I’ll tell you one thing, it’s not what I ought to be writing about just now. But I have poor time management skills.
I just got around to reading the talk NP posted that she gave recently at a conference. Go read it. The talk is on Marx and NP’s larger project of writing on what she calls immanent reflexive critical theory (IRCT), defined I think as a critical theory which can account for its own origins within the contradictory reproduction of a society.
She starts out with a taxonomy that I like for its own sake. NP lays out five versions of critical theory which are not IRCT. NP doesn’t use all of these names, but I’ll call them performatively contradictory, functional, external, impossible-totality, and bigger-coathook. The performatively contradictory are those theories which are cryptonormative (NP takes the term from Habermas), which is to say, they express a claim about normative claims which should bar them from making other normative claims but they do so anyway. (A simplistic case: “All universal statements are wrong!”) Functional are those which reduce things to their role in a given society. External look for some sort of outside or remainder. Impossible-totality (which as NP points out are cousins to external) argue that alternative possibilities are ineliminable. Bigger coathook look to something larger to hang critical claims on, something which contains society, so to speak.
NP’s typology is more skillfully laid out than I do here, go read it. NP takes pains to stress that she is not setting these up to reject them for not being IRCT, but I still do get the sense from NP that there’s some specific good about IRCT lacking in these five types. My own tastes tend to run toward the external (as in appeals to some sort of common sense - an admittedly questionable category but one that I’m committed to - as a sort of “aww come on, let’s be honest, is it _really_ so surprising that X happens in Y circumstance?”; as well as suggesting that our present circumstance is only possible if we presume something which implies that other circumstances must also be possible), and to a lesser extent to the impossible-totality and the functional. The impossible-totality perspective I take less as a matter of positive assertion and more as a procedure, a sort of deflationary impulse like I mentioned in my last post.
For NP, IRCT is not a given, at least not for us. IRCT is a maybe, so to speak, in two senses. IRCT “involves an attempt (…) to provide an account of the genesis within collective practice of critical sensibilities.” And, for NP it’ s not at all clear that these attempts can succeed, for us today. NP sees “no reason to assume that a process of social reproduction should generate systematic and therefore theorisable potentials for an alternative organisation of collective life.”
I have some thoughts and questions about this. First, if IRCT is an attempt, then it seems to me that there’s really two types of theory here. One is AIRCT - Attempted AIRCT - and the other SIRCT - Successful IRCT. All SIRCT are AIRCT but not all AIRCT are SIRCT: some attempts fail. If not, then the language of attempt would be misplaced. (To be an attempt there must be a possibility of failure.) What about AIRCTs that fail? (FIRCT - Failed IRCT.) Presumably some FIRCTs mistake themselves for SIRCTs. Presumably some of these and other FIRCTs are or could be also one of the five above types of critical theory which are not IRCT. Right? It seems to me that NP is being charitable in saying that IRCT is an attempt. I think really, though, IRCTs must succeed to REALLY be IRCT. Only SIRCTs are really IRCTs. If I bake a cake but accidentally spill ground glass and cigarette butts in the batter then bake it at 700 degrees for 60 minutes, I have not actually baked a cake and the product of my activity is not really a cake. At least in one important sense. In another sense I could be said to have baked a cake, but that’s an expanded sense of “bake” and “cake.” Likewise if I produce what I take to be a SIRCT but I unknowingly make logical errors and/or factual errors at key points in the process such that my argument is compromised, I have not actually produced a SIRCT.
Second, while I very much like that NP says “attempt” and doesn’t presume all this is possible, I think the term “attempt” implies some criterion for success, which implies knowing what IRCT would look like. How would we get such a knowledge without a successful example of IRCT to derive said knowledge from? We might perhaps just reason our way there, but that doesn’t feel exactly satisfying… if we can just reason our way to a successful definition of IRCT such that we can tell a real attempt (an attempt with an actual shot at success) from a half-hearted attempt (an attempt which really doesn’t have a chance), or an attempt from a success, then it seems that IRCT could just be achieved by reasoning. If that’s the case, though, then where does the grounding withing collective practice bit come in? I’m not sure I’ve been clear here and I’m sure I can be any clearer, but it seems to me that this is tension around which metatheoretical questions will keep coming up. (Presumably the “account” given in IRCT is a theoretical account rather than a historical account, or rather than just some story about what the theory came from, right? Because this is an “account”: “a lot workers didn’t like their jobs and didn’t like that they had to have jobs so they wrote some stuff about that in order to explain to other people why they didn’t like it and they built some organizations and there was a lot of conflict and they made some improvements but not enough and some of those improvements have since been reversed; we’re trying to do the same thing today because we don’t like our jobs and we can draw on the material they left behind” but it’s not a theoretical one or a very good one.)
NP takes Marx’s work as an example of IRCT. I assume this means SIRCT, that Marx didn’t just attempt IRCT (and I assume that for NP Marx did not fail to produce IRCT). It strikes me that there are possible responses to this. First, if we say that Marx’s moment wasn’t all that different from our own then describing why Marx’s IRCT was possible is to explain why it’s possible now. That is to say, why is it “Marx produced IRCT” insufficient evidence for “IRCT is possible today”? (That is, if Marx produced IRCT why is IRCT “an open question” as NP insists - an insistence I like, by the way.) Second, if we say that Marx’s moment was a lot different from our own then we can’t just do the “describe Marx and we describe us” move, but I think this would need to be established. I take it that since NP says both (I think) “Marx produced IRCT” and “IRCT may not be possible today” that for NP there has been some shift between our time and Marx’s time such that the conditions of possibility for IRCT have changed. What is this shift? Third, how and why was Marx able to produce IRCT? Fourth, maybe time/epoch is a mistake, maybe “a process of social production” isn’t temporal so much as spacial or a matter of social-strata. That is, NP’s question is basically “can _we_ have IRCT” with the implication that “we” does not include Marx. That’s fair, but the implied definition of the “we” here isn’t clear to me.
NP writes that the turn away from IRCT among theory folk involved an aversion “to the notion that critical ideals should be grounded in ‘what is’,” which is one the one hand reasonable but on the other hand NP seems to suggest this was a mistake. It’s not clear what counts as being part of “what is”, though. Put maybe simplistically, I like to just point to historical examples - organizations like the heyday of the IWW and events like general strikes - and say “I mean something like that, only now, here.” I’m generally happy to leave the specifics of that kind of transposition implied (ie, not thought out clearly) rather than made explicit. The problems I’ve run into more often involve a failure to compellingly imagine (ie really believe in) such an event/organization rather than an ability to think it through. This connects to prior discussions w/ NP re: posts here and here and relates in a sense to some of the stuff in my last post which was all “yay for history!”
