego. Hegel warns once again that we must not leap directly to judgment as to whether the object exists in this form “in truth”, but must instead explore whether sense-certainty contains any immanent tensions that undermine this perception of the object (94).

What follows is a beautiful, playful series of passages exploring the nature of the object – the This of sense-certainty. Hegel breaks the This into the Now and the Here, and initially unfolds an argument predicated on a distinction between what we mean and what we can say – what language allows us to express. Like a good analytic philosopher, Hegel demands: tell me – precisely – what you mean! When is this Now? Where is this Here? Hegel argues that we will always fail to meet this challenge. No doubt we mean something determinate, but language fails us utterly when we try to capture and communicate this determinacy. Instead, what we are able to communicate is not being, but negation, not immediacy, but meditation, not specificity and concreteness, but Universality – this, Hegel argues, is the truth of sense-certainty:

To the question, What is the Now? we reply, for example, the Now is night-time. To test the truth of this certainty of sense, a simple experiment is all we need: write that truth down. A truth cannot lose anything by being written down, and just as little by our preserving and keeping it. If we look again at the truth we have written down, look at it now, at this noon-time, we shall have to say it has turned stale and become out of date.

The Now that is night is kept fixed, i.e. it is treated as what it is given out to be, as something which is; but it proves to be rather a something which is not. The Now itself no doubt maintains itself, but as what is not night; similarly in its relation to the day which the Now is at present, it maintains itself as something that is also not day, or as altogether something negative. This self -maintaining Now is therefore not something immediate but something mediated; for, qua something that remains and preserves itself, it is determined through and by means of the fact that something else, namely day and night, is not. Thereby it is just as much as ever it was before, Now, and in being this simple fact, it is indifferent to what is still associated with it; just as little as night or day is its being, it is just as truly also day and night; it is not in the least affected by this otherness through which it is what it is. A simple entity of this sort, which is by and through negation, which is neither this nor that, which is a not-this, and with equal indifference this as well as that–a thing of this kind we call a Universal. The Universal is therefore in point of fact the truth of sense-certainty, the true content of sense-experience.

It is as a universal, too, that we give utterance to sensuous fact. What we say is: “This”, i.e. the universal this; or we say: “it is”, i.e. being in general. Of course we do not present before our mind in saying, so the universal this, or being in general, but we utter what is universal; in other words, we do not actually and absolutely say what in this sense-certainty we really mean. Language, however, as we see, is the more truthful; in it we ourselves refute directly and at once our own “meaning”; and since universality is the real truth of sense-certainty, and language merely expresses this truth, it is not possible at all for us even to express in words any sensuous existence which we “mean”. (95-97)

Hegel runs through a parallel argument with reference to the Here (98). He then explores the attempt to resolve this problem through a flight from the object – which has now come to be regarded as inessential – to the ego, now regarded as the ground of sense-certainty (100-101). Here again, Hegel argues that the “I” of sense-certainty is the universal, rather than the particular, I – and illustrates how language renders it impossible for us to pick out the specific I that we mean:

The force of its truth thus lies now in the I, in the immediate fact of my seeing, hearing, and so on; the disappearance of the particular Now and Here that we “mean” is prevented by the fact that I keep hold on them. The Now is daytime, because I see it; the Here is a tree for a similar reason. Sense-certainty, however, goes through, in this connection, the same dialectic process as in the former case. I, this I, see the tree, and assert the tree to be the Here; another I, however, sees the house and maintains the Here is not a tree but a house. Both truths have the same authenticity–the immediacy of seeing and the certainty and assurance both have as to their specific way of knowing; but the one certainty disappears in the other.

In all this, what does not disappear is the I qua universal, whose seeing is neither the seeing of this tree nor of this house, but just seeing simpliciter, which is mediated through the negation of this house, etc., and, in being so, is all the same simple and indifferent to what is associated with it, the house, the tree, and so on. I is merely universal, like Now, Here, or This in general. No doubt I “mean” an individual I, but just something as little as I am able to say what I “mean” by Now, Here, so it is impossible in the case of the I too. By saying “this Here”, “this Now”, “an individual thing”, I say all Thises, Heres, Nows, or Individuals. In the same way when I say “I”, “this individual I”, I say quite generally “all I’s”, every one is “I”, this individual I. When philosophy is requested, by way of putting it to a crucial test–a test which it could not possibly sustain–to “deduce”, to “construe”, “to find a priori”, or however it is put, a so-called this thing, or this particular man, it is reasonable that the person making this demand should say what “this thing”, or what “this I”, he means: but to say this is quite impossible. (101-102)

One final step remains for sense-certainty, after this experience that positing either the subject or the object as essential undermines immediacy: the attempt to suspend the distinction between subject and object, to posit the immediate identity of both, and to view the resultant exclusionary whole as essential (103-104). To address this form of sense-certainty immanently, Hegel accepts the limitation of moving beyond language, to gestures – to pointing:

