Are we not, then, at the center of what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls the postmodern condition, which I, unlike him, understand to be the paradigm of all submission and every sort of compromise with the existing status quo? For Lyotard, postmodernism represents the collapse of what he calls the grand narratives of legitimation (for example, the discourses of the Enlightenment, those of Hegel’s accomplishment of the Spirit and the Marxist emanicipation of the workers). It would always be wise, according to Lyotard, to be suspicious of the least desire for concerted social action. Any promotion of consensus as an ideal, Lyotard argues, is to be regarded as out-dated and suspect. Only little narratives of legitimation, in other words, the ‘pragmatics of linguistic particles’ that are multiple, heterogeneous, and whose performativity would be only limited in time and space, can still save some aspects of justice and freedom. In this way, Lyotard joins other theorists, such as Jean Buadrillard, for whom the social and political have never been more than traps, or ‘semblances’, for which it would be wise to lose one’s fondness.
Whether they are painters, architects, or philosophers, the heroes of postmodernism have in common the belief that the crises experienced today in artistic and social practices can only lead to an irrevocable refusal of any large-scale social undertaking. So we ought to take care of our own backyards first and, preferably, in conformity with the habits and customs of our contemporaries. Don’t rock the boat! Just drift with the currents of the marketplace of art and opinion that are modulated by publicity campaigns and surveys.
But where does the idea that the socius is reducible to the facts of language, and that these facts are in turn reducible to binarizable and ‘digitalizable’ signifying chains, come from? On this point postmodernists have hardly said anything innovative! In fact, their views are directly in keeping with the modernist tradition of structuralism, whose influence on the human sciences appears to have been a carry-over from the worst aspects of Anglo-Saxon systematization. The secret link that binds these various doctrines, I believe, stems from a subterranean relationship– marked by reductionist concepts, and conveyed immediately after the war by information theory and new cybernetic research. The references that everyone continually made to the new communications and computer technologies were so hastily developed, so poorly mastered, that they put us far behind the phenomenological research that preceded them.
Here we must return to a basic truism, but on pregnant with implications; namely, that concrete social assemblages– not to be confused with the ‘primary group’ of American sociology, which only reflects the economy of opinion polls –call into question much more than just linguistic performance: for example, ethological and ecological dimensions, as well as the economic semiotic components, aesthetic, corporeal and fantasmatic ones that are irreducible to the semiology of language, and the diverse incorporeal universes of reference which are not readily inscribed within the coordinates of the dominant empiricity… (The Guattari Reader, 111)
Much of this passage reads as if it could have come directly out of Badiou, when he rails against the sophists that placed philosophy under the poem. How did language come to be seen as the “transcendental condition for the possibility of x” any? One says, “you must use language to express any thought therefore language is a condition for all beings in much the same way that Kantian categories are conditions.” Yet I have to use my lips, teeth, tongue, and ears as well, but I do not treat these as conditions in this way. I use my brain as well, yet I do not treat this as a condition in this way. There must be oxygen for the sound waves to travel, yet this is not a condition in this way. How did this move occur? What grounds it?
Larval Subjects . 
August 24, 2007 at 4:53 am
There is a lot in this passage that I don’t understand, and I haven’t tackles A Thousand Plateaus as of yet, but I can say that (not all) “postmodernists” claim to be “that” innovative. Derrida, for instance (because once again I cannot speak, this time for Lyotard), while he has his points of messianic conceit, is constantly undercutting any claim to unique territory on which his own texts implicitly, unavoidably, encroach. This is, of course, an impasse.
Furthermore, it seems reckless to accuse the postmodern project of forsaking politics in a substantive way, simply because its operation is more negative than most socialist programs (but is it more negative that Marx?).
The last point, the one you give more direct voice to is more nuanced. What constitutes a ‘condition’? You imply that there is no essential characteristic of language that singles it out among other material facts, and that may be true-it is new food for thought for me. On the other hand, it is fairly obvious that language can be singled out as the grounds for what humans now take for granted as society, culture in a way that lips, on the other hand, cannot (perhaps Derrida’s work on Levi-Strauss relevant here?).
