Rough Theory

Theory In The Rough

Rough Thoughts on Friendship

4 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on December 4, 2006

Inspired by Spurious’ recent round of posts on W., Jodi Dean at I Cite has been discussing friendship. Jodi’s posts outline a contrast between a vision of friendship she attributes to Aristotle – an agonistic vision of friendship as a process of driving one another toward an exclusionary form of excellence – and the vision she identifies in Spurious’ relationship to W. – a vision of friendship as a process of playfully dragging one another down and delighting in a shared decline. She wonders:

What if the most complete friends are those drag each other down, slowly, playfully, with tenderness and wit? And they stick by one another, as they are dragged down, into childishness, into a condition where no other could stand them? This may be the most complete friendship, where one becomes for the other a complete friend, the one who can endure one’s insecurity, dampness, odd humor (and humours), silliness, and despair.

For what does it take to be a friend to the virtuous? Not much, I should think, not much at all. For the virtuous are generous and humble, lively and smart, never demanding, never needy, never insecure. And with the virtuous we try to act accordingly, expending all our energies in the labors of virtue.

But virtue is tiresome and the mean is boring. Complete friends drag each other down, as low as they can go, and stay around to laugh at the other as he hits bottom.

I speak to this discussion somewhat diffidently, as the concept of friendship is not something I’ve thought about in a theoretical or philosophical sense – and, to compound the situation, I’m also a very new reader of Spurious, with less knowledge of that blog or its author than many in the I Cite discussion. The opportunities to say profoundly ignorant things abound… I’d still like to use a reflection on the I Cite discussion to work my way a bit closer to a few nagging concepts, but I’ll tuck the content below the fold, with the usual below-the-fold caveat that what follows is rather ill-considered and underdone… Read more of this post

Conversations

The Apparition of Postmodernity

2 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on December 3, 2006

So I was going to write something on the concept of theoretical pessimism, but then got distracted by this article from The Australian on the rather severe absence of opportunities for students to study Australian literature systematically at university level – severe as in:

Next year, the University of Sydney may have no students taking up the country’s only honours program in Australian literature.

Readers not from Australia may not appreciate how local discussions of anything vaguely related to literary matters – or, more broadly, education policy – somehow always come back to postmodernism. Sure enough, this article obliges:

THE decline of Australian literature is also blamed on funding cuts and the inexorable rise of postmodern theory, a charge that supporters of that theory deny strenuously.

And:

But this indifference doesn’t just come from the pincer movement of academics – Eurocentric traditionalists on one flank, postmodern theorists on the other – who have pushed Australian literature to the periphery.

And:

Pierce declares that the tertiary sector’s neglect of our literature exposes a disconnect between the public and academics: “It isn’t as if people have stopped reading Australian literature. It’s a dissociation of the readership from the formal study of Australian literature.”

He says the rot set in when academics who “abased” themselves before the altar of literary theory acquired institutional power and “captured literature departments in the ’80s”.

Postmodern literary theory – and its near-relation, cultural studies – do not accord canonical works, Australian or otherwise, a privileged place. Such theories hold that everything from Big Brother to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Peter Carey’s Bliss is a text, thus diminishing the role of serious literature as a defining cultural force.

The bitter divisions provoked by the rise of theory are well known. Yale University professor Harold Bloom has attacked cultural studies as an enemy of reading and part of the “lunatic destruction of literary studies”.

In Australia, what remains largely unexplored is the role imported, voguish theories have played in the destruction of our literature.

I have a strange fascination with the way in which postmodernism has assumed this sinister reds-under-beds status in Australian policy discussions. The article is filled with more mundane explanations for the plight of Australian literary studies at the tertiary level: longstanding Anglophilia and deprecation of local cultural production; a shift in student interests away from the humanities and, for those who remain within the humanities, toward programs such as creative writing, and away from the study of literary texts; changing structures for the funding of tertiary education, which have resulted in pressures on universities to demonstrate the financial viability of individual degree programs; the drying up of career paths and publication opportunities for tertiary students of Australian literature… But these mundane and obvious causal explanations apparently lack the lustre of postmodernism as a form of spectral causation – after all, how can you beat something that can be demonised as “imported” and “voguish”, that “captures” departments and causes “rot” and that, apparently, carries a faint whiff of idolatry, requiring as it does ritual abasement before an altar of literary theory.

The casual juxtapositions sprinkled through the article are equally problematic – the absence of any impulse to try to reconcile or make sense of contradictory statements suggests the degree to which postmodernism functions as a spectre. Thus the article notes that postmodernism denies privileged status to the canon, while also asking readers to imagine that Eurocentric traditionalists have cooperated with postmodernists in a pincher move to squeeze out the teaching of Australian literature… The article also cites funding cuts and postmodernism in the same sentence – hitting here on something that may represent an actual relationship, but mainly in the sense that the assault on specific forms of academic theory is often hauled out as a political rationalisation for funding cuts, on the grounds that the sorts of “frivolous” studies postmodernism is claimed to promote, are then taken to exemplify why universities must be made more accountable in their use of government funds.