Since, then, this certainty wholly refuses to come out if we direct its attention to a Now that is night or an I to whom it is night, we will go to it and let ourselves point out the Now that is asserted. We must let ourselves point it out for the truth of this immediate relation is the truth of this ego which restricts itself to a Now or a Here. Were we to examine this truth afterwards, or stand at a distance from it, it would have no meaning at all; for that would do away with the immediacy, which is of its essence. We have therefore to enter the same point of time or of space, indicate them, point them out to ourselves, i.e. we must let ourselves take the place of the very same I, the very same This, which is the subject knowing with certainty. Let us, then, see how that immediate is constituted, which is shown to us. (105)

Yet even this, Hegel argues, will not capture the immediacy that is meant: as soon as the Now has been pointed out, it is past – and therefore revealed as situated in its relationship with other Nows; the Here when pointed out shows itself necessarily in its spatial relationship with other Heres. The point therefore does not transcend the limitations of language to pick out an immediate experience of a specific Now and a particular Here. Instead, pointing reveals itself to be a process, and sense-certainty the history of this process – and the process selects, not the immediacy that is meant, but mediation, negation and universality (106-109).

Hegel returns at the end to the issue of language, and to the gap between what we “mean” when we try to capture our experience of particular, individual, unique things, and what language allows us to say:

Those who put forward such assertions really themselves say, if we bear in mind what we remarked before, the direct opposite of what they mean: a fact which is perhaps best able to bring them to reflect on the nature of the certainty of sense-experience. They speak of the “existence” of external objects, which can be more precisely characterized as actual, absolutely particular, wholly personal, individual things, each of them not like anything or anyone else; this is the existence which they say has absolute certainty and truty. They “mean” this bit of paper I am writing on, or rather have written on: but they do not say what they “mean”. If they really wanted to say this bit of paper which they “mean”, and they wanted to say so, that is impossible, because the This of sense, which is “meant”, cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e. to what is inherently universal. In the very attempt to say it, it would, therefore, crumble in their hands; those who have begun to describe it would not be able to finish doing so: they would have to hand it over to others, who would themselves in the last resort have to confess to speaking about a thing that has no being. They mean, then, doubtless this bit of paper here, which is quite different from that bit over there; but they speak of actual things, external or sensible objects, absolutely individual, real, and so on; that is, they say about them what is simply universal. Consequently what is called unspeakable is nothing else than what is untrue, irrational, something barely and simply meant.

If nothing is said of a thing except that it is an actual thing, an external object, this only makes it the most universal of all possible things, and thereby we express its likeness, its identity, with everything, rather than its difference from everything else. When I say “an individual thing”, I at once state it to be really quite a universal, for everything is an individual thing: and in the same way “this thing” is everything and anything we like. More precisely, as this bit of paper, each and every paper is a “this bit of paper”, and I have thus said all the while what is universal. If I want, however, to help out speech-which has the divine nature of directly turning the mere “meaning” right round about, making it into something else, and so not letting it ever come the length of words at all-by pointing out this bit of paper, then I get the experience of what is, in point of fact, the real truth of sense-certainty. I point it out as a Here, which is a Here of other Heres, or is in itself simply many Heres together, i.e. is a universal. I take it up then, as in truth it is; and instead of knowing something immediate, I “take” something “truly”, I per-ceive (wahrnehme, per-cipio). (110)

The final sentence is particularly important – and expresses a principle that will guide Hegel’s approach throughout: “I take it up then, as in truth it is”. Another way to express the same concept: things appear as what they are. A central implication of Hegel’s approach – this would also hold true for elements of my own theoretical work – is the contention that, searching for some essential truth behind appearance, constantly striving to penetrate the veil, we miss the opportunity to explore and unfold the significance of the qualitative character of appearance itself – and thus to capture a kind of knowledge that becomes visible only once we stop trying to overcome appearance and begin to ask, instead, why things should appear in their specific, determinate form.

Philosophy of History, Reading Group

Hegelian Fog

3 Comments Posted by on April 9, 2007

I had intended to write something during the break on The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology – a work over which the reading group discussion has tarried. When we originally met to discuss our agreed selections, I found myself repeatedly supporting my own interpretations with reference to sections of the text that fell outside our collective reading. This gave me an inequitable argumentative advantage (I wish I had a photo of the expression on L Magee’s face at the precise moment when, contesting a quite vehement and unequivocal reading LM had advanced, I read out a fairly unambiguous – for Adorno – quotation from a page that hadn’t been in sections photocopied for the group). And this caused us to decide to reconvene the following week, so that everyone could have the benefit of reading and discussing the same text…

Unfortunately, when the appointed time arrived, both LM and I were under the weather and, moreover, I hadn’t gotten around to photocopying the additional sections for everyone else (evidently, I want to keep these passages to myself…). Our meeting was thus postponed, and G Gollings impounded my text to ensure that some photocopying would actually take place. So, while I had planned to write something on Popper’s concept of science, Adorno’s concept of totality, and my own programmatic understanding of critical theory as it relates to such topics, any post on these subjects will have to wait until my text is returned.

