This is from a conversation my friend Nathaniel and I have been having about Ranciere, though it’s not much about Ranciere here, and is slightly shaped by reading the first two pages of Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Buck-Morss says the opening bit, entitled ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’, had a big impact on Adorno).
I recently read a set of notes on Schiller, by Gary Thomas. Gary notes that for Schiller we never know a thing itself, but rather our knowing occurs filtered through historically contingent subjectivities. He goes on to say “ ‘modes of perception’ result in diverse accounts of reality, each compatible with facts and logic though incompatible with each other”. Gary says that Schiller’s book On The Sublime is an attempt to escape the compulsion to discover a fixed unalterable reality. He writes, “concepts of reality (…)” are “inventions, not discoveries about the world” or “all human constructs are (…) ‘fictions’, ‘texts’”. Later he notes that this poses a difficult demand – “that we somehow resolve the problem how to maintain our deepest and most serious beliefs strongly enough to be able to act on them, while at the same time recognizing that those beliefs have no final justification”.
In another context, Richard Leppert was discussing Baumgarten (whom I’m told coined the term ‘aesthetics’) and Kant, as a prelude for future discussion of Adorno. Richard said that for Baumgarten aesthetics was the study of sense experience. A basic tenet of Baumgarten’s is that the object (of sense experience, or perhaps the object is sense experience itself – both?) always exceeds the subject and concepts. In other words, the subject can not exhaust the object. My question with regard to Adorno was – and is – whether or not Adorno maintains this as well. Richard seemed to be saying that this is how Adorno views art, as inexhaustible. What I wonder about is if art is inexhaustible qua art, or qua object. There is a difference between saying “all objects are inexhaustible, and I’m going to talk about art” versus saying “art objects are inexhaustible, and I’m going to talk about art”. I think the Baumgarten bits here and the Schiller bits earlier are quite assimilable (or perhaps a nicer word is amicable) to each other, at least in this brief cocktail party presentation. I think this shared sensibility between the two is very important and is contiguous with many, many debates in continental and analytic philosophy.
With regard to the above, it strikes me as important to note, regarding the Schiller and the Baumgarten, that the point has to apply to itself. That is, it is easy to read “concepts of reality are invented not discovered” as being itself a discovery, a truth about the world. This would mean that actually one truth, one unlike any other truths, was actually discovered, a truth which corresponds to reality or speaks reality’s own language, in a way which not other truth can. That seems silly to me. It’s not clear what would result from saying “the phrase ‘concepts are invented not discovered’ itself expresses an invented concept”, but I think it’s an important preliminary. I think this is part of what Ranciere may be doing when he says he’s not doing ontology. There’s a line somewhere in the Ignorant Schoolmaster where he talks about some belief saying something to the effect of “it’s not so much that this is true and we try to prove it unequivocably, but rather it’s a matter of what we can accomplish in believing it”. This is wonderfully evocative (and very pragmatist), and I think another way to express what I’m trying to say about Schiller/Baumgarten – I think this claim or sensibility in them (or the thumbnail sketch I’ve gotten of them) must be treated the same way: what would it mean to verify the claim that concepts are fictions?
I’d also like to note something else that comes to mind. One of the issues involved here is how vocabularies can be used in ways that start to take themselves apart, or (in) refer(ing) to themselves. The object’s exceeding the subject, such that the subject’s concepts are never final, never exhaust the object or master it, in a sense relativizes concepts (objects are infinite, in the sense that they can be assigned an infinite quantity of predicates). Absolutes become very hard to maintain. This relativization applies to the terms and schema by which one arrives at and tries to express these points. That is, if the object exceeds the subject, if the subject’s concepts are never final, never exhaust the object or master it, this quality of exceeding and not being exhausted has to apply everywhere, to any possible object of conceptualization. That means it includes also our terms of expression. In other words, we are not required to stick to terms like exhaust, master, etc, because if we take “terms for describing modes of subject-object relations” as object, these terms themselves are capable of receiving infinite predicates, they are not conceptually exhaustible, such that there is still a gap between terms like “conceptually inexhaustible”, “infinite”, “gap”, etc and the subject-object relation.
