A guest post by John C. Halasz. I've basically reposted John's omments to an early post on Adorno and subjectivity. This is an important topic as Adorno conceived of the development of liberal theory in terms of a dialectical struggle between the principles of individual autonomy and social conformity.So subjectivity is a key category and Adorno's concern for the autonomous individual was central to his moral and political philosophy. Adorno argued that a large part of what was so morally wrong with liberal capitalist societies is the extent to which, despite their professed individualist ideology, these societies actually frustrated and thwarted individuals' exercise of autonomy.
John says that he has long been dissatisfied with Habermas, whilst returning to an early notion of his that he seems to have abandoned: namely, ideology as systematically distorted communication. He goes on.....
Habermas seems to have taken that in a systematic and procedural direction, with the "ideal speech situation", which is always counterfactual and never quite instantiated or institutionally specified, losing hold of all "concreteness" through an excessive cognitivism that privileges discursive abstraction and gains "access" to the realms of practice only by sociologizing it and focusing on a version of epistemic "certainty" qua security of consensus, for both "political" and epistemic reasons.
So my basic proposal was to understand the notion of "reification" in ongoing processes of communicative interaction in initially really embedded, practically oriented conditions, which generate worldly "meaning", micrologically as, in speech-act terms, the dissociation of propositional contents from illocutionary force, whereby the modal-relational and contextual elements of meaning-constitution are suppressed and split-off, while, at the same time, distorting, uprooting, and overextending the meaning/application of the propositional contents of cognitive claims. On the one hand, that would describe a "quality" of local interactions with their self-reifiying tendencies that would instantiate and give rise to more "global" socio-structural reifying tendencies, while the latter would re-enforce the former.
On the other hand, that would begin to account for an exclusive pre-dominance of an objectifying, cognitive-instrumental conception of "reason" to the detriment of all else, and for the (de-)formation of selves/agents as "subjects", who are at once complicit in and alienated from objectifying cognition, of which they are nonetheless and even "rightly" the bearers. This, at least, would "capture" some of Adorno's stigmatization of "communication", which Habermas challenges and repudiates, as partaking of the inevitable functionalization of reified "society".
But the first paragraph of my above first comment was addressing the potential criticism that "reification" and "alienation" are merely artefacts of the subjectivist metaphysics encoded into Hegelian-Marxism, whether from an "objectivist" point-of-view, such as positivism or Popperian "scientific realism" or from an Heideggerian perspective. The latter case is, of course, the more complicated one, since it raises something of the same concerns and issues, (hence its rivalry).
But, aside from concerns as to whether "Dasein" really manages to break-out of the subjectivist idealism it excoriates, and as to whether it adequately conceives of the constitutive role of "the other" in its quest for otherness, and as to whether it de-differentiates crucial distinctions between nature and socio-historical reality and between "ontological truth" and intra-worldly empirical learning, and as to whether it just stuffs the "transcendental subject" back into the empirical one and thus at once over-inflates and "ontologizes" the latter, while extending the aporia of "transcendental constitution", the alienation of "modern man" qua "subject" is traced to a forgetfulness/withdrawal of "Being", which itself is said to be a "destining" of "Being", which renders the "alienation" of the "subject at once inevitable, irremediable and negligible. It's not for "nothing" that Horkheimer in the 1930's already styled "authoritarian metaphysics",- (no need to name names),- as "the reified transcendance of reification".
But the problem that I was espying in Adorno concerns whether his "deconstruction" of the subject-object relation, aside from the fact that those two terms are already over-generalizations, and though the connection/relation between the two is mutually "constitutive" and hence "fundamental", actually breaks out of its constrictions, as rooted in inherited epistemological problematics, and achieves any "new ground" in relation the practice, or whether, hypostatizing a kind of negative Neo-Kantian critique of knowledge, as per his academic "origins", whereby the only practice that is acknowledged is that of knowledge professionals, which merely reflects and re-enforces the allegedly total reification of "society", in the manner of "we have met the enemy and it is us", he reifies the very terms he critiques, leaving any "shifting of ground" to the place-holder of cognitivized aesthetic experience/production, as the quasi-eschatological locus of split-off "experience" and absent "communication".
The problem is not just a missing relation to practice, but a missing tertiam datur of any context of "worldliness", by which the notion of "mediation" could be applied. (There, of course, is also the problem of his conflating an inadequate economics and an unconceived politics into the image of a "totally administered society").
Doesn't Adorno just circle about the aporias of the subject-object relation without proffering or allowing for any reformulation of conceptions by which the indicted impasse might be broken or dissolved? (The Adornian response would presumably be that any such conceptual reformulation would be subject to the same reifying "forces" deriving from the material "infrastructure" that the "original" conceptions reflected). But the further point is that the subject-object relation remains tied to the entitative thinking of "metaphysics", to which the notion of non-objectifying thinking takes objection, and, by focusing on the "non-identity" of the "object", it misses the otherness of the other, which is the root of any moral, if not political, resistance to unrestrictedly instrumentalized practice. It's only and even in the "face" of the other that the "mournfulness" of suffering nature takes hold and becomes amenable to any possible practice.
There are further complicated issues here of what any "deconstruction" amounts to as a critical procedure and what "fruits" it might bear, let alone how it might relate to possible or actual practices or political "programs" that would organize the latter.
Update: 2 February
It occurs to me that I forgot to get to the issue that set of my last screed here, which was that Adorno makes an apparant appeal to "autonomy" in opposition to the "world" of entirely instrumentalized reason. While it's true that Adorno's contention that "the wrong life can not be rightly lived" seems to imply an ethic of resistance, perhaps even, as Bernstein would have it, a kind of "fugitive" version of "virtue" ethics, nonetheless the appeal to "autonomy", rooted in the Kantian side of Adorno's thinking, is, in fact, tied to the deepest roots of metaphysical thinking from its Greek inception, including especially the whole notion of philosophical theory, and can be of little avail in finding a way out of the quandary, but, to the contrary, is one of the matters that is most eminently in need of "deconstruction". (Each and every irreducibly particular human being is existentially separate from each and every other human being, but such existential separateness is the the same as "autonomy", and the notion of "freedom" as self-determination needs to take into account the fundamental dependency of human beings on relatedness with others to even come to be ing as a self/agent and their inevitable intrication in elementary social groups, which, rather than "individuals", would form the basic unit of social analysis).