August 24, 2007 at 8:37 am
Very interesting. It’d be good to read you more generally on the linguistic turn and what Deleuze and Guattari and others have to say about it.
August 24, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Floyd has some good points I think. But I also want to ask how Lacan might play into this – especially with his concept of the Symbolic? Isn’t that also, in a way, about the importance, if not primacy of language in human relations?
August 24, 2007 at 4:45 pm
I’m still unsure as to where I come down on all of these issues. My own thought is heavily indebted to thinkers that fall under the so-called linguistic turn or what might be referred to as “transcendental linguisticism” (i.e., language comes to function in place of the Kantian categories and intuition in figures such as Wittgenstein, Lyotard, Derrida, Levi-Strauss, etc.), and I find it difficult to think outside of the linguistic turn or not to be haunted by the arguments of the linguistic turn.
The point is clearly not one of rejecting language, but of calling into question its hegemonic status among postmodern, post-structuralist, and Anglo-American ordinary language philosophers with regard to all other conditions. Language is clearly important but there’s a significant question as to whether language is the primary condition to which all other things must be subordinated. Deleuze and Guattari, in What is Philosophy?, for instance, show how philosophy, science, and art always unfold in a “subtractive” relation to language, carving out something else from within language (where language here might be thought as Wittgenstein-Lyotard’s “language games”), that can no longer be reduced to language. Lacan, I think, is different from the postmoderns and makes an uncomfortable bedfellow with thinkers of the linguistic turn. The Symbolic is, of course, very important for Lacan– especially in his work during the fifties –but it’s important to recall that for Lacan there are three orders: the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. From the sixties on, Lacan begins to focus on the primacy of the real. In addition to the real as the impossible and trauma, Lacan also thinks of mathematics as the real. Under this view, Lacan argues, like Badiou, that maths fall outside of language or the symbolic.
I found the Guattari passage interesting mostly because of how closely it resembles a number of arguments advanced by Badiou with regard to the linguistic turn. Badiou’s portrayal of Deleuze and Guattari (especially Guattari) has not been very flattering, and has tended to be characterized by rhetorical low blows rather than genuine arguments (especially with Zizek), and yet here we find Guattari denouncing the very things Badiou is militating against and defending large-scale forms of engagement. In recent years we’ve had a series of perplexing texts written by Badiousians on Deleuze: Badiou’s The Clamor of Being, Zizek’s Organs Without Bodies, and Hallward’s Out of this World. Each of these books, while possessing their own virtues, have also been significant misreadings and distoritions of Deleuze’s thought. One wonders why those in the Badiou camp have felt the need to target Deleuze specifically, when arguably Deleuze’s thought provides such powerful tools for the Marxist attempting to think through the phenomena of late capital. The more I’ve worked on Badiou– initially I was extremely enthusiastic about his work, experiencing it as a breath of fresh air where thought had once again become possible and allowing us to finally depart from the pious discourses of neo-phenomenology and deconstruction –the more my enthusiasm has cooled as his ontology and onto-logy (Logiques des mondes) is, to my thinking, tremendously underdetermined, providing us with little in the way of tools for analyzing contemporary situations. There seems to be something of a symptom at work here in these critiques of Deleuze, like the disavowel of a ghostly question that insists in the thought of these thinkers without being directly articulated.
August 24, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Thanks for this passage by Guattari, I hadn’t come across it before. It does seem a bit like something that Badiou might say, but in many respects it is closer to Ranciere’s thought, as he would argue for fundamental equalities between art and art discourse or politics being an inherent component to art/aesthetics. (Though for Ranciere, ‘postmodernism’ would only be the recognition of what modernism had been.)
I don’t see the necessity of Badiousians attacking Deleuze, either (by the by I’m suspicious that D&G’s treatment of the relationships between art, science, and philosophy would have to do with ‘language games’ per se). I might hazard that it is instead a matter of making Deleuze say something else, in a way that doesn’t carry the violence a move like that might suggest – as any close reading of Badiou should reveal just how Deleuzean he actually is.
August 24, 2007 at 5:28 pm
as any close reading of Badiou should reveal just how Deleuzean he actually is.
This is the direction I’d like to move in. In my view, a false opposition has emerged here (likewise with the relationship of Deleuze and Guattari to Lacan).