This seems to present a number of aporia and paradoxes. One response is to say that what is happening here is a description of subjects: the infinite object implies also an infinite subject (in the sense of being always able to engage in predication and in the sense of being capable of being assigned infinite predicates), and all this stuff about objects being inexhaustible and so on means that assigned sets of predicates can always be added to and revised, and that people are always capable of predication (and more). A philosophy of freedom, though perhaps a little thin, and I certainly don’t want to say that freedom needs a/any philosophy.
One potential problem lurking here has to do with relativization, as Gary noted from Schiller, how do keep our beliefs while also recognizing their groundlessness? An immediate response to this question is a counterquestion: what is the link between ground(lessness) and (in)stability? Or, what is the link between metaphysical/religious beliefs and convictions? Do we need the former to have the latter? Of course not. Certainly in some instances speaking about the former can be a useful tactic in regard to acting upon the former, as a matter of rhetorical strategy, but that’s another manner. I wonder if this can be a way (trying to get back to Ranciere) to think about this non/anti-ontological claims, and his whole archival research project: as a matter of commitment(s) that do not need these other grounds. This is in response to old ways of attack: “if you (don’t) believe X then how can you believe Y?”, to which the answer philosophically is just “I just do”, or a long explanation which boils down to the same (though rhetorical strategy may entail other modes of response). One of my favorite Negri quotes says something like, ‘among the many reasons to read Capital, the best is the sense of class hatred it gives’, but really, one can get to class hatred without that book – we can get it from our experiences of work as well.
This touches on another problem that arises from this: that of intersubjectivity and conflict. Absolutes and transcendentals are guarantors of communicability and intersubjective harmony (or at a minimum, of their possibility). Without them, how do we think about intersubjective relations? To my mind this is insoluble, and is just how people behave (a fiction I can’t imagine doing without, if you will) – relations between people are sets of various forces and there is always the possibility of them taking on new vectors (or breaking down), for any number of reasons. In regards to politics, I would link this to the unlikely nature of dialog solving the capital relation (dialog being potentially infinite, and this particularly dialog imagined between capital and workers being highly unlikely to happen let alone to convince the bosses) and the likely requirement to at least low level forms of class violence (even if it’s just so low as to include wrecking the boss’s day by walking off the job).
How do I justify all these are’s and is’s, and any kind of communism? I don’t. That’s part of the argument for me, it means that one does not have to (and can not, in any ultimate sense) justify, at least not for reasons other than strategic (strategy can also include affective and relational bonds, of course, like family members who want to understand one’s political views and always have questions about ‘why’). This is part of what I see as going in Ranciere. It’s a different mode of argument, or perhaps a non-argumentative mode of proceeding at least some of the time. I also think that one decent response to all the above is to say one will bracket larger/deeper/more abstract philosophical questions (though I would want to say, bracket them from move within philosophy) and proceed instead to act and reflect on my commitments and loyalties (hence R’s archival work etc), and to engage with other ideas critically as needed (when they are bad, that is, to attempt to relative things which become, in a sense, absolutized (like, in some contexts, terms like human rights, democracy, free market, intellectual, theory, etc).
Another way of proceeding might be, thinking about Ranciere’s remark about “it’s not about proving the idea but about seeing what we can accomplish when we believe it”, to try and invent beliefs and to try to believe them (there’s a bit in something by Lewis Carroll that goes on about this, it may be Humpty Dumpty, or perhaps one of the scenes with some member of royalty, where the other character is telling Alice that he regularly believes several impossible things before lunch time). This last, in turn, raises questions about distinctions of genre and discipline (philosophy and literature, for instance – Richard Rorty gets attacked for leveling that difference – or, in terms of intersubjectivity and potential conflicts,, the difference between convincing and persuading, between rhetoric and reason, etc), and also is a way to characterize certain works that are hard to place within specific bounds (like Ranciere’s literary moments).
So, perhaps one of the things going on in Ranciere is a bracketing of certain types of questions in order to focus on others. (Like the question about what does the demarcation of a specific sphere as aesthetic mean, what are some different roles/uses that this demarcation has been put to, and [how] can asking questions of this demarcation be productive for some purpose?) He may also be breaking the (perceived) necessity of a link between theory and practice – yet another way to translate some of the points here is to say that outcomes and uses are always underdetermined: theory doesn’t follow practice, nor the converse, but rather can be made to fly off in any number of vectors (and may sometimes do so regardless of our best intention), as such it’s not clear if ‘why do need theory (or not)’ is very interesting at all. More interesting might be just ‘from where we are located what can we do’.