Away until Monday.

Homo Academicus

From the comments (some time ago) at Le Colonel Chabert. I'd like to return to this later:

Lcc: I like something I read by Ranciere about the relations bteween generals and spontaneity on the battlefield, but I'm not ready to call it 'Ranciere's idea' because the first time I encountered it described in detail was in Tolstoy, who, with the novelist's humility did not pretend to invent it, only to observe it: no commons enclosing! i don't want to have to obey ranciere's implications. qlip, qlip, qlip! we can begin qlipping in this our favourite hobby. after all that was already our gold the King stuck his profile on.


M: Agreed. Many of the distinctions made by a Ranciere or Lacan can of course be made in another language, and one can make and use these distinctions without tagging them with Names, and simply use them in so far as they help you to think. But what’s interesting is that if you do this – if you leave off the tags and the names – your ideas are much less likely to be noticed or discussed within the academic marketplace. In fact, they will often be invisible. People are reluctant to risk floating or discussing untagged ideas. Do not speak only of friendship, 'employ' or read instead X's notion thereof - unmediated access to concepts is forbidden.

This exchange came to mind recently, reading a book by Renata Salecl. She offers a brief and lucid paraphrase of Judith Butler.How easy, I thought, to articulate Butler’s ideas without ‘tagging’ them, without saying ‘Ranciere’s this’ and ‘Althusser’s that’, or ‘deploying’ Agamben’s notion in conjunction with Marx’s.. And it would be perfectly possible, perhaps, for Butler herself to do this, to present her ideas unadorned and untagged, as if she just wanting to talk about power or the Self, and reach certain conclusions about these things. But again, in certain quarters of academia the presentations of untagged ideas is inadvisible. You must show yourself to be using an existing currency, a currency of proper names. I wonder about the origins of this tendency. My sense is that it’s to be understood as an institutional demand and not finally indigeneous or essential to the thinking itself, although it may then enter and corrupt the thinking. [joke/] In fact, it would be useful to deploy Bourdieu’s notion of taste culture here [/joke].

spectacle

re Watching the World Cup. Have you noticed that when a crown member sees his/ her image on the giant screen inside the stadium they don't wave at the camera (or its implied position) but directly at the screen - as if it's a giant mirror.

Insert yr own subscriptio.

Free thought must be won by a historical anamnesis capable of revealing everything in thought which is the forgotten product of historical work (Bourdieu)

random thoughts on 'cultural relativism', II

In the ‘bloodless abstraction’ post, the position attributed to Rorty is that our “sensuous sympathies” are first of all extended to our immediate (culturally specific) group rather than to some generic ‘humanity’.

There is, though, another move, whereby one's folk is prematurely identified with this 'generic humanity' as such; so that the traits specific to this familiar group – historically and culturally local - are misrecognised as the physiognomy of humanity per se. The particular, disguised as the universal, can then dismiss other specific folks as enemies of the universal, as inhuman rather than as (so to speak) only pathologically different.

What is sometimes misnamed 'cultural relativism' can be seen as precisely the attempt to avoid this error of misrecognition. That is, what the understanding of cultural difference seeks to do is to move toward a comprehension of the true generic humanity. It does this through the cautionary insistence that no particular society is to be simply identified with it.

There may be some who experience a frission at the mere fact of difference, difference qua difference without regard to content, but this is an empty formalism. Difference is only a sign and summons to pass on.

The call to (in a contemporary idiom) 'listen to the Other' is not an invitation simply to be stimulated by the discordant yet enigmatic notes of Difference. Nor should it be an interdiction telling us to go no further. It solicits, rather, a re-tuning of our understanding and a timely awareness of our own finitude - of the categories and concepts through which the world has appeared to us. But this awareness of limitation only makes sense in relation to an implicit and coming universality, the prospect of which this finitude opens up.

So it is that the comprehension of cultural difference points beyond difference.

human

Two quotes I think are related to the posts on 'bloodless abstraction' and 'cultural relativism'. More later..

"The problem of what is man is always therefore the so-called problem of 'human nature' or that if so-called man in general'. It is thus an attempt to create a science of man (a philosophy) which starts from an initiallt 'unitary ' concept, from an abstraction in which everything that is 'human' can be contained. But is the 'human' a starting point or a point of arrival, as a concept and as a unitary fact? Or might not the whole attempt, in so far as it posits the human as a starting-point, be a 'theological' or 'metaphysical' residue?" (Gramsci)

'Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust.' (Marx)

ohio impromptu

thoughts on 'cultural relativism', I

I'm not sure exactly who believes in 'cultural relativism' as it is defined by its adversaries, but I can agree that this version is false and/or contradictory. You know the idea: we can't judge another culture from the outside, there are no universal criteria that allow us to say that one culture's better than another etc.Well, firstly, 'We' are not homogenous and neither is the 'other culture'; and by what criteria have we identified it as 'Other' in the first place rather than simply 'different'? A New Yorker might be culturally different from a Londoner but is surely not irredemiably Other. To mark something as Other presupposes an interpreatative decision that cultural relativism arguably prohibits. Secondly, if there are no universals and all cultures are 'equally valid' , then you have to say equally valid in respect of what, valid as what? Logically, the criteria in question must be a universal one. For example, you say 'all are valid as expressions of life', then 'expressing life' is posited as a value. Needless to say, only for the Western intellectual are these other cultures 'expressing life' , they themselves are engaged in religious worship or whatever.

so far so obvious. It seems to me though, that the bugbear of 'cultural relativism' among the newly Enlightened is frequently a rhetorical device used to dismiss the interpretative generosity we should indeed extend to different societies. 'Cultural relativism' is one of various threats to an Enlightenment conceived of as a static set of attained Values rather than a necessarily ongoing process of critical self-reflection. In fact, Cultural Relativism, even in the self-contradictory variant above, continues with and presupposes enlightenment categories.

Anyway, as regards the question of cultural difference and truth, permit me a slight detour by way of illustration.

Someone asked me the other night about the question of 'Shakespeare's homosexuality'. They mentioned the infamous sonnet 20. Was their interpretation (revolving around 'thing'/ 'nothing') correct? Broadly yes. But I reminded them of the conventions of male-male friendship that existed back then, the important historical differences, the dnagers of prematurely applying contemporary categories (eg of 'sexuality') and so on.

One has to be aware of and 'respect' the cultural differences between the present and the past, not because we can't assess the past at all using our present categories, but because some of the most obvious and ready to hand categories would involve basic interpretetive error. We observe and allow cultural difference not in defiance of Truth but in its name. Moreover, it's not that we say - in the case just cited - ok, the past is a foreign country, they're allowed their quaint little differences. It is also, simultaneously, that these differences interrogate the self-evidence of our own values and expost them precisely as 'cultural'. To expose culture as culture is precisely one of the basic tasks of critical thought. To reveal something as cultural confiscates its self-evidence and makes it contestable and subject to human transformation.

Some of you will have seen this entry from notes on rhetoric:

Turkey - If your opponent is criticising the policies of some state you favour, demand that he talks about Turkey instead. This may sound a feeble ploy, equivalent to saying ‘please talk about something else’ but can be effective if you use language like ‘if you’re being consistent’ ‘disproportionate and selective attention’. (You may if you wish substitute some other country for Turkey – obviously so if, by chance, your opponent is talking about Turkey

I received a brief email recently asserting that it’s perfectly reasonable to ask that someone who is talking about abuses in country a address themselves to far more sever abuses in country b.
Well, except that your criterion for talking about regime a is not simply the severity of the abuses but, precisely, the likely consequences of speaking out about regime a, as well as the complicity of your own government (ie your representative) in the abuses of regime a.

Those who favour the Turkey ruse might consider applying it to other areas of their lives:

“How dare you criticise me as a parent when there are far worse parents overseas about whom you are scandalously silent!”

That's not to say, of course, that people can't be quizzed about why (strategically, pragmatically, ethically) they are criticising this particular regime. Indeed, the question 'a rather than b?' might be supplemented with 'now rather than then?' Why are you suddenly criticising Chavez now? Come, Is it your own devising? How is it that the free movement of your own intellect happens to coincide exactly with the interests of the US administration? etc.

Alberto, different angle

via

Zizek, by way of example

[meant to post this last week] Zizek has been addressing his famously repetitive use of examples, according to F., who attended some of the early 'masterclasses' at Birkbeck. For those of you not familiar with this feature of Zizek's work, the same joke or anecdote is re-worked in several different contexts (sometimes within the space of 50 pages) often to 'exemplify' different points or conclusions. Apparently, says F., Zizek claims to be perfectly aware of this technique and its philosophical and pedagogical uses. It's by no means simply lazy recycling. The idea is to repeat with a difference, and in repeating to insist on instabilities and non-identities of meaning.

This argument is partly supported in his latest book. Take these two sentences:

"the explanation of a universal concept becomes 'interesting' when the particular cases evoked to exemplify it are in tension with their own universality" &
"One practices concrete universality by confronting a universality with its 'unbearable' example".

The idea then is:
-To keep open the tension between the universal and the particular examples (which never can never simply 'exemplify' it but retain a substantiality of their own).
-To find and insist on the Particular which the Universal cannot quite assimilate or which renders the Universal comic (zizek's example is applying the Hegelian dialectic to sex).

