Theory Reading Group

titulus libri Jamesoni

2005-12-17T20:11:00.000-08:00

The title of the Jameson book, which i could not remember, is The Political Unconscious. The title came up in our discussion of the use of structural parallels between phenomenon, which as an analytic mode has been quite useful as one loci tends to suggest another.
Anyhow, thanks for your time all. Wednesday was fun and productive.

Greg

Towards Defining the Past

2005-12-12T15:31:00.000-08:00

Greg Woolverton

Every history has its constitutive philosophy of history. Such a philosophy rubricates things like the use value of historiography, the epistemological status of historical knowledge, and the desiderata of reading practices. A definition of the past as such is one more element a philosophy of history. How do historians work with that which is manifestly not actual? Entities – material and non-material – exist that originated in the past, and yet their origins lie in a non-iterable and irretrievably absent reality. Even my slightest gesture of seconds ago recedes ineluctably into this absence of the past, and yet I continue to exist. It is with this phenomenon, which I characterize as the presence/absence of the past, that this paper deals.
Through a comparison of selected conceptual categories deployed to deal with the phenomenon of presence/absence I outline the ontic structure of metaphorical materiality. Metaphorical materiality is the concretion of abstract entities or concepts – reification – without which human understanding is moribund. But, reification's 'seeing as' function raises the epistemological question of the possibility of perceiving something in itself. Is it possible to transcend the seeing-as function of reification? The question does not orient a Rankean principle of telling 'how it really was'. Rather, the question concerns what may be called the philosophical definition of 'the past'; what is the past? I am attempting to define in general and structural terms that province which is the historian's object.
To transcend the seeing as function of metaphorical reification I turn to Heidegger's fundamental ontology of historicality in Being and Time. However, Heidegger presupposes an embodied reading practice, orienting his analysis to Dasein: finite human existence. A discursive mapping of the structure of the past in terms other than 'seeing-as' is impossible. Therefore , in terms of approaching a coherent philosophy of history, this paper argues that the past is virtual; the past is only in essence and effect; it cannot be formally recognized or admitted.
In the widest sense, the term 'the past' has as its referent a non-extensive conceptual entity defined provisionally as 'that which has been'. The past refers to that totality of Being whose existence transpired prior to 'now'. This presupposes a simple definition of time relative to my own existence. That which was before 'my time' is the past. The presence/absence of the past is manifest in the simple fact that much that currently exists did so before my time. Reality effects such as 'Edmonton' and the physical infrastructure of the city itself existed prior to my birth and continue to exist in my experience of them. However, the non-iterable acts and events that are the condition of the possibility of the existence of these things – the founding of a settlement, the construction of the Legislature – are irretrievably absented from perception except through memory or imagination. The perception of the past in terms of its presence/absence can be likened to the perception of music. A piece of music is a totality in itself, however we hear it one measure at a time, and if we want to hear it again, we have to play it again. The past cannot be 'played again'. Is it any wonder why time travel is a distinct theme of science fiction literature and film?
This, then, is the presence/absence of the past. The past is present in entities – indeed, in everything that exists – and is absent in events, acts, and other entities which are non-iterable or no longer exist. Where is the boundary between the presence and the absence of the past? Here one might take their lead from Nietzsche's logical and linguistic caveat concerning the separation of doer and deed in Genealogy of Morals and argue that there is no such boundary except in language. Nietzsche argues that only by "[…] the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a 'subject'" can casuistries like "[…] 'being' behind doing, effecting, becoming […]" originate.[1] To separate, therefore, the lightning from its flash, or the doer from the deed is to fall into the seduction of a false premise; the existence of a 'subject' or "the Kantian 'thing-in-itself'". In the terms of this paper, the question becomes, Is it possible to detach the existing entity from the non-iterable existential conditions of its possibility?
Nietzsche's argument is important for thinking along existentially phenomenological axes, but not helpful along material axes. The very structure of the past makes this obvious. For example, the ancient manuscript is constituted as such by the scribe's handwriting. The scribe's strokes and gestures, his or her sitting in the scriptorium, however, are the non-iterable activities which are the conditions of possibility for the handwriting, which, again, constitutes the extant manuscript. The scribe's activities, unlike the manuscript, cannot be present to hand for the historian in the same way that the manuscript can. The manuscript exists through time, the scribe's activities existed in the past. To accept this distinction is not to separate the doer and the deed; the scribe is constituted qua scribere, but the manuscript is constituted qua scribant. While it may be spurious to distinguish between the actor and the act, the distinction between the act and its material effects is manifold. But, the perdurable connection between non-iterable act and existent effect, is constitutive for the Being-present of the past.
Nietzsche's caveat is thus the proviso for stating that the past is in effect. The ongoing existence of material entities in time has as its fundamental precondition those non-iterable acts and events which are their possibility of emergence. Every jot and tittle, as it were, remains unalterably the effect of non-iterable acts and events, and inasmuch as those effects are the past is. The Being of the past is its residual effects. To say as much is to restate the conceptualization of the past's presence in terms of presence/absence outlined above. The proposition is enthymeme. The paradoxical formulation of presence/absence is demonstrable in the definition of the past as Being-in-effect, since it is the absent act – writing – which is present in its material effect – manuscripts. This is one half of the definition of the past as virtual, existing in essence and effect.
The past is not the only province of presence/absence known to historians. Scholars of religion characterize the relation between the alterity of the divine and the human encounter of God in this way as well. "This theme is, for want of a better term, the 'monotheistic paradox' between God's absence and presence."[2] The correlation of this formulation with historiography is explicit in Keith Jenkins' work. Consider his argument to the effect that there is a distinction to be drawn between the past and history.
[…] we can think of 'the past as such' as being an absent object of inquiry, its presence (its absent presence) being signified by its remaining traces, which is the only 'real past' we have, such traces functioning not as the historian's referent in the sense of actually being some kind of extra-discursive reality, but as if they were such a referent in that they constitute the last court of appeal for historical disputes […] within discourse.[3]
In purely conceptual terms, then, the past and the divine share this notable feature of presence/absence. The past and the divine, in terms of their availability to human perception, are similar in that they resist domestication in language, retaining their transcendence of any linguistic categories almost by definition, and are of a fundamentally different order of Being than that which we presently experience. This is the clue that justifies comparing the linguistic strategies and conceptual categories of religious scholars and historians in order to elucidate a definition of the past.
Aaron Hughes' work collapses the traditional dialectic of philosophy and literature into one paradigm, that of embodied reading. He contends that philosophy uses the language of reason on the assumption that this enables humanity to transcend their world, whereas literature situates humans in the midst of their embodied condition. Philosophical literature such as medieval Jewish and Islamic initiatory tales traverse both horizons of discourse, taking up the categories of life and embodiment in order to communicate transcendental truth. Hughes' argument is that the medieval Jewish and Islamic neoplatonist philosophers were alive to the implications of what hermeneutic phenomenology and experiential philosophers are demonstrating in the twentieth century; that cognition depends on reification, which originates in the embodied human experience of the world. Demonstrating by their use of metaphorical and allegorical narrative their awareness that discursive and expository writing are inadequate to the task of knowing divine truth, devout philosophers such as Avicenna, Ibn Ezra, and Ibn Tufayl deployed figurative language to initiate their readers into an experience of the divine. The heuristic key that enables this interpretation of these thinkers' writing is Hughes' contention that:
Philosophy possesses an existential dimension. It cannot be completely objective, but must also be grounded in the particulars of human experience. To phrase this somewhat differently, humans can only think with the contents of their imagination, their memories, and their experiences. We can only apprehend that which exists without form by means of form, the incorporeal through the corporeal.[4]
Central to this claim is the role of metaphor in the conceptual system of human beings generally, a claim based on the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, to which I will return.[5] In the context of the quote above, imagination uses metaphor to furnish the contents of the imagination, memory, and experience for the process of intellection. The claim is that abstract thought is not possible without sensory experience, which the imagination refines into a serviceable vehicle for abstraction. The importance of the initiatory tales in the history of literature is their implicit claim and explicit demonstration of the fact that reification is the sine qua non of cognition. The deployment of metaphor for conceptual efficacy, however, surfaces in discursive writing of an ostensibly different character than allegorical religious literature, historiographical theory and philosophy, for example. So, whereas Hughes argues for the necessity of conceptual metaphors for comprehending non-extensive entities and abstract concepts, the work of Michel Foucault and Soren Kierkegaard may be said to demonstrate that necessity.
In the introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault asks, "[…]how is one to specify the different concepts that enable us to conceive of discontinuity (threshold, rupture, break, mutation, transformation)?"[6] I would argue that, in part Foucault draws on metaphorical materiality, specifically the metaphor – DISCOURSE IS A GEOLOGICAL FORMATION – to construct his text and present the ideas of rupture and discontinuity. The fact that his method unfolds under the sign of archaeology is not arbitrary. Conceiving of discourse as geology enables Foucault to locate layers, breaks, ruptures, sediment, and spaces of dispersion in an opaque archival medium. The geological metaphor shapes the way that Foucault's archaeological method understands itself and unfolds. Construed in literal terms, discourse is the totality of effective statements, stripped of all media of conveyance.[7] Such a totality would be sublime, the imaginary space into which all statements ever uttered or written had been dumped, forming an indistinguishable mass. To make sense of this would require a coherent method, which must be predicated on a conceptualization of the object, hence the archaeological method of understanding the vast field of human knowledge. Metaphorical materiality is the form and content of Foucault's archaeological method. The very title, The Archaeology of Knowledge, invites a figurative comparison between two entities that could not be more literally unlike: knowledge and rock.
Kierkegaard's existential philosophy provides another example of how metaphorical materiality surfaces in the discussion of abstract concepts, in this case, the past specifically. In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard explains his primary problem with the doctrine of original sin as he understands it; "Adam was fantastically placed outside this history [of the human race]".[8] This concise statement, upon further reflection on its implicit structuration, demonstrates the consistency of a metaphorical interpretation of the past and of the forces that shape history. The idea of inside/outside, which presupposes movement on the part of actors such as Adam and "thought" or theology, invites an apprehension of a concrete spatial relation, as though between a person and a room, for example. The concept of being "fantastically placed" presupposes a power relation in which the figure of Adam can be manipulated by thought like a chess piece to different positions in that spatial relation. The history of the human race itself constitutes that space, admitting of interiority and exteriority, inclusion and exclusion.
It may be argued that since these discourses have material entities as their subject they must adopt material categories to express themselves. Perhaps the attenuated abstraction gradient is germane in that it begins with material entities, such as real people, and moves towards the abstract. But, Foucault's text deals with discourse, and purports to dismantle any unities of discourse such as the tradition, the book, or the oeuvre, such that discourse becomes the totality of effective statements. What Foucault's dismantling of discursive unities permits as a methodological first principle is the perception of discourse as disembodied from any material conveyance, which conveyances are reintroduced later as objects of inquiry for the purpose of establishing enunciative modalities. Foucault is talking about statements, whether printed or spoken, which, if their materiality was to form the metaphorical materiality of his work would conduce to any number of possible structures, and not just geological ones. This arbitrariness of the metaphor applies to Kierkegaard's thought as well. The spatial metaphor is not the only one that conveys a sense of proximity or involvement; relational metaphors may be candidates to express these things as well.
The ideas of metaphorical materiality and embodied reading are the subject of two books published by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Their first collaborative work, Metaphors We Live By, begins with the claim that "our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature."[9] This claim is based on an analysis of linguistic evidence, but the entailments of the claim reach farther than the realm of linguistics. Not only are concepts structured metaphorically, but their metaphorical structure governs the way humans behave. Concepts are "structured, understood, performed, and talked about"[10] metaphorically. This is an entailment of the systematicity of particular metaphors. Understanding argument as war, for example, entails conceptualizing, and thus performing arguments as war. For example, "He destroyed my argument," or, "My thesis was blown away by her evidence."
The point that I want to draw out of Lakoff and Johnson's discussion is their claim that "[…] no metaphor can ever be comprehended or even adequately represented independently of its experiential basis."[11] Metaphorical conceptualizations of abstract concepts arise out of the embodied experience particular to human beings. For example, the embodied experience of the world around us in terms of entities like cars, buildings, landscapes, etc., is translated into the metaphorical apprehension of abstract things like inflation. Lakoff and Johnson argue that the everyday language dealing with inflation, such as "We need to combat inflation," or "Inflation is taking its toll at the checkout counter and the gas pump," arises from a basic metaphor – INFLATION IS AN ENTITY – which is based on the embodied experience of entities in the world.[12] In an example that is perhaps more pertinent, Lakoff and Johnson identify the THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS metaphor which makes it possible to transpose concepts from the domain of construction (edifice, foundation, structure) into the domain of theory so that 'the structure of the theory' can be understood.
One concept can be understood in terms of more than one metaphor. This is a function of the coherence and consistency of metaphors. Related aspects of a single concept can be expressed by the use of different metaphors. Argument, in an alternative to the war metaphor, is conceived of as a journey in the statement, "We have set out to prove that bats are birds."[13] This metaphor – AN ARGUMENT IS A JOURNEY – can be combined with the metaphor – AN ARGUMENT IS A CONTAINER – so that the entailments of both metaphors can express the progress and the content of the concept of metaphor: "The content of the argument proceeds as follows."[14] The coherence of metaphorical conceptualization is such that out of a single effective statement such as the one above, more than one metaphor may precipitate. For Lakoff and Johnson, this is indicative of the pervasiveness of metaphor in human understanding.
Lakoff and Johnson follow up their analysis of the pervasiveness of metaphor in linguistic data with an analysis of the ramifications of this phenomenon. Their book Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought represents an attempt to refound philosophical speculation on the basis of empirical science. They claim that "[…] the very properties of concepts are created as a result of the way the brain and body are structured and the way they function in interpersonal relations and in the physical world."[15] Their claims are wide-ranging and overtly controversial in a manner that intends to situate cognitive science as the first principle of Western philosophy. "More than two millennia of a priori philosophical speculation about these aspects of reason are over [metaphor, embodiedness, the unconscious]. Because of these [our] discoveries, philosophy can never be the same again."[16] As my own argument proceeds, the vacuity of these claims will be made apparent, however, the basic ideas of embodied reading and the experiential basis for human meaning are a basic part of my argument.
Lakoff and Johnson seem to think that the western tradition consists of Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Locke. They contend with linguistic theorists and analytic philosophers, provisionally mention methodologies such as post-structuralism and psychoanalysis, but for the most part, the implications of their theory – inescapable embodiedness, existential phenomenology – have been anticipated by philosophers whom they overlook, most notably Martin Heidegger. A contemporary philosopher such as Derrida, when mentioned, is not cited. In the final analysis, Lakoff and Johnson provide a good explanation of reification in discursive prose, insights that are indeed crucial for historiography, as Aaron Hughes has shown; but, in my experience little that overtly claims the status of revolutionary truly is, while often understated 'revolutionaries' carry the field. Nor are Lakoff and Johnson the first to suggest that figurative language is the basis of truth. One may consult the work of Paul Ricoeur for another theoretical approach to how figurative language (narrative) structures truth and meaning in such a way as to be essential rather than accidental.[17] As it turns out, numerous philosophers were alive to the implications of Lakoff and Johnson's thesis, including medieval religious thinkers (cf. Hughes).
The systematicity involved in understanding one concept in terms of another means that elements of the concept so understood are revealed as well as concealed by the metaphor; understanding one thing in terms of another simply means not understanding it in terms of something else, which may or may not be equivocally illuminating. Lakoff and Johnson solve this problem for empirical research by convergence evidence tests. When embodied scientific realism generates a number of theories in various methodologies, and when those theories converge towards similar conclusions after empirical testing, embodied scientific realism is vindicated in the tradition of scientific understanding.[18]
For non-extensive categories – the past, for example – Lakoff and Johnson take a different approach. "In sum, embodied truth requires us to give up the illusion that there exists a unique correct description of any situation."[19] The theory of embodied truth replaces a correspondence theory of truth. Thus, "A statement is true when it fits the way things are in the world," is replaced by, "A person takes a sentence as 'true' of a situation if what he or she understands the sentence as expressing accords with what he or she understands the situation to be."[20] The implications of this theory of truth for the question of the definition of the past are manifold. On the intuitive level the embodied reading thesis makes sense. Lakoff and Johnson's claim that abstraction is dependent on bodily experience is implicit in my discussion of time above. The absence of the past is that which transpired before 'my time' and the presence of the past is that which exists in my ongoing experience of the world. My way of 'timing time', as it were, depends on my own experience. My argument that the past is in essence and effect depends on this perspective. In one sense, the claim that embodied experiences determine the trajectories of thought, and that truth is understanding, seem self evident.
But this is a difficult issue for historiography and its constitutive philosophies of history. The problem with metaphor is that it potentially conceals as much as it reveals. Seeing one thing in terms of another means that there are multiple possible conceptual metaphors that conduce to understanding. This mode of seeing one thing as something else precludes seeing the thing in itself, and this is what Lakoff and Johnson concede; but it is antithetical to what traditional historiography attempts. The arbitrariness of these conceptualizations is a related problem. If Foucault's understanding of discourse potentially conduces to a number of conceptualizations, can it be said that there is a right one? To understand the past in terms of experience – before my time – is one thing, but when we conceptualize the past in its entirety in differential metaphorical terms, how can we arbitrate between them? If understanding the past as an bounded entity is as valid as understanding the past as a movement, whence criticism? How responsible can the historian be for the stability of there method? Is there an essential being of the past that can be explicated in unequivocal terms?
The short answer is; metaphorically, no; existentially yes. Metaphors are inherently interchangeable and their primary value is their use value for understanding reality in terms that conduce to efficacy. Existentially, the nature of the past is understood humanly. Not all the particulars of experience are the same, cultures and languages condition experience, for example; but, there could be no credible human claim to have transcended the essential presence/absence of the past outlined above. Such a claim would necessitate time travel, which remains a tantalizing fantasy. This, I would argue, is the unalterable human existential experience of the past. It is this presence/absence, itself an embodied experiential conceptualization, that remains as the fundamental item to be explicated with a view to understanding the definition of the past.
The specificities of human understanding outlined by Lakoff and Johnson form one component within a general problematic of historicism. For nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinkers the problem was acute.
Critical theorists had approached historical reflection as a unique way of comprehending the human world. They shared an idea in common that all understanding, as part of the human world, participated in its historical development. Because all understanding was tied to the historical context in which it arose, it was unable to reach beyond this context to grasp the world as a metaphysical totality[21]
The problem of realism in historiography is similar, stemming at least in part from nineteenth-century disputes over claims to accurate representations of humanity as both a participant in history and an objective, realistic observer.[22] Embodiedness, realism, and particularity, then, are involved in a general problematic of historicism, to which Martin Heidegger addressed himself in his work, Being and Time.
Heidegger's work is important because; 1) it anticipates the thesis of Lakoff and Johnson by half a century, and 2) it is concerned with historicity – the past – fundamentally. It is apodictic in Being and Time that "the question of existence never gets straightened out except through existing itself."[23] This is a presupposition of methodology for Heidegger, who begins his ontological analysis of Being with the kind of being which the inquirer in any case is: Dasein, defined as finite human existence. By orienting his method to the Being of Dasein, Heidegger can account for reification and the metaphorical structure of human cognition in language.
This priority of the spatial in the Articulation of concepts and significations has its basis not in some specific power which space possesses, but in Dasein's kind of Being. Temporality is essentially falling, and it loses itself in making present; not only does it understand itself circumspectively in terms of objects of concern which are ready-at-hand, but from those spatial relationships which making-present is constantly meeting in the ready-to-hand as having presence, it takes its clues for articulating that which has been understood and can be interpreted in the understanding in general.[24]
Compared to other theorists, Heidegger's work "approached the problem of historical meaning from an entirely different standpoint, finding the primary source of historical meaning, not in continuity and coherence of an objective historical process, but in the ontological structure of Dasein (finite human existence).[25] Heidegger's concernful dealing with the problematics of historicism are the basis of my definition of the past as being in essence. What follows is a reading of Heidegger's Being and Time oriented towards establishing the second part of my definition of the past as being in essence. The being of the past in effect is the irreducible relation of non-iterable acts with their existent material effects. The being of the past in essence is the consistency of entities through time, containing, as it were, their pastness as a fundamental aspect of their being.[26]
Because "an understanding of Being is already included in conceiving anything which one perceives as an entity" (22), Heidegger takes as his entry point into the question of Being his own existence-as-questioning. This permits no prefabricated or unanalysed concept to pass into the discourse. This is Heidegger's issue with Descartes' cogito ergo sum, where the cogito is demonstrated, but the sum remains unexplicated ontologically. Heidegger argues that Descartes automatically imports analytic categories from the Scholastics in order to substantiate the Being of the sum. He opts to take Dasein, as that being which comports itself towards its own being as his starting point, and thus avoids categories like subject, I, soul, self, and mind, each of which contain an implicit ontology. This initiative is based on the problem of being in Heidegger's reading of Aristotle, where Being as such transcends all instantiations of Being in the form of entities. By starting where Being first manifests itself – in the inquirer after Being's meaning – ontological categorization is replaced by phenomenology. "Looking at something, understanding and conceiving it, choosing, access to it – all these ways of behaving are constitutive for our inquiry, and therefore are modes of Being for those particular entities which we, the inquirers, are ourselves" (26-27). Only when philosophical inquiry is itself taken as the place to begin analysing how existence is worked out by Dasein does it become possible to understand that which constitutes existence as such.
The problem of Being's transcendence of particular entities is developed in the concepts of ontic and ontological. The ontic is a treatment of the being specific to an entity, whereas the ontological is a treatment of being itself. The difference between ontic and ontological is predicated on the contradistinction between existentiell and existentiality. Existentiell denotes the self-understanding of Dasein that arises through the process of existing; "the individual self of man in so far as it is interested in itself as this particular entity."[27] Existentiality denotes the context of the ontological structure of existence, "the selfhood of man in so far as it is related not to the individual self but to being and the relationship to being."[28] Heidegger orients this analysis toward the fundamental problem of historicism early in his treatise. "[…] what is philosophically primary is neither a theory of the concept-formation of historiology nor the theory of historiological knowledge, nor yet the theory of history as the Object of historiology; what is primary is rather the Interpretation of authentically historical entities as regards their historicality" (31). The difference adumbrated between the philosophically primary and the philosophically derivative is based on the difference between the ontic and the ontological.
The distinction between the ontic and the ontological is what makes it imperative to pursue the definition of the past further than metaphorical materiality. I contend that metaphorical materiality is the existentiell primordiality of historiography, that is to say, it is the understanding that arises out of following history's own working out of itself. Ontically, the metaphor covers as much as it reveals when it is used to define the past. If the metaphor operates in the ontic realm of the being of the past, in that metaphor becomes the being of a past entity – THE PAST IS A MOVEMENT – so that the existentiell analytic of the past may be grasped by Dasein, the ontological existentiality of the past remains covered over. "Yet so much semblance, so much Being" (60), does not designate therefore, the being of the past, but only Dasein apprehending itself as it unfolds in a historical way, that is, as concern with the ontic rather than the ontological.
The past as understood metaphorically – as a movement, as an object, as a landscape – conduces to the ontic, to the givenness of the past as an entity to thought, while the ontological Being of the past transcends its metaphorically ontic givenness. This is axiomatic given the definitions of ontic and ontological. "Entities are, quite independently of the experience by which they are disclosed, and acquaintance in which they are discovered, and the grasping in which their nature is ascertained. But Being 'is' only in the understanding of those entities to whose Being something like an understanding of Being belongs" (228). The revolutionary rhetoric of the embodied reading thesis is undercut once it is realized that "all these terms refer to definite phenomenal domains which can be 'given form': but they are never used without a notable failure to see the need for inquiring about the Being of the entities thus designated" (72). I.e., the pastness of the past and the historicality of history. "We can depict the way such entities 'look', and we can give an account of occurrences in them and with them. This, however, is obviously a pre-phenomenological 'business' which cannot be at all relevant phenomenologically. Such a description is always confined to entities. It is ontical" (91).
The crux of Hediegger's analysis for my purpose is the implication he draws out for the nature of understanding itself. "That which has been circumspectively taken apart with regard to its 'in-order-to', and taken apart as such – that which is explicitly understood – has the structure of something as something" (189). The 'seeing as' structure of embodied reading is an entailment of Heidegger's method; nothing has Being that is not related to Dasein, and conversely Being is ontologically defined in terms of its relation to Dasein (being-ready-to-hand, for example). Heidegger goes on to call this analytic the 'existential-hermeneutical 'as'" (201). Contra Lakoff and Johnson's claim to have discovered the embodiedness of logic, Hediegger states "[…] we have made plain that the 'logic' of the logos is rooted in the existential analytic of Dasein […]" (203). Not only does this presuppose embodied and experiential categories, but it proposes to move past metaphorical materiality towards a primordially existential analysis of the definition of the past. The move accepts embodiedness but rejects overt metaphorical structuration.
The ontic/existentiell and ontological/existential dualities exfoliate in a genealogical extrapolation toward the concepts of historizing and historicality, both of which are introduced in terms of temporality, which is internal to the structure of Dasein. Dasein is Being-towards-death which has the existential meaning of Being-towards-one's-ownmost-possibility. This Being-towards not yet actualized possibilities, and Being-towards-death as the possibility of the impossibility of existence is the source of conceptions of the future as that which comes towards one's Being. Alternatives exclude, Being-in-the-world cannot actualize every possibility. Being-toward-possibility is founded on Dasein's throwness, which is the condition of simply finding oneself in the world, a condition that does not arise from any specific choice, but just is. To have this condition be disclosed to Dasein and to have this condition thereby become the basis of Dasein's concernful dealings with the world constitutes a return, so to speak, to Dasein's mode of being as it already was. "Only in so far as Dasein is as an 'I-am-as-having-been', can Dasein come towards itself futurally in such a way that it comes back" (373).
The disclosedness of possibility to Dasein and Dasein's resoluteness toward a possibility is conceptualized as a motion towards, a motion ahead, which translates into a sense of the futural. The present, in this conception, is the 'moment of vision' that discloses the Situation in which Dasein finds itself in its throwness. "The authentic coming-towards-itself of anticipatory resoluteness is at the same time a coming-back to one's ownmost Self, which has been thrown into its individualization" (388). The primordial basis of temporality is therefore found in Dasein's ontological structure. It arises out of the structure of the Being of Dasein, it is not something external.
Temporality, as I have intimated, is the ontological basis of attenuating the concepts of ontic/existentiell and ontological/existential into the concepts of historizing and historicality respectively. "In terms of temporality, it then becomes intelligible why Dasein is, and can be, historical in the basis of its Being, and why, as historical, it can develop historiology" (278). The manner in which Dasein is 'stretched along' between birth and death so as to form an ontological whole is Dasein's historizing, which is defined as 'Being happening in a historical way'. Dasein's historizing occurs when Dasein, as Being-towards-death resolves on actualizing its possibilities. In order to do this, Dasein grasps hold of that which has been given to it in the form of a heritage, the condition of the possibility of having possibilities to begin with. "This is how we designate Dasein's primordial historizing, which lies in authentic resoluteness and in which Dasein hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet chosen" (435).
Dasein happening in a historical way – historizing – is ontic and existentiell in the sense that it is Dasein's autochthonous precondition arising out of throwness, on the basis of which Dasein works out its existence while existing. Historicality, on the other hand is ontological and existential in the sense that Dasein is its past. The existential totality of Dasein bounded at its horizons by birth and death is constituted as a totality, not by the phenomenal unity of the self for which that totality is the sum of experiences, but by the way in which Dasein is "'what' it already was" (41). To recall Nietzsche's caveat, the doer is not separated from the deed in Heidegger. Furthermore, Dasein is not the individual, it is finite human existence. "Whatever the way of being it may have at the time, and thus with whatever understanding of Being it may possess, Dasein has grown up both into and in a traditional way of interpreting itself: in terms of this it understands itself proximally and, within a certain range, constantly. By this understanding, the possibilities of its Being are disclosed and regulated. Its own past – and this always means the past of its 'generation' – is not something which follows along after Dasein, but something which already goes ahead of it" (41). Finite human existence is always in terms of the finite human existence which has furnished the conditions of its possibilities for actualizing itself in the world. This is why Heidegger can say, "whatever the way of being it may have," since that being is the indeterminacy of a particular way of being; culturally defined, linguistically conditioned.
Heidegger defines essence as 'the Being-what-it-is' of an entity (42). In his treatment of Dasein's historizing, the essence of Dasein is its historizing, which is the ontical possibility of its primordial historicality. To define the Being of the past by saying that that past is in essence, is to state that the Being of the past is the essence of Dasein. Arising as it does from Dasein's primordial existentiality of temporality and its constitutive historicality, historizing has as its primordial precondition the acceptance of an inheritance disclosed by the world into which Dasein is thrown. This shows that the essence of Dasein, in existentially historizing out of primordially ontological historicality, is the past. Not totally, it is one existential structure of care, but primordially, on the level of being definitive for the ontological constitution of Dasein, the past is in essence. Heidegger acknowledges the justification of commonsense notions of time and history; there is simply no way around the absence of non-iterable events, even in the ontology of history. "Thus 'the past' has a remarkable double meaning; the past belongs irretrievably to an earlier time; it belonged to the events of that time; and in spite of that, it can still be present-at-hand 'now' – for instance, the remains of a Greek temple. With the temple, a 'bit of the past' is still 'in the present'" (430).
I have been arguing that the past is virtual; it is in essence and effect, it cannot be formally recognized or admitted. If my arguments above hold water, so to speak, the definition of the past is constitutive for a philosophy of history which is the presupposition of methodology. To state that the past is in essence is to hold in view the consistency of an entity through time in such a way as to demonstrate that its being-what-it-is is existentially constituted by being-what-it-was. To state that the past is in effect is to hold in view how non-iterable events and acts are constitutive for the being-what-it-is of an entity, but to acknowledge the retreat of these acts and events out of the realm of perception except in their effects. This definition of the past is inextricably tied to the embodied human experience of time and reality, an analytic which is inescapable. But, this definition moves past the ontic understanding of the past in which the past is understood in terms of a reifying concept such as a container, a movement, or an entity. Defining the past in metaphorical terms, such that the past becomes, for example, a conceptually concrete model – THE PAST IS A MOVING TRAIN – should be seen as ultimately derivative from the definition of the past outlined above. Again, embodiedness is inescapable, but the aegis of ontic metaphor conceals as much as it reveals, necessitating an existential explication defining the past in terms that uncover what metaphor potentially covers over.

