Summer enervation continues apace. By summer’s end I should be divested of an interest in the printed word. (Actually, that’s a lie. I read a short Lovecraft collection that was quite fun (and I’m about to go to the lieberry to get some more), some comics, and a bit of a Dave Roediger book, all of which were invigorating, or at least not enervating.) I’m a third of the way through the second chapter of Difference and Repetition and holy crap is it painful going. More notes on that to come. In the meantime, a few scattered notes from another (thankfully shorter) enervating text, Fredric Jameson’s “Cognitive Mapping” in Nelson and Grossberg, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.
“the notion of capital stands or falls with the notion of some unified logic of this social system itself, that is to say (…) that both are irrevocably totalizing concepts.” (348.) I like that.
With the growth of imperialism is “a growing contradiction between lived experience and structure, or between a phenomenological description of the life of an individual and a more properly structural model of the conditions of existence of that experience. (…) At this point the phenomenological experience of the individual subject (…) becomes limited to a tiny corner of the social world” while “the truth of that experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place.” This is so because the individual experienced locale is bound up with - or, perhaps, determined by - a global economic system. “Yet those structural coordinates are no longer accessible to immediate lived experience and are often not even conceptualizable for most people.” (349.) All of which strikes me as nonsense.
Here’s some more nonsense, Jameson writes of “the Althusserian phrase” of “an absent cause, one that can never emerge into the presence of perception.” (350.) If it’s imperceptible then it can’t be identified (all identification being a species of perception). This absent cause is no more coherent than intangible invisible angels exerting power upon humans.
Jameson does get points for calling the League of Revolutionary Black Workers “the single most significant political experience of the American 1960s.” (351.) His account of the League is mixed, though. Predictably, he focuses on their party type sections and says nothing about the most exciting part as far as I’m concerned, which are the factory committees of the Revolutionary Union Movement (RUM, with DRUM being the Dodge plant section, FRUM the Ford section, etc). It’s also indicative that Jameson speaks of “local gains remain[ing]” after the break up of the League, but has no more to say than this, with the subjective organizational capacity gained described as a case of “feed[ing] the tradition in underground ways” in the way in which “every rich political experiment” does. (352.) This is true and a good description, but one vague line does not suffice to describe the subjective and organizational aspects of “the most successful social revolutionary experiment of that rich political decade in the United States.” (352.) Or rather, that description doesn’t suffice if one wants to claim something to contribute to such subjective and organizational projects.
Jameson is great in his succinct summations and dismissals of post-marxist and post-Althusserian nonsense. (353-4.) He’s also right about the need to retain in theory “the possibility of transforming a whole social system” and that anti-totalizing theoretical positions which question this possibility are social democratic at best.
“[T]here has never existed a cohesive form of human society that was not based on some form of transcendence or religion.” Jameson excepts capitalism from this. He adds that without transcendence/religion or brute force, which he asserts is only temporarily effective, “people cannot in this vein be asked to live cooperatively and to renounce the omnivorous desires of the id without some appeal to religious beliefs or transcendental values, something absolutely incompatible with any socialist society.” I wonder how this invocation of the id - essentially a human nature claim - fits with Jameson’s injunction to always historicize. “In reality this dilemma” of the need to fit the id into society without religion is “the most urgent task that confronts Marxism today.” In the face of this Jameson calls for more marxist ideology or culture, defined as “a vision of the future that grips the masses.” (355.)
If you want painful, try the Spivak chapter (”Can the Subaltern Speak?”) from the Nelson and Grossberg book the Jameson piece comes from.
It’s a fabulous argument, but — oh my — is it an agonising read!
Comment by rob — May 25, 2007 @ 12:14 am
hi Rob,
You’re anticipating my reading list. I’ve read one or two things by Spivak before, as part of a symposium at Long Sunday, my contribution to which is here -
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2006/04/19/is-are-qtamabsawajamcataq/
After I read “Can the Subaltern” I’ll slap up my notes here and maybe we can discuss it?
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 27, 2007 @ 12:24 am
Imagine like Baudrillard meets oh Carnapian empiricism: analyticity applied to political, economic and even Kultur critique. The Simulacra, falsified—or something like that. Hold your quantifiers, or your XML code, or your subalterns, the summer Pop Flick Fests have started: First up, Bourbon decadence via 90s grunge: The Pirates of Viacom (or whatever shekelmeisters fund the phunn). Depp and the Stones, man, like keeping it real: Blackbeard, PC icon. The object petit a functions best like in a state of nature, man (as long as you have superior British gold and materiel, behind you, and some clean ho’s on board), and Rolling Stones, Inc. along for the entertainment……..
But if you think pirates are fairly miserable cinematic icons, how about the next episode in the George Lucas Grand Ol’ Space Opry. At least pirates existed at one point.
Comment by Perezoso — May 27, 2007 @ 4:31 pm
Sorry Per, you lost me.
