conversations

critical reflections

A concern in contemporary philosophy is the need or necessity of a new direction. Often this takes place through the "denigration of the tradition," via a critical reflection upon the presuppositions of the tradition and, at the same time, proposing new directions. This is often evident in French philosophy, especially in phenomenology and deconstruction, with its new pathways of embodiment and alterity.

A review of a book of embodiment by Jack Reynolds entitled ' Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity.' It is a very critical review, and I'm in no position to judge it as I have not read this text. So I do not know how Reynolds judges phenomenology and deconstruction's success in critiquing the philosophical tradition and opening up new pathways.

The text is a reading of Merleau Ponty through Derrida; one that tries to move beyond the traditional phenomenologist vs post-structuralist schematic on the grounds that this might not be an adequate theoretical framework to get a grip on the more valuable contributions of both Merleau-Ponty and Derrida.

popularising philosophy

I've just noticed this. It is philosophy on public radio--- on the ABC's Radio National.

The Philosopher's Zone is a 'weekly look at the world of philosophy and at what philosophy has to tell us about the world.' Sounds interesting doesn't it? 'The world'? Is it our world, the world we live in? Or is it the world in abstract?

Scrolling through the archives I notice this progam on ethical relationships. Christina Colegate says that 'philosophy isn't just a bundle of dusty books on the shelf, but is actually, following Aristotle, a way of being in the world. It's actually a practice, an activity.'
I concur with that. The conversation quickly quickly turns to Aristotle, with Christina saying that:

"... one of the virtues of his work is that it isn't a dogmatic kind of set of rules about how to live; it's actually a theory that develops a notion of wisdom as practice, wisdom as the accumulation of living skills, I suppose ----I'm trying to think of a better word---of how to moderate behaviour, how to live with others, negotiating the middle line, where we can actually remain happy in our sense, happy people living a pleasurable lives, but also good lives where we're living in harmony with the people around us.

That is a fair interepretation of Aristotle, one that I'm quite happy with.

So how does our mode of being in the world become one of happy people living pleasurable lives in late modernity or postmodernity? Christina's suggestion is this:

Aristotle's idea of the ergon, of always on a journey of developing virtue, developing the good life, seeking out happiness, through reflection, through critical thinking. I think point of view is definitely important; I think wisdom is something accumulated over time, for sure, and that's why in my book I've attempted as much as I can to write from the naive point of view, a questioning point of view, to borrow Socrates' kind of practice of questioning, to try and seek the questions rather than the answers to these huge philosophical dilemmas.

Suprisingly, neither Saunders nor Colgate address Adorno's thesis of the decay of ethical life in late rmodernity, which argues that it is very difficult to live the good life: ie., a mode of being in the world of happy people living pleassurable lives.

So this understanding of populising philosophy does not engage with the difficulties we encounter in living an ethical life. It is content with populising classical texts.

embodied knowledge

The embodied character of human conduct--embodied practices and embodied discourse--- presupposes the idea of a set of historical relations 'deposited' within individual bodies in the form of mental and corporeal schemata of perception, appreciation, and action. We are socialized into both a linguistic and a bodily community of practices. concept of habitus expands and illustrates its force as an embodied discourse. Our body is not just the executant of the goals we frame or just the locus of the causal factors which shape our representations. Our understanding itself is embodied. That is, our bodily know-how and the way we act and move can encode components of our understanding of self and world.

Our embodied skills are acquired by dealing with things and situations. These skills in turn determine how things and situations show up for us as requiring our responses.

Heidegger & bodies

In searching for some internet material on Whitehead, Heidegger and Deleuze I chanced upon this judgement on Heidegger by Steven Shaviro over at Pinocchio Theory. He says:

I’ve long detested Heidegger, for a number of reasons....Heidegger embodies for me, more than any other thinker in the Western tradition, what Nietzsche called the “spirit of gravity.” He’s heavy and morbid, without an ounce of humor or irony or even sense that we human beings are/have bodies. He picks up on the worst part of Nietzsche, the heavy-handed, pompous, self-obsessed, doom-laden, apocalyptic, romantic rhetoric — so stereotypically “Germanic” — of Zarathustra, but completely misses Nietzsche’s gaiety, sarcasm, “French” scepticism, and general sense of dancing over the abyss. I’ve never been able to decide which part of Heidegger is worse: the existential part, all about authenticity and resoluteness and the earth and the dwelling and being-towards-death (i.e. the Nazi side), or the ontological part, with its endless dissection of concepts by returning to their etymological roots, its walking on forest paths, its idiotic hatred of technology, its mythology of (capital-L) Language, its waiting and hearkening, its twisting of its own formulations into an endless process of self-confirmation through self-undoing (i.e. the deconstructionist side).

