So far we have only abstract oppositions for thinking the space of the political. By “abstract opposition” I have in mind an opposition where the terms are conceived as existing independent of one another, apart from one another. As Blah-feme points out, we suppose that there are two options: agency which is free and ubiquitous subjectivity which is enslaved. On the one side, a free and autonomous subject, unmediated by any social, linguistic, technological, or economic relation. On the other side, an ego completely formed and produced by the social system as an instance of a Borg collective. That is, an ego’s being that is so distributed that its very thoughts are simply iterations of the collective, global network where we immediately move to action in response to the proper stimulus. All the women at Heathrow were wearing tall leather boots. I return and all the women here are wearing precisely the same boots. No doubt they all believe they made an absolutely unique decision based on their own unique, singular, and absolutely individual aesthetic taste.
The image of a fly caught in a web comes to mind… But not just a fly caught in a web. Rather a fly that has itself been produced by the web. There is a whole genre of theory premised on such an idea: Bourdieu, Foucault, perhaps Althusser and Butler. The anxiety is that the fly never existed independently of the web to begin with; not in any meaningful sense, anyway.
If the fly never existed existed independently of the web, then there can be no question of overcoming alienation as there never was an origin, a substance, an essence, that was then subsequently alienated. There can be no talk here of recuperating a “species-being” that we are at our core but in alienated form. There can be no return if there is no destination to which to return. The fly was never outside the web or prior to the web.
But if the fly is nothing but folds or weavings of the web, a product or creation of the web in the robust sense that an origami bird is not other than the paper out of which it is made but is itself continuous with that paper as a topological variation of its substance, then how can creations of the fly be anything but creations, foldings, weavings of the web of social relations? That is, how can they be anything but ways of strengthening the web. The content might change through the fly’s foldings and weavings of the threads of the web, yet the form remains the same: the material out of which the content is woven remains that of a spider’s web. Quicksand. The more the fly struggles the deeper it is pulled, the more it is entangled. We thus get another genre of theory: Sartre, Badiou, Ranciere, Zizek, various appropriations of Lacan. Here it is always a matter of conceiving a void place that is unmediated by the social system, that is not touched by the web, that would function as a point of leverage– Archimedes said that the entire world could be moved with one fixed point and a lever –that would allow a space of autonomy and freedom from which to challenge the web.
Yet ontologically a subtraction or non-mediated point is untenable or a bit of wishful thinking. The real question ought to be drawn from judo: how can web be used against itself?
Larval Subjects . 
December 14, 2007 at 12:02 am
I don’t know that Ranciere would accept that read (at any rate, I don’t) of his work, as looking for “a void place that is unmediated;” I read him as starting from examples, from which the theory is the derived. That is, I think, at least what happened in his work biographically following the break from Althusser. That speaks to me much more than use-the-web-against-itself thing, to be honest. On that, in terms of the opening of this post, it strikes me that your ending embraces one side of an absract opposition rather than getting out of the opposition.
take care,
Nate
December 14, 2007 at 1:15 am
What happens if we follow your metaphorical scheme a little more closely, Sinthome, and inquire into the weaving of the web? That is to say (with a rather pronounced transcendental accent, perhaps), if the web produces the fly, and the web is produced by the spider, why are we not dealing with an alienated species being?
if the essence of the spider is expressed by the ensnared fly, is this not precisely Marx’s (early) conception of species being and alienation? Is it not also the case, then, that rather than struggling to free the insect, we need to equally see ourselves as predators, and consume what is properly ours? Does the problem remain if we recognize that we’re actually at home in our web?
In any event though, it would seem that in omitting the eight-eyed position in your parable, you’ve allowed for a void yourself: the transcendental unity of apperception, which is felt only in the intensity of calling its products ‘mine’– the predator itself.
Might it not be, then, that the ontological problems raised by Zizek, Badiou, etc. actually amount to a unproductive flattening out, a nihilistic unfolding of ‘species-being’ rather than allowing for — or forcing — the confrontation between what we are and what we’ve made? Are we really hollow men, voided subjects, origami flies, or have we successfully made ourselves at home?
cheers
December 14, 2007 at 1:27 am
That’s possible with Ranciere. I’m primarily familiar with Disagreement. What I’m referring to specifically is his talk of the “part of no part”, which I think has strong affinities with Badiou. As in the case of Badiou, there’s a search here for something that isn’t counted by what Badiou calls the encyclopedia of a situation and what Ranciere calls the “police”, which I take to be crypto-language for the unmediated or something outside the system. Thus, while it arises from the situation (in Badiou’s language) it is curiously outside the situation.
I hope I’m not opting for one side of the opposition so much as trying to undermine the opposition altogether. I don’t have very well developed language to describe what I’m trying to think about. The question then would be somewhat close to N.Pepperell’s and Marx– insofar as I understand Marx –of determining not how we can find an outside– an Archimedian point from which the entire world could be leveraged (where could such a point exist in an infinite, constantly moving universe) –but rather how a situation is itself capable of producing emancipatory potentials out of the tensions and antagonisms of the system itself.
December 14, 2007 at 1:34 am
Alexei, I’m a little unclear as to just where you’re seeing the species-being. By “species-being” I have in mind something like an unchanging human nature. I take it that one of Marx’s key theses– traces of which can even be found in the earlier humanist writings –is that there is no human nature in itself, but rather human being is always a product of the social milieu out of which it is produced or individuated. This would be in contrast to an idealist conception that posits an unchanging substance of the human that is invariant in all possible historical settings… To give a very vulgar example, something like the Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus thesis that argues that men and women have an invariant essence for all times and places. If we claim, by contrast, that the being of a being is not an invariant form underlying changes but something individuated in and through how it resolves its milieu, the question of emancipation changes, I think, dramatically, as we can no longer talk about the liberation of an essence that is alienated from itself.
Can we imagine a spider spun by its web that spins the web and the fly?
December 14, 2007 at 1:43 am
Alexei, I find your point about the weaving of the web especially interesting insofar as I think one of the key “transcendental illusions” of social theory is the sort of belief that there is a center of control or agency orchestrating the system. Negri and Hardt put this point beautifully in another context when they write:
In short, social systems ought not be thought as controlled by some central agency, but rather as emergent systems from all sorts of micro-processes like the functioning of a slime-mold as depicted in the graphic at the top of this blog. The spider, then, would be cut out of such an account. The system both weaves itself and is woven by its elements… A very difficult thing to think, I think.
December 14, 2007 at 7:02 am
It would seem that there’s a slight and unnecessary terminological dissonance between how you and I conceive of Species-being. But first things first: Within the confines of your parable, I tried to raise the possibility that the fly and the web express the species being of the spider, though I suppose there’s something of a symmetrical relation here. So it could go the other way….
Now, as I understand Marx, there’s nothing static about species-being (at least as he outlines the concept in the Paris Manuscripts — and now that I think of it, I don’t believe he uses the term in German Ideology; if I recall correctly, he and Engels stick with ‘consciousness’). As our technical mastery over ‘nature’ changes so does our potential. Sticking with the evolutionary connotations of the term, species-being evolves in relation to our environment (although Marx’s conception seems to imply that such an evolution is cumulative and transitive, a progression; indeed, it’s the growing disparity between the wealth and potential of the species and the poverty and determination of the individual that’s supposed to make ‘revolution’ possible).
Hopefully the above clarifies things a little. Or, at least hazily points to where any possible points of contention between us may actually reside. For my part, I agree that ’emancipation’ can’t be conceived in transcendental terms — this approach merely engenders an infinite, and therefore impotent striving, or a democrat conscience that rests easy in its own beautiful intentions.
