1. An ideology of philosophy. A fellow academic responded to an article on philosophy (http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=mlhxjx9y84d00ct2jxthph91zm9dcdtz) by accusing this writer and others like him of demonstrating to the outside world that the university is “full of arrogant, useless assholes. Philosophers nowadays REALLY need to be smacked off their high horses”. (Michael Collins made the same point about the university in general in hackneyed tirades in his most recent nove. Unfortunately, while Collins is right about what he says, a novel is a poor soapbox and one cannot but get the impression it is the result of a disgruntled B student in literature.)
This article concerned the popularity and (alleged) success of books such as those published by Open Court attempting to bridge philosophy and popular culture (e.g., The Simpsons and Philosophy). Such projects are caught in a double bind.
On the one hand, as the article’s author says, the contributors to these volumes “tend to be fans of the particular show or band [being written about], and they are writing for other fans who may sense the intellectual dimension but not fully grasp it”. Philosophy, it is said, thus has the ability to reveal “deep meanings” through “sophisticated interpretations” for the New Yorker intellectual. Long time series editor Bill Irwin has hoped that these kinds of “accessible” books about philosophy will bring people to philosophy proper.
Philosophy, therefore, is something to which people need to be brought—to be “better democratic citizens” who can “think critically”—or just “better thinkers” because thinking without philosophy is slovenly. Philosophy’s pretension is that it has something unique to say to which people should pay attention if they want to know how to think properly and not be deluded by themselves. Philosophy thus “needs to be knocked off its high horse”.
On the other hand, if philosophers do not make the attempt to be “accessible” so their profession can become palatable topics of cocktail conversation, philosophy is accused of being “irrelevant”, “impractical”, or simply elitist; once again, therefore, philosophy “needs to be knocked off its high horse”.
For the record, I cannot resist mentioning that the contributors to the Open Court series are not always philosophers (and when they are, rather mediocre ones at that) and include writers from my colleague’s own discipline. Even if one generalizes the problem to the university as a whole, however (one wonders why this accusation is unique to philosophers and also to, say, literary theorists or any of the humanities), the question remains the same: what is the nature of this double bind of “professional thinking”?
Consider a story (which I may not get exactly right) about Derrida. Having sat through a roundtable about justice, when the discussion moved to him, he burst forth with a diatribe, asserting that instead of sitting in the room talking theory, everyone in the room should march to the prison down the street where an innocent man was being held. Or recall Rousseau’s indignation at the moral philosopher who sits in his armchair looking down at the atrocities in the street.
On the one hand, the partisans of moral and political action (over and above grand theorizing) are obviously caught in a manifest performative contradiction—one which should have been known to literary theory for quite some time (i.e., saying one doesn’t have a theory for practice is itself a theory). For myself, I see no other solution to the failure of recognizing a contradiction than Aristotle’s.
On the other hand, philosophy can no longer be content either with Enlightenment foundationalism nor with a blithely naïve pragmatism (for which someone like Rorty, for example, has been soundly disciplined by his colleagues in Europe). It’s most pressing institutional concern is to re-evaluate its relation to its interlocutors.
2. The ideology of philosophers. Philosophers learn techniques for argument. The layman is under the thrall of common sense, of opinion, of ideology. The bigot, the fascist, has a “closed mind”. The intellectual has an “open mind”. The philosopher has an “active mind”—an open mind that is at the same time “critical”. The fascist refuses to change his mind—his belief is his belief and he has a right to his beliefs, damnit. The philosopher goes one better: the philosopher, so every introductory handbook says, is the one who can “justify” his beliefs … which is precisely why the philosopher is least apt to change his beliefs. The philosopher has an earned right to his beliefs, and it is the philosopher (the philosopher-king) who then, through his generosity and liberality, grants the fascist the right to his own beliefs in the name of “toleration”.
13 October 2007
26 September 2007
Some orientations
1. The thinking of singularity. The old metaphysics consisted of a thinking of the infinite, which took the name of God—i.e., what Heidegger called onto-theology and Marion the “theological destitution of metaphysics”. In France, Bergson’s “introduction” to metaphysics consisted of a rejection of this tradition not, as some would say, into a preoccupation with conceptions of difference, but into a thinking of singularity (without negation and, of course, without death). The problem for (metaphysical) thinking today remains this thinking of singularity (which Lévinas gives the name of infinity, but in this he is just as much a “philosopher of the event” as Deleuze and Badiou). But as the preeminent thinkers of singularity have warned us, this thinking is perhaps not best described by the term “metaphysics” and “concept”, for the singular is precisely that which cannot be grasped. The singular is presented, rather, in an image (something like what Deleuze calls the “image of thought”).
As a corollary: the hegemony of vision from Plato (the “solar eye”) to Husserl (in intentional analysis) is the hegemony of the concept over affect. What is needed is to assert the rights of listening and of sound.