For the last several days, I’ve taken this situation as licence to catch up on a term’s worth of stunted sleep, to read randomly and lightly and, particularly, to bombard LM with emails on any and all associations that have cropped up in my random, light readings – an action I can only interpret as some kind of particularly unfitting punshiment for the extraordinarily helpful feedback LM has been providing lately on my dissertation… But I am beginning to feel guilty for not having done any substantive writing during the break, as well as for not having done any serious reading-group-related writing in some weeks, and thought that now was perhaps the time to resume the dropped arc on Hegel’s Phenomenology.

Hegel seems to be cropping up quite often on this blog lately but, for those wanting a more specific overview of the discussion at hand, the main posts dedicated specifically to Phenomenology (not necessarily posted in this order) include mine on:

The Preface and
The Introduction,

as well as LM’s detailed post on the section on Lordship and Bondage, which provoked such a long response from me that I lifted it out of the comments and published it in a post of its own.

In addition, there have been a number of small posts, some only half-serious, and all in the form of placeholders or unresolved discussions, of which the principal include:

LM’s New Year’s Challenge,
A Discussion of Whether Hegel’s Method Is Deductive and, of course, a post on
Nothing (you know, with me, that nothing – or, more accurately, how nothing is really something – is going to have to enter into the discussion at some point…).

Quotations and citations for all posts in this series are derived from the same online source text, chosen because it allows easy reference to both English and German.

These existing posts suggest that I have left an annoying gap between the introduction and the discussion of self-consciousness – a gap into which, I suppose, some discussion of Hegel’s treatment of consciousness should now be inserted… I confess to having difficulty getting myself back into this thoughtspace – but that’s the challenge of the Phenomenology, isn’t it: getting ourselves into the thoughtspace or standpoint of particular perspectival positions? That, or I’m just mired in what LM has recently called the “Hegelian fog”.

What I thought I would do in this post is just remind myself of the issues LM and I discussed in relation to the section on Consciousness – which, from memory, were mainly (again!) reflections on the structure and argumentative strategy of the text. I’ll then try to follow up in the next couple of days with more substantive commentary on the text itself. I should note that I don’t take notes on the reading group discussions, and so have only my memory (several months old, at this point) of what we discussed. I should also note that, although I am playing off against some questions LM raised at the time, I don’t understand these positions to reflect LM’s current views – I am only recalling such positions here because they provide the easiest means for me to explain the occasion for the sorts of comments I’ll be making below.

First – from a memory that LM should correct as needed – LM voiced quite strongly the feeling that the text in these early sections was quite arbitrary – the arguments clever but, from LM’s perspective, “forced”, driven into a direction that revealed mediation and negation as necessary endpoints to every argumentative turn, the conclusions unconvincing because the path was so obviously predetermined. LM also, I think, perceived the structure of the argument to remain essentially deductive, with the notions of mediation and/or negation functioning as something like a priori concepts from which everything else was to be derived.

My position was to point to Hegel’s various stage whispers and comments on the style and argumentative strategy of the text (issues that I explore in greater depth in the posts linked above), and to argue that an immanent philosophical framework – one intended to contest the validity of subject-object dualism (while also explaining the plausibility or attraction of such an approach) – in a sense isn’t “allowed” to engage in deduction from a priori grounds. Instead, the system grounds itself through the unfolding of its own concepts – an argumentative strategy that means, as Hegel flags in the prolegomena, that the presentation will initially appear quite arbitrary, as the plausibility of the concepts can only be demonstrated by seeing what the core concepts allow you to grasp as the system unfolds.

This kind of argument is designed to react back on itself, such that starting points become less and less arbitrary as the argument demonstrates how much can be understood if the system is allowed to unfold in this exact form. As the argument unfolds, Hegel’s system gradually swallows competing modes of thought – showing that it can grasp these alternative approaches to science, philosophy, political theory and other fields – enveloping them within itself, and thus preserving their insights as it also transcends them by grasping what they cannot. Done effectively, the self-grounding character of this kind of argument cannot be refuted by a direct attack on its “ground”, as the “ground” is no longer a starting point from which the rest of the argument derives, but more like a fractal structure that drops out of the argument in each of its moments and as a whole. In this context, refutation needs to assume at least something of the form of the original system – embedding that system, too, as a plausible and yet limited perspective whose contours can be enveloped and transcended within a more powerful form of immanent critique.

Whether Hegel constructs his immanent argument “effectively” in this sense, and therefore requires such an enveloping critique in response, is something that can be explored in later discussion. I think, however, that the basic concept that immanent critique must be self-grounding in this specific sense – that all of the normative or critical standards deployed by a critique must “drop out”, immanently, from its own analysis – is a direct logical implication of the move to transcend subject-object dualism. I think that I see this point made directly in Hegel’s text, in his various reflections on the style and order of presentation. If it’s not there, I would suggest that it should be… ;-P And my assumption that Hegel is intending to create an argument in this form, structures my reading of this text.