I need to wrap this up and there’s much more I’d like to say but it’ll have to wait. For now, one final question. NP writes that ““historicising” forms of perception – whether or not they might also provide useful conceptual categories for understanding the contingency of certain aspects of human practice – tend to distract us endlessly into contestations over dimensions of our collective life that we intuitively grasp as social – thereby tending to deflect us from other forms of contestation that might be required, if capitalism is to be overcome.” I like this. I take this to mean that historicizing) is insufficient practice. (Is that right NP?) I assume this means that theoretical practice is insufficient practice (taking “historicizing forms of perception” as a type of theoretical practice), but there’s another possible interpretation, which is that another type of theoretical practice is (also) needed. It’s also not clear to me if the claim is that historicizing (and/or theory?) is insufficient or if historicizing is a sort of block in some cases - the phrases “tend to distract us endlessly” could suggest not only “more than historicize” (and/or theorize?) but also “sometimes historicizing is like a light that blinds us to some important things” which would mean not merely “insufficient” but actually harmful in some instance. That’s all for now.
Oh yeah, NP also has a post on chapter ten of Capital, check it out.
1709. Nanowrimorific.
Comment by Nate — November 28, 2007 @ 2:51 pm
Hi Nate
Some nice moves there. Just a couple of quick points:
I see the above analogy as confusing the process or practice for a product. One has indeed attempted to bake a cake and no “expanded” notion of bake or cake is needed to say that. Your use of the term “accidentally” confirms this. One set out to bake a cake, but one ended up doing a very bad job of it. To say that because one did not bake a cake (i.e. produce SIRCT) therefore the process of “baking a cake” (i.e. the process of “IRCTing”) did not play out is to privilege a particular standpoint (i.e. a point after the fact, rather than say in the intention) as the proper place to evaluate the success or otherwise of the process.
This privileging is problematic, but also provides an answer to some of your other questions. The question about why IRCT may not be possible today has to do with the fact that the “success” or otherwise of IRCT today cannot be assessed today: the temporality of IRCT (or SIRCT or FIRCT) does not take the form of the present or the present perfect but rather of something far more like the future perfect or, indeed, the “future anterior” ( in the sense that Lyotard uses to describe “the postmodern”) — IRCT is that which will have happened.
Now to the problematic bit: the precise moment of that future remains unspecified. Your analogy treats a particular moment after the fact as an acceptable moment to decide (implying, btw, a final judgement) whether or not the baking (IRCTing) process was successful. What are the grounds for prioritising this moment in the future rather than that moment in the future as the proper moment for making that judgement? To be sure, it seems unimaginable to me that the cake that resulted from the baking process you described would be deemed very appetising, but I have no access to any means by which to be absolutely certain that such cakes might not happen to become the standard by which all other cakes are judged.
(Quick Q: what are telephones for? As little as 10 years ago, anybody asked that question would have said “to speak to people over long distances”. Most people today would still say that, yet it is a fact that telephones are today used more for writing to people than for speaking to people, with the added complication that they are also used to send photos, films, music, etc. to each other as well.)
To the extent that one cannot rule out the possibility that what is currently deemed a failure might one day be judged a success, IRCTing may never be successful or unsuccessful — IRCTing is always an attempt at IRCTing.
In NP’s case, her judgement that Marx’s was a successful attempt at IRCTing unfolds as part of a supplementary attempt at IRCTing. This just goes to show that it is not possible, as part of any attempt at IRCTing, to avoid having to make judgements of some sort. But to the extent that NP’s remains a judgement, her argument may yet be deemed as unsuccessful (a judgement which might itself be later deemed unsuccessful and so on). The evaluation of the success or otherwise of any attempt at IRCTing must always be deferred (must remain an “open question”), even though such evaluations are unavoidable (”Marx produced IRCT”).
Cheers
Comment by rob — November 28, 2007 @ 6:38 pm
hi Rob,
Thanks for this. I really like your reply, but I think you’re wrong. I’m keen to hear what NP says.
I’m not wedded to the baking analogy, but for now -
If I bake a cigarette and glass and chocolate cake, accidentally or not, I have in an important sense not baked a cake. Like, if I bring that “cake” to a bake-off and you bring any reasonably good conventional cake, you will win (provided it’s a fairly conventional bake-off and not a Situationist bake-off or something). I have indeed baked, but I have not baked a cake in the conventional sense - the sense which would be implied if you and I were planning a fairly traditional birthday party for someone and I said “oh, I’ll handle baking the cake.” These sorts of conventional standards do of course change, but they also do exist.
Likewise, if I theorize in such a way that I attempt to produce an IRCT but I fail, then I have not produced an IRCT. I have indeed theorized and produced some theory, but I have failed to produce some theory which meets NP’s standards for what is IRCT. Those standards, like mine for cakes, may well change and they may be criticized and they may be in a sense merely conventional so on, but they still exist and are pretty easily delineable - the cake standards more than the IRCT standards, though I think NP does a good job laying out her IRCT standards pretty clearly.
That is to say, I think part of what NP is doing can only work precisely by the sort of temporal fix - one which occurs at some point prior to the not-yet-present moment you mention - which looks at products. NP is on about theories or bodies of theory or theoretical works or whatever the theory equivalent to cake is. NP is not talking solely about the activity of theorizing. This means that the sort of product-used-to-evaluate-process bit is a key bit of what she’s talking about, just like my cake analogy. Now, you could object to that, but then you’re objecting to a pretty big part of NP’s project. The first bit of NP’s paper is about differentiating a taxonomy of things which are not IRCT - judging cakes, so to speak.
On finality, it’s not really a final judgment. The standards can be revised. We might find a use for glass and cigarette and chocolate cakes - like making our boss’s life miserable, or shorter, or for playing a funny prank, or for displaying in an art gallery, etc. In doing so we can either change the definition of “cake” to include things that are currently outside the current conventions of what “cake” means (I know I’m treating these standards as less fuzzy than they are, but I think the point is clear), which is to say we’re revising the conventions to include not only edible baked goods but inedible - deadly, even - baked goods which we do not eat but instead feed to our bosses, use in pranks, display in art galleries, etc. That is to say - it’s not final. It’s a temporary provisional and therefore revisable judgment - a convention, like wearing shoes with laces instead of velcro, or vice versa - which doesn’t commit us to anything we can’t undo and is of a type which we’d have a really hard time getting by without.
As a result of the above, I disagree with you when you say:
“To the extent that one cannot rule out the possibility that what is currently deemed a failure might one day be judged a success, IRCTing may never be successful or unsuccessful — IRCTing is always an attempt at IRCTing.”
I agree that we can never rule out that today’s failures will be tomorrow’s successes (or that what is judged some way by this convention might not be judged some other way by this other convention), but I don’t see how that undercuts the conventions we happen to be using. (Just like “but this glass and cigarette and chocolate baked good is a cake! it’s going to be awesome in the art gallery!” is not an answer to “Nate, you said you would bake a cake for the birthday and instead you made this … this thing!” - my appeal to a different convention of judgment does not undermine the fact that I have failed according to the other, and in the case of this hypothetical, agreed upon convention.) That someone in the future or in some other place may determine an alternate definition of IRCT does not undercut judgments made now about what is and is not IRCT. It _does_ mean that no one can say “this is IRCT” (or cake) “according to any possible standard whatsoever! I have the last word!” but no one is saying that. I’m saying something smaller - “this isn’t the last word, but it’s the last one for now for me - my most recent and most thought out word - and that’s good enough; of course I may change my mind eventually but for now, I say this is not a cake!” (Or is a cake, or is/is-not IRCT, whatever the particular judgment is.)