I don’t see the necessity of Badiousians attacking Deleuze,
The three books on Deleuze have been highly polemical critiques, so I’m not sure how else you would characterize it.
either (by the by I’m suspicious that D&G’s treatment of the relationships between art, science, and philosophy would have to do with ‘language games’ per se).
This is probably sloppy language on my part. To my knowledge, Deleuze and Guattari never mention “language games” in what is philosophy. They do, however, show how each of these activities does something very specific with language that is no longer continuous with ordinary or dominant language. I was treating “ordinary language” and “language games” as being synonyms, which is probably a bad move on my part.
August 24, 2007 at 5:42 pm
Ok, I’ll rephrase that. I’m not sure why Badiousians *feel the need* to approach Deleuze in the way they have. However, the same can certainly be said of those approaching Badiou by way of Deleuze. Of course, there are times when the limiting critique would be a necessary one – say in the sense that Badiou’s own book on Deleuze, if it was a scarecrow, was a necessary one. That’s all.
August 24, 2007 at 6:48 pm
You’ve prompted this post:
http://leisurearts.blogspot.com/2007/08/shusterman-linguistic-turn-guattari.html
It provides another look through the lens of American pragmatic philosophy. Maybe it is of some interest?
August 25, 2007 at 1:02 am
Much of this passage reads as if it could have come directly out of Badiou, when he rails against the sophists that placed philosophy under the poem.
How do you distinguish between language and the poetic? I do not know Badiou on this. I sense that those dealing with the poetic are much more concerned with hovering around the sacred or Real (perhaps Agamben?). I find this different than the structural and linguistic approach to language and philosophy. The poetic assumes reality beyond language and calls language to its humble task.
August 25, 2007 at 2:33 am
Badiou addresses this shift in philosophy in his book Manifesto for Philosophy. He doesn’t, as far as I can tell, draw a distinction between philosophies following from the linguistic turn (Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Lyotard, etc), and pious discourses pertaining to the sacred. In many instances, those who have followed the linguistic turn end up in this place (for instance, Derrida’s late work). In any event, Badiou takes it (rightly, I think), that philosophy has abdicated itself when it follows this path or ends up in a pious crypto-theology suitable to the needs of priests, despots, and demagogues– immanence, which is philosophy’s vocation since Thales’ declaration that the world is sufficient to itself, requiring no mythological explanation or transcendent beyond, always rejecting any sort of obfuscatory and hypnotic sacred, “beyond”, “Real” (a highly non-Lacanian usage of the term, I would say) or pious “humble task” in the sense you’re using the term.
August 25, 2007 at 6:30 am
that philosophy has abdicated itself when it follows this path or ends up in a pious crypto-theology suitable to the needs of priests, despots, and demagogues . . . always rejecting any sort of obfuscatory and hypnotic sacred.
Whooeeee that is one of the sharpest distinctions between theology and philosophy that I have read for some time. So philosophy is understood as that search for “truth” that excludes the poetic and theological (sorry that may not be a helpful can of worms to try and open).
Was Kierkegaard a philosopher?
I find it interesting that the term “pious” kept coming up in your reply. Is this your formulation or Badiou’s? How is it that this would function as such a compromising element as your comments would imply?
Are you making a clear distinction between “this path or . . . a pious cryto-theology.”
Is the notion of the sacred always obfuscatory and hypnotic?
August 25, 2007 at 3:59 pm
We who are summoned by the void, we who intervene so as to decide the undecidible, we who are sustained by the indiscernible truth, we who are finite fragments of that infinity which will come to establish that there is nothing more true than the indifferent and the generic, we who dwell in the vicinity of that indistinction in which all reality dissolves, we, throws of the dice for a nameless star — we are greater than the sacred, we are greater than all gods, and we are so here and now, already and forever.
