There is an abstract and Platonizing tendency of thought that is difficult to avoid. Whenever faced with a phenomenon we ask the question what is it, and immediately set about trying to find a category, concept, form, or Idea to which the phenomenon belongs. The category or form thus becomes transcendent to the phenomenon in question, such that the category doesn’t function simply as a sortal or descriptor of the phenomenon, but instead becomes a normative measure of the phenomenon, determining the degree to which the phenomenon approaches the Ideal set up by the category.
Read on.
Often, when speaking of such forms, the the category implicitly embodies a protypical example against which all other instances are measured. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid smuggling an exemplar or protypical example into our categories. Someone speaks of the category of the “human” for instance, but what is really meant is a particular group of humans such as European, white males, against which all other instances of the kind are measured in terms of how well they embody the characteristics of this prototype. This is what is at stake in the “True Scotsman Fallacy“:
No true Scotsman is a term coined by Antony Flew in his 1975 book Thinking About Thinking – or do I sincerely want to be right?:
Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Press and Journal and seeing an article about how the “Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again.” Hamish is shocked and declares that “No Scotsman would do such a thing.” The next day he sits down to read his Press and Journal again and this time finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, “No true Scotsman would do such a thing.”
Flew’s original example may be softened into the following [1]:
Argument: “No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”
Reply: “But my uncle Angus likes sugar with his porridge.”
Rebuttal: “Ah yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”This form of argument is a fallacy if the predicate (”putting sugar on porridge” or “doing such a thing [as committing a sex crime]”) is not actually contradictory for the accepted definition of the subject (”Scotsman”), or if the definition of the subject is silently adjusted after the fact to make the rebuttal work.
Rather than seeing the category as a topological space capable of undergoing infinite variation while maintaining its structural identity, one variation is raised above all the rest, becomes transcendent to all the rest, and becomes the measure of all the others. As a result, there emerges a gap between the category and existence. Existence is lost in the process of categorization and the world becomes abstract. Instead, following Bergson and Deleuze’s ideal, we should strive for concepts that are identical to the thing itself. “…Bergson puts forward philosophy’s ideal: to tailor ‘for the object a concept appropriate to that object alone, a concept that one can hardly still call a concept, since it applies only to that one thing.’ This unity of the thing and the concept is internal difference, which one reaches through differences of nature” (“Bergson’s Conception of Difference”, in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 33).
When speaking of social groups and movements we can clearly see how this essentialist way of thinking is a problem. We use an abstract essentialist definition to define the phenomenon rather than letting the phenomenon produce the definition. Rather than examining the way in which these groups individuate themselves, we instead think in terms of abstract categories or essences, which themselves might be quite remote from the actual organization and structure of the social phenomenon.
What is needed is a way of thinking these social phenomena that coincides with the phenomena itself. Rather than using the term “concept” or “category”, I will instead refer to this form of thought as a “constellation”. In its second definition, my dictionary tells me that a constellation is “any of the 88 arbitrary configurations of stars or an area of the celestial sphere covering one of these configurations”, while in the third definition it says that a constellation is “…an assemblage, collection, or gathering of usu. related persons, qualities, or things”. I steal this term from Benjamin, though I have no sense of whether or not it coincides with his usage. Of specific importance to this notion is its emphasis on the arbitrary nature of the configuration and its status as an assemblage. What a constellation seeks to capture is the organization of a really existing configuration, rather than an abstract thought divorced from really existing configurations. Put otherwise, it seeks to capture auto-organizing and sorting phenomena of the world. Negri and Hardt, for instance, indicate something approaching the thought of a constellation when they criticize Kelsen’s Kantian understanding of the United Nations as a transcendental scheme. There they write that,
Kelsen conceived the formal construction and validity of the system as independent from the material structure that organizes it, but in reality the structure must somehow exist and be organized materially. How can the system actually be constructed? This is the point at which Kelsen’s thought ceases to be of any use to us: it remains merely a fantastic utopia. The transition we wish to study consist precisely in this gap between the formal conception that grounds the validity of the juridical process in a supranational source and the material realization of this conception. (Empire, 6)
I offer this only as an example and not as an analysis to be endorsed. What is important here is Negri and Hardt’s focus on material reality and existence in their analysis, rather than an abstract transcendental schema. Such an analysis requires the investigation of a constellation, of really existing concrete conditions.