The other point I vaguely remember making – much more tentatively – in the discussion with LM was that one possible implication of an immanent critique (and here I do not mean to suggest that this applies necessarily to Hegel’s system, although I’m interested in exploring the issue) could be an argument that the simplest, most pristine and most “universal”, concepts could only become visible, could only become available or intuitive to thought, in a quite complex context characterised by the entire constellation of relationships analysed by the theory. Unlike in a deductive system, where more complex entities are derived or built up from simpler entities, in an immanent approach the simplest entities are moments within a complex system of relationships – they exist – and only could exist, in the form in which the theory immanently grasps them – alongside and in relationship with more apparently complex entities.

This point has a number of complex implications. One is that “universals” – the concepts or ideals that seem the easiest to detach from their context, because they present themselves as having abstracted away all the specific elements of a context – are actually determinately bound to the complex context in which they are moments: they may appear to be what results when determinate content has been stripped away, but their universality is actually a determinate content of its own.

The distinction between “real” and “conceptual” abstractions, which has occasionally occupied this blog over the past several months, is related to this point: immanent universals are “real” abstractions – reflecting a determinate perspective that is generated within a particular kind of context; if we take such immanent universals and cast about with them through history, we sever their immanent character, and deploy these ideals and concepts as nothing more than “conceptual” abstractions – as mere generalisations or thought experiments. This argument thus has some implications for how we might understand how we are tempted to think about the past – militating in particular against the tendency to assume that simpler and more pristine concepts are somehow signs of some more primitive condition, earlier origin, or natural state. More interestingly, the capacity precisely to disentangle a universal from the constellation in which it arose might have some important potentials for practice – for critique in a more transformative sense than is likely implied directly within Hegel’s approach: universals whose determinate character implies they are not intrinsically bound to a particular context can have the corrosive potential to react back against the specific context in which they arose…

There are other implications (as well as a number of important qualifications and clarifications that I should probably make), but it’s getting late, and I’m intending this discussion as a means of working my way back into Hegel, rather than – at this point – as a means of diving off into my own conception of critical theory.

LM is welcome to correct my memory of our earlier discussions, or reprise and update the discussion from the perspective of the further readings we’ve done. I’ll try to write something about Hegel’s actual text in the next couple of days.

Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Reading Group

The Social Function of Philosophy

Leave a comment Posted by on April 8, 2007

Still recovering from a cold and feeling a bit too fuzzy to write. I’ve been wanting to revisit Horkheimer’s “Traditional and Critical Theory”, and was casting about to see if there were a copy readily available online. Instead, I stumbled across his 1939 piece “The Social Function of Philosophy”.

Re-reading it, I was struck by his reflections on Hegel as an example of the unintended consequences of mobilising philosophy in the service of reaction:

In philosophy, unlike business and politics, criticism does not mean the condemnation of a thing, grumbling about some measure or other, or mere negation and repudiation. Under certain conditions, criticism may actually take this destructive turn; there are examples in the Hellenistic age. By criticism, we mean that intellectual, and eventually practical, effort which is not satisfied to accept the prevailing ideas, actions, and social conditions unthinkingly and from mere habit; effort which aims to coordinate the individual sides of social life with each other and with the general ideas and aims of the epoch, to deduce them genetically, to distinguish the appearance from the essence, to examine the foundations of things, in short, really to know them. Hegel, the philosopher to whom we are most indebted in many respects, was so far removed from any querulous repudiation of specific conditions, that the King of Prussia called him to Berlin to inculcate the students with the proper loyalty and to immunize them against political opposition. Hegel did his best in that direction, and declared the Prussian state to be the embodiment of the divine Idea on earth. But thought is a peculiar factor. To justify the Prussian state, Hegel had to teach man to overcome the onesidedness and limitations of ordinary human understanding and to see the interrelationship between all conceptual and real relations. Further, he had to teach man to construe human history in its complex and contradictory structure, to search out the ideas of freedom and justice in the lives of nations, to know how nations perish when their principle proves inadequate and the time is ripe for new social forms. The fact that Hegel thus had to train his students in theoretical thought, had highly equivocal consequences for the Prussian state. In the long run, Hegel’s work did more serious harm to that reactionary institution than all the use the latter could derive from his formal glorification. Reason is a poor ally of reaction. A little less than ten years after Hegel’s death (his chair remained unoccupied that long), the King appointed a successor to fight the “dragon’s teeth of Hegelian pantheism,” and the “arrogance and fanaticism of his school.”

And by his analysis of the role of critique in the Enlightenment, compared with his own time:

We cannot say that, in the history of philosophy, the thinkers who had the most progressive effect were those who found most to criticize or who were always on hand with so-called practical programs. Things are not that simple. A philosophical doctrine has many sides, and each side may have the most diverse historical effects. Only in exceptional historical periods, such as the French Enlightenment, does philosophy itself become politics. In that period, the word philosophy did not call to mind logic and epistemology so much as attacks on the Church hierarchy and on an inhuman judicial system. The removal of certain preconceptions was virtually equivalent to opening the gates of the new world. Tradition and faith were two of the most powerful bulwarks of the old regime, and the philosophical attacks constituted an immediate historical action. Today, however, it is not a matter of eliminating a creed, for in the totalitarian states, where the noisiest appeal is made to heroism and a lofty Weltanschauung, neither faith nor Weltanshauung rule, but only dull indifference and the apathy of the individual towards destiny and to what comes from above. Today our task is rather to ensure that, in the future, the capacity for theory and for action which derives from theory will never again disappear, even in some coming period of peace when the daily routine may tend to allow the whole problem to be forgotten once more. Our task is continually to struggle, lest mankind become completely disheartened by the frightful happenings of the present, lest man’s belief in a worthy, peaceful and happy direction of society perish from the earth.