Greek metaphysical thinking began with the realization of the transcendence of Being, that Being is beyond any thing said or done about it, which, in turn, gave rise to the recognition of a quasi-systematic implicature by means of which the order of beings could be arrayed and understood. That amounted to an emergence from mythic enmeshment in and subjection to the "powers" of nature, which emergence also contained a trauma of separation. But the counterpart to the transcendence of Being was the "rational soul", which recognized it, which raised itself up into the bliss of theoretic contemplation, as the balm and compensation for its new-found trauma, which, in turn, founded a new ethic of self-mastery, of self-governance on the model of the cosmic order, which aristocratic ethos of "autonomy", self-law, was closely tied to the pre-eminence of theoria.
Now it should be apparent that Adorno's critique of social domination and the complicity of conceptual thought and knowledge in it can not rest upon such a "foundation", but such an appeal to "autonomy" can only be indicative of the impasse of his thinking and paradoxical. (Indeed, his whole appeal to "autonomous" artworks as resistent to reified society and as a model of an alternative non-identical mode of thinking and knowing is based on the fact that such artworks are not really "autonomous"). But this oddity perhaps connects up with another one: Adorno's incessant denunciation of "exchange society", by which he presumably means the prevasive instrumentalization of all social relations in a society dominated by commodity production (and the over-riding imperative to reproduce and accumulate capital). The oddity here is that all societies are based on exchange, namely, symbolic exhange, not just for their organization, but for the very "humanness", as well. (This goes back to Marx and his incomplete critique and separation from his German Idealist sources: is the "free association of the producers" an atomistic or a communitarian conception?) Indeed, this goes to what I said above about a "negative Neo-Knatian critique of knowledge, for one of Adorno's basic claims is that the "transcendental subject" is false and illusory, but that this illusion is correlate to the "exchange society" with its irresolvable antagonisms and divisions, as the alleged "constitution" of the "truth" of knowledge as a whole, in denial of those antagonisms and divisions, and this illusion of "transcendental constitution" will persist so long as the "exchange society" does. (The simliarity to and difference from Wittgenstein's critical dissolution of epistemology is noteworthy). "Autonomy", then, is really a placeholder for something else, not for an unbridled realization of individual "freedom", but for a collective transformation of society/political community as a whole, for a new form of life, based on an altered conception and distribution of "goods".
I think the clue here is in the notion of alienation itself. For Adorno's vision of the "reconciled" condition is one where the alien is no longer compulsively assimilated and suborned to "identity thinking", but is let be, in its proximity and distance, no longer perceived as something threatening. It's not that alienation should or even can be utterly irradicated or abolished, for a certain baseline of alienness belongs to being a separate self. And alienation is to some measure a "positive value, for, to speak with Hegel, as passing over into otherness, the individual rises above his narrow, particularistic, and egotistic self-interestedness to participate in publicness, "the universal", and, to speak with Levinas, the relation to the other is constitutive for becoming a genuine self, for its "inspiration". It's rather the incapacity to experience alienation that is politically dangerous, the adaption and assimilation of alienated selves to the false satisfaction of an entirely commodified world.
The alternative condition would be a life in common of fruitful activity in relation to others, wherein our particular and separate embodied existence would no longer be experienced as a degrading objectification, giving rise to fantasy of being a "transcendental subject".
Hegel's critical 'method' is presuppositionless, immanent, and developmental. It is presuppositionless in that brings nothing external into the subject matter. It is immanent in that the internal contradictions of one way of knowing (or form of consciousness) will lead to the next. It is developmental in that the process or movement is one of actualization. The Phenomenology of Spirit is characterised as 'the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair' since the Phenomenology moves from one failed position to the next. This was Hegel's challenge to the first philosophy of the Cartesian and Kantian projects, and more specifically to the permanent structures that Kant located in the fundamental capacities of knowledge. Hegel's argument for the highway of despair was spelt out in the Introduction to The Phenomenology. A commentary can be found here at Rough Theory.
If we are immersed in our culture then, then the old skyhook (transcendent ) option is out, and an immanent critique of our historical categories and ways of thinking does make sense. An example. It indicates becoming self-reflexive about the categories that we use, and evaluating them to see if they do the job adequately. A historical, self-reflexive and immanent critical theory, drawing on Marx, Weber and Adorno, among others, is under consideration by N. Pepperell and L. Magee over at Rough Theory. The conversation arises out of a reading/discussion group and it is an interesting one.
As N. Pepperell states:
What begins to motivate thinking about an immanent theory, in a contemporary social theoretic context, is usually a recognition that the object of analysis - social institutions, normative ideals, collective practices, etc. - has actually changed over time. The point of a non-immanent concept is, generally, that it can be universal or timeless or transcend contexts...So, since the object of analysis is perceived as an historical object, and the goal of the analysis is to cast light on further potentials for historical change, there’s a need for the categories of analysis themselves to be historical categories - otherwise, it’s a bit difficult to see how the theory can grasp the things it claims to want to understand…
N. Pepperell describes the process of immanent critique in the Phenomenology well. A:
consistent immanent theory wouldn’t declare itself as such, but would just unfold an argument through the categories available within a particular context, gradually unfolding its analysis so that it becomes clear that a concept such as immanence is actually required to make sense of all the categories. Hegel - quite rightly - doesn’t trust his readers to “get” that kind of argument, so he adopts a kind of bifurcated presentational strategy, where some elements are quite consistently immanently voiced, while other elements are full of, effectively, stage whispers and stage directions - hints to the reader about what he intends to do, so the reader won’t lose patience or become confused at the strategic intent of the sections that are more immanently voiced.