Such a thought is of Darwinian inspiration as described by Deleuze. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that Darwin effects a “Copernican Revolution” in how we think of difference:
Darwin’s great novelty, perhaps, was that of inaugurating the thought of individual difference. The leitmotiv of The Origin of Species is: we do not know what individual difference is capable of! We do not know how far it can go, assuming that we add to it natural selection. Darwin’s problem is posed in terms rather similar to those employed by Freud on another occasion: it is a question of knowing under what conditions small, unconnected or free-floating differences become appreciable, connected and fixed differences. Natural selection indeed plays the role of a principle of reality, even of success, and shows how differences become connected to one another and accumulate in a given direction, but also how they tend to diverge further and further in different or even opposed directions. Natural selection plays an essential role: the differenciation of difference (survival of the most divergent). Where selection does not occur or no longer occurs, differences remain or once more become free-floating; where it occurs, it does so to fix the differences and make them diverge. The great taxonomic units– genera, families, orders and classes –no longer provide a means of understanding difference by relating it to such apparent conditions as resemblances, identities, analogies and determined oppositions. On the contrary, these taxonomic units are understood on the basis of such fundamental mechanisms of natural selection as difference and the differenciation of difference. For Darwin, no doubt, individual difference does not yet have a clear status, to the extent that it is considered for itself and as primary matter of selection or differenciation: understood as free-floating or unconnected difference, it is not distinguished from an indeterminate variability… These are the three figures of the Copernican Revolution of Darwinism. The first concerns the differenciation of individual differences in the form of the divergence of characteristics and the determination of groups. The second concerns the connection of differences in the form of the co-ordination of characteristics within the same group. The third concerns the production of differences as the continuous matter of differenciation and connection. (DR, 248-49)
The question here is not one of advocating a sort of biologism where all phenomena are to be traced back to the organism. Rather, the “Copernican Revolution” that Darwin institutes is that of the primacy of individual difference over conceptual difference. As Deleuze put it, “…it is a question of knowing under what conditions small, unconnected or free-floating differences become appreciable, connected, and fixed difference.” It is in this connection that we must think in terms of populations, actually existing populations.
A population is something that exists somewhere and at some time. Moreover, a population is populated by a heterogeneous diversity of elements, composed of different tendencies or vectors of movement. Compare the idea of a population to the idea of the intension of a concept. Logicians speak of the intension of a concept as being those defining features that specify the conditions under which an element belongs to a class. For instance, “three-sided figure” is the intension of the class “triangle”, such that all existing figures belong to this class if they have these properties. Here there is a pre-defined criteria for membership, such that the actually existing triangles are irrelevant to any talk of triangles as such.
However, when we speak of a population existence matters quite a bit, as it is the differences that inhabit the population that determine the tendencies by which the population organizes and deploys itself. It is best to look at concrete examples in order to begin thinking about constellations. Any example will do. For instance, we might think of the bustle of people at New York’s Grand Central Station on any given day. This is a population. Here we have people of all types. There are an infinite number of ways we could sort them according to representational modes of thought working with concepts or intensions. We could sort them by gender, by religion, by ethnicity, by economic bracket, by jobs, by destinations, and so on.
However, the problem with all of these sorting strategies is that they remain abstract and exterior to the population itself. This sorting strategy relies on resemblance and analogy, as Deleuze outlines in the passage above. They impose external and foreign criteria on the immanent dynamics of the population. When we think in terms of constellations, by contrast, we instead examine the immanent processes by which the elements that populate the population sort or group themselves into various patterns and forms of organization. That is, constellation thought seeks to investigate the tendencies that inhabit the population, and how these tendencies more or less inhabit the situation. Some tendencies will be very small and fleeting, having little impact on the overall organization of the population in question. Other tendencies will be dominant within the population, seeking to dominate the rest or push the others into a particular form of organization. Occasionally there will be divergent tendencies within a population, creating a breaking point, a critical point, where we can no longer speak of a single population but must instead say the population has split, or where the dominant organization of the population undergoes a qualitative transformation such that it is no longer the same constellation as it was before (for instance, the shift from Feudalism to Capitalism).