Though I often wear a transcendental hat, I am by no means a Kantian. I do worry, however, that the transcendental illusion you mentioned cannot be compensated for or overcome by the brash application of Reason’s transcendent Ideas
IN fact, I think you’re right to point out that (neo)Kantianism is (in part) responsible for the state of some of the dead ends in the more sociologically inspired theoretical developments. I never managed to finish it, but Gillian Rose has an excellent book that argues precisely this called, Hegel contra Sociology
but I’m not convinced that the metaphors/concepts of ensnarement or the systems-theoretic notions of equilibrium and emergence (i.e. the slime mold) are more helpful.
The latter option implies a teleological development (as evidenced by the idea that,”The system both weaves itself and is woven by its elements” — i.e. Telos and teleology intermingle and co-determine one another) which merely expands the plausible frame for what is to be considered ‘subject’ (be it god, Multitude, Nature, state apparatuses, etc) without effectively changing, let alone answering the question: how do we change our situation?
It’s precisely the evacuation of individual agency, however thinly conceived, by means of an ever widening attempt to delineate the systemic interactions among parts that I take to be responsible for theoretical pessimism. despite all of Spinoza’s radicalism, for instance, he remains a quietist: act in harmony with your conatus, as it has indviduated itself within god, or nature!
But perhaps I’m rambling now — so I should leave off; have I clarifies things a little?
December 14, 2007 at 7:36 am
Alexei, I think that clarifies a lot. I think there are tendencies in earlier Marx that move in both directions and that there were subsequent appropriations of his work (very vulgar appropriations) that conceived “species-being” in essentialist terms. My reading, like yours, would tend in the direction of instead seeing Marx as developing a particular theory of social individuation that doesn’t presuppose such an essentialism of human nature. Consequently, I would say that not only does our potential change, but our nature changes as well. I am not sure where you’re seeing teleology in the notion I’ve proposed. I think the value of concepts such as assemblages lies in loosening certain very hardened notions of structure that treat structures as akin to forms that overdetermine everything else by emphasizing the manning in which systems must produce and reproduce themselves. It could be that this problematic is specific to French philosophy and certain appropriations of structuralism that resonate differently when coming from the context of critical theory and post-Kantian German idealism. I begin from the premise that individuals are always individuated in a field of relations, so I would see the sort of individual you seem to be proposing as a sort of mystification or romantic mythology that ignores how individuals are produced. I do not, however, see this as being at odds with the possibility of agency. I think part of the problem is that these questions are often posed at such a level of abstraction that we end up pushing notions like “individual”, “system”, “social relation”, etc., around as so many “notions” like Plato pushing about notions like the Same, Other, One, etc., in the Parmenides. As I think Nate was rightly alluding to with respect to Ranciere, a different story begins to emerge when we look at concrete situations where change began to take place and ask ourselves why an agency other than the simple social reproduction of assemblage occurred at these particular points in time, in these geographic locals. In drawing on the metaphor of the slime mold, it is not notions of equilibrium that I find particularly important– which would doom us to a sort of fatalism without any possibility of unity –but rather the idea of a unity and disunity without centralized control and where elements become qualitatively different when they enter into relation and yet also exist independently for much of their existence. Minimally, I think, any transformational social theory requires a theory of the emergence of new collectives that are not simply iterations of dominant tendencies within the social system. Part of the problem I think is we look to extant collectives, reify them, and then ask how change is possible without looking at emerging tendencies in their becoming.
December 14, 2007 at 7:56 am
It might be that I’m making a very vulgar and obvious point: We create all sorts of problems for ourselves by treating structure and system as a substance or thing that exists ontologically in its own right, failing to see that structure exists only in so far as it is performed or enacted by the agents within structure. Now I don’t want to be misunderstood. I am not suggesting that an individual can simply wave his hand and say “voila! I resolve to cease performing structure!” I may indeed cease performing or enacting structure, yet my neighbors continue to do so and in response to my lack of enactment feedback takes place that can range from anything to a quizzical look and the mild judgment that “He’s just a foreigner or eccentric”, to the far more serious matters of murder, persecution, or incarceration. What’s important is that structures exist only in and through these enactments in assemblages: the organization of these assemblages can be difference, have been different, and never function in the smooth manner of an Apollonian mathematical code like the workings through of an input/output machine in a algorithm. The question then becomes how tendencies can be maximized in these fuzzy aggregates that can come to transform that organization itself. Again, some of these questions might very well be context specific to certain reifications and ontologizations of structure in French thought. This would be an example of what I have in mind:
Again, my background in Frankfurt school critical theory is very limited, though growing, so I sense that we’re working here with different vocabularies and problematics where bridges– not translation keys –need to be built that are attentive to the specific field of historical problems (not theoretical problems) and constellations out of which these respective concepts and problematics have grown. It’s difficult for me, for instance, to put much stock in blanket statements about what is and is not helpful when concepts have particular origins and spaces of individuation and histories from whence they come and with respect to which they function as tools or responses, i.e., such statements seem to implicitly assume a sort of generality of problems where concepts can be causally tried on or not tried on as fitting or not fitting, to problems that are treated as ahistorical and decontextualized (not unlike the Anglo-American idea of The Problems of Philosophy, as if there were a set body of problems that philosophers then try to have a crack at). It doesn’t make much sense to me to say that the Aboriginal didgeridoo is a better or worse solution to the problem of music or that there is even a problem of music, than the violin, nor that a chimpanzee is a better solution to a jungle than a snake. Concepts, I think, should be thought of in similar terms.
December 14, 2007 at 5:32 pm
Hi Larval,
I’m afraid you are making a slightly vulgar and obvious point. It’s not really true that “So far we have only abstract oppositions for thinking the space of the political.” You may not mean to, but you make it sound as though no-one has approached this problem effectively yet. Your first problem is, “the space of the political” is an abstraction. It won’t be easy to move it towards concretion, especially because you remain resolutely abstract in your analysis. The opposition part is also a little mistaken: the history of political thought has never dealt in oppositions “where the terms are conceived as existing independent of one another.” Political thought has pretty much always dealt in dialectics, and since Marx and Derrida, we have had very effective deconstructions of the Hegelian dialectic. Plus dialectics can be pretty useful for getting out of the abstract. Most of all, I think you should be wary of letting your metaphors develop lives of their own. Sustaining a figuration is not the same as sustaining an analysis — the metaphor can develop wings of its own and fly away.
December 14, 2007 at 10:02 pm
Some nice metaphors woven through this discussion – these things are difficult to express.
Alexei – Hopefully this won’t be confusing – I just wanted to pick up on a couple of your points from various comments above.
It’s clever to seize the predator image out of the original metaphor, although I would take it that Sinthome wasn’t intending to imply that subjects are external to the web, producing it at the distance that the spider might be seen to produce the web. Your predator image, though, does permit a thematisation of overcoming alienation – consuming what is ours – that hits on some aspects of what I see in Marx’s critique. In some senses, and recognising the limits of these sorts of metaphors, he seems to understand the overcoming of alienation in this way – as the actualisation of a potential to seize consciously, what previously we had only produced unintentionally and in a form where we were passively “produced” by our own productions. Of course, in saying this, I’m taking your metaphoric sense in a slightly different sense that perhaps you meant it – not positing a kind of transcendental unity of apperception, but just appreciating the potential to thematise a certain active relationship of socialised subjects to their conditions of socialisation.
I wouldn’t myself reach for notions of species being, although it’s probably not unfair to do so, and certainly these notions are important to Marx’s early conceptions of critique. I would tend to take this concept as shifting somewhat in later works, so that Marx begins to consider why something like species being might become possible – in other words, not simply how this being might change over time, as a constant shell filled with new contents, but why a concept at that level of generality might be generated as a kind of real abstraction (which doesn’t mean that there can’t be critical kickback in such a concept, only that the level of historicisation becomes more fundamental). I’m far from an expert on the evolution of this and related concepts in Marx’s work, though.