So no, judgment doesn’t have to be deferred. We just can’t predict with certainty that future judgment will affirm our judgment. Future judgment may well reverse our judgment. But that’s for future-people to decide, not for us in the present. Present-people can - and I think on some subjects have to - have perfectly good judgments (is/is-not cake/IRCT) that are not suspended (suspended entirely) from a future moment. Again, NP’s assessment of Marx as having IRCTed is such a judgment, and one that’s not problematic - certainly not problematic as a _type_ of judgment (even if one disagreed with NP about the IRCTness of Marx’s work, which I don’t), your objection is about this whole type of judgment not merely about making that judgment about Marx.
Convinced?
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — November 28, 2007 @ 9:35 pm
I should preface this (and what I wrote before, too) with the usual disclaimer about not speaking for NP, etc. I’m glad that you’ve pointed out how my comments might diverge from what NP has actually written (to the point, perhaps, of proposing an entirely different argument that has little to do with she has actually argued).
“Convinced?”
Yes and no. I’m glad you’re not wedded to the baking analogy, because I think it recalls a context that is entirely different to that context in which something like IRCT (or just “theory” generally) may arise and be practised. I’ll come back to this, after I’ve commented on this:
I like the way you put that second sentence: “We just can’t predict with certainty that future judgment will affirm our judgment”. And I agree that judgement doesn’t have to be deferred; indeed, I said that it’s impossible to avoid having to make judgements of some sort. And I agree that “present-people can - and I think on some subjects have to - have perfectly good judgments (is/is-not cake/IRCT)” — although the construction “suspended from” (”judgements … that are not suspended from … a future moment”) is a little unclear for me and so I’d need elaboration to say whether I agree with the rest of the sentence.
But I disagree that the question of whether our judgement will be affirmed by future-people is “for future-people to decide, not for us in the present”. As ever I think it’s a question of context, and this is part of the reason why the baking analogy just cannot work for me. Put simply, today, in the context of the kind of work that we are engaging in when NP presents her argument and we comment on it, part of what defines what we do is its somewhat unspecifiable relation to the future.
So far as I know, according to most available norms underpinning the rituals, social objectives, etc. of cake-baking, that activity is not expected to have any relation to the future beyond, say, the particular event for which the cake has been baked or beyond the reproduction (more-or-less) of the rituals, etc., that initiated the process. At the very least, I feel no sense of obligation (let’s put aside the question of from where such a sense of obligation might emanate) to make cakes in such a way that they will be open to the possibility that future norms regulating cake-baking practices might change in some way.
In the context of my professional academic work, however, I do feel something like that sense of obligation to allow for the possibility of a future (both in terms of a future “society” and in terms of future possibilities or ways of “reasoning”) that is as yet unimaginable. I’d probably never have put it as baldly as this, but part of what I do involves asking the question: to what extent is my argument open to the possibility of being affirmed again in a future that is radically different from the present? to what extent is it open to the possibility of doing justice to or welcoming the arrival of future possibilities (where “future” here is always marked by a difference from what presently is)?
Now, I see NP’s work as marked by a very similar relation to an as-yet-unimaginable future. (I could be wrong here, but I wouldn’t let that bother me, since I see that aspect to her work and I affirm it, regardless of whether the author has authorised my appropriation.) To that extent, part of that project affirms the necessity, or exigency perhaps, of undercutting “the conventions we happen to be using”. Part of her project (in my eyes) is precisely to hold open an idea of IRCT such that it can affirm, perhaps even against itself, future conceptions of IRCT.
This is why I think what’s most significant about the initial NP’s typology of CT is her disclaimer: “I want to emphasise very strongly here that I am not listing these various approaches to critical theory in order to reject them, in favour of an alternative concept of critique that I think must be embraced to the exclusion of others.” I would argue that these other approaches to CT remain important, even essential to IRCT, insofar as they constitute horizons of expectation. Indeed, NP’s reading of Marx as IRCT is precisely a demonstration of how IRCT (as a non-teleological yet future-oriented theoretical practice) might be seen as arising within CT. The point, then, is that it is simply not the case that Marx’s work is IRCT: it becomes IRCT via its recontextualisation within and activation as IRCT.
To put it another way, in the process/product distinction we made earlier: Marx-as-IRCT is the product of the process of IRCTing as a future-oriented theoretical practice. Now, don’t take me the wrong way when I say this, but your reading of NP’s argument strikes me as aiming at what it is, rather than at how it attempts to open a relation to the future; hence your question about whether “Marx’s moment” is different from “ours” and the implications of this for whether IRCT is possible today. On my view, there is no “Marx’s moment” as such; any such moment is already compromised by its relation to a future moment in which it is defined as a moment. IRCT, as I see it, is both a recognition of that complication and an attempt to see “Marx’s moment” in a way that is consistent with that complication: i.e. by compromising “Marx’s moment”, by opening it to a future that was perhaps unimaginable at that moment (perhaps).
Sorry for the lengthy, unstructured response, and thanks for the comments that sparked that response. I, too, am looking forward to what NP might have to say.
Cheers
Comment by rob — November 28, 2007 @ 11:45 pm
hi Rob,
I really, really have to get to bed as I have a simply craptacular day on tomorrow for which I will need at least 6 hours of sleep, so I can only be cursory. I’m sorry for that, as I want to give this fuller shrift, but I also want to start responding now because this is interesting. Oh yeah, and lest I forget, NP has started to respond to the post - http://www.roughtheory.org/content/what-in-the-hell/
Rob, I could be wrong but I think you and NP have a disagreement (I haven’t read her reply yet, maybe I’m wrong). I’m not sure. I’d like to find out, and if so then I’d like to see you two sort it out, as in, I’d learn a lot from watching that. My ventriloquizing NP was my sincere attempt to represent what I take her argument to be, so while maybe I’ve misread her and while I do think she’s convincing, I’m _not_ putting forward those positions in order to argue them. I wouldn’t know how to, though I’d like to see NP do so. For now…
I take NP’s argument to be in part about what is. While she’s not sure IRCT can exist now, she does think Marx accomplished it. Past tense. Prior to the present. Marx wrote a book and it contained some IRCT, like in a specifiable space and time. We could point to those times and places (the spots where Capital V1 was published) and say “here in these locations at these times were books which contained written IRCT.” That’s not what NP is doing, exactly, and is a bit silly stated this way, but I think it’s there when NP says Marx produced IRCT. (Unless he didn’t produce it and merely attempted it.) And if I have book shelves full of perfectly good theory of the five types listed in the taxonomy and nothing else (maybe a graphic novel here and a cookbook there, but no other theory), I do not have a bookshelf which contains an example of IRCT. That doesn’t mean they’re to be rejected. But they’re not examples of IRCT. I think NP means something like that. And I think that’s eminently reasonable on her part.