I hope to revisit the issue of critical theory – what it is, what its contemporary role might be – very soon.

Critical Theory, Philosophy of History

The Ourglass

Leave a comment Posted by on March 23, 2007

I mentioned the other day that L Magee and G Gollings foolishly allowed themselves to be tempted by a lunch invitation, little knowing that this would entrap them in a four-hour discussion of how I can best carve a thesis out of a life project. While this discussion was very much in the spirit of the methodology slam, those who know me well, also know that my extensive involvement in teaching and consulting on research methodology very much embodies the spirit “those who can’t do, teach” (those who are currently teaching jointly with me may then wonder where one goes when, as seems to be happening to me this term, one can’t necessarily teach either – I plead the 5th [I can do that in Australia, can’t I? ;-P])… When one’s work seems not to involve a methodology per se, and when the discussion therefore revolves more around the logic and coherence of the narrative presentation of the dissertation, I’m not sure one is permitted to say one has been slammed. Perhaps a new term is required: perhaps I have been… dissed!

In the wake of my dissing, I have tossed together some personal notes and placeholders – I’ll write on all of this in a much more adequate way when I have more time and am less tired. I post this here mainly for GG and LM (and others locally who have been involved in more truncated versions of such discussions), in case they are wondering what I’ve “done” with these talks. My guess is that what I’ve done with them won’t much resemble what one might have hoped, given the detail of our discussions and the excellent suggestions made by everyone: by way of apology, I simply haven’t had time to digest and assimilate everything you’ve said. I’ll therefore stress that the following notes are not intended for prime time viewing, don’t even meet the usual loose standards that govern gestural comments around these parts, and are internalistic, rather than shaped for public discussion and debate. Below the fold they go. Read more of this post

Critical Theory, Negations, Philosophy of History

Appearances Can’t Be Deceiving

Leave a comment Posted by on March 22, 2007

Since I have no time at the moment to write on Hegel (but evidently have time to comment, when someone else writes a good post on his work), I wanted to point readers over to Larval Subjects, where Sinthome has posted a very nice reflection on among other things, Hegel’s attempt to move beyond the dichotomy of appearance and essence, and to explore some of the ways in which it can be stranger than one might think, to contemplate the possibility that things might actually be… what they appear to be… I’ve made a few comments over there that might either clarify or further confuse positions I’ve tried to develop here in the past.

At some point this week, I will try to find time to post something more substantive here – in between course planning and some very intensive conceptual work, I just haven’t quite found a way to voice the theoretical issues that are occupying my thoughts right now… But soon… Soon…

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History

Immediate Reactions

12 Comments Posted by on March 14, 2007

Sinthome at Larval Subjects has written a couple of responses to my recent post on real abstractions. My current response to the most recent is, I suspect, trapped in the same Akismet queue that seems also to be holding up some legitimate comments over here lately (incidentally, people should email me if they notice posts not getting through, as this will help me collect them from the spam bucket more quickly…). In the off chance that the post has disappeared entirely into the ether, I wanted to cross-post here – but, since this was written as a comment and therefore relies on the context to which it responds, you should really read Sinthome’s post first:

Just a quick note on my end, as well 🙂

Sense-perception jumped out at me in this passage for a different reason, I suspect, than it may have seemed: what interested me was that, in these couple of sentences, Deleuze and Guattari appear to assume that Marx’s point would have been to criticise notions of sense-perception, by arguing that sense perception needs to be placed back into a context of various mediations. I am contesting their reading of Marx, rather than making any arguments about what they themselves think – and I am doing this, not because I particularly care what Marx “really meant”, but because there are implications for how we understand the emergence of critical subjectivities.

What it seemed to me that this quotation might have missed (and, again, I don’t know the context, so I’m not making this as a strong claim, but just explaining what prompted me to write on the topic) is that, for Marx, the historical emergence of a form of subjectivity that could look at a product like wheat and see it as a product – as a thing, as an object potentially devoid of any particular intrinsic social determination essential to itself – is not a standpoint being criticised, but actually a dimension of Marx’s own standpoint of critique. I need to be careful here: Marx will try to historicise everything, so in that sense any form of subjectivity he discusses will be an object of critique in that he will attempt to historicise it. But he is not, I am suggesting, trying to criticise the notion of looking at an object, and seeing something potentially free of social determinations – he is not offering a critique of immediacy (in this sort of comment) from the standpoint of advocating a perspective that captures mediation more clearly. (Again: I need to be very cautious, because of course Marx does also focus on mediations – I am trying to draw attention to something very specific here.)