2. Discourse is inherently ideological. As a corollary, “discourse ethics” is a contradiction in terms.
3. To avoid the conflation of politics to democracy (or, equivalently, to fascism), the proper marriage is not that between politics and ontology but politics and aesthetics (neither the politicization of the aesthetic nor the aestheticization of the political but the production of images at their point of intersection). One presupposes, of course, the necessity of radical politics just as in the thinking of singularity one presupposes the necessity of radical alterity.
4. The fundamental error of analytic philosophy is the conflation of ontology and logic; the fundamental error of continental philosophy is the conflation of science and technology.
As a corollary: the hegemony of vision from Plato (the “solar eye”) to Husserl (in intentional analysis) is the hegemony of the concept over affect. What is needed is to assert the rights of listening and of sound.
2. Discourse is inherently ideological. As a corollary, “discourse ethics” is a contradiction in terms.
3. To avoid the conflation of politics to democracy (or, equivalently, to fascism), the proper marriage is not that between politics and ontology but politics and aesthetics (neither the politicization of the aesthetic nor the aestheticization of the political but the production of images at their point of intersection). One presupposes, of course, the necessity of radical politics just as in the thinking of singularity one presupposes the necessity of radical alterity.
4. The fundamental error of analytic philosophy is the conflation of ontology and logic; the fundamental error of continental philosophy is the conflation of science and technology.
10 September 2007
Useless information
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/health/research/06hyper.html?ex=1189828800&en=0ae934b1e68385ed&ei=5070&emc=eta1
(Again, I had hoped that the friend who sent me this article and some comments would post here, but apparently my powers of persuasion require an upgrade. I raise here what I take to be her major points with an extension of my own.)
Like much of the work done in sociology, one needs to proceed with care. One is probably advised, for example, to separate Glassner’s thesis of the “culture of fear” from its connection with the power elite. In so doing, what is left is a useful rubric for understanding the generalized fear (pre-dating 9/11, which probably contributed to the subsequent depolitization of discourse under the Bush administration) disseminated by and through information systems (or what is usually, fairly imprecisely, termed “the media”).
This article is no exception, since only two responses are possible given the information provided; these two responses, however, while practically different, are theoretically equivalent. On the one hand, since the article only names one additive, one can react with a generalized suspicion of food additives and proceed to the nearest Whole Foods to look for organic labels. On the other hand, one can for the same reason ignore the information altogether and eat all the soda, chips, and candy one wants.
In both cases, what is taken for granted is a naïve conception of what “healthy food” is or, better, what the relationship between food and health is. Instead, one doctor (from MGH, no less) is quoted worrying about whether the clinical significance of increased hyperactivity outweighs concerns of social ostracism if children don’t eat the same foods as their peers. Aside from being too stupid for rebuttal, one wonders what this doctor would say to the schools who have already eliminated vending machines and junk food from their buildings in favor of juice, fruit, and vegetables after finding that these latter foods improve students’ energy and focus.
Or, perhaps we need further to separate the “social” aspect of these kinds of questions from the “science”. That this study found that some food additives raise hyperactivity already begs certain questions and, in so doing, masks certain presuppositions in the discourse concerning health. Suppose, as an intelligent skeptic ought, someone faults the method of the study or a particularly belligerent rival performs a counter-study. Nothing in the business of conducting studies provides a measure for theoretical judgment. So much is banal. But what is not as easy to see is the active work of ideology that bloats practical judgment at the expense of theoretical judgment. Taking studies such as this one seriously requires a certain frame of intelligibility according to which the important issues are things like assuming “hyperactivity” is a coherent category, that the relevant focus group is children, and so on.
(Again, I had hoped that the friend who sent me this article and some comments would post here, but apparently my powers of persuasion require an upgrade. I raise here what I take to be her major points with an extension of my own.)
Like much of the work done in sociology, one needs to proceed with care. One is probably advised, for example, to separate Glassner’s thesis of the “culture of fear” from its connection with the power elite. In so doing, what is left is a useful rubric for understanding the generalized fear (pre-dating 9/11, which probably contributed to the subsequent depolitization of discourse under the Bush administration) disseminated by and through information systems (or what is usually, fairly imprecisely, termed “the media”).
This article is no exception, since only two responses are possible given the information provided; these two responses, however, while practically different, are theoretically equivalent. On the one hand, since the article only names one additive, one can react with a generalized suspicion of food additives and proceed to the nearest Whole Foods to look for organic labels. On the other hand, one can for the same reason ignore the information altogether and eat all the soda, chips, and candy one wants.