As for future conceptions, I don’t think it makes sense to say one affirms or seeks to affirm future conceptions. They don’t exist yet and so can not be affirmed. We cross (or burn, or remodel, etc) those bridges when we come to them. Maybe future is a bad term here. Here’s a better one: unexpected. That’s what I mean.
We can never fully predict that we will not change our conventions or that others may not have the same conventions as us. But all we have are our conventions. We don’t have conventions that we don’t have. We are not aware of that which we are not aware of yet. We can not prepare for that which have no expectation or prediction of. The unexpected is that which happens which were not aware of and which we did not predict. It’s likely that we will encounter things we didn’t expect and we will need to respond to them; some of those “things” (occurrences, changes) we will encounter include changing our minds etc. But we can’t anticipate that. I mean, sure, we can in a limited way - one probably shouldn’t get a tattoo of the bartender just because one really, really liked him/her in the five minute conversation. One should wait and make sure that that strong feeling will persist long enough so that the tattoo is not likely to be a mistake. But sometimes those sorts of predictions are made and we’re wrong. Marriages end, for instance. Similarly, we can’t rule out that we will change our minds or that others will come up with novel arguments we haven’t thought of, such that our standards for IRCT change. But that doesn’t undermine our conventions right now. Beyond certain minimal - though genuinely important - quasi-ethical prescriptions (be flexible, be prepared to change your mind, re-evaluate, keep all decisions are provisional, etc) I don’t think anything follows from the orientation toward the future, that our current affirmed judgments may in other contexts not be affirmed (by others or by us).
Finally, on “the necessity of undercutting the conventions we happen to be using,” I guess I just don’t see it. I agree about the utility - I’d actually agree about using the term necessity here, but it’s of a moral sort rather than a logical sort, as in “it’s REALLY IMPORTANT!” rather than “it’s required in order to think - of recognizing that our conventions are ours and are conventions. This is I think a pretty simply historicizing and relativizing move, against any positing of us as absolute and all that. But that doesn’t undermine our standards at all. It certainly doesn’t have to. And I think the appeal to necessity here, that is, the normative appeal, implies an non-undermined … something … which serves as the source/justification/whatever for that normative appeal. I think this is what NP means by cryptonormative, actually, to be honest. If there’s a need to undermine our standards, then why no undermine the standard which says there is such a need? In doing so, the whole thing shortcircuits. Not doing so leaves the question: why not? Why not do so? If our standards must be undermined in order to leave us open to the future or possible futures, well… shouldn’t we also leave ourselves open possible futures which have decided there’s no need for people to open to possible futures? If that is a future to which we must be open, then doesn’t the whole thing dissolve or short circuit?
If that’s not a future to which we must be open, why not? ie on what normative ground [according to what convention, to use the terms I was using before]? and how do those normative grounds satisfy the test of remaining open to the future or possible futures? It seems to me that the only way out of this is via other principles or maxims - the maxim of futurity, so to speak, is insufficient. Those other principles operate in the background, hence the cryptonormative bit, I think.
Okay, this feels very rambly and confused and perhaps a bit clipped in tone. I’m sorry for that. I’ve really got to run, dishes to do before bed. Thanks for this exchange, if I don’t make sense then say so and I’ll try again when I have more time and sleep.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — November 29, 2007 @ 12:46 am
hmmm… I’m not sure I can intervene in a useful way here. As I’ve mentioned over at rough theory, when I was writing in this particular paper about the, for want of a better word, hypotheticalness with which I think we need to approach the possibility of something like an immanent and reflexive critique, I had a slightly different constellation of issues in mind, including: my own critiques of positions that have taken something like immanent contradiction to be a sort of intrinsic property of human societies - so that it was taken for granted that history progresses through the working out of these contradictions; the issue of how one acknowledges an “audience-eye view” of what I’m presenting (and so differentiates my own personal stances from what I think I might have “shown”); and the hope to carve out the space for a particular possibility for critique - at least as an option - even if my implementation of that possibility should not work out. So I had been intending the language of “attempt” to capture these sorts of things, and wasn’t thinking specifically about the question, or attempting to gesture at an answer for the question, of standards for how we would judge that attempt. Am I right, Nate, that it’s this final issue that you’re trying to get to the bottom of here?
Regardless of what I was trying to do in this particular paper, my impulse is to say that what rob is saying sounds “right” to me - in other words, I don’t immediately find myself reacting to what rob has written as though rob and I have a disagreement. But I say this in a context in which I’m not completely certain how both of your comments “hit” one another - in other words, I might not be thinking about my own work from the right perspective, to understand why Nate sees a disagreement between what I’m saying and what rob says. I hear rob’s comments, among other things, as consonant with the sorts of things I think I’m saying when I use, say, Benjamin to talk about the constellations our moment makes with particular moments in the “past” - where Benjamin is problematising the way in which some “pasts” aren’t “past” in the way in which (in his framework) historicism posits them to be, but are instead something more like potentials in the present - pasts in which the present recognises its own concerns - that then open the possibility for particular futures. I’m not saying this to open a discussion of Benjamin specifically, and mentioning Benjamin at all may simply confuse the discussion - apologies. I’m a bit groggy and therefore thinking somewhat over-concretely. And I’m not trying to reduce rob’s point back to what I’ve just written - just to gesture at one of the reasons what rob has written doesn’t seem “foreign” to the thought-space for my project, although, again, this wasn’t specifically a set of issues I was trying to problematise in a direct way in this particular paper.
All that said, I’m not certain I have a disagreement with Nate, either - in other words, I am taking Marx as my “model” for this kind of theory - I am making a claim that he is engaging in a theory of a particular sort. It’s just that I see this as a sort of… interpretive gamble? And as a gamble related to the question of whether this sort of theory is possible today? I’m not so much trying to make a claim that something has changed between Marx and now, so that Marx could definitely do this kind of theory, but I’ve become uncertain whether we can today. I’m more trying to say: it’s uncertain whether we can do this kind of theory - let me try to make an argument that “we” can, via an argument that illustrates how (I’m claiming) Marx did - and then, further to this (although this paper doesn’t thematise this specific issue) an argument about why, in the respects important to me, it has present-day implications, that Marx might have done such a thing.
But I may be misunderstanding the stakes of the discussion? Sometimes one can fall into default perception of one’s work, and from that perspective particular tensions simply won’t be viewable, so I may just not be looking at my work in the right way to bring a particular tension into view.