On the issue of whether we’ve “made ourselves at home” – and apologies if I’m misunderstanding what you were trying to thematise here: I tend to take a Benjaminian position on this: revolutionary subjects are those who have made themselves at home, by engaging in actions that attempt to render our history citable in all its moments, recognising the potentials we have constituted in the present – the potentials that arouse envy in us precisely because they are possible – and attempting to realise these potentials, rather than remaining satisfied with the partial realisations we collectively limit ourselves to at the present time.
On the issue of telos: I’m not certain that Sinthome’s metaphor can really be spun in a teleological direction – a notion of telos would seem to imply some sort of unitary centre to social reproduction – this would, I would think, be exactly the conception of social reproduction that is being challenged here, as it then suggests the need to leap outside the social in order to speak about conditions of possibility for transformation. Given Sinthome’s emphasis on assemblages and constellations, I would suspect he’s aiming for a less self-identical understanding of the social.
Personally, I do take Marx to be making an argument about the teleology of capitalism – not in the sense that he understands capitalism to culminate in some particular end point, but in the sense that he defines it in terms of a trajectory of transformation that, nevertheless, continues to reproduce the same social “essence”. Marx labels this essence “value”, ironically appropriating the political economic term for a concept he thinks is not related in any intrinsic way to “economics” at all.
This telos, though, is explicitly a form of domination – something with which we need to break, in order to overcome capitalism. Again, Benjamin is very sensitive to these elements in Marx – speaking of revolution in terms of the break with “progress”, etc.
At the same time – and, importantly, for how critique is conceptualised within this framework – this telos isn’t the only thing going on, isn’t the only “product”, of the process of social reproduction. Instead, social reproduction, in the process of reproducing value, also generates and reproduces determinate potentials that point beyond value. The non-unitary character of social reproduction therefore generates a complex history and a multifaceted society, characterised by conflicting potentials that cannot be fully realised, so long as they remain coupled to the reproduction of capitalism.
Sinthome needn’t be committed to these sorts of points, however. By itself, there is no reason to assume that a claim that a “system both weaves itself and is woven by its elements” implies a teleological conception: this would only follow, I think, if coupled to some sort of claim that what is woven has a single centre – a claim that I suspect would be harder to push with Sinthome’s work than with my own, since I actually am trying to talk about a kind of teleology (albeit one that is produced, contingent, transformable – and not the only thing that I understand to be happening socially), whereas I’m not sure that Sinthome is committed to these sorts of claims on any level, but is rather speaking at (I think) a higher level of abstraction here.
December 14, 2007 at 11:26 pm
Gee Derek, do you now? Why don’t you say what you really think! I am speaking to something that come up again and again in discussions surrounding the political that occur in the blogosphere, so I take it that it is not all that obvious or self-evident. I provide a couple examples in the thread and others could be given. We are told that there must either be some free agency or complete determination, or in many instances that there is no agency whatsoever. That is an abstract opposition. Second, it is simply untrue that “the history of political thought has never dealt in oppositions “where the terms are conceived as existing independent of one another.” Political thought has pretty much always dealt in dialectics.” I am not sure how you could possibly arrive at such a sweeping generalization, yet I think we can find a whole plethora of examples of non-dialectical political thought both within academic political thought itself, and outside in various forms of political practice as well. Thanks for the observations though.
December 15, 2007 at 9:28 am
LS,
On the whole, I’m deeply sympathetic to the way you pose your final question. In literary criticism, it seems to me that one finds instances of precisely that struggle — the web unweaving itself — everywhere. In Dostoevsky, how can Christianity overcome what Christianity has become? In James, how can the American become something finer than himself without becoming European? In Bataille, how can the very abjection and lostness of the modern condition produce transcendence? One is reminded of the gorgeous final sentence of Chekhov’s short story: “the hardest and most difficult part was just beginning.”
A quick observation about the leather boots: I’m not entirely comfortable relegating unawareness to the world of fashion. Certainly, there are lots of cases where people following trends perceive themselves to be acting “autonomously.” But, first of all, just because something is shared or has a social context doesn’t make it inauthentic. I have a black leather jacket, which is of course a bit corny, but it’s also a reasonably satisfying expressive compromise.
My sense is that plenty of people realize that they are working with a limited, socially determined palette when they make fashion decisions. In a sense, most people are actually saner about fashion, towards which they maintain a certain amount of irony, then they are about other opinions. For example, academic opinion about The Wire or National Public Radio is so standardized that it’s honestly a bit frightening. Likewise the opinion that Foucault’s early work is embarrassingly utopian, a hiccup of the sixties before he really got rigorous.
Finally not everything must be overcome all at once. Boots, which give people so much joy, are perhaps an excellent example. So are the pleasures of the table amidst the bleakly comic landscape of Dead Souls. The trouble with the Borg or zombie metaphor is that it decontextualizes alienation, even if it it does enable us to recognize our alienation that much more clearly. The social world is not merely a locus of oppression. It is also the sum of our daily pleasures, our friendships and families and dalliances.
We are permanent voyeurs of Nietzsche’s descent into madness, as he denied himself Wagner, then tried to deny himself all discourses of morality, and then subjectivity, and then the grammar of subjectivity, and so on. Ultimately, he is almost a hero of extreme metaphysical allergy, and yet his writing shares joyously in so much old language of chivalry and conquest that — precisely because it is joyous — it isn’t free, and it reaches us. We might look to Heidegger here, on what else remains invisibly “ready-to-hand” while our consciousness is directly focused on this or that local task of freedom.
December 15, 2007 at 2:43 pm
(I’m always amazed by the length of NP’s responses! How do you do that, N, in these little boxes!?)
Sinthome, thank you very much for the clarifications; indeed, you and I are approaching similar sets of problem spaces from different traditions, I think. And I think you’re right to point out that,
IN all, I guess that I’m still very skeptical about the “French” or “Poststructuralist” response: I don’t think, for instance, that the term ‘assemblage’ differs all that much from ‘form,’ though, to be sure, it helps to crack a calcified understanding of the former one, which is the result of vulgar thinking (there is nothing essential to ‘form’ which would necessitate that we understand it in a purely hypotactic sense, a sense that organizes and subordinates according to a single logic). My experience with distinct terminologies has always been that people fight long and hard about the ‘name’ of a concept, without really thinking too hard about its senses.
And I agree that we need to seriously consider the life — or history — of concepts, rather than simply opposing one set to another (which is typically a fruitless and polarizing gesture). But when you say,
I’m a little reluctant to agree. Here’s why: (1) the juxtaposition of evolutionary problems with specifically human ones is not accurate. It’s impossible to think of problems be solved by evolution, without some kind of anthropomism, an injection of specifically human qualities from the outside. I don’t think the same problem arises within the case of music. Human Problems, like concepts have histories and they don’t remain the same. So, It may be the case that an instrument is now useless. And since the conception of music has changed, it’s entirely acceptable to say that the didgeridoo is more or less useless given its limitations (its a rhythmic instrument that plays one note, if i remember correctly; and hence cannot produce harmonies and dissonances) and how those limitations ‘fit’ within the context of the present tasks of music. Simply put, it’s equally fatal to be to liberal with “the problems of philosophy” as it is to hypostaize “the problem of philosophy,” just as it is equally fatal to hypostatize or be too liberal with concepts (Badiou strikes me, for example, as someone who has hypostatized the problems of philosophy).