That suprised me. The judgement is so uncompromising hostile. I guess it rolls all the prejudices into one.

My first reaction is that this is is an expression of a literary cultural theorist's intense dislike for philosophy, but Shapiro kinda likes Whitehead's Process and Reality.

Shaviro says the philsophy in this text is all about change, creativity, and the production of novelty.

There are no entities in the universe according to Whitehead, but only events. Or rather, events (which he usually calls “occasions”) are themselves the only entities. These “occasions” are each of them radically new — each of them is something that never existed before — and indeed, it is only because of this perpetual creativity and novelty that we are even able to think in terms of a “before” and an “after,” of time passing and irreversible — and yet each of them is radically intertwined with, affected by and affecting in its own turn, everything else. Everything is singular, but nothing is isolated.

So where to begin with the prejudices towards Heidegger? The; idiotic hatred of technology' claim is partly addressed here. I want to briedly Shaviro's claim that Heidegger has no sense that we human beings are/have bodies.

This is misleading because Heidegger's account of our everyday unsustainable practices ( turning the key in the door, doing the dishes, making the bed) are habitual. Instead of these habitual pratices being being the effects of consciousness directing bodily movement; they are rather the expression of an implicit kind of bodily intelligence or tacit knowledge. In these everyday situations, or those like walking the dog , one’s body knows what to do, even in the absence of a determining mental attitude. Though we can, and do, reflect on these habitual practices, they are far more bodily comportments than they are shapes of mind or consciousness.

This understanding of Heidegger's conception of our everyday habitual practices is well known. Dasein is a bodily being. It is Merleau-Ponty who is credited with drawing out the implications for our understanding of the body of Heidegger’s analysis of human being in Being and Time.

That is why I talk in terms of Shaviro's prejudices about Heidegger.

Heidegger, environmentalism

A quote from Simon James, Heidegger and the Role of the Body in Environmental Ethics':

Many radical environmental thinkers proclaim that we are at a crucial point in our historical understanding of nature. To pass beyond our current period of environmental crisis, the story runs, we must relinquish the impoverished conceptions of nature bequeathed us by the western tradition for a richer, more spiritually satisfying account of the natural world and our place in it. Heidegger would agree with this general project. ...he maintains that the modern devastation of nature is the result of the predominance of our modern “technological” understanding of the world, which, in turn, he sees as the culmination of the western “metaphysical” tradition.

I concur with that interpretation of Heidegger. Heidegger is making an ecological critique of modernity.

Carlson

Maybe the growing ferocity of hurricanes hitting the United States is probably caused by global warming? The increased intensity of these kinds of extreme storms is very likely to be due to global warming. Those who simply don't want to accept human activities can change climate, and are changing the climate, can be likened to the people who denied that smoking causes lung cancer.

James says that Heidegger associates technology with a distinctive sort of thinking, namely, calculative thinking, a thinking that “computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities. It is perhaps for this reason that Heidegger introduces his account of technology in terms of the extraction of energy: “The way of revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such.” In this way, Heidegger links his account of technology with the devastation of nature. To see the natural world as a reservoir of standing reserve is to see it as something that can be challenged, set upon, in short, exploited.

James says that Heidegger’s technological world, in which nature can be exploited without limit, can be thought of as the metaphysical basis of a society that is, in a sense, unsustainable. I concur with that judgement. The implication is that we have lost our rootedness in the world.

James says that in his later writings on “dwelling” Heidegger presents an account of a wholesome “non-technological” understanding of the world.

end of metaphysics?