It is clear that thinking in terms of populations and constellations is hostile to all “a priorism” of theory and those abstract modes of thought that fail to attend to actually existing conditions, populated by their potentials or tendencies, and their antagonisms. It is also clear that this conceptual deployment raises all sorts of questions about material logistics and strategics, focusing on how very small, almost imperceptible differences that are nearly invisible with respect to the dominant organizing dynamics or tendencies of a situation can be made into large, transformative differences. What is of crucial importance is that a population not be seen as populated by the same, but that it be thought as a bubbling “heterosphere” that is something less than a system or structure and more than a collection of disconnected atoms. I find deep comfort in the thought that all things pass away and come to be in the order of history.
Larval Subjects . 
May 16, 2007 at 4:30 pm
[…] at Larval Subjects has written a beautiful post on how it might be possible to approach theory as something other than […]
May 16, 2007 at 5:14 pm
[…] coherence. N.Pepperell of Rough Theory has written a nice response to my discussion yesterday on constellations and populations, raising some important and forceful questions. N.Pepperell writes: Tacitly, this formulation is […]
May 17, 2007 at 1:03 am
Intensional meaning is not necessary; it is connotative, or perhaps stipulative, associational, etc. The extension of the term or concept is denotative, and necessary, at least in traditional sense: the extension of “presidents” being the class of actual persons denoted by “presidents” whereas the intension includes the various attributes, descriptions, connotations (commander in chief, etc). Yet intension in some sense determines extension: the definition of president leads to the denotation, the class of entities the term actually refers to.
Definitions change, however, whatever they really are, cognitively: “abstraction” doesn’t really describe the problem. It’s unlikely the noun “mother” will be altered much in terms of its denotation, but in some sense the connotations of “mother” are rather open-ended….All rather obvious (and anti-essentialist), yet most postmods seem to think that phil. of language and anal.phil was all platonic. Quine was (at least most of the time) as nominalist and anti-essentialist as most marxists, or biologists…………..though his nominalism also prevents the reinforcement of ideology of whatever sort……………
May 17, 2007 at 1:17 am
I don’t know that I’ve come across postmodernists that believe analytic philosophy is “Platonist”. What is interesting here in your remarks is that this post had nothing to do with analytic philosophy (which, btw, I appreciate having done a good deal of my training in Anglo-American philosophy), but with a particular common socio-cognitive phenomenon.
May 17, 2007 at 2:25 am
There was a reference to intensional meaning:
“”A population is something that exists somewhere and at some time. Moreover, a population is populated by a heterogeneous diversity of elements, composed of different tendencies or vectors of movement. Compare the idea of a population to the idea of the intension of a concept. Logicians speak of the intension of a concept as being those defining features that specify the conditions under which an element belongs to a class. For instance, “three-sided figure” is the intension of the class “triangle”, such that all existing figures belong to this class if they have these properties. Here there is a pre-defined criteria for membership, such that the actually existing triangles are irrelevant to any talk of triangles as such.”
Really I do not think one can specify an analytical/intensional meaning for the noun “population” in the way one can analytically define triangles or other mathematical relationships, or at least it might take a bit more legwork. Population seems related to, if not nearly synonymous to
“quantity”, or grouping, class membership: and a quantity is a quantity of something. The population of Los Angeles; the population of rats in a certain apartment house. Etc.
Making claims (or predications) about the population is of course another problem–induction really. Again, perhaps an obvious point, but it seems important to note that marxists (and most social scientists) continually make grand inductive claims (those are really claims about members who fall within the extension of a term, such as humans defined [intensionally] as “bourgeois” etc.) with little or no aquaintance with the data set.