NP — I think you’ve got exactly what I intended by the image of the spider. The transcendental motif, however, is not so alien to this conception: Think of the way in which Lukacs discussion class concsiousness in terms that structurally mimic Transcendental Unity of apperception in his Class consciousness essay (i.e. as the categorial parsing of the possibilities of experience that produce certain kinds of antinomical relations, which are then subjected to an ideological restriction (an equivalent of Kant’s solution to the transcendental dialectic). IN effect, Lukacs’ analysis emphasizes the paradoxical binarization of the Transcendental subject (bourgeois against proletariat) that manifests itself with the contradictions of society and stabilizes itself by ideologically normalizing the situation (curbing the speculative use of reason).
And yes, there is definitely a Benjaminian twinge to my perspective as Block put the matter,
.
As for teleology, let me say this: the telos of any dynamical system (the slime mold being one such example) is nothing other than equilibrium. Without it, you don’t get anything approximating ‘organization’ of assemblages. And it is indeed a kind of domination. My overwhelming concern about this kind of explanation is essentially its violent nature alongside the potential for category mistake (mixing various levels of explanations of various stances; I’m thinking here of Dennet’s work, and his stance stance, which you are familiar with from Brandom). The Slime mold is a violent battle with as many organisms being killed as are being reproduced. It’s movement is nothing but the emergence or expression of a food source capable of allowing new organisms to ‘be born’ while its tail dies off from starvation. It’s hardly an metaphor i would choose for anything social.
Here, I think I need to stress the notion of emergence: it’s a ‘product’ of the interactions amongst de-centered products. One doesn’t need a centre to speak of a telos. one needs only a series of denumerable interactions which produce a ‘rule governed’ tendency or ‘behaviour.’ to philosophically frame the issue, we need only think of how the telos of Science emerges for (late) Husserl out of the anonymous performances of researchers. It’s not a centralized operation, but it nevertheless norms a unified discipline, Science.
But I have to run now (I’m currently in Bucharest, and I need to get a few things done.) Cheers — and know that it’s always a pleasure to discuss things with You, NP, and Sinthome!
December 15, 2007 at 4:10 pm
‘Larval has written an interesting post about the interconnection of folding and unfolding, or what I understand as metamorphosis. I will not be able to do justice to the contents of the post…’
http://struggleswithphilosophy.blogspot.com/2007/12/political-ontology-living-in-web.html
December 15, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Alexie, hopefully you’ll forgive me if I take this with a grain of salt:
I haven’t seen much indication that you have deep familiarity with French thought, so it’s difficult to know how to take you on this. There’s nothing in your comments that could be responded to here beyond vague generalities. I tend to think it’s far more productive to see how these various traditions might resonate with one another in interesting ways. As far as I can tell, there’s no such thing as a “post-structuralist” response, because there’s no such thing as some unified post-structuralist philosophy, but rather a grab bag of very different orientations. Deleuze, for instance, is working from an entirely different ontological framework than Derrida, which doesn’t fit well with some of the more dominant tendencies in French thought following the 60s. It might be that I just have a tendency to look for parallels and points of resonance, but I’ve found that Deleuze resonates in a number of ways with Adorno– especially the Adorno of Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory –while also having a broader and more explicitly well developed ontology. In other words, my preference wouldn’t be to take sides– a practice I think I make clear in simultaneously drawing from Hegel, Lacan, Badiou, and Deleuze, among others in my own work (figures often seen at odds with one another) –but instead looking for productive resonances around the space of a problem. I apologize if I’m mischaracterizing your background here.
Maybe you could say more about this:
First, let me emphasize again that in the metaphor of the slime mold, it is not the dimension of equilibrium that I am focusing on or picking up. All analogies are imperfect, and this would be an imperfection of the slime mold analogy. For those who might be reading and unfamiliar with slime molds: slime molds live most of their lives as single cell organisms. Under certain environmental conditions– certain temperatures, I believe –these single cell organisms enter into an aggregate multi-cellular organisms that have characteristics of unified intentionality in the search for food, despite having no centralized control or brain. When these conditions change the single celled organisms return to their independent existence.
First, Alexei, how is it that you are using the term “teleology”? It seems to me that there’s a difference between a goal towards which something is moving– Husserl’s scientists –and an equilibrium. If I roll a marble in a bowl, that marble will roll down one side and up another, back and forth, until it settles at the bottom of the bowl. I would not describe the resting place at the bottom of the bowl as the teleology of this system or its goal. Similarly, I would not describe equilibriums of the sort belonging to the slime mold as being teleological… Unless you’re using the term “teleological” in some other way. That is, in the case of the slime mold, these are mechanical phenomena that are perfectly understandable in biochemical terms without having to introduce something as mysterious as teleology into the mix.
In thinking about social phenomena, I think the slime mold analogy fails on a couple of counts:
1. As you point out, there’s something very problematic about talk of equilibrium like a thermostat. With regard to social phenomena I do not think we can ignore disequilibriums as occasions of changes. A massive food shortage, for instance, can lead to significant changes in how people organize themselves and relate to one another. Unlike the slime mold, however, it does not seem to me that the social is always looking for a point of stable equilibrium.
2. It does not seem to me that social systems function mechanically in the way the slime mold behaves. The biochemistry of the slime mold spores coupled with temperature and moisture in the environment tells us exactly what we’ll get with slime molds: a “society” (in Whitehead’s language) or collection of slime molds that now function like a unified organism. No such clarity of outcome is clear in the case of human social relations.
3. In the slime mold analogy, the elements that make up the unified “society” (in Whitehead’s sense of the term), are qualitatively the same, whereas they are not in human group relations. One might exclaim “but they’re all human!” I think this is far too abstract and is precisely what I’d like to avoid. Rather, humans always emerge in a complex milieu of individuation economically, geographically, culturally, and in terms of life experiences. These differences should not be glossed over such that we’re led to positing a human essence that says we’re all alike as a starting point. Maybe the failure of the analogy could be put this way: The slime molds secret a chemical trace to which other slimes molds respond that functions univocally as a rallying call for the formation of an aggregate. Persons, by contrast, secret signs that are polyvocal and heterogeneous, and which are thus without the isomorphism of the mechanical processes of the slime molds. We thus get a qualitatively different set of questions where human collectives are concerned: how, out of heterogeneous elements, individuated in very different ways, do we get the formation of new aggregates?
I think the productive aspects of the slime mold analogy or metaphor are as follows:
1. The movement from a dispersed multitude to some sort of new unity or collective. This could be a multitude of individuals or a multitude of groups or a combination of both. I’ll take the so-called “theory blogosphere” as an example. Here you have all these people sitting in coffee shops, pubs, offices, studies, etc., engaged in their own researches and questions that decide to throw up a blog one day. When I first began blogging nearly two years ago, I was just a college professor looking for some anonymous place where I might work through underdeveloped ideas in an anonymous fashion. I didn’t expect that I would get a readership or even engage with others very much. In fact, part of the reason I chose this medium is that I had come to be bothered with limitations I encountered on academic discussion lists where you seem hemmed in by discussing only the thinkers the list is devoted to and where discussion seems often unproductive.