It would be obvious to regular readers that I am very critical of many theoretical approaches that could legitimately be described as postmodernist. The spectrisation of the term “postmodernism” in local policy discussions, however, has very little to do with either the theory or the practice of any kind of actual academic theory. Whatever the intentions, the term “postmodernism” in Australian policy discourse has come to function as a useful deflector of political energies – invoking this term predictably draws out people compelled to defend the theoretical tradition, whose participation in this ritual debate then reinforces the impression that the political dispute actually has something to do with academic theory. Coverage of the various criticisms and defenses of postmodernism then dominates the public discussion. Meanwhile issues that, from my point of view, would be worth a more serious and sustained discussion in the public sphere – changes to the structure of funding for tertiary education, for example – can hide in plain sight, while the heat of the postmodernism debate helps ensure that light rarely falls on them…

Maybe I’m writing about pessimism after all… ;-P

Current Events, Politics

The Scott Heard Round the World

1 Comment Posted by N Pepperell on December 3, 2006

Most readers will already know from Acephalous, Crooked Timber, or elsewhere the fate of Scott Eric Kaufman’s meme experiment, which has been discussed here on a couple of prior occasions. The methodology slam concept seems to have become a bit of a mini-meme (counter meme?) following in Scott’s wake – an unintended experimental side effect, which Scott now apparently intends to address in his MLA presentation:

I’m happy I ran the experiment, if only because I can now cite N. Pepperell’s “methodology slam” in my talk. Because if “the new interdisciplinary” means anything, it’s that people outside your tiny corner of academia can now read, evaluate and condemn your work.

Always happy to be of service…

Blogging, Links

Blogging Identity

15 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on December 2, 2006

Over at is there no sin in it?, A White Bear has raised some interesting questions about how blogging intersects with real-world contexts. The post begins with a reflection on blogging ethics – is it problematic to blog about our lives, when it’s essentially impossible to do this without bringing in the lives of those around us? It then moves to a discussion of blogging identity: how similar is the “you” of the blog to the “you” in various real-life contexts? What happens when people who know the “you” from one context suddenly encounter the “you” from another? Specifically, A White Bear asks:

So when, if at all, do you tell people you meet that you blog? Do you like it when your new friends read it, or is that kind of creepy, for them to have so much intimate information at their fingertips when you have so little? Do people report back to you in person with their thoughts instead of commenting? Do you ever get super-paranoid that maybe it’s not okay to be talking about your life, which necessarily intersects with the life of others? Then do you get super-extra-paranoid that maybe that’s the wagging finger of the inner “you’re a bad girl!” voice talking?

So That’s Where My Words Went…

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on December 2, 2006

Yesterday, I couldn’t find the words to describe what Spurious is. This morning, I notice that Joseph Kugelmass seems to have found a few:

I’ve just found out that Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot have gotten together to work on a group blog where they pretend to be one person named W. Except they are actually writing a novel about somebody (who appears in the picture to be a waifish woman, but I can’t even figure out what genders are really in play here) who is having a devastating, tormented relationship with W. that seems to be vaguely about intellectual despair and missed opportunity, leavened with an asthma from too much history and living in Europe. One clue is that money is given in pounds.

Must. Stop. Laughing. Now. It Hurts!

Links

Methodology Slam

3 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on December 1, 2006

I’ve been watching with some amusement the evolution of Scott Eric Kaufman’s meme experiment, which I mentioned here the other day (anyone who hasn’t yet linked back will… I don’t know… have some horrible chain-lettery thing happen to you very soon…). For those following from the sidelines, Scott has posted an update on the quantitative success of his experiment. Personally, I’ve been following the unintended qualitative dimensions of the project – specifically, the number of people who’ve evidently decided to help out because, well, they’re so damned irritated about how badly they think the whole thing has been designed.

Sarapen opened with a thoughtful and even-tempered critique (including a literature review, even), but not all participants were as kind. Scrolling through the comments on Scott’s blog, you see a very large number of methodology criticisms, pointing Scott to things he hasn’t controlled for, noting problems in capturing the relevant data, criticising what he believes the data will show, complaining that he hasn’t sufficiently defined his hypothesis prior to the experiment, accusing him of stacking the experimental deck, arguing that the experiment can’t possibly be expected to follow the course of “wild” memes, contesting the finer points of whether “meme” was the right word for this – and, my personal favourite:

Based on my experience with technorati, when they pick up a link can be highly variable and not well-correlated with the actual time that link is created (to the point of being off by days). Your methodology is already crap just on technical grounds, even before taking into account all the objections above. Try using a web bug or something like it next time.