One option is to turn to a dialectics at a standstill," if you reckon that the forward momentum of nineteenth-century progressive (liberal) and/or revolutionary (Marxist) narratives of eventual (of course, diversely) happy endings have stalled in the steady-state nightmare of the twentieth century, where, as Adorno and Horkheimer starkly put it, "mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism" For a world at such an impasse, "dialectics at a standstill"--a non-narrative dialectic--it is argued, is the kind of dialectic that is relevant to our historical condition.
What this gives us is a way to highlight the unavoidable tensions between polar opposites,whose oppostion constitutes their unity and generates change, without affirming any underlying identity or final synthesis of polar opposities.
As I noted back in this post Liz Grosz in her Time Travels: Feminism, Nature and Power has a chapter on Deleuze, Bergson, and the Virtual. I find it hard to follow mainly because movement (life) is placed in consciousness and not in the material processes of objects. I recoil from the idealism, but I guess that is Bergson. Does Deleuze materialize Bergson on Grosz's reading? I'm not sure as Bergson and Deleuze tend to be run together.
She begins by placing matter on the side of the actual and the real and mind, life, or duration on the side of the virtual. I presume that the "real" includes, in addition to the physically perceived, sensuous world of the actual, the virtual properties inherent in matter and the intensive processes that select and animate them. Grosz turns to Bergson to say that he claims:
that a distinction betwen subjective and objective (or, what amounts to the same thing, duration and spatiality) can be formulated in terms of the distinction between virtual and actual. Objects, space, the world of the inert are entirely actual;t hey contain no elements of the virtual. While matter may well exceed the images we have of it, while there is more in matter than in our images of it insofar as it is the ongoing occassion for the generation of images, the images that our perception gives of it are nonetheless of the same kind as our images. That is, because matter has not virtuality, no hidden latency, it is assimilable to the images we have of it, even if it is not reducible to our image along. (p.105)
What we have are two sets of oppositions: virtual/actual and possible/real. Bergson, Grosz says, rejects the possible/real couple (duality?) in favour of the virtual/actual, as does Deleuze, with the movement of becoming understood as a process of actualization rather than realization. She then says:
The process of realization is governed by two principles--resemblance and limitation: the real exists in a relation of resemblence to the possible.Indeed the real is an exact image of the possible, with the addition of the category of existence or reality...Moreover, the process of realization involves the limitation, the narowing down of possibilities so that some are rejected and others are selected for exisence. The fields of the possible is wider than that of the real. (p.108)
Grosz then gives us paragraph upon paragraph about the possible/real duality. It is unclear whether this kind of intellectual labouring (it reads like a dialectics that does speak its name) is a laying out of how Bergson (or is it Deleuze?) understand the possible/real duality, only to highlight its limitiations, then make the shift to the virtual/actual couple (or duality?). Deleuze does say that the danger is that the virtual could be confused with the possible, which would in turn suggest that the virtual and actual resemble each other. Grosz recognizes, and then describes how Deleuze distinguishes the virtual and the possible--he does so in three ways.The upshot is that, as opposed to the realisation of the possible, the crucial point about the actualisation of the virtual is that it always occurs by 'difference, divergence or differenciation' (Difference and Repetition, p. 212). Actualisation, (or differentiation) is 'always a genuine creation' that is not limited by, nor does it result from, 'any limitation of a pre-existing possibility'.
Manuel DeLanda's in his Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy seeks to present the process-based realist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to an audience of analytical philosophers of science and scientists with an interest in philosophical questions. DeLanda reconstructs Deleuze's ontology in scientific terms.
As we have seen in this book DeLanda juxtaposed essence to multipliciity. Multiplicity belongs to the many without having a one, and so it replaces the talk of identity of a material objects in terms of essences and natural kinds. It offers a different way of modelling complex dynamic processes. He says:
While essences are traditionally regarded as possessing a clear and distinct nature ....the singularities which define a multiplicty are by design obscure and distinct: the singularites come in sets, and these sets are both given all at once but are structured in such a way that they progressively specifiy the nature of a multiplicity as they unfold following recurrent sequences. (p.16)
Delanda says:
Classifying geometrical objects by their degrees of symmetry represents a sharp departure from traditional classificiation of geometical figures by their essence. While in the latter approach we look for a set properties common to all cubes, or to all spheres, groups do not classify the figures on the basis of their static properties but in terms of how these figures are affected (or not affected) by active transformations, that is, figures are classified by their response to events that occur to them. Another way of putting this is that even though in this new approach we are still classifying entities by a property (their degree of symmetry), this property is never an intrinsic property of the entity beign classified but always a property relative to a specific transformation (or group of transformations).
I've started thumbing though Gilles Deleuze's Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1972). In it we find an early essay on Henri Bergson, entitled Bergson's 'Conception of Difference', in which he argues that Bergson's concept of difference is different from dialectical difference--both Plato's and Hegels' . With respect to the latter Deleuze says:
In Bergon, thanks to the notion of the virtual, the thing differs from itself first, immediately. According to Hegel, the thing differs from itself because it differs first from everything it is not, and thus difference goes as far as contradiction. If Bergon could object that Platonism goes no further than a concept of difference as still external, the objection that he woudl adddress to a dialectic of contradiction is that it gets no further than a conception of difference as only abstract....the dialectic falls short of difference itself, which is the cause or reason for nuance.
Why so? This is what I don't understand. What's the big problem with negation, that it has to be done away with?
Deleuze says that difference is an action and an actualization. Isn't that Hegel? A thing changes (becomes) through the process of actualization? Hegel also thinks in terms of tendencies in physical processes, self-organizing tendencies in dynamical processes, and also holds that 'what is actual ' as a fully formed entity.