This is another quote from John Protevi's review of Eric Alliez, The Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy?:

Here of course we see the refreshing courage of Deleuze and Guattari -- and that of Alliez -- in ignoring all qualms about the "end of metaphysics." Hence not only is there a need to draw a distance between Deleuze and Guattari's ontology and that of Badiou -- as when Alliez correctly notes that contemporary philosophy finds itself staging "the idea of a maximal ontological tension between Deleuze and Badiou".. -- and the need to note the affinity of Deleuze and Guattari's endeavor with the great speculative metaphysics of Whitehead -- which will occupy Alliez throughout his third chapter -- but also an unacknowledged confrontation with the Derridean / Levinasian "post-phenomenologists."

I've never understood all the talk about the end of metaphysics at all, other than in the Heideggerian sense of exhaustion of scientific metaphysics (ontology) Another way that I can make sense of this is in terms of a positivist conception of science. On this account the critique of religion, the end of metaphysics, and the displacement of philosophy are rolled in together to give us empirical enquiry and science.

We also seem to have a postmodernism that interprets Nietzsche as radicalising the critique of metaphysics, Heidegger declaring Nietzsche the last metaphysician, and Derrida declaring that Heidegger's 'Being' as the metaphysics of presence … cannot be continued. Hence we reach a dead end----the end of metaphysics.

This suggests that the end of metaphysics’ is a development in continental philosophy that took place in the course of the nineteenth century and has as its focus the Nietzsche-Heidegger axis, which is then interpreted as the main motor behind the debate on metaphysics in contemporary philosophy.

In his review Protevi says that Deleuze and Guattari's start doing metaphysics as they are engaged in the attempt "to sketch a programme of physical ontology up to the task of superseding the opposition between 'physicalism' and 'phenomenology' :

'...the best philosophical work in Alliez's book is done in the third chapter, "Onto-Ethologics," which comments on the shortest part of What is Philosophy?, the conclusion, "From Chaos to the Brain." Here Whitehead steps to the fore, as the question is the "undoing the dependence of the point of view on a preformed subject" (53). To reinforce To reinforce the importance of this point Alliez cites Deleuze from his book on Leibniz, The Fold: "a subject will be what comes to the point of view, or rather what inhabits the point of view"'

What we get is the Whiteheadean "ontological auto-constitution of a new subject on the basis of its objects" connected to Varela's work on self-organization in neural assemblages and the development of the concept of "enaction," or the co-arising of subject and world.

bodies, sex, ecstasy

Another reason for turning to the work of Bill Henson is that it is about bodies and sexuality as well as inner experience and the unconscious:

Bill Henson, Untitled #47, 1998, Untitled, 1997 - 1998

We have hints of ecstasy:

Bill Henson, Untitled #86, 1998, Untitled, 1997 - 1998

This takes us beyond the utilitarian conception of pain and pleasure the possibility that something could be pleasureable because it is painful. This throws the theory of utilitarianism into disarray. In this world, pleasure is good, and pain is bad. The notion that pain and pleasure can fold back onto each other in complex ways is absent. The ways in which pain and pleasure can annihilate the self and liberate one from the bounds of the ego are not included.

Bill Henson, Untitled 1994 / 95

This is a world of conflicting forces. in which the boundaries of the self are overcome and the edicts of the rational ego often ignored in the pursuit in sexual experience. Though the pursuit of sexual ecstasy through pain is seen as masochism, as a perversion, Bataille argues that this is one example of liberation through surrender.

politics and ethical modernity

Some of the recent events in Australian politics highlight the hollowing out of ethical modernity that we have been exploring with Adorno.

I'm back on deck

I'm back on deck. I was busy working in Melbourne over the weekend and I had little time to post, read or even to think about becoming.

Bill Henson, Untitled #37, Untitled, 1997 - 1998

I 'll have to ease my way back into posting, as I've become disconnected from my previous posts.

So I will rely on the work of Bill Henson He seems to have an affinity with the French philosophers:

Bill Henson, Untitled #5, Untitled, 1997 - 1998

I was thinking of Bataille and Kossowski

Bill Henson, Untitled #12, Untitled, 1997 - 1998
It's all about inner experience, the unconscious and sexuality:

Bill Henson, Untitled #19, Untitled, 1997 - 1998

Art for Deleuze is interpreted as having a capacity to rupture life. Does Henson do this? I Dunno. The images are more affective than cognitive. I guess it does disrupt the everyday and common sense.