Bibliography

Barash, Jeffrey Andrew. Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning. Perspectives on Continental Philosophy, Vol. 31. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. The Library of Philosophy and Theology. London: SCM Press, 1962.

Hughes, Aaron W. The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

Inwood, Michael. A Heidegger Dictionary. The Blackwell Philosopher Dictionaries, Vol. 3. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.

Jenkins, Keith. On "What is History?" From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White. London: Routledge, 1995.

Kierkegaard, Soren. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, Edited and translated by Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson. Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol. 8. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

________. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Nietzsche, Frederich. Genealogy of Morals. In The Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Translated by Walter Kaufman. Modern Library: New York, 2000.

White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1973.

[1] Frederich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufman (Modern Library: New York, 2000), 481.
[2] Aaron W. Hughes, The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 4. It should be clear that I am suggesting a conceptual and not an actual correspondence between the past and the divine; and further the entailments of my arguments for the Being of the past do not apply to the divine, i.e.; virtual, existing in essence and effect, not formally recognizable or admissible.
[3] Keith Jenkins, On "What is History?" From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White (London: Routledge, 1995), 17, (italics his).
[4] Hughes, Texture, 102.
[5] It may be noted provisionally that to say, "Central to this claim…" is to engage in metaphorically structured thinking, since the statement is senseless in a literal interpretation.
[6] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 5.
[7] Foucault, Archaeology, 26-27.
[8] Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, Reidar Thomte ed. and trans., and Albert B. Anderson ed/, Kierkegaard's Writings, vol. 8 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 25.
[9] George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 3.
[10] Ibid., 5.
[11] Ibid., 19.
[12] Ibid., 52-55.
[13] Ibid., 90.
[14] Ibid., 95.
[15] Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 37.
[16] Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy, 3.
[17] Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
[18] Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy, 89-92.
[19] Ibid., 109.
[20] Ibid., 98, 106.
[21] Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning, Perspectives on Continental Philosophy, vol. 31 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 255.
[22] Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press), 45-46.
[23] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, The Library of Philosophy and Theology (London: SCM Press, 1962), 33.
[24] Being and Time, 421.
[25] Barash, Martin Heidegger, 255.
[26] In the following section, quotations from Being and Time are indicated in the text
[27] Michael Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, The Blackwell Philosopher Dictionaries, vol. 3 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 61, s.v. existence.
[28] Ibid.

Dan's Paper

2005-12-12T14:13:00.000-08:00

“… Culture is a site of the secret, of seduction, of initiation, of a restrained and highly ritualized symbolic exchange. Nothing can be done about it. Too bad for the masses…”
(Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 64)
“There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself
This is where seduction begins.”
(Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 164)
The work of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard has often been accused by scholars from the social sciences of being hyperbolic jargon which fails to provide any pragmatic analysis on societal and/or cultural issues. It is unfortunate that Baudrillard’s work has been dismissed simply on the grounds that it lacks pragmatism by these proponents of the social sciences. Yet, despite their density and occasional exaggerated nature, Baudrillard’s commentaries on culture, reversibility, production, seduction, and the system have taught me that in order to gain an insight, or even gain a glimpse of the intricate and chaotic nature of the social, I must be willing to engage with a fluid subject* that, like sand, slips through my fingers every time I begin to feel comfortable with my understanding of it. The introductory quotations above serve as a departure point from which I hope to explore the interaction between theory and “the real” by using Baudrillard’s theory of seduction and its challenge to the order of production, as a case study.
According to Baudrillard, “theory is simply a challenge to the real,” but the “real is not an objective status of things, it is the point at which theory can do nothing.”[1] Baudrillard then quickly counters these statements by stating that “the real is actually a challenge to the theoretical edifice [itself],”[2] upon first glance, these contradicting* statements appear to neutralize each other, making each devoid of meaning, but they are a key aspect to comprehending Baudrillard’s theory of Seduction and its interaction with “the real” in the form of production. It is the goal of this paper to attempt to decipher how theory can act in the form of seduction as a challenge to conceptions of ‘the real,’ where production will constitute the realm of ‘the real.’ An analysis of this interaction requires an investigation into the possibility of a cultural site where “highly ritualized symbolic exchange” can occur.[3] Before this is possible, a brief analysis* of the etymological nature of the term culture is necessary to understand the different conceptualizations Baudrillard has of culture.
The conflicting meanings and uses of the word are a pivotal point when one begins delving into Baudrillard’s conception of “cultural production” as well as his ideas about highly ritualized symbolic exchange. (Placing culture in a navigable space will help)***
Raymond Williams’ analysis of the term culture, from his book Keywords, is a vital introduction to the complexities of the word. Culture is a complicated term to understand and utilize because it has “an intricate historical development,” and is used to convey the importance of different ideas in many distinct academic disciplines, as well as being a key term to many “distinct and incompatible systems of thought.”[4] Williams identifies three categories that are commonly identified by using “culture”: (1) as an independent and abstract noun used to describe the process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic expansion; (2) as an independent noun which describes a certain way of life characteristic of a group of people, or of a historical time period; (3) as an independent abstract noun which characterizes various works of intellectual and artistic activities.[5] These descriptions are further complicated by the confusion of whether culture is used to describe issues of human development and a specific way of life, or as the various works and practices that are the result of art and intelligence.[6] Analyzing Williams’ work on the development of the complexities of the word indicates that ‘culture,’ as a signifier, carries various referents that tend to intermingle, overlap and thus result in a dense term that conveys a complicated and commonly misunderstood message.
Another point of contention highlighted by Williams is the difference between the conceptions of material culture and symbolic culture. He highlights the disciplines of archeology and ‘cultural anthropology’ refer to the term ‘culture,’ or ‘a culture’, as chiefly ‘material’ production, whereas history and ‘cultural studies’ places emphasis on the signifying or symbolic systems characteristic to a culture.[7] Yet, outside of academic discourse, the term culture is commonly and loosely applied to various entities* that range from museums to movie theatres to literature, to name a few. An excellent example of a product of culture that is both material and symbolic is that of literature. The War of the Worlds, by H.G Wells portrays a specific culture and, eventually, the book and the story become absorbed by another culture separated by temporal and geographical space. The story was adapted for another culture through the interpretation by Orson Wells in 1939, and again by Steven Spielberg in 2005. In both cases, the story took on a new form of material culture via radio and film respectively, while critiquing certain contemporary symbolic culture. H.G. Wells’ story became integrated into Western “culture” as a part of its history, as well as through its applied contemporary relevance, thus becoming a work of literature that has cultural value, both symbolically and materially. Consequently, The War of the Worlds becomes a ‘cultural product’ which is marketable and consumable, essentially it becomes a piece of cultural capital. This is the ground on which Baudrillard attacks the accepted understandings of culture, identifying them as problematic because he feels that “the very ideology of ‘cultural production’ is antithetical to all culture.”[8]
Baudrillard beautifully critiques the modern notion of culture in his essay entitled “The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence.”[9] He demonstrates the execution of culture by the masses through the mass production of the masses, and therefore of culture.* The act of production and stockpiling of material culture such as the books and films that tell a story like The War of the Worlds as well as the contents in Beaubourg, is where the masses, and mass culture is created. A juxtaposition of two passages illustrates the relationship between the formation of the masses and how this formation creates a terminal state where the traditional sites of culture have no other fate than that of commoditization.
“And this translates a more general fact: that throughout the ‘civilized’ world the construction of stockpiles of objects have brought with it the complementary process of stockpiles of people-the line, waiting, traffic jams, concentration, the camp. That is ‘mass production,’ not in the sense of massive production or for use by the masses, but the production of the masses.”[10]

“For that, the mass of consumers must be equivalent or homologous to the mass of products. It is the confrontation and the fusion of these two masses that occurs in the hypermarket as it does at Beaubourg, and that makes something very different from the traditional sites of culture (monuments, museums, galleries, libraries, community arts centers, etc.).”[11]

This inverse dependency of mass culture on production of the masses creates a fusion of a commodity culture that the masses will not reject, but consume and devour.[12] The culture consumed in bookstores, theaters, and Beaubourg is one of production and synthetic meaning* and, according to Baudrillard, it is “the only real cultural practice” that remains. [13] Mass culture belongs to everybody and, in turn, everybody belongs to mass culture because the line that separates it from traditional culture has not just been blurred, it has been completely absorbed in the hypermarket that culture is now a part of. With this in mind, Baudrillard pessimistically declares that the culture of the masses – thus all culture – no longer has any meaning.[14] Thus, if the medium that allows subjects to communicate no longer carries meaning, then meaning itself becomes liquidated.[15]
The liquidation of meaning proclaimed by Baudrillard creates a new problem concerning the issue of “the secret” and the traditional cultural site that allows it to be communicated through “highly ritualized symbolic exchange”– despite the masses. [16] If all opportunities for conveying meaning are futile, then where does the secret reside? It is at this juncture where it is necessary for one to take a chance, leave the familiar and charted territory of ‘the real’ behind, and step into the uncertainty that surrounds Baudrillard’s theoretical attack on the system that produces a culture of ‘the real.’*
Theory and the Real: Entering the Game of Seduction
Theory can be interpreted as a method of critiquing accepted ideas by pushing their epistemological foundations to the limit of their reality in order to expose flaws, misconceptions, as well as the useful aspects of a dominant idea. Ultimately, theory is a way of challenging conceptions of the real with new and/or different alternatives.[17] Baudrillard does not accept this static notion of challenging theory and reconciling the differences between the theoretical and ‘the real’ due to his complicated interpretations of the real. This becomes apparent when he states that:* “There is no ‘reality’ with respect to which theory could become dissident or heretical, pursuing its fate other than in the objectivity of things.”[18] It appears that theory has no place to go, that it and ‘the real’ are all but an event- fused together. But, it is this conception of theory and ‘the real’ that creates a space for theory to challenge ‘the real’ from within.
SL: “Is anything happening to theory then?”
JB: “Theory dismantles the reality principle; it’s [sic] not at all a means of objectivizing things in order to transform them”[19]

The challenge does not consist of a head-on collision, but that of continuous manipulating, eroding and warping of ‘the real’ by theory, and vice-versa. Theory and ‘the real’ are engaged in a continually reversible challenge. A similar process is that of waves which slowly dismantle a shore line, gradually pulling the individual grains of sand down into the depths; both the sea and the shore tediously absorb each other.[20]
Further reading of Baudrillard’s approach to theory starts to reveal a theme that becomes an essential part of his approach to critiquing ‘the real’ through his own theory of seduction.
“There is a curve you can’t [sic] escape. You know that my way is to make ideas appear, but as soon as they appear I immediately try to make them disappear. That’s [sic] what the game has always consisted of. Strictly speaking, nothing remains but a sense of dizziness, in which you can’t [sic] do anything.”[21]
An emphasis on the “dizziness” in this passage demonstrates a fundamental step towards exposing a feeling of vertigo that is associated with seduction. Comparing the conceptualization of the movement of theory in “dismantling the real” to that of ocean waves is a fruitful metaphor when approaching the complexities of seduction. But before seduction can be parsed,* the relationship between theory and ‘truth’ should be explored briefly in Baudrillard’s terms.
Baudrillard sees the relationship between theory and “truth” as one that cannot solidify into a meaningful exchange because “truth doesn’t exist.”[22] ‘Truth’ is viewed as a slippery and amorphous state that fails to hold any permanent form at any single instant. As such, theory cannot confront ‘truth,’ but can only work around it and the constantly shifting void that it creates.[23] The void created by the idea of truth then poses a problem for theory’s destiny to challenge the real. If the truth does not exist, but simply operates in the form of a void, then Baudrillard’s proclamation that the real does not exist leaves theory in a state of limbo. This may be irreconcilable, but I feel that this is an appropriate point to defer back to the metaphor of the ocean and the shore.
All conceptions of absolute entities* must not only be forgotten, but annihilated, because the workings of seduction are chaotic* and mystifying. Any attempt to cling to an absolute form will only lead one down the wrong path, for the requirement of engaging with seduction is the ability to tread in the fluidity between deceptive meanings.
Seduction is a theory that encompasses various concepts, issues, and ideas. Although every aspect of this concept is vital to its operation, there are a few major points that are essential to understanding* the characteristics and operations of seduction. Baudrillard’s main goal in employing seduction as a theory is to oppose and radically stand out against the realm of production.[24] Opposing production causes seduction to take on a series of complex relationships with signs and notions that compose appearances of ‘the real’ and of ‘truth’ inherent to the system. Seduction is seductive due to its “very appearance, its inflections, its nuances, [because of] the circulation (whether aleatory and senseless, or ritualized and meticulous) of signs at its surface.”[25] The deceptive aspects of appearance characterize seduction’s ability* to deprive signs of their meaning.
The deceptive characteristics inherent in seduction are a result of signs losing their meaning and becoming strictly reflective, empty surfaces. It is “only [those] signs without referents, empty, senseless, absurd and elliptical signs [that] absorb us,” thereby creating a space within which seduction can operate. [26] An example of this space can be found in Soren Kierkegaard’s The Seducer’s Diary, where Johannes creates a space to seduce Cordelia by exploiting their engagement as the space between being single and married.
“Of all the ludicrous things an engagement is still the most ludicrous. There is still meaning in marriage, even if this meaning does not suit me. An engagement is purely a human invention and is no credit whatsoever to its inventor. It is neither one thing nor the other…”[27]
Engagement is a sign that carries no referent thus absorbing both Johannes and Cordelia by creating a fertile ground for seduction to begin. Johannes is able to deceive and therefore seduce Cordelia because they are in a space which is devoid of meaning. It is apparent that Cordelia is deceived into seduction by Johannes through the account of the editor of Johannes’ journal where he explains the disturbing effects of Johannes’ deception on his victims, including Cordelia:
“No visible change took place in them; they lived in the accustomed context, were respected as always, and yet they were changed, almost unaccountably to themselves and incomprehensibly to others.”[28]
This observation of the effects of seduction on Cordelia by Johannes “demonstrates the power of the insignificant… and meaningless signifier” which allows seduction to occur. [29]
The insignificant and meaningless signifiers deployed by Johannes create a sense of dizziness and uncertainty that are observable in Cordelia. Yet, the truly disturbing aspect of this change, or observation of it, is that there is no way to describe the state in which Cordelia continues to exist after her engagement with Johannes. Cordelia’s change is not perceptible to the senses. It is a change in her state of being; her truth has been deceived and her identity put into a perpetual state of vertigo and unease*. In a fashion similar to how theory is supposed to dismantle ‘the real,’ Cordelia’s state of being is dismantled, her conception of ‘the real’ altered– she had been seduced. This change in Cordelia corresponds to Baudrillard’s conception of seduction as being a “form [of meaningless signs] which tend always to unsettle someone in their identity and the meaning they can have for themselves,” and that ultimately “they find the possibility of radical otherness” surrounding and enclosing them with a feeling of angst and uncertainty. [30]
The example of Johannes and Cordelia serves as an example of seduction operating on a microcosmic level. It helps to demonstrate that seduction is not a competition resulting in complete dominance or triumph. A seductive encounter is a complicated and highly nuanced occurrence where nothing meets head-on,* but all parties are left unsettled after the engagement.
Signs that seduce are annulled of all meaning and seduce strictly by appearances.[31] Therefore, these signs have already been seduced, forming a space for the reversibility of signs between entities.* This allows seduction to occur. The framework for this concept is effectively conveyed by the following passage:
“But to be seduced is the best way to seduce. It is an endless refrain. There is no active or passive mode in seduction, no subject, no object, no interior or exterior: seduction plays on both sides, and there is no frontier separating them. One cannot seduce others if one has oneself not been seduced.”[32]
Thus, seduction, occurs in a constant rhythmic movement like waves undulating along the shoreline. There is no refrain; it is a continual and changing movement. Constantly responding to the challenge of the ocean, the shore protrudes into it, going deeper and deeper, but never truly separating from the water. Without the shore, there is no ocean, for there would be no frontier that separates the land from the water. The shoreline is seduced, the ocean is seduced, and they are constantly challenging each other, constantly sliding past each other, and continuously dismantling each other.
The all encompassing nature of seduction, as a result of its reversibility, produces a form of anxiety* due to the lack of ground on which one can regroup [diction], catch one’s breath, or escape: for existence within seduction is a constant challenge of fluid one-up-manship. The relationship between the panther and her victim is an example of a seductive relationship given by Baudrillard. By releasing an infatuating scent, the panther is able to lure her prey, which experiences a dizziness characteristic of seduction, within range for the panther’s attack. Yet, the panther can also be hunted/seduced with “spices, herbs, and perfumes as bait.”[33] This is an excellent example of reversibility characteristic of seduction. But the relationship between the panther as the hunter and the panther as the hunted creates problems for the possibility of theory being able to dismantle the real. Like the ocean and the shoreline, the panther as hunter or hunted is a closed system, which is constantly engaging in reversible relationships. The relationship between the panther and her opposition is one of a constantly shifting nature with no possible reconciliation.
Thus it is necessary to come back to Baudrillard’s idea that theory and ‘the real’ slip past each other, but now the statement “nothing happens in the real” adds an interesting dimension to the problem.[34] It is becoming more apparent that Baudrillard is right in implicating seduction’s illusive nature because the difference between theory and ‘the real’ seems to be non-existent in the realm* (maybe game?) of seduction. If this is the case, ‘the real’ and theory do not exist;* the system absorbs the differences between the two and places them in the realm of seduction, an environment in which all they can do is manipulate each other. Eventually, theory may dismantle ‘the real,’ but like the sand off of the shoreline, it will accumulate somewhere else and continue the constant reversal. (Introduce the part of Kierkegaard where she is always his)
Baudrillard posits that “the seducer’s weapons are the same as those of the girl, but turned against her; and it is this reversibility that gives the strategy its spiritual appeal.”[35] This can be seen in the relationship between Cordelia and Johannes before, as well as after Johannes cuts off all connections from her. Cordelia’s first letter reveals the reversible nature of seduction operating between two individuals.
“Never will I call you my Johannes,” for certainly I realize you have never been that… Yet I do call you “mine”: my seducer, my deceiver, my enemy, my murderer, the source of my unhappiness, the tomb of my joy, the abyss of my unhappiness… Yours I am, yours, yours, your curse.”[36]
Cordelia has been seduced, but so has Johannes –the exchange that occurs is one of a reversible nature. [37] Johannes and Cordelia are no longer in physical contact, but they are still influencing each other in a seductive sense.
Johannes has seduced, deceived and put Cordelia into a constant state of uncertainty where her conceived notions of absolutes and truth, (conceptions of ‘the real’) no longer bring any comfort. But Cordelia is still influencing Johannes in that she has reversed her seduction by realizing that regardless of physical relationships, he was also seduced and she will always be a part of him.* The pair will remain in a state of interactive motion sliding past one another, not meeting head on, but always influencing from the periphery, gradually dismantling each other and continuing the challenge from new, distant and oblique angles.*
Baudrillard on Foucault, Sex and Seduction*
In Forget Foucault, Baudrillard starts to develop the groundwork in which he proposes that theory is meant to be a challenge to the real.[38] It is in this analysis of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: An Introduction[39] that “Baudrillard stakes his claim to surpass Foucault” and his concentrated focus on power.[40] One of the points of contention between Baudrillard and Foucault lies in their differing interpretations of power. Gerry Coulter points out that Baudrillard’s conception of power is that it is a seductive, and therefore reversible and exchangeable, force that occurs between entities.*[41] Foucault however, states that:
“Pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another. They are linked together by complex mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement.”[42]
This interpretation of a static, reinforcing power goes completely against Baudrillard’s conception of power as a seductive and reversible exchange. An attempt to reconcile the differences between Baudrillard and Foucault appears at first to be futile,* but an analysis of the point in which they depart will help to gain better insight to the nature of seduction as a theory challenging ‘the real’ as production.
A site where Baudrillard and Foucault share similar ground is Foucault’s analysis of the confession. Starting with this analysis will prove a fertile ground in approaching seduction’s challenge to production. Foucault taps into one of the most important aspects essential to understanding production by recognizing that the introduction of mandatory confession by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 led to one of the most effective methods of producing truth in the west.[43] This production of truth via confession can be seen in “justice, medicine, education, family relationships [and] love relationships” thus turning these institutions into discourses that are commodities, or forms of cultural capital, to be produced.[44] The same can be said for sexuality. A constant requirement for confessions of sexual behavior turns sex into a discourse to be studied, therefore rejecting the possibility for an ars erotica, a seductive form of sexual interaction, thus giving rise to a productive discourse which Foucault terms a Scientia Sexualis.[45]*
From here it is possible to use Foucault’s analysis to help develop a conception of seduction’s relationship with production. With the development of the Scientia Sexualis, sex is produced in that it becomes visible, whether it be* in discourse or pornography. By becoming visible, sex becomes part of the order of production. It is the establishment of this Scientia Sexualis that enables Baudrillard to use Foucault’s concept to shape the landscape in which seduction will challenge production:
“To produce is to force what belongs to another order (that of secrecy and seduction) to materialize. Seduction is that which is everywhere and always opposed to production; seduction withdraws something from the visible order and so runs counter to production, whose project is to set everything up in a clear view, whether it be an object, number or a concept.”[46]
Thus, the state of the Scientia Sexualis is a form of productive discourse which helps to expand ‘the real’ whereas the ars erotica can be interpreted as a form of seduction because it does not disseminate the knowledge that is required to engage in it. It can also be understood as a form of seduction because “truth is drawn from pleasure… it is evaluated in terms of intensity” and because the knowledge gained from each experience “is deflected back into the sexual practice itself.”[47]
Like the relationship between the ocean and the shore, the intensity of the ars erotica penetrates the one experiencing it but, instead of confessing, or producing a description of it, the energy of the experience flows back into the act, for the sake of the act itself. Nothing is brought into the visible order from another; the secret of the experience remains a secret, and evades the force of production. This is not the case however, in the culture produced by the West: “ours is a culture of ‘monstration’ and demonstration of productive ‘monstrousity’… we never find seduction [here],” only Scientia Sexualis.[48]
By characterizing the West as an entity founded on production, and thereby devoid of the possibility of engaging in ritualistic exchange, Baudrillard places the West in the realm of ‘the real.’ This creates the opportunity to use the West as a case study in which the interaction between theory in the form of seduction, and ‘the real’ in the form of production can be orchestrated. There appears to be an alternative to the “culture of monstration,” where ritualistic exchange is possible as compared to the forced production characteristic of the West. Baudrillard beautifully juxtaposes the realm of “the real/production/the system” with the realm of seduction to demonstrate the different methods of engaging the sex act. (***)
“We do not understand, or we vaguely sympathize with, those cultures for which the sexual act has no finality in itself and for which sexuality does not have the deadly seriousness of an energy to be freed, a forced ejaculation, a production at all costs…”[49]
Here is a perfect example of the antithesis of seduction. Baudrillard commenting on sex shows that one of the most intimate and potentially reversible exchanges between people has become one of pure confession– pure production. The comparison is revealed by the nature of the culture that engages with seduction.
“These are cultures which maintain long processes of seduction and sensuousness in which sexuality is one service among others, a long procedure of gifts and countergifts; lovemaking is only the eventual outcome of this reciprocity measured to the rhythm of an ineluctable ritual.”[50]
It is this emphasis on countergifts and reciprocity which is an essential aspect of the seductive element characteristic of a culture where highly ritualized symbolic exchange occurs.
Symbolic exchange is a vital element of the workings of seduction in challenging production. It is a concept based on cultural observations of anthropology which helped Baudrillard break away from his static notion of “market exchange” as pure reality. Instead, he realized the workings of the “market economy” as purely ideological.[51] In symbolic exchange, the exchange does not take on the order of a contract, but a pact between individuals.[52] Ultimately, the conditions for highly ritualized symbolic exchange must permit an environment of reversibility in order to occur.[53]* This is emphasized when Baudrillard states:* “exchange must never have an end, it must always increase in intensity, possibly continuing until death.”[54] (smoother transition)*
Baudrillard accepts and supports Foucault’s hypothesis that the bourgeoisie gave rise to sexuality through the process of production. But he believes that the rise of sexuality via the production of “discourse, speech and desire”[55] has repressed seduction. In order to address sexuality in terms of seduction, and not production, one needs to look at the relationship which engages the reversible play of signs between the masculine and the feminine. This is an environment where the interactions between the masculine and the feminine “must be interpreted in the terms of play, challenges, duels, the strategy of appearances – that is, in the terms of seduction.”[56] Seduction occurs when the feminine does not oppose the masculine, but seduces it, therefore making the feminine an ambiguous term that disallows direct opposition of structural entities.[57]
Thus, it is very important not to interpret seduction as a simple exchange between the sexes.[58] Seduction is a fluid exchange, demonstrated through its interaction with the sexes as the feminine. The reversible nature of seduction that occurs between the sexes is a result of the feminine.
“But seduction for [Baudrillard] was, first, that reversible form in which both physiological sexes played out their identity, put themselves in play. What interested [him] was a kind of becoming-masculine of the feminine and becoming-feminine of the masculine… [he] understood the feminine as that which contradicts the masculine/feminine opposition, the value opposition between the two sexes.”[59]
This demonstrates the concepts of the reversible nature of seduction and the impossibility of a head on challenge between the two entities. In this interaction, the feminine acts in a seductive nature because it reverses the opposition between the polar conceptions of the masculine and the feminine and, ultimately, like theory’s relationship to ‘the real,’ it dismantles the two constructs from within. It also helps to reconcile the nature of the feminine and its position surrounding both the masculinity and femininity.[60] One cannot firmly distinguish the masculine as male, and the feminine as female. Consequently, the biological sexes become irrelevant in the exchange because in order to seduce, one has to deceive the other by manipulating empty signs.
The reversible and deceptive play of signs essential to seduction is emphasized in the actions of the transvestite. “Neither homosexuals nor transsexuals, transvestites like to play with the indistinctiveness of the sexes,” thereby undermining the polarized structures which conceptualize the male and the female into a state of vertiginous, fluid confrontation.[61] This confrontation involves the interaction of signs that constitute male and female with the transvestite seducing “the signs themselves” in a “ritual[istic] game”.[62] The ground on which transvestitism occurs is an ideal ground for seduction to be observed because it is the epitome of a “sphere in which putting beings into play is a kind of ethic, a sphere of flexible, reversible forms where neither sex is assured of its foundation nor, above all, its superiority.”[63]
The absence of the superiority and foundation of sex is illustrated in Baudrillard’s reference to Nico, the female dressed up as a drag queen. Nico’s deception is a double play with the superficial nature of signs. Therefore it is impossible to situate Nico as a bi-sexual, a hetero-sexual or even a transvestite because here, interactive manipulations* are constantly reversing, and falling back in on each other. There are no points with which to ground any terms that describe the nature of transvestitism, “there are only signs to seduce.”[64]
When analyzing the nature of seduction and its relationship to a sexual act, it is essential to realize that the act of sex is not simply a relationship between male and female. It is a challenge between the masculine and the feminine in a constantly reversible engagement with the superficial nature of signs. “Everything is played out in the vertigo of this inversion, this transubstantiation of sex into signs that is the secret of all seduction.”[65]*
Seduction, Power and Nietzsche
Distinguishing the interaction between power, seduction and production is crucial in understanding Baudrillard’s conception of how theory can challenge ‘the real.’ Baudrillard departs from Foucault’s notion of a spiraling power, as well as a linear conception of it, in favor of the idea that power does not resonate and force itself among entities from an “antagonistic position.”[66] He sees power as a cyclical process which can only seduce through “the reversibility that haunts it.”[67]
It is perhaps appropriate to introduce a stable, concrete and historical example of the non-linear nature of seductive power. This serves as a good opportunity to address Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. The confrontation between the noble and the slave can be viewed as a binary opposition where one way of life, one set of morals, and ultimately one winner is the logical outcome. An extrapolation* of Nietzsche’s observations seems to indicate that this is not the case. There is a blending of ideals with one set becoming dominant, only to shift and accommodate another set of morals in a process which eventually results in the leveling off of society, and the emergence of modernity.*
Baudrillard’s insightful observation that “dominators and dominated exist no more than victims and executioners” meshes seemlessly with Nietzsche’s commentary on “slave” and “noble” morality.[68] At first glance, the relationship between the “slave” and the “noble” is one of pure repression countered by direct head-on retaliation. Yet, the interaction is not that simple, for the “noble” morality is not concerned with repressing or objecting to the morals of the slave.
“…Noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, [whereas] slave morality from the outset says no to what is “outside,” what is “different,” what is “not itself;” and this No is its creative deed… Slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all – its action is fundamentally reaction.”[69]
The noble morality is one of seduction; it affirms itself and does not seek validation* in discovering enemies or “others.” The noble man does not feel the need to be something specific, he is content with just “being,” and therefore, “the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself.”[70] By not needing to produce an enemy, or a specific reason for being, the nobleman’s existence is characterized by seduction, not production.
On the other hand, the slave morality does not balance noble morality because it produces its morals based on the stimuli of the outside world.[71] Slave morality is one of production, not seduction, “for [the slave] desires his enemy for himself…” and thus his being becomes centered on an idea of revolt.[72]* Needing external stimuli, the slave’s very existence is based on the actions of a conceived “other,” and therefore they can never be satisfied in their own being. Slave morality needs an “Evil one” in order to constitute a “good one” which ultimately ends up being him.[73]
Whereas slave morality creates a dichotomy on the foundations of an established “other,” noble morality does not even conceive of a set of distinguished groups where hostility and dichotomy can breed. Thus the conception of power as a linear, or spiraling force does not hold up because the equation does not balance, and these conceptions of power rely on an idea of balance, or lack thereof.* Nietzsche’s example of the interaction between sheep and birds of prey better illustrates the seductive nature of power.
“That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no ground for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves: “these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb – would he not be good? There is no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal, except perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little ironically and say: “we don’t dislike them at all, these good little lambs; we even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb.”[74]
The relationships are not centered around the same ideal, therefore the power relationships between the two exist in a seductive form, and if they cannot, then the relationship is one of production, not seduction.*
Baudrillard is* right in his observation that there are none dominated, just the idea that there are dominators. This becomes irrelevant because according to Nietzsche, “the people have won- or ‘the slaves’ or ‘the mob’ or ‘the herd.’”[75] The struggle is over! The oppressed have overcome their evil overlords; the dominated now dominate the dominators. Ideals based on producing “The Evil One” are reactions to external stimuli which have become prominent.* “Production constantly seeks to eliminate seduction in order to establish itself on an economy of relations and force alone.”[76] [77]* These morals prevent the opportunity for the reversibility of their maintenance of the status quo through the operation of production. Instead of allowing for seduction, they produce sex; thus, “it is true that in our culture the sexual has triumphed over seduction, and annexed it in its subaltern form.”[78]
I would argue that the very concept of power seems to be an ideal which is observed by a slave morality, whereas a noble morality is not concerned with the concept or perceived workings of power at all. Looking at Baudrillard’s commentary on the nature of power as “a particular form of hegemonic logic belonging to reason,” “want[ing] to be irreversible like value, as well as cumulative like value,” and finally, “share[ing] all the illusions of the real and of production”[79] it appears that every aspect of power, in a structural sense, characterizes a slave morality. Yet the static power of force relations, ‘fetishized’ by slave morality, is still no match for seduction.
Seduction’s dominate nature over power lies in the idea that it is a mortal and reversible process.[80] It does not engage in head-on antagonistic confrontations, it comes back to itself; it moves forward and backward in an unpredictable reversible cycle, and therefore it cannot belong “to the order of force or to force relations.”[81]* Seduction is a slippery, all encompassing form that does not participate in the order of the real.[82]
“It is precisely for this reason that seduction envelopes the whole real process of power, as well as the whole real order of production, with this never-ending reversibility and disaccumulation – without which neither power nor production would even exist.”[83]
A slave morality cannot exist without a noble morality to attack and triumph over. But the noble morality, like seduction, allows the productive forces to exist and function, just like water allows a boat to float. Without the water, the boat serves no function; it is dependant on the abundant and inconsistent nature of the water – seduction.
The Challenge of Seduction
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 on New York City and the Pentagon appeared to be a direct challenge to the West by an Islamic power. Or at least that is how it was presented. This is because a direct challenge, or visible antagonism, poses no dangerous threat to the system.[84] Baudrillard recognizes that the portrayal of September 11 and the ensuing declarations of war were simply an attempt to solidify the appearance of a polarized confrontation on the grounds of a conflict between civilizations or religions.[85] By drawing a hypothetical line in the sand, the system is establishing an illusionary confrontation in which in which force may be used to directly counter the actions of the terrorists. It is essentially attempting to create or produce an “other” that it will triumph over. With this observation, an eerie parallel to the notions that conceptualize Nietzsche’s slave morality becomes an appropriate avenue to explore.
Baudrillard presents a contemporary example of an inverted form of Nietzsche’s master-slave relationship which deals with death.[86] The powerful masses that comprise the Western world do not deal with the possibility of death; they live an existence of stability and production where death is an afterthought.
“We, the powerful, sheltered now from death and overprotected on all sides, occupy exactly the position of slave; whereas those whose deaths are at their own disposal, and who do not have survival as their exclusive aim, are the ones who today symbolically occupy the position of master.”[87]
The “powerful” are the ones who are afraid of their own deaths and produce an enemy over whom the goal is ultimate and irreversible conquest. Therefore, the system that makes up the West is founded on the ideals of production and employs a notion of power based on forceful relationships. Thus, it is destined ultimately to be at the mercy of the more powerful, organic seduction.
Hence, the attempts at establishing a front on which to combat the order that compromises terrorism are impossible because it is in the position of the master, thereby its form is one of seduction which surrounds the system of production- a head-on challenge is impossible.** The idea that a front, or even a visible enemy, is possible simply serves the purpose of creating a feeling of comfort and stability. But unfortunately for the system, it has already been flanked, encircled, and even penetrated. (they had a man on the inside – elaborate on this in a footnote? Or scrap?)[88]
Terrorism is succeeding in dismantling* the system because of its seductive, reversible nature. Employing their deaths as a means of attacking a system which is founded on “the exclusion of death,” terrorists create an environment where reversibility can penetrate and take apart the system.[89] This act nullifies any possible response of the system because it can only operate in the realm of production, not the symbolic. Therefore “all the means of deterrence and destruction can do nothing against an enemy who has already turned his death into a counterstrike weapon.”[90] The stakes have been changed, and exchange must occur within the realm of the symbolic.[91] The terrorist’s method of engagement has enabled him to avoid confronting the system in a collision of force relations, and thus placed the challenge outside the realm of the system, and into the uncharted terrain of seduction.[92]
The system cannot respond to the terrorists because it is only able to respond in terms of force and aggression, and cannot engage in a reversible challenge.[93] By not being able to return the challenge, the West has been humiliated by the terrorists, just as the West had humiliated “non-globalized” civilizations.[94] By constantly forcing upon them their own means of production and refusing to allow the possibility of a counter-gift.[95] Yet, those who perpetrated the terrorist acts of September 11 succeeded in delivering a counter-gift to the West. They managed to “shift the struggle into the symbolic sphere, where the rule is that of challenge, reversion and outbidding”– not out producing, overpowering and forceful retaliation.[96] What is in store for the system? The system is incapable of engaging with a challenge where the means of exchange are symbolic and reversible. Thus, Baudrillard’s commentary on page 47 of Seduction may provide us with an answer: “inject the smallest dose of reversibility into our economic, political, sexual or institutional mechanisms, and everything collapses,” this is the fragility that characterizes “the entire edifice of production.”[97]
“Today we no longer have anyone to whom we may give back, to whom we may repay the symbolic debt – and that is the curse of our culture. It is not that giving is impossible in this culture, but that the counter-gift is impossible, since all paths of sacrifice have been neutralized and diffused.”[98]
If this is indeed the case, then how can theory challenge ‘the real,’ or at least even interact with it? Here it becomes appropriate to turn to Baudrillard’s analysis of the trompe l’oeil and the implications it holds for “the real.” By mimicking the appearance of a third dimension the trompe l’oeil becomes a simulation of reality.[99] Yet it is impossible to tell the difference between this simulation of a three dimensional space, and an actual physical one. Therefore, the trompe l’oeil questions the possibility of ‘the real,’ and ultimately proves that ‘the real’ is a reversible space in which the differences between reality and simulation are indistinguishable.[100] Couple this with Baudrillard’s notion that theory is a simulation and a challenge at the same time – all while being incapable of taking an actual form – and the interaction between theory and ‘the real’ seems to be a vain concept to entertain.[101] Resolution between the two is impossible because there is nothing to resolve; what at first appears to be two opposing entities are in fact one fluid, dense, and intermingled composition.
So what can be taken from this examination of the interactions between theory and ‘the real’? There is no structural binary opposition, simply an encounter; therefore the two are irreconcilable. But is this such a bad thing? Reconciliation is a mechanism which creates an environment of comfort and predictability founded on the ideals of teleology. The desire to produce compatible relationships with distinguished boundaries characterizes the system’s need to realize an identifiable and specific need for being- to produce. Theory and seduction cannot operate in this fashion and will ultimately dismantle the system in the form of reversible exchange. Thus, shall I declare that Baudrilard’s observations create a theoretical black-hole from which there is no escape? No, I observe that theory and ‘the real’ do not exist in separate forms. They are all one interrelated amorphous mass in which the need to be something specific is futile, but where just Being while enjoying the sound of the ocean is bliss…

Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Baudrillard, Jean. Passwords. Tans. Chris Turner. New York: Verso, 2003.

Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. Trans. Brian Singer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.

Baudrillard, Jean. Forget Foucault. Trans. Nicole Dufresne. New York: Semiotext(e), 1987. ***

Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays. Trans. Chris Turner. New York: Verso, 2003.

Coulter, Gerry. “Reversibility: Baudrillard’s “One Great Thought.”” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, No 2 (2004): ***

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. Toronto: Vintage Books, 1990.

Kierkegaard, Soren. The Seducer’s Diary. In Either/Or Part I, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987, 301-445.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. In The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufman. New York: Random House, 2000, 449-599.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

[1] Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucaultt, trans. Nicole Dufresne (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987), 124,125.
[2] Ibid,; 125.
[3] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 164.
[4] Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 87
[5] Williams, 90.
[6] Williams, 91.
[7] Williams, 91.
[8] Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 64.
[9] This essay can be found in Baudrilard’s Simulacra and Simulation.
[10] Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 68.
[11] Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 67.
[12] Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 69.
[13] Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 65.
[14] Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 65.
[15] *** 65 one must.
[16] Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 64.
[17] An example of this can be seen in a Foucauldian theory challenging dominant epistemological thoughts concerning historical power. The Foucauldian genealogical approach to power structures challenges the unified teleological explanatory schemes which characterize Marxist and Whig historical narratives. (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy: 321.)
[18] Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 125.
[19] Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 126.
[20] On page 129 of Forget Foucault, Baudrillard states that he cannot “see how theory and reality can go together.” It is vital that I address this piece of text in the light that it could possibly disqualify my interpretation of, and my metaphor for the relationship between theory and “the real.” The metaphor is not claiming that the relationship between theory and the real are similar to the mixing of elements of the ocean and the shoreline. It is a relation of destruction, alteration- ultimately the continual dismantlement of them both. The two are ambiguous; they are constantly interacting but never coming into complete contact, not fusing into a solid mass. There is no way to designate the ocean as theory and the shore as “the real” because they both absorb each other and ultimately create consistently changing formations that are not static, and therefore cannot be categorized. Thus, the metaphor of the ocean supports the idea that theory and reality cannot go together, they can only continuously displace and dismantle each other.
[21] Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 127 and 128.
[22] Forget Baudrillard, 129 and 130. ***
[23] Ibid, 130.
[24] Jean Baudrillard, Passwords, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2003), 21.
[25] Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 54.
[26] Baudrillard, Seduction, 74.
[27] Soren Kierkegaard, The Seducer’s Diary, appended to Either/Or Part I, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), 375.
[28] Kierkegaard, 307.
[29] Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, 74 (Baudrillard’s italics).
[30] Baudrillard, Passwords, 22.
[31] Baudrillard, Seduction, 76.
[32] Baudrillard, Seduction, 81.
[33] Baudrillard, Seduction, 76.
[34] Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 126.
[35] Baudrillard, Seduction, 102.
[36] Kierkegaard, 312.
[37] It can be argued that Johannes was seduced by Cordelia on the terms that “to be seduced is the best way to seduce.” (Seduction, 81) Johannes’ state of seduction is revealed on page 325 of The Seducer’s Diary where he is constantly deceived by the green cloaks similar to that of Cordelia’s. This is further demonstrated by Johannes admitting that “Cordelia occupied him too much for him really to have time to look around.” (311) “With a restlessness and vehemence my soul, as if my welfare were at stake, demands this image, and yet it does not appear; I could tear out my eyes to punish them for their forgetfulness.” Kierkegaard (324).
[38] Gerry Coulter, “Reversibility: Baudrillard’s “One Great Thought,”” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 2 (2004): (Right after footnote 35). For an excellent, and in depth analysis regarding the development of Baudrillard’s idea of reversibility, see Dr. Gerry Coulter’s essay “Reversibility: Baudrillard’s “One Great Thought.”” This essay was extremely helpful in developing my understanding of the importance of reversibility as an integral part of seduction. (Should I expand on this footnote?)*
[39] In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Foucault establishes a backdrop in which he is attempting to challenge the “repressive hypothesis” which he feels is the dominant discursive formation used to explain sexual discourse. Foucault’s hypothesis is that the strict approach to sexuality after the Middle Ages, and especially throughout the period of Victorian England, was not a way of silencing sex, but instead of producing new discourses about it. On page 49 he writes that “we must therefore abandon the hypothesis that modern industrial societies ushered in an age of increased sexual repression”.* “We have not only witnessed a visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities; but – and this is the important part point - … the proliferation of specific pleasures and the manipulation of the disparate sexualities.”* The thesis is further supported by the interpretation that “sex was driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive existence.”(33)
Baudrillard refutes the central object of the book stating that “there has never been a repression of sex, but on the contrary an injunction against talking about it or voicing it and a compulsion to confess, to express, and to produce sex.” (Forget Foucault), 17.
[40] Gerry Coulter (Af FN 35).*** No Page Numbers
[41] Gerry Coulter (Af FN 37 BF 38).*** No Page Numbers
[42] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Toronto: Vintage Books, 1990), 48.
[43] Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 58 and 59. (My italics)
[44] Ibid 59.
[45] According to Foucault, the ars erotica is considered one of the two great methods for discovering sexual truth (57). It was* practiced in numerous societies such as Rome, China, India, and Arabo-Moslem societies (57). The ars erotica derives sexual truth through pleasure “evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and soul” (57). This form of sexual truth relies on internal reflection and is not characteristic of Western societies.
The Scientia Sexualis is the second dominant form of interpreting sexual truth, and prominant in Western societies. It is a practice which has developed over the centuries where procedures for telling the truth concerning sex are centered on a “form of knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret” (58). Foucault then proceeds to link the development of the Scientia Sexualis with the rise of the confession. History of Sexuality: An Introduction 57-58. (should I continue this footnote with a disclaimer???)***

[46] Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 21. (Baudrillard’s italics)
[47] Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 57.
[48] Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 22.
[49] Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 23.
[50] Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 22. (My italics)
[51] Baudrillard, Passwords, 9.
[52] Baudrillard, Passwords, 10.
[53] Baudrillard, Passwords, 15.
[54] Baudrillard, Passwords, 16.
[55] Baudrillard, Seduction, 1.
[56] Baudrillard, Seduction, 7.
[57] Ibid
[58] Baudrillard, Passwords, 21.
[59] Ibid, 21 and 22.
[60] Baudrillard’s commentary concerning the feminine created a hostile environment between him and such feminist thinkers as Luce Irigaray. It is my interpretation that Baudrillard’s writings are not an attack on the role of women in society, or that the feminist movement should resign and allow women to be put back into a repressed role within society. I shall briefly look at Baudrillard’s work regarding the feminine and its contribution to the synthesis which helps to explain reversibility and seduction. A debate on the issue of Baudrillard versus feminism is a delicate and intricate topic which deserves attention that this work cannot do justice.
On page 14 of Seduction Baudrillard states: “contrary to every search for an authentic femininity, for a woman’s speech, etc., the claim here is that the female is nothing, and that this is her strength.” This is followed up with him saying: “the only, and irresistible, power of femininity is the inverse power of seduction. In itself it is nul, seduction has no power of its own, only that of an annulling power of production. But it always annuls the latter.” (15) Continuing on to page 17, Baudrillard situates the feminine and its relationship to power.
“The feminine knows neither equivalence nor value: it is, therefore, not soluble in power. It is not even subversive, it is reversible. Power on the other hand, is soluble in the reversibility of the feminine… The excluded form prevails, secretly, over the dominant form. The seductive form prevails over the productive form.”
Following Baudrillard’s logic, it appears that the feminine is the reversible form that challenges the static form- which can be interpreted as the distinctions male and female. In Passwords, Baudrillard refers to the “femina” as a form which allows the reversibility between male and female to occur. (23) The feminine assumes the role of the sacred, the secret, the possibility of highly ritualized symbolic exchange. The importance of the feminine as an example of reversibility – which is so essential to seduction - is revealed further down page 23 in Passwords.
“But some have taken the view that to link women and seduction was to consign them to the realm of appearances – and hence to frivolity. This is a total misunderstanding: the seduction I was referring to is really the symbolic mastery of forms, whereas the other is merely the material mastery of power by way of a stratagem.” (23)
[61] Baudrillard, Seduction, 12.
[62] Baudrillard, Seduction, 13.
[63] Baudrillard, Passwords, 23.
[64] Baudrillard, Seduction, 13.
[65] Ibid 13. (Baudrillard’s italics)
[66] Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 44.
[67] Ibid, 44.
[68] Baudrillard, Forgert Foucault, 44.
[69] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 2000), 472 and 473.
[70] Nietzsche, 474.
[71] Nietzsche, 472.
[72] Nietzsche, 475.
[73] Nietzsche, 475.
[74] Nietzsche 480 and 481.
[75] Nietzsche, 471.
[76] Baudrillard, Seduction, 47.
[77] There is a piece where Baudrillard says seduction is being suppressed by production.*
[78] Baudrillard, Seduction, 41.
[79] Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 45.
[80] Ibid 45.
[81] Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 45.
[82] Ibid 45.
[83] Ibid 45.
[84] Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (2002) in The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2003), 10. An example of this is a challenge in the form of dissention and therefore revolution. May 68’ serves as Baudrillard’s key example of a movement opposed to the system which attempted to de-stabalize it and eventually became absorbed into the system. This is the kind of challenge that occurs on the grounds employed by the system, and therefore it can never lose. As a result, May 68’ becomes a blip, an afterthought and nothing more.
[85] Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 11.
[86] Jean Baudrillard, Hypothesis on Terrorism (2003) in The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2003), 70-71.
[87] Baudrillard, Hypothesis on Terrorism, 70.
[88] Should I footnote this???
[89] Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 16.
[90] Ibid 16.
[91] I am referencing Baudrillard’s notion of the pact… Should I footnote this with a source?
[92] Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 17.
[93] Jean Bauldrillard, The Violence of the Global (2003) in The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2003), 101.
[94] Ibid 101.
[95] Baudrillard, The Violence of the Global, 100.
[96] Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 17.
[97] Baudrillard, Seduction, 47.
[98] Baudrillard, The Violence of the Global, 102 (possibly make this the last part of the essay, with the other quotation from page 103.
[99] Baudrillard, Seduction, 63.
[100] Baudrillard, Seduction, 66.
[101] Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 133.

And So It Begins... Again

2005-12-08T19:30:00.000-08:00

Hello, all. Sean here. I can't figure out how to load my essay as a file, so I am just going to copy and paste it here. If this is not what was expected of me, I apologize.

Preface to my Essay:

This piece was written under the lingering influence of Hayden White, combined with that sort of lightheadedness symptomatic of a Baudrillard overdose. The most obvious problem is an insufficient engagement of the problem of 'the sign' and its integrity. Essentially, this essay operates on a plane wherein a whole and self-present sign is possible, but recently lost to an encroaching Simulation. This is something Baudrillard most likely disagrees with--although sometimes it seems otherwise. The relationship between sign and subject, which fractures both, is also left unattended.

The paper essentially deals with the problems of a 'systematic' way of thinking about the past--that is, as a storehouse for knowledge and/or information. It uses aesthetics as a wedge-issue by which to probe the historical discipline's approach to the past. Basically, I was trying to use a White-based aesthetic approach to critique the Historical 'system' (based on Baudrillard's ideas on the function of systems). I tried to draw a political point out of the two, founded on the neutralizing force of a systematic, 'disinterested' historical discipline. Unfortunately, such a project has--in my mind, at least--been subsumed by greatest questions of signification and meaning. It is no longer a question of resuscitation or mourning, but of the constitution of the sign itself. Still, I think a discussion of the ground upon which I now find this essay inadequate should prove fruitful for future ventures.

And so here it is:

‘Towards an As Yet Uncharted Land and Unforeseeable Conclusion:’
Possibilities of a New Romanticism for a Neutralizing Historicity

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
(George Santayana, Life of Reason)

“…every single event is an offspring not of one, but of all other events, prior or contemporaneous, and it will in its turn combine with others to give birth to new: it is an ever-living, ever-working Chaos of Being, wherein shape after shape bodies itself forth from innumerable elements.”
(Thomas Carlyle, On History, 59-60)

If Michel Foucault ‘teaches’ anything, it is that it is always more profitable to place texts, authors, and ideas in tension than to be satisfied with predetermined concordances. The incompatible conceptualizations of history put forth by George Santayana and Thomas Carlyle should provide a fertile starting point for such activity. In Santayana’s terms, the past is a font of knowledge which we can use to guide our present actions. If we neglect its gifts, we will be doomed to fail in the long run. For Carlyle, the answers do not come so easily. He offers us a past, present, and future that are characterised by complex contingency and radical disjuncture rather than the ebb and flow of similitude. He retains the notion of interconnection, but in such a way that he is able to evoke feelings of the chaotic discontinuity of history and life. In other words, he is able to invoke the sublime.
“Meaning is mortal,” wrote Jean Baudrillard, “and without a doubt this is a good thing.”[1] His diagnosis of modernity as a wasteland wherein meaning has been reduced to nothing in the wake of an endlessly circular and superficial simulation seems to have sealed our ethicopolitical fate. “What do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter?” he asks us: “All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen.”[2] And yet, at least in the historiographic sphere, there may be an opening, a secret site, for the transmission not of knowledge, but culture, and perhaps even of meaning. If such a site exists, it might resemble the sublime mode of history as laid out by Hayden White. For White, the bold continuity of the modern historical discipline acts as a limiting factor on human potential. While pretending to be unbiased and objective, it promotes the politics of neutrality and exclusion (of the grotesque, fantastic, utopian).[3] His ‘visionary politics,’ accessible through the acceptance of the possibility that the past has no inherent meaning, and that we are free to act with or against it as we choose, represents all that is ruled out by a conception of history as a monologic guide for present actions. If we were to loosen the shackles, to realize that we may not be as beholden to the past as previously believed, we might begin to posit that humanity is not quite yet done with the creation of meaning.
Baudrillard opposes information to meaning as inversely proportional.[4] The historical discipline, with all the information it has accumulated over the years, might actually hinder the development of new meaning. One wonders, then, what potential an uninformative history might have. I think White’s sublimely incomprehensible view of history gives us a clue, and I hope to see, with the aid of some methodology selected from the works of M.M. Bakhtin, what we can flesh out regarding a possibility for meaning at this site, in this space between White and Baudrillard.

Beauty & its Limits

Nietzsche was fiercely aware of the limitations man imposed upon himself through community, internalization, and modernity. He remained vigilant against “the will to the lowering, the abasement, the leveling and the decline and twilight of mankind”.[5] The price paid for the comforts of communal living, general peace, and the myth of progress appeared too steep, even constituting “our greatest danger.”[6] Nietzsche condemned historiography as life-denying, a place where mere reflection hindered the new.[7] Placing the broader strokes of his polemic aside, I think it would be fair to accept Nietzsche’s diagnosis as apt.
The historical discipline, as critiqued by both White and Dominick LaCapra, is still trapped by the dogma of continuity. White has noted that this dogma promotes the ‘beautiful’ aspects of the past (the smooth connections and similarities) at the expense of the ‘sublime’ (the ruptures and differences).[8] History in the beautiful mode, then, lays out the past in such a way that it appears to tell its own story, which comes to us in remarkably good literary form, complete with familiar rhetoric, tropes, and plot. This act of finding “order in chaos or a design in the carpet of the past”[9] is, however, not one of natural discovery. Beautiful, continuous history is the result of invention,[10] and it has no inherent connection to the reality of the past.
If the study of history is based upon the ‘gospel of the document,’ then allow me to blaspheme: the text is not a vessel through which we can reach the past, but a barrier closing off access. This ‘textual barrier’ is the result of several phenomena, among them heteroglossia, dialogism, and the political intricacies of discourse. What LaCapra terms the documentary approach to history tends to neglect all of the above.[11] Evidential texts, as acts of literature, are not neutral communicators of past reality. They are creative representations that will always be at least once removed from that reality. Bakhtin puts things nicely, stating that “there is a sharp and categorical boundary line between the actual world as a source of representation and the world represented in the work. We must never forget this, we must never confuse—as has been done up to now and as is still often done—the represented world with the world outside the text (naïve realism).”[12] His reasoning depends on his theory of ‘chronotopes,’ that is, the relationships between time and space in literary works:

“If I relate (or write about) an event that has just happened to me, then I as the teller (or writer) of this event am already outside the time and space in which the event occurred… The represented world, however realistic and truthful, can never be chronotopically identical with the real world it represents, where the author and creator of the literary work is to be found.”[13]

Chronotopes, then, highlight the pervasiveness of heteroglossia, wherein all utterances are part of a complex network of relations that determine their meaning. The meaning of a word in a text is subject to such multitudes of meaning because it represents an event or idea that existed in some other time and space. Readers of the text are interpreting it in their own chronotope, within their own discourse. Thus, all texts—indeed, all aspects of language—exist in a state of dialogism. That is to say, texts are permanently in dialogue with their authors, the world they represent, as well as the reader and his or her world. A transparent view into the past this is not.
Despite these textual problematics, the crux of the documentary approach to history continues to be its faith in objectivity and ‘disinterested interest.’ Even openly subjective historians, such as Howard Zinn, depend upon the foundations of a comprehensible, continuous, and useful concept of the historical past.[14] Aside from the textual barrier, there is still another layer which closes off access to some past reality. This one is of a political nature, and it consists of the rhetoric of the historical discipline, its politics of interpretation, as well as the politics inherent in discourse itself.
“Understandably fearful of the involuted, narcissistic extremes of self-reflection,” writes LaCapra, “historians have paid scant attention to their own rhetoric and to the role of the rhetorical (including the rhetoric of so-called ‘hard’ science) in constituting their discipline.”[15] The rhetoric of the discipline is based upon the document as a reliable, factual source of real evidence. Using methods of ‘probability’ and ‘common sense,’ historians have fit disparate texts together into cohesive, literary accounts. Stories are built up around surviving texts, with more authority given to writings deemed ‘documentary’ as opposed to ‘artistic.’ Subsequent historiographical activity is usually limited to the revision of standardized accounts,[16] which themselves are based upon the politics and rhetoric of the documentary approach. The discipline, then, seems to be continually closing off new interpretations and readings of past texts rather than opening them up. It is important to note that the methods by which such standard, dogmatic historical accounts are institutionalized are hardly what anyone would call ‘objective.’
LaCapra’s idea of rhetoric is intimately connected to White’s meditations on the politics of interpretation. Much as certain texts are privileged over others, so are certain readings of those texts. The authority of a historian’s account is predicated upon its following of certain rules. The politics of neutrality must be promoted at the expense of those of radicality (especially utopianism).[17] The grotesque and the fantastic must be systematically excluded in the name of far more ‘realistic’ and factual aspects such as the statistical, the demographic, or the bureaucratic. We hear echoes of Baudrillard: the models are preceding the actual; the informative is being promoted at the expense of that which carries social meaning. The historical discipline, rather than acknowledging dissimilarity and opening up the past to dialogical exchange, seeks to fit all human events into a neatly continuous chain of models and lessons. Even the Holocaust has not escaped this fate.
On an even deeper level of analysis, we come to Foucault’s discussion of discourse. We must not begin to think of the rhetoric and politics of the historical discipline as extrinsic parasites hindering the possibility of discursive purity. For discourses are inherently imperfect.[18] Bias, appropriation, subjectivity: these are not violations of discourse; they are its enabling factors:

“… neither the relation of discourse to desire, nor the processes of its appropriation, nor its role among non-discursive practices is extrinsic to its unity, its characterization, and the laws of its formation. They are not disturbing elements which, superposing themselves upon its pure, neutral, atemporal, silent form, suppress its true voice and emit in its place a travestied discourse, but, on the contrary, its formative elements.”[19]

The tenets of the documentary model—absence of bias, noble objectivity—now appear dissolved. The textual nature of historical study, the necessity of its rhetoric and politics, and the fundamental characteristics of discourse have rendered the documentary approach untenable. Modern historiography—beautiful, continuous, comprehensible—has become the endless revision of dogmatic accounts, the foundations of which have been obliterated. New ‘discoveries’ in the field are not excavations into truth, but the mediated archaeology of discourse:

“Hence the fact that, taken up again, placed, and interpreted in a new constellation, a given discursive formation may reveal new possibilities… but we are not dealing with a silent content that has remained implicit, that has been said and yet not said, and which constitutes beneath manifest statements a sort of sub-discourse that is more fundamental, and which is now emerging at last into the light of day; what we are dealing with is a modification in the principle of exclusion and the principle of the possibility of choices; a modification that is due to an insertion in a new discursive constellation.”[20]

Such is the fate of a historiographic model and methodology that were constructed upon “faith in information that attach themselves to this tautological proof that the system gives of itself by doubling the signs of an unlocatable reality.”[21] The most important question that arises when we view the study of history in this light is: what are we ruling out by treating the past in this way?
Nietzsche condemned modern historiography as a site wherein “nothing will grow or prosper any longer.”[22] He was right, in the sense that the way we close down the past for (re-)interpretation affects our possibilities in the present, at least as long as we view the past as a treasure house of life lessons or ‘collective memory.’ In White’s terms, we have accepted a “‘politics of interpretation’ which produces an ‘interpretation of politics.’”[23] Human potential becomes limited by the standardized account of ‘reality’ that a beautiful history creates. We become conditioned to absorb the radically Other; we deny ourselves the chance for change. As Leonard Krieger wrote in defense of the discipline in 1965: “‘It has helped to build into the structure of knowledge meanings that are general without being abstract, and it has contributed its bit thereby to the preparation of men’s minds for the admission of the hitherto unknown in ways that refine but do not violate their fundamental ideas. And this, after all, is the prime function of the historical sense.’”[24]
Time has not eroded the basic convictions of this sentiment within the historical community. We still invoke the exemplars and lessons of the past to guide our future actions, with the weight of the historian’s (or journalist’s, or some other person of literary authority’s) pen dictating the ‘reality’ of the past.[25] Whenever a politician speaks of history bearing him or her out, or of plainly showing us something, he is participating in this venerable pastime in the most overt way. Bakhtin’s notion of historical inversion highlights the problem of man’s pushing of both ideals and priorities into the past. “The essence of this inversion,” he writes, “is found in the fact that mythological and artistic thinking locates such categories as purpose, ideal, justice, perfection, the harmonious condition of man and society and the like in the past.”[26] Thus, “the present and even more the past are enriched at the expense of the future.”[27]
This is not to say that modern historiography depends on a belief in an Eden-like originary point. Rather, its idealization of the past consists of making it into a Tree of Knowledge. The harmony of the past is not the peace of eternity, but the comprehensive and comprehensible lessons of bygone successes and failures. Like the tree in Eden, however, we pick its fruit at our peril. If we build up an image of history as a teacher, based upon false assumptions regarding our ability to access the past through texts, then we are submitting our imaginations to the cruel discipline of a tyrannical monologue.[28] We are running the risk of enabling political auto-pilot.[29] The politics we are left with “are those that come from history, a retro politics, emptied of substance and legalized in their superficial exercise, with the air of a game and a field of adventure, this kind of politics is like… posthumous liberalization.”[30] If this is to be the function of history in our culture, then it seems Baudrillard was right when he spoke of the death of meaning and the endless recycling of its simulacra.