I do think the question you raise, Nate, about, essentially, argumentative standards - standards of judgement - the “how the hell do we know we’ve done this?” question - is a valid question. Andrew Montin has effectively raised the same question over at rought theory - in the form of an argument that we should perhaps engage in a different form of theory, invoke a different notion of “contradiction” (as second and third generation Frankfurt scholars have) that, among its various virtues, makes more visible whether you have, or have not, met the standards of the theory. For those who haven’t been following: Andrew’s basic point - hopefully I won’t be simplifying too badly - is that, if you derive your normative standards of critique from something like the intrinsic function that something fills within social reproduction, as recent Frankfurt-inspired theory tends to do - then you can easily make the case for why someone should prioritise “your” norms over other socially-constituted potentials. An approach like mine, by contrast, that sees potentials as arising far more “contingently” - with no potential particularly more closely linked to something “essential” about society than other potentials - carries a much more difficult argumentative burden, in explaining why its ideals are nevertheless compelling. I think I can meet this sort of burden, and I think there are consequences to the way in which I perceive, say, Habermas, to abridge this question, but I nevertheless understand Andrew’s worry…
What you “lose” with an approach like mine is an appeal to “hard” necessity - an appeal to something like logical necessity (which I think some of the recent Frankfurt-inspired critiques are trying to preserve). My argument would be that moral ideals can be just as compelling - just as “necessary” - even if they derive only from our own collective practices, and even if initially they arose essentially by accident, due to the idiosyncratic requirements of a particular form of social reproduction, rather than to some intrinsic and ineradicable dimension of socialisation as such. To me, the fight is in a sense more urgent, precisely because the moral norms we are asserting can actually be endangered in a profound sense, because they are not “necessary” in any sense that would show us history driving inevitably toward them. I do, though, see our norms as something like “necessary for us” - as sufficiently “objective” to do the work they need to do, for humans socialised into this moment in time. But I know my position on this makes some theoretical perspectives very nervous, and I fully agree that the kind of argument required here is extremely complex (if we’re talking about how to ground this sort of position theoretically, in an adequate way - I don’t think these issues have to be discussed at this level of detail, if we’re just talking about mobilising practice for immediate political purposes - I think, at the point that we get to these sorts of questions, the discussion is in fairly rarified territory).
But perhaps I have misunderstood what the discussion is about? Basically: yes, I think Nate’s right that there needs to be some kind of “compelling” dimension to the ideals I’m putting forward, but I don’t see what rob is saying to contradict my own sense of how I would go about doing that.
And Nate: I know you’re very busy, and I’ll be out for the entire day and have piles of work to do over the weekend, so please don’t feel pressure to respond.
Comment by N. Pepperell — November 29, 2007 @ 2:52 pm
hmm… I think my comment got eaten. If it can’t be reclaimed, let me know (though there’s a certain strange appropriateness to leaving this discussion… undetermined…)
Comment by N. Pepperell — November 29, 2007 @ 2:54 pm
Hi Nate
I wrote this prior to reading your response and NP’s, so some of it is redundant (and possibly misguided) by now, but I’ll reproduce it nevertheless in the hope that it clears a few things up. I’ll also add a few of points afterwards:
I think I’ve made a meal of this. You should probably ignore the lot. In the first place, I read your initial post too hurriedly. Secondly, my understanding of IRCT is heavily mediated by my understanding of “other” critico-speculative approaches to the questions that NP is exploring, and so I read challenges to IRCT as challenges to those other approaches even though the challenges don’t deserve to be read in that way. Finally (and accordingly), what prompted me to respond here has a lot less to do with any of your specific comments than with what appears to me to be the mode of argument that generated those comments.
Now, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that mode of argument, per se, and I certainly don’t think that it’s inappropriate to assess NP’s discussion/theoretical framework in terms of that mode of argument. It’s just that I can’t help but feel that any depiction of IRCT that would meet the rigorous standards of that mode of argument simply wouldn’t be IRCT. To me (and again I don’t speak for NP; she has every right to wish that I would stop making these claims about IRCT), IRCT arises from and calls for a different logic than is at play in your reading of it.
As an e.g. what you point to as something like a problem to be resolved (i.e. in NP’s claim that Marx does IRCT, is Marx’s moment to be understood as separate from ours or as part of ours?) I see, rather, as a strength. The refusal to relieve that tension is part of what makes it IRCT. The language of “attempt”, which avoids making definitive positive statements about what IRCT is, is part of what makes it IRCT. The refusal to define IRCT against existing forms of CT, with the corresponding implication that it may already be immanent to existing forms of CT, is part of what makes it IRCT.
But again, none of that is to suggest that IRCT cannot or should not be appropriated for the purpose of subjecting it to a form of critique that does not value those dimensions to IRCT. Hopefully, though, it helps explain why I chose to answer “yes and no” to your question about whether or not I am convinced by your argument.
Comment by rob — November 29, 2007 @ 8:09 pm
Ack!
Good thing my previous attempts didn’t come through as they have some serious typos. Please delete them and leave this one in their stead (assuming this one isn’t spaminated too).
On to the three other points, the first of which will require some block quotation (apologies — I find it helps me make the point).
Nate wrote:
NP wrote:
I have a different way of understanding the move than NP presents here, but I’ll latch on to the phrase “interpretive gamble” (plus NP’s other useful construction: “textual strategy”) as a way of explaining why I think my way of understanding it is one that NP might find appealing. There is a very real sense in which NP’s claim is that “Marx wrote a book and it contained some IRCT”. But I would argue that to say that does not entail posting a “Marx’s moment” that either is or is not separate from “our moment”.
The issue that has remained unaddressed here (both in Nate’s version and in NP’s version) is whether Marx’s book could be read as IRCT at the time it was written. There’s obviously a theory of “communication” at the basis of this question (one which may or may not be taken here as debatable), but the question also arises from an affirmation of history. History, in other words, does not just maintain and transform modes of thinking and presenting arguments; it also maintains and transforms modes of receiving and deciphering those arguments. And I would argue that any reading today of what appears to us as though it comes from “the past” cannot be undertaken except in relation to the existing modes of receiving and deciphering that history gives us (even if the “relation” here is one that also opens to a future understood as radically different from the present).
Any claim, in other words, that Marx did or said anything in his books is never less than a claim about what it is possible for us today to see as what Marx “did” or “said”. There is no “Marx’s moment” that is purely separable from “our moment”, because any designation of Marx’s moment must (logical necessity) go by way of “our moment”. By the same token, any claim that Marx’s moment and our moment are the same is one that denies any alterity or singularity to each of those moments: i.e. it is to deny history as such. This is why I see a refusal to define each moment in its respective (self)identity as a strength of IRCT. All that can be said is something like this: it is possible to read Marx as doing IRCT. More than that — e.g. whether Marx was actually doing IRCT and not all the other things he’s been said to have done; whether IRCT was at all possible in Marx’s moment or whether it is something imposed on that moment from today or whether the possibility of IRCT today is, in fact, owed to Marx’s having done it in his moment; etc. — l cannot say without denying the fact of history (be it the fact of Marx’s historical distance from us or of our historical difference from Marx).