Something very different happened. Blogs begin to link to one another, forming networks and relations. Cross-blog discussions ensue. Now I think one of the most interesting aspects of these cross-blog discussions is that often those engaged in these discussions have very different theoretical and disciplinary backgrounds. Thus, for example, N.Pepperell comes from an entirely different tradition than I come from. Spurious works a good deal with Heidegger and Levinas, among others. Jodi Dean works with a Lacan different than my clinically oriented Lacan. Nate knows more about Marx and all things Marxist than I’ll probably ever know. Etc. And then there’s the fact that all of these participants are coming from different backgrounds: philosophers, educators, artists, musicians, activists, political scientists, writers, homemakers, stockbrokers, etc. So on the one hand these cross-blog discussions encounter a problem. How to dialogue within such a heterogeneous space? Already, if you wish to participate in dialogue, you are detached, as it were, from your home soil as you now have to begin form relations with foreign territories that rebound back on your theoretical framework modifying it. More interestingly yet, shared problematics and questions begin to emerge across the different blogs, that have collectivity-forming results. Now a theoretical space begins to emerge that isn’t the theoretical space of the original research orientation, but of the cross-blog discussions themselves. People pound away at questions and issues together. Concepts, consensuses (often unrecognized or in the background) and norms begin to emerge. All of this begins to rebound back on the original theoretical spaces, affecting publications and presentations in the outside world. So I guess, something like new agents are formed or individuated through such encounters. There’s nothing centralized about any of this, nothing programmatic or manifesto like, just an encounter. Here I think the slime mold analogy works well.
2. The other productive aspect of the slime mold analogy is also one of its problems: the slime-molds enter into an assemblage under certain crisis conditions. In what way can we see social aggregates forming under crisis conditions? The political blogosphere in the United States is interesting in this regard. I know a number of people take a dim view of blogs such as Dailykos, Americablog, etc. However, regardless of their politics, the story of how they emerged and the impact they’ve had on American politics is interesting as a case study. These blogs emerged in a situation where America had gone to war and where media consolidation had led to very one sided, slanted reporting where a number of people felt as if they weren’t being represented. In America following 9-11, many critics of the administration felt that they were alone in their criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and changes being made with respect to civil liberties, etc. They felt there was something wrong with them as their families, co-workers, and mainstream media all spoke glowingly of these things. Blogs began to emerge where some isolated individual might anonymously air his or her concerns about decisions that were being made. Amazingly, these blogs literally exploded, creating vibrant and often contentious communities. These communities began to develop norms and shared agendas (very loosely shared and anarchic), that were able to organize activists and raise money, that then rebounded back on the mainstream media systems and politicians in significant ways. They’ve played a major role in shifting the content of reporting in the United States in the last few years.
Again, it was a crisis point that led to the formation of these collectivities. The crisis point(s) didn’t function as an equilibrium producing mechanism– indeed, it introduced all sorts of disequilibriums into the social sphere in the States –but was a catalyst for the formation of collectivities. There was nothing homogeneous about the persons that entered into these assemblages. They came from all walks of life, of varying degrees of political sophistication, with very different jobs, economic backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds, and very different concerns. So a sort of fuzzy aggregate formed out of these heterogeneous multitudes. Again, I think the slime mold is an apt metaphor for this and invites us to look at tensions, frictions, and points of antagonism around which new identities might be individuated departing from reified and self-reproducing identities and where new agencies might be emerging.
Perhaps you could say more vis a vis your points about domination here. Are you looking for a form of agency free of all domination and conflict?
I’ve babbled on long enough. Time to get back to marking.
December 16, 2007 at 12:47 am
Wow, that’s a long, and cogent response! Hopefully I can do justice to some of the issues you’ve raised, Sinthome. First off, please do take everything I say about french philosophy after about 1970 with a generous amount of salt. As you note, I don’t have a deep familiarity with it, which is to say that I haven’t studied it in any rigorous way; to make matters worse, I truly don’t “get” Lacan. But I have read most of the writers to whom you’ve referred.
Now, if I had to elucidate my remark about “poststructuralist thought” (for which the scare quotes are essential), I would start with the following motto: extend a text into context, until the latter can no longer account for/support/etc. the emphasis being placed on it, then claim something new. In this respect I think that Deleuze, Badiou, and Derrida are similar, even if their manners of extending a text and proceeding afterwards (rhizomatics, set-theoretical operations, Il n’y a rien hors de le texte) differ.
My dissatisfaction stems from my perception that in all of these approaches the concrete and individual elements or interests from which the analysis or investigation proceed disappear in favour of something conceptual, generic, or merely undecidable. And I take this disappearance to be extremely problematic.
But I suppose that these remarks are really an aside, since I’m not well versed enough to argue critically about French thought with you. And, in any event, I agree with you: points of contact or resonances are much more fertile sites of investigation than criticizing superficial dissimilarities. So If I’ve missed the boat with French thought, then please tell me.
Let’s move on to something I can say something about: teleology.
I think I have a rather straightforward understanding of the terms involved. By telos, I understand that for the sake of which an action occurs. By teleology, I understand the ‘logic’ informing the endeavour, i.e. the organizing functions which permit certain ‘behaviours,’reinforce some, and disincline others, and which are in force and at play within a given topos.
The fact that the slime mold can be explained in causal, biochemical terms doesn’t change the fact that the “logic” we’ve used to catalog its behaviour presupposes certain ‘ends’ (food and survival being two easy examples), and certain modes of attaining these ends. My sense is that we sometimes mask this fact, by appealing to deterministic laws, and then think we’ve eliminated the problem. When it comes to biological examples, I not so sure we’ve always succeeded.
Anyway, with respect to systems, the goal is always equilibrium — though it must be noted that equilibrium should not be understood in the sense of rest, but rather as the optimum distribution of forces such that a stable ‘state’ within the system is reached (we might want to think of this as a state capable of indefinitely reproducing the system itself). Now, since it makes no difference whether we take a mechanical system or an organic one for an example (a dynamical system is a dynamical system, no matter its instantiation), let me illlustrate by way of the Watt Governor: here, the governor’s telos is to produce a certain equilibrium, a constant steam pressure for powering a turbine. The hotter the furnace, the more water boils; the more the water boils, the faster the governor spins; the faster the governor spine, the wider the cooling valves open; the wider the cooling valves, the cooler the water gets. You get the picture. What’s important is that there’s no brain performing any calculations, and the whole process is massively decentralized. But the goal remains an equilibrium of the system as a whole. Simply put, there’s no such thing as dissequilibrium or tension for a system, there’s only ‘input’ and end-state.
Now, what differentiates the kind of teleology involved in a dynamical system, and the kind of teleology involved in Husserl’s project is precisely what the system lacks: a brain. Or, more precisely, self-consciousness — the ability to not remain anonymous. Within a system no such possibility really exists, I think. No matter how interpolated we are, the system never gets ‘deep enough,’ so to speak (Hegel’s analyses of Antigone and the Slave are, in part, designed to show this, and to show that it’s precisely the generation of self-consciousness out of the system, that legitimates while surpassing the system itself)
Admittedly, I think the productive elements you mentioned of the slime mold analogy are extraordinarily useful and well suited to our purposes. My sole worry remains, however, that analogy — what Blumenberg once called the realism of metaphor — obscures more than it reveals. IN particular, while you’ve noted all of the organisational potential, you’ve also downplayed the homogenizing effects; you’ve also left out how the multitudes thus created gain, say, political weight — how they actually affect change, rather than merely consuming what another system has produced. And, finally, I’m worried that the more intellectual(ized) examples also downplay or undercut the very real, de-individualizing (I would say de-humanizing, but I would lose generality) losses — death — involved in the constant reproduction of the system. Most of these you’ve noted yourself, so I won’t belabour the point. It’s just that I think it’s very easy to model human interactions on ‘academic behaviour.’ take for instance Habermas’ procedural democratic theory: it operates like a university. And, in the end, I’m worried that such an idealization doesn’t actually do justice to the phenomena it tries to understand.
All this to say: I’m not advocating some absurdly utopian idea of a coerceionless society, a society absolutely free from domination and control. But I don’t think we should throw ourselves into the opposite extreme either. Like Hegel, I guess, the difference that makes a difference for me
is that we sit on both sides of a self-imposed limit. It’s why we worry about politics, morality, and art, whereas slime molds and watt governors don’t.