For Marx, the emergence of a form of subjectivity that can potentially see products as secular goods – as things that are not intrinsically bound together with some particular means of production – is actually integral to his attempt to establish that a transformation of the relations of production is possible. If this form of subjectivity were not widespread – if this notion weren’t intuitively plausible to people on a mass scale, then the task of transformation would be much more difficult, as it could look as though you could only advocate transforming the relationship of production, at the expense of the results of production – material wealth, mastery over nature, etc. (One can criticise Marx for valorising these things, but this issue is beyond the scope for this comment.)

So my reaction to the Deleuze and Guattari passage was that, to me, it seemed to be suggesting that Marx was saying something like: we really need to get past this form of immediacy that causes us to see wheat as a thing, and instead see it as, what it is, a product of a specific form of production – critical subjectivity consist in becoming more aware, more conscious, of the determinate processes that brought this particular object into being. Whereas I take Marx to be saying something more like: there are emancipatory potentials contained within the fact that we can look at this object – this wheat – and not associate it intrinsically with the specific processes that brought it into being. Because we can look on this product this way, we are open to the potential that its production might have taken a very different form. Now that we are open to this potential, we can reflect on what that different form ought to be. This might have been more difficult for us, if we saw the wheat as intrinsically embedded in some specific network of social relations.

Now of course, in the terms in which you were speaking in your original post, Marx is actually still very interested in mediation – and he does try to show how this specific kind of secular perception, this ability to perceive and experience objects as potentially devoid of social determinations, as not intrinsically socialised – as itself a product of a very specific social context. When he tries to analyse that context, he is of course offering an analysis of what you would term (as I would, as well) social mediations.

This is why my reaction focussed on these particular two sentences from Deleuze and Guattari (and were aimed at the reading of Marx, never at their theory in any broader sense) – and why I didn’t then focus on any other aspects of your post.

I would contest that this kind of analysis – understanding critical forms of subjectivity – is not pressing. I think there have been dire consequences for social movements that have resulted from not being sufficiently aware of the context they inhabit, and therefore engaging in practices whose consequences might have been easier to foresee, had a more adequate analysis been available to them. I see my work as working toward something that would be useful in this way. But perhaps I’m wrong. 😉

I worry a bit, though, that when we venture into this topic, you have several times pushed in this direction, as though I am somehow driving the discussion away from practical concerns, or raising questions that, for some reason, somehow intrinsically can’t be answered. It’s obviously up to you how you’d like to engage, but I am actually trying to answer such questions, believe they can be answered – at least to a better degree than they have been to date – and think these are questions worth worrying about, rather than shrugging off and dismissing. This doesn’t mean that such questions need to occupy everyone’s work – there is division of labour in theory as in other things. But I’ll contest the suggestion that the questions aren’t pressing. 😉

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy

Gesturing at a History of the Immediate

5 Comments Posted by on March 12, 2007

Sinthome from Larval Subjects has this annoyingly productive knack for writing things that won’t leave my thoughts, that provoke me to cast back on unresolved problems that are quite central in my own work – destabilising and reactivating those problems once again, and thus prompting me to write responses even when I have other commitments to meet. (If anyone needs to know how to reach me during this interlude while I’m dead, you all know whom to ask… ;-P) Sinthome’s recent writings on, for want of a better term, the phenomenology of stupidity have been nagging away, teasing me with a constellation of concepts I can’t quite bring into focus, but which have something to do with the theoretical standards of immanence and self-reflexivity, the need to historicise this kind of analysis, and the concept of a real abstraction. Since I can’t grasp the constellation (I gather from a recent discussion over at Acephalous that I’m not alone in this…), I thought I’d tug at one of the threads – that connected to the concept of a real abstraction – and see what thoughts I could begin to shake loose as a result.

In the recent post “Immediacy, Mediation, and Stupidity”, Sinthome develops an earlier set of reflections that seek to understand something about the emergence of critical forms of subjectivity, by exploring what it means to judge a form of subjectivity as being in error, once we have committed to an immanent and self-reflexive theoretical framework. I won’t here go into detail about why an immanent and self-reflexive framework transforms the terms in which one analyses error – Sinthome touches on the issue in the posts cited above, and this issue has been discussed a number of times in the conversation that has criss-crossed these blogs over the past several months. I will note that Sinthome’s main focus in these posts is categorial, rather than causal (although causal questions also figure): Sinthome is asking how we can grasp or understand what would constitute error (and, therefore, how we can grasp or understand the normative ideals in the name of which we would make such judgments), when we no longer have recourse to the option of appealing to an outside standpoint from which thought can look down from the lofty heights of some transcendent reality. How can thought that remains necessarily embedded in the context it seeks to criticise, understand and justify the possibility for its own critique?

