(Fade in. Our protagonist sighs in embarrassment as his organ of communication devolves into pretensious self-narrations and the electronic equivalent of paper notes taped to the refrigerator door. He pauses, blinks, then scribbles another and affixes the adhesive.)
The thought struck me today that another (albeit highly abstract) avenue to address my concerns over historical representation and narration, which are at play in some of my reservations over Negri, might be to think again about indexicals.
Hegel and others less canonically Continental have noted that phrases which can be taken to be most specific in their content - “this thing here now” (or “this I, here now”) - are in another sense the least specific in their content. It may be worth a bit of digging around into different accounts of how indexicals are deployed, how this I makes connections between words and not words (bits of worlds, though one could also say between words and other words, if words are the objects of inquiry and reference), fills in the specific contents I mean to indicate in specific uses of terms like “this”. Andrew Bowie made a good deal out of all this indexical stuff as being a way to read and to demonstrate the relevance of the early german romantics. Perhaps it’s another way to get clearer on the odd bits Negri, translating or analogizing his work into aesthetics and into philosophy of language, rather like running sound signals through multiple processors to see what tones emerge and what tones disappear, in order to redeploy those elements for new uses.
Another avenue would be to revisit theoretical work on possible worlds (which for me was never more than a brush through, so ‘revisist’ may be overly strong, perhaps more like ‘meet again for the first time’), as it seems like one version of the Negri argument would run counter to a sort of possible worlds viewpoint, such that certain (communist) possible worlds only come into possibility at a given historical moment, rather than having modes which exist following on from every moment. This is partly a way to refigure what we talked about in the Event Horizon pamphlet as futures that inhere in a moment in time.
surprised to read you referencing the Germans in this regard Nate - but that’s probably because I never studied them. In any case, this seems to me like crushing together analytical and continental philosophy, which becomes very manifest in the last bit. I put some stuff in a draft thesis chapter about possible worlds realism and modal logic a while back and my supervisor told me to can it. Not that it’s not possible to have meaningful encounters between analytical and continental philosophy, but I don’t think there’s much promise in either of these ideas, certainly not the second one.
Comment by mark — October 12, 2005 @ 11:50 pm
hi Mark,
Fair enough, but… In my undergrad I did a lot of analytic stuff, with some leftish continental stuff, with the two never in contact. It all became contiguous for me around the germans and analytic stuff on anti-realism/anti-foundationalism, specifically through the work of Andrew Bowie and Richard Rorty. Bowie’s got great things to say about Schelling, Adorno, and Quine, which spans normal translatlantic divisions. A number of contemporary analytics have turned to continental stuff (particular quasi-Hegelian stuff) in order to deal with questions about correspondence theory of truth etc. Virno’s also written extensively on Wittgenstein and others often held to be analytic philosophy of language, and the bastard social democrat sons of the Frankfurt School (like Appel) have turned to analytic philosophy as well. So I’m not sure it’s quite such an artificial turn. Particularly with regard to Negri, and my concerns over him (which are the same as I have for much of marxism, basically that parts of it end up in a theodice). Negri gets a lot of mileage from Virno’s work on language and Marazzi’s work on language in the economy, which makes the language questions at least a point of attack. And Negri’s work on Spinoza could I think be profitable addressed via Davidson on anomolous monism, as it address Spinoza (albeit in a different idiom) and might help alleviate some of Negri’s occasional tendencies to flatten things. Even more interesting, though, would be to know more about the history of the analytic/continental divide and the reasons for its periodic loosening and tightening. I generally find the analytic philosophy I’ve read (and the people I know who get really into that stuff) to be a little staid, but also not so shrill or self-absorbed as some continental(ists). At a minimum, it’s a useful conversational power play to have in one’s back pocket occasionally.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 13, 2005 @ 2:42 am
yeah, even though I’ve been exposed to this stuff in Australia, I still haven’t really got my head around the connection between American analytical philosophy and continental philosophy - these links just aren’t there in British analytical stuff, where pragmatism is unknown. I hadn’t thought of the connections you’re pointing to now, so I guess I’ll withdraw my previous total disbelief.
Comment by mark — October 13, 2005 @ 9:02 am