The key term is 'viritual' as Deleuze says that it is only our ignorance of the virtual that makes us believe in contradicton and negation. Why so? isn't virtual referring to the way that tendencies in dynamical processes happen? So how does the virtual/actual couple work? (Why the use of couple instead of duality?) If so, then the virtuality is the "yet-to-come" --it refers to how we can we speak of the future in a world of becoming, when the yet -to-come in that it is not yet and it has not yet arrived.
I've always been puzzled by the big gap and antagonism between academics and bloggers. I make sense of the conflict as one of an inside and outside of the modernist liberal university, and many conservative academics blogs are deemed to be unscholarly, nay unsavoury, as they belong to trashy pop culture. This position, however, is undercut by the academic bloggers and their success in establishing debate and dialogue in civil society.
I understand the tensions as philosophical conversations started out with its foot in the academy in Adelaide. However, the daily post of the weblog was too alien for the academic research way of working. What this points is not a rejection of blogging but a need is to experiment with different ways of working and writing to that currently practised in academia (a monolithic series of texts) journalism (partisanship) and the little magazines (essays).
However, I fail to understand the distinction between between "academics who blog" and "academic blogs" that Acephalous insists upon, but I guess the distinction makes some sense within academia. Maybe the former write about academia as a workplace, whilst the latter write about their research interests?
I would have thought that what the intellectual orientated blogs have done is deepened the activity of public intellectuals, heightened the closure of academia and the failure of many academics to be public intellectuals, and showed how intellectual life in Australia is not confined to the liberal university. So the category intellectual blogs, introduced by Kugelmass Episodes, makes sense, as it transgresses both the conventional academic way of writing and thinking and the essay writing of the little print magazines that cluster around the universities.
This makes the university more porous in relation to civil society, and it offers another pathway out of the modernist liberal university to the hegemonic neo-liberal one. It can only help broaden and increase the vitality of our intellectual life in these deeply conservative times, with their return to positivism of the 1930s, a fundamentalist Enlightenment, and cultural conservatism.
From my perspective there is no need to add that "intellectual " to mean culture and politics, or code culture as literary, since public intellectual life ranges over those issues that people find interesting and of concern in their family life and in their activities in civil society. These concerns shift, are very diverse, and may well push the boundaries of what we understand culture and poltiics to be. There is a lot of diversity amongst intellectual blogs, and the terrain is constantly shifting. As N. Pepperell over at Rough Theory puts it, there is a need to be critical of academic tendency:
to overgeneralisation that has been so characteristic of analyses of blogging since its advent - blogging as revolutionary, blogging as detrimental, blogging as a fad, blogging as the new mainstream, etc. I guess my question is: why are we so tempted to generalise this medium? Does it need to be one thing? Do its mechanics really dictate a strong and pregiven trajectory for the realisation of its potentials? Do we need a consensus on where “we” are going, with our writing in this form?
Academic blogs like have their roots in their research ---a PhD in this case---and then they develop connections from this base, though with some degree of anxiety. This anxiety is an expression from inside the university, and it relates to the unease therein about blogs and their connection to academic research and teaching. Outside the university there is no such anxiety. Here the concern is more about how small and incestuous the Australian blogosphere actually is.
In my own case the writing and content is a way of becoming familar with the philosophical material that I have not previously read. It is a shift from the Germans--- Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche , Heidegger, Adorno--to the French poststructuralists with Nietzsche as the link or bridge. The writing is a process of becoming familar in the sense of a trying to understand the concerns of the latter (with limited time to do so), to use one's philosophical skills to introduce new and interesting ideas into our intellectual culture and to question the strong “anti-theory” trend that has reacted to the academic reception of poststructuralism.
Daniel Smith has an article on Deleuze, ethics and desire in Parrhesia. It explore the nature of an immanent ethics, examines two sets of texts from Nietzsche and Leibniz to flesh out some of the details of an immanent ethics, and has some comments on the nature of desire and some of the themes of Anti-Oedipus.
What then is an immanent ethics? How does it differ from morality or a non immanent ethics?
Smith says that:
Deleuze has often drawn a distinction between “ethics” and “morality”—a distinction that has traditionally been drawn to distinguish modes of reflection that place greater emphasis, respectively, on the good life (such as Stoicism) or on the moral law (such as Kantianism). Deleuze, however, uses the term “morality” to define, in very general terms, any set of “constraining” rules, such as a moral code, that consists in judging actions and intentions by relating them to transcendent or universal values ... What he calls “ethics” is, on the contrary, a set of “facilitative” [facultative] rules that evaluates what we do, say, and think according to the immanent mode of existence that it implies. One says or does this, thinks or feels that: what mode of existence does it imply? “
There is a discussion between K-Punk, and Poetix, and I Cite about whether we are living in an apocalypse culture happening in the blogosphere. The initial issue of the conversation has been whether or not the question revolves not the damage to the world is irrevocable and whether another world is possible. This is interpreted in terms of whether there's a limit to capitalism or an alternative to capitalism, rather than the cultural or philosophical aspects in the discourse of apocalypse or the destruction of civilization; or the way social theory draws on some explicit or implicit notion of the unconscious to understand fantasy and desire.
This aspect of apocalypticism is picked up by Larval Subjects and Rough Theory. The former gives examples of apocalyptic fantasies from a wide range of contexts, and then argues that psychoanalysis can help us understand this phenomenon:
the psychoanalytic approach suggests that we ask how our desire is imbricated with these particular representations or scenerios and enjoins us to analyze how our thought collectively arrives at these visions of the present rather than others. How is it that we are to account for the the ubiquity of these scenerios in popular imagination... An omnipresence so great that it even filters down into the most intimate recesses of erotic fantasy as presented in the consulting room?