Sublimity and its Possibilities

Luckily for us—luckily for the masses—it may not have to be that way. We need not conceive of history as a beautiful design or an understandable web of connections. There are other ways of conceptualizing the past, aside from making it into the standard of realism and the model for life, by which we determine the depth and breadth of our pool of possibilities. In contrast to an aesthetically pleasing, continuous history, we can conceive of a dauntingly discontinuous past. This I shall term history in the sublime mode.
Now, when I speak of history (as in ‘the past’) as sublime, I mean that in the sense of a subjective reaction rather than an objective trait.[31] To stare into the gaping maw of an incomprehensible history is more likely to invoke a feeling of terror than comfort in the subject.[32] To believe that man carries with him always his guidebook for the reception of future events (as dictated by the past) is a calming notion. When that guide is torn to shreds in front of his eyes, the knees of man buckle. For to imagine a meaningless history is to invalidate such commonplace support-systems as tradition and influence.[33] So man is forced to navigate his own existence, and what could be more terrifying than that? Like Abraham before us, we are called to walk the desolate mountain path, detached from the so-called wisdom of our forebears.[34]
And yet there is great pleasure in the horror of an incomprehensible history. The beautifying system that is the historical discipline provides the friendly atmosphere of understandability, but it cannot compare to the sheer euphoria one grasps when that system is subverted. For as frightening as it is to walk a lonely path, it is also glorious, exciting, life-affirming.[35] Beautiful history tells us what will and will not work, so that we may learn to ‘not repeat the mistakes of the past.’ But a conception of the past that evades such systematization allows us to inform ourselves that nothing is ruled out: the success and failure of ventures is not dictated by the past. The supposedly intrinsic meaning of history is actually an import from the present, and so the past does not so much teach us as act as a vessel for lessons conceived of in the now, which are paradoxically based upon an ideal of ‘realism’ falsely construed out of that past. This aspect of an indecipherable history is liberating, and it enables the aforementioned euphoria of possibilities.
The beautiful, disciplined mode of history coaxes the subject into a state of comfortable relaxation: time marches forward, all discontinuities are eventually worked back into the system, the future will be brightened through the lessons of the past. Know the rules, and you will be fine. A sublime mode of history, on the other hand, is one that is more likely to inspire the twinned feelings of pleasure and terror in the subject. The death of Mother History is terrifying, yet also invigorating. For it is through this sublime mode which White delineated (and upon which I extrapolated) that we may have our best chance at emancipation.[36]
White speaks of history in the sublime mode as an enabling factor for ‘visionary politics.’ This term is appropriately vague, because what it is hinting at is precisely those utterances which current historical and political discourses terrorize into silence. It was vital to the creation of modern historiography that certain possibilities be ruled out, most importantly the possibility “that history may be as meaningless ‘in itself’ as the theorists of the historical sublime thought it to be.”[37] This initial exclusion had the effect of setting limits on all subsequent historical (and thus political) thought. A meaningful history, founded on false tenets of discipline, had the paradoxical effect of hindering the creation of new meaning. Political potential suffered at the hands of progress.
Are we doomed, then, to be stuck in this rut of limitations? Has the historical discipline, in concert with our modern culture of science, commerce, and information, made itself invincible to any intellectual puncture wounds? Or is there some hint, some clue that will indicate a hidden site of cultural production, of meaning? Let us consider Foucault once again. He has ruptured the genres, typologies, and classifications that we operate upon as givens. This type of analysis can throw the historian’s worldview into disarray, causing him to reevaluate the very foundations of his discipline. There is a ‘danger’ to this revelation, but it is of a sort that opens up new political possibilities, thus endangering the systematic use of the past rather than an open dialogue with it.[38] This is a fundamental step in the realization of a sublime mode of history, and it is also why Baudrillard could have been too hasty in his admonition of us to ‘forget Foucault.’
How would history in the sublime mode function? Several strategies come to mind: LaCapra’s rhetorical-ethicopolitical method, Bakhtin’s dialogic reading, Jauss and the Konstanz school’s aesthetics of reception. History in the sublime mode is based upon an interminable openness, and in accordance there are innumerable ways to go about practicing the study of the past in a way that is not caught up in its own comforts. I have only listed three with which I have at least some familiarity. LaCapra’s rhetorical style and Bakhtin’s dialogism encourage us to meet texts within our own world, rather than submitting ourselves to an ideal of their past context with reverential awe. The political use of a text on the part of the reader should not be a mark of shame, as the textual process itself is only completed when the author and his world meet in dialogue with said reader. These methods lend themselves to open interpretation and the creation of new answers.[39] They keep possibilities and potentialities available by making us work for meaning, rather than simply inheriting the recycled mantras of past generations.[40]
Whatever strategy we choose, we must also consider the ramifications of dispelling the fallacies of the documentary approach. White does this artfully when he writes of “a conception of the historical record as being not a window through which the past ‘as it really was’ can be apprehended but rather a wall that must be broken through if the ‘terror of history’ is to be directly confronted and the fear it induces dispelled.”[41] The textual barrier lies between us and the past, and when we break through it we find not a facsimile of what was, but rather Carlyle’s ‘Chaos of Being.’ But what good is this terror to us? What good is it to the subject?[42]
If continuous history is a fortress of the subject (as in Foucault[43]), then history-as-discontinuity can be characterized as the proving grounds of the subject. It is there, when we engage in dialogue, conversation, battle with the past, that we are ‘pushed back into ourselves’ by the sublime. Continuous history assures the subject that it is in firm control; discontinuous history destabilizes the subject, decenters it, but does not dissolve it. In fact, I would argue, it is in this sublime mode of history that the subject comes to be most fully individuated. The comforts of continuity lend themselves to atrophy, wherein the subject can fall into the trap of Baudrillard’s ‘pre-inscribed models,’[44] can live in clichés. But when the subject looks out from his mountain perch onto the valley of the Past and sees not its abode but the harsh domain of the Other, only then will it be seized by the life-affirming vigor that inspires it to go forth and make things better for itself and that which it cares about.[45] Only then can man go out and conquer that valley, make it his home. A fool’s hope, yes, but:

“…if we shut the vision of it completely out of our minds, or insist on its being limited in various ways, something goes dead inside us, perhaps the one thing that it’s really important to keep alive.”[46]

The Possibility of Meaning: White and Baudrillard

Before I continue to speak of White and Baudrillard in a related manner, I must exercise further caution in explaining my methods: a sort of ‘Foucauldian disclaimer’ is in order. The two thinkers with whom I am currently dealing are hardly compatible. White’s ideas of sublime history and visionary politics are quickly and efficiently incapacitated when one attempts to work them into the space of Baudrillard’s simulation and seduction. For Baudrillard, order and disorder are of the same stock, that of the order of power.[47] He places seduction, with its manipulation of the play of appearances and the reversibility of signs, above power itself. Everything is not as ordered as high modernism suggests, nor is it as radically contingent as the romantics have written. All is subject to the rules of the game, given not by the subject but the object, and meaning itself (as quintessentially linked to order and power) has long been lost to the cold seduction of a hyperreal simulation.[48] This all-encompassing illustration of sociality has a scope far more expansive than White’s rhetorical, political, and historiographical concerns. White’s most notable collection of essays is entitled The Content of the Form, whereas Baudrillard advises that “it is useless to dream of a revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable.”[49] And yet, maybe there is a space where the works of both can be placed and discussed: an arbitrary ‘operating table’[50] where disparate philosophies clash and bleed; a salon where unrelated thinkers acknowledge their non-relation. Let us, at least, entertain the possibility that there is an opening for dialogue between White and Baudrillard, so that we may by chance stumble upon some new item of interest.
Like White and others, Baudrillard is acquainted with exclusion and the dangers it poses. He views it as perpetrated as part of a performative machine of simulation. In our unceasing quest for the reality of the past (its facsimile, its simulacrum), we are cheating ourselves of a dynamic aspect of meaning that could be ascribed to what came before us:

“It is this fabulous character, the mythical energy of an event or of a narrative, that today seems to be increasingly lost. Behind a performative and demonstrative logic: the obsession with historical fidelity, with a perfect rendering,…this negative and implacable fidelity to the materiality of the past, to a particular scene of the past or of the present, to the restitution of an absolute simulacrum of the past or the present, which was substituted for all other value—we are all complicitous in this, and this is irreversible.”[51]

“We are all complicitous,” then, in the limiting of possibilities of the ascription of meaning. The loss of “mythical energy” mimics the disappearance of political energy. Our social and rhetorical movement is hindered by the negation of so many avenues. The variety of ways in which we can attach meaning to events is minimized; all value thus belongs to the document and the model. There is a select number of corridors one can take within beautiful historiography that lead to an ‘acceptable’ telos of inoffensive interpretation. History as a discipline then becomes “a circular arrangement through which one stages the desire of the audience, the antitheater of communication, which, as one knows, is never anything but the recycling in the negative of the traditional institution, the integrated circuit of the negative.”[52] The institutions of our society and of our knowledge work to continue the flow of an impotent sociality (that of ‘the masses’). A comprehensible and recapturable past stands guard over the wild liberty of an unchecked possibility of meaning. In the words of Baudrillard: “Immense energies are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal desimulation that would confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a radical loss of meaning.”[53] What if, however, we were to attempt to access this “radical loss of meaning,” that is, of meaning purported to be inherently historical? It must be kept in mind that Baudrillard would of course scoff at any such suggestion, for there is to be no escape from the grip of simulation. But to go beyond Baudrillard for a moment: could a violent disturbance within the field of historiographical aesthetics allow us to question handed-down meanings and political assumptions that normally shield themselves in the garb of an untouchable historicity?
Systematically, the historical discipline removes any threat of such a violent disturbance. This enterprise is powered by the exclusion of the senseless in the name of factuality, and the absorption of extremes into the comfortable middle. It is politically domesticating. “Historical perspective,” like a virus, infects the historian with the disease of passivity and political impotence.[54] All actions, events, and persons are ascertained through a filter that is ever mindful of pre-inscribed models: we encounter ‘comparative history,’ where war is filed under ‘war’ and genocide under ‘genocide.’ Even the most reprehensible of events is fitted into the smooth chronology of progress, the big book of lessons learned. There is nary a hint of that dark side of things that stirs us to action. Seldom will you find an approach to the past that is in awe of its ungraspable totality. In conformity with the operation of all systems, that of historiography absorbs all events and produces an understandable, manageable, economic version of history. If we subscribe to this mode of historiography, we are letting beauty get the best of us. Ironically, taking hold of the meaning that supposedly lies beneath the surface of all historical happenings is what keeps us mired in superficiality.[55]
Exclusion and limitation are vital mechanisms within the informative-documentary machine of beautiful historiography. Through it, we render smooth images and models, giving us a microscopically detailed quasi-facsimile of the past, thus ending the need for creative reimagination or dialogue. The playgrounds of meaning are demolished and replaced by a state-of-the-art tower housing the archives of reality, or better yet, a projection of such a tower: the illusion of historical meaning as being matter-of-fact rather than matter-of-discourse. These are the ramifications of an extraordinarily ‘informative’ history. History in the sublime mode, on the other hand, does not need to put forth such pretences of information. In such a mode, past texts offer up relationships and discussions, not monologic, phenomenological evidence. Meaning is worked for, not merely pointed out as plainly there for all to see.
Bakhtin offers up a literary key to the question of semantics in his aforementioned theory of chronotopes. Meaning is transmitted socially (and what is meaning if not social?) through its actualization as a sign. Discourse, literature, language—all are infused with a particular time-space, that of their chronotope, which is unlike that of both the author’s world and that of the reader. All utterances are thus heteroglot, in that their meaning is determined by the particular chronotope of the receiver in dialogue with that of the sender and that of the text. In the words of Bakhtin himself:

“For us the following is important: whatever these meanings turn out to be, in order to enter our experience (which is social experience) they must take on the form of a sign that is audible and visible for us… Consequently, every entry into the sphere of meaning is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope.”[56]

The chronotope, then, is vital. It leads us to reconsider the embodiment of time and space within the historical discipline, within its general practices and popularized dogmas. A chronotope of beauty believes itself to be passive, thus allowing the document to dictate reality and meaning. However, beautiful historiography, as we have seen, is founded upon unstable philosophical assumptions of its own. There are no neutral chronotopes, and that of beauty is no exception. Past texts are ascribed a meaning that is conducive to the functioning of present-day systems and society. The crime is then whitewashed under the veil of ‘disinterested interest’ and objectivity. But the chronotope still determines the reception of meaning, and the beautiful option, with its tendencies toward neutralization and absorption, is only one of many.
Certain questions arise when we contemplate this chronotopic nature of language and meaning. Could a refiguration of the historical chronotope into a subjective-sublime perspective, as opposed to the rigidly informative one, force open these gates, thus allowing for the creation of new meaning? Furthermore, what does it mean to encounter the past within a sublime time-space? Perhaps it would be to look at the past itself as sublime, to see it as a sublime object, that is, dissolved in its own wonderful “rapture.”[57] If we see the past not as a well-spring of information, but as a terrible mass of contingencies the totality of which could never be grasped, we open up innumerable new avenues for meaning. To strip history of its ‘inherently informative’ status may be to break it open, and also to pry apart our own chronotope in order to make room for flourishing possibilities. This is where Baudrillard’s inverse relationship between information and meaning is so useful, despite the baggage that comes with it. Instead of working to accelerate the recycling of meaning and politics through the proliferation of informative models (whether in the form of narrative account, quantitative or statistical analysis, or simple historical justification), we should be dismantling the interface that enables such projects. Beautiful historiography has limited out the possibilities of the grotesque, the fantastical, the mad,[58] and the utopian, among others. If we wish to hold on to what might be the most important possibility of all—the possibility of meaning—we might have to reconsider the way we structure the time and space around us. A shift in chronotope, an opening up of the past, anything to thrust us into the uncomfortable realm of the sublime.[59] For then, and only then, in the shadow of a dead meaning, may we play Christ to its Lazarus.
Upon further investigation of his gleefully cyclical web of an argument, it seems Baudrillard may have left a side-door slightly ajar: “The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference. I will leave it to be considered whether there can be a romanticism, an aesthetic of the neutral therein. I don’t think so…”[60] Is what I have proposed here such a romanticism of the neutral? Probing the aesthetic features of the way in which we conceive of the past may yield some sort of bounty. I am not suggesting that Baudrillard thought meaning could be saved through such a venture, but the mere fact that he did not completely close off such aesthetic considerations is noteworthy. This interstitial space within his argument may leave room for action. The ideal of a history from which we can learn, a past that offers itself up to us as a sacrifice from which we can benefit if only we open our minds to it (not unlike the way Christians are asked to open their hearts to the pre-made sacrifice of their Lord), is a neutralizing force in society. ‘Disinterested interest’ leads to political domestication and indifference. Neutral and neutralizing models are continually propagated, with revision being limited to that which is inoffensive. This closed system, which may not appear as such, is a limiting factor to its core. It is reminiscent of that leveling-off about which Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were so concerned. If we were to examine further the aesthetics of this neutral force, with the critical and humane eye of the romantic, might we alter the fate of meaning? ‘I think so…’

“…For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure is still free:
Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.”

(Mutability, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1816)

The quotation in the title of this work is from Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 38-39. The two following are from Santayana, Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense (New York: Scribner’s, 1905), 284, and Carlyle, “On History” in A Carlyle Reader: Selections from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle, ed. G.B. Tennyson (New York, 1969), 59-60; they were inspired—as was this essay in large part—by Hayden White’s “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1987), 58-82.
[1] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 164.
[2] Ibid.
[3] White, 66 (grotesque, fantastic), 73 (utopianism).
[4] Baudrillard, Simulacra, 79-80: “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning… Where we think that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs.”
[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 2000), 490.
[6] Nietzsche, 480.
[7] Nietzsche, 593.
[8] White, 66-67.
[9] Dominick LaCapra, “Rhetoric and History,” in History & Criticism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 24.
[10] White, 66, on the rhetoric of anti-rhetoric: “It consisted of little more than a reaffirmation of the Aristotelian distinction between history and poetry… and the affirmation of the fiction that the ‘stories’ historians tell are found in the evidence rather than invented.”
[11] Recent works on the ‘state of the discipline today’ tend to encapsulate theories which problematize textuality within a mutedly triumphant narrative of disciplinary unity. While becoming less adamant in the pursuit of teleologies and etiologies, “students and general readers had not stopped believing that historians were telling them some kind of truth about the past.” (David Cannadine, ed., What is History Now? {New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002}, 8) The historical discipline systematically absorbs destabilizing projects, and thus the wide range of textual inquiry that has intensified with the works of Bakhtin, Foucault, Derrida, J.F. Lyotard, White, and others, has been reduced for many to a simple lessening of the degree to which the historian prostrates himself before the document: “A genuine historian will never manipulate or distort the materials which the past has left behind and which form the basis for the historian’s work; but within the limits of what the sources allow there is plenty of room for differing emphases and interpretations…” (Cannadine, 16). And so we are left with the impotent pluralism of unjustifiable limitations.
[12] M.M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 253.
[13] Bakhtin, 256.
[14] Politically, Zinn tends to invoke the history of American protest and revolt in order to support his platform. In Declarations of Independence (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), for example, he seeks inspiration from the Boston Bread Rioters and Carolina Anti-tax Farmers (7). Later in the same work, his methodology betrays the seed of traditional historicity it carries within itself: “Scrupulous honesty in reporting the past would be needed, because any decision on means (tactics, avenues, and instruments) had to be tentative and had to be open to change based on what one could learn from history.” (49)
[15] LaCapra, 16.
[16] LaCapra, 18.
[17] LaCapra, 37: “…even the seemingly disinterested description or analysis of facts, disengaged from more manifest ideological functions it may have served in the past… nonetheless approximates a neutralist political position… it remains one position among others and not the simple absence of a position or ‘bias.’” Baudrillard on the dangers of a systematic neutrality and neutralization: “…to this active nihilism of radicality, the system opposes its own, the nihilism of neutralization. The system is itself also nihilistic, in the sense that it has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference.” (Simulacra, 163)
[18] Foucault, Archaeology, 70: “There is not… a sort of ideal discourse that is both ultimate and timeless, and which choices, extrinsic in origin , have perverted… There is no natural taxonomy that has been exact, fixism excepted; there is no economy of exchange and use that has been true, without the preferences and illusions of a mercantile bourgeoisie…”
[19] Foucault, Archaeology, 68.
[20] Foucault, Archaeology, 67.
[21] Baudrillard, Simulacra, 81.
[22] Nietzsche, 593.
[23] White, 70.
[24] John Higham with Felix Gilbert and Leonard Krieger, History (Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965), 313; taken from LaCapra, 24.
[25] Witness Marshall Berman, who in his defense of modernity attempts to persuade us that “the modernisms of the past can give us back a sense of our own modern roots, roots that go back two hundred years.” (“All That is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity,” in Michael Drolet, ed., Postmodernism Reader {London and New York: Routledge, 2004}, 65-66) Other examples among many: Canadianist Jack Granatstein is emblematic of the reactionary trend of ‘traditional historiography,’ often advocating a purely nationalistic and selectively positive reading of past texts (see Who Killed Canadian History? {Toronto: HarperCollins, 1998}); Cannadine’s prologue and epilogue to What is History Now? buy into the same old historical mythos in a much less offensive way (“The study of history enhances life because it conjures in the mind a vivid context for … appreciation and understanding… It can make you a better person.”, 154); Norman J. Wilson’s History in Crisis?: Recent Directions in Historiography (2nd ed, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005) uses scare tactics (of undesirable revisionism; 136) to champion comparative history (156-7), pluralism (161), and New Historicism, effectively ‘re-righting’ the historical discipline, while advising us that “the absence of historical understanding limits the range of thinking and acting,” (158) a hypothesis in direct opposition to my own, and that “the Archimedean point for evaluating the respective merits of any form of discourse becomes a historical problem.” (162)
[26] Bakhtin, 147. He continues: “…a thing that could and in fact must only be realized exclusively in the future is here portrayed as something out of the past, a thing that is in no sense part of the past’s reality, but a thing that is in its essence a purpose, an obligation.”
[27] Ibid. Bakhtin on the disempowerment of the future: “The force and persuasiveness of reality, of real life, belong to the present and the past alone—to the ‘is’ and the ‘was’—and to the future belongs a reality of a different sort, one that is more ephemeral, a reality that when placed in the future is deprived of that materiality and density, that real-life weightiness that is essential to the ‘is’ and ‘was.’”
[28] LaCapra, 36.
[29] Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (London and New York: Penguin, 1985; originally published in 1843), 145.
[30] Baudrillard, Simulacra, 43.
[31] See Immanuel Kant’s sublime state of mind, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), book 2, 104, 121. Taken from White, 229.
[32] White has also called attention to the very useful descriptions of the Sublime put forward by Edmund Burke. See White, 228, and Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (New York, 1909): 61, 114.
[33] Foucault, Archaeology, 21.
[34] “… higher up there winds a lonely path, narrow and steep: [the knight of faith] knows it is terrible to be born in solitude outside the universal, to walk without meeting a single traveler.” (Kierkegaard, 103) The key difference, here, being that we are not called by God but by our own humanity. We remain, though—deity or no—knights of faith.
[35] I am reminded here of Nietzsche’s useful discussion of man’s pleasure in cruelty, which is ‘sublime’ in the sense that it combines the loci of pain and pleasure into one.
[36] By ‘emancipation’ I mean the maximization of potentialities (whether finite or infinite, I do not know), concurrent with the minimization of the ‘limiting effects’ characteristic of modern historical practice.
[37] White, 82.
[38] Foucault, Archaeology, 38-39: “The danger [of his analysis], in short, is that instead of provoking a basis for what already exists, instead of going over with bold strokes lines that have already been sketched, instead of finding reassurance in this return and final confirmation, instead of completing the blessed circle that announces, after innumerable stratagems and as many nights, that all is saved, one is forced to advance beyond familiar territory, far from the certainties to which one is accustomed, towards an as yet uncharted land and unforeseeable conclusion. Is there not a danger that everything that has so far protected the historian in his daily journey and accompanied him until nightfall… may disappear, leaving for analysis a blank, indifferent space, lacking in both interiority and promise?”
[39] Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 1982), 5: “Citations customarily call upon an authority to sanction a step in the process of scholarly reflection. But they can also remind us of a former way of posing a question, to prove that an answer that has become classic is no longer satisfactory, that it has itself become historical again and demands of us a renewal of the process of question and answer.”
[40] I am reminded here once again of Kierkegaard: “Whatever one generation learns from another, it can never learn from a predecessor the genuinely human factor… This authentically human factor is passion, in which the one generation also fully understands the other and understands itself. Thus no generation has learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning, the task of no later generation is shorter than its predecessor’s, and if someone, unlike the previous generation, is unwilling to stay with love but wants to go further, then that is simply idle and foolish talk.” See Kierkegaard, 145.
[41] White, 82.
[42] Whether or not the subject is to be defended is another story. At this juncture, I am satisfied to say that I am still concerned with the action of subjects rather than the dissolution thereof. For the time being, that is where my stake lies.
[43] Foucault, on p. 14 of his Archaeology, proclaims that Marx and Nietzsche “could not be depended on [by historians] to preserve privilege; nor to affirm once and for all… that history, at least, is living and continuous, that it is, for the subject in question, a place of rest, certainty, reconciliation, a place of tranquilized sleep.”
[44] Baudrillard, Simulacra, 21: “This is how all the holdups, airplane hijackings, etc. are now in some sense simulation holdups in that they are already inscribed in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their presentation and their possible consequences.”
[45] White, 72: “…these ideologies deprive history of the kind of meaninglessness that alone can goad living human beings to make their lives different for themselves and their children, which is to say, to endow their lives with a meaning for which they alone are fully responsible.”
[46] Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1993; first published 1963), 48
[47] Baudrillard, Seduction (1979), 146: “…the idea that the world of things is subjected to a molecular and objective disorder… this assumption is insane. Scarcely less demented than the assumption of an objective order…” “The idea of chance first emerged as the residue of a logical order of determination. But even hypostasized as a revolutionary variable, it still remains the mirror image of the principle of causality.”
[48] Baudrillard, Seduction, 148: “…it is not indeterminacy that is opposed to causality, but obligation. The latter is neither a linear chain, nor an unchaining (which is merely the romanticism of a deranged causality); it forms a reversible chain that, moving from sign to sign, inexorably completes its cycle…”
[49] Baudrillard, Simulacra, 83.
[50] Foucault, The Order of Things, Introduction.
[51] Baudrillard, Simulacra, 47-48.
[52] Baudrillard, Simulacra, 80.
[53] Ibid.
[54] White, 71: “All this permits the historian to see some beauty, if not good, in everything human and to assume an Olympian calm in the face of any current social situation, however terrifying it may appear to anyone who lacks historical perspective.”
[55] White, 72: “Historical facts are politically domesticated precisely insofar as they are effectively removed from displaying any aspect of the sublime…” “…insofar as historical events and processes become understandable, as conservatives maintain, or explainable, as radicals believe them to be, they can never serve as a basis for a visionary politics more concerned to endow social life with meaning than with beauty.”
[56] Bakhtin, 258.
[57] Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection,” in The Powers of Horror (), 12: “For the Sublime has no object. When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things that I see, hear, or think. The “sublime” object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory.”
[58] Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Drolet, 110: “It is only by virtue of this oppression of madness that finite-thought, that is to say, history, can reign. Extending this truth to historicity in general, without keeping to a determined historical moment, one could say that the reign of finite thought can be established only on the basis of the more or less disguised internment, humiliation, fettering and mockery of the madman within us, of the madman who can only be the fool of a logos which is father, master, and king.” This is but a slight aspect of a much farther-ranging argument that itself deserves the devotion of numerous volumes.
[59] White, 72: “But modern ideologies… impute a meaning to history that renders its manifest confusion comprehensible to either reason, understanding, or aesthetic sensibility. To the extent that they succeed in doing so, these ideologies deprive history of the kind of meaninglessness that alone can goad living human beings to make their lives different for themselves and their children, which is to say, to endow their lives with a meaning for which they alone are fully responsible.”
[60] Baudrillard, Simulacra, 160.

Maurading Martha

2005-09-05T14:47:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure whether to be proud of Nussbaum for exposing a lot of bullshit, or tired of her for criticizing Butler for not being what she expected her to be. I guess it comes back to LaCapra. Is the Cheese and the Worms MEANT to be intellectual history? If not, how can you criticize it on those grounds for not being what it never intended to be?

Is she pulling a Heidegger here, criticizing Nietzsche for being a bad metaphysician? Not metaphysician enough?

Anyways, paper meeting.
Are they due on Wednesday morning? Thursday? Friday? I need a specific target time.

I suppose that we're not meeting informally this week, at least not that I've been notified of...
If this changes, let me know.

Ali

Martha Nussbaum tears Judith Butler a new asshole

2005-09-01T14:21:00.000-07:00

This is harsh. It is of particular relevance to Ali's essay, but of general interest anyway. It was origianlly published in The New Republic Online, 22.2.1999.

AG

The Professor of Parody
by Martha Nussbaum

I.
For a long time, academic feminism in America has been closely allied to the practical struggle to achieve justice and equality for women. Feminist theory has been understood by theorists as not just fancy words on paper; theory is connected to proposals for social change. Thus feminist scholars have engaged in many concrete projects: the reform of rape law; winning attention and legal redress for the problems of domestic violence and sexual harassment; improving women's economic opportunities, working conditions, and education; winning pregnancy benefits for female workers; campaigning against the trafficking of women and girls in prostitution; working for the social and political equality of lesbians and gay men.

Indeed, some theorists have left the academy altogether, feeling more comfortable in the world of practical politics, where they can address these urgent problems directly. Those who remain in the academy have frequently made it a point of honor to be academics of a committed practical sort, eyes always on the material conditions of real women, writing always in a way that acknowledges those real bodies and those real struggles. One cannot read a page of Catharine MacKinnon, for example, without being engaged with a real issue of legal and institutional change. If one disagrees with her proposals--and many feminists disagree with them--the challenge posed by her writing is to find some other way of solving the problem that has been vividly delineated.

Feminists have differed in some cases about what is bad, and about what is needed to make things better; but all have agreed that the circumstances of women are often unjust and that law and political action can make them more nearly just. MacKinnon, who portrays hierarchy and subordination as endemic to our entire culture, is also committed to, and cautiously optimistic about, change through law--the domestic law of rape and sexual harassment and international human rights law. Even Nancy Chodorow, who, in The Reproduction of Mothering, offered a depressing account of the replication of oppressive gender categories in child-rearing, argued that this situation could change. Men and women could decide, understanding the unhappy consequences of these habits, that they will henceforth do things differently; and changes in laws and institutions can assist in such decisions.

Feminist theory still looks like this in many parts of the world. In India, for example, academic feminists have thrown themselves into practical struggles, and feminist theorizing is closely tethered to practical commitments such as female literacy, the reform of unequal land laws, changes in rape law (which, in India today, has most of the flaws that the first generation of American feminists targeted), the effort to get social recognition for problems of sexual harassment and domestic violence. These feminists know that they live in the middle of a fiercely unjust reality; they cannot live with themselves without addressing it more or less daily, in their theoretical writing and in their activities outside the seminar room.

In the United States, however, things have been changing. One observes a new, disquieting trend. It is not only that feminist theory pays relatively little attention to the struggles of women outside the United States. (This was always a dispiriting feature even of much of the best work of the earlier period.) Something more insidious than provincialism has come to prominence in the American academy. It is the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women.

Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly. The new feminism, moreover, instructs its members that there is little room for large-scale social change, and maybe no room at all. We are all, more or less, prisoners of the structures of power that have defined our identity as women; we can never change those structures in a large-scale way, and we can never escape from them. All that we can hope to do is to find spaces within the structures of power in which to parody them, to poke fun at them, to transgress them in speech. And so symbolic verbal politics, in addition to being offered as a type of real politics, is held to be the only politics that is really possible.

These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action. Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways. Such feminists therefore find comfort in the idea that the subversive use of words is still available to feminist intellectuals. Deprived of the hope of larger or more lasting changes, we can still perform our resistance by the reworking of verbal categories, and thus, at the margins, of the selves who are constituted by them.

One American feminist has shaped these developments more than any other. Judith Butler seems to many young scholars to define what feminism is now. Trained as a philosopher, she is frequently seen (more by people in literature than by philosophers) as a major thinker about gender, power, and the body. As we wonder what has become of old-style feminist politics and the material realities to which it was committed, it seems necessary to reckon with Butler's work and influence, and to scrutinize the arguments that have led so many to adopt a stance that looks very much like quietism and retreat.