On a book on Deleuze and Guattari

A review of a book on Deleuze by Eric Alliez, entitled 'The Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy?', This text focuses on Deleuze and Guattari's text 'What is Philosophy? The reviewer says that in his second chapter, "The Aetiology of Science," Alliez stages :

'...Deleuze and Guattari's polemic against analytic philosophy, as scientization of philosophy. Now we have to read the analytics not as Hegelians, that is, as philosophers judging science from above, but as faithful to Deleuze and Guattari's notion that philosophy, science, and art are three different modes of thought. For Alliez, Deleuze and Guattari are engaged in the attempt "to sketch a programme of physical ontology up to the task of superseding the opposition between 'physicalism' and 'phenomenology' by integrating the physico-mathematical phenomenology of scientific thought into a superior materialism founded on a general dynamics" '

I too understand analytic philosophy in Australia to be a scientization of philosophy. Hence my turn to continental philosophy.

What I understand is that Deleuze constructs a "non-Hegelian" ontology that seeks to explain ontological change in terms of immanent difference. Rather than rely upon a change of unified beings imposing wills on each other, forming coherence by reaction (presumably, this is how Deleuze interprets Hegel dialectic of the master-slave relationship), Deleuze scours his philosophical predecessors for concepts that differentiate between external and internal causation and privilege internal causation.

I interpret this on terms of autopoiesis associated with the Chilean biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco J. Varela. Autopoiesis is process whereby an organization produces itself. An autopoietic organization is an autonomous and self-maintaining unity which contains component-producing processes; it is self-production understood in terms of living machines. Maturana and Varela say:

"An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network." (Maturana, Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization of the Living, 1973, p. 78)

It is an attempt to think self movement in terms of a machine metaphysics .Hence an autopoietic system operates as a closed system.

Can Delueze's notion of becoming be conceptualized in terms of autopoiesis?

Deleuze/Nietzsche #2

Another post from John C. Halasz that has been taken from the comments section of this post..

Well, I read the Deleuze/Nietzsche article a few days back, though, needless to say, I wasn't exactly convinced by it, nor did it seem of compelling interest. (Such a lot of homework, but I treat it as an "open book" exam anyway.) But the bone I want to pick is the notion that there is a distinctively "post-modern" critique of metaphysics, with an unprecedented scope and force of its own.

To the contrary, my understanding of the main line of Western philosophy since Kant is precisely as a progressive critique of metaphysics. By "progressive", I don't mean a linear development, nor that the various proponents habored a progressive intent or view of history. I'm borrowing from the philosophy/historiography of science, and I mean a step-by-step and cummulative process, whereby the various positions mutually modify one another, leading through such acccumulation to the transformation of frameworks and shared, but contested problematics. You can name the parade of usual suspects, as you please, and the outliers, some of whom subsequently were promoted to the head of the class,- (though my own favorite outlier, Vico, actually preceded this whole development),- but what they all shared was a sense of growing crisis in the inherited, received metaphysical conception of reason, and the response of attempting to remedy that growing deficiency, however variously.

The case can be summarized thusly: Greek metaphysics first emerged, in opposition to the enmeshment and sacrificial submission to the mythic powers of the world, through the recognition of the transcendence of being, which yielded the sense that the world could be understood in terms of a quasi-systematic rational implicature, and a trauma of separation from the mythic world, which the "rational soul" had to master in order to be equal to its insight into that rational implicature. Henceforth, the notion of reason as a self-sufficient mode of the human understanding of the world and of human self-understanding is born. But Greek metaphysics, through its "binary" opposition to myth, carried its mythic antagonist with it as its doppelgaenger.

Further, Greek philosophy was born precisely at the point that the world of the Greek polis, which it presupposed, was at the point of collapse,- ("the owl of Minevrva flies at dusk")-, and would be transmitted into tradition by societies/cultures that were at once more politically diffuse and more mythically enmeshed than what had emerged and come to fruition in classical Greece. But eventually, the ideal of Greek metaphysics would make its way into the (re-)emergence of Western (philosophical/elite) culture, whereby the distinctive mark was that all knowledges, practices, social or natural orders, received their legitimation ostensibly through their "justification" by "Reason".

