Rough Theory

Theory In The Rough

Surfaces

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

My coffeeshop has been going through a remodelling process over the past several months – a process we have occasionally had reason to suspect was orchestrated to make a lot of noise, so as to move us along, when we monopolise a table longer than our collective coffee rent justifies.

Aside from more structural changes, the remodel has also involved the addition of new furniture, including today’s novelty: a large “communal” table created out of a metal ladder, suspended between what look like those small metallic barriers occasionally used by street cafes to create a boundary around their outdoor tables. The rungs of the ladder are capped for the moment by ill-fitting metal plates salvaged from fire-escape-style staircases, but will eventually be covered by deliberately mismatched wooden planks. All pieces of the table – like the rest of the furniture and artwork in this place – have been created from materials salvaged and recycled from other places: the owner steadily collects, gathering materials into storage until he can visualise something that can be made from them. He also weaves people into his creations: the welding was done by a regular customer who happened to overhear the owner wonder who he should get to do that work. I’ve heard this kind of thing happen before here – been drawn into it myself, on occasion.

Because the owner deliberately mixes materials and styles, new creations tend to cause cascading transformations of the entire environment, as their idiosyncratic mix of stuff contrasts too starkly, or blends in too well, inspiring or irritating the owner to transform the space until things settle into a new dynamic tension. The interior of this space is thus in a constant state of transformation, occasionally interrupted by breathing periods of stasis.

The auditory environment is similarly bricoleured. There are times when I will swear the owner deliberately introduces profoundly irritating musical tracks just for the almost expressionist experience of relief it provides when the track has ended – it’s a thing of wonder and beauty, a genuinely novel way of experiencing a mundane and generally dull piece of music, when for the first time you hear it out of context, following something truly awful. Occasionally, I’ve been here when this kind of experiment doesn’t work as intended – when I’ve paused in my reading or writing in a kind of open admiration for how truly abysmal some cover or mix happens to be, only to have the music stop in mid-note and be exchanged for something else: at that point, I’ll know the owner agreed, and that the moment of transcendence I was waiting for – wondering to myself: what can possibly follow and complete this? – will never come.

This morning, though, it was the new table that was the centre of attention. I loved it on sight. I said as much to a member of the waitstaff, who at first smiled indulgently, and then realised I might be serious. They couldn’t contain their surprise: “You do?!” I think it’s wonderful, I repeated. They laughed nervously – I think they were convinced I was teasing them. You don’t agree? I wanted to know. More nervous laughter as they scuttled back to the kitchen.

The staff, apparently, are divided on the issue. The budding opera singer looked at the table with frank admiration. The owner gazes on it with no small mixture of externalised exhibitionism. The most senior staff member doesn’t see the table, only the owner’s tactile enjoyment of it, and that is enough.

Customers are divided as well. Everyone who ducks in for a coffee, even if they don’t normally investigate those nether realms of the establishment where the table resides, must come have a look. Again nervous laughs. Some customers clearly don’t believe this table will stay – it can’t be serious, this table. I mean, just look at it. A few offer suggestions for turning it into a more conventional eating surface: “Why don’t you just, I don’t know, cover it with a big plank of wood?” – “Oh I’ll cover it with several planks,” replies the owner, “but they have to be different colours, you see – they have to have different grains”. Some, too polite, reach for neutral words: “That’ll seat twelve people for sure”, one man offers. Others, more bluntly: “What happened to that medieval table thing you used to have here? I liked that.” The owner points to the fragments of what used to be one large tree-trunk table – now scattered against several pillars throughout the room, multiple tables now. He doesn’t explain that this multiplicity can also coalesce: if you hang around here long enough, you’ll occasionally see the fragments dragged back together into a plausible imitation of their former cohesive self.

Coffee, Overheard, Procrastination

Libraries as a Transformative Space

3 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on March 6, 2007

From a conversation earlier today:

I remember going into the Baillieu library for the first time, and realising, not how little I knew, but how little I would ever know.

Overheard

Site Maintenance

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

Since Sunday evening would usually be a low-traffic night, and I am organising a blog for one of my courses anyway, I’ve been playing around with the backend for this site – upgrading WordPress and playing around with a few new plugins and such. Apologies to folks who may have been trying to access the site – particularly when the upgrade broke the old pagination plugin, and the entire posting history of RoughTheory loaded onto the front page… That was one massive scroll bar! There have also been various moments (and will likely be others over the next couple of days) where database errors prevented some or all of the site from being accessible.

Apologies for all of this (since comments were actually being posted through some of the chaos, I know at least a few people were trying to view the site while some of this was going on). And do please let me know if you notice any lingering issues.