II.
It is difficult to come to grips with Butler's ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are. Butler is a very smart person. In public discussions, she proves that she can speak clearly and has a quick grasp of what is said to her. Her written style, however, is ponderous and obscure. It is dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions. In addition to Foucault, and to a more recent focus on Freud, Butler's work relies heavily on the thought of Louis Althusser, the French lesbian theorist Monique Wittig, the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, Jacques Lacan, J.L. Austin, and the American philosopher of language Saul Kripke. These figures do not all agree with one another, to say the least; so an initial problem in reading Butler is that one is bewildered to find her arguments buttressed by appeal to so many contradictory concepts and doctrines, usually without any account of how the apparent contradictions will be resolved.

A further problem lies in Butler's casual mode of allusion. The ideas of these thinkers are never described in enough detail to include the uninitiated (if you are not familiar with the Althusserian concept of "interpellation," you are lost for chapters) or to explain to the initiated how, precisely, the difficult ideas are being understood. Of course, much academic writing is allusive in some way: it presupposes prior knowledge of certain doctrines and positions. But in both the continental and the Anglo-American philosophical traditions, academic writers for a specialist audience standardly acknowledge that the figures they mention are complicated, and the object of many different interpretations. They therefore typically assume the responsibility of advancing a definite interpretation among the contested ones, and of showing by argument why they have interpreted the figure as they have, and why their own interpretation is better than others.

We find none of this in Butler. Divergent interpretations are simply not considered--even where, as in the cases of Foucault and Freud, she is advancing highly contestable interpretations that would not be accepted by many scholars. Thus one is led to the conclusion that the allusiveness of the writing cannot be explained in the usual way, by positing an audience of specialists eager to debate the details of an esoteric academic position. The writing is simply too thin to satisfy any such audience. It is also obvious that Butler's work is not directed at a non-academic audience eager to grapple with actual injustices. Such an audience would simply be baffled by the thick soup of Butler's prose, by its air of in-group knowingness, by its extremely high ratio of names to explanations.

To whom, then, is Butler speaking? It would seem that she is addressing a group of young feminist theorists in the academy who are neither students of philosophy, caring about what Althusser and Freud and Kripke really said, nor outsiders, needing to be informed about the nature of their projects and persuaded of their worth. This implied audience is imagined as remarkably docile. Subservient to the oracular voice of Butler's text, and dazzled by its patina of high-concept abstractness, the imagined reader poses few questions, requests no arguments and no clear definitions of terms.

Still more strangely, the implied reader is expected not to care greatly about Butler's own final view on many matters. For a large proportion of the sentences in any book by Butler--especially sentences near the end of chapters--are questions. Sometimes the answer that the question expects is evident. But often things are much more indeterminate. Among the non-interrogative sentences, many begin with "Consider..." or "One could suggest..."--in such a way that Butler never quite tells the reader whether she approves of the view described. Mystification as well as hierarchy are the tools of her practice, a mystification that eludes criticism because it makes few definite claims.

Take two representative examples:

What does it mean for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination? Is the act of presupposing the same as the act of reinstating, or is there a discontinuity between the power presupposed and the power reinstated? Consider that in the very act by which the subject reproduces the conditions of its own subordination, the subject exemplifies a temporally based vulnerability that belongs to those conditions, specifically, to the exigencies of their renewal.
And:

Such questions cannot be answered here, but they indicate a direction for thinking that is perhaps prior to the question of conscience, namely, the question that preoccupied Spinoza, Nietzsche, and most recently, Giorgio Agamben: How are we to understand the desire to be as a constitutive desire? Resituating conscience and interpellation within such an account, we might then add to this question another: How is such a desire exploited not only by a law in the singular, but by laws of various kinds such that we yield to subordination in order to maintain some sense of social "being"?
Why does Butler prefer to write in this teasing, exasperating way? The style is certainly not unprecedented. Some precincts of the continental philosophical tradition, though surely not all of them, have an unfortunate tendency to regard the philosopher as a star who fascinates, and frequently by obscurity, rather than as an arguer among equals. When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one's own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority. The thinker is heeded only for his or her turgid charisma. One hangs in suspense, eager for the next move. When Butler does follow that "direction for thinking," what will she say? What does it mean, tell us please, for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination? (No clear answer to this question, so far as I can see, is forthcoming.) One is given the impression of a mind so profoundly cogitative that it will not pronounce on anything lightly: so one waits, in awe of its depth, for it finally to do so.

In this way obscurity creates an aura of importance. It also serves another related purpose. It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding. When the bullied readers of Butler's books muster the daring to think thus, they will see that the ideas in these books are thin. When Butler's notions are stated clearly and succinctly, one sees that, without a lot more distinctions and arguments, they don't go far, and they are not especially new. Thus obscurity fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and argument.

Last year Butler won the first prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature, for the following sentence:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Now, Butler might have written: "Marxist accounts, focusing on capital as the central force structuring social relations, depicted the operations of that force as everywhere uniform. By contrast, Althusserian accounts, focusing on power, see the operations of that force as variegated and as shifting over time." Instead, she prefers a verbosity that causes the reader to expend so much effort in deciphering her prose that little energy is left for assessing the truth of the claims. Announcing the award, the journal's editor remarked that "it's possibly the anxiety-inducing obscurity of such writing that has led Professor Warren Hedges of Southern Oregon University to praise Judith Butler as `probably one of the ten smartest people on the planet.'" (Such bad writing, incidentally, is by no means ubiquitous in the "queer theory" group of theorists with which Butler is associated. David Halperin, for example, writes about the relationship between Foucault and Kant, and about Greek homosexuality, with philosophical clarity and historical precision.)

Butler gains prestige in the literary world by being a philosopher; many admirers associate her manner of writing with philosophical profundity. But one should ask whether it belongs to the philosophical tradition at all, rather than to the closely related but adversarial traditions of sophistry and rhetoric. Ever since Socrates distinguished philosophy from what the sophists and the rhetoricians were doing, it has been a discourse of equals who trade arguments and counter-arguments without any obscurantist sleight-of-hand. In that way, he claimed, philosophy showed respect for the soul, while the others' manipulative methods showed only disrespect. One afternoon, fatigued by Butler on a long plane trip, I turned to a draft of a student's dissertation on Hume's views of personal identity. I quickly felt my spirits reviving. Doesn't she write clearly, I thought with pleasure, and a tiny bit of pride. And Hume, what a fine, what a gracious spirit: how kindly he respects the reader's intelligence, even at the cost of exposing his own uncertainty.

III.
Butler's main idea, first introduced in Gender Trouble in 1989 and repeated throughout her books, is that gender is a social artifice. Our ideas of what women and men are reflect nothing that exists eternally in nature. Instead they derive from customs that embed social relations of power.

This notion, of course, is nothing new. The denaturalizing of gender was present already in Plato, and it received a great boost from John Stuart Mill, who claimed in The Subjection of Women that "what is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing." Mill saw that claims about "women's nature" derive from, and shore up, hierarchies of power: womanliness is made to be whatever would serve the cause of keeping women in subjection, or, as he put it, "enslav[ing] their minds." With the family as with feudalism, the rhetoric of nature itself serves the cause of slavery. "The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural.... But was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?"

Mill was hardly the first social-constructionist. Similar ideas about anger, greed, envy, and other prominent features of our lives had been commonplace in the history of philosophy since ancient Greece. And Mill's application of familiar notions of social-construction to gender needed, and still needs, much fuller development; his suggestive remarks did not yet amount to a theory of gender. Long before Butler came on the scene, many feminists contributed to the articulation of such an account.

In work published in the 1970s and 1980s, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin argued that the conventional understanding of gender roles is a way of ensuring continued male domination in sexual relations, as well as in the public sphere. They took the core of Mill's insight into a sphere of life concerning which the Victorian philosopher had said little. (Not nothing, though: in 1869 Mill already understood that the failure to criminalize rape within marriage defined woman as a tool for male use and negated her human dignity.) Before Butler, MacKinnon and Dworkin addressed the feminist fantasy of an idyllic natural sexuality of women that only needed to be "liberated"; and argued that social forces go so deep that we should not suppose we have access to such a notion of "nature." Before Butler, they stressed the ways in which male-dominated power structures marginalize and subordinate not only women, but also people who would like to choose a same-sex relationship. They understood that discrimination against gays and lesbians is a way of enforcing the familiar hierarchically ordered gender roles; and so they saw discrimination against gays and lesbians as a form of sex discrimination.

Before Butler, the psychologist Nancy Chodorow gave a detailed and compelling account of how gender differences replicate themselves across the generations: she argued that the ubiquity of these mechanisms of replication enables us to understand how what is artificial can nonetheless be nearly ubiquitous. Before Butler, the biologist Anne Fausto Sterling, through her painstaking criticism of experimental work allegedly supporting the naturalness of conventional gender distinctions, showed how deeply social power-relations had compromised the objectivity of scientists: Myths of Gender (1985) was an apt title for what she found in the biology of the time. (Other biologists and primatologists also contributed to this enterprise.) Before Butler, the political theorist Susan Moller Okin explored the role of law and political thought in constructing a gendered destiny for women in the family; and this project, too, was pursued further by a number of feminists in law and political philosophy. Before Butler, Gayle Rubin's important anthropological account of subordination, The Traffic in Women (1975), provided a valuable analysis of the relationship between the social organization of gender and the asymmetries of power.

So what does Butler's work add to this copious body of writing? Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter contain no detailed argument against biological claims of "natural" difference, no account of mechanisms of gender replication, and no account of the legal shaping of the family; nor do they contain any detailed focus on possibilities for legal change. What, then, does Butler offer that we might not find more fully done in earlier feminist writings? One relatively original claim is that when we recognize the artificiality of gender distinctions, and refrain from thinking of them as expressing an independent natural reality, we will also understand that there is no compelling reason why the gender types should have been two (correlated with the two biological sexes), rather than three or five or indefinitely many. "When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice," she writes.

From this claim it does not follow, for Butler, that we can freely reinvent the genders as we like: she holds, indeed, that there are severe limits to our freedom. She insists that we should not naively imagine that there is a pristine self that stands behind society, ready to emerge all pure and liberated: "There is no self that is prior to the convergence or who maintains `integrity' prior to its entrance into this conflicted cultural field. There is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very `taking up' is enabled by the tool lying there." Butler does claim, though, that we can create categories that are in some sense new ones, by means of the artful parody of the old ones. Thus her best known idea, her conception of politics as a parodic performance, is born out of the sense of a (strictly limited) freedom that comes from the recognition that one's ideas of gender have been shaped by forces that are social rather than biological. We are doomed to repetition of the power structures into which we are born, but we can at least make fun of them; and some ways of making fun are subversive assaults on the original norms.

The idea of gender as performance is Butler's most famous idea, and so it is worth pausing to scrutinize it more closely. She introduced the notion intuitively, in Gender Trouble, without invoking theoretical precedent. Later she denied that she was referring to quasi-theatrical performance, and associated her notion instead with Austin's account of speech acts in How to Do Things with Words. Austin's linguistic category of "performatives" is a category of linguistic utterances that function, in and of themselves, as actions rather than as assertions. When (in appropriate social circumstances) I say "I bet ten dollars," or "I'm sorry," or "I do" (in a marriage ceremony), or "I name this ship...," I am not reporting on a bet or an apology or a marriage or a naming ceremony, I am conducting one.

Butler's analogous claim about gender is not obvious, since the "performances" in question involve gesture, dress, movement, and action, as well as language. Austin's thesis, which is restricted to a rather technical analysis of a certain class of sentences, is in fact not especially helpful to Butler in developing her ideas. Indeed, though she vehemently repudiates readings of her work that associate her view with theater, thinking about the Living Theater's subversive work with gender seems to illuminate her ideas far more than thinking about Austin.

Nor is Butler's treatment of Austin very plausible. She makes the bizarre claim that the fact that the marriage ceremony is one of dozens of examples of performatives in Austin's text suggests "that the heterosexualization of the social bond is the paradigmatic form for those speech acts which bring about what they name." Hardly. Marriage is no more paradigmatic for Austin than betting or ship-naming or promising or apologizing. He is interested in a formal feature of certain utterances, and we are given no reason to suppose that their content has any significance for his argument. It is usually a mistake to read earth-shaking significance into a philosopher's pedestrian choice of examples. Should we say that Aristotle's use of a low-fat diet to illustrate the practical syllogism suggests that chicken is at the heart of Aristotelian virtue? Or that Rawls's use of travel plans to illustrate practical reasoning shows that A Theory of Justice aims at giving us all a vacation?

Leaving these oddities to one side, Butler's point is presumably this: when we act and speak in a gendered way, we are not simply reporting on something that is already fixed in the world, we are actively constituting it, replicating it, and reinforcing it. By behaving as if there were male and female "natures," we co-create the social fiction that these natures exist. They are never there apart from our deeds; we are always making them be there. At the same time, by carrying out these performances in a slightly different manner, a parodic manner, we can perhaps unmake them just a little.

Thus the one place for agency in a world constrained by hierarchy is in the small opportunities we have to oppose gender roles every time they take shape. When I find myself doing femaleness, I can turn it around, poke fun at it, do it a little bit differently. Such reactive and parodic performances, in Butler's view, never destabilize the larger system. She doesn't envisage mass movements of resistance or campaigns for political reform; only personal acts carried out by a small number of knowing actors. Just as actors with a bad script can subvert it by delivering the bad lines oddly, so too with gender: the script remains bad, but the actors have a tiny bit of freedom. Thus we have the basis for what, in Excitable Speech, Butler calls "an ironic hopefulness."

Up to this point, Butler's contentions, though relatively familiar, are plausible and even interesting, though one is already unsettled by her narrow vision of the possibilities for change. Yet Butler adds to these plausible claims about gender two other claims that are stronger and more contentious. The first is that there is no agent behind or prior to the social forces that produce the self. If this means only that babies are born into a gendered world that begins to replicate males and females almost immediately, the claim is plausible, but not surprising: experiments have for some time demonstrated that the way babies are held and talked to, the way their emotions are described, are profoundly shaped by the sex the adults in question believe the child to have. (The same baby will be bounced if the adults think it is a boy, cuddled if they think it is a girl; its crying will be labeled as fear if the adults think it is a girl, as anger if they think it is a boy.) Butler shows no interest in these empirical facts, but they do support her contention.

If she means, however, that babies enter the world completely inert, with no tendencies and no abilities that are in some sense prior to their experience in a gendered society, this is far less plausible, and difficult to support empirically. Butler offers no such support, preferring to remain on the high plane of metaphysical abstraction. (Indeed, her recent Freudian work may even repudiate this idea: it suggests, with Freud, that there are at least some presocial impulses and tendencies, although, typically, this line is not clearly developed.) Moreover, such an exaggerated denial of pre-cultural agency takes away some of the resources that Chodorow and others use when they try to account for cultural change in the direction of the better.

Butler does in the end want to say that we have a kind of agency, an ability to undertake change and resistance. But where does this ability come from, if there is no structure in the personality that is not thoroughly power's creation? It is not impossible for Butler to answer this question, but she certainly has not answered it yet, in a way that would convince those who believe that human beings have at least some pre-cultural desires--for food, for comfort, for cognitive mastery, for survival--and that this structure in the personality is crucial in the explanation of our development as moral and political agents. One would like to see her engage with the strongest forms of such a view, and to say, clearly and without jargon, exactly why and where she rejects them. One would also like to hear her speak about real infants, who do appear to manifest a structure of striving that influences from the start their reception of cultural forms.

Butler's second strong claim is that the body itself, and especially the distinction between the two sexes, is also a social construction. She means not only that the body is shaped in many ways by social norms of how men and women should be; she means also that the fact that a binary division of sexes is taken as fundamental, as a key to arranging society, is itself a social idea that is not given in bodily reality. What exactly does this claim mean, and how plausible is it?

Butler's brief exploration of Foucault on hermaphrodites does show us society's anxious insistence to classify every human being in one box or another, whether or not the individual fits a box; but of course it does not show that there are many such indeterminate cases. She is right to insist that we might have made many different classifications of body types, not necessarily focusing on the binary division as the most salient; and she is also right to insist that, to a large extent, claims of bodily sex difference allegedly based upon scientific research have been projections of cultural prejudice--though Butler offers nothing here that is nearly as compelling as Fausto Sterling's painstaking biological analysis.

And yet it is much too simple to say that power is all that the body is. We might have had the bodies of birds or dinosaurs or lions, but we do not; and this reality shapes our choices. Culture can shape and reshape some aspects of our bodily existence, but it does not shape all the aspects of it. "In the man burdened by hunger and thirst," as Sextus Empiricus observed long ago, "it is impossible to produce by argument the conviction that he is not so burdened." This is an important fact also for feminism, since women's nutritional needs (and their special needs when pregnant or lactating) are an important feminist topic. Even where sex difference is concerned, it is surely too simple to write it all off as culture; nor should feminists be eager to make such a sweeping gesture. Women who run or play basketball, for example, were right to welcome the demolition of myths about women's athletic performance that were the product of male-dominated assumptions; but they were also right to demand the specialized research on women's bodies that has fostered a better understanding of women's training needs and women's injuries. In short: what feminism needs, and sometimes gets, is a subtle study of the interplay of bodily difference and cultural construction. And Butler's abstract pronouncements, floating high above all matter, give us none of what we need.

IV.
Suppose we grant Butler her most interesting claims up to this point: that the social structure of gender is ubiquitous, but we can resist it by subversive and parodic acts. Two significant questions remain. What should be resisted, and on what basis? What would the acts of resistance be like, and what would we expect them to accomplish?

Butler uses several words for what she takes to be bad and therefore worthy of resistance: the "repressive," the "subordinating," the "oppressive." But she provides no empirical discussion of resistance of the sort that we find, say, in Barry Adam's fascinating sociological study The Survival of Domination (1978), which studies the subordination of blacks, Jews, women, and gays and lesbians, and their ways of wrestling with the forms of social power that have oppressed them. Nor does Butler provide any account of the concepts of resistance and oppression that would help us, were we really in doubt about what we ought to be resisting.

Butler departs in this regard from earlier social-constructionist feminists, all of whom used ideas such as non-hierarchy, equality, dignity, autonomy, and treating as an end rather than a means, to indicate a direction for actual politics. Still less is she willing to elaborate any positive normative notion. Indeed, it is clear that Butler, like Foucault, is adamantly opposed to normative notions such as human dignity, or treating humanity as an end, on the grounds that they are inherently dictatorial. In her view, we ought to wait to see what the political struggle itself throws up, rather than prescribe in advance to its participants. Universal normative notions, she says, "colonize under the sign of the same."

This idea of waiting to see what we get--in a word, this moral passivity--seems plausible in Butler because she tacitly assumes an audience of like-minded readers who agree (sort of) about what the bad things are--discrimination against gays and lesbians, the unequal and hierarchical treatment of women--and who even agree (sort of) about why they are bad (they subordinate some people to others, they deny people freedoms that they ought to have). But take that assumption away, and the absence of a normative dimension becomes a severe problem.

Try teaching Foucault at a contemporary law school, as I have, and you will quickly find that subversion takes many forms, not all of them congenial to Butler and her allies. As a perceptive libertarian student said to me, Why can't I use these ideas to resist the tax structure, or the antidiscrimination laws, or perhaps even to join the militias? Others, less fond of liberty, might engage in the subversive performances of making fun of feminist remarks in class, or ripping down the posters of the lesbian and gay law students' association. These things happen. They are parodic and subversive. Why, then, aren't they daring and good?

Well, there are good answers to those questions, but you won't find them in Foucault, or in Butler. Answering them requires discussing which liberties and opportunities human beings ought to have, and what it is for social institutions to treat human beings as ends rather than as means--in short, a normative theory of social justice and human dignity. It is one thing to say that we should be humble about our universal norms, and willing to learn from the experience of oppressed people. It is quite another thing to say that we don't need any norms at all. Foucault, unlike Butler, at least showed signs in his late work of grappling with this problem; and all his writing is animated by a fierce sense of the texture of social oppression and the harm that it does.

Come to think of it, justice, understood as a personal virtue, has exactly the structure of gender in the Butlerian analysis: it is not innate or "natural," it is produced by repeated performances (or as Aristotle said, we learn it by doing it), it shapes our inclinations and forces the repression of some of them. These ritual performances, and their associated repressions, are enforced by arrangements of social power, as children who won't share on the playground quickly discover. Moreover, the parodic subversion of justice is ubiquitous in politics, as in personal life. But there is an important difference. Generally we dislike these subversive performances, and we think that young people should be strongly discouraged from seeing norms of justice in such a cynical light. Butler cannot explain in any purely structural or procedural way why the subversion of gender norms is a social good while the subversion of justice norms is a social bad. Foucault, we should remember, cheered for the Ayatollah, and why not? That, too, was resistance, and there was indeed nothing in the text to tell us that that struggle was less worthy than a struggle for civil rights and civil liberties.

There is a void, then, at the heart of Butler's notion of politics. This void can look liberating, because the reader fills it implicitly with a normative theory of human equality or dignity. But let there be no mistake: for Butler, as for Foucault, subversion is subversion, and it can in principle go in any direction. Indeed, Butler's naively empty politics is especially dangerous for the very causes she holds dear. For every friend of Butler, eager to engage in subversive performances that proclaim the repressiveness of heterosexual gender norms, there are dozens who would like to engage in subversive performances that flout the norms of tax compliance, of non-discrimination, of decent treatment of one's fellow students. To such people we should say, you cannot simply resist as you please, for there are norms of fairness, decency, and dignity that entail that this is bad behavior. But then we have to articulate those norms--and this Butler refuses to do.

V.
What precisely does Butler offer when she counsels subversion? She tells us to engage in parodic performances, but she warns us that the dream of escaping altogether from the oppressive structures is just a dream: it is within the oppressive structures that we must find little spaces for resistance, and this resistance cannot hope to change the overall situation. And here lies a dangerous quietism.

If Butler means only to warn us against the dangers of fantasizing an idyllic world in which sex raises no serious problems, she is wise to do so. Yet frequently she goes much further. She suggests that the institutional structures that ensure the marginalization of lesbians and gay men in our society, and the continued inequality of women, will never be changed in a deep way; and so our best hope is to thumb our noses at them, and to find pockets of personal freedom within them. "Called by an injurious name, I come into social being, and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially." In other words: I cannot escape the humiliating structures without ceasing to be, so the best I can do is mock, and use the language of subordination stingingly. In Butler, resistance is always imagined as personal, more or less private, involving no unironic, organized public action for legal or institutional change.

Isn't this like saying to a slave that the institution of slavery will never change, but you can find ways of mocking it and subverting it, finding your personal freedom within those acts of carefully limited defiance? Yet it is a fact that the institution of slavery can be changed, and was changed--but not by people who took a Butler-like view of the possibilities. It was changed because people did not rest content with parodic performance: they demanded, and to some extent they got, social upheaval. It is also a fact that the institutional structures that shape women's lives have changed. The law of rape, still defective, has at least improved; the law of sexual harassment exists, where it did not exist before; marriage is no longer regarded as giving men monarchical control over women's bodies. These things were changed by feminists who would not take parodic performance as their answer, who thought that power, where bad, should, and would, yield before justice.

Butler not only eschews such a hope, she takes pleasure in its impossibility. She finds it exciting to contemplate the alleged immovability of power, and to envisage the ritual subversions of the slave who is convinced that she must remain such. She tells us--this is the central thesis of The Psychic Life of Power--that we all eroticize the power structures that oppress us, and can thus find sexual pleasure only within their confines. It seems to be for that reason that she prefers the sexy acts of parodic subversion to any lasting material or institutional change. Real change would so uproot our psyches that it would make sexual satisfaction impossible. Our libidos are the creation of the bad enslaving forces, and thus necessarily sadomasochistic in structure.

Well, parodic performance is not so bad when you are a powerful tenured academic in a liberal university. But here is where Butler's focus on the symbolic, her proud neglect of the material side of life, becomes a fatal blindness. For women who are hungry, illiterate, disenfranchised, beaten, raped, it is not sexy or liberating to reenact, however parodically, the conditions of hunger, illiteracy, disenfranchisement, beating, and rape. Such women prefer food, schools, votes, and the integrity of their bodies. I see no reason to believe that they long sadomasochistically for a return to the bad state. If some individuals cannot live without the sexiness of domination, that seems sad, but it is not really our business. But when a major theorist tells women in desperate conditions that life offers them only bondage, she purveys a cruel lie, and a lie that flatters evil by giving it much more power than it actually has.

Excitable Speech, Butler's most recent book, which provides her analysis of legal controversies involving pornography and hate speech, shows us exactly how far her quietism extends. For she is now willing to say that even where legal change is possible, even where it has already happened, we should wish it away, so as to preserve the space within which the oppressed may enact their sadomasochistic rituals of parody.

As a work on the law of free speech, Excitable Speech is an unconscionably bad book. Butler shows no awareness of the major theoretical accounts of the First Amendment, and no awareness of the wide range of cases such a theory will need to take into consideration. She makes absurd legal claims: for example, she says that the only type of speech that has been held to be unprotected is speech that has been previously defined as conduct rather than speech. (In fact, there are many types of speech, from false or misleading advertising to libelous statements to obscenity as currently defined, which have never been claimed to be action rather than speech, and which are nonetheless denied First Amendment protection.) Butler even claims, mistakenly, that obscenity has been judged to be the equivalent of "fighting words." It is not that Butler has an argument to back up her novel readings of the wide range of cases of unprotected speech that an account of the First Amendment would need to cover. She just has not noticed that there is this wide range of cases, or that her view is not a widely accepted legal view. Nobody interested in law can take her argument seriously.

But let us extract from Butler's thin discussion of hate speech and pornography the core of her position. It is this: legal prohibitions of hate speech and pornography are problematic (though in the end she does not clearly oppose them) because they close the space within which the parties injured by that speech can perform their resistance. By this Butler appears to mean that if the offense is dealt with through the legal system, there will be fewer occasions for informal protest; and also, perhaps, that if the offense becomes rarer because of its illegality we will have fewer opportunities to protest its presence.

Well, yes. Law does close those spaces. Hate speech and pornography are extremely complicated subjects on which feminists may reasonably differ. (Still, one should state the contending views precisely: Butler's account of MacKinnon is less than careful, stating that MacKinnon supports "ordinances against pornography" and suggesting that, despite MacKinnon's explicit denial, they involve a form of censorship. Nowhere does Butler mention that what MacKinnon actually supports is a civil damage action in which particular women harmed through pornography can sue its makers and its distributors.)

But Butler's argument has implications well beyond the cases of hate speech and pornography. It would appear to support not just quietism in these areas, but a much more general legal quietism--or, indeed, a radical libertarianism. It goes like this: let us do away with everything from building codes to non-discrimination laws to rape laws, because they close the space within which the injured tenants, the victims of discrimination, the raped women, can perform their resistance. Now, this is not the same argument radical libertarians use to oppose building codes and anti-discrimination laws; even they draw the line at rape. But the conclusions converge.

If Butler should reply that her argument pertains only to speech (and there is no reason given in the text for such a limitation, given the assimilation of harmful speech to conduct), then we can reply in the domain of speech. Let us get rid of laws against false advertising and unlicensed medical advice, for they close the space within which poisoned consumers and mutilated patients can perform their resistance! Again, if Butler does not approve of these extensions, she needs to make an argument that divides her cases from these cases, and it is not clear that her position permits her to make such a distinction.

For Butler, the act of subversion is so riveting, so sexy, that it is a bad dream to think that the world will actually get better. What a bore equality is! No bondage, no delight. In this way, her pessimistic erotic anthropology offers support to an amoral anarchist politics.

VI.
When we consider the quietism inherent in Butler's writing, we have some keys to understanding Butler's influential fascination with drag and cross-dressing as paradigms of feminist resistance. Butler's followers understand her account of drag to imply that such performances are ways for women to be daring and subversive. I am unaware of any attempt by Butler to repudiate such readings.

But what is going on here? The woman dressed mannishly is hardly a new figure. Indeed, even when she was relatively new, in the nineteenth century, she was in another way quite old, for she simply replicated in the lesbian world the existing stereotypes and hierarchies of male-female society. What, we may well ask, is parodic subversion in this area, and what a kind of prosperous middle-class acceptance? Isn't hierarchy in drag still hierarchy? And is it really true (as The Psychic Life of Power would seem to conclude) that domination and subordination are the roles that women must play in every sphere, and if not subordination, then mannish domination?

In short, cross-dressing for women is a tired old script--as Butler herself informs us. Yet she would have us see the script as subverted, made new, by the cross-dresser's knowing symbolic sartorial gestures; but again we must wonder about the newness, and even the subversiveness. Consider Andrea Dworkin's parody (in her novel Mercy) of a Butlerish parodic feminist, who announces from her posture of secure academic comfort:

The notion that bad things happen is both propagandistic and inadequate.... To understand a woman's life requires that we affirm the hidden or obscure dimensions of pleasure, often in pain, and choice, often under duress. One must develop an eye for secret signs--the clothes that are more than clothes or decoration in the contemporary dialogue, for instance, or the rebellion hidden behind apparent conformity. There is no victim. There is perhaps an insufficiency of signs, an obdurate appearance of conformity that simply masks the deeper level on which choice occurs.
In prose quite unlike Butler's, this passage captures the ambivalence of the implied author of some of Butler's writings, who delights in her violative practice while turning her theoretical eye resolutely away from the material suffering of women who are hungry, illiterate, violated, beaten. There is no victim. There is only an insufficiency of signs.

Butler suggests to her readers that this sly send-up of the status quo is the only script for resistance that life offers. Well, no. Besides offering many other ways to be human in one's personal life, beyond traditional norms of domination and subservience, life also offers many scripts for resistance that do not focus narcissistically on personal self-presentation. Such scripts involve feminists (and others, of course) in building laws and institutions, without much concern for how a woman displays her own body and its gendered nature: in short, they involve working for others who are suffering.

The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment. In this sense, Butler's self-involved feminism is extremely American, and it is not surprising that it has caught on here, where successful middle-class people prefer to focus on cultivating the self rather than thinking in a way that helps the material condition of others. Even in America, however, it is possible for theorists to be dedicated to the public good and to achieve something through that effort.

Many feminists in America are still theorizing in a way that supports material change and responds to the situation of the most oppressed. Increasingly, however, the academic and cultural trend is toward the pessimistic flirtatiousness represented by the theorizing of Butler and her followers. Butlerian feminism is in many ways easier than the old feminism. It tells scores of talented young women that they need not work on changing the law, or feeding the hungry, or assailing power through theory harnessed to material politics. They can do politics in safety of their campuses, remaining on the symbolic level, making subversive gestures at power through speech and gesture. This, the theory says, is pretty much all that is available to us anyway, by way of political action, and isn't it exciting and sexy?

