Rough Theory

Around bursts of technical support for students trying to familiarise themselves with the class wiki, I’ve been reading through Richard Rorty’s work. I haven’t read Rorty for some time, and have never read him systematically. I’m not in general a fan of pragmatism – something that I may have reason to post about on another occasion – but I am finding myself thoroughly enjoying Rorty’s writings. Some of this is simply related to how well Rorty writes – whether I agree or disagree with the points he is trying to make, I often find myself admiring the way he frames an issue, and the analogies through which he clarifies an otherwise complex topic.

The other thing I’m enjoying, however, is watching Rorty wrestle with what it implies, if you take seriously the claim that our knowledge and beliefs are historical at some fundamental level. Rorty tackles this issue by describing our commitment to key values and beliefs – in universal human rights, for example – as “ethnocentric”.

By itself, of course, this is nothing new – many social critics have levelled this kind of accusation, as a means of debunking purportedly universal values, by demonstrating that those values actually express and serve the quite particular interests of a particular segment of society, in a particular historical period. Labelling values “ethnocentric” is a common theoretical move, when you intend to debunk and dismiss the values in question.

The interesting thing about Rorty is that he does not label values “ethnocentric” in order to debunk them but, rather, as a step toward validating those values, while frankly acknowledging their contingent social and historical origins.

In this respect, I regard Rorty as a fellow-traveller – one who does not believe that transhistorical justifications are required for us to make meaningful value judgments about the just and unjust dimensions of our social environment. At the same time, I think Rorty sells short the historical potentials of our present moment, by accepting too readily the validity of a strong distinction between “Western” and “non-Western” societies in the contemporary historical period.

I won’t have time or space to do justice to this point here, but I wanted at least to suggest that – for all the multitude of meaningful differences between parts of the world in the current era – nevertheless, one of the things that we have unintentionally created in the past several hundred years is the – dare I say “pragmatic”? – basis for certain concepts, including pivotal moral concepts such as those underlying the notion of universal human rights, to be conceptually available to persons living throughout the world.

What I have in mind when I make this claim is something like a fully historicised version of Habermas’ project: as I’ve written in other contexts, Habermas’ primary goal is to explain why certain core values of liberal democracy are conceptually available to everyone in contemporary society – such that everyone currently has the ability to “grok” the concepts, to understand what they mean and to deploy them in critiques of existing social practices and institutions – even though Habermas believes, from the historical record, that many people in previous historical periods would not have had this same ability. Habermas does not require that everyone agree on how the values should be applied, on how far these values should be extended, on what social practices and institutions ideally express these values – pace the critics who claim that Habermas is seeking a utopia of soporific consensus, Habermas leaves room for enormous disagreement and contestation on all aspects of social experience. What is universal, he claims, is only the capacity to understand what is going on, when someone criticises a social practice in the name of a liberal democratic ideal.

Habermas’ weakness is that, even though he poses a fundamentally historical problem, he can’t quite bring himself to offer a fully historical solution – he can’t quite surrender an appeal to a “true” universal. Liberal democratic ideals are therefore, in his framework, something like the historical emergence of a “natural” human trait, one that has always been embedded in human communication, but that has only burst into consciousness in very recent history.

Rorty offers a healthy corrective to Habermas, in that he relishes the historical contingency of even the most cherished democratic values. Yet Rorty doesn’t seem to consider whether Habermas might also have the right idea, when it comes to the level of abstraction on which these values operate: perhaps the important issue, in defining where one “society” ends and another begins, is not where human communities draw the line in their application of rights talk, but rather whether the members of the contemporary global human community have a reasonable idea what is being discussed, when we use rights talk at all.

Seen in this way, we can begin to analyse whether – and how – we may have practiced our way into something like a meaningful historical universal in the past few hundred years – to analyse whether we might have so transformed our global social environment that people throughout the world now share at least some pivotal common experiences, in addition to the many unique experiences that also shape diverse individuals and communities. If these common experiences can then be tied in a meaningful way to the gestalt that enables someone to “grok” liberal democratic discourse – as I’ve suggested gesturally in some of my writing on Lakoff – we can move toward a fully historical understanding of key critical values. This approach would allow us to acknowledge, in Rorty’s terms, our own “ethnocentrism”, while still grounding Habermas’ insight that there is something distinctive and important about the emergence of “universal” values as a “real abstraction” in the modern era.