Admin

The Little Picture

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

Sinthome over at Larval Subjects has been posting a series of reflections on the relationship between Lacan and Deleuze & Guattari – revisiting what were apparently some of the foundational irritations that led to the creation of Larval Subjects. The most recent post also gestures toward some of the issues Sinthome and I have been discussing over the past several months, and includes a particularly interesting set of quotations from Deleuze and Guattari, revolving around the issue of the ways in which “overarching” social structures that are often conceptualised as being “macrological” in character can equally be conceptualised as “micrological” – as structures of family life and everyday interaction. Sinthome then suggests that this simultaneously macrological and micrological character of social structuration raises some potentially interesting questions for how we should understand the emergence of critical sensibilities, and how we should conceptualise potentials for structural transformation.

My schedule is unfortunately awful at the moment, and so I won’t be able to take up these issues substantively – most likely for several weeks. But the basic issue of pointing to the ways in which social structures permeate micrological contexts is one that has interested me for quite some time. When I used to teach on Marx, in a period in which my students were likely already to be familiar with a form of Marxism that focussed on macrosociological conceptions of structural constraints (essentially confusing finance capital with social structure, but no point in diving into minutiae…), I used to collect stories of micrological examples of forms of perception and thought that I could use to demonstrate that the reproduction of a social structure (the “cause” of a social structure, in some sense) could operate on a very wide range of scales, effected through institutions and practices one wouldn’t necessarily consider if social structure were being conceptualised as an intrinsically and exclusively macrological entity. One of my favourite stories was something that I witnessed one day when I was walking home from teaching. I found myself at a streetlight behind a precocious kindergartner and his mum, who seemed to be returning home from what had apparently been some kind of event led by a local historian at the child’s school.

Flushed with excitement, the young boy recounted the event, and then breathlessly declared: “When I grow up, I want to be a historian!”

A long paused received this statement and, while the boy looked up curious, waiting for his mum’s response, one could almost hear the mother calculating furiously in her head – the costs of university tuition, balanced against the probability of future employment and income in such a field… No: things didn’t look good… Eventually, the mother guardedly offered, “You know, when you grow up… You want to get a job you can enjoy. A job that is meaningful and that you like to do. That’s really important. But… You know… You also want to make money…”

I found this wickedly delightful – could one find a more concise lesson in the difference between use value and exchange value? And yet this lesson was taught on the street corner in a mundane domestic interaction far removed from the sorts of settings social theorists often consider, when talking about the reproduction of social structure… How many other such interactions must be taking place, in how many other street corners, shops, kitchens and schools, refracting and reproducing a quite abstract structure of perception and thought?

The passages Sinthome quotes from Deleuze and Guattari seem informed by a similar appreciation for micrological reproduction of social structures as mediated by the family – a process in which socialisation means something more than just the rearing of a child in the context of the intimate dynamics of the household, but is also a process of socialisation into a much broader context. Sinthome then asks what implications this form of socialisation within the household might have, for the ways in which we come to be affectively attached to, or repelled by, dimensions of our broader social context. Excellent questions – I’d very much like to take them up in relation to some aspects of Adorno’s writings on similar issues, but at the moment I sadly don’t have the time. I do, though, expect these and related questions will recur as the discussion moves along… For the moment, I’ll just point folks over to the Larval Subjects post, which also leads on to some interesting discussion in the commentary, spiraling out in a wide range of directions from the concerns of the original post.

Conversations, Critical Theory, Overheard

Placeholders on Conscience and Consciousness

12 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on March 2, 2007

I’m much too tired to attempt a serious post on the topic that interests me at the moment, but I’ve been trying to recapture a bit of equilibrium from a chaotic schedule by wrestling with Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. So many questions for me in this text… What does Adorno believe can be transcended, and what is intrinsic to thought? What is the historical register of the argument here? Is the underlying argument about the distortions of conceptual thought fundamentally a “psychological” one – such that the qualitative characteristics of universalisation and of identitarian impulses are understood as necessary scar imprinted on thought by defense mechanisms?