ON the other hand I sort of understand the “constellation” concept, and the problems of defining what are the most fundamental features of humans, whether at organism or population level (and language issues are also generally somewhat negligible), but I believe you are (as Deleuze may have been) sort of over-abstracting the problem, though I do approve of a certain anti-ideological tendency in your remarks. AS with much postmodernist BlogSpeak, however, you seem to be hinting at pathology of various sorts, and the conceptualism sort of peters out, due to lack of evidence, data, specific claims,etc. Stanley Milgram or Tversky , however quotidian, did more than a Foucault ever did in proving the psychopathology of the everyday (tho’ I realize that is a bit “off topic”).
May 17, 2007 at 2:45 am
You might be right here. The issue wasn’t one of defining the intension of a population, but was really something quite unrelated. It has been my experience that in discussions with some Christians there is a tendency, when confronted with remarks about fundamentalist groups, to claim that “those aren’t real Christians”. That is, people that argue in this way are positing that there is an essence of a particular type of group and then using it to dismiss any other group that calls themselves by the same name as “not being that type of thing”. I did not explicitly use the example of Christianity in this post because I did not wish to reignite a bitter, and I think unproductive, debate about this particular issue once again. Moreover, I think this phenomenon is far more pervasive in how social groupings are sometimes talked about and can’t simply be restricted to Christians. The argument, consequently, was that those who argue in this way are implicitly claiming that intension defines denotation or that there is an essence that precedes the denotation. I was objecting to this thesis and proposing an alternative way of discussing social formations. I chose the example of a triangle to illustrate the relationship between intension and extension because those outside the Anglo-American tradition are not always familiar with the concept of of intensionality and this example neatly allows the reader to get the gist of what an intension is and how it differs from extension. I certainly was not jumping into all the debates surrounding intension and extension within the literature of Anglo-American philosophy. The concept of a population refuses this move of allowing an essence to define the group and instead looks at the composition of the group itself, without asking whether a group that calls itself “Christian” (or for that matter “Marxist”, “American”, “Democrat”, “Republican”, etc) is genuinely “Christian” in the essentialist sense of the term. For a sociological perspective the question is not whether a really existing group meets some predefined criteria, but about the real composition of that group in its existing actuality.
May 17, 2007 at 8:26 am
i) Are Stalinists true communists?
ii) Are anti-Stalinist communists enablers of Stalinism?
May 17, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Dominic, perhaps you could give a bit of commentary on the point you’re making here. The question as you pose it is very abstract, giving no specific context or circumstances, and making no allowances for structural causality that exceeds the intentionality of the anti-Stalinist communists involved. There are anti-Stalinist communists that could function in such a way as to forbid enabling Stalinism and who militantly and very publicly fight Stalinists, and there are others that end up enabling Stalinists without realizing it due to their rhetorical strategies and how they close off certain forms of engagement. I would certainly say that Anti-Stalinist communists could be enablers of Stalinism in a particular context if they behaved in such a way towards those that were trying to overturn Stalinists such that they refused to even acknowledge that Stalinists exist and are a dangerous group. Of course, the question here is not one of determining whether or not Stalinists are true communists, but of analyzing the structure of a particular group that really exists that happens to call itself “communist” and is also Stalinist. In this imaginary universe it has been my experience that this group of people enable the Stalinists by 1) denying that they exist or are a powerful segment of the population often referred to as communist, 2) pointing out that even though they do exist, they have no real power, and 3) getting in lengthy and angry discussions about how critics of the Stalinists are really hostile to communism and are intolarant of communists, 4) how critics of Stalinists are really painting all communists with a Stalinist brush, and finally 5) claiming that although Stalinists are bad, criticizing communists is not a winning strategy. These things enable Stalinists by functioning in such a way as to take criticism of Stalinists off the table. This is sad because the anti-Stalinist communists certainly don’t want a Stalinist communism. Hopefully you can appreciate the kettle logic of this bundle of argumentative strategies that occur within one and the same breath, though there sometimes seems to be difficulty among the anti-Stalinist communists in getting this not-so-nuanced point. I’m eternally thankful that discussions like this only happen in imaginary universes and that there are never any structural equivalents to this kind of kettle logic in our real universe. I’m especially glad I don’t live in a universe where one version of a particular group comes to paint all of the other versions with a particular brush in the public square and use rhetoric in such a way that many of these other communists end up supporting the policies of the Stalinists unwittingly because the Stalinists simply refers to themselves as “communists” rather than “Stalinists” and others therefore assume that they’re just “communists” rather than something qualitatively different, believing them to be policies of communists in general. That would be a horrible universe to live in!