In its small way, of course, this is a hopeful politics. It instructs people that they can, right now, without compromising their security, do something bold. But the boldness is entirely gestural, and insofar as Butler's ideal suggests that these symbolic gestures really are political change, it offers only a false hope. Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it.

Finally there is despair at the heart of the cheerful Butlerian enterprise. The big hope, the hope for a world of real justice, where laws and institutions protect the equality and the dignity of all citizens, has been banished, even perhaps mocked as sexually tedious. Judith Butler's hip quietism is a comprehensible response to the difficulty of realizing justice in America. But it is a bad response. It collaborates with evil. Feminism demands more and women deserve better.

MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM

Kierkegaard-related stuff

2005-08-31T18:58:00.000-07:00

I thought this would be of interest:

Prof. Yehuda (Jerome) Gellman is a lecturer in philosophy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His general areas of research include philosophy of religion, epistemology, and Jewish thought and he is currently working on projects which address topics of religious experience, the concept of belief, Hasidic thought, and feminist theology. Prof. Gellman's works include: Experience of God; The Fear, The Trembling, and the Fire; Mystical Experience of God: A Philosophical Inquiry; and Abraham! Abraham! Kierkegaard and the Hasidim on the Binding of Isaac.

MARKS!!! one for each of the classes you signed up for.

ABSTRACTS!!!

Meeting?

2005-08-30T12:45:00.000-07:00

Are we meeting this week?
I'm supposed to have band practice and move tomorrow night, but class has first dibs... just let me know what the deal is. (soon, please!)

How are you guys doing on papers? As in, has anyone starting writing a good draft yet?

-Ali

Movie, marks, abstracts

2005-08-29T12:03:00.000-07:00

Ali, I'm glad you felt free to say that $25 is too much for you--it would have been for me too as a student. Is there no way to get the movie otherwise?

Oh, and I need marks and paper titles/abstracts asap!

AG

Heidegger Movie

2005-08-26T18:04:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you guys, but I think that $25 is a bit too much for a movie. At least, I can't hack it. Is it possible to just rent from the Movie Studio, or just from this guy?

Also, isn't there some sort of copyright law about playing a movie and charging for admittance? They'd have to have the movie be free, and just a mandatory $5 popcorn purhase or something... OTherwise it's a coypright fiasco.

Yeah... I love Heidegger as much as the next nerd, but $20 for a movie is too much for me. Sorry.

-Ali

Paper Meeting?>

2005-08-21T15:17:00.000-07:00

After Phil's super insightful comment I feel a bit too intimidated to post here...

But, if anyone else is game to discuss papers, Sean Logan and I all thought it would bge a good idea- totally informal- just sort of a meet and chat about what we're working on.

Sean, why don't you post your free days, because you;'re the only one who works nights among us. Then we can go from there.

-Ali

tonight, right?

2005-08-16T09:05:00.000-07:00

I hope I am right in thinking that we meet tonight at Sean's at 5:00. Someone please enlighten me if I am mistaken!

Great questions, Ali. Glad to see you are back in form and that it was not more serious (though it looked very unpleasant).

AG

Derrida Questions

2005-08-15T14:25:00.000-07:00

So here are what I have so far for questions. As usual, they're different... probably even coming off as flippant. However, one thing I notice when reading Derrida is that I need to keep at least one foot planted on the ground, or else I float off into philosophic obscurity. (don't get me wrong, it's my favorite place to be! but sometimes one needs to be a bit more...what's the word... certainly not "reasonable" or "logical"... but perhaps "grounded". I'm trying not to get too absorbed into Derrida's poetry, which could otherwise totally carry me away.) So, here are my fairly down to earth, hopefully not too basic questions.

Ali
August 16, 2005
Derrida and Foucault Questions

1. Reading Derrida and Foucault, is it possible to argue that both have glorified madness into a colony, an annexation, or an aspect of reason? Even as Derrida discusses Foucault’s annexation of silence by his writing of it, is he not doing the same to madness by fetishizing it- glorifying it- making it fashionable, mysterious, rebellious, and romantic? How different is this portrayal of madness-“inaccessible primitive purity”(91) than that of the smelly, greasy, dirty pile of rags that lifts an empty hand on the street corner? Or the woman on whyte ave with the long frizzy blonde hair who talks to people you can’t see? Is she as fantastic as Foucault’s portrayal of madness in all of his “dense beauty”(90)? Is he, therefore, not annexing madness into fashionable philosophy just as Derrida considered annexing madness into reason?

2. Foucault’s books are sold at every Chapter’s location. How does this mainstream representation affect his work? If he means to be a revolution within or without of the system (depending on whose side of the debate you take) can he come close to accomplishing it when anyone can pick up his books at any bookstore? How does his popularity and almost pop-culture status affect his philosophy? Can you take Foucault’s desire to represent madness seriously when he is published by large publishers, and available everywhere? Is he not like the studded belt phenomena- where fashionable 13 year old girls wear silver bullets/spikes/metal skulls on their black belts, which they purchased at “le chateau”. Do they still contain the same message of rebellion? Is Foucault still a rebel with the ability to preach revolution? Or is his work compromised by being annexed into the system? Dow does this apply to madness being colonized by fashion? (pop psychology, internet diagnoses, every psycho 104 student realizing that they have 30 different mental ailments).

3. Compare “following the madman down his road of exile”(90) to Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith. How do they differ?

4. Is it possible for Foucault to present “madness speaking about itself”(88)? (I realize this is a main issue Derrida attacks, but think for yourselves-) is it possible for us to understand madness? Truthfully? Can we really speak AS the mad?
-He connects this to silence. Are the mad silent, or do they speak, and just not notice us writing it all down and analyzing it? If a mad person read Foucault’s book, would it matter to them, or are they rather indifferent to his theorizing about what is to them quite ordinary life?

Hospital Vespers

2005-08-12T18:14:00.000-07:00

Well, I am happy to report that I am still alive.
Hurray for being alive!

But seriously. In case anyone wondered, I'm ok. I went to emerg and had the lovely honor of spending 6 hours in mortal agony in their waiting room. Hurray for waiting rooms! Then I got to see a multitude of doctors who told me that I'm not dying, but I am having a pretty severe reaction to my cold medicine, hence the mortal agony. So, no dying here, and I feel pretty ok at this point.

My sincere apologies for interrupting class and for causing a scene. I really hate drama, and I'm sorry for the disruption. IF anyone would be so kind as to let me know the gist of the class, and any logistics we decided upon (ie when the next class is, what we're reading etc...), I would REALLY appreciate it :)

-ALI

Questions

2005-08-11T09:58:00.000-07:00

I will make a set of questions for tonight, but I won't have time to type them up until this afternoon, so I won't bother posting them on the blog.

Logan

Next Week (And This)

2005-08-09T21:56:00.000-07:00

I would like to formally request that we *not* have next week's meeting on Thursday the 18th, because I am quite busy then. I would like to throw out both Tuesday and Wednesday evenings as times that work for me. If I am alone in this, and Thursday works the best for everyone else, I will of course respectfully bow out. But if it could be done on Tues or Wed, I'd be forever grateful.

As for this week: As far as I know, it's still at my house, Thursday the 11th, 5PM. All we need is one more chair (or someone can sit on the floor, or we can go 3 on the couch).

That is all,
-Sean

PS: Are we still doing 'Cogito' next week? Because--and I'll be straight with the class here--it's looking to be a close call whether I get Baudrillard's first & last essay from Seduction done for this Thursday. If anyone's up for going all-out with Baudrillard for the next two classes, I'd be all for that. But, once again, I yield to the democratic will ['democracy breeds fascism!' -MacIntyre] of the class.

Fall term

2005-08-09T16:51:00.000-07:00

I was thinking it might be an interesting idea to set up a weekly informal meeting this fall to continue our work of the summer and to open the group up to other people--this allows us to continue to discuss our papers and maybe even workshop them with a wider group, as well as reading some more texts together (not as many, and perhaps in some other areas too).

I have also set up a HIST 498 this fall on the specific topics of relations between witchcraft theory and heresy, and witchcraft theory and magic. Period: antiquity and the middle ages; approach: largely literary with some tricks from the history of ideas and the history of science. A few students from HIST 300 this summer asked for such a thing, and three have expressed an interest already. That would be another 1 hour meeting each week or two hours every two weeks, otherwise reading and a paper.

See you Thursday--

AG

Thursday 10th August

2005-08-09T16:50:00.000-07:00

OK folks--so I take it that our next meeting is Thursday the 10th at Sean's--what time? I can bring a couple of folding chairs if Sean can get me a parking pass for the evening.

AG

Heidegger Basic WRitings

2005-08-08T12:51:00.000-07:00

For anyone interested, the BookCellar in HUB mall has Heidegger's Basic Writings for $6. Brand new. Dude, you can't go wrong.

-Ali

Baudrillard

2005-08-08T08:13:00.000-07:00

Thursday at 5 sounds great. If your house doesn't work Sean, we can always use mine. 114st and 76 Ave. Near the uni.

I've been trying to get my hands on a copy of On Seduction for the past few days, but they're all taken out or will take a week to ship. Dan, did you ever get around to photocopying it? If so, can I meet you somewhere to make a copy?
I'll be working downtown all day, and at the Winspear most of tonight, so I can make my own copy... Email me allison.jones (at) gov.ab.ca

If NOT, has anyone found a store in town that carries it?

-Ali

Availability

2005-08-07T00:57:00.000-07:00

I can't remember if I emailed this info out already, but I'll put it on here just in case: I am good to go for Thursday at 5. My house is available, but due to chair issues we'll have to go three-to-a-couch or someone will have to sit on the floor.

That's all,
-Sean

Great Classes

2005-08-06T21:15:00.000-07:00

Just want to let everyone know that I thought that our last couple of classes were really great. Let's all keep up the good work!

-Logan

WEdnesday

2005-08-02T19:42:00.000-07:00

So, class on wednesday. This is fantastic. But are we back to class on this sunday, or are we moving to weeknights now? Personally I sort of prefer the midweek, since I am a rather large fan of camping.. but if we stay on sundays I can make it as well. What do you all think?

Sean, what's your address?

-Ali

My Bad

2005-08-01T16:59:00.000-07:00

Those questions were by Logan

Some Questions for Wednesday

2005-08-01T16:25:00.000-07:00

I'll try to be a bit briefer with my questions today in an attempt to open them up to as many avenues of investigation as possible, as opposed to my last few sets, in which I've essentially posited an interpretation and said "discuss". I hope this approach will be more effective in opening up the discussion, especially as regards the links we might draw with other works that we've all read.

1. At the end of the introduction, Foucault writes the following: "I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same." Soem of the reasons for this statement are obvious, but let's flesh them out a bit. Does Focuault efface the concept of authorship _entirely_? Is this equivalent to an effecing of the subject as such? How does this compare to the objectivity posited by Baudrillard (obviously B's is not a "scientific" objectivity of presence, but my other readings of Baudrillard have convinced me that he does indeed call his brand of analysis "objectivity" as opposed to "subjectivity." More to come Wednesday)?

2. Let us read the paragraph beginning at the top of p25 Sheridan ("One last precaution must be taken . . .") on prediscursivity. What relation can we draw here between Foucault and Heidegger, and where can we see a great divergence? See p47 (paragraph beginning with "in the descriptions for which I have attempted to provide a theory. . . "): Where does Focuault seem to situate Heidegger's method? Does he allow for the continuation of Heideggerian analysis, or does he mandate significant methodological revisions? Point 2 in "The Formation of Strategies" also provides an interesying lik between Heidegger and Foucault.

3. Baudrillard gives us some clues as to his relationship with Focault, but we can expand upon them. Given what we have read, where might we find the greatest points of divergence/convergence between Baudrillard and Foucault? I would be happy to elaborate my reading of this question, but I'm curious to see if everyone else views Foucault in the same light I do. However, I will list what I personally found to be the most striking passages: p45 ("2. These relations are established between institutions, . . . "); end of "The Formation of Objects" re: the relationship between signs and discourse; p61 (2. "How General Grammar defines a domain of validity . . . ", a few pages into "The Formation of Concepts");end of "The Formation of Concepts"; 67 (end of bullet 2. in "The Formation of Strategies"); and the last page of Part II (esp. the line "a prediscursive that belongs to an essential silence"). The segments I have listed mainly highlight divergences (in my reading), except for the last one, which I believe to be the possible site of a shared affinity.

4. Can we add Levinas to our discussion from last time regarding an absolute relation to the absolute in Baudrillard and Kierkegaard? Can we draw any parallels between Levinas and Baudrillard, despite their radically different methodologies? Can we describe Baudrillard as metaphysical in a manner similar to Levinas, albeit with a MUCH different presentation and ontology?

Paper, etc.

2005-07-26T14:52:00.000-07:00

I am back. I hope that my description to Ali was along the lines of what we had agreed upon. Moving class to Wednesday is fine by me.
Re: Baudrillard: I intend to work closely with Baudrillard on the paper, though I'm not sure yet in exactly which vein, so I'd certainly be open to reading _On Seduction_, but I don't want to impose it on the group if people are wanting to use a wider variety of writers for the papers. The actual book _On Seduction_ is hard to get a hold of (I don't think the library actualy has any copies), but I can make copies of an essay by the same name (and from the same book) from _Selected Readings_ if anyone wants (I think it's around 25 pages or so). I have now read that essay, so if the group doesn't want to read any more Baudrillard, I could just "report" on it to everyone.

Logan

Paper, etc.

2005-07-26T14:43:00.000-07:00

PAPER!

2005-07-25T15:33:00.000-07:00

Ali's post of 22 July reminded me of what we collectively actually had discussed during our last meeting regarding the papers, and her fuller report of what Logan reported to her about that discussion made more sense to me--I admit that 'pedagogy' was too sketchy a description of that discussion for me to recognise it immediately!

Actually, I think Ali's report of Logan's comments is quite clear! Perhaps not yet to Ali, but it was to me. The point is, we have a lot of room in which to situate ourselves, and a large choice of authors and ideas, situations and contexts we can address: from Nietzsche to past classroom experiences to textbooks and their use to ... Dan is right that anyone wishing to work seriously in a Baudrillardian vein on this topic as it relates to 'seduction' will need to read B.'s book on same. Should we read it together?

Finally, it should have occurred to me earlier, but Sunday the 31st is the day my family get home from a month away. They will have driven from Toronto, so I think I cannot leave the house just as they are getting back! I propose, with apologies, that we move this next class to the evening of Weds. the 3rd, perhaps starting after dinner at 6:30ish? Can we meet at Sean's again?

Best wishes,

AG

PAPER?

2005-07-22T04:21:00.000-07:00

So, Logan emailed me and said that we'd picked a topic for the paper. However, after seeking clarification from Dr. Gow, he has no idea what Logan's talking about, and neither do I. Did we choose a topic? Did we even discuss the paper? I'm going to be spending a week on a beach with no one between the ages of 13-30 in sight, so it would be a really great time to give this some thought... However, I'm not sure what to think about!

This is what Logan sent me:

We decided that our group paper topic will have to do with locating intellectual/pedagogical work as such in various thinkers, i.e. what space do they allow for such operations, how might intellectual/academic culture operate in their schema, what ends should pedagogical/intellectual relations pursue, etc.

...And then:
the idea for the paper is not how they write/think/teach, but what "space" their schema/system of thought allows academics/thinkers/teachers/intellectuals in general, what such people might accomplish within such a space, what ends such people can/should/might pursue, what kinds of relations might such people enter into via (or to facilitate) intellectual culture, pedagogy, etc. So, in short, not exactly how they write/think/teach, but what their schema allows others to accomplish in those regards.

Now, this could be me just being a bit of a space cadet this summer, but I'm not really sure what he's talking about.
Does anyone have an idea? IS it the environment surrounding the author, (ie Heidegger's silence, Nazism etc...?) Or how one thinker makes use of Another's work? (ie how Heidegger ripped off Kierkegaard something fierce!)

I'm leaving tomorrow morning, so hopefully we can work something out before then!

Oh, if anyone needs to get ahold of me, my phone number from August 2-Sept 1 is 436-0872...

Like we decided, the two weeks holiday is last week and this coming sunday. However, I'm gone this sunday and next. We all know that Logan is admiral in commander around here, so I'm going to miss a class rather than postponing it another week, or making him miss one. If someone could send me a summary, or notes, or even just the logistics we decide upon, I would really appreciate it!

-Ali

Foucault Reading

2005-07-20T23:42:00.000-07:00

Hey all,

So, we're reading up 'til the end of Part II in AoK, right? I just wanted to double check... I think it was the Routledge/Random House page-number differences that confused me.

Thanks,
-Sean

Theory Reading Group

2005-07-15T11:11:00.000-07:00

Theory Reading Group

Hi Guys!

I have figured out how to use this thing! I was thinking that if we are going to be doing a paper on Baudrillard's seduction, we should consider reading the book he wrote on it. Just an idea, yet I still think it deserves some attention.

Have a great weekend!

-Dan

Volunteer

2005-07-14T08:42:00.000-07:00

I just spoke to Lorrie at the Zebra Centre about the volunteer work. She sent me a file about the program- just a basic overview/summary type of thing. If anyone wants a copy just let me know and I'll email it to you.

Ali

Interviews posted

2005-07-12T18:42:00.000-07:00

The 3 interviews (2 w/ Levinas, 1 w/ Baudrillard) are posted outside the Honours Room door in the usual box.

Logan

Sunday Class

2005-07-11T08:29:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to apologize for missing class last night. I was up in the Northeast corner of the province and there was no way I would have made in back in time. I'm sure Greg brought my regrets, but I just wanted to apologize "in person". However, judging by this discussion and the questions, I'm sure that the class was really fantastic. (how do I always manage to miss the best ones!?)

As we won't be seeing each other for another 3 weeks, I was wondering if anyone wants to get together sometime in the next 2 weeks, grab a beer (or non alcholic beverage) and discuss papers? Let me know...

Also, Could someone update me on the "technical" stuff I missed? Did we make any decisions on papers, camping, marks, topics for papers etc...?

Again, I'm sorry to have missed it.

Ali

P.P.S.

2005-07-09T12:22:00.000-07:00

I meant to include this in my last post:

"Maybe Heidegger is merely a simulacrum of a metaphysical philosopher…FADE TO LAUGHTER!!!!!"

Actually, this is very close to how I am coming to view H. Very close indeed.

As an interesting side note that I don't have time to really expand upon at the moment, H-ian phenomenology has been co-opted by Emmanuel Levinas in a metaphysical effort. Essentially, he relegates H's Being-in-the-world to the realm of the finite, and phenomenologically problematizes insatiable desire, which, as a desire for something otherworldly that can never be satisfied, demonstrates a relationship with the infinite/the Absolute Other (divinty, metaphysics). It is this relationship that constitutes responsibility (to the Face of the Other).
I have only read a very little bit of Levinas, so I don't know if he makes the argument on similar grounds to those I've tried to use or not, and I can't comment on his relationship to K, bvut I just wanted to point out that parsing H as we have done does not render his work irrelevant but, on the contrary, perhaps heightens its relevance in evoking its limitations.

Logan

Replyt to Brent

2005-07-09T12:21:00.000-07:00

"This is why I think you cannot analyze Heidegger using words like ‘finitude/infinitude’, ‘transcendence’ etc because he has made his own language which is the ‘dwelling’ or the house of Being that’s different from the language of metaphysics in K. But the interesting thing to me is that there does appear to be close similarities to H and K even though they use a different language, a different analytic. I think the problem with any discussion of a system of decidability or actualizers of action/inaction - hence the ethical- is the utter disparity between the language of Heidegger’s existentialism/and or discourse on the analytic of Dasein, and of the language of metaphysics. Both presuppose an entirely different relationship to the self and the other. The very ordering, for example, of man’s existence to his essence and his action to his thinking becomes divisive. I see these fundamental discrepancies in H’s and K’s thought has a Differend which exists in any discussion of their implicit and explicit ethics. But I also think that the philosophical tradition of western metaphysics from Plato-Kierkegaard is not so foreign to Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein either. Derrida states - and I want to end with this!"

I don't think I agree with you that we can't discuss Heidegger on the basis of terms like infinitude/fintitude, transcendence, etc. Yes, he presupposes an entirely different relation of the self to the other, but the "close similarities" between H and K, I think, betray the similarity of their analytics, despite the differences in their "language". No, the infinite does not exist in H in at all the same manner as in K, but I think that to demonstrate an un-problematized quasi-infinitude of potentialities is to demonstrate an (unproblematized?) affinity between the analytics of H and K that extends to lengths that we otherwise would not perceive. In other words, such an affinity might demonstrate the extent to which H fails to move beyond metaphysics, the extent to which he fails to fully shed the fundamental analytics of a K, etc. A fundamental Differend? Maybe, but one that, to me, marks the limit of H's applicability and the limits of his ability to replace metaphysics.

Regarding the urgency of anxiety/death: You have demonstrated death as wholeness and the responsibility this entails, etc., and that this urgency, in H, emanates from the fact that, for Dasein, Being is an issue. However, I think that this again takes us to H's limits and begs the question of metaphysics - in other words, does H problematize how or why Being is at issue for Dasein, or how/why it is the issue of the utmost importance? Does this kind of problematic require metaphysics? H's existentialism denies this kind of question based on its PRESUPPOSITION (cogently argued and brilliantly supported though it may be) of ontology rather than metaphysics. Perhaps Derrida is suggesting a similar point in the lines you cite. Is it sufficient to construct a perfectly coherent "model" of existence (obviously this is an oversimplification) and to state that, on the basis of the otherwise total functioning of such a model, the excluded is irrelevant? This is hideously oversimplified for effect, but I think the point bears discussion.

Lastly, re: action/inaction, etc. Perhaps we aren't justified posing this as a dichotomy, but it is still in issue of extreme relevance, especially if one shares my view of the relationship between the analytics of H and K. Of course in H there is no "inaction" as such (temporality and worldliness as a movement, etc.), but from apprehension to "action" there is, I believe, an undeniable gap. You argue that authenticity would be the only sufficient grounds for judging an action, and that wholeness and responsibility are contained in authenticity in Being-towards-death. Even if we accept this reading, we are left with the same question of the urgency of the issue of Being, why/how responsibility is inherent in wholeness(being-t-d), the genesis of the urgency of the issue of Being, etc. It is insufficient simply to state that such is the state of our Being and as such shall be the basis of our existential analysis. It is simply insufficient.

Of course, as is necessary for a blog post given limited time, the arguments here have been grossly simplified. However, I think they merit greater discussion on Sunday.

-Logan

P.S. Brent, I know you are working partly from H's later works, such as Letter on Humanism. I have only read Being and Time, so I apologize if I ahven't been fair to H's later works or to your readings thereof.

A Smattering of Kierkegaard Questions

2005-07-08T20:04:00.000-07:00

1. On Kierkegaard & History

“Whenever nowadays we hear the words ‘That’s to be judged by the outcome’ we know immediately with whom we have the honour of conversing… [:] the ‘lecturers.’ They live in their thoughts, secure in life, they have a permanent position and sure prospects in a well-organized State; they are separated by centuries, even millennia, from the convulsions of existence; they have no fear that such things could happen again; what would the police and the newspaper say? Their lifework is to judge the great, to judge them according to the outcome.” (91)

Is this an apt description of the Historical discipline? Is Kierkegaard here undercutting the comfortable conceits of nineteenth-century bourgeois history?

And on p. 93:

“…whatever can only be great at a distance, whatever people want to exalt with empty and hollow phrases, that they themselves reduce to nothing.”

Could this be, in effect, History as objective beautification? When we look back upon greatness with academic disinterest, are we not making it sterile, impotent? What happens when we focus on the telos at the expense of the actions and chaos populating the interstitial spaces of the past? when we forsake human passion in the name of absorption of events into a tidy system? when we steal from the past its fear and trembling?

2. A Kierkegaardian Prescription?

“Even though the result may gladden the whole world, that cannot help the hero; for he knows the result only when the whole thing is over, and that is not how he becomes a hero, but by virtue of the fact that he began.
But in any case the outcome in its dialectic (in so far as it is finitude’s answer to the infinite question) is totally incompatible with the existence of the hero…
But it is the outcome that arouses our curiosity, as with the conclusion of a book; one wants nothing of the fear, the distress, the paradox. One flirts with the outcome aesthetically; it comes as unexpectedly and yet as effortlessly as a prize in the lottery; and having heard the outcome one his improved. And yet no robber of temples hard-labouring in chains is so base a criminal as he who plunders the holy in this way, and not even Judas, who sold his master for thirty pieces of silver, is more contemptible than the person who would thus offer greatness for sale.” (91-92)

This attack on those who put the end before the beginning (and the fearful, distressful, paradoxical middle) seems to foreshadow, in a sense, twentieth-century critiques of narrativity and teleological History. But what could be the focus of historical study if not the results of history?

“…ever since the Creation it has been accepted practice for the outcome to come last, and that if one is really to learn something from the great it is precisely the beginning one must attend to.” (91)

It is the beginning—the movement of action, the translation of passion into a tangible form—that should ‘give the lessons’ of the past. For greatness comes not “by being relieved of the distress, the agony, and the paradox, but because of these.” (94) It is these terrifying middles, these sublime notions of pain, suffering, and confusion, that give us clues, whether they be existential, spiritual, political, or what-not. This crossing-point of the divine and the demonic, wherein man is left on his own to carry the weight of existence, should be the focus of a quintessentially human History.

Can this Historical critique be so harvested from Kierkegaard, or are these merely my own usual flights of fancy?

3. Kierkegaard & Humanism

For Kierkegaard, greatness (and, as I have extrapolated, history) must be encountered humanly:

“It goes against my nature to speak inhumanly of greatness, to let its grandeur fade into an indistinct outline at an immense distance, or represent it as great without the human element in it coming to the fore—whence it ceases to be the great; for it is not what happens to me that makes me great, but what I do…” (92)

He then goes on to encourage us all to not be afraid to imagine and approach the ‘palaces of the chosen’ (93), wherein greatness lives on for our study and appreciation. Is this form of humanism relatable to a Kierkegaardian historiology? Is it the task of every generation to examine the human passion and suffering of their forebears, so that they might work towards a faith that transcends the System of Hegel’s ‘universal,’ which ‘levels down’ human existence (91)? Could such an examination ever be taken up, or does the nature of ‘the past as text’ obscure such an intangible target?

4. The Secular Absurd

“[Abraham] resigned everything infinitely, and then took everything back on the strength of the absurd. He is continually making the movement of infinity, but he makes it with such accuracy and poise that he is continually getting finitude out of it, and not for a second would one suspect anything else.” (70)

Abraham is a knight of faith because he makes movements of infinity in such a manner that he assures himself of the belief that the absurd will come to pass in the finite world. That which he resigns infinitely, he expects finitely. The absurd task at hand is the return of Isaac to Abraham on new grounds. Absurdity here operates as a function of God’s power to do the impossible. But if we so choose, could we refigure Kierkegaard’s investigation of faith into a non-Christian—indeed, non-religious—mentality?

For example, let us take Frye’s vision of a fully human world. Now, Frye himself admits that such an idea is fantastical, absurd. Yet if we push the thought of it out of our minds, if we limit it in some way, he states, we will be losing that which might be most important of all. If we are then, in a sense, to have faith in such a vision against all ‘practical’ hope, could we not metaphorically ‘sacrifice’ this world of models and systems in order to receive it back, like Abraham regained Isaac, on new grounds: the grounds of human imagination?

5. Speech, Universality, Abjection

“No thought has frightened me so far. Should I ever come across one I hope I will at least have the honesty to say: ‘This thought scares me, it stirs up something else in me so that I don’t want to think it… I would presumably keep quiet, for thoughts like that are not to be intimated to others.” (60)

Is Abraham-as-murderer (ethically speaking) an abject thought in the Christian-influenced world? Is the way in which the ignorant preacher (as later described by Kierkegaard, such as on p. 81) discusses Abraham, without passion and horror, an absorption of the tale into the nineteenth-century European system (and thus a lessening, disempowerment, leveling-down)? As speech is a grasping of the universal, will the analysis of Abraham as a paradoxically great violator of ethical-communal duty in the name of the absolute always remain abject, cast out as the Other? Could we ever really “learn how to be horrified at the monstrous paradox which is the significance of [Abraham’s] life” (81)?
______________________________________________

-Sean

Here is a bit of Moreness to add to Logan’s ‘a-little-bit-more’

2005-07-08T18:45:00.000-07:00

This is in response to Logan’s initial post about Heidegger, Kierkegaard, infinitude/finitude, death, and anxiety with some mention of Logan’s second post. This may not answer any of your questions Logan, but these are my thoughts on what you said as I feel the tugging of a good paper coming on.

Logan, your parsing of Heidegger is always enlightening to say the least. I want to start my response, or rather contribution, first, by extrapolating some thoughts from Rushdy’s quote about H and K.

I am going to escape the finitude/ infinitude dialectic because I think that it is secondary to H’s and K’s thought where instead I would position death and anxiety as the sites of analysis concerning any linkage or relation to their philosophy. I do this because I think Rushdy never makes an explicit motion that there is such a thing as infinitude in Heidegger’s discourse on the analytic of Dasein [ie: in Being and Time]. He only concerns the latter with Kierkegaard, so I first want to make clear that any extrapolation from Rushdy concerning a ‘quasi-infinitude’ in Heidegger is purely from eisegesis. However I agree with Logan that Heidegger never problematizes infinitude, or moving from infinitude to finitude, or in other terms moving from possibilities for Being into action [maybe this could be characterized as faith, or K’s absurdity, or H’s ‘uncanniness’/not-at-home, or White’s sublime, or Frye’s imaginative possibilities.] A good topic for Sunday discussion.

I want to key on Rushdy’s association of death/anxiety in both of H’s and K’s discourses. Specifically Rushdy states that “being-towards-death… is anxiety, which expresses itself as freedom-towards-death.”[My Italics] I want to unpack this quote because I believe it gives us some clues as to why Heidegger gives such urgency to anxiety, as if he appropriated anxiety directly from K, but does not problematize the question of faith, explicitly in my opinion, or any sort of infinitude.

To K, anxiety promotes faith, freedom, and godliness, but what does it promote in Heidegger? In the context of the above quote, I believe anxiety is the only mechanism through which Dasein problematizes itself, where Dasein, or the more exactly, ‘the question of the meaning of being’ becomes in itself, its own potentiality- to-Being in an authentic state, where the potentiality is FINITUDE itself and nothing else. This potentiality is fully realized, I think, in death where Dasein reaches a state of ‘wholeness’ or ‘totality’ in its coming to its limits and ending.