Alain Badiou, Une Soirée philosophique
August 25, 2007 at 4:23 pm
In a number of respects, I draw my distinction between theology and philosophy from Jean-Luc Marion who rigorously tries to define the limit of philosophy. I differ from Marion in holding that theologies that posit transcendence ought to be left behind. I read the history of philosophy as the history of attempts to think immanence. These attempts can be deployed in a variety of ways, can be more or less successful, and the question of whether or not immanence has ever been fully thought is entirely open. By immanence I understand the thesis that we don’t need to refer to anything beyond, or to any intervention outside the world, to explain the world or to account for value. Consequently, when Thales says “all is water”, he is appealing to a principle of explanation that is strictly immanent to the world and is breaking with mythos or narrative explanations of the world such as those found in Greek mythology. To complicate matters more, we can have ontological forms of immanence and epistemological forms of immanence, and various combinations of the two. An account is epistemically immanent if it rejects any form of appeal in establishing a conclusion that cannot be arrived at through reason or some form of experience. That is, epistemological immanence rejects any appeals to privileged esoteric experiences, revelation, etc. Ontological immanence would be the principle that there are no causes outside of natural causes.
I don’t think I’m so much excluding poetry from this project (though philosophy and poetry are distinct), as questioning your characterization of poetry as the articulation of the sacred. Certainly a number of poets would themselves take issue with being characterized as Rilkean. The case of theology is complex. Professional theologians mean so many different things by theology, that it’s difficult to make generalizations. Descartes, for example, would fit the criteria of epistemological immanence in his proofs for the existence of God as his conception of God and proof for the existence of God is not premised on any revelation or esoteric experience, but proceeds through reason in a way that all can repeat. His position does not meet the criteria of ontological immanence, as he conceives God as being outside nature or transcendent to being. Spinoza, and Whitehead’s conception of God as I understand it, do meet the ontological forms of immanence. If these are theologies then they fall within the scope of philosophy. The moment a theology appeals to revelation, whether in the form of sacred texts, the authority of a prophet or man in the form of God, or esoteric, non-repeatable experiences, that theology is no longer in the domain of philosophy, though it can certainly remain of interest as a phenomenon to be studied by the psychoanalyst, sociologist, or the anthropologist.
Taking a text like The Sickness Unto Death, I would argue that Kierkegaard is a philosopher up to that precise point where he unfolds the “knight of faith” and speaks of the leap. Prior to this point Kierkegaard is more or less giving a series of phenomenological descriptions describing various forms of lived experience or psychological types. Kierkegaard is quite clear on this himself, and treats his work as a critique of the philosophers. Likewise, I would argue that Plato crosses out of philosophy when, in Book VI of The Republic, he speaks of a Good so transcendent that it is otherwise than being and transcendent to being, and cannot itself be thought. In my view, theologies that are premised on transcendence only become interesting to the philosopher when they carefully demonstrate that, when immanence is carried through, we are still led to posit and irreducible transcendence. This, for instance, is what Marion attempts to do with his “saturated phenomenon”, or what Derrida strives to do sometimes in his discussions of language. Philosophy then comes back and tries to show how this isn’t the case, and so it goes.
This is my formulation, not Badiou’s (though I suspect he’d be sympathetic). I see the experience of the sacred, as I understand it, as identical to the sort of hypnotic adoration we see in fascist movements or the hypnotic mass group phenomena described by Freud in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and as turning us away from the world and the project of improving our conditions in the world. I associate the sacred with the phenomenon of the sublime and an experience of the transcendent. Large swaths of American Christians are obsessed with the issue of abortion, teen sex, evolution, and gay marriage, and end up voting for a party that exploits them through the way it relates to the interests of large corporations and the environment. These same groups seem to tie their religious beliefs to militaristic, nationalistic, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, authoritarian, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific agendas. Those ministers who have risen up trying to preach a social gospel (devotion to issues of poverty and liberation, rather than primarily the sexual issues which, incidentally, always seems to be about someone else), or stewardship to the environment, or peace, etc., have often been denounced as heretics and received tremendous pressure from the evangelical organizations (as in the case of the current president of the NEA). It seems clear, then, that in many instances, perhaps the majority of instances, these religious groups are intent on maintaining a certain dominant ideology tied in with current structures of capitalism and exploitation.
Are you making a clear distinction between “this path or . . . a pious cryto-theology.”
No, I’m treating them as synonyms, although it is appropriate to speak of “crypto-theologies” where there isn’t an explicit religious discourse arising out of a sacred text, but a structure of thought that posits privileged esoteric experiences and revelations. Much of Derrida’s later work, for instance, could be characterized as “crypto-theological”.