In both cases, what is taken for granted is a naïve conception of what “healthy food” is or, better, what the relationship between food and health is. Instead, one doctor (from MGH, no less) is quoted worrying about whether the clinical significance of increased hyperactivity outweighs concerns of social ostracism if children don’t eat the same foods as their peers. Aside from being too stupid for rebuttal, one wonders what this doctor would say to the schools who have already eliminated vending machines and junk food from their buildings in favor of juice, fruit, and vegetables after finding that these latter foods improve students’ energy and focus.
Or, perhaps we need further to separate the “social” aspect of these kinds of questions from the “science”. That this study found that some food additives raise hyperactivity already begs certain questions and, in so doing, masks certain presuppositions in the discourse concerning health. Suppose, as an intelligent skeptic ought, someone faults the method of the study or a particularly belligerent rival performs a counter-study. Nothing in the business of conducting studies provides a measure for theoretical judgment. So much is banal. But what is not as easy to see is the active work of ideology that bloats practical judgment at the expense of theoretical judgment. Taking studies such as this one seriously requires a certain frame of intelligibility according to which the important issues are things like assuming “hyperactivity” is a coherent category, that the relevant focus group is children, and so on.
06 September 2007
Panagia: the poetics of politics
Why the image? Panagia has also answered this question, though perhaps less emphatically as one might like (for one, Panagia explicitly avoids the term “the musical” in favor of “the poetic”). In proposing a poetics of political thinking, Panagia has taken important (though early) first steps, faithful to the spirit of Rancière, in the diachronous (or what Desmond would call the metaxological; or what could even be called metaxiological) thinking of aesthetics and politics. But the insight expressed by Panagia’s method is not simply the value of aesthetics for politics and political thinking (although the reading of Rawls given therein, for example, is second perhaps only to MacAdam’s deconstruction of the original position) but the development of a poetics of thinking that preserves the (not just formal) distinction between ontology and logic and the refusal to reduce ethics to either (a poetics of political thinking is, rather, an account of the ethics of representation).
In other terms: the image is what, in representation, exceeds the subject. But of course this is unhelpful because everything exceeds the subject. It is something like, in the Lyotardian-Kantian sublime, the experience of this excess. Or, succinctly, the image is precisely what Bergson said it was (no one else has managed to say it better): the universe is simply an ensemble of images.
In other terms: the image is what, in representation, exceeds the subject. But of course this is unhelpful because everything exceeds the subject. It is something like, in the Lyotardian-Kantian sublime, the experience of this excess. Or, succinctly, the image is precisely what Bergson said it was (no one else has managed to say it better): the universe is simply an ensemble of images.
26 August 2007
Friedman
In the final volume of the Poetics of Social Forms, Jameson has again (as if we were not convinced previously) demonstrated that there is apparently nothing he has not read and, more importantly, nothing he could not fail to illumine. AF is more than the application of the critical functions previously developed to a particular genre, as certain reviewers (friendly as they may be) would have us believe. AF is itself a certain poetics, just as the genre it treats constitutes a certain poetics.
In speaking of Friedman, I take one key insight from AF (while doing some neglect to the critical method developed therein): that utopianism is not the goal of SF (science fiction) narrative but is a function of it. Is this not precisely what is revealed at the end of Friedman's Coldfire triology? In the human encounter with the fae--with the unconscious power of life, of production, of immanence--Friedman posits the encounter with nihilism and presents a startling alternative to Zarathustra in Tarrant: the redeemed Messiah, the tragic Christ who brings God to man but in so doing debars himself from ever seeing His face. When the patriarch of the Church unites humanity under the sign of the Go(o)d--thus foreclosing the possibility of magic--he does so precisely by giving birth to the modern man--the divided psyche (Freud), the sovereign separated from nature (Comte or any number of others), the Ulysses bound to the mast (Adorno): Erna becomes the Earth from which the colonists had left.
And here the narrative ends. Utopia is signified by the absence of any détente or dénouement but in the smile "at the dawn of a new world".
This new world is not a project (Heidegger) or a program (Saint-Simon, Fourier, etc). Friedman indicates nothing other than possibility itself--but a possibility marked by the burden of guilt (sacrifice), responsibility (the withdrawal of God), and freedom.
In speaking of Friedman, I take one key insight from AF (while doing some neglect to the critical method developed therein): that utopianism is not the goal of SF (science fiction) narrative but is a function of it. Is this not precisely what is revealed at the end of Friedman's Coldfire triology? In the human encounter with the fae--with the unconscious power of life, of production, of immanence--Friedman posits the encounter with nihilism and presents a startling alternative to Zarathustra in Tarrant: the redeemed Messiah, the tragic Christ who brings God to man but in so doing debars himself from ever seeing His face. When the patriarch of the Church unites humanity under the sign of the Go(o)d--thus foreclosing the possibility of magic--he does so precisely by giving birth to the modern man--the divided psyche (Freud), the sovereign separated from nature (Comte or any number of others), the Ulysses bound to the mast (Adorno): Erna becomes the Earth from which the colonists had left.