Again, I don’t know whether NP would be happy with that way of putting it, but that’s what I take from (or impose upon) her argument, on the principle that NP’s argument may also be received in relation to the differential array of reading protocols available to us today.
Second point. Nate wrote:
I agree (more or less with this). What I spoke of is not affirming future conceptions, but affirming the possibility of such future conceptions. To put it in the language of expectation as you already have: you can’t prepare for the unexpected, but you can prepare for unexpectedness, albeit, only in a very minimal and very provisional way.
I’m quite happy to describe my affirmation of the exigency of being prepared for unexpectedness (i.e. the possibility of the unexpected) as being “pretty simply historicizing and relativizing move, against any positing of us as absolute and all that”. The thing is, I think that’s easier said than done. The real question is how does one habituate oneself to making that move? how does one institutionalise that openness — especially given that habituation and institutionalisation appear very much at odds with the “principle” of openness that one seeks to adopt as habit and as institution? These are questions that are tangential to what we’re discussing here, so I’ll leave them at that. In any case, you’re rightly concerned with a different contradiction, which brings us to the third issue:
When I said “necessity” I immediately followed it with “or exigency perhaps”. I think that in one sense there’s no disagreement here. I’m happy for my argument to be seen as normative in the first instance (hence my reference to the sense of obligation I feel), although I’d want to argue that it’s not normative in any simple way. Certainly, I could point to various arguments that appear to be primarily “logical” or non-normative as a way of trying to make out that my argument isn’t normative and is based in logical necessity, but the truth is that I would argue that “logical reasoning” is always tacitly normative, in any case, and so I actually think that the goal of grounding norms in non-normative thinking gets in the way of doing what we’re doing.
Indeed, one of the things that attracts me to NP’s work is that it affirms, simultaneously, the need to question norms and normative thinking and the ideal of a logic that can come before (in a metaphysical sense) normative thinking. Certainly, I agree with the way NP puts it here:
Still, this leave the question of the precise way in which what I said before is normative. I would say that it is partly cryptonormative, to the extent that I would want to begin by stressing the “situatedness” of ideals, but continue to treat some as more worthy of affirmation than others. At any rate, I have forsaken the idea that I could find some way of ultimately justifying my arguments, etc. I have certain resources at hand, but if they fail to convince others, then at a certain point I just have to say, “I give up”. In other words, I do not see argument as occurring in a pure space of thought; argument is always an event that takes place between participants, ideas, institutions, etc., and so my argument is only as good as it is effective in convincing others, and it remains situated by virtue of its ineffectiveness.
There’s also a sense in which I see my argument as normative in the third sense, in reference to something “outside”, e.g. insofar as I refer to a relation to the future where the future is understood in terms of its radical difference from what is. However, I’d say that it’s rather inside/outside; it’s the trace of this future “already” within the present (And very brief aside to Andrew Montin: thanks very much for treating my sloppy commentary as worthy of taking seriously; this paragraph is intended partly to respond to your remark at rough theory, just in case I don’t get a chance to give your remarks a more extended response).
In fact, the more I think of it, the more I think what I’ve been arguing is normative in all the other ways that NP lists — to an extent, or in a sense. And I have a suspicion that IRCT is also, to an extent and in a sense, normative in those ways too. This is part of the reason why I think the language of attempt should be treated not as a rhetorical flourish or a statement of modesty but rather as part of what “defines” IRCT.
Sorry, I’ve left this last point way underdeveloped, but I will by now have tried the patience of even the most tolerant and deliberative reader.
Cheers
rob
Comment by rob — November 29, 2007 @ 9:49 pm
Okay. Taking a break from Brandom. Let’s see whether I can make a bit of sense.
I have a dilemma over how to respond, in the sense that I think I’ve been perceiving the questions you both have raised as operating on different levels of abstraction - which may just be my convenient way of papering over a practice of putting forward mutually contradictory positions ;-P
In other words, I took Nate to be asking whether there was a sort of tacit sociological claim underlying my paper: many contemporary theorists do seem to assert that there is some kind of sociological break between Marx’s time and ours, and I took Nate (perhaps incorrectly) to be pressing me to tell him whether I think there is a similar sort of fundamental sociological break - something, for example, that might make Marx’s theory potentially inapplicable at the current moment, due to some fundamental structural transformation in capitalism. I hadn’t actually intended to imply this position in the paper at all, although I can see, looking back now, why Nate would ask. I basically wasn’t thinking about the issue, and so it didn’t occur to me to make my position on this issue clearer in the paper. So part of my response to Nate was just a straightforward: I didn’t mean to imply this - although I think there have been transformations between Marx and us, my own theoretical work is not premised on the notion that these transformations meant that a particular kind of theory used to be possible for Marx, but has been rendered somehow more precarious over time. My work is actually, on one level, a critique of positions that, from my point of view, overstate the differences between our historical moment and the moment in which Marx was writing.
However. I do agree with rob - although, again, it wasn’t something I was trying to thematise consciously in this paper - that my particular “return to Marx” is very much a creature of our moment: I gestured at this very, very quickly in my response to Nate over at rough theory (perhaps too quickly, given that this has become a bigger issue here in the interim), when I mentioned that I took my notion of capitalism to be more abstract than Marx’s. That statement condenses a great deal, much of which is very difficult to unpack quickly, and I apologise for tossing it out in such an offhanded way in the rough theory discussion - again, my mind was thinking in other directions, and so I just wrote it as a kind of placeholder to register a position, without explaining what I mean or (obviously) how it might relate to the kinds of questions that have been arising over here.
On one level, if I’m being strictly rigorous, I deploy a sort of Benjaminian notion of the way in which “history” needs to be understood as a moment that is constituted in the present - that involves the construction of a particular, charged constellation between our present, and those bits of the (intuitively understood) past in which our present can recognise its own concerns. (I deploy a very similar notion to think about why we become attuned to particular potentials in the natural world - or to the very notion of a natural world - at particular moments in time.) I don’t always speak this way, because it’s difficult to express, and clumsy, and often gets in the way of problematising other things that are also worth discussing. So - perhaps unjustifiably - I’ve felt comfortable saying, “yes, I think Marx did this kind of theory”, as an attempt to communicate how I am trying to deploy Marx’s work, in contrast to how other appropriations of Marx are trying to deploy him, while regarding this as what I’ve sometimes called a “Newtonian approximation” - as a mode of talking about positions that is “good enough” for most purposes where I’m not explicitly trying to problematise my metatheory about the constitution of the past within the present, but which isn’t actually intended to disavow the more… er… Einsteinian metatheory - but just to bracket it, because I don’t feel that it’s required for some specific discussion. This inconsistency may be completely indefensible on my part, but it’s this practice that, I suspect, has led to the current confusion: rob, if I’m reading him correctly, is asking me to state my position in a form adequate to the more Benjaminian formulations he has probably seen me use in other places, while Nate, if I’m reading him correctly, is saying, “but that’s not what she seems to be saying here”. If I’ve understood what you’re both saying: you’re both right - the problem is due to lack of consistency on my end.