Always a pleasure
December 16, 2007 at 10:19 pm
I must say that it’s a bit disconcerting to find Skinnerian behaviorism alive and well in such a place in the blogosphere but, as far as I can, the view of human nature presented here is pretty much what Skinner (and Watson before him) believed, that the environment determines our behavior. I don’t for a minute believe that myself, but I really don’t want to engage that question here.
But, if you’re going to summon an example of emergent behavior, why not the human brain rather than the slime mold? Neurons are living entities, each seeking nutrients and so forth in a complex meshwork of other cells. Or, if you will, think of the brain as a hive of buzzing bees, each going about its life, but all of them physically coupled to other bees. There’s your Borg collective.
And it exists prior to interaction with others.
December 17, 2007 at 12:09 am
It is odd to jump from the thesis that persons are individuated within a field to the conclusion of Skinnerian behaviourism, but to each their own. I don’t for a minute believe that myself. You’re really making the claim that it makes entirely no difference whether someone develops in a medieval feudal society, an industrial factory context, a modern digitized environment, a hunter-gatherer context, etc? Pointing out that these milieus of individuation play an important role in embodiment, affect, and forms of consciousness does not entail something like Skinnerian operant conditioning, unless one is working with extreme abstractions in thinking about human development or very dull distinctions. This would be an instance of the sort of abstract opposition I talk about at the very beginning.
December 17, 2007 at 2:08 am
You’re really making the claim that it makes entirely no difference whether someone develops in a medieval feudal society, an industrial factory context, a modern digitized environment, a hunter-gatherer context, etc?
I’m not making that claim at all. But you don’t seem to believe that there is anything but context, that the individual is but a passive reflex of external circumstances — the web. That’s certainly consistent with Skinner.
December 17, 2007 at 2:31 am
No, this is not a claim that I advocate. For example, I believe that there is DNA and basic human physiology among any number of other things; however, I think that these things will manifest themselves very differently depending on the environment in which they develop. The issue would be one of thinking the interrelationship of these dimensions as they unfold, rather than treating one or the other as dominant and unchanging. It’s a difficult thing to put into words so I can see how my language might be misleading.
My favorite example comes from an anthropologist friend of mine. Growing up his father was a high ranking official with the U.S. State Department and they lived all over the world. His mother, an avid gardener, brought green bell pepper seeds with them to Africa when they moved there. The first generation of peppers were exactly what you’d expect. However, with the second generation they got very tiny peppers that were an orange/red color and very spicy to taste. The genetics of the peppers were the same, but phenotypically they got very different peppers. Were the peppers “determined” by their environment? To say they were would be to posit too strong a notion of causality, suggesting unilateral causation. The genes certainly contributed something, yet were actualized in a different way as a result of interactions with this new environment. Skinner is problematic precisely because, as you point out, he treats the body as this passive quivering mass that contributes nothing of its own to the stimuli it receives. The story is far more complex than that and I certainly would not deny that subjects can take a reflexive relation to stimuli. One of my key claims developed on this blog and elsewhere is that affects and percepts are actively produced (rather than passive givens), which is a thesis entirely foreign to anything we find in Skinnerianism. You might consult Suan Oyama’s The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution, for a good example of a story I’d largely accept in the domain of genetics.
I think that we often have a very difficult time thinking what is between, which is what I’m trying to work through. We always choose one side of the equation. For instance, some say genetics determines the nature of the person, failing to recognizing genetic processes in development with respect to an environment. Then we want to say that environment determines everything, failing to recognize the role that genetics play. Or we say that everything results from the activity of a sovereign subjects (perhaps a version of Sartreanism), failing to see the role that being-in-the-world and the social play in the formation of the subject. Or we say that the social world determines everything (certain versions of Foucault– especially in Discipline and Punish –or certain versions of Marx), failing to see the role that individuals play in these milieus. What I’m trying to look at is this between that is irreducible to either of the poles.
December 17, 2007 at 2:56 am
Yes, thinking between IS difficult. I’m not sure it can be done without explicit models. Qualitative reasoning tends to get driven to polar extremes and then gets stuck.
Given that we have a non-trivial biological nature why not start there; our biological human nature underlies all social arrangements but that does not totally determine them. The processes and structures of human society are under-determined by human biology; hence we share the same biological nature, but live according to different conventions, etc. From there one could begin crafting an argument that our biological nature is a potential source of resistance to grindingly oppressive social circumstances; our biology is a potential source of liberation. I’ve not tried to work out such an argument, but I’m sure it can be done, though such an argument (or family of arguments) must necessarily be speculative.
December 17, 2007 at 3:08 am
I’ve tended to find socio- and psycho-biology tremendously suspect in my various encounters with it. First, my experience is that sociobiologists tend to have a very poor background in ethnography. As a result of this lack of ethnographical and historical knowledge, they tend to universal cultural practices belonging to their social world without realizing that they’re doing so. Second, my sense is that there are a lot of “just so” stories in these fields, adopting a sort of teleological perspective– at odds, I think, with evolutionary biology –where social practices are always explained in terms of their biological usefulness. Where a genuine biological approach begins from the premise that the eagle can hunt well because it has such keen eyesight and swift flight, these stories reverse explanations and argue that keen sight and swift flight developed to hunt well. Very sloppy. Hopefully these fields will develop over time and get more serious, well informed practitioners. From what I’ve read and seen so far, these fields are not there yet and social philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, ethnographers, linguists, etc., are right to hold the claims of these fields in a bit of contempt due to their far more sophisticated analytic tools that have been so hard-one over the last two hundred years.
I get nervous whenever something like “biological nature” is evoked as it sounds like a synonym for the old essences to me, or a positing of models that are outside the flow of time, unaffected by changing circumstances, such that everything is a copy of these invariant models. Nonetheless, the idea of a biological resistance is interesting; though I don’t think it’s the only form of resistance or even the most important.
December 17, 2007 at 5:10 am
bill – Just on a logical level, it doesn’t immediately follow that, because biology underdetermines society, therefore biology provides a locus of resistence to socialisation, powerful or otherwise. I’m not denying that you might be able to do something with notions of “friction” between biological potentials and forms of socialisation (there are a number of social theoretic approaches that try to develop just this sort of claim) – just pointing to what seems to me a strange elision in your argument above.
It’s also perhaps a more complex question than you are leaving room for, above – the question of why we come to conceptualise ourselves as having certain “biological” potentials. Again, there is a great deal of work that tries to address this sort of question, and that might regard it as problematic to start from biology, understood as some sort of “given” to which we have transparent access, without asking how that “given” comes to be given. These are complex issues on which people can disagree – my point is simply that this is heavily debated and contentious space, rather than the straightforward and obvious starting point you suggest above.
These sorts of issues aside, though, my sense is that, in leaping to a Skinnerian reading of the discussion of socialisation above, you are perhaps missing a strategic point of the sort of analysis that has been suggested in these comments. The starting point for this discussion, in the original post, was a question about whether it might be productive to think of alternatives to abstract structure-agency dichotomies – I would personally tend to include Skinnerian understandings of socialisation within the dichotomy that was being criticised. So the question here is basically: do we need to see socialisation in terms that, essentially, posit the social, from the outset, as necessarily and one-sidedly a form of domination? Is it possible to think of socialisation in a more nuanced way, seeing the process of socialisation itself as shot through with potentials – perhaps potentials that point in contradictory directions and suggest lines of flight that may point immanently toward forms of freedom that are being blocked by other dimensions of collective practice? This sort of analysis doesn’t preclude looking for contradictions between “the social” and “something else” (like your suggestion above to look to friction between the social and some sort of inherent nature), but it suggests that it might not be necessary to do this, in order to recover potentials for mobilising critique and transformative practice.