Given the forgoing synopsis, the point of the progressive critique of metaphysics is that it amounts to a reflexive continuation of the critique of myth: a critique of metaphysics is a critique of the myth of (metaphysical) reason. (Marx, a major suspect, is a crucial case here. It's important to recognize that Marx did not have a critique of religion, but rather a critique of the critique of religion. In consequence, he transferred the critique of religion on to a critique of secular ideology, while fitting it out with a "material" basis, all the while giving rise to a novel secular ideology.)

To further sharpen the point, though the metaphysical form of reason, indeed, criticizes and evades the mythified powers of natural and social domination, it is wont thereby to form conceptual mythologies of its own, de facto in submission to those self-same powers, and it is the reflexive critique of those conceptual mythologies that has been the contested burden of modern philosophy. (My own personal position is that this work is "completed" in the critical dissolution of epistemology in the work of Wittgenstein and Levinas. Henceforth, philosophy of itself has no claim to knowledge as such: there is no distinctively philosophical knowledge.

In fact, the criticism of the notion that knowledge is the supreme justification of existence is one of the main concept-fetishes to be purged of myth. Henceforth, other than the interminable debates over rationality and reason, the only competences left to philosophy as a distinct perspective or discipline are the interpretation and analysis of meaning- rather than truth-, the criticism of abstraction and its derivation, and the elucidation of norms, all without any claim to self-grounding or self-constituting "autonomy" and without any accompanying claim to the human sufficiency of reason, which is always contested and always at stake.)

The paradox of the "end" of philosophy is that it is precisely one of the finest products of the ideal of critical and self-critical reason that first emerged into the light of day under the aegis of Greek metaphysics. It's at that point that any specifically post-modern approach or mode enters onto the stage.

As to Nietzsche, I've never exactly taken him as a "positive" doctrinal philosopher, rather than as an extremely acute philosphical critic/critic of philosophy. I'd thought Heidegger's point about Nietzsche being, willy-nilly, enmeshed in the metaphysical tradition, aside from that deriving from taking the "doctrinal" Nietzsche a bit too seriously, even ponderously, was that Nietzsche was relying on a metaphysical notion of subjectivity, both in his appeal to "will" and to "values", which subjectivity, according to Heidegger, is a reflex of the metaphysical notion of substance. The critique of the metaphysics of the will, in my humble opinion, is one of the more valuable and recuperable parts of Heidegger, however mightily he sinned against it.

But I've alway thought that, whatever his broader prospects as a classical philologist, Nietzsche really needs to be understood against the background of Kant. It's not just that his ad hominem polemics bring out all those half-truths that are suppressed by the four-square Kantian conception of "Reason". It's that the basic move he makes is to reduce and identify all judgments to aesthetic judgments of taste, the rationality of which Kant first foregrounded and vindicated.

But the Kantian "justification" of aesthetic judgments of taste relied precisely upon the infrastructure of Kantian differentiations between domains of judgment, which are at once relied upon and collapsed by Nietzsche's generalization of aesthetic judgments onto a "cosmic" scale. (Briefly, the correlation would run: the "will-to-power" = transcendental synthesis, the uebermensch = transcendental subject, and "eternal recurrance" = the categorical imperative gone beserk. It's not so much that Nietzshe is "wrong", as that he's already operating in a parodic mode of criticism.)

But Nietzsche's criticisms actually gain greater force if one understands the "will-to-power", not as some generalization of 'cosmic" force, as he seems to present it, but as an existential locus of a perspectival criticism of presuppositions: where Nietzsche differs from his aestheticizing contemporaries is not just in his refusal to restrict such awareness to the domain of art, but rather in his lending it a specifically ethical import- hence "immoralism". Perhaps the whole paradox of Nietzsche's subsequent reception- how could he have known?- is that, while the thrust of his endeavor is against the notion of a return to any mythic "home", as represented to him by romanticism, as well as, Hegelian historical dialectics, he was taken by his epigones as authorizing a "new" mythology, in whatever direction, as a requirement for new "meaning".