I go back and forth on these questions, although my suspicions point me in particular directions – directions that suggest tensions within Adorno’s thought. I believe the underlying explanation for what Adorno regards as the qualitative characteristics in conceptual thought – for universalism and identitarian thinking – is psychological: that Adorno ultimately sees these qualities as the traces of a defense mechanism at work, as the signs of thought scarred by fear and denial. The historical register for the operation of these defense mechanisms appears to be very long – occasionally, Adorno gestures at something that might resemble the advent of capitalism, but often at civilisation as such – and sometimes even at something more ahistorical:

The system by which the sovereign Spirit thought to transfigure itself has its Ur-history in that which is pre-intellectual, in the animal life of the species. Predators are hungry; the pounce onto the prey is difficult, often dangerous. The animal needs, as it were, additional impulses in order to dare this. These fuse with the displeasure [Unlust] of hunger into rage at the victim, whose expression is designed to terrify and weaken the latter. During the progression to humanity this is rationalized through projection. The animal rationale [French: rational animal] which is hungry for its opponent, already the fortunate owner of a super-ego, must have a reason. The more completely that what it does follows the law of self-preservation, the less it may confess the primacy of this to itself and others; otherwise its laboriously achieved status as a zoon politikon [Greek: political animal] loses, as modern German puts it, credibility. The life-form to be devoured must be evil. This anthropological schemata has been sublimated all the way into epistemology. In idealism – most obviously in Fichte – the ideology unconsciously rules that the non-Ego, l’autrui [French: the others], finally everything reminiscent of nature, is inferior, so that the unity of the thought bent on preserving itself may gobble it up, thus consoled. This justifies its principle as much as it increases the desire. The system is the Spirit turned belly, rage the signature of each and every idealism; it distorts even Kant’s humanity, dispelling the nimbus of that which is higher and more noble in which this knew how to clothe itself. The opinion of the person in the middle is the sibling of contempt for human beings: to let nothing go undisputed. The sublime inexorability of moral law was of a piece with such rationalized rage at the non-identical, and even the liberal Hegel was no better, when he walled off the superiority of the bad conscience, from those who demurred from the speculative concept, the hypostasis of the Spirit. (ND 35-36)

I’ve always been drawn to Adorno’s focus on rage – and particularly to his recurrent concern with understanding how rage comes to be directed specifically toward the powerless and the weak. I think this is a pivotal question, and I suspect it would be very difficult to answer without the appropriation of some kind of psychodynamic theory. I am also drawn toward Adorno’s suggestion that historically constituted potentials for transformation constitute a conscience – a reservoir of recognition that other and more is possible, and moreover a recognition that cannot be avoided, although it can certainly be denied. For Adorno, there is a price to pay for this denial, and this price does not fall exclusively on those most visibly disadvantaged by current social arrangements.

Beyond this point, though, I find myself reluctant to follow. I’ve remained unconvinced by Adorno’s attempt to extrapolate from his analyses of rage and of bad conscience, into an explanation of the qualitative character of universalism. My hesitation, I think, relates to how I think this approach forces a long historical register, rendering it very difficult to grasp and make sense of qualitative distinctions in forms of thought across time. I believe more historical nuance is possible – and that achieving this level of nuance then makes it possible to think more productively about what might, and what might not, be possible to transcend. But I’ll have to leave this point as nothing more than a placeholder – even if I were more alert, this would not be a position I could develop easily or in a short space.

What I’ve always wondered, though, is whether, if I were to develop this argument, it would react back on those elements within Adorno’s thought that do appeal – whether it makes sense for me to be drawn to Adorno’s arguments about rage and about a sort of Benjaminian historical conscience, while rejecting the arguments about universalism as the product of a defense mechanism geared toward the denial of the potential for transformation… It’s time, I suppose, that I develop my position in sufficient detail that I can begin to resolve some of my own questions…

Critical Theory, Philosophy of History

Readers Anonymous, Or, the Non-Utopian Approach to Text

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on February 28, 2007

It’s been so long since we’ve met to discuss actual readings, rather than just commiserating about our overworked lives, that L Magee recently referred to us as “Readers Anonymous” – but, as promised, with March approaching, we’ll be entering a tangent on the sociology of scientific knowledge – with works carefully chosen to be relevant to various dissertations (in states of greater or lesser virtuality…) floating around the group. The proposed list of readings has already been outlined. We’ll start with Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia next week, and hopefully an online discussion of some sort will follow.

We did have a proto-discussion of the Mannheim today (limited by the fact that some of us have been rudely hording our copies of our shared text, leaving others text-deprived). Unmoored from any detailed textual analysis, our discussion wandered around the concept of “utopia”, and made its way eventually to the issue of locating ideals in any realised political system – whether in the present, or in history. LM asked how any existent system could provide a normative model; I seized the opportunity to discuss my fondness for counter-factuals – and LM expressed a certain downside to my approach:

Well, you know, it’s hard to explain in an everyday sense what it means to hold a non-realisable ideal. It’s just that you know automatically that, well, that’s just gonna take some time to explain…

Hey – do I look like someone who’s pressed for time? ;-P

Critical Theory, Reading Group, Sociology of Knowledge

Dancing with Myself

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on February 26, 2007

So recently I’ve noticed that people who know me personally have started citing my blog back at me in theoretical discussions. Often in situations where they remember what I wrote far more clearly than I do… It’s a strangely effective argumentative move: I sit there wondering, “Did I really say that?”… And then: “If I did say that, was I right?” ;-P

Blogging

The Theory Chapter Reloaded

25 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on February 24, 2007

I know this is becoming a bit of a regular rant… but I was thinking again this afternoon about how common it is for methods courses and textbooks to start with some kind of introductory “theory chapter”, which generally informs students that, before they begin any kind of research design process, they must:

(1) know their epistemological and ontological stance; and

(2) be able to position themselves in relation to a wide range of theoretical debates.