In the current post, Sinthome suggests that an answer for this question might lie in the distinction between forms of thought that focus on the immediate, and forms of thought that seek to bring mediations to light. Sinthome equates the focus on the immediate with abstract thought, defined as thought that confuses a part for the whole. Dialectical thought, by contrast, seeks to undermine such abstractions by resituating perception such that the concrete network of mediations comes more clearly into view. Sinthome illustrates this issue by quoting the following passage from Delueze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus:

Let us remember once again one of Marx’s caveats: we cannot tell from the mere taste of wheat who grew it; the product gives us no hint as to the system and the relations of production. The product appears to be all the more specific, incredibly specific and readily describable, the more closely the theoretician relates it to ideal forms of causation, comprehension, or expression, rather than to the real process of production on which it depends. (AO, 24)

When I was reading Sinthome’s post, this quote jarred me and threw me out of the text. The thought “real abstraction!” flashed into my head, and I’ve been trying ever since to disentangle the significance of that association. What I’d like to do here is see if I can tease out some of the thoughts underlying my reaction – with the strong caveat that what I’m writing here is a reflection on this quotation alone – I don’t have the background to comment on Deleuze and Guattari’s work in any broader sense. So I’ll ask some forbearance here, as my intention is not to comment on what these authors might think in some general sense, but simply to explore a few of the implications of this specific passage, to see where they might lead.

I think the reason for my sort of lightening flash reaction to the text is that – again, solely in terms of the internal logic of this small collection of sentences – the problem of immediacy is here posed as a problem of how sense perception is inadequate or works to confuse us: the taste of the wheat gives us no clues; if we attend only to the evidence of our senses, then, it is plausible – if also criticisable – that we should not stumble across the various social mediations that have led to the production of this wheat, have carried it to our tables, have caused us to perceive it as something to be used for food rather than for some other purpose, etc. Tacitly, the properly critical perspective here lies in focussing our attention, not on the abstracted physical properties of the thing that we are consuming, but on the complex network of social relationships that has enabled this sense perception to take place. Marx is cited unproblematically as the inspiration for this insight.

I can hardly question that Marx sought to draw our vision to social relations. I’ve often felt, however, that common readings of Marx – including the one suggested in these sentences – turn him into far more of an unmasking-and-debunking theorist than I read him to be, and thus fail to capture the ways in which his theory attempts to embrace and seize, rather than unmask and reject, forms of subjectivity that he regarded as generated by capitalism, but in alienated form. As an unmasking-and-debunking theorist, Marx might have sought to do no more than draw our attention to the (unjust) social relations that underlay the production of goods then laundered by the market. As a critical theorist concerned with appropriating Hegel in materialist guise, however, Marx might be interested in something else entirely – without, of course, losing sight of the injustice he also wanted to criticise.

A critical theoretic approach would require that Marx ground his own critical standpoint – that he account for the forms of critical subjectivity manifest in his own critique – using the same categories and the same analytical strategies he directs at the society he criticises. We would presumably agree that Marx understood himself to be presenting a materialist theory – and that materialism functions as a normative ideal within his approach, as a standard against which Marx criticises the mystifications underlying other approaches. Yet what could be more “materialist” than this perception of wheat in terms of its immediate physical properties – this image of objects shorn of their embeddedness in social relationships and moral valences, open for examination by our senses, either directly or as amplified by technology? This issue becomes confused by the more recent flattening of the concept of “materialism” as though it pertains to something specifically economic – and therefore somehow should naturally direct our thoughts to social relations of production. In Marx, I would suggest, the concept still carries both a mixture of this later meaning, and its earlier sense of “secular” and “scientific” thinking – and would thus be somewhat aligned with the tendency to explore the “material” world, understood as a “demystified” and “rationalised” world, shorn of anthropomorphic projections.

Marx’s materialism suggests that things might not be as simple as Deleuze and Guattari imply. If Marx were to point to an object like wheat, and note that social relations cannot be deduced from it, perhaps there is a more complex sense in which such an observation might figure in Marx’s work: perhaps he might also be asking how he can justify the use of “materialist” concepts, within his own self-reflexive and immanent approach. Perhaps he might be seeking to meet the criteria of self-reflexivity (and of immanence or materialism itself) by posing the problem of how it came to pass that we exist in a society that can perceive and think in materialist terms, a society for which notions like sense perception might be appear to be the most basic, the most “natural”, way of perceiving the world – a society whose inhabitants can observe wheat and not immediately think things like: “Yes of course: I recognise this substance: it may only be lawfully consumed by persons of this caste, when prepared in this way, and at this time. It may only be produced by persons of that sort, using these traditional techniques, and with the proper ritual performances.”

I am suggesting, in other words, that Deleuze and Guattari might be here confusing a problem Marx was attempting to solve, with a debunking statement about an illusion that they position Marx as trying to move past. Ironically, at least in the few sentences quoted above, Deleuze and Guattari may even themselves be participating in the phenomenon Marx is trying to problematise and make available to investigation: they appear to take for granted that sense perception should be a form of immediacy, and therefore carries an inherent risk of obscuring the potential to perceive more mediated forms. Marx, I am suggesting, is more interested in a prior question: how does something like sense perception, or the notion of objects shorn from their embeddedness in a network of social relations – in other words, the constellation of concepts we association with “materialism” – ever come to be experienced as “immediate” in the first place?