That aside, I’m keen to hear what you make of the Quine/Davidson/Lovecraft post. The exposition of Q and D is bad (pretty much nonexistent, really), which is a shame. I forgot how much I like those essays. You wouldn’t happen to know of a publicly accessible online copy of Davidon’s “Very Idea…” essay, would you?
Comment by Nate — May 27, 2007 @ 9:40 pm
I’ve been put off investing time in making sense of Spivak by Terry Eagleton’s essay on her book ‘A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason’: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n10/eagl01_.html
Comment by Mike Beggs — May 28, 2007 @ 12:21 am
I’ve been put off investing time in making sense of Spivak by Terry Eagleton’s essay on her book ‘A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason’: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n10/eagl01_.html
Comment by Mike Beggs — May 28, 2007 @ 12:21 am
hi Mike,
Some points bear repeating.
I didn’t like the Spivak pieces I read on Marx, but then the point of the Summer of Enervating books is not to read things I enjoy…
Thanks for the Eagleton reference, I’ll give that a look soon.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 28, 2007 @ 1:35 am
I find Davidson’s arguments contra-Quine quite feeble if not bizarre: however I have not yet read that much of Dav., and that is on my summer’s reading list. There may be some cogent rebuttals to Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” but I have yet to read them: in a sense, Quinean “radical empiricism” merely extends the traditional a posteriori sensationism of, say, Locke, tho’ Quine a bit more concerned with formality. I believe, however, that Quine underwent some strange shift though after WWII: early on he was a pure nominalist and semanticist—google the seminal essay on “Constructive Nominalism,” co-authored along with Nelson Goodman—then with “From a Logical Point of View” (still very powerful reading), he seems to move towards the Fregean-Russell logicism again, yet at the same time occasionally shifting back to his nominalist roots. So what was it Herr Doktor Van??? Nominalism or platonism? Can one have both? Ich denke nicht. Yet later (apres Skinner, perhaps) he still seems to be holding to a nominalist-naturalist position: I think Dr. Van realized how dangerous nominalism and behaviorism was for the logic business as a whole, and so consistently ducked the issue: nominalism is, I suggest, a central problem, if not THE problem of, well, epistemology, and one could say philosophy as a whole—and once one rejects innateness, a prioricity, analyticity (not synonymous really, but very close cousins), and really platonic views of logic and mathematics, the world sort of falls apart (as the germans realized even when reading old Locke). I believe that Quine more or less formalizes Locke’s anti-innateness and anti-a priori arguments (tho’ Quine would probably not care for that definition), and that Two Dogmas is thus not really a rejection of empiricism, but a refinement thereof–it expands the scope of empiricism, yet also modifies it, as in the denial of mental entities or the “idea idea” (WVOQ may have been mistaken or reductionist in regards to his denial of mental entities, but like Skinner he suggests that we don’t know enough about thinking and perception to really make statements about consciousness). At any rate Quinean naturalism, however ugly to some out in the belle-lettrist land, allows us to discuss a real world, nature, events: even say economics, green issues, or the petroleum crisis. etc. More than most postmod ontology permits, or (ie Dasein, and its descendants).
Comment by Perezoso — May 28, 2007 @ 1:19 pm
‘Scuzi if that’s not really an in-depth analysis of Two Dogmas: however I do feel the distinction between meaning and reference (denotation) is correct, as is the material denying analyticity (the bachelor jazz–more or less, the “meanings” of words (and I think by extension, all words, variables, functions—) have no inherent stability and lexicographic, stipulative). TDOE does get rather complex–and the implications are rather unpleasant, in a sense (as were Locke’s points contra-innateness), but who is the person ready to take it on? Not I. Yet the TDOE is still Quine the nominalist, and anti-Realist, more or less, and his “efficaciousness” also quite nominalist and empirical. And, really ammunition for those of us willing to take on theists, mystics, dogmatists–even subtle postmodernist ones (as we should, while attempting to overcome the vulgarity of a Dawkins and the new school corporate skeptics).
Comment by Perezoso — May 28, 2007 @ 1:59 pm
hi Per,
Thanks for that, that’s quite helpful. I looked up the Quine/Goodman essay, it’s online here -
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/quine_goodman_nominalism.htm
and I’ll read it later this week or next. (I’ve read Goodman’s _Ways of Worldmaking_ several years ago, I remember finding it really fantastic but I don’t remember a lot of the details.)
I didn’t take Davidson to be objecting to Quine much of the time, though maybe Quine did, rather I took him to be (or to think he was) extending Quine’s argument. At any rate, Davidson is certainly pro-Quine, one of his books is dedicated to Quine “without whom not.”
Please keep me posted on your Davidson reading, I’d be keen to read/discuss that with you. I’ve not read a lot of his stuff but I’ve read I’ve liked quite a bit. (A professor of mine in undergrad was a big Quine fan and very anti-Davidson, called D “just a dumber Quine.”)
Ditto works on nominalism, I find that fascinating from my minor brushes with the topic and I’d love to know the relevant literature better.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 28, 2007 @ 7:08 pm