This is so common that I’m beginning to get a bit worried about how counter-intuitive I find it to be. I mean, I love discussions of epistemology and ontology – probably a bit too much ;-P – and I’m quite happy to position myself away in theoretical debates of all sorts. But I think it’s fairly safe to say that I would never start a research design course or text with these issues. I think it’s also safe to say that these are not issues that arose – in this form, at least – early in my own engagement with either research or philosophy. Am I that much of an outlier?

Amusingly enough, my main objection to this approach is itself ontological: there’s something about formulating the issue in this way – as though the researcher is some kind of disembodied consciousness, floating around in The Matrix, saying, “I need Theory – lots of Theory!” – and then out roll the shelves of high-powered concepts from the aether, from which the disembodied consciousness then selects whatever approach makes it feel most secure. What about the relationship of the theory to the object of analysis? What about the relationship of all of this to some underlying question? How do students make sense of and understand their theoretical choices, when this is how theory is presented to them?

Then there’s the pedagogical issue: maybe I overcompensate, but I tend to assume that most students – most peers, for that matter – won’t be as interested in abstract theoretical discussions as I am… Unless forced to start with these issues because the students are confronting them in assigned texts, I tend to sidle my way up to terms like “epistemology” and “ontology”, because I think it takes a bit of intellectual grounding for students to be able to understand why someone would care about what appear, on their face, to be rather abstract concerns. My experience has been that students find the concepts terrifyingly fuzzy – and that their fear isn’t assuaged by the tendency of “theory chapters” in methodology texts to rush past a definition of these concepts, and into long lists of competing ontological and epistemological stances one could conceivably adopt – all lined up in a row, in neat boxes – sometimes with light bulbs flashing beside them – as though people make a common practice of dealing with significant ontological and epistemological questions by trundling their conceptual carts down the theoretical aisles in some vast grocery store of human knowledge…

I know I’ve said this before – recently enough that I shouldn’t still be ranting about this topic – but my impulse is to start with something much more grounded – much more solidly within students’ experiential frame: with what students are curious about, where their passions lie. From here, they can begin to ask questions – and those questions will then, eventually, give them the basis for finding ontological and epistemological questions meaningful – and for translating their interests into something that might fall within the boundaries of academic research.

I realise that textbooks don’t have the flexibility I have in the classroom, to build a discussion around students’ questions and dreams… But still… Wouldn’t it be possible, at least in principle, for a text to talk about curiosity as the origin point for a research process? To sketch some examples (which surely wouldn’t be any more misleading that the text box versions of theoretical positions these texts already supply) of how particular researchers found their way to problems, which then teased and thwarted them into methodological strategies – and then to unpack the concepts of epistemology and ontology from there?

Methodology, Teaching

Images of Redemption

2 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on February 22, 2007

I’ve been wanting for the past several days to pick up on Sinthome’s wonderful post Of the Law as a Veil. In this post, Sinthome reflects on tensions between the Lacanian notion of lack as perhaps constitutive of our experience of intersubjectivity, and critical theoretic appeals to ideals that view lack as historically constituted – as something that can be overcome through social transformation. Sinthome builds toward a fantastic series of questions, left hanging and unresolved:

On the one hand, to what degree is it legitimate to see lack as constitutive in this way? Could this particular form of lack be the result of a historical emergence or development? And if so, how would we go about demonstrating this, without falling into narratives of the fall? On the other hand, supposing that Lacan is right, what would a Marxist informed politics look like that takes this into account.

These questions condense an enormous amount of complex content, and touch on issues that are very much “live” and unresolved for me, to the extent that I don’t actually feel that I have enough distance to comment meaningfully at this point. I’ll tuck a few scattered (and I really, really need to emphasise the “scattered” qualifier here) below the fold – but otherwise just point readers to Sinthome’s far more coherent and productive reflections.

Street Corner Virtual Society

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on February 22, 2007

Going to the train station around midnight last night, I passed a frustrated man talking to someone on a public telephone on a major street. “Blog!” he was insisting, “No: blog! B – L – O – G! Blog! Look… it’s a kind of online diary, okay?!”

Blogging, Overheard

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