What Marx is directly critical of, I would suggest, is not the fact that we should perceive the world in materialist terms – he takes materialism as one of the standpoints of his critique, and presumably believes that this form of subjectivity, which arose in alienated form under capitalism, is one of those forms of subjectivity worth preserving and translating into a more emancipated society. He is, however, critical of the tendency in political economy, the natural sciences, and other fields to take materialism for granted – to act as though “there used to be history, but there no longer is any” – to understand materialist forms of perception and thought in terms of a “stripping away” of social relations from some underlying “nature”.

The self-reflexivity of Marx’s approach won’t allow him to posit his own normative ideals as somehow natural or immediately given, while he treats other forms of thought as artificial social constructs. Instead, he must somehow try to understand how his own ideals are also socially constructed – and, in his work, he time and again comments on the special historical irony of a society whose own unique form of social construction should take on the appearance of being nothing more than pure biological or organimistic reality, stripped of all contingent and artificial social determinations. For Marx, this poses a unique historical puzzle of why the determinate form of social mediation in our society should necessarily cloak itself in the appearance of this particular kind of immediacy – of why our specific and unique “social” should generate a self-perception that articulates its (unrecognised) sociality in terms of categories like immediate sense perception. This, I would suggest, is the problem Marx is trying to solve – and not simply so that he can criticise the political economists for not paying history its due, but so that he can ground his own standpoint of critique.

I suspect Marx’s solution to this puzzle is not quite mine – and, in any event, I have articulated this response in terms of Marx’s work more because he was already haunting the Deleuze and Guattari quotation, rather than because we owe any special obeisance to his critical theory. Nevertheless, I would suggest that Marx does pose the problem particularly well, and – very gesturally here – that I suspect the solution to this problem would involve the concept of a real abstraction. If other societies might look on wheat and see something in which we might immediately recognise a dense network of concrete social relations, detailing who produces, how, for whom, and why, and we look on wheat and see an object we experience as being devoid of such concrete social relations, the issue is not that our perceptions are less “socialised” than those of other human communities that look on the world in a different way. The issue is that we have been socialised into a context in which, at some level of social practice, we enact a genuine indifference to networks of concrete social relations. Our ability to perceive the world “materialistically”, to develop ideals related to forms of perception that might not be bound together in any particular kind of social relation, itself points to some level of social practice at which we are in practice indifferent to such relations – at which we treat such relations as contingent, arbitrary, dispensable. This level of social practice, I would suggest, enacts a real abstraction – not a transcendental illusion haunting thought as such, but a form of collective behaviour focussed (nonconsciously) on enacting a social context that transcends more concrete social practices, that relativises those concrete practices and makes them appear – as they are in fact demonstrated to be in our social practice – artificial human creations. When we look on objects and see objects – material things that we can meaningfully interpret in light of our sense perceptions – we are exploring our world through the unique lens provided by our own enacted, collective, practical indifference to more concrete forms of social relations, extrapolating the potential for a form of perception that views such concrete relations as radically contingent and artificial. This is a real abstraction.

From this standpoint, the options with which Deleuze and Guattari present us above are both too immediate. Their quotation criticises the tendency to privilege sense perception, against the standpoint provided by concrete social relations. I would suggest that a more adequate critique would first explain why it might be possible to privilege sense perception in this way – why, in spite of appearances, something more than biological (asocial) perception is at issue here – how what we perceive as “sense” perception is social through and through, to its most abstract formulations. At the same time, a more adequate perspective would recognise that concrete social relations might not be the sole standpoint for critique – or even, in some circumstances, a desirable standpoint of critique – but should themselves be understood as only a moment in quite complex social context that simultaneously generates, and relativises, such concrete relations. And, finally, a more adequate perspective might ask: in what senses is it good to be aware of concrete social relations? How have we perhaps been liberated in some senses by the possibility of not being aware of such things? We are presumably children enough of our time to find something liberatory about the notion that our wheat need not be grown under certain ritualised conditions, for example – can we perhaps differentiate this “secular” perspective as a normative ideal from the alienated conditions in which it arose, wedded as it was to a horrific social indifference to the gruesome conditions in which production can sometimes take place? This kind of process – of brushing history against the grain, in Benjamin’s sense, or recognising what we owe to the time that has birthed us as critics, while also reflecting critically on the ways in which that time stands in the way of its own best potential – is what would be involved, I suggest, in developing a more adequate self-reflexive critical theory of contemporary society.

This is all terribly incomplete, of course – even with reference to the narrow issue of coming to terms with “materialism” or “immanence” as a theoretical ideal, much more work is required, as there are more substantive claims buried within these concepts than just indifference to concrete social relations, and I haven’t even adequately grounded the bits and pieces to which I’ve gestured above. Some day perhaps I’ll become adequate to my own questions… I’ll also apologise once again for taking this one isolated quotation from Deleuze and Guattari, and using it as the springboard for critical reflections – I am acutely aware that isolated passages rarely represent the thoughts of any theorist, and my intention here was simply to take the quotation as a jumping off point, rather than to cast aspersions in any broader sense. I should also perhaps mention that Sinthome is also banned (if China can do it, so can I) from writing anything else interesting, until I’ve gotten through more of my own work…

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy

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