And here the narrative ends. Utopia is signified by the absence of any détente or dénouement but in the smile "at the dawn of a new world".
This new world is not a project (Heidegger) or a program (Saint-Simon, Fourier, etc). Friedman indicates nothing other than possibility itself--but a possibility marked by the burden of guilt (sacrifice), responsibility (the withdrawal of God), and freedom.
02 August 2007
Tragedy II
We are all looking for a good time. Life is too short and there is no day but today (time flies, time dies). If we are all born into sin, then redemption can only consist in the denial of sin by taking the sin of someone else’s failures onto my own soul—into me, eating of this bread, swallowing your pride. But always someone else—not “you” but “that one”, another one … no one.
“Don’t hate me for my beauty!” How can I give you a mile when all I have is an inch, caught between me and you, between me and myself? If I wanted to show you my nakedness, I wouldn’t wear fishnet. “Look! LOOK AT ME … and let me disappear.”
“Don’t hate me for my beauty!” How can I give you a mile when all I have is an inch, caught between me and you, between me and myself? If I wanted to show you my nakedness, I wouldn’t wear fishnet. “Look! LOOK AT ME … and let me disappear.”
01 August 2007
Courage
1. Courage must always manifest in the face of violence. In particular, courage is predicated on self-violence, in death (the extreme possibility), in the willing of death. (This is, however, different from suicide, for suicide cannot be a willing.) Courage, real courage, is more common and, thus, more demanding than perhaps we always want to acknowledge. At the risk of falling into the jargon of authenticity, there is courage in every faithful act—in the greeting, in the glance, in the smile, in the departure.
2. In courage the distinction between morality and ethics is blurred: there cannot be a distinction between the care of the self and the recognition of the other, for example (not because these two things are conflated, but because they are presented under two aspects of this phenomenon).
3. Courage is also an artistic virtue (which in some sense is also an intellectual virtue, I suppose). Artistic courage opposes every utterance like “I want to be famous” (which in academia manifests in wanting an “–ian” attached to one’s name), for nothing could be more disastrous for an artist.
At first, this seems like a strange thing to say. What, for example, is more lamentable than the fate of “forgotten” artists (like Thalberg or Méhul) who are being valiantly “recovered”, now that we are getting bored with Liszt and Beethoven? Would not their art have been better served with fame?
Fame, of course, is recognition, and nothing is more ruinous for art than recognition (the shortest path to ideology). What art requires, instead, is repetition. Hence the term “recovery” is not quite right, for there is nothing more asinine than the “rediscovery” of third-rate art simply because it is an alternative to the exhaustion of the classics. (But, of course, a classic that is exhausted is not a classic.)
The real tragedy is for an artist to disappear. But in this case there is a special problem and forms the very limit of art: if an artist disappears, then we (here, now) can never know that he has. (Hence, to eulogize or elegize this artist would require the construction of a fiction.) This possibility of disappearing is, in short, the very definition of artistic courage.
3a. This explains why the artist cannot care for fame. Along the same examples I’ve been using, this is why Alkan more than Liszt is the artist par excellence (and why, among his more limited output, there is more uniform quality in Alkan’s work than in Liszt’s). And yet, what was Alkan’s fate?
2. In courage the distinction between morality and ethics is blurred: there cannot be a distinction between the care of the self and the recognition of the other, for example (not because these two things are conflated, but because they are presented under two aspects of this phenomenon).
3. Courage is also an artistic virtue (which in some sense is also an intellectual virtue, I suppose). Artistic courage opposes every utterance like “I want to be famous” (which in academia manifests in wanting an “–ian” attached to one’s name), for nothing could be more disastrous for an artist.
At first, this seems like a strange thing to say. What, for example, is more lamentable than the fate of “forgotten” artists (like Thalberg or Méhul) who are being valiantly “recovered”, now that we are getting bored with Liszt and Beethoven? Would not their art have been better served with fame?
Fame, of course, is recognition, and nothing is more ruinous for art than recognition (the shortest path to ideology). What art requires, instead, is repetition. Hence the term “recovery” is not quite right, for there is nothing more asinine than the “rediscovery” of third-rate art simply because it is an alternative to the exhaustion of the classics. (But, of course, a classic that is exhausted is not a classic.)
The real tragedy is for an artist to disappear. But in this case there is a special problem and forms the very limit of art: if an artist disappears, then we (here, now) can never know that he has. (Hence, to eulogize or elegize this artist would require the construction of a fiction.) This possibility of disappearing is, in short, the very definition of artistic courage.
3a. This explains why the artist cannot care for fame. Along the same examples I’ve been using, this is why Alkan more than Liszt is the artist par excellence (and why, among his more limited output, there is more uniform quality in Alkan’s work than in Liszt’s). And yet, what was Alkan’s fate?
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