Rough Theory appraches the issue in terms of how critical theory, in Adorno's sense, can provide an historically immanent and self-reflexive critique, with this qualification:
I have remained aware that simply establishing the historicity or the social grounding of critical forms of subjectivity is only part of the task. Such a critical historical analysis can take us to a certain point: it can help us understand the forms of subjectivity - including critical forms of subjectivity - that are historically plausible at specific times and - crucially for political practice - it can help us understand the relationships that connect these forms of subjectivity in specific ways to elements of our social context that we experience and articulate as forms of “objectivity”. From here, though, the path to be followed by critical theory becomes much more complex, because it is from this point that we have to ask ourselves whether we intend just to understand the world, or also to change it.
One response to the kind of cultural crisis mentioned here is the Nietzschean idea of self-fashioning in both an ethical and aesthetic sense. This kind of crisis, which involves the the inability of a culture to conceive of its own destruction and possible extinction, raises questions such as: What should a people do in such a situation --when, for a number of historical contingent reasons, a traditional way of life comes to an end? How should one face the possibility that one's culture might collapse? How should we live with this vulnerability? Can we make any sense of facing up to such a challenge with "courage"? What conception of "courage" is required? What would "virtue" or "imaginative excellence" and "courage" entail in such a context? Can we still have hope?
As is well known, Nietzsche's response to the cultural crisis provoked by the death of God, was an active nihilism:--- a possibility of self-overcoming, encapsulated in Nietzsche’s different notions of the “free spirit,” the “philosopher of the future,” the “higher men,” and the Ubermensch. This was a process of “becoming-Ubermensch a process of self-overcoming and the transvaluation of values. And for Foucault, the death of the humanist subject, that heir to the Christian subject, also created the possibility of an ethics of self-fashioning, entailing both an aesthetics of existence and a vision of asceticism rooted in the Greco-Roman world, and pointing to an overcoming of the crisis brought on by the death of man. Both Nietzsche and Foucault understood philosophy as an art of living.
This is explored in an article entitled The Aesthetic and Ascetic Dimensions of an Ethics of Self-Fashioning in Nietzsche and Foucault by Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg in the latest issue of Parrhesia. I'll concentrate on their interpretation fo Foucault as they argue that he builds upon builds upon what Nietzsche had bequeathed to him. Nietzsche had called for making one’s life into a work of art, the broad outlines of which he had delineated.
Milchman and Alan Rosenberg say that Foucault's understanding of philosophy as an art of living is dominated by the principle that says one must ‘take care of oneself ’.
It is this idea of care of self ...and the idea that one could take one’s own life or body, as the “material” for a work of art that is the hallmark of Foucault’s refunctioning of aesthetics. Several conceptual breakthroughs follow from this move. First, there is the establishment of an intimate link between
the aesthetic and the ethical domains, between an art of existence and care of self, the latter being
central to Foucault’s ethics of self-fashioning...Second, there is Foucault’s translation of art as technê, which also links it to the Greek concept of poiêsis, to the work of an artisan, and to the word “technique.” ...Third,even when Foucault did link the aesthetic to the beautiful, it was in the Greek, not the modern sense, that he used this term. Thus, for Foucault, the beautiful, kalos, had – as it did for the Greeks – the sense of “fine” or “good,” as when we still speak today of one’s “inward beauty” or “beautiful soul,” and mean it in an ethical sense
In the Introduction (link here) to his Gamer Theory McKenzie Wark asks:
Ever get the feeling you’re playing some vast and useless game whose goal you don’t know and whose rules you can’t remember? Ever get the fierce desire to quit, to resign, to forfeit, only to discover there’s no umpire, no referee, no regulator to whom you can announce your capitulation? Ever get the vague dread that while you have no choice but to play the game, you can’t win it, can’t know the score, or who keeps it? Ever suspect that you don’t even know who your real opponent might be? Ever get mad over the obvious fact that the dice are loaded, the deck stacked, the table rigged and the fix--in?
Wark continues:
Welcome to gamespace. It’s everywhere, this atopian arena, this speculation sport. No pain no gain. No guts no glory. Give it your best shot. There’s no second place. Winner take all. Here’s a heads up: In gamespace, even if you know the deal, are a player, have got game, you will notice, all the same, that the game has got you. Welcome to the thunderdome. Welcome to the terrordome. Welcome to the greatest game of all. Welcome to the playoffs, the big league, the masters, the only game in town. You are a gamer whether you like it or not, now that we all live in a gamespace that is everywhere and nowhere. As Microsoft says: Where do you want to go today? You can go anywhere you want in gamespace but you can never leave it.
Via this Harvard Press link, I've just come across this Creative Commons interview with McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto (2004) and the forthcoming Gamer Theory.
The thesis of Gamer Theory is that computer games constitute the dominant cultural form of our time (see the stats). Wark argues that we had better get started developing a critical language we can use to discuss them and their impact on the way we live. Wark says that he is interested in two questions: 'can we explore games as allegories for the world we live in?' 'Can there be a critical theory of games?'
A unique feature of Gamer Theory is that it has existed online for some time in draft form, hosted on the website of the Institute for the Future of the Book. They've built a custom interface that allows for commenting, or what Wark calls a sort of "open peer review." So we have an experimental networked book based around an online conversation.
Wark says that:
media corporations refuse to countenance is the fact that communication has always been in part a commodity economy, but in part also a gift economy. They want to use intellectual property law and the technical crippling of media technologies – what I call Digital Restrictions Management – to shut down the gift part of the communication cycle. It’s crippleware for the whole culture.Having written against this in A Hacker Manifesto, I wanted to make damn sure I wasn’t contributing to it. in its own small way, GAM3R 7H30RY was about making it clear that there is also a gift economy side to participatory media. I give my book away, in its not-quite finished state, for free to anyone who wants to read it or share it, as a way of encouraging people to help improve it.