Is the notion of the sacred always obfuscatory and hypnotic.
Yes, I believe so, though it can take more and less dangerous forms.
August 25, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Thanks for your thorough response. I can’t say that I have the stamina to respond to all that right now, much appreciated though.
In time I can hopefully do some more work on addressing the potential poverty of categories such as transcendence and immanence (though you did a great job making some important distinctions) for what I am trying to address. My concern with the sacred arises from my reflection on language and beauty and the issue of “presence” (and yes of course flows from confessional commitments).
Here is my most substantial piece on language, aesthetics and the sacred.
I would have to put more thought into whether I fall into either of your categories of transcendence. I of course believe in God and God as a relational reality but I don’t find these philosophical categories helpful to speak of this.
Thanks again.
August 25, 2007 at 7:36 pm
Thanks for the link to the fascinating paper. I would fall squarely in some variation of the Douglas camp and have often argued along these lines on this blog. I see no reason that Christianity or any other religion should be treated any differently than Clendinnen treats the Aztecs or Vernant and Detienne approach Greek mythology. Milbank’s argument that such theorist presuppose the social precedes the religious strike me as a misconstrual of what the anthropologist is claiming (the anthropologist and sociologist seeing all these relations bound up with one another in a whole). Not having read his work, however, it’s entirely possible I’m misconstruing his claims or simplifying them.
August 25, 2007 at 7:40 pm
McCutcheon’s Critics not Caretakers is an excellent read on these issues as well. I would see these anthropological and sociological forms of analysis as a form of critique, showing how apparently religious phenomena can be explained on immanent grounds, thereby allowing us to reject any ontological claims of transcendence.
August 26, 2007 at 2:59 am
I suppose this is where things come to an impasse. Both theology and sociology assume the ability to correctly read and position the other. Milbank was essentially saying that in sociology’s critique of (policing) the sublime that they claim to have seen the “other side” and that there is nothing. Sociology is in no such position or should be more forthright in declaring such assumptions.
This returns us in some respect to your initial quotation in this post. Which narrative is authoritative and on what grounds? I am not sure that the two of us could agree on a mediating third discourse of shared ontology and epistemology. To be a little non-philosophical we are in some ways reduced to the primacy (and hope) of language as the place (perhaps neither the beginning nor the end) of possibility and relationship.
On one other note:
“Yet I have to use my lips, teeth, tongue, and ears as well, but I do not treat these as conditions in this way.”
Graham Ward (I will have to get the specifics later) writes a great article on the condition of “touch” as all of our senses are also ultimately fields of touch (i.e. the surface of the tongue, ears, eyes, etc.)
August 26, 2007 at 5:28 am
IF – Just a quick and inadequate note, as I’m a bit fuzzy today :-) The sort of critique that Milbank makes – of a form of sociological theory that operates (tacitly or explicitly) from a claim to its own objective or “God’s eye” point of view – would probably seem to many of us to address a form of sociological or anthropological theory that itself contravenes the notion of immanence. The fact that something claims to be sociological, rather than theological, doesn’t necessarily mean that it is immanent – no matter how vociferously it may claim to reject transcendence.
Immanance is a strange sort of claim – and the forms of argument adequate to this claim are unusual, and to some degree even uncommon. The analysis somehow has to loop back on itself, such that even the possibility of immanence is immanently unfolded. When immanence is posited as some sort of underived first principle, this is a form of argument that breaches an immanent frame. By the same token, arguments within an immanent framework can’t claim to “disprove” transcendence (the argumentative move that seems to draw down Milbank’s ire) – instead, immanent arguments do something more like rendering the hypothesis of transcendence unnecessary, in relation to what they are trying to explain.
Many sociological arguments are prima facie not adequate to their own stances about immanence, social conditioning, etc. In some cases, this will just be because sociologists or anthropologists take the “hard yards” work on these sorts of questions to have been settled elsewhere, such that they can presuppose these treatments, and move forward from there. In some cases, sociologists and anthropologists may actually not “get” the question you’re asking – in which case Milbank’s critique begins to close in.