Frank H. Strauss – an evidently frustrated reader of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project – posted the following in Amazon’s reader reviews:

This book is a nihilistic, incoherent work, and I dare anyone who reads this review to argue to the contrary. Admiration for this book is humbuggery in action. The emperor has no clothes.

There is, of course, a veritable cottage industry commenting on the quality of the Arcades’ vestments. It doesn’t hurt that the fragmentary nature of the work can function as a kind of theoretical rorschach, such that the resulting interpretations tell you a great deal about the commentators, but possibly not so much about what Benjamin was seeking to accomplish.

Since I am not personally a Benjamin scholar, this rorschach quality doesn’t worry me unduly – as I’ve previously commented on my occasional use of Marx, while I do my best to interpret the work accurately, my main concern is identifying interesting questions, and perhaps uncovering better conceptual tools for answering them. It is in this spirit that I approach Benjamin, who provides, I believe, excellent source material for both questions and conceptual tools.

In most sections of the Arcades Project, those questions remain very tacit, implied in the grouping of material. So, Convolute B, relating to fashion, seems fascinated with the question of historical cycles of consumption – with the turnover rate of taste, and also with the tendency for particular fashions to recur after set intervals. Convolute C, relating to the Paris catacombs, demolition, and concepts of decline, seems drawn to the emergence of a historical sensibility that is attuned to the long sweep of history, from whose perspective we can readily imagine a time when everything around us will, in its turn, be destroyed. Convolute D, on boredom and eternal return, again draws attention to perceptions of historical time – in this case, time that moves on and on without a substantive endpoint. In many convolutes, Benjamin therefore seems to be operating on a parallel track to Weber’s famous diagnosis of modern society:

Now, do they have any meanings that go beyond the purely practical and technical? You will find this question raised in the most principled form in the works of Leo Tolstoi. He came to raise the question in a peculiar way. All his broodings increasingly revolved around the problem of whether or not death is a meaningful phenomenon. And his answer was: for civilized person death has no meaning. It has none because the individual life of civilized man, placed into an infinite ‘progress,’ according to its own imminent meaning should never come to an end; for there is always a further step ahead of one who stands in the march of progress. And no person who comes to die stands upon the peak which lies in infinity. Abraham, or some peasant of the past, died ‘old and satiated with life’ because he stood in the organic cycle of life; because his life, in terms of its meaning and on the eve of his days, had given to him what life had to offer; because for him there remained no puzzles he might wish to solve; and therefore he could have had ‘enough’ of life. Whereas civilized man, placed in the midst of the continuous enrichment of culture by ideas, knowledge, and problems, may become ‘tired of life’ but not ‘satiated with life.’ He catches only the most minute part of what the life of the spirit brings forth ever anew, and what he seizes is always something provisional and not definitive, and therefore death for him is a meaningless occurrence. And because death is meaningless, civilized life as such is meaningless; by its very ‘progressiveness’ it gives death the imprint of meaninglessness.(“Science as a Vocation”, pp. 14-15)

At the same time, Benjamin does not descend fully into Weberian pessimism. Instead, Benjamin holds out the potential for emancipatory alternatives. In this vein, Convolute E, on Haussmann and the barricades, tacitly contrasts two different forms of action oriented to bringing about a better future – town planning (conscious in its aims, but not necessarily oriented to emancipation) and revolutionary uprising (oriented to emancipation, but not necessarily fully conscious of its aims). Further convolutes – particularly the most explicitly theoretical material in convolute N – work and rework the concept of the “dreamtime” of modernity, holding out the possibility that it might somehow be possible to awaken potentials for emancipation.

In my own personal rorschach, therefore, what I see everywhere in Benjamin’s images are tacit questions about why we experience and perceive history the way we do, and how those experiences and perceptions relate to the historical emergence of emancipatory ideals – and, possibly, to our ability to achieve greater freedom in practice. I see Benjamin, then, as quintessentially concerned with questions of epistemology – how do we know what we claim to know? why do we perceive the world in a certain way? – and with the relationship between epistemology and critique – why do we believe (at least in some ways, in some times) that more freedom is possible? This is, of course, not a bad diagnosis of the central goals of my own work – which may mean that I have merely taken a “tiger’s leap” into Benjamin’s writings, scenting only what is relevant to my own interests. If so, I believe it has been a productive hunt. I’ll try in future installments to flesh out more fully what I have captured from Benjamin’s work.