As for Deleuze and his ilk, there are several worries. For one, does the obsession with difference actually have a flattening and de-differentiating effect, authorizing a regressive atavism by failing to sustain a sufficient conception of reason to acknowledge real differences and their effects? Does the collapsing of the notion of reason and its infrastructure proceed so far as to lose the demythifying intent and "authorize" or perversely legitimize new forms of mythic delusionality? Does the obsession with "becoming" not only conflate the the differences between change in "being", change in the world, and change in individual or collective human existences, but convert human freedom into a blind compulsion, rather than a real phenomenon, which can be delineated under different contents and conditions?

And doesn't such a self-insistent approach to sheer differentiation for difference's sake mirror the disintegrative tendencies of late capitalist societies without allowing for the establishment of any framework of social analysis by which such differentiation can be appreciated, beyond the sheerly categorical level? (It matters little that the claim is issued in the name of the acategorial: what is really at issue is what is "properly" and meaningfully acategorial.) Finally, isn't the insistence on differentiating "force" a (sollipsistic) continuation of the classical metaphysical insistence on the superiority of activity over passivity: patience, waiting, attentiveness, vulnerability, suffering, woundedness?

So, to return to the initial question about being and becoming, I'm not sure that is a good one in which to raise the issue of "binary oppositions" and the excluded middle and the ways such oppositions determine the alternatives of thinking, since, while the Parmenidean identification of thought and being is irremediably broken, the association of being and becoming is not, nor is it a crux through which to view different perspectives on reality.

"Reality" is precisely not that which remains the same through all change, but rather that which changes of itself, willy-nilly, whereby we understand change through what endures and enduring reality through what changes. Reality is the sense of cohesion in change. That such a reality does not satisfy us, indeed, might on occasion appall us, does not mean we can change it by simply appealing to its opposite.

The big easy

What millions of ordinary Americans saw on television's images of New Orleans was the brutality, destitution, desperation and chaos of the Third World. Instead of instinctive solidarity, mutality and compassion, they were witnesses to a descent into a Hobbesian state of nature; with Leviathan offering fly-by compassion, 30,000ft up.

Nick Anderson

Katrina was the most anticipated natural catastrophe in modern American history. Instead of acts of mutual support there was the police force of Gretna, south of New Orleans, sealing off a bridge across the Missisippi river against incoming evacuees, and turning them back under threats of gunfire.

Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky's expression of his emotions perceptions led to the development of an abstract style of painting based on the non-representational properties of color and form.

Kandinsksy, Composition V11, 1913

Colour gives way to form

Kandinsky, Composition VIII, 1923

I wonder wha this kind of abstraction has to do with the abstraction explored in Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment?

Kandinsky, Composition X,1939

criticizing Hegel

This is one way to interpret the representation of system in Hegel's texts:

A link for other interpretations.

Theodor W. Adorno, describes the challenge to critique Hegel in the following way:

Like other closed systems of thought, Hegel's philosophy avails itself of the dubious advantage of not having to allow any criticism whatsoever. All criticism of the details, according to Hegel, remains partial and misses the whole, which in any case takes this criticism into account. Conversely, criticizing the whole as a whole is abstract, "unmediated," and ignores the fundamental motif of Hegelian philosophy: that it cannot be distilled into any "maxim" or general principle and proves its worth only as a totality, in the concrete interconnections of all its moments. (Three Studies 2)

The bind in which Adorno situates the would-be explicator of Hegel needs to must be taken seriously.

Self-described "deconstructive" commentators have sought to reveal "cracks" or "flaws" in the Hegelian system, locating passages with which to argue that he is not a thinker of mastery because he understands subjectivity as a constant process of abandoning oneself and that he is not a thinker of totality and of pure self-presence because he treats discord and privation as constitutive of any position. To some degree, these demonstrations must be welcomed given the all-too-common impression that Hegel is a purveyor of reconciliation who strives to "mediate" between extremes, employs negativity to "erase" negativity, and offers us unlimited optimism in the form of a system that can only make progress in its quest for the truth of absolute knowledge.