Here, anxiety operates not as an entity which is present-at-hand but as a basic state-of-mind that belongs to Dasein’s essential state of being-in-the-world therefore is never present-at-hand itself, but rather in a ‘mode of factical being-there.’ (P234) [K’s Anxiety does not have to only be a means to transcendence or a radically-beyond-dasein, but rather it is quite tenable in Heidegger’s ontology within these confines] I want to make reference to Logan’s mention of Dasein’s fallenness as relating to the first infinite movement to the universal, which is indeed an extremely interesting dynamic. As Dasein falls, anxiety brings it back from the absorption in the world(233), in the ‘they’, and from the state of generalized/fascinated/or snake charmedness with the being of other entities – which is of course inauthentic and a dissimulation or a simulacrum because there is no Dasein in the ontical. Heidegger’s writings on technology, I believe, highlight this point. So to reiterate, Dasein flees/falls towards other entities BUT it is anxiety that always brings Dasein face-to-face or ‘back’ unto itself, disclosing again a being-possible.
I see anxiety as essentially concerned with Dasein’s being-towards-death. Anxiety then is profound and urgent because it individualizes Dasein, bringing it back from falling and making manifest to it the authentic and inauthentic [I see this as continuing process of back and forth in Dasein]. Perhaps this is what actualizes or differentiates, for Dasein, the inauthentic and the authentic as you pondered when you mentioned on what grounds there is “to judge and evaluate Dasein’s own potentialities for Being except on their autheniticity. To imagine any other sort of standard to judge potentialities other than on their authencity may be pointless because it is pointless for Heidegger. Moreover, I would argue that the judgement/evaluation of authenticness in Dasein, in the factical state of anxiety[being-towards-death], would be a plausible site for any sort of ethics, faith, or actualizers-to-action in Heidegger’s discourse

Here is why I think it is a sort of equivalent in the contexts of H’s and K’s discourse on anxiety and death. I think it is important to highlight that anxiety(being-towards-death) expresses itself as freedom-towards-death. The clue in pinning down any sort of ethics/faith may be found in anxiety/death because ‘in’ death and ‘mirrored’ in anxiety the very Being of Dasein is what is at issue, is what is at stake. This is unique only to death. From an ontological perspective, a total and finite perspective, Heidegger’s anxiety is concerned with the responsibility of Dasein’s freedom-towards-death. Freedom and responsibility are inextricably bound.

An ethics could perhaps be realized if death, made fully realized by anxiety, and the irreplaceabilty of death, as The possibility-to-Being that ends all other possibilities-to-Being in its authenticity of finitude or the state of being-no-longer-in-the-world – is made fully realized by the freedom and responsibility of Dasein. (P284) Freedom and responsibility because no one can either give you death or take it away from you – it is only yours to give and take therefore the most authentic. Therefore it is “only on the basis of death {or being-towards-death}, and in its name, that giving and taking become possible” according to Derrida. Heidegger discusses this on page 284 of Being in Time that there may be a kind of an ethics or impetus to action [to give/to take] in the face of being-towards-death, where action for Heidegger is “…the essence of accomplishment. To accomplish means to unfold into the fullness of its (Dasein’s) essence, to lead forth into this fullness.” (Letter on Humanism) I see Fullness as also wholeness which is apprehending in being-towards-death and totalized in death. In accordance with Kierkegaard, I think this responsibility, which exists ontico-ontologically for H, married to faith, which exists in the dualism of metaphysics for K, must be central in any discussion of the ethical. I think this is what Derrida is conveying when he describes death as a ‘gift’.

Transcendence, for Heidegger, can only exist in the rudiments and manifolds of Dasein, where the apprehension/standing in the clearing of Being and truth is what is being comprehended by itself and not transcended. Nothing is radically beyond Dasein because the “radically-beyond” is in fact for Heidegger, the apprehension/comprehension of Dasein to itself. However, I don’t see any lack of profundity in the apprehension of possibilities as opposed to the transcendence in K – to suggest such a thing would be to stack the language of the analyzer on the side of metaphysics before even beginning to evaluate Heidegger’s ontology. This is why I think you cannot analyze Heidegger using words like ‘finitude/infinitude’, ‘transcendence’ etc because he has made his own language which is the ‘dwelling’ or the house of Being that’s different from the language of metaphysics in K. But the interesting thing to me is that there does appear to be close similarities to H and K even though they use a different language, a different analytic. I think the problem with any discussion of a system of decidability or actualizers of action/inaction - hence the ethical- is the utter disparity between the language of Heidegger’s existentialism/and or discourse on the analytic of Dasein, and of the language of metaphysics. Both presuppose an entirely different relationship to the self and the other. The very ordering, for example, of man’s existence to his essence and his action to his thinking becomes divisive. I see these fundamental discrepancies in H’s and K’s thought has a Differend which exists in any discussion of their implicit and explicit ethics. But I also think that the philosophical tradition of western metaphysics from Plato-Kierkegaard is not so foreign to Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein either. Derrida states - and I want to end with this!

“But in the final analysis this list has no clear limit and it can be said, once again taking into account the differences, that a certain Kant and a certain Hegel, Kierkegaard of course, and I might even dare to say for provocative effect, Heidegger also, belong to this tradition that consists of proposing a nondogmatic doublet of dogma, a philosophical and metaphysical doublet, in any case a thinking that ‘repeats’ the possibility of religion without religion.”

Maybe Heidegger is merely a simulacrum of a metaphysical philosopher…FADE TO LAUGHTER!!!!!

With Sincereliness,

Brent

Inspired By Logan's Second Point

2005-07-08T18:40:00.000-07:00

It is difficult to say whether Heidegger’s silence on the Holocaust can be interpreted as an act of ‘infinite resignation’ of sorts. He seems to be resigning it to some place, but where, exactly, is debatable. The difficulty here arises, I think, from the problem of the infinite in Heidegger (something that I think Logan and perhaps Brent have been mulling over for a little while). Infinity does not seem to align with authentic Being, in that the latter is attained only in moments of vision. Nor does everyday Being seem to encompass the infinite, for as Logan has indicated, even Dasein’s historically-handed-down potentialities-for-Being appear to be finite. So it seems that Heidegger’s delineation of temporality (authentic, historical, or everyday) does not fit so nicely with a Kierkegaardian infinite.

Heidegger also seems quite dissimilar to F&T’s Abraham in the faith department. For if Heidegger’s silence is to be interpreted as an instance of the particular rising above the universal towards an absolute relationship to the absolute, to what absolute is he relating? That very question itself seems antithetical to the project of phenomenology as practiced in Being & Time. Abraham cannot speak because there would be none who could understand his absolute duty or his belief in the absurd. Could Heidegger have had similar motivations? Perhaps his ‘absolute duty’ was to his own philosophical values, and maybe he had ‘faith’ that Nazi barbarism would—quite absurdly—lead to some sort of (social?) improvement (although how one would measure ‘improvement’ in terms of Heideggerian ontology and ‘ethics’ is unknown to me). But even if those assumptions were accurate, would this allow us relate him to Abraham? I don’t think so. If Heidegger was called upon to sacrifice his works, it was to a Nazi ethics (just another set of universals), not an individual relationship to the absolute. I know that Logan listed these problematic aspects of the comparison in his post (faith, infinity, etc.), so this isn’t really a contradiction of him or anything… but I just thought I’d toss in my 2 cents: namely, that these problems appear to actually preclude any meaningful comparison between Abraham and Heidegger regarding their respective silences.

A Little More

2005-07-08T12:22:00.000-07:00

Just a note on my last post: I've now finished reading F & T, and obviously there are aspects of K that render a direct comparison with H more difficult (eg. in K, the first infinite movement is towards the universal, which seems to correspond more to H's fallenness than to anything else - this is an interesting dynamic, but I will leave discussion of it for Sunday. Also, the dynamic b/w H and ethics, which he in large part disallows in authenticity, but which, in my view, he inadequately problematizes). However, I think that these difficulties actually render the comparison more profound in more clearly demonstrating what I see as the inadequacy of H's reproblematization of K's foundational concepts. We can get into this further on Sunday, but I just wanted to post a note so as to make it clear that I am not proposing a direct "mirroring" of K by H on all axes (it exists on some, I think).

Secondly, I would like to add another possible topic for discussion Sunday. Having recognized a certain linkage between H and K, might we reinterpret H's silence on the Holocaust in terms of K? Does H's proximity to the Holocaust constitute a kind of infinite movement with respect to the universal, and might his silence then be viewed as an inability to speak similar to Abraham's, i.e. if we view H as called upon to sacrifice his work to whatever may come of it in light of his political commitments, and if we view words as inadequate to convey the totality of/urgency of/(especially)impetus for the sacrifice, when the "ethical" responsibility according to K would have been for H to "disclose," or parse out in detailed fashion, the use and misuse of his thought, its remaining relevance, its gaps and how they might be filled, etc.? This is not identical to Derrida's reading, since Derrida argues that perhaps Heidegger could have "spoken" only if at his "peak" - here the sacrifice of his work (which one might argue seems to have backfired, and perhaps in K's terms to have been a spiritual trial after all) is so profoundly internal that it defies expression under any circumstances, and as to its impetus we are left in perpetual speculation. Or, if Derrida is implying that a "peak" as such is impossible (we'd have to read him to find out), then perhaps he agrees with a K-ian reading. In any case, La Capra is correct in arguing that H's silence is indefensible on _ethical_ grounds.
Of course, this reading is perhaps not so plausible given that Heidegger has inadequately problematized faith, the infinite, divinity, ethics and even action. Perhaps such an interpretaion would become more plausible given a reading of Heidegger's later works in comparison to _Being and Time_. I intend to undertake this at some point but, unfortunately, not yet.

-Logan

I hate to do this...

2005-07-08T09:18:00.000-07:00

I feel like such a dork doing this... but in response to the topics breached by Greg on Sunday, I thought I might post a link, for your own sadistic enjoyment, on simulacra...

http://www.whiteboydj.com/babygotbook/index.html

Lyrics can be found on this blog...
http://unhomed.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_unhomed_archive.html

Oh my....

Ali

A Few Things

2005-07-05T19:24:00.000-07:00

#1. At the end of last class, I brought up a point regarding Heidegger, Kierkegaard, White, Frye, etc. Its genesis was in this quotation from a book Brent showed me:

"According to Heidegger's tracing of Dasein's ways of Being-in-the-world, anxiety (angst) is what attends the moment when being directs itself: "Anxiety makes manifest in Dasein its being-free-for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself. Anxiety brings Dasein face to face with its being free for the authenticity of its Being, and for this authenticity as a possibility which it always is" The most distinctive possibility of Dasein's being turns out to be its "being towards death" which Heidegger maintians, "is essentially anxiety" and which expresses itself in the last instance as "freedom towards death." That interestingly is how Kierkegaard defines anxiey - "anxiety is freedom's actuality as the possiblity of possiblity" which of course reaches its furthest possiblity in Christ's anxiety unto death. The response toward death is anxeity because the human being is made up of both soul and body, as both Milton in his ruminations on Christ and Kierkegaard in his on humanity determined, and only in the dialectic between finitude and infinitude may anxiety assume what Kierkegaard calls its educative function. Moreover, once it assumes that function, anxiety promotes faith, freedom, and ultimately godliness: "With the help of faith, anxiety brings up the individuality to rest in providence."

My response was as follows:

it seems that in K, anxiety unto death forces "Dasein" into the recognition of infinitude - in Heidegger, infinitude, if there is such a thing (and there isn't, since H rejects metaphysics), would seem to be a quasi-infinitude of potentialities for Being, which must somehow be reconciled with the finitude of the "real world," historicality, etc. in order to move into the sphere of action. The sense I get here of K is that the infinite, the "possibility of possibility," is metaphysical, i.e. of the spirit - if the epitome is Christ's anxiety before death, then it would seem that infinitude/freedom is concerned with the possibilities of the spirit, or even of the divine. Accordingly, K's infinitude (of spirit/God) can only be reconciled with finitude (the world as such) by . . . faith. In K, for Dasein to move from the sphere of possibility to that of action, it must make a "leap" of sorts, from infinitude (or H's approximation thereof) into finitude. In K, it seems that this leap is base upon a faith derived from the confrontation of infinitude, i.e. the divine. In H, on the other hand, it seems that the body and spirit are not so easily separated, and his version of the infinite, which is not infinite but rather a radical apprehension of potentialities for Being (in-the-world, not spiritually/beyond-the-world), is difficult to reconcile with finitude as such.

Whereas in K Dasein may "take a leap of faith" and move from possibility to action (not necessarily finality, but action), H's Dasein has no grounds upon which to "choose" a potentiality for being in order to move into the sphere of action. Absent faith, ethics or something else, H's Dasein has no grounds upon which to evaluate/judge its potentialities for Being except on their autheniticity. As Greg pointed out, H is not practicing metaphysics - but he adopts K's anxiety, does not fully account for the profundity of this anxiety (in K it is obviously profound, for it forces the confrontation of the possibilities of the spirit - why does anxiety/ the proliferation of possibility take on such urgency in H? I don't think this is adequately explored), and seems to confound or avoid mention of infinitude (or the confrontation of something radically beyond Dasein) while invoking a very similar concept. He sets up the same dialectic, refusing to do so in K's overtly religious terms, but without recourse to such terms, H is unable to resolve the dialectic (and move from his quasi-infinite proliferation of possibilities into "action" in the realm of finitude). K resolves in on faith, H leaves it as an unposed question.

Has H then done precisely what he accuses theology of in failing to problematize faith? In moving from possibility to action, the burden would seem to be on H to either acknowledge faith or to replace it (in some secular manner) and fully problematize it as a means of reconciling his quasi-infinity, which is not infinite but which operates as such, with the finite in entrance into the sphere of action.

At the end of last class, I suggested that we might level a similar critique against White and Frye, whose foundations are unlike those of Heidegger but whose insistence on the radical proliferation of potentialities (whether imaginative, political, etc.) seem to beg the same question of how to reconcile the infinite (again, not infinite, but operationally so) with a move into the realm of action (which, again, need not be a move into finality). White suggests a state of permanent undecidability, but this is not adequately problematized, and on its own does not contribute to a resolution of the kind of tension I have tried to call attention to. I would like to problematize the degree to which White's relativism operates as an infinity of sorts, analogous to Heidegger's, and would like to question how precisely, given what White tells us, his operational infinity (which admittedly may not be one to the same extent as H's, but which I think is subject to the same critique) can be reconciled with the finite/historicality/etc. Ditto for Frye.

#2. I know that the late finishes we've had the past few weeks are a bit of a problem for several people. We've been taking a fair bit of time throughout the discussions to decompress by joking around off-topic. Might I suggest that, for the benefit of those who have to get up extremely early, we try to stay more closely focused on the discussion at hand - with breaks, of course, but maybe we can do better getting back to business after the breaks out of courtesy to the 6:00 am crowd. Then, if people want to just chat/decompress further or whatever at the end, the early risers can go and not miss anything course-related. We did a better job of this last class, but I still feel like our best discussion came towards the end, unfortunately after Greg had already left and when everyone was starting to really tire, and it would be great if we could have gotten to that an hour earlier. Let me know what you guys think.

Logan

LOGAN

2005-07-03T10:34:00.000-07:00

That would be swell. It's 10:30, and I've been up since 6..Give me a shout.

-Ali

Frye Questions (more of an existential rant really)

2005-07-03T00:35:00.000-07:00

Sorry to leave this so late... Would you beleive I haven't been home since wednesday? No? Then I simply apologize for my tardiness.

July 3, 2005
Ali Frye Questions

Frye Thoughts and Questions

1. In response, or perhaps simply an addition to Sean’s question 1 “literature as an expression of man’s relation to nature.”
I agree that Frye may be echoing Heidegger’s Dasein, in a “getting back” motion. He seems to indicate that literature allows us to reach behind the individual examples, and reach some sort of objective absolute. I refer again to Rilke’s poem “Departure of the Prodigal Son”.

and then still to go, hand leaving hand,
as if you were tearing open a new-healed wound,
and to go away: where? Into uncertainty,
far into some unrelated warm land
that behind all action keeps its distance
like a backdrop – garden or wall;

Is Frye perhaps making reference to this similar “unrelated warm” idea, unattainable, yet sought after to the extent of “tearing open a new-healed wound”? To this warm and rather objective notion of “something else”, vague and undefinable. He seems to argue that literature allows man to move past the particulars of science and the world man sees (8) forward into the “World man constructs”. This is a world comprised not of individual examples or “primal realities” such as “atoms or electrons”(9), but rather of larger, abstract theories such as “love and death and passion and joy.” It is as if he is moving from the concrete to the abstract- from the dasein to the Dasein; from the individual to the absolute.

My question is whether this is possible, in relation to the notion of the author, and the reader, and the interaction between the two. I am thinking here of Barthes’ “The Death of the Author”, wherein he states that “the birth of the reader must come at the death of the author”. To summarize, the text is given meaning by the reader who reads and connects that text to his life. The author is some sort of vague entity who disappears the second the words are on the page, because one written, they become open to interpretation, and any invested meaning is gone. How does this relate to Frye? How does literature propel us to an absolute, or a greater, more general theory, when some argue that all reading is so individual that a text cannot have a concrete meaning, but rather exists individually to each and every reader? Is literature moving back to some form of absolute essence, or merely spiraling further and further into subjective interpretation? To cite Rilke again, “Sehnsucht geht zu oft ins Ungenaue” / “longing leads out too often into vagueness”. Is the concrete longing leading out into vague subjectivity? Perhaps then this subjectivity is our only form of absolute?

2. On page 9 Frye writes,
“in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world. Here we recapture, in full consciousness, that original lost sense of identity with our surroundings, where there is nothing outside the mind of man”.
How does this relate to Derrida’s notion that there is “nothing but the text”? Is Frye truly arguing that “the limit of the imagination is a totally human world”? If so, why does he also imply that literature is a world of absolutes and essences rather than ions and electrons, if he actually thinks that humans are the limit of the world and the imagination?

Compare this notion to Plato’s allegory of the Cave, wherein the humans believe that they live in reality, but in fact are sitting in the dark, facing a wall and watching the shadows. Would they have also argued that “the limit of the imagination is a totally human world”? What about the entire world outside of the cave, on which they were totally unable to conceive, until one of them made his way out? The shadows they saw were only a tiny reflection of this bright world. Is this comparable to Frye, arguing that literature aims towards some sort of bigger picture, yet limiting this picture to human minds? Could he be hinting towards the world outside the cave, but unable to conceive of it?

Ali

A Few Frye Questions....(more of an existential rant really)

2005-07-03T00:21:00.000-07:00

Ali

2005-07-02T22:21:00.000-07:00

Ali, I can drive you if you want. I'll try to call you tomorrow, but I'm posting here in case I can't get a hold of you by phone in the morning.

Logan

Dr. Gow's Abode

2005-07-02T21:05:00.000-07:00

Does anyone know which bus to take to Dr. Gow's? OR is it possible to carpool? I can bus pretty much anywhere to make it convienant for a connection... Let me know who's driving... Call me at the 437 number... (which I'm not going to post on here in it's entirety, but I emailed to you all). I'm going to bed now, but I shall be awake around 9 ish. (note the use of "shall" rather than "will", to imply a potential action, but not a certainty.)

Ali

Belated Baudrilliard

2005-07-02T20:03:00.000-07:00

Just so I can appear to be slightly computer-literate, here are my much belated Baudrilliard questions, which I have FINALLY managed to get off my computer.

Baudrilliard Questions

1. On page 38 he states that “thus one can completely miss the truth of a war: namely, that it was finished well before it started, that there was an end to the war at the heart of the war itself, and that perhaps it never started.” In what way does this remind you of the tradition of Holocaust deniers? How does it differ? Is Baudrillard perhaps arguing the dissolution of the meaning of war rather than its reality? How is meaning then, more poignant than actual historical occurrence?
He further explores the “history of delay, a spiral of delay, that they long ago exhausted their meaning and only live from an artificial effervescence of signs…” how does this relate to Holocaust deniers, and to his previous statement?
On p.49 he explores the Holocaust, and argues that “forgetting extermination is also part of extermination…This artificial memory will be the restaging of extermination.” How does the replacing of history relate to the meaning of the past, and how can the alteration of meaning essentially not only deny the past, but create an entirely new one?
On page 50 he writes that “the Holocaust is primarily (and exclusively) an event, or rather, a televised object…” How does this imply that the past becomes our own interpretation and selected memory rather than an objective reality? Could meaning exist only in interpretation, regardless of how flawed and utterly inaccurate it may be?

Ali

Two More Frye Questions

2005-07-01T16:08:00.000-07:00

3. On p. 48, Frye speaks of the horizon of the imagination as a “universe entirely possessed and occupied by human life.” He then proceeds to say about this universe:

“…if we shut the vision of it completely out of our minds, or insist on its being limited in various ways, something goes dead inside us, perhaps the one thing that it’s really important to keep alive.”

Could there be a link here to White’s theory of a sublime history leading the way for a visionary politics? When we limit the imagination, Frye posits, we are killing that which we need most: possibilities? The chance for change (a change outside of the realm of predetermined models and dominant social systems)? The ability to alter our social realities rather than merely adjust to them? Similarly, in White, we are told of the limiting of the historical imagination (the imposition of beauty), and how this takes away from us the vision of a utopian world, a fully human world: an impossible world that must nevertheless be preserved in our imaginations.

4. Frye puts forth the idea that there comes a point at which ‘realism’ in art becomes detrimental to its effect:

“…whenever literature gets too probable, too much like life, some self-defeating process, some mysterious law of diminishing return, seems to set in.” (52)

“But a painting as realistic as that isn’t a reality but an illusion: it has the glittering unnatural clarity of a hallucination.” (58)

This point of diminishing return seems to anticipate, perhaps in a very elementary way, Baudrillard’s exploration of simulation. Through ‘natural symbolism,’ such as the “wrath of Achilles or jealousy of Othello” (58), literature can attain those ‘real realities’ that trigger and train our imaginations. This is akin to pre-simulative signifying in Baudrillard, such as religious imagery (the apple as fruit of knowledge of good and evil). But when literature attempts to come back full circle, it realizes that it cannot rediscover its starting point. The extremely realistic work of art is not real in what it represents: it is an illusion, a hyperreal hallucination (a computer imaging of an apple which highlights its chemical composition). The resulting creation is, mysteriously, more devoid of meaning than those less advanced, less realistic, less informative (and more poetic?) works that preceded it.

___________________________________________________________
-Sean

Hi, Dietlind!

2005-06-30T12:53:00.000-07:00

Update on 498: I stopped by the History office today and Dietlind was there (even though I thought she was on vacation...). Anyway, she said that my application has been processed, so I guess registry for 498 is back on track. Crisis averted!

-Sean

498

2005-06-28T18:11:00.000-07:00

Well, Dan and I tried to hand in our 498 forms on Monday, but apparently Dietlind is gone for a month and therefore no one at the office can register us. This is according to the older secretary-lady whose name I forget. Hopefully she finds some way to register us before next week. I don't know why they would only tell one secretary per department how to register people. Doesn't seem terribly efficient to me. Ah, bureaucracy...

Also: I bought the Penguin Kierkegaard at Chapters. I look forward to bringing a different (read: incorrect) reading to the group.

-Sean

Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling

2005-06-27T09:21:00.000-07:00

The text that I'm using is Howard V Hong and Edna H Hong translators. I really like it, as it's got the repetition attached, as well as a lot of the notes that Kierkegaard wrote (in his diary, for instance) that lend a lot of insight in to the text. It's $25 used at subtitles, and there are a few copies there... The ISBN is 0691020264. It's on sale for $21.66 at chapters.ca (as usual, even the used price at the UofA is blatant inflation. Hurray for the education industry). Don't bother with the penguin version - it's $14, but absolutely useless. The translator just sort of... leaves out key passages, and changes things to suit what he thinks it should say. (Walter Kaufman is guilty of the same crime...)

There are numerous copies in the library of the Fear and Trembling. I have like, 6 of his other works signed out right now, so before you recall anyhting else, please just drop me a line, and I can happily share it!

I think this text would have been great to read aloud around a campfire. Kierkegaard just demands to be read slowely and patiently... I don't know if this will fit our timeline though... too bad.

next week

2005-06-27T07:29:00.000-07:00

I understood our agreement to be Frye next week, Kierkegard the week after, then two weeks' break.

In the meanwhile, have a look at this article by David Bauerlein:

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=134

Note the comment about erudition: imagining it as a new-found land... It is utterly indispensable, none of the major theorists started without it, and yet in the scramble to assimilate theory and 'syllabize' it (i.e., run Theory courses), discipline after discipline has abandoned erudition: too costly, too time-consuming (and therefore too old-fashioned, even retrograde--a cosy convergence of Old Left egalitarianism and corporatist agendas that allows the 'suits' to coopt the Old Left in departments like PoliSci or History and fight against 'traditional' erudite education using old ressentiments to stir a new anti-intellectual stew. This deliberation was part of the origin of our Hyphenated Histories conference back in May, BTW.

My place next Sunday, 5:00 p.m.: 9829, 91 Ave. (just east of 99th Street before it drops down to the river valley). Please don't bring any processed food (much of it, including *Chunks Ahoy TM*, which contain lard, is very unkosher) unless it displays O with a U inside it--and even then, don't bring any processed food! I'm cooking. Meat ok with everyone? Bring stuff to drink (booze or not, as you like).

2005-06-27T07:17:00.000-07:00

Sunday at 5:00 Dr. Gow's house
Frye again.

Next week (?) is Kierkegaard instead of postcolonialism. Then 2 weeks off, then Foucault.

Frye's With That (sorry, I couldn't resist)

2005-06-25T10:59:00.000-07:00

Frye and Kristeva

1. “. . . literature can derive its forms only from itself: they can’t exist outside literature” (43)
“Still, if Homer’s Achilles isn’t the real Achilles, he isn’t unreal either; unrealities don’t seem so full of life” (62)
“. . . you don’t just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a complete world of which every work of literature forms part.” (69)
“Nobody can believe in such a universe . . . . Bu if we shut the vision of it completely out of our minds, or insist on its being limited in various ways, something goes dead inside us, perhaps the one thing that it is really important to keep alive.” (81)
“What the imagination suggests is horror, not the paralyzing sickening horror of a real blinding scene, but an exuberant horror, full of the energy of repudiation.” (99)
“The first thing our imaginations have to do for us . . . is to fight to protect us from falling into the illusions that society threatens us with.” (141)

a) Let us trace to relationship between Frye and Baudrillard. Frye seems to anticipate Baudrillard in describing literature as what the latter would call a simulacrum, but the function of the simulacrum here differs greatly. Its task here is, in part, to expose the constructed nature of social mythologies and to call on the individual to re-imagine his society (this seems reminiscent of White’s project, although in White such a re-imagining is undermined by narrative coherence – perhaps here we must distinguish between personal and social imagination, and between fictional and historical narratives). In other words, literature seems to enact a process similar to implosion, presumably leading to a certain disconnect on the level of the social, but seems at the same time to permit a certain personal (might I say seductive) reinvention. Does this allow us to temper Baudrillard’s pessimism? Or does Frye’s example of electoral choice simply demonstrate the re-incorporation of imagination by the system in the form of a remodeled political sphere? Does imagination as Frye imagines it remain possible at the individual level, though?
b) On the last question in a), might we draw a comparison between Heidegger’s repetition and Frye’s literary convention, both of which permit Dasein to enter into a dialogue with its past in radically expanding its potentialities for being?

2. Kristeva writes that literature’s sublimation of abjection replaces the sacred, and becomes “a sublimation without consecration. Forfeited.” (27) How might Frye respond to that statement? Might he argue that literature does “keep open the wound” that is the space of analytic adventure, “a heterogeneous corporeal, and verbal ordeal of fundamental incompleteness” (27)? Does literature’s call to imagination do just that, or is it impossible for the narrative structure to achieve such an aim? If we are to break away from identification by interpretation, as Kristeva suggests, then might identification by imagination be a plausible alternative?

3. Kristeva: “It is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that ‘I’ does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence. Hence a jouissance in which the subject is swallowed up but in which the Other, in return, keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant.” (9)
Can we draw a parallel between the above statement and White’s project of sublimation, particularly with regard to Schiller’s “bad sublime” and the idea of past events as meaningless in themselves? Are there undertones of abjection and jouissance in White’s project?

-Logan

Frye Stuff

2005-06-24T15:56:00.000-07:00

First of all, I think these snippets can provide a nice response to Sokal & Dawkins:

“It’s no use telling the poet that he ought to write in a different way so you can understand him better.” (24)

[The confused man usually asks:] “Why couldn’t he have written in a different way so I could understand him?”

I think those nicely sum up Dawkins’ issues.

And a couple questions:

1. Frye speaks of literature as an expression of man’s relation to nature (self to Other, subject to object):

“The story of the loss & regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.” (30)
“… a feeling of lost identity…” (29)
“poetry, by using the language of identification, which is metaphor, tries to lead our imaginations back to it [lost identity?]” (29)

Is this leading-back to man’s lost identity with the world analogous to the recapturing of a forsaken reality? Could this theme be extended, and thus related to some of the other authors we have discussed? Is it reminiscent of Nietzsche’s disdain for the ascetic masking of real life (the man as noble animal [humanized nature])? Of Baudrillard’s pseudo-nostalgia for a direct relation between signification (man) and the world (nature)? Perhaps even of Heidegger’s “getting-back” to authenticity, an extratemporal primordiality that allows Dasein a moment of authentic Being-in-the-World?

2. Frye on History:

“The historian makes specific and particular statements… Consequently, he’s judged by the truth or falsehood of what he says.” (34-35)

Is this an oversimplification of the historian’s task? When Frye delineates between historical-scientific writing and the poetic, is he perhaps holding on to a risky notion of objective analysis (although it should be noted that he does allow for overlap between types of writing)? To make use of Ankersmit (as read, I admit, only through Jenkins; please hold back your tomatoes): when creating ‘history proper’, the historian must expand from “statements” into “texts.” This is not a neutral move. It carries with it the connotations of causality, of connecting events and entities in an interlocking web of meaning. As soon as this occurs—as soon as the historian narrativizes or perhaps even analyzes—he is engaging in the act of poiesis. Is the historian, then, just a poet with a different job description?
______________________________________________________

-Sean

Questioning Approaching Abjection

2005-06-23T23:55:00.000-07:00

Kristeva Questions

1. Kristeva states at the end of her essay that her survey of abjection has been “phenomenological on the whole.” In what ways do you think her methodology reflects the approach(es) of phenomenology?