I suggested to Scott that he put all of this criticism to productive use at the MLA conference – prove the value of internet academic discussion, by challenging his panel audience to see whether they can come up with as many reasons that his methodology is “crap”. ;-P Since making this comment, though, I’ve begun to wonder: perhaps we’re looking at the birth of a new kind of PhD student performance art – the methodology slam. Someone stands up on some obscure corner of the net, calls out their research methodology, and asks a friend to tell a friend… Perhaps the results can be submitted as part of the portfolio to the committee approving candidature – a new criterion before you can call yourself ABD…

Blogging, Links, Methodology

Power for the People

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on November 30, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History

Argument as End and Means

5 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on November 29, 2006

Note: this post started as a comment to Joseph Kugelmass’ post on “The Love of Argument: A Response to Michael Berube” (cross-posted to The Valve). Since the reply has grown a bit cancerous, I’ll post it here instead, with the caveat that the post still has the character of a comment, in the sense that it refers directly to the post without making an attempt to summarise comprehensively the post content. I’d suggest that readers look at the post first, and then read this response…

***

My reaction to your post is a bit complicated. On the one hand, I tend to agree with this position:

Argumentation is a regrettable means, not an end; believing otherwise leads one to fetishize intelligence, misinterpret opponents, maintain incompatible ideas, and worse.

I’m not sure, though, that my reasons for agreeing reflect your reasons for writing the statement. The fetishisation of argument bothers me because I think, as academics, as intellectuals, we ought to be engaged at least in principle in a truth game – that we ought to care sufficiently about truth, that assessing truth claims matters more than “winning” or the aesthetic gratification of constructing an elegant argument. And I tend to become deeply uncomfortable with situations where I feel that opponents are being misinterpreted, or where some sort of self-reinforcing in-group consensus abridges analysis at the level of “well, of course we all know what’s wrong with [x]”, when one gets the sinking feeling that very few people would be able to articulate what, precisely, is wrong with [x]. I say this with full cognisance of the epistemological issues involved – my concern is with our willingness to engage in a discursive process that is more than purely agonistic, where the parties in the exchange are each in principle committed to the same goal of testing, refining, improving – and, if necessary, abandoning – their starting positions, with the goal of arriving at better positions.

I agree with your concern about aestheticising the perpetuation of debate, of conflict, of opposing positions – as though these were substantive ends in their own right, above and beyond other substantive endpoints. At the same time, I do think it’s very important to remain aware that not all debates have definitive conclusions that can be rationally determined at any given point in time – I may even personally lean toward the notion that most important debates at a given historical moment in fact do not have such conclusions, although I won’t assert this as a strong position – and I actually think that recognising when this might be the case can be a very important dimension of positioning argument as “a regrettable means”. Behaving as though all reasonable people would reach our personally preferred conclusion, when this is not in fact the case, undermines the orientation to truth just as strongly as aestheticising argument for its own sake. (As a side point – and I know we’ve had this discussion before – the insight I would personally draw from Habermas is not that consensus – understood as some sort of achievable static endpoint – is our goal, but that our awareness of the possibility for consensus represents a kind of counterfactual ideal: this counterfactual ideal is then useful for practice because, as long as we keep firmly in mind that we’ll never reach something like TRUTH as a static endpoint, it still lifts our game if we all behave in ways that are compatible with seeking this unattainable endpoint…)

I have not yet read Berube’s book (yes, yes, I know… I should get to it… it’s been a hectic period…), but I understand the concerns you express in your analysis of the miscommunication that persists through Berube’s “teachable moment” discussion of his interaction with a conservative student. You argue that Berube has aligned the student with an intellectual tradition not actually expressed in the student’s own statements, and thus empowered the student (in your account, at the evident expense of the other students in the room), without actually enlightening the student any further about the rational bases (or lack thereof) for their own position. I understand your concern – without reading Berube myself, it’s difficult to know whether I would agree with your reading of the situation. But I did at least want to indicate that something like the strategy you describe – where Berube addresses himself to the broad intellectual tradition of which the student’s views are a “symptom”, so to speak – is something that I’ve found, in practice, can actually be a very good way of getting students from various political backgrounds to step back and gain some critical distance on their own positions – to recognise that more than just “common sense” is involved in constructing their views.