But this business of allowing the particular to breath, of endlessly revising or expanding the universal (and therefore questioning its universality), this seems to be the very reverse of Zizek's practice, where - it so often seems - the particular is gleefully embraced precisely in so far as it illustrates the same neo-Lacanian conceptual matrix. Kafka's Odradek is 'jouissance embodied'; something else is 'object petit a at its purest', and so on. Zizek's readings - and this is hardly news - are scarcely sensitive to the specifics of form and context.

Thus, on the one hand, we have the errant examples slipping their conceptual marker to turn up in some other unexpected place; on the other, the self-same conceptual matrix endlessly seizing on supporting examples. But the willful imposition of meaning & the re-usable non-meaning-specific example are in two sides of the same script.

Let's re-cap:
Yes odradek signifies jouissance but could (with a little tweaking), one imagines, just as equally have signified 'objet a'; a passage from Hamlet illustrates the nature of Symbolic mandates, but this Lacanian subscriptio will tomorrow be inscribed elsewhere. There is a line in Yeats where he exclaims "another emblem there!", performatively creating what he claims (perhaps ironically) merely to discover. And this gesture - "Another Objet a (etc) there! - is the silent accompaniment to much of Zizek's analysis.

What this ends up drawing attention to, as with Benjamin's allegorist, is less the object itself than the plastic powers of the author to impose and remove meaning by fiat. Objects, says WB, are 'enslaved' in the "eccentric embrace of meaning" by the allegorist, in whose world "any person, any object" "can mean absolutely anything else." Zizek's world is not quite as open and indeterminate as this. The interpretive matrix is finite, the range of concepts to be coupled with objects and examples relatively small; but he appetite is gargantuan.

This isn't of course to suggest that Zizek's practice isn't illuminating, but the illumination is fitful, often accidental, and the suspicion always what what has flashed before you is less some hidden recess of the object than the interpretive elan of the virtuoso.

Having said all that, there is a 'logic of example' visible in Zizek which he may or mayn't be aware of. What I noticed when I was trying to compile the (now more or less abandoned) Critical Dictionary is that Zizek's definitions - of the 'Big Other' or whatever - frequently don't square with one another. This he will triumphantly proclaim is what Lacan means by the subject (etc)! But 'this' is not quite the same as the definition implied in his previous example. The new example or context will suggest a different model of the concept. This is what I mean by the logic of example. There are, for instance, many subtly different definitions of the Big Other. There will always be something in the example that deflects, resists revises the conceptual matrix you bring to it. No matter how vampiric the concept, it will always bear the colour of its victims' blood.

But perhaps (and Z. would probably profess agreement here) this refunctioning of the concept, its contextual transformation, its 'transmigration' through particular examplifications, this is the concept.

Bloodless abstraction

the American philosopher Richard Rorty, who in an essay entitled "Solidarity" argues that those who helped Jews in the last world war probably did so less because they saw them as fellow human beings but becasue they belonged to the same city, profession, or other social grouping as themselves. He then goes on to ask himself why modern American liberals should help oppressed American blacks. "Do we say that these people must be helped because they are our fellow human beings? We may, but it is much more persuasive, morally as well as politically, to describe them as our fellow Americans--to insist that it is outrageous that an American should live without hope." Morality, in short, is really just a species of patriotism. Rorty's case, however, strikes me as still too universalist. There are, after all, rather a lot of Americans, of various shapes and sizes, and there is surely something a little abstract in basing one's compassion on such grandiosely general grounds. It is almost as though "American" operates here as some sort of metalanguage or metaphysical essence, collapsing into unity a vast variety of creeds, lifestyles, ethnic groupings, and so on. Would it not be preferable for an authentic critic of universality to base his fellow-feeling on some genuine localism, say the city block? ….. I have not, incidently, yet resigned from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, merely adjusted my reasons for belonging. I now object to nuclear warfare not because it would blow up some metaphysical abstraction known as the human race, but because it would introduce a degree of unpleasantness into the lives of my Oxford neighbors. The benefit of this adjustment is that my membership of the campaign is no longer the bloodless, cerebral affair it once was, but pragmatic, experiential, lived sensuously on the pulses.

For Rorty, contingency – i.e., being born into a certain place and its culture – is Fate: your affections, moral obligations, and your default understanding of ‘how things are’ remain wedded to this accident. Some might see this doctrine as simply a regression to tribalism + a soupcon of resigned irony. It’s not that you think your little tribe is humanity as such, its just that, realistically, and experientially, you act as if it is.

Eagleton’s précis of Rorty suggests that the philosopher presents his positon as being on the side of that which is ‘… lived sensuously on the pulses’ as opposed to ‘bloodless abstraction. The solidarities of community are identified with the former, the concept of 'human rights' etc with the latter. Rorty relies on a common perception that ‘bloodless abstractions’ are inhuman, whereas spontaneous compassion is the very defining trait of ‘humanity’. This may be the exact reverse of the truth.

