What in the hell …

Ranciere writes in the preface to his Nights of Labor that “[t]he topic of this book is, first of all, the history of those nights snatched from the normal round of work and repose. A harmless and imperceptible interruption of the normal round, one might say, in which our characters prepare and dream and already live the impossible: the suspension of the ancestral hierarchy subordinating those dedicated to manual labor to those who have been given the privilege of thinking. Nights of studying, nights of boozing.” (viii)
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This is from a conversation my friend Nathaniel and I have been having about Ranciere, though it’s not much about Ranciere here, and is slightly shaped by reading the first two pages of Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Buck-Morss says the opening bit, entitled ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’, had a big impact on Adorno).

I recently read a set of notes on Schiller, by Gary Thomas. Gary notes that for Schiller we never know a thing itself, but rather our knowing occurs filtered through historically contingent subjectivities. He goes on to say “ ‘modes of perception’ result in diverse accounts of reality, each compatible with facts and logic though incompatible with each other”. Gary says that Schiller’s book On The Sublime is an attempt to escape the compulsion to discover a fixed unalterable reality. He writes, “concepts of reality (…)” are “inventions, not discoveries about the world” or “all human constructs are (…) ‘fictions’, ‘texts’”. Later he notes that this poses a difficult demand – “that we somehow resolve the problem how to maintain our deepest and most serious beliefs strongly enough to be able to act on them, while at the same time recognizing that those beliefs have no final justification”. (more…)

Notes on Ranciere. awaiting completion in the future…

In his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Jacques Ranciere reads the work of a 19th century French teacher, Jacotot. Jacotot ended up having Flemish students with whom he could not adequately communicate, as they did not speak French and he did not speak Flemish. In order to instruct them in French, he had them each get a copy of Telemachus in Flemish and in French. He had them read the book in their own language until it was very familiar. Then he had them read the book in French and compare the two, slowly, painstakingly. Over time, the students learned French. Reflecting on this, Jacotot decided that while the students had learned, it was not clear if or how he had taught them. His own knowledge of French had not been transmitted to the students, or even been relevant to the students’ learning. If the students had learned without Jacotot’s knowledge entering into play, then didn’t this mean that one did not have to know to teach? As an experiment, he undertook to teach painting and piano, which he did not know. And his students learned painting and piano. (more…)

I’m told that the term ‘performative’ has a certain suspicious charge in some circles, perhaps due to (mis?)uses of the work of Judith Butler. I don’t know about that. Back when I was more analyitically minded, I got excited about certain aspects of Anglo-American philosophy of language, emphasizing pragmatics, performative utterances. At the time, a professor and friend of mine remarked that reading Wittgenstein was the way he began reading Marx. I’ve moved away from much of this in the past five years, but just recently have had a recurrence of some of those themes. Nick Thoburn writes, “[i]f the world is at base a primary flux of matter without form or constant, then things are always a temporary product of a channeling of this flux in what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘assemblages’ or ‘arrangements’.” (Thoburn: Deluze, Marx, and Politics, p4). There is a moment here that is problematic: the ‘at base’ implies a certain foundationalism, as if one can only attend to the temporary, contingent (to social relations we wish revised via the abolition of capitalism), if one has a certain ontology. Politics and communism are not dependent on any philosophical world view (that is, questions such as - or analogous to - that of ‘does god exist?’ are non sequitur to matters of communism). But I digress. Thoburn’s comment can be interpreted as parallel to a pragmatics/performative turn in the analytic philosophy of language: language is action, language exists in its enacting. (more…)