In postgraduate courses, for example, my preferred teaching style (not appropriate to all subjects, of course) is to begin by essentially scribing the student discussion: ideally, I say only as much as I have to say to get discussion started – preferably via questions, rather than positive statements – and then let the students run with the day’s topic. The scribing is not random, however: as students speak, I’m mapping what they say according to where the points sit in intellectual and social history, drawing lines between connected points, sketching trees to show the relationship between points that have unexpected common ancestors, etc. When the discussion begins to repeat, or students run out of things to say, I then use this sketch as the basis for an impromptu lecture about the intellectual traditions with which their positions are affiliated – and then I open the discussion back up, on the basis of the broader questions this new background allows us to discuss. (Note that I’m not necessarily promoting this technique, or my own skills in deploying it – among other things, as one of my students this past term commented with some dismay, “I’ve never really seen anything like this: we come up with these ideas, and we’re thinking we’re being really original and creative, and then you come along and tell us that everything we think has already been thought, in much greater detail, by someone three hundred years ago – and that dozens of people are experts on the topic now… My other courses don’t do this…” ;-P) This technique sounds, at least superficially, somewhat like what you describe Berube to be doing – and I would suggest that it’s at least possible to use this sort of technique, as I attempt to do, to help students achieve some level of critical distance on their received concepts – as well as some critical empathy for other people’s received concepts…

The notion of critical empathy brings me to your other major point:

I have no interest whatsoever in seeing right-wing positions (say, for example, the “flat-rate” income tax, or the privatization of social services) preserved out of respect for their long and distinguished histories. I am only willing, as a private citizen, to continue to participate civilly in debates over taxes, social services, abortion, etc., because it is my hope that these debates will one day be ended, replaced by a steady state of reasonable policy and maximal human welfare….

I see definitive limits on the amount of “intelligence” one can muster in defense of right-wing arguments, since they always reason from false premises. I write this with a wincing awareness that it shows some disrespect to conservatives. I apologize for that, because this isn’t the forum for arguing the specifics of the issues.

I realise I’m responding to a blog post, and so this may not be the phrasing you would choose in a more considered medium. And I’ll confess that I’m coming off a term where I’ve probably spent a bit too much time arguing with people who hold very similar views, so I’ll apologise in advance if I take some of my long-term frustration out on you. I understand your anger at prominent public figures who seem themselves to have little concern for truth or rationality in putting forward their positions – and I have no problem with the decision to dismiss out of hand opponents who have placed themselves outside the parameters of rational discourse. If this is all you mean, I don’t disagree.

But your statement seems more far-reaching than this – and I do tend to think that, if we seriously cannot perceive how a relatively mainstream position could conceivably be defended intellectually, or why such a position might appeal socially or psychologically, this should probably be taken as a sign that we need to do more homework. Note that achieving greater insight into how someone could reasonably embrace or defend a position does not entail agreeing with the position: something can be plausible, and still completely wrong. As a matter both of intellectual integrity and of practical politics, however, I don’t believe that wholesale dismissal of the potential rationality of an opposing position is a good starting place. If our goal is critique, I also tend to feel that we are better off reconstructing what opposing positions would be at their best – at their clearest and most rational – and then aiming our critique at this highest possible expression of an opposing position. This approach produces, in my opinion, a more fundamental critique – and is also generally most productive as we try to refine our alternative concepts – but it does require a bit of dancing with the devil: a serious attempt to place yourself in what can sometimes be a very alien thought-space, so that you can seriously test your ideas against opposing claims… I do understand that this process may not be reciprocated. But the point isn’t to gain the respect of intellectual or political opponents – the point is to test ourselves, and to practice commitment to a particular standard of intellectual engagement. I think both of these goals are extremely important – and that both are actually related to the desire for discussion oriented to truth claims, rather than discussion centred on the fetishisation of argument…

Conversations, Teaching

Demotivational Products

1 Comment Posted by N Pepperell on November 28, 2006

So many interesting, useful, productive things to do – and instead, I find myself browsing the catalogue at Despair.com – a site that produces demotivational posters and products. Just what every PhD student needs. I’ve enjoyed the posters for mediocrity, irresponsibility, idiocy, humiliation, and doubt, but the one I really want for my office door is the poster on meetings. People who know me in person know that I’ve been on something like a year-long tirade about the number of meetings I’m expected to attend. This poster pretty much manages to distill my objections down into one concise phrase:

[Note: image @2006 Despair, Inc. URL: http://despair.com/meetings.html%5D

Links, Procrastination

In the Name of Science…

2 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on November 28, 2006

The things I do for Scott Eric Kaufman… As some of you already know, Scott has been conducting various kinds of research for his MLA panel on academic blogging. Now’s your very own opportunity to participate in a bit of science in the making. Or something like that. In what looks something like an attempt to give scientific respectability to an internet chain letter, Scott has asked his readers:

1. Write a post linking to this one in which you explain the experiment. (All blogs count, be they TypePad, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, &c.)

2. Ask your readers to do the same. Beg them. Relate sob stories about poor graduate students in desperate circumstances. Imply I’m one of them. (Do whatever you have to. If that fails, try whatever it takes.)

3. Ping Techorati.

Scott will then attempt to track the speed, at ten-minute intervals, by which this little experiment sprawls across that corner of the net that has some six-degree-of-separation connectedness to his site…

So: go forth and multiply!

Blogging, Links

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