There are, though, a number of us who worry our way very explicitly through these sorts of questions – not taking immanence, or the social, or “matter”, or other such categories as sort of ungrounded grounds or exceptionalised Archimedean points, but instead trying to construct the sort of self-looping argument adequate to a form of theory that doesn’t appeal to tacit or explicit notions of transcendence – and that, as a consequence, does not “abstractly negate” or imply some kind of “objective” or transcendent standpoint from which to unmask transcendence as untrue (a sort of “sawing off the branch you’re standing on” critique of transcendence ;-P)… Whether any of us is successful is another matter, but there are certainly approaches that would fare significantly better than others in the face of a Milbank-style critique. It would be interesting to explore whether this provides a more promising foundation for the sorts of dialogue you seem to be seeking.
Apologies that this has been so condensed…
November 2, 2007 at 11:26 pm
I’m wondering I haven’t really heard of any new postmodern authors. My question is who are the new postmodern authors in their thirties that have been writing in the past fifteen years
March 3, 2008 at 10:39 am
It’s amusing to see in this lengthy series of diaribes that the quote from Guattari and its specific meanings and implications are not really discussed at all! Instead it seems to be largely about Badiou and the inevitable Zizek!
In the quote, Guattari is talking about Lyotard’s book, The Postmodern Condition. Those with some vague memory of the world to which books refer will recall that Lyotard’s book was about the digitization of knowledge and its entry into the economy as an endless series of “moves” in a competitive language-game. Something like what now goes on in this blog. Lyotard presents this as an ineluctable “condition” whose significance is mainly economic. He predicts that it will render obsolete the great struggles around which political passion used to arise. Guattari, who wants to refute that prediction, is concerned with the very premise of Lyotard’s argument: that the socius is digitizable. In other words, that what matters about social life can have a significant analogue in computerized circuits of communication. He broaches a critique of postwar cybernetics and its consequences, which seem to him like a regression by comparison to phemonelogical research and _its_ consequences. In all this, he’s concerned with the state of social development, the forms it takes, how it channels the activity and the affects of populations.
I would argue that both Guattari and Lyotard have been correct. Lyotard, because as we can see, in the past forty years (The Postmodern Condition was published in 1979) there has been a huge explosion of the language-based or “semiotic” economy. The consequence has been the emergence of the Internet and the time that so many of us now spend on computers, plus the forms of (impoverished) social relations that are given by a computer-mediated society. But Guattari too has been right, because such passions as there are in the world arise when the multiple dimensions of life – sensorial, affective, fanasmatic, economic, ideational – are called into question by some “assemblage”. i.e. some active group. To take the most obvious example, America was changed forever by the explosions of 9/11 and the multiple challenges they set off at all levels of social interaction in the world. I like very much Guattari’s way of conceiving social “assemblages” with their multiple dimensions. The conception itself draws me on into the world, encourages me to experiment. I can’t say I really read much Badiou – let alone Zizek!
best, Brian Holmes
March 4, 2008 at 1:02 am
Brian, the fact that you see this discussion as a “diatribe” against Guattari indicates that you’ve misread the original post and the subsequent comments. The whole point was that, contrary to Badiou’s diatribes against Deleuze and Guattari, we here find an example of Guattari championing subject-groups that aim at the transformation of situations. The implicit thesis lurking in the background of this post is that Deleuze and Guattari offer us a more adequate ontology for the conceptualization of these processes.
March 5, 2008 at 12:57 am
No no, I certainly didn’t see it as a diatribe “against” Guattari, I was just amused how the quote (one I happen to be very interested in right now) seemed to totally disappear, as though any excuse were enough to start talking about the latest Badiou-Zizek-Ranciere or whatever. It’s just that I often find theoretical discussions very self-referential, rather faddish, really. So I was trying to point toward a world of situations out there which, in the best of cases, ideas can give some grip on, some way deeper into, or around, or over. Because after all, those “subject groups” only matter in a social world of some kind, where struggles make ripples or waves or tears or joy in other people’s affects… But of course, maybe I totally missed the ways you all were trying to get at exactly that, maybe I misread the whole thing. A blog is a very disjointed group, it’s tough to feel your way through it, that’s a general social problem and not one of any single person’s making.
best, BH