On the other hand, I’m not sure that this is a presentational inconsistency I want to avoid. In other words, I think there’s a value to what I’m calling “Newtonian approximations”, in terms of allowing particular, more concrete, issues to be debated, where the debates unfold essentially within a certain framework (so, questions like: has capitalism undergone a fundamental sociological transformation since the 1970s?, or: are forms of subjecitivity socially conditioned?, or: did Marx construct an immanent, reflexive critique?), although I also do think that somewhere, by someone, the metatheoretical work should also be done that speaks more adequately and reflexively about what we’re doing when we ask and answer these sorts of questions. I tend, I think, to see part of the value in that kind of metatheoretical work, that it might provide a sort of philosophically rigorous understanding or context for the sorts of conversations that take place in any event, and which I have no desire to prevent - and, obviously, some sort of desire to dive into myself - but which will never problematise everything that would be problematised at the metatheoretical level. This may be an indefensible position on my part, but it seems to be what I, in fact, do in practice.
This answer may just make everyone unhappy. And I can absolutely understand why. So I’m happy to accept further rounds of criticism for this.
There’s a separate issue, perhaps, running through the discussion - around the issue of normativity. The vocabulary of normativity is extremely charged - I understand rob’s hesitancy about calling his position “normative”, in spite of my own gripes about “cryptonormativity” (I should also perhaps flag briefly here that I’ve been regretting pulling that particular term from Habermas - I should have used, and in the past have used, “performative contradiction” for the same concept, and that would have been a less “charged” term than “cryptonormative”, which Habermas applies to theorists to whom I wouldn’t necessarily apply this concept… At any rate…).
I was noticing that, in his last reply, rob mentioned the issue of approaches that seem to perceive norms as things that can drive arguments “in a pure space of thought” - and he expressed his cynicism about this. I actually share this cynicism - but I also tend to think that it’s perhaps a “wrong move”, in a way, to try to understand norms this way. To be clear: I’m not here accusing rob of making a wrong move: I’m sympathising with his allergic reaction to the tendency to reduce the question of critical ideals, to the question of “can I make a compelling rational argument for what I want to achieve?” There are several things that don’t sit well with me in this kind of move - perhaps irrationally
There’s something about this move that seems to conflate normative force with logical force - a conflation that, first, raises all sorts of issues in relation to how “logical” social actors are (given that these are discussions taking place within a framework that purports to be oriented to potentials for social transformation, so we are in principle talking about social actors), but that also tends to suggest a… how do I put this… I think things are simply messier than this - that something about this move misses the constituted character of ideals, and the accidental or meaningless nature of their origins - such that the ways in which meaningfulness becomes a consequence, and moral compellingness becomes a product, of social practices, somehow manages to drop out of the framework. I’m not expressing this very well - my apologies.
What confuses me, though - and here perhaps I just have the wrong impression of the state of play, so please correct me on this - is why the discussion of normativity seems to revolve around the issue of logical compulsion - as though (I think rob’s right here) we expect that moral decisions will take place in a space of pure thought. And when I say “seems to revolve around the issue of logical compulsion”, I mean this both in the sense that theorists who want to embrace some kind of explicit “normativity” often then try to ground their position in a kind of logical compulsion, while theorists who dislike this cognitivisation of normative ideals often respond by shying away from the vocabulary of normativity at all. (I suppose what I’m describing here might be a subset of the “objective ground” vs. “no ground” argument…)
I’ve tended, I think, to come at the question in a different way - thinking in terms, first, of potentials for practice: what sorts of things have we suggested to ourselves that it might be possible for us to do? And then in terms of priming for subjectivity: what sorts of creatures are we at the moment - how do we seem to experience ourselves and our world - what sorts of things seem to attract or repel us? I also don’t tend to think the “we” is all that uniform - part of the point of unfolding a theory that conceptualises the context as… er… lumpy, is that it becomes possible to make sense of the availability of quite different modes of self-experience and ways of being in the world - differently available “primings”, associated with greater or lesser receptivity to particular potentials. Understanding these things, perhaps, might make it possible to say something about the sorts of ideals that might “resonate” (and therefore about the sorts of arguments, as well as calls to action and other forms of communication, that might have an impact, not in the space of pure thought, but in the rather complex space in which our thoughts unfold) - and about small-scale shifts in local environments, that might make it easier, experientially, to become able to communicate the existence of certain kinds of possibilities.
I don’t know if any of this makes sense - I feel very awkward about my vocabulary here. It’s also not that I don’t think argument has any place - it’s just that I tend to see argument itself as pointing back to practical (collective) experiences, such that the argument is not so much along the lines of “logic dictates that you must do this”, but more along the lines of “there is a dimension of collective practice in which we are enacting a certain kind of equality - as long as we keep doing this, we are going to be “priming” or opening receptivity to social movements appealing to the potential to achieve greater equality in other dimensions of our collective life - we can regularly expect contestations around this issue: inequality cannot remain doxic in our current context, as long as there are these specific dimensions of practice in which we are constantly irritating ourselves by enacting a kind of equality” (apologies if this example makes no sense - I take Marx to be making an argument to this effect, in his discussion of abstract labour). This isn’t a logical argument for why people should be compelled to consent, when confronted with the ideal of equality (and, in fact, we know that in practice many people do not consent in many ways). Instead, it’s the basis for making sense of why struggles break out around this issue in a particular historical moment, and why (once you add a bit more to this inadequate sketch I’ve provided here) those struggles might tend to take particular forms (on the issue of whether any particular struggle might succeed, I think we exceed what a theory is likely to be able to provide); it’s also the basis for beginning to understand why, perhaps, attempts to assert forms of inequality in the current context are often so repressive (because they are imposing something in one dimension of collective practice, that another dimension of practice will never allow to become “doxic” and taken-for-granted); and it could be the basis for thinking more concretely about potentials for political action, in terms like: how can we reinforce this particular ideal by making more widely available, and in other dimensions of social practice, opportunities to be “primed” to this potential; how can we express political ideals in ways that are likely already to resonate, etc. Hopefully it’s clear that I’m not trying to fixate on this one ideal as the only thing that can be analysed in this way - I’m just trying to use an example to voice how I might attempt to think about normativity in a more “situated” way.
I have, though, run into the same situation rob describes - L Magee, actually, often makes this critique of my work: that it doesn’t go far enough in showing why someone “ought” to be convinced - and, like rob, I can’t help but experience this as a question that somehow refers to a hypothetical pure space of thought (or, alternatively, to a desire for a kind of causal determination - to a notion that we are “primed” so strongly that we can’t help but respond by preferring a particular normative option). I’m not sure I can meet this demand - I can hypothetically see how one might go about it, but I have to admit that following through on thay hypothetical is not a major driving force in my work, even at the metatheoretical level, at least at this point. I do tend to think we’re operating in the space of situated struggle - making our own history, but not in conditions of our choosing. My theoretical work is aimed at understanding a little bit better those conditions we didn’t choose, but that now provide the fodder for whatever it is we’re hoping to do from here.