What the networked book needs, however, is new tools, new conventions, new economies. That’s where GAM3R 7H30RY and experiments like it are interesting. It’s about reinventing the connective tissue between books, across space and time, and between different kinds of reader. It’s about making an end-run around monopolies of knowledge and culture. Creative Commons is a key part of that process. But so too are new media tools, and perhaps even more importantly, new cultural, social, and literary conventions. We need to relearn how to read and write.
Andeas Molt in Adorno and the Myth of Subjectivity in Contretemps says that subjectivity:
...is a central concept for an understanding of modernity. The idea of modernity is tied to the Enlightenment .... Kant defined the Enlightenment as humanity’s release from its self-incurred tutelage, and emphasized the individual’s power to use her own reason or in Kant’s case his own reason. He formulated the Enlightenment’s motto as, "Sapere Aude, Have the courage to use your own reason." This idea, that the subject exercise their own reason, is not only one of the most central features of the Enlightenment and thereby modernity, but also of subjectivity.
Adorno also questions the autonomy of the subject altogether. People in modern society are passive and unfree as the culture industry impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves.
Molt addresses the issue of whether Adorno’s philosophy is a different way out of the philosophy of the subject, rather than just a negative theory of the subject--- in modern society the individual is powerless, a mere appendage to the social machinery with little real power. She says that Adorno's concern is to find a different way of the modernist philosophy of the subject:
It is the hierarchical structure between subject and object that is wrong, not the positions accorded to the parties....It is this idea of otherness, that the object is something other to the subject, that got lost when the subject reached out to become absolute. Paradoxically, Adorno holds that this otherness of the object can only be reached by subjective reflection. Thus, Adorno is given to say that he wants to break the spell of constitutive subjectivity by force of the subject. Similarly his book Minima Moralia is written entirely from the standpoint of subjective experience.
I think that this right. It is a pity this text was not connected to Heidegger as well as Habermas. Adorno really needs to be bought into play with Heidegger's deconstrucion of the Cartesian subject object duality. What are their differences? Their similarities?
For a religious person, a secular liberal society is a mistaken society. Religious people, believe that a secular society needs a religious element, because it is only in religion that we find something urgently needed by every society, something that a secular society cannot produce in and of itself.This kind of argument about secular liberal societies' lack of meaning is commonly made by conservatives, and it is usual interpretation of the argument about lack of meaning is that secular societies fail to offer binding concepts of meaning, but that people need them.
The next stage in the argument talks in terms of a culture of death and sometimes about a totalitarianism behind western liberal democracy because of its atheism;'or "the dictatorship of relativism" Plainly put this argues that the view that religion is a private matter and that its potential public role is defined on the basis that it is a private matter is an act of aggression against religion.
In her Time Travels: Feminism, Nature and Power Liz Grosz turns to exploring Merleau-Ponty and ontological difference, by which she means the provocations of the world, the entertwinment of the thing with the subject and the subject with the thing, the ways in which subjects are or can be differentiated from each other, and their different perspectives on and interests in the world . She reads Merleau-Ponty differently as she positions his writings:
in a different context than that in which it is commonly placed: rather than with his own self-consciously acknowledged lineage of phenomenological thinkers from Hegel through Husserl to Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir (and onto feminst phenomenology) I will place his work in a less understood and examined context....the philosophy of nature, of biology and the movement of evolutionary theory developed since the the mid-nineteenth century.
She says:
Philosophy after Darwin could no longer justifiably devote itself to the classical contemplation of unchanging forms or essences, or even Hegelian a priori historical convolutions, but had to convert itself into something like an attunment to the particular and its history. It is required henceforth, as Merleau-Pont'ys work testifies to take seriously the immersion of consciousness in life, and the immersion of life in time and materiality that Darwinism has left as a question, a gift to philosophy.
Grosz explores Merleau Ponty in relation to the texts of Bergson rather than Darwin.
From Contretemps a seminar by Deleuze on 26 March 1973 entitled Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities (Desire-Pleasure-Jouissance). After talking briefly about multiplicities, and a theory and practice of multiplicities (an assemblage of lines taken as a rhizomatic whole,which replaces the old substance that endured beneath accidental changes) Deleuze turns to desire.
Desire is problematic in philosophy as to desire the world and to know its meanings and structures have seemed conflicting enterprises. With Spinoza we have a theory of "striving" (conatusimmanentiae ) to persevere in their own Being (vis inertiae). In Anti-Oedipus desire is argued to be productive. For Deleuze desire produces reality --produces multiplicity and constructs an assemblage.
In the seminar he says:
What I have been saying since the beginning amounts to saying that thinking and desiring are the same thing. The best way to avoid seeing or to refuse to see that desire is thought, that the position of desire in thought is a veritable process, is obviously to link desire to lack. Once desire is linked to lack, one is immediately in the domain, one has already assumed the basis of dualism. But today I would like to say that there are more underhanded ways of reintroducing lack into desire, either through the Other, or through dualism. Here, so-called Western thought is constructed from the relation between desire and pleasure, a completely rotten (pourrie) conception.
To say that jouissance is not pleasure, that it takes part in a kind of system, which, in order to simplify it, I would present as a circular conception of desire in which, at the bottom, there is always the same starting postulate—and it is true that Western philosophy has always consisted in saying: if desire exists, it is the very sign, or the very fact, that you are lacking something. Everything starts from that. A first welding of desire-lack is brought about; from there, it goes without saying that desire is defined as a function of a field of transcendence; desire is desire for what one does not have; that begins with Plato, it continues with Lacan. This is the first malediction of desire, it’s the first wayto curse desire...In a tradition that reaches from Plato to Lacan and beyond, desire has been understood as negative, abyssal, a lack at the level of ontology itself (this was most clearly articulated in Hegel's understanding of the lack [of the object] of desire being the necessary condition for the maintenance of desire), a lack in being that strives to be filled through the (impossible) attainment of an object. Desire, according to Hegel, is the incessant human effort to overcome external differences, a project to become a self-sufficient and self- conscious subject.