2. Kristeva on the experience of “want:”

The abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being. There is nothing like the abjection of self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded… But if one imagines… the experience of want itself as logically preliminary to being and object—then one understands that abjection, and even more so abjection of self, is its only signified. Its signifier, then, is none but literature. (p. 5)

What is Kristeva saying about “want” here? Is it similar to Frye’s discussion of literature as an expression of imagination, of that which we want (in both the sense of ‘lacking’ and of ‘desiring’), especially in a social context (Ch. 1, Ch. 5 of Frye)? Is Kristeva’s talk of “the inaugural loss that laid the foundation of [the subject’s] own being” reminiscent of Frye’s discussion of man setting himself apart from nature (thus delineating the difference between subjective/objective, home/environment)? Is literature our symbolic method of approaching that which we have banished from the psychological and the social, that which we have rendered abject? Through this symbolizing process, as discussed by Kristeva (recognizing our ‘want’ as a lacking), can we come to achieve Frye’s social function of literature: recognizing our ‘want’ as a vision of desire?

3. On the abjection of the Holocaust:

The abjection of Nazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in any case, kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other things. (p. 4)

But is the abject nature of Nazi atrocities being beautified, harmonized, integrated into the Subject-Object relationship of culture? To ape Baudrillard: are the horrors of the Holocaust being eased into the system as simulacra? Let us look at the sentence immediately preceding our last quotation:

In the dark halls of the museum that is now what remains of Auschwitz, I see a heap of children’s shoes, or something like that, something I have already seen elsewhere, under a Christmas tree, for instance, dolls I believe.

Kristeva’s tone here seems to echo a Baudrillard-esque disillusionment with the simulated commemoration of the Holocaust. The heaps of shoes and dolls, indistinguishable and following a set pattern (the formation of piles as a measure of quantifiable death), have lost their power of horror: they seem to have lost their meaning, their rightful ability to disgust. The heap of dolls is even paired up with that great emblem of that which once had meaning but has now (through the filters of commercialization and hypercommodification) become pure simulacrum: the Christmas tree. In what state, then, is the abjection of the Holocaust in our society?

4. Does the following passage by Kristeva provide us with a clue as to just how important semiotics could be to the understanding of human behaviour (transcending the linguistic and perhaps even the social, if possible)?

I experience abjection only if an Other has settled in place and stead of what will be “me.” Not at all an other with whom I identify and incorporate, but an Other who precedes and possesses me, and through such possession causes me to be. A possession previous to my advent: a being-there of the symbolic that a father might or might not embody. Significance is indeed inherent in the human body. (p. 10)

Is the Other spoken of here Death? If that is the case, then it would follow that through Death’s ‘possession’ of us we come to Be (that is, Be-towards-Death). When we experience the abject, often through disgust or unease, we are reminded of the Other that is Death: that actuality which we never forget but always banish to abjection in order to function. The body is inherently significant (symbolic), then, in that it is constantly ‘dropping’ hints (from bodily fluids to aging) of our eventual ‘fall’. The body, too, must then have what Kristeva calls on the same page a demarcated “space out of which signs and objects arise;” that is, the body inherently contains the Other.

Is there merit in this analysis?

5. In light of our previous discussions of the Sublime, I thought that these excerpts might prove fruitful for discussion:

For the Sublime has no object. When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things that I see, hear, or think. The “sublime” object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. (p. 12)

And on the effects of experiencing the Sublime:

I then forget the point of departure and find myself removed to a secondary universe, set off from the one where “I” am—delight and loss. Not at all short of but always with and through perception and words, the sublime is a something added that expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be both here, as dejects, and there, as other and sparkling. A divergence, an impossible bounding. Everything missed, joy—fascination. (p. 12)

In Dostoevsky, Kristeva has found a simple yet useful description of feeling the Sublimity of fire: a “grim sensation” which is “almost always delightful” (18). This sensation comes at the gates of abjection: it is the jouissance one experiences when near a vessel of pain (or some other abject phenomenon). Fire gives the delight of spectacle and warmth (its beautiful qualities), but it is tempered by the grim-yet-exciting possibility of burning to Death (its sublime ones). In this way, encountering the abject can lead one to a most Sublime (and thus life-affirming?) experience.

6. What is lost when we harmonize or sublimate the abject (whether through religion or literature or some other mechanism)?

… contemporary literature, in its multiple variants, and when it is written as the language, possible at last, of that impossible constituted either by a-subjectivity or non-objectivity, propounds, as a matter of fact, a sublimation of abjection. Thus it becomes a substitute for the role formerly played by the sacred… (26)

With Aristotle’s poetic purification of the abject:

… one does not get rid of the impure; one can, however, bring it into being a second time, and differently from the original impurity. It is a repetition through rhythm and song… [that] harmonizes pathos, bile, warmth, and enthusiasm. (28)

Could this re-channeling of the abject (the effect of which is presumably lessened through linguistic representation) into acceptable social spaces and forms be to our detriment in some way? If I could combine Nietzsche and Heidegger a moment: could this beautification be a denial of life, in that it is a denial of death (Being-towards-death, which is tied so intimately to possibilities and potentialities)?

Also, does Kristeva’s characterization of religion as a source of the sublimation of the abject shed some light on the nature of the Sublime experience? Many have felt in the past that their encounters with the Sublime (say, through nature) were of a religious quality. Could we now say, through Kristeva, that religion is a re-channeling of the abject, and thus the commiseration between religiosity and Sublimity is due to the fact that they both deal with abjection itself. Abjection precedes religion. The Sublime can be experienced through the encountering of any form of the abject. Therefore religion, as one of many refuges housing the abject, is dependent upon it for its Sublime aspect. Sublime experiences outside of the sacred are not expressions of the holy; they merely share the same source as their religious counterparts.
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-Sean

2005-06-23T23:01:00.000-07:00

Oops... sorry, wrong blog! I have a bout 4 of these, and sometimes I get them mixed up...

So, sunday at 5:00 in front of old arts... sounds good to me. See you all there.

Oh, who took Kristeva? I went by a couple times tongiht, and its; totally gone...

-Ali

2005-06-23T00:47:00.000-07:00

Any idea where we'll meet this week?

-Ali

housekeeping

2005-06-21T11:21:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Summer session is fast approaching. For admin reasons, I need everyone to register as soon as possible in HIST 492 (over Beartracks) and for those who want six credits, in HIST 498 as well. That may not be possible over Beartracks--try and if it does not work, email me so i can instruct the office staff to sign you in manually.

Technically, 492 is the undergrad section of my palaeography course, but I don't really expect any undergrad enrolments in it anyway. We'll arrange the course title for the transcript later--the main title is very appropriate (Topics in History and Theory).

AG

Sokal, reading, etc.

2005-06-20T20:45:00.000-07:00

English is in fact the language of modern scientific *culture*; German has just as much of a claim to be the language of modern science.

Let's do keep the readings within bounds: I'm having trouble finishing everything, and as of 4 July I'll be teaching two other courses...

Sean dropped by my office today, and among other things, we talked about the idea of a camping trip, including how we might do it: prepare an ordinary set of readings in advance, and then read a few articles or chapters out loud, as slowly and with as many digressions and as much discussion (and good things to eat and drink) as necessary or as we want. Ali mentioned that her family has a piece of land on which we could camp near Bonnyville, with a lake nearby. That's a possibility. But I am an aging sybarite who needs such things as showers and toilets to feel relatively normal. I have a camping van that I can sleep in (there's one other bed) and in which a total of around five, maybe six people can travel (no problem hauling all the gear, tents and food for five). It has a sink, stove, hot water, and I could get by on those for two days in a pinch. I'd have to bring along our dogs if we go in July, but they're not a big problem (two are tiny). If we go to Jasper, the cost of a campsite and parks pass for one car would not be exhorbitant. We can talk about where and some dates next class--think about when you might be able to go.

AG

On Kristeva

2005-06-20T20:00:00.000-07:00

I have put a copy that contains three of Kristeva's essays on abjection outside the honours room. The first essay, "Approaching Abjection" is what we will concentrate on, but feel free to read the other two. Thank you.

Brent

THE SOKAL AFFAIR

2005-06-20T16:26:00.000-07:00

I thoroughly enjoyed our seminar last night as I now feel I have only scratched the surface of Baudrillard's arguments.

Sean drew my attention to the Sokal affair which is briefly highlighted in the introduction of Drolet's Postmodernism Reader on Page 27, and Wikipedia also has an entry on the topic. This blog is also inspired by Sean's reading of the back of Lyotard's Dreamworks which made we want to vomit.

I won't go into too much detail on the topic but basically scientist Alan Sokal submitted a paper to the US journal 'Social Text' entitled "Transgresing the boundaries:towards a transformative hermeneutics of quatum gravity". The editor's of the journal thought Sokal's paper was legit, but Sokal wrote it as a hoax to expose the absurdity of post-modern thought. Sokal and Bricmont went on to publish Intellectual Impostures and Fashionable Non-sense which attack the uses and abuses of science by 'post-modern' thinkers like Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Lacan, Guattari, Irigaray...

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/dawkins.html
Here is a link to an essay written by Richard Dawkins, the famous Oxford evolutionary biologist and bulldog of atheism and scientism, which is included in 'Intellectual Impostures". He attacks Baudrillard and Lyotard to name a few, and I found the essay to be quite entertaining in light of reading Simulacra and Simulation. [Which I honestly don't think Dawkins has read]

Thought provoking? I wouldn't go that far. Dawkins tends to set-up some pretty big straw men in his criticisms of post-modern thought. But I think he does raise some interesting questions which I think are in the realm of our current discussion on 'pretentious/farfetched' elements within certain veins of theoretical and prescriptive writings.

However I want to add that Sokal, Bricmont, and Dawkins all seem to be missing the point in the invocation science in a stylized form of writing like Baudrillard's. Dawkins appears, to me, to be coming from the English tradition, and all the intellectual baggage that comes with the language; a language and tradition that in Dr. Gow's words is, "Straightforward, commonsensical, commercial, accessible--the attributes of the international language of accountability? Of comfort? Of predictability? Of transparency?" Perhaps english is even the language of MODERN SCIENCE ITSELF. Baudrillard isn't out to prove that some variable in an equation is wrong thereby undermining our scientific understanding of say... gravity or genetics or hydraulics. His concern is in the social and in culture. Although I am still thinking about the implications of simulacra on our scientific understanding of reality.

I think this is lost on Dawkins and he percieves the use of science in post-modern literature [i hate using that characterization] as scientific, when in fact it has nothing to do with science, but culture and the social. Science is only what goes on in test tubes, any other assumptions that go beyond the 'test tube' is no longer science but in the realm of metaphysics, ontology..etc.

However I do think Dawkins is effective in showing the intellectual danger of venturing a theoretical line of thought into the world of science. One must be careful to clarify what they mean when the are using science in their argument or you might get the "science police" on your back. Also, as Greg so eloquently put, people might actually start to think that Baudrillard and they themselves can walk through walls as they are enthralled in the pages of Simulacra and Simulation.

I especially liked Dawkins opening paragraph! Think of the 'post' craze in culture and then think of what Baudrillard said, "the very ideology of "cultural production" is anti-thetical to all culture.

I could write more but I don't have the time. I will try to get Kristeva's essay up tonight. But if not tonight, definitely tommorrow.

Brent

Questions

2005-06-20T16:25:00.000-07:00

I have no problem posting the questions a day in advance, as long as we keep the readings down to the kind of quantity they're at for this week. When we're burning through a whole book in a week, it's hard to finish it before Sunday morning, but if the load is more reasonable, like it is this week, then posting earlier should be no problem.

Logan

2005-06-20T10:08:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Thank you for a very stimulating discussion last night! Here's the link for the Catholic Encyclopedia: www.newadvent.org; as well as www.wikipedia.org

Do you think that posting discussion questions here a day or two in advance would be a good idea? It might streamline the class a bit (people could still bring questions to class).

AG

french/pretentious/farfetched

2005-06-19T10:45:00.000-07:00

hmm hmm hmm. Baudrillard is fantastic, yes... but: "farfetched" I might buy--it's a rhetotical device of geat antiquity that Baudrillard uses to wonderful grotesque effect; but what is "a bit too French"? What would that mean? Is the French language "a bit too French"? Or is Baudrillard in fact "not English enough"? By the implicit counter-term "English", what would we mean? Straightforward, commonsensical, commercial, accessible--the attributes of the international language of accountability? Of comfort? Of predictability? Of transparency?

"Pretentious" I will not buy, at least not in this context: pretentious always means "I am uncomfortable with the possibility that I don't know/cannot do/cannot appreciate/cannot understand something" (regardless of whether or not an utterance or the phenomenon in question is indeed 'pretentious', by which we mean 'jumped-up', 'too-big-for-its-britches', i.e. insuficiently pragmatic/abject/terrorised). Truly pretentious would be something that truly pretends to be something it is not; does Baudrillard's prose pretend to be something it is not? Do his ideas?

AG

Meeting Tomorrow

2005-06-18T13:34:00.000-07:00

Ok, we're good to meet here on Sunday at 5:00. Let me know if anyone can't make it

-Ali

Questions

2005-06-17T10:37:00.000-07:00

I've had a really crazy week, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to pump out my usual slate of questions. I'll try, but could somebody else do some questions in case I'm not able to get to it?

Logan

FRYE

2005-06-17T09:40:00.000-07:00

FryeSo, there are 3 or 4 copies of Frye in the library..it's like, 56 pages. I put the one in chapters on Hold in case anyone wants it. It's at the front desk until tomorrow under "Ali". I'm not going to get it, because it's short enough to photocopy.

Photocopy
Also, I made a copy of Baudrilliard for GReg. IF anyone wants me to run it through the copier again let me know BEFORE 4:30... AFter that it's too late. It's not a problem to copy at all from the copy...but this is the only day my boss isn't at work, so let me know.

Sunday- so far I hope to move on monday... Do we have another option of where to meet? We could probably still meet at my place though. I'll find out.

-Ali

Semiotics

2005-06-15T08:43:00.000-07:00

Is it just me being a super-undercover-nerd, or are semiotics REALLY REALLY cool? I mean, Baudrilliard is just frikin fantastic... A bit overly french/pretensious/farfetched, but really really enjoyable...

Thanks for the heads up Sean... the race is on!

-Ali

Educated Imagination

2005-06-14T15:11:00.000-07:00

Hey all,

There is at least one more copy of Frye's "The Educated Imagination" at the Whyte Ave. Chapters. It is located in the "literary criticism" subsection of the Literary Studies section, which I did not know existed until today.

It is also extremely cheap (12 bucks).

That is all,

-Sean

Sunday

2005-06-11T13:22:00.000-07:00

So, my house 3:00 on sunday

Just so you all know, I'm moving out on June 19th... I might be able to score the house for sunday nights for a few more weeks, but right now, consider us needing someplace to work after the 19th.

Ali

Brief Reply to Sean

2005-06-10T10:49:00.000-07:00

I don't disagree with anything you said, and in fact in mirrors in a lot of ways the course of the conversation Ali and I had. We came to the same dilemma you reached in your last paragraph: "I certainly hope so, but . . . ."

Just a quick point on your first point, about the intersection of professional historians (or theorists) possibly diluting their ultimate aims by becoming explicitly political in established spheres. You certainly have a point, but I wonder if by refusing to become so engaged, we might in fact fail to to rob politicians of the abaility to say "history bears me out." Does professionalization and arcane specialization render the impact of our work both more profound and less influential? Perhaps that is simply a necessary tradeoff if the alternative is methodological ignorance or over-simplification. I'm beginning to think that this is the case, and it's a little depressing.

Unfortunately, I have to go, but I will try to get back on here later to expand upon these suggestions.

Logan

Reply to Logan

2005-06-09T19:14:00.000-07:00

First of all, thanks for the clarification. I apologize to Ali if I in any way misrepresented her point. Secondly, I may be coming off as more adamant than I really am. This is all just stuff that’s been floating around my head for a while.

“BUT, there is a tendency among "theorists" to, in failing to concretize their ideas with specific reference to the political sphere, form what Ali calls it a "bubble" that is out of touch with "reality," and which thereby limits its potential for change.”

It is true that many theoreticians aren’t especially active in the currently-dominant ‘political game.’ This indeed hinders their ability to effect immediate ‘change.’ But I wonder whether the type of change that can be gained most easily by playing that game (within its rules, its limits) is, in fact, a redirection of the same model, rather than the creation of a/some whole new one(s). Politics and History have a give-and-take relationship [White], and I think that if historians were to begin to take away the ability of the politician to say “History bears me out…” or “History proves that…”, it would be a far more genuine chance for change than, say, Derrida campaigning for the Socialists or whoever (an admittedly extreme example).

I’m not advocating apathy in the everyday-political sphere. I’m simply brainstorming upon ways in which the historian/philosopher/etc. could ‘cut under’ the political game.

“ we wondered whether the "sublime" (and we have to characterize this more conretely to proceed, but just keep in mind sheer incommensurability and alterity) is at all truly accessible as an experience through theoretical reflection, or if so, how so?”

I don’t know that the Sublime itself is attainable through theoretical pontification… I think it’s something to be experienced on a more primordial level. What theorists can do is not to ‘engage the Sublime’ through reflection, but to disable the false ‘realism’ of narrativity and modernity through recognition of the incomprehensibility of the Past. I don’t think we have to train ourselves to see the Sublime in history. We simply have to be done with the everyday way of categorizing, limiting, and beautifying it. As we do so, I think, the inherent Sublimity of the Past will reveal itself to us (almost sounds phenomenological, now that I think about it…).

“Is this kind of proliferation of possibility desirable, or more particularly, to what (ethics? our own Republic) can we anchor our choices and assess our "mistakes"?)”

Yes, the questions of ethics & morality are difficult ones. I can say that the proliferation of possibility seems desirable in that it is a way for us to break out of the model of the modern, common-sense, History-revering ‘everyday’ (which, while comfortable, leads more to levelling-off than the liberty to change). There is, in this venture, definitely a possibility of human suffering through a moral breakdown. My only reply to this is to say that the way in which we ‘anchor ourselves’ now –the twin gods of history & religion—is no more inherently proper than a ‘morality of the present’ (what that would look like, I do not know). Is there a way to avoid human suffering through a transcendence of the social model? Can this transcendence, instead of destroying ‘freedom’, strike out for a new human liberty (one that is not contained within Enlightenment standards)? I certainly hope so, but it’s far from certain.
___________________________________________________

Thanks again for your reply! And I hope I’m not polluting this blog too much with my silly musings…

-Sean

Clarification for Sean

2005-06-09T15:52:00.000-07:00

I don't really have time to get into it right now, but I'll just try to clarify what Ali was getting at. I don't think she (or I) proceed from a view of "theory" as such and "practice" as such as diametrically opposed in theoretical terms . . . BUT, there is a tendency among "theorists" to, in failing to concretize their ideas with specific reference to the political sphere, form what Ali calls it a "bubble" that is out of touch with "reality," and which thereby limits its potential for change.

Then we got on to the question of what precisely these "theorists" could even "advocate" specifically with respect to the political sphere, and Ali put our dilemma here perfectly (in her section questioning the possibility of expressing without reducing). If such is the case, then we wondered whether the "sublime" (and we have to characterize this more conretely to proceed, but just keep in mind sheer incommensurability and alterity) is at all truly accessible as an experience through theoretical reflection, or if so, how so? (Only as anxiety, as per Heidegger? Is this kind of proliferation of possibility desirable, or more particularly, to what (ethics? our own Republic) can we anchor our choices and assess our "mistakes"?)We wondered if it was perhaps in this that the appeal of Mysticism, or even ceremonial worship in general, lay. And then Ali had to pee.

-Logan

Academia & 'Reality'

2005-06-08T23:30:00.000-07:00

A friendly rebuttal to Ali:

I don't think that we have to look at theory as a concept so diametrically opposed to 'practice,' wherein one takes place in 'Academia' and the other in 'Reality.' I think such binary oppositions (credit to Brent, because we were discussing this earlier in the evening) do more harm than good. For the 'reality' of bills/grades/whatever is as constructed as philosophy itself. Of course, we all need to eat (etc. etc.), but does this necessarily mean that theory is inapplicable outside of the seminar room? I don't think so.

In fact, I think that the political and philosophical worlds not only *can* coincide, but that they *should*. This is something that has to an extent been solidifed through my re-reading of Hayden White. Modernity as a project (not a monolith of evil, but a standard of mediocrity) and the beautification (narrativization) of history, 'level off' human potential and close down social possibilities. I think that the works of theory that we read, be they by Nietzsche (with his distaste for averaging), Heidegger (possibilities, potentialities), White (the preconditions of a 'visionary politics'), or whoever, allow us to grasp the actuality of our lives. What I mean by this is that the 'self-obviousness' and common-sense of our everyday lives is but a conditioning of our minds, a social construct. That which we take for granted should always be questioned, for how else can we 'strike out' for new possibilities?

In White-speak: the realization of the sublime nature of history (its incomprehensibility and inherent meaninglessness) is a precondition for visionary politics. If we 'loose ourselves of the shackles' of narrative history, we can see more clearly the fact that we can't see as much as we thought we could. That is: our understanding of the past and of teleologies for the future is not what we thought it was. We are not prisoners of our pasts. We are locked-in to nothing. Interminable openness, for better or for worse, is available.

Theory does not solve all of 'practical' life's problems. But it does allow us to realize the possibility that humanity has innumerable options laid out in front of it, and the act of attempting to seize these possibilities constitutes a very political application of philosophical thought.

The distinction between Academia & Reality, then, needn't be made. Reality in the sense of the 'everyday average' is no less of a construct than the concepts put forth by Derrida or Nietzsche. And furthermore, I posit, it is desirable that we embrace the openness provided by (certain practitioners of) semiotics, literary criticism, and the philosophy of history. In this way, perhaps we could engage in a life of 'praxis', wherein the arbitrary distinction between theory & 'reality' is eschewed in favour of a new political-philosophical project, one that doesn't limit itself according to the standards of modernity (which are determined most often by taste, style, and the cult of narrative). To submit ourselves to the faux-'reality' of the everyday (as opposed to the 'inapplicable' realm of theory) is to surrender ourselves as cogs in a machine that exists only to perpetuate itself. And why do so, when we have all the possibilities in the world open to us?

This is the real world.

(Or I could be completely wrong...)
__________________________________________________________

[Sorry if I got too ideological, there. ;) ]

-Sean

2005-06-08T20:39:00.000-07:00

Logan and I had this conversation after our second Cup pilgrimage, and although I fear that recording it will push it further away from it's inherent Dasein, it is alwready spiraling away into interpretation ANYWAY, so we might as well record it before the revolutions get too distant. We were discussing academia and theory and whether any of what we are doing in class actually has any relevance whatsoever, and whether Banff is something that theory should bother concerning itself with, or if banff should bother with theory... And we began to question the essential worth of theory, being as abstract and impractical as it is... When we're 50, and have lives and families, will theory still be all encompassing? Or will this be a passing fad in our intellectual development that was simply crystallized for an extended period of time, because we happened to make life-altering decisions in that phase, which happened to fall during University, as opposed to one year earlier, or later. And is theory everything? But to excell in any field one must be so dedicated and single minded that one's study BECOMES absolutely everything... and yet, is it worth it? Is it a choice of being broadly based, or single minded? A specialist, or soeone with a rich and broad understand to draw from? To excel you require a rigour that is almost unhuman... and is theory worth it? This existential anxiety got us thinking about Heidegger, and his own silence. I'm missing a LOT here, due to my failing memory, but we were discussing absoutes, and the tension between the two worlds of "Reality" and "Academia", and how they can never really mesh, and we're trapped stradling the border between intellectual and actual life... The uni is such a comfortable little bubble, yet we all will have to pay the bills and raise a family... and can you ever really dedicate yourself to both, or does one have to suffer... And is that why Heidegger didn't say anything? Is his silence a recognition of the inability to ever really face both political and philosophic worlds? In relation to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, and the irreducible and incommunicable Leap of Faith, which the Knight of Faith can NEVER explain, and NEVER communicate, yet remains the definition of himself and his own ethics... Yet he can never relate it to anyone, because in trying to speak it, he reduces it beyond it's essence. Just as I might be reducing our conversation beneath it's own essence by writing it... so instead of trying to speak out, Heidegger recognizes the impossibility, and so just remains silent. And this inherent anxiety, this straddling the border and NEVER being understood and being totally UNABLE to EVER explain- this is the characteristic of our lives as academics, and his life as philosopher. Definition by omission. We are defined by our silences, but as soon as we put them into words, they become less than what they were, and can't be understood anyway, because they've changed. All you have is your own experience. Which may lead us to nihilism, or to mysticism... Like Augustine's ectatic vision with Monica... Although in writing it in his Confessions, which was an intensely literary and artificially constructed text he also reduced it, and we're left with a meere shadow of the expereience... more a shadow of a shadow of a memory of an experience.... And that's so very depressing! And that anxiety is exactly where we reside, and what Heidegger is talking about. The utter inabiliy to communicate, or ever understand, or really ever formulate any idea... And so we can only stay silent, or risk bastardizing and reducing something beyond recognition. So we're damned if we do, and damned if we don't. And in the end what does it all come down to? To one's own REpublic? To a cv? to a family? or to silence? I can't answer that... I can't even voice an opinion... Maybe that's why Derrida is called a Nihilist, and why Nietzsche is considered so depressing...

Perhaps this existential rant is simply an anxiety attack, but I think it might relate to what we're trying to grasp in some of these texts...

-Ali

Nietzsche

2005-06-08T16:18:00.000-07:00

Sorry, nothing too profound today.
Does anyone want the copy of Genealogy I made for class? I have it in a book, so if anyone wants the copy, I'm just going to recycle it....

See most of you tonight at 5ish

-Ali

2005-06-08T09:12:00.000-07:00

Hello again all. I thought this article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. on a new film (!) about Heidegger would be germane both to our discussion of Heidegger's politics and to the issue of historicity (in odd ways, perhaps); much of what is in this article meshes nicely with Logan's recent post:
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=wz7n53ufckak2an9dpxwljgfo82kc7t7

AG

Msg from Dr. Kitchen

2005-06-07T16:30:00.000-07:00

I did want to say, and I hope you'll pass this on to the others, that it was wonderful to hear your discussion. You have engaging and thoughtful colleagues. It's remarkable to see how well your seminar works. Thanks for letting me participate.

All the best, JK

c/o -Ali

Various

2005-06-07T16:14:00.000-07:00

Sorry everyone, I forgot that I have a previous engagement this evening, so I won't be able to post the readings until about 9:00. Ali, I think everyone else owns the White essay from 190, so I'll just bring you a copy Wednesday if that's okay.

Regarding Heidegger's silence and Derrida's reading thereof: I wonder if perhaps we are extrapolating Derrida's reading too far. LaCapra does quote Derrida as calling Heidegger's silence "perhaps unforgivable," so I think it's important to keep in mind that Derrida is speculating as to why Heidegger kept silent and the ramifications of his silence for discussion, and is not "forgiving" Heidegger or advocating silence. And, I do think Derrida has a point regarding Heidegger's possible repsonses: if he said "Auschwitz was wrong," he would have completely divorced his work from its most horrendous permutations (and blocked of discussion thereof); if he said "I was wrong," he would risk his entire work being discarded in certain circles. That said, I can't disagree with LaCapra that the binarism between theory and practice often leaves us in the dark as to the ramifications of theory, and theorists cannot simply recuse themselves from commenting upon the concerns of "the everyday" by relegating them to the sphere of the concrete. I'm also inclined to agree with LaCapra's rejection of Derrida's argument that a response to the Holocaust would have required Heidegger to ascend to his philosphical "peak," which he was unable to do. To accept Derrida would not necessarily be to extrapolate silence as an acceptable response to any historico-political concern, but it would seem to me to abandon serious "everyday" commentary on the most important issues to those unconcerned with philosophical "peaks" - a levelling off, as it were. Perhaps the problem is that Derrida is unwilling to draw a link between Heidegger's silence and philosophical silence on everyday (political? concrete?) issues in general, whereas LaCapra makes the link explicit.

Logan

Seductive Heidegger

2005-06-07T14:39:00.000-07:00

I unfortunately do not have time to comment on the interesting posts, swamped as I am in tiny fights and administrivia. One of these has produced a slight change in plans for the registration aspect of our reading course: you will need to register in the appropriately titled HIST 492, 'Studies in History and Theory'. I might just try to stop by Weds at 5 between adminstrative engagements--it would be nice to talk about something important for a change...

AG

Heidegger / LaCapra / Meeting /Notes

2005-06-07T10:22:00.000-07:00

Logan, Yes, if I could borrow that article/book, that would be great. I can photocopy it at work if it's already in a sheet-form format... Just bring it to the discussion on wed.

I'm so happy about the way this blog is blossoming! Just remember to sign your name, so we all know who to direct replies to!

WEDNESDAY. Let's meet at my house, 5:00. Bring your own food, or eat first. I get home from work right at 5:00, so if I'm not there, just come in and sit down... Pat usually isn't home anyway. Heidegger and historicity is the theme.

In regards to Hayden White, are there copies in the library, or are they going to be on the door as well?

In regards to sunday, I'm technically free all day. Earlier is fine. Do you want to meet at 3:00?

Food- I think we should either only have 4 people bring a dish, or bring our own food and trade as we desire.

NOTES: Being somewhat of an over-organizer, I type up my notes anyways, (or whatever in them is legible). I'll happily email them to everyone, or print them out... Let me know which version you all prefer.

In reply to "all purpose", I personally find Heidegger VERY seductive. In fact, our bashing and critiquing is really shattering a daydream I've had of him as this fabulous philosopher... I guess it comes from reading "Letter on Humanism" and "Nietzsche's Word", which I will likely have to re-read critically, but which really swept me off my feet the first time. I'm currently working on "Nietzsche Vol 1-4", and am REALLY enjoying it. Perhaps this is because it's a later/easier text, or maybe because it's Ferrell Krell translating, but somehow it doesn't feel as pedantically annoying as Being and Time. Has anyone else noticed this? I guess his style/thought changes DRAMATICALLY over the course of the years...

In regards to Derrida, I once against suggest "Confrontations: Derrida Heidegger and Nietzsche".

Ok, I should actually do work. See you all tomorrow at 5.

-Ali