May 17, 2007 at 2:08 pm
There is, of course, a very easy way of avoiding this unintended enabling. 1) Clearly and readily admit the existence of Stalinists. 2) Acknowledge that concern and criticism of Stalinists is a legitimate and desirable activity. For instance, acknowledge that it is a matter of concern that 150 appointees in the current Department of Justice came from Pat Jameston’s Stalin inspired Comrade University and that party headquarters of Stalinist orientation with tremendous amounts of money and political clout are cropping up all over the country and have attendances on Sundays that number in the thousands. 3) Clearly recognize that criticism of Stalinists is not criticism of communists and refrain from suggesting that it is such every time criticism of Stalinists comes up. 4) Don’t behave in such a way as to squelch or dismiss criticism of Stalinists under any circumstances or for any reason. If one behaved in such a way they, as Anti-Stalinist communists would never ever be accused of being Stalinist enablers.
May 17, 2007 at 3:08 pm
Part of the problem is that even Stalinists can be still good comrades to some degree; as ex-Stalinists in particular are sometimes painfully aware. Some ex-Stalinists manage to remain communists, in spite of the tensions inherent in their position; others, regrettably, become imperialist lackeys whose anti-Stalinism is that of the renegade from communism rather than the faithful (but principled) communist. Communist ex-Stalinists can sometimes be a bit paranoid about the motivations of ex-Stalinists who don’t share their particular set of emotional/political quandaries – do they really understand the nuances of the situation, or are they just lining up with the imperialist lackeys…?
May 17, 2007 at 3:09 pm
…motivations of anti-Stalinists, sorry.
May 17, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Things get quite complicated with these assemblages, don’t they! The ex-Stalinist communists are paranoid about the anti-Stalinists and the anti-Stalinists sometimes worry that the ex-Stalinists are deluding themselves and still, unwittingly, aligning themselves with the Stalinists as a functional effect of their alignments and commitments, rather than an intended desire to do so. It reminds me of that book by Thomas Drank entitled What’s the Matter with Leningrad? How Stalinists Won the Hearts of Mother Russia, where he talks about how people are led to engage politically in activities that are against their own interests based on their concerns about “traditional communist values”.
May 17, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Of course, the hardest argument in the world to win is the one where you try to convince someone that their alignments and commitments have a functional effect that contravenes their intentions and desires. The lightbulb must want to change.
May 17, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Who said the person being talked to is the person one is trying to convince? Discussions often occur before an audience that isn’t directly involved in the discussion. One side or the other is seldom convinced of anything in a debate, but a number of things about ex-Stalinists can become plain to a previously sympathetic or tolerant audience in how the ex-Stalinists behave and argue. In the case of Socrates, for instance, the leaders weren’t distraught by being shown ignorant per se, but by being shown ignorant in the marketplace before onlookers. The people would only follow them if they believed the leaders had knowledge. Socrates performatively undermined this in a public space. It’s worthwhile to think of audience from time to time.
May 17, 2007 at 5:29 pm
I would ask that you don’t incite further conflict on my blog by making things personal when they aren’t about that and when such suggestions aren’t being made. I believe the issue you’re alluding to was resolved, that the equation you refer to was never in fact made, feel that what I discuss in this post is an independent and valid set of theoretical concerns that is a widespread phenomenon in a number of discussions about groups, and have no desire to see that conflict flame back up. For whatever reason you’ve come here trying to pick a fight and reignite misunderstandings that have already been marginally worked through and that don’t need to be repeated. I have also been asked in private email that certain people would prefer their names not mentioned on this blog and I would ask that you practice that courtesy as well. Hence the reason I have deleted your most recent post. Perhaps you could even practice a bit of charity in what you infer from certain statements. There really must be a gene or cognitive brain structure (such as that described by Freud with regard to impermeable neurons in the Project essay that lead to cognitive distortions as a way of blocking a path) that leads people to distort things when certain issues are raised. To suggest that it is somehow being said that x is responsible for murdering Socrates when the obvious interpretation was that x was pissed off at Socrates because of the forum in which he engaged in his dialogues and how this led the audience to perceive x is truly absurd. Is there some sort of special reactionary rejoinder training one undergoes to engage in these distortions? It reminds me of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News.