If the first malediction is desire-lack then the second malediction of desire is pleasure-discharge---a matter of calming desire for a moment, and then the malediction will begin again. And then it will be necessary to call it up again, and then it’s the conception of pleasure-discharge, as illustrated in Reich’s protest against Freud, where retains this conception of desire-discharge, which he thematizes in the theory of the orgasm.
If I remember the Freudian conception of desire refers to unconscious wishes, bound to indestructible infantile signs, organized as phantasy. That implies that psychoanalysis limits desire to imaginary fantasies.But I thought hat In Anti-Oedipus, for example, desire is from the start argued to be productive. but it was spredeteremined (repressed?) by the Oedipal triangle of mommy-daddy-child.
Now here is a racy account of postmodernism from the Economist. It connects continental philosophy to shopping and argues that capitalism employs the critique that was designed to destroy it.
The founding post-modern text (as books are called in pomo) is by two Germans, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Published in 1944, “Dialectic of Enlightenment” examined the culture that had given birth to Auschwitz. It declared that “enlightenment is totalitarian”—that the 18th-century attempt to replace religion with rationalism had supplanted one form of mental slavery with another. God had been elbowed out by fascism, communism, Marxism, Freudianism, Darwinism, socialism and capitalism. The post-modernists thought their job was to “deconstruct” these grand theories, which they called the “meta-narratives”. The pomos would free people from them by exposing their sinister nature.The pomos wrote about pretty much everything in society—literature, psychoanalysis, punishment, sociology, architecture—except economics. This was perhaps odd, given that they emerged during the longest economic boom in European history and the birth of the consumer society. The only pomo who tried, far too late, to come to grips with this irony was Foucault. In one of his last lectures, in January 1979, four months before Margaret Thatcher came to power in Britain, he shocked his students by telling them to read the works of F.A. Hayek if they wanted to know about “the will not to be governed”. Hayek was the Iron Lady's guru. Surely there was nothing post-modern about her?
The Economist goes on to say that Foucault had belatedly spotted that post-modernism and “neo-liberal” free-market economics, which had developed entirely independently of each other over the previous half-century, pointed in much the same direction.
One talked about sex, art and penal systems, the other about monetary targets. But both sought to “emancipate” the individual from the control of state power or other authorities—one through thought and the other through economic power. Both put restoring individual choice and power at the hearts of their “projects”, as the pomos like to describe their work.
How does this impact on shopping.Presumably it is more than an experience or retail therapy. The fragmentation means the decline of department stores—that clung too long to the idea of a mass market, of a one-stop store Those that have prospered embrace fragmentation and cater to the niche. The second means the The consumer's rebirth as artist has created whole new businesses such as Google. The Economist is unclear how that relates to the shopping experience. I will hazard a guess--the culture of shopping in Japan is highly designed and very fluid spaces in stores that appeal to the sophisticated artistic sensibility of discerning consumers caught up in fashion.
Glenn Fuller, over at the cultural studies based Event Mechanics has an interesting post on Geert Lovink’s recent article on blogs that I mentioned here. Fuller's post has its roots in a paper given at a Blogtalk conference in Sydney last year.
Fuller follows Lovink in rejecting the way blogging and the ‘Old Media’ have been traditionally set up in an antagonistic relation, and he then reads Lovink to explore and think through the nature of blogging. He says:
The complexity of blogging becomes apparent when the two points outlined above are brought together – the topology of interest and the event-based nature of blogging. The scale of blogging as an event is determined by the shared interest distributed across the network of bloggers.
Fuller then explores the event-based nature of blogging by saying that 'something happens and bloggers then comment in particular ways. The event shifts from that which has happened to incorporating the elements of the event now distributed across the blogosphere. ' So the event is Geert Lovink’s article on blogs and we have a series of commentary in the Australian blogosphere that bounces off it in a variety of ways. This commentary forms into a network and so we have different types blogging networks based on shared interests, such as the cultural studies one. 'Event' here is not simply Lovink's representation of blogging but his intervention in the blogging world, which helps to actualize more commentary, and presumably events.
'Network' is a key concept here. Fuller says that:
Lovink is spot on when he suggests: “the network is the alternative [to ‘old media’].” That is, the synergistic concrescence of all these differentially repeated elements of events (what Whitehead calls prehensions) across blogs produces and modulates events on different scales. As Deleuze intimated in The Fold, the structure of events forms a nomadic baroque architecture, and the models and images of inter-blog citations and networking that I have seen are thoroughly ‘baroque’.
The problem I have with both Fuller's and Lovink's interpretation of blogging is that they don't really move away the corporate media versus blogging relationship to consider the relationship between, say cultural studies based weblogs eg., Event Mechanics, or Home Cooked Theory or Memes of Production and Lovink's concern with cynical reason and nihilism. Shouldn't this relationship be of key concern to those academic researchers in the humanities
As we have seen in Telling Flesh Vicki Kirby is dissatisfied with what she holds to be the postmodern refusal to consider the question of the body, and she seeks to transplant, with slight variations, certain post-structuralist insights regarding language onto the contours of the body. One of her claims is the viability of an embodied deconstruction. In his review of Telling Flesh in Contretemps Jack Reynolds responds to this claim in a way that links with my understanding of deconstruction:
It might be worth suggesting instead that deconstruction prepares for such a conception of the body, and I emphasize prepares, because literally taken, deconstruction can do little more than deconstruct. By insisting on this apparent tautology, I mean that deconstruction reveals how oppositions are always already breached; more often than not it doesn’t concern itself with positively framing a new and original way of thinking about the mind-body relation. This is not to suggest that deconstruction is purely negative and that its interventions have no enabling or restructuring component. It is also not to suggest that deconstruction is irrelevant to questions concerning embodiment--on the contrary, it has been illustrated just how provocative and helpful it can be.
