It’s good to get confused sometimes, especially if one aims to be honest and not obfuscate. I’m having trouble remembering why I used to get so worked up over universals.
Clearly certain universals are wrong and leave things out. But do all universals leave things out? If so, is that a universally true? If so, what does it leave out? One could modify the claim, saying “all universal claims, except one, leave something out. This is the exceptional one which leaves nothing out.” That seems specious right off the bat. I suspect these aporias just suggest that identity and difference, universal and particular may be a set of concepts of limited utility. At a minimum, constantly railing against universals places one in a position of still being defined by universals.
The political stakes are interesting, though I suspect that one of the confusions that feeds into the energy around some conversations about universals has to do with a slip between universals in the realm of language and truth claims and universals in the realm of political organization. Clearly in the latter case one wants to proceed very carefully, and I’m sympathetic. But it’s not clear that an idea like, say, the correspondence theory of truth (or Christianity, for that matter) is actually directly inimical to nonrepresentative organizational forms. The energy spent in railing against universals in language etc (if anyone’s wondering who is being so vaguely referred to here, my main opponent is myself in a younger form) is probably at least in part energy displaced from genuinely important issues of organization and social life (experiences connected with gender, race, sex, work and so forth).
I found a quote that’s at least tangentially connected to all this (it’s actually what sparked me thinking about this), from Catherine MacKinnon: “sexual politics, in feminism, is not an overarching preexisting general theory that is appealed to in order to understand or explain, but a constantly provisional analysis in the process of being made by the social realities that produce(d) it.” I like that, and would want to say exactly the same of class politics. It’s also important to note that it’s not just an analysis, but a declaration of some kind of loyalities and project.
MacKinnon also quotes Foucault, saying “I am an empiricist”, which I found quite striking and which I quite like. One can, however, distinguish between being an empiricist in the sense of proceeding empirically and in the sense of doing ‘empiricist theory’ (laying out the conditions of possibility for empiricist inquiry, shoring it up, etc). I’m thinking of a remark that Thiago told me, in which he was accused of having a narcissistic and bourgeois idea of intelligibility (or it may have been consistency, I don’t recall exactly just now … Sorry to steal your story Thiago, you should lay it out in its entirety as it’s quite outrageous). One could argue against that type of remark at the level of theory/in a theoretical idiom, this is what I mean by ‘empiricist theory’.
This latter is one thing I’d like to do in thinking about all of this, universals and so forth - to look at the functions of different terms, approaches, claims, in varying contexts. As Rorty puts it somewhere, the question is not ‘identify or difference’ but ‘what difference does it make’. I wonder if this is what’s called immanent critique?
the universals that don’t leave things out can be found constructed in the Tractatus.. heeheehee
Comment by Tzuchien — November 7, 2005 @ 6:12 am
For reals though, I’ve never liked the equivocation-cum-reduction made by some to reduce logical operators to political consequences.
An early piece that pushed me away from this Adornian-radical reduction is Zizek’s early work in the sublime object where he basically argues that the only possible way of providing such a critique is by fully assuming the universalization of the gaps which it leaves out… retroactively, universalization can be revealed as precisely this gap itself.
Comment by Tzuchien — November 7, 2005 @ 6:16 am
Hi Tzuchien,
I assume ‘Tractatus’ is a Wittgenstein reference, is that right? I can’t really speak to that, I’ve got an excess of interest and a dearth of information and time. I’m with you on the politics of logical operators. It strikes me as a non sequitur and a distraction. I was in a Capital reading group once, where I would try to talk about work and others would bring up (really bad versions of) philosophy of mind and philosophy of history. It was infuriating. I finally just start responding with something like “Well, I’d be willing to settle for the abolition of waged labor, after that I’d be willing to work on stopping the violence done to the world by our universalizing concepts”. There’s also something that bothers me in the nonchalant use of the term ‘violence’ and similar metaphors to describe language and logic. I worry about a slippage that equates forms of violence, some of which are much more important (though probably less interesting intellectually and a lot less marketable) than others. The ‘logic is domination’ view seems a little self-serving to me, at least when it appears in certain quarters, as it renders contemplative poetic play with words the primary mode of political activity (a la that presentation we saw once, remember this? “you know what would be really radical? Forms of money that aren’t like our money”). I’m not averse to that type of activity and it does have a value, but I feel a bit suspicious when it comes from people who get paid to do so for a living. (Which was not the case w/ my friends in that disastrous reading group, so the ad hominem is not directed at them.)
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — November 7, 2005 @ 3:13 pm
Well, there are a lot of criticisms about ‘universals’. Historically, this was something that came out of the nominalist tradition, probably the ultimate statement would be John Austen, who hammers this stuff. That’s philosophical universals, which would be objects - perhaps transendental objects - which unite all manner of various experiences. So this patch of grey and that patch of gray would be ‘instances’ of the universal ‘gray’. Quine and people in the naturalistic tradition argue that whatever it is that lets you say this is gray and that is gray is a brain function of some sort, rather than access to Greyness by some logical means.
Now, it seems to me that this is quite different from universals as they are used in political philosophy or in the social sciences. Here it isn’t a question of universals that exist in some way besides the objects that instantiate them, but rather of there being propositions that are true of all humans, something which could be constructed on entirely nominalist grounds, as is done by Chomsky or for that matter an number of otherpeople. It seems to me that this has led to a lot of confusions, where people attack the metaphysics of universals as if this would somehow affect whether or not there are things that are true of all people. Maybe I am confused about the confusion, and there is something else to it - I don’t know.
With respect to actual human universals, the question is how significant they are. Very few people would disagree that there are universals like “all human societies reproduce through time” or “everyone normal human being is capable of speech”. It strikes me that the ‘normal’ or ceteris paribus claus is actually much less interesting than people make it seem. It is really obvious what it meant by ‘normal’ in this case, it really isn’t anything sinister or oppressive. It’s not as if we have ever found a community of people who do not ever communicate. At any rate, you may debate whether these are significant. The real question is the reality and significance of things like the supposed human universal that men will oppress women. That’s probably true of almost all known societies, but the question is whether this can be overcome. Every known society before 1940 lacked electronic computers, but clearly that didn’t mean that humans could not develop them. Similarly, it may be that things that are human universals now aren’t actually necessary - that’s another dimension of the problem.
Then there is the question of human capacities. It is arguable that Foucault had a sort of ‘metaliberal’ concept of the freedom, in which the capacities of the human body could be exited in any number of ways, including those stimulated by counterpowers, so that new subjectivities could be developed that excite and mobilse people. A situation of maximum freedom corresponds to the maximum capacity to the people to arouse and mobilise these capacities. If this is the case, then he is in fact very close to Noam Chomsky’s position, much closer than Chomsky or Foucault, and especially their followers ever accepted.
The relation of the ‘capacities’ to universals is intriguing. Here is the question of ‘human nature’ - which is obviously about capacities, since people might be greedy and monstruous, but they can also be really selfless.
Comment by Ghost of the Machine — November 11, 2005 @ 4:38 am
Hmm… my other comment seems to have vanished… damn.
Thiago, can you say more on this, especially the capacities stuff? It’s all very interesting. I don’t know Foucault as much as I’d like. I’m quite keen on this capacities stuff, from reading Ranciere (my most recent crush). He posits something like a universal equal intellectual capacity, but as a regulative ideal linked to political equality. He doesn’t ontologize or naturalize it (”we take our opinion for opinions” he says), then he sets out to attack other positions that don’t hold this. I quite like that. I’m not hung up on universals like I used to be, I’m more interested now in what people are doing with them (or without them).
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — November 11, 2005 @ 5:23 am