May 17, 2007 at 8:04 pm
I knew I should have gone with the emoticon (whichever one best expresses “in case it isn’t obvious that I cannot possibly be serious, here is a symbol that expresses my awareness of the ludicrousness of what I have just said”). Sometimes it’s better to be understood than to be classy.
Now, as to what I came here to do: mostly I came here to read stuff, because the stuff here is good.
I should like to take up again, later, the question of Badiou’s materialism, because I get the impression that what you want is, more or less, a Deleuzian Badiou, and for me part of the attraction of Badiou lies in the clarity with which he distinguishes his own position from Deleuze’s. Perhaps the distinction doesn’t hold, or holds only at the cost of enervating Badiou’s materialism – in that case, a Deleuzian Badiou may well be something worth wanting. On the other hand, perhaps it does hold, and one really has to choose – in the first instance between Badiou/Hallward’s Deleuze and the Deleuze of the Deleuzians (assuming for the moment that there is only one).
On the matter of the religions, I think the Stalinist/anti-Stalinist communist comparison is simply better than the Nazi/Heideggerean one: anti-Stalinist communists aren’t simply more refined Stalinists, or Stalinists committed to a “high-theoretical” obscurantism that occludes the reality of Stalinist state bureaucracy and terror. That type of argument is in fact typical of the anti-communists, for whom communism itself is directly and inevitably responsible for the “black book” of crimes committed by the Stalinist state apparatus. They, of course, will insist on the absolute moral and intellectual bankruptcy of any attempt to separate communism from Stalinism, to defend the former or claim that it provides the means to critique the latter. Elitist delusion! Communism immediately becomes Stalinism the moment it descends from the ivory tower and hits the streets…
I don’t think I’m being uncharitable when I say that the situation brought to my mind by the word “enabler” is that of the alcoholic’s co-dependent spouse, who tuts and frets and cajoles but ultimately provides the alcoholic with the support he needs to carry on being an alcoholic. I’m fairly sure that the US religious right is not in a co-dependant relationship with Radical Orthodox theologians, not least because the majority of the latter (that I’m aware of) are UK-based Anglicans, and are happily rather remote from the lunacies of bible-belt puritanism. (Not that one can be too smug: the Anglican communion is busily tearing itself apart over homosexuality as we speak; although the very fact of this conflict I take as evidence of health). Outside of the US, it clearly doesn’t make the slightest sense to take the Republican religious right as the key spiritual phenomenon towards which which all religious thinkers of conscience must maintain an unceasing vigilance. So from the side of the pond I’m sitting on there’s a kind of self-evident parochialism to this notion that practitioners of “high-theoretical” theology are locked in an unacknowledged deadly embrace with the most reactionary forces in US society…
May 17, 2007 at 9:07 pm
Thanks, this clarifies things. I’m still very touchy about that discussion and really do not wish to see a repeat, especially since I like and value the bloggers in question regardless of what they might think I think of them.
I was initially attracted to Badiou by virtue of his clarity and argumentative rigor as well. For me the problem is two-fold. On the one hand, and this is simply a personal idiosyncracy, but I simply cannot seem to detach myself from process oriented philosophies and relational based ontologies. Badiou improves in Logiques des mondes but I still think there are serious flaws in his ontology from this perspective. On the other hand, I’ve never found Badiou’s account of the operations of the count-as-one satisfactory; which means I don’t feel his “logics” do the job in accounting for the situation. I suppose I can’t see how we can avoid positing some causal agency such as forces to account for beings. This is woefully underdeveloped, and is simply intended as a placeholder for the concerns I have.