To further extend one's moral intelligence, to break through the prison house, relies on a faculty of abstraction. It requires not only affect but conceptual thought and/or thought-experiments, acts of the imagination. The demand to be Universalist and apply to the Other the moral concern we apply to ourselves can be foreign to and opposed to some of our most ingrained pre-rational attachments. Such moral intelligence is frequently counter-intuitive and has to be won through intellectual work.

Thus, in ‘abstracting’ from those merely sensuous common sympathies, those shared cultural traits that are so immediately palpable, so easy on the eye and ear, those shared predicates with which it is all too easy to ‘identify’, one’s sympathy and comprehension are actually enlarged; you pass beyond the immediate to a more generic humanity: the bloodless abstraction is finally the more human.

And we should even be alert to the possibility that a too tenacious attachment to ones ‘folk’ blocks the perception of this generic humanity and results in an ultimately incoherent morality wherein there is one rule for Us and another for Them.

[A version of this was originally posted at Long Sunday. I thought it worth repeating (with a difference) after observing how 'universal' values are frequently invoked- polemically and rhetorically - only in order to prosecute a particular case. In such cases the true rigour of the universal is lost sight of. One passes off a particular and 'pathological' gripe as pure fidelity to the universal. Would like to return to this another time. For now, this]

Enter Fleeing

"Again and again, in Shakespeare, in Calderon, battles fill the last act, and kings, princes, attendants and followers "enter fleeing." The moment in which they become visible to spectators brings them to a standstill. The flight of the dramatis personae is arrested by the stage. Their entry into the visual field of non-participating and truly impartial persons allows the harassed to draw breath, bathes them in new air. The appearance on stage of those who enter "fleeing" takes from this its hidden meaning. Our reading of this formula is imbued with the expectation of a place, a light, a footlight glare, in which our flight through life may be likewise sheltered in the presence of on looking strangers"

Walter Benjamin

Zizek Masterclass

Reports on the Zizek masterclass so far:

Thursday, May 25th: K-Punk

Tuesday, May 30th Different Maps

Thursday, June 1st: Different Maps & Sit Down Man..

Tuesday, June 6th: Infinite Thought

I made it to the 25th May one. It’s pretty well covered in the link above. Some of it certainly seemed to bear out the suggestion that Zizek is moving closer to Deleuze. At one point he used the ‘Hegelian-Deleuzian’ hyphenation in speaking about concrete universals. He claimed that Hegel’s ‘concrete universal’ is very close to Deleuze’s ‘reinterpretation of the Idea’. What follows are my lecture notes on this section of the talk (slightly edited for the sake of clarity). The repetitions are in the original, btw

Deleuze’s reinterpretation of an Idea: An Idea is not the fully elaborated concept but the problem. All particular empirical solutions are attempts to 'solve' this problem. This can be seen, for instance, in the way nature experiments with organs - the eye as a response to a certain 'problem'. (problem of light). Thus, the ‘problem’ is inscribed in reality itself.

Only way to grasp the thing concretely is to see it not as a self-contained thing but as an answer to a problem - as a sign of that problem. The relation between particular and universal is the relation between problem and answer/ response.

This is what characterises the Hegelian-Deleuzian approach. Can see this using the example of modernity.

What defines modernity is a problem, an antagonism. Actually existing ‘modernities’ are answers to the general universal problem, attempts to resolve the tension inscribed in the universal. It is nto just that a plurality of modernities have sprung up here and there (so let us not impose one model etc)... concrete modernities not simply ‘examples’ of modernity, but particular solutions to a single deadlock.

The particular examples of modernity do not fight each other/ compete with each other/ exist in tension with each other; no, the site of tension is universality itself. The Universal not an empty container but an antagonism.

The particular is only an attempt to resolve the tension of universality > concrete universal eg concrete forms of the state are answers to the problem of the state.

The modernity example is in fact a paraphrased version of The Parallax View, pp. 34-5. Some of it is conveniently online here (scroll down to 'jameson').

Joyce Carol Oates:

The writer's resistance to Nature:

It has no sense of humor: in its beauty, as in its ugliness, or its neutrality, there is no laughter.
It lacks a moral purpose.
It lacks a satirical dimension, registers no irony.
Its pleasures lack resonance, being accidental; its horrors, even when premeditated, are equally perfunctory, "red in tooth and claw," et cetera.
It lacks a symbolic subtext - excepting that provided by man.
It has no (verbal) language.
It has no interest in ours.
It inspires a painfully limited set of responses in 'nature writers' -
REVERENCE, AWE, PIETY, MYSTICAL ONENESS.
It eludes us even as it prepares to swallow us up, books and all.