Unfortunately, such efforts to locate instabilities internal to the Hegelian system may lack a broader interpretive significance. As Derrida never tires of reminding us, merely reversing the terms of an oppositional hierarchy does not necessarily even alter the dynamic at work, much less explain why it takes the form it does or what its pretensions to a totalizing authority may be.

instrumental reason

An instrumental reason is that form of reason humans have adopted to to deal with a threatening nature. It resulted in the progressive mastery of nature in a disenchanted world.

Adorno's microanalysis of a deformed ethical life of private existence points to a disenchanted rationalized morality in a disenchanted natural world that is represented as a casual order knowable in mathematical terms.

It is this rationalized instrumental reason that is deployed in modernity to rationalize the major institutions of society into the modern bureaucratic legal-rational form---Weber's iron cage of modernity dominating persons. The cage is iron because the main forces of modern life, science, capitalism and bureaucratic organization are triumphs of rationality and so the mind has no purchase to attack them.

Why not?

Well, what is delivered are legal codes and administrative organizations that promise order, predictable decisions, regularity of procedures, and responsible, objective and qualified officials; and an economics that operates according to principles of calculated advantage , efficiency and means-end strategies. Human action becomes a response to economic compulsion.

This kind of ratoinalization tendentially subjects institutions (the bureaucracy, hospitals, universities etc) to the norms of instrumental reason--efficiency, calculability, standardization.

Adorno's thesis is that it is the same conception of reason that governs scieintific rationality as governs societal rationalization.

Adorno: the end of ethical life

I've been watching television images of a flooded New Orleans. Large parts of it look like as if it is a banana republic in the Third World. Here a public ethical life whose elements make us ethical subjects has broken down, and everyday life has become a Hobbesian state of nature.

Tony Auth

Swat teams are invading their own city and they having to fight to regain control of the hospitals. The state could not proceeed with the rescue until the city had been secured.

Jeff Parker

Not even the Adorno retreat to the deformed personal or intimate sphere is possible in many parts of the city. That too has disintegrated.

New Orleans highlights the truth of Adorno's argument about the rationality deficit in our ethical life.

Where to from there?

Nietzche's reversal of Platonism

In the light of the double bind in which interpretive critique finds itself, how then does Deleuze read Nietzsche's reversal of the Platonic tradition in Nietzsche and Philosophy?

Nietzsche argues that chaos needs to be ordered by us. We do so by schematizing in order to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require. Our practical needs require that the strange and unfamiliar be reduced to what is familiar and the same. In this way they become calculable and usable to us [i.e., conform to our "practical needs". The predictable, regular, and ordered is therefore necessary for life.

How does this overcome Platonism? This article can help us. Nietzsche's pragmatism displaces Plato's conception of the Forms in which the 'Idea' of X -pre-exist it being applied to the realm of practical, day-to-day necessity; they are a consequence of this necessity, of our "practical needs." The Idea is contrasted with the sensuous world of appearances and thus it is part of a supersensuous world. It is therefore the relationship between the sensuous and the supersensuous which Nietzsche reverses: the sensuous world is genuine being. Hence Nietzsche's overcoming of Platonism is an inversion of Plato, as the Plato's true world of the (ideal) Forms is expunged.

This leaves the dual/oppositional, metaphysical structure intact. Is this a plausible interpretation of Nietzsche?

double bind

The usual response to the postmodern critique of metaphysics thast does away with metaphysics is to argue that this critique presupposes concepts and argumentative strategies that are at the core of the tradition of metaphysics itself, and thus the critique fails to overcome this tradition. This criticism was Heidegger's criticism of Nietzsche's inversion and reversal of Platonism. It was reinforced by Derrida, who cited Heidegger's claim that the Nietzschean reversalof Platonism (and its demolition) remains dogmatic and, like all reversals, a captive of that metaphysical edifice which it professes to overthrow".

Habermas claimed that such a claim is equally valid of Heidegger and Derrida themselves, in that each remain within "the constraints of the paradigm of the philosophy of the subject," a paradigm they claim to be criticizing.

This kind of criticism works in terms of the logic of either/or, whereby either one opposes and reverses the tradition completely, or one remains stuck in this tradition.

This would be a criticism I would make of being and becoming: we have the logic of either/or; consequently, critique is a reversal, inversion, or opposition (becoming)to that which is critiqued (substance), or attempts to reveal and restore a pre-existing order and realm of concepts.