May 18, 2007 at 12:53 am
Of course it doesn’t make sense to speak of this outside the U.S. I have been exceedingly clear on this point and have emphasized the situated nature of these issues again and again. I have written posts on geophilosophy, and developed concepts such as that of populations and constellations as a way of expressing and capturing the historically and geographically situated nature of certain groupings and forms of organizations. What I have been speaking of in this connection has been a uniquely American phenomenon and I’ve repeated this point again and again. My comments were never directed at people “across the pond”, but at very specific things I’ve observed here in the states both here and elsewhere in other online discussions I’ve witnessed without being an active participant. It is perfectly fine for someone outside the U.S. situation to be indifferent to this issue, just as you wouldn’t be inclined to get much involved in questions of school-board politics here in Dallas, Texas. I am sorry I can’t make my referents more specific. One would think the signifier “fundamentalism” or “American fundamentalism” would be self-evidently clear and would do a fairly good job identifying the referent, yet apparently some across the pond still seem to compelled to jump into discussion when they have no dog in this fight. I suspect some of this is due to an oversensitivity to the so-called figure of the “atheist” that invites defensiveness in discussion. In a disconnected way, I think this tendency to get riled up whenever any religious phenomena is questioned speaks to some of the frustrations I’ve vented here. I believe that progressive religious folk would do well to restrain this impulse.
I think religious folk need to get better about this and concede the points about the particular religious group being criticized, not seek to obstruct that criticism in any way or qualify it away, and clearly distinguish their own positions from that of the group being criticized. For instance, were I on the other side on this issue, I would concede that the likes of Dennett, Dawkins, and Hitchens have said something true (not everything) about a particular religious segment and also concede that this group is a powerful and often dangerous force within the context of American politics. This would be a sort of Zizekian “healed by the spear that smote you” gesture. I would then go on to carefully distinguish my own position from the positions described by the likes of Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens, and show how it offers a powerful religious alternative to these religious formations of ressentiment that is also struggling against the very things that these figures are arguing against. When one fails to very clearly accept the validity of these criticisms of particular groups in an unqualified manner (i.e., without turning around and saying these groups don’t really have power in the U.S. situation or that they are a small, loud, but impotent minority, or that they are not the real problem), they provoke the suspicion that they are secretly sympathetic to these groups being criticized and share a number of their beliefs. Such a clear statement without qualification would be enough to quiet me and any suspicions I have with regard to any additional critiques of other religious populations. The concept of populations is actually an attempt to clearly state this and allow for the diversity of different movements and their different politics. In the U.S. context, at least, it is very important that religion of all forms begin to be open to exactly the same criticism as every other ethical, political, and philosophical position if it wishes to participate in the public sphere.
May 18, 2007 at 5:39 am
[…] through with regard to abstract categories and populations. In a recent post responding to my post on populations and constellations, Nicole wrote: Tacitly, this formulation is not completely […]
May 18, 2007 at 3:32 pm
[…] from Larval Subjects continues our recent conversation, following up on the issue of how to conceptualise abstractions within […]
May 22, 2007 at 4:34 pm
What is important here is Negri and Hardt’s focus on material reality and existence in their analysis, rather than an abstract transcendental schema.
Yes, that material, economic application of concepts–and of theory, if not philosophy itself—is continually, as y’all say, displaced in the endless postmodernist and psychoanalytic chitchat, I believe. “Empire” is a pretty piece of polemic (not that we agree with it, or even most of it), but H & N have some, shall we say, Hobbesian roots (as does Marx), and rarely lose themselves in the psychoanalytical or metaphysical labyrinthes. Hipsters may debate the synthetic a priori or the object petit a, 24/7 at the Walmart Cafe: yet the real questions pertain to the Walmartopolis itself (its “modes of production”) if you will, however tres sauvvage those questions may be.
March 10, 2008 at 8:19 pm
[…] Now what I find interesting in this passage is Gould’s postulation of different levels at which natural selection occurs, each with their own immanent organization. According to Gould, the various processes by which evolutionary change take place occur not only at the level of the individual organism– many variants of evolutionary theory are “organism-centric” in the sense that they take organisms as the basic units of selection –but rather selection processes take place at a variety of levels, including genes, cells, organisms, demes (local populations of organisms of one species), species, and clades (taxonomic groups sharing a common ancestor). Gould proposes to treat all of these levels as individuals, with a history, functioning as a constellation. […]