I’ve gotten well and truly off track with this comment - my deepest apologies. I’m working on something else entirely at the moment (amusingly, on people who are trying to understand normative questions more along these logical lines I’ve just been criticising), and so I’ve gotten off track. Please don’t hesitate to pull me back on track, if this is useful. And also feel free to correct or criticise what I’ve just written on normativity above - I’m in a very funny space on this, because, at the moment, I’m being criticised (not here; I’m speaking of other contexts) from both directions - some people seem extremely unhappy that I continue to use normative vocabulary, while others are extremely unhappy that I don’t seem to be grounding my normative positions as logically or deterministically compelling. So, again, I think I might be making everyone unhappy. And I’m concious as well that I might not be understanding the stakes here well enough, to grasp what I’m trampling with my own idiosyncratic approach…
Apologies for the length and the inadequacy - and also a note that I’m really and truly buried right now, and will soon be leaving for a week for this conference, so apologies also if I’m not particular responsive.
Comment by N. Pepperell — December 2, 2007 @ 12:57 am
hi Rob, NP,
I’ve got a wicked headache just now and while the worst of the work is done there’s till a lot left to tackle, so I can’t give this the time and energy I want to. But I still want to start, because this is interesting. First, Rob, you certainly haven’t tried _my_ patience, so no worries there at least re: me, and I’m pretty sure the same goes for NP from what I can tell from her comments. Second, thanks to both of you for the substantive comments. Third, Rob, I want to apologize in case I’ve come off here as glib. Much of my take on these sorts of metatheoretical matters is heavily swayed by Richard Rorty (he was my intro to this kind of thing), and while I think he’s generally right re: this stuff, he’s also often glib. (It makes for good reading, but I can see how it’d be irritating to be on the receiving end of that.) If I’ve displayed a bit of vulgar semi-Rortian glibness to you in an annoying way, I apologize.
I say that because I’m in complete agreement with you here:
I said (as you quoted me) something was a “pretty simply historicizing and relativizing move, against any positing of us as absolute and all that” to which you replied “The thing is, I think that’s easier said than done. The real question is how does one habituate oneself to making that move?” I couldn’t agree more.
Likewise when you wrote that “the idea that I could find some way of ultimately justifying my arguments, etc” doesn’t compel you, that you “have certain resources at hand, but if they fail to convince others, then at a certain point [you] just have to say, “I give up”.” Me too, 100%.
On the former, this is part of my slow trek away from purely (disciplinarily) philosophical work. I think that type of habituation happens much less by argument and logic than by narrative and rhetoric. Rorty says something like that someplace about the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that that book did more for moral progress than anything Kant wrote. I think that’s true. I gestured fumblingly at a similar sort of sensibility in my posts about music, lyrical content vs sentiment or experience of the song as a whole.
I think the latter, the lack of ultimate justification, links to the former. I think I’m rather pessimistic about how much philosophy (defined as a set of written texts) can accommodate the former. I don’t think there’s a lot of positive content to be had philosophically on that issue. I think the most we’re going to get to is a more minimal and negative content like what you described: absence of big foundations, and the practice that should be attendant with that recognition - learning to say something like “I give up” or “we’ll have to agree to disagree.” I think that that sensibility: deciding to stop or to pause the argument and to do so with a bit of gracefulness (not being in a huff etc) is a real skill, and one that we are more likely to acquire via the practices of arguing (that is, via argument construction) rather than via reading already written arguments. I also think that we’re more likely to acquire this sensibility by reading works outside of philosophy - literature, history (particularly more narrative types), etc, where there’s less of an impulse toward ultimate arbiters, archimedean points, etc.
I say all this because I think it’s possible to affirm the argument you make in both points (the one expressed in the quote from me about “simple moves” and the one about no ultimate foundation) while still responding to the argument gracelessly (as you sort of said, actually living with that simple move is easier said than done - so, we might affirm the point but fail to act in response to it any graceful way - and while someone might affirm that there aren’t ultimate foundations they might still be really bad at giving up w/ any sort of finesse during actual arguments).
Part of what I’m trying to get at here is that the “simple move” to me is _intellectually_ simple, but not easy. (I think the same way about a lot of political stuff.) I think the issue is not that it’s really complicated theoretically to do the non-absolutizing then, it’s just hard in terms of … disposition or intuitions. As a parallel: I don’t think running a marathon or keeping a marriage together under extreme external duress (bankruptcy and serious illness or whatever) are intellectually/theoretically complicated (such that we are going to resolve the difficulties there by some sort of conceptual discovery/invention), they’re just really, really hard. (This another distinction related to what I’ve tried to gesture at before re: music and conviction and stuff - keeping up one’s commitment to acting on beliefs one agrees with is not a matter of being argued into the rightness of the belief but of something else.)
I dunno if this clears anything up or no. I’ll revisit all this when I get more time (and will print it all out as I have a hard time reading long things onscreen very well) but it may take me a while.
Oh yeah I nearly forgot - NP, I was asking if you were making such a sociological claim. I didn’t think you were but the pair in the paper of “Marx is an example of IRCT” alongside “IRCT may not be possible” (you’ve since glossed the latter making me understand it differently) made me wonder that.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 2, 2007 @ 11:38 am
this was fun to read.
Nate, I think if you haven’t already read it, Jameson’s The Political Unconscious would be interesting comparison to this debate. It has much the same “shape” and many shared concerns. Jameson champions a kind of critique (he calls it simply “Marxism”) of a more narrowly defined object (literature and its auxilliary product), against five rivals: psychoanalytic, myth critical, stylistic, ethical, structualist. Like NP his posture on historicising is basically Benjamin’s, with emphasis on the reflexive feature. Then he shows that Marxism prevails over these rivals not because it avoids any specific errors necessarily characteristic of them but because it contains them, and digests them, and completes them. And cake would not be a bad metaphor for critical product as seen by this book - (even really yummy cake is not cake for very long.)
Comment by chabert — December 2, 2007 @ 7:34 pm
Thanks Nate (and NP).
I really don’t have much to add here other than, yep and thanks for enduring the headaches, etc. to help us arrive at this point.
I’ve not read a huge amount of Rorty’s work (basically, just Contingency, Irony, Solidarity), but he’s definitely one of the writers who I would read more of if I still had any time to read. Certainly, that quote from him that pops up at rough theory, about Hegel’s move from Kant to teleology being a proto-pragmatism, strikes me as one of the most profound and constructive things I’ve ever read about the history of philosophy.
Cheers
rob
Comment by rob — December 2, 2007 @ 10:07 pm