Media theorist and Internet activist Geert Lovink has an interesting article on blogging in Eurozine. It is entitled Blogging, the nihilist impulse, and it connects blogging to cynical reason (ie., enlightened false consciousness) and nihilism. This is a different approach to the political blogging/journalism one, which sees blogging as opposed to the mainstream corporate media, and is the usual way the talk about blogging in Australia up to now.
Lovink, who works from the Institute of Network Cultures was recently in Australia, and the talk he gave seems to be similar to his Blogging/nihilist article. On the nihilism point he says:
Nihilism is not a monolithic belief system. We no longer "believe" in Nothing as in nineteenth-century Russia or post-war Paris. Nihilism is no longer a danger or problem, but the default postmodern condition. It is an unremarkable, even banal feature of life, as Karen Carr writes is and no longer related to the Religious Question. Blogs are neither religious nor secular. They are "post-virtue". The paradoxical temporality of nihilism today is that of a not-quite-already-Now.
Lovink introduces the idea that instead of contributing to the fragmentation of the media landscape we are:
seeing the proliferation of specialty blogs as an indicator of the fragmentation of our society, we should see this trend as providing a way for citizen-experts to emerge and to bring together global constituencies in many disparate fields."
Morality as an everyday cultural phenomenon, the stuff of common-sense and common opinion, guiding the conduct of ordinary people, is different from the more-or-less systematized, improved, and codified in some theoretical ethical framework produced by a particular philosopher. Should we be concerned with the effects of the unsystematic, uncodified, tacit moral beliefs that comprise the daily life of our liberal culture? Nietzsche, who was a critic of morality, certainly thought so. So did Marx. Both held that our ordinary morality that infuses our culture, is an obstacle to human flourishing.
Marx held that the criterion of right action and justice is the maximization of well-being; and he understood the criterion of well-being to be objective, in an Aristotlean sense in that it is based on a certain conception of human nature and the conditions for human flourishing. Capitalism, on this account, is morally objectionable because it fails to maximize well-being so understood. So we criticize the everyday morality because it thwarts well-being.
In his review of Vicki Kirby's Telling Flesh entitled, 'Kirby, Merleau-Ponty, and the Question of an Embodied Deconstruction' Jack Reynolds draws attention to the proximity that Merleau-Ponty’s views with what Kirby is exploring in the blurring
of the boundaries between ideality and matter. Reynolds says that:
Merleau-Ponty insists that perception “already stylises,”and in the The Visible and the Invisible he also suggests that what we have termed the object, always encroaches upon us, just as we encroach upon it.These two claims ensure that rather than being conceived of as merely brute facts of the world, objects are capable of the same transformations that are commonly associated with our understanding of culture.
I have not read The Visible and the Invisible as it is out of print, so we need to use Reynolds as a guide. He mentions an example that Merleau-Ponty uses fairly regularly:
it is through the differentiation (or divergence) between our left hand touching our right hand that we gain an apprehension of ourselves. Merleau-Ponty’s initial, and I think permissible presumption, is that we can never
simultaneously touch our right hand while it is also touching an object of the world...Touching and touched are not simply separate orders of being in the world since they are reversible, and this image of our left hand touching our
right hand does more than merely represent the body’s capacity to be both perceiving object and subject of perception, in a constant oscillation (e.g., the Sartrean looked at, looked upon dichotomy, as well as the master-slave oscillations that such a conception engenders).
A review of Vicki Kirby's Telling Flesh by Jack Reynolds in Contretemps. It is entitled, 'Kirby, Merleau-Ponty, and the Question of an Embodied Deconstruction' and Reynolds quickly highlights Kirby's key argument in relation to poststructuralist feminism:
While Kirby’s references to Derrida are often quite allusive, he is an important background figure in her work, because many of the feminists that she seeks to criticise use Derridean deconstruction as an intellectual support. According to Kirby, recent feminist articulations of the body have a tendency to rely heavily upon the linguistic emphasis of certain early Derridean texts, and in this respect she finds theorists like Drucilla Cornell and Judith Butler to be complicit in something akin to the semiological reductionist reading. That is, they take Derrida as something of a linguistic idealist, even if they generally endorse this position rather than reject it, as the more unsympathetic critics of deconstruction have done. Kirby contends that Derrida actually resists any such reading of his work, and has an implied conception of the body that avoids this mere reversal of binary oppositions.
Reynolds says that Kirby does more than merely refute the claim that Derrida is a semiological reductionist. She also explores what her proposed intertwining of the ideal and the material might mean for notions like materiality, and objects by arguing e that just as objects are influenced by what we describe as culture, so culture is influenced by materiality.
The emergent field of cultural studies presupposes that we are produced by signifying practices and ideologies, discourses motivated or determined by power, and our gender or cultural identities are contingent politico-cultural constructions, not natural givens. The concept of the body as text signifies poststructuralism's departure from biologistic accounts of the body and 'a world before or without language'. This means that the body is the universal biological stuff written by culture, that dead, inert matter, and this is what is assumed both by the culturalist and the biological reductionist. The former reverses the latter.
Feminist poststructuralism has repeatedly returned to the metaphor of inscription, to a body written on by culture, and often only at the exterior. That implies that the flesh is actually a word. Well not quite. If matter is inscribed, what does the inscribing (if not culture), and on what bedrock (if not nature)? So 'body-as-inscription' position necessarily posits the very body-as-exceeding-representation it wishes to avoid.
Vicki Kirby in Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal, argues for the possibility that 'nature scribbles', that 'flesh reads' (p. 127). I'm not sure what 'flesh reads' means. Does it mean the same as 'bodies speak?
Penelope Deutscher in a review of Telling Flesh says that:
There is a world of difference between thinking the body as natural, essential as opposed to culturally inscribed and thinking the body as natural, essential 'because indistinguishable from culture'.