The devil then resides in the details of the analysis of some specific social: is there a way to understand social reproduction of some particular sort of context, so that this process of reproduction can be shown to be non-identical in certain specific respects – such that everyday engagement with a particular social context might constantly be irritating social actors with the potential that more and other is within their reach? You don’t need to be persuaded that such an analysis is possible – this is a short post; there’s only so much it can do; no one needs to be persuaded by an argument still in nucleus. I see no reason, though, to shut down the possibility of making this sort of argument from the outset, before seeing where it might take us – it seems a strange a priori sort of move.
December 17, 2007 at 5:28 pm
NP: The starting point for this discussion, in the original post, was a question about whether it might be productive to think of alternatives to abstract structure-agency dichotomies …
I understand that, but this discussion seems too abstract and airless to make much headway. By way of comparison, Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson recently edited a volume of essays entitled The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Wilson contributed a chapter on “Evolutionary Social Constructivism” in which he argued for a “middle ground” between genetric determinism and social constructivism. While I’m all for such a middle ground, I didn’t find his argument very useful. In my review I began my critique by asserting:
Keeping in mind that this is a relatively informal blog discussion, not a full-dress academic affair, nonetheless I feel much the same about this discussion. Sure we need to get get beyond abstract structure-agency dichotomies. So what? Abstract argument isn’t going to do it. Abstract formulations are a dime a dozen. You need to come to grips with the social and biological mechanisms and processes involved. That’s not easy to do.
LS: I’ve tended to find socio- and psycho-biology tremendously suspect in my various encounters with it. First, my experience is that sociobiologists tend to have a very poor background in ethnography. As a result of this lack of ethnographical and historical knowledge, they tend to universal cultural practices belonging to their social world without realizing that they’re doing so.
Forget their broad program statements and polemics. What’s important are the concrete descriptions and analyses of animal behavior. As for lack of ethnographic knowledge, I blitzed through your music paper and was getting a little queasy on that score when you finally got around to discussing music. I realize you were working from someone else’s argument, but I have the sense that someone hasn’t thought much about how music functions in hunter-gatherer bands, where the distinction between performer and audience, between performer’s space and audience space, is obliterated.
But what really stopped me in my tracks was a statement near the bottom of your first page: “Put bluntly, and I hope without offense, the newborn is little more than a beast or animal. It is a chaotic and unformed body and flow of cognitions, with few or no set desires and affects.”
It is not at all clear to me in what sense a human newborn has “few or no set desires and affects.” It’s the inclusion of “or no” that threw me for a loop, as though that were an option. And since you are asserting that the newborn is little more than an animal, that would seem to imply that animals have “few or no set desires and affects.” That’s just not true. And I find it a bit difficult to believe that you really think that, but I hesitate to guess at what you in fact believe about either animal behavior or infant behavior.
Of course, right after those two sentences you offer an ethnographic example of a practice from another culture, the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, that is something we do not do, assertng: “Yet these trajectories are possibilities for all human bodies. What is the process by which we are individuated, formed, produced to live one of these social universes rather than another?” Well, yeah, sure, But I don’t see how we can possibly understand those processes if, at the beginning, we treat our biology as a chaotic cipher.
December 17, 2007 at 6:01 pm
Bill, you write:
I understand that, but this discussion seems too abstract and airless to make much headway.
Quantum mechanics and mathematical category theory strike me as “too abstract and airless”, but I assume that this is because I lack the background and training to make much headway in this discourse. Respectfully I would submit that perhaps the case is similar here. You are jumping into a discussion that has been unfolding for ever a year on these blogs, working with theoretical references that are largely assumed by the participants, and then exclaiming when it seems a bit opaque to you. Then, as a curative, you propose reading things from the framework that you are familiar with, confusing this familiarity with greater concreteness or exactitude. I’m more than happy to read work from a variety of different fields, but certainly not on these grounds. In other words, the subtext is “talk about what I want to talk about!” This is hardly the way to conduct a discussion on foreign territory. As in all foreign countries, perhaps you might first begin learning a bit about the local customs and language.
You go on to say:
Is this a charitable reading of what I wrote? Would a reasonable person argue that the human body is pure chaos? What might this hyperbole indicate under a more charitable reading? First, it would be based on the observation that the infant body lacks motor co-ordination or even a sense of its own bodily unity and dimensions. For instance, an infant might try to crawl through a space too small for its body. It can see through this space and therefore thinks it can move there, but it as yet lacks a sense of the dimensions of its own body. Second, such hyperbole is based on the observation that the realm of affect and emotion belonging to the infant, is minimal in comparison to an adult human. For instance, it is unlikely that an infant will be filled with rage when seeing an American flag burned like some adults in the United States are filled with rage. This is because the infant does not yet live in a symbolic universe where the American flag has special significance. Certainly I wouldn’t deny that the infant has minimal affects such as pleasure, pain, and the ability to be startled. The issue is the more complex form of affects pertaining to what Heidegger referred to as attunements that populate our world.
The issue of desire is far more complex. Here a bit of blogosphere ethnography is in order… That is, a bit of familiarity with technical vocabulary. This particular blog and the audience I was speaking before is largely Lacanian in its orientation. Often, in English, desire is a generic term that signifies any want or needs whatsoever. However, within the Lacanian framework, desire is treated as distinct from needs and is argued to be something that only emerges at a specific stage of interpersonal development in relation to language. In this connection, need is understood as a specific relation to an object, whereas desire has no object, but is a relationship with the desire of others. The linguistic situation is analogous to that of the French distinction between fleuve and riviere. In English streams and rivers are distinguished according to their size, whereas in French they are distinguished not in terms of size but whether or not they flow into the see. Outside of this particular theoretical context it will of course appear absurd and bizarre to suggest that the infant is born without any desires. The Lacanian in no way denies that the infant is born with needs such as the need for food, warmth, etc., but it is denied that the infant is born with desires: desires for prestige, recognition, to be loved, and so on. You can find a good deal about desire on this blog, especially in earlier posts, where these Lacanian distinctions are worked through.
If the infant is a little beast– an infant terrible as we sometimes say –then this is because the infant is outside the interpersonal, symbolic universe as we, as adults, live it. We do not find awareness of the other and the complex system of affects and desires in infants that we find in adults. The question then becomes that of how body, desire, sense of self, affectivity, etc., emerge over the course of the infant’s development. This is a story, I believe, that can only be told by situating the infant in an interpersonal context. Moreover, we find that children outside such interpersonal contexts– children locked in rooms with minimal human contact, children raised in the wild, etc –do not develop these symbolic universes or systems of affect and desire.
December 17, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Hi Alexei,
Apologies for not getting back to you sooner. I’ve been trapped in the midst of marking and your posts require careful thought. You write:
I really do not think this schema works with Deleuze and Badiou. Deleuze does not reduce everything to context– though he certainly takes context seriously –but has a profound respect for the singularity of the individual existent. This comes out with special clarity in his studies of various artists. Here it’s worthwhile to look at Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Proust and Signs, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, and Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. The red thread that unites all these studies is a sustained attentiveness to the organization of the art itself, refusing to reduce it to historical context, narrative, or variations on a model that transcends the work. For instance, in his Bacon book Deleuze approaches Bacon in terms of his unique use of color and form, refusing any sort of narratology of his work. What interests Deleuze is always the affects and percepts that the body of work invents, which is irreducible to context even if it might resonate with or respond to context.
This is even more evident in the case of Badiou. Against sociologizing tendencies within social and political theory, Badiou instead attempts to theorize a subject subtracted from context, that cannot be seen as a product of context and that has the potential to transform the social field. In other words, Badiou is attempting to respond to the very concern you raise. This is common to the entire school of theorists that can loosely be referred to as the “children of Althusser” (Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere). Thus, while I think what you describe is certainly the case with Derrida and perhaps Foucault, I don’t think it applies in the case of Deleuze or Badiou.
It seems to me that this muddies the issue, as the logics informing the Husserlian scientist is very different than the processes at work in the slime-mold. The Husserlian scientist posits a goal or aim as the meaning of his action. The equilibriums reached in the formation of a crystal or the behavior of a slime-mold are not posited, so I don’t see how we can speak of them as “informing” the activity of these systems. It is only with respect to the gaze of the observer that they appear to play a role in the system or “inform” it; but in-itself these processes are simply mechanical interactions yielding certain results.
The goal of systems is indeed equilibrium, but the question is whether disequilibriums can change the system itself. When one of the elements within a system challenges the system, feedback comes into play striving to minimize or destroy that element. Yet nonetheless, as a matter of empirical fact, de facto, we know that systems change, are transformed, and are broken. This takes place when disequilibriums are introduced that explode the functioning of the system, pushing it in a very different direction that the system can no longer cope with and where feedback mechanisms lose their force. We might, for instance, think of the rise of the merchantile class in the movement from Feudalism to Capitalism.
It is in this connection, I think, that the concept of assemblage shows its cash-value. The concept of system is too hegemonic, and leads us to think in terms of smooth inputs and outputs in an all devouring machine without any outside or escape. An assemblage, by contrast, leads us to think of shifting alliances and formations that often take on patterned activity but that can also shift in ways that explode certain forms of relation, allowing new potentials to emerge.
December 18, 2007 at 3:23 pm
Point well taken, Sinthome, about Deleuze’s project. I haven’t looked at the works you’ve mentioned; I’ll find them after Christmas, and flip through them. I’m still less convinced about Badiou though: insofar as the subject, such as it is, only appears in and through the break in being, which is the singular event, one has to move through a great deal of context and abstraction to get to the point. In fact, it would seem that both subject and event are produced precisely when context (consistent multiples of the situation) is pushed to its limit. Of course, this is merely my impression at the moment I haven’t finished Being and Event, and, in all likelihood, I’m making a snap judgment because I find Badiou’s style and emphasis on set-theory (as Ontology) rather off-putting (especially since Husserl argued for this point some 80 years ago; cf Formal and Transcendental logic and Experience and Judgment, wherein formal ontology [theory of multiplicities] produces and is a product of a formal logic [theory of judgment], whose clarification opens upon the pure spontaneity of the [transcendental] subject. Husserl’s account, however, remains embedded within a concrete historical context, and tracks the various transformations of its sense, rather than merely being tacked onto a conception of set-theory).
Moving on to Husserlian Scientists: I’m not sure what you think muddies the water here. As I mentioned earlier, I think Husserl’s account of teleology of Science differs from the kind we find in a systems-theoretical approach precisely insofar as a Husserlian Scientist can posit a goal. What’s at issue is how this positing takes place. My point, which remained obscure I guess, is that, whereas a system’s telos emerges form it’s interactive complexes, and hence isn’t available to anything but the system as a whole, the reflective potential of the Husselrian scientist allows — but in no way necessitates — for a grasp of Science’s sense.
For the system, there’s no way to account for it telos within it; for husserl there’s nothing inherent to the performances characterizing a determinate moment of Science that necessitate progress or the positing of teloi. Science can — and has — remain(ed) more or less at an equilibrium for large stretches of time (to pick a completely different concept, there is always ‘normal science’).
Husserl’s key notion here is anonymity. an anonymous scientist simply follows established procedure (a useful figure would be a lab technician). What Husserl is always at pains to explain and identify, however, is the moment in which anonymous scientist breaks with the codified techniques of his or her discipline. but this isn’t done simply through ‘positing’ — at least not in his mature genetic-phenomenology.
Rather, it has everything to do with recovering a ‘sense’ of science by attending to the being-sense of the world, as constituted and reinforced by a particular set of activities within it.
But all of this is, I think, a long-winded way of agreeing with you: systems-theory isn’t typically very helpful to think through certain kinds of change.
cheers
December 18, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Alexei,
Perhaps you could clarify what you’re looking for in contrast to this (which isn’t to say that I endorse Badiou’s concept of the subject, quite the contrary). I myself get very nervous about the idea of a subject, agency, or individual that is “a priori” in the sense of being prior to and outside of all other relations. For instance, I’m generally hostile to the Kantian critic or the Husserlian transcendental ego, as they’re purity reminds me all too much of something like Platonic forms that are themselves outside of change and becoming but which condition all other entities. Admittedly the case is very complex with Husserl (especially in his later work), as he seems to oscillate between something like a Platonism and genetic and constitutional accounts. This antipathy has more to do with my ontological commitments more than anything else. I outline some of these basic principles in relation to Hegel here:
I vacillate back and forth on Badiou here. On the one hand, I don’t think the reference to Husserl (or Kant) quite gets at Badiou’s point. Lurking in the background of Badiou’s engagement with axiomatic set theory is a critique of the various philosophies of finitude. Badiou thinks that philosophy took a wrong turn when it shackled all knowledge to intuition, which inevitably led to the primacy of finitude and a sacralization of the infinite as what is other than the finite. Part of the reason Badiou picks up axiomatic set theory is that the multiplicities described there are thinkable without being intuitable. On the one hand, Badiou is thus pointing all the way back to Parmenides in the relationship between being and the thinkable. On the other hand, he’s trying to “out-Kant” Kant (and the heirs of Kant), by referring to a form of mathematical thought that would not be shackled to intuition and finitude. I personally think this is a brilliant and much needed move, though I don’t know that he manages to pull it off. This is especially the case when he begins talking about concrete multiplicities or situations, where I think it becomes evidence that we need to introduce something other than being (in Badiou’s sense of being as multiplicity qua multiplicity) that can no longer be accounted for in purely formal terms. That is, there’s something lacking in Badiou’s materialism. I outline these problems here:
At the other end, I think Badiou’s ontology is a response to the various philosophies of difference and post-structuralist thought. As is very evident in Derrida, the concept of difference is generally mobilized to demonstrate the ruin of the philosophical project. Badiou’s thesis seems to be that this only occurs if we begin from the premise of the primacy of identity over difference. The basic post-structuralist gesture is then to show how identity, the same, and the similar are always ruined by an unthinkable tangle of difference. Badiou’s strategy is to show that there is in fact a thinkable concept of difference qua difference, multiplicity qua multiplicity, in axiomatic set theory, thereby undercutting this line of argument. Again, for me the problem is that Badiou seems to give no real persuasive account of how we shift from these pure inconsistent multplicities to consistent multiplicities that are counted-as-one. Badiou argues that such operations take place, but doesn’t, to my thinking, give a satisfactory transcendental account of just how this takes place. I develop some of this critique here in a slightly different context:
For me, then, Badiou is important not for the success of his project but for the way in which his thought potentially resituates some of the key problematics in the history of philosophy. Apologies for all the diary pimping.
December 18, 2007 at 8:16 pm
LS: Thanks for the clarification about the infant and about desire.
Might I ask for clarification of “system”? Or at least a pointer to earlier posts. I’m familiar with many notions of system, some of which do indeed tend toward equilibrium. But, over the last 3 or 4 decades there’s been a great deal of interest in dynamical systems that do not necessarily tend to equilibrium. On the contrary, these systems often exhibit emergent structures when driven far from equilibrium; they change. Are such systems within the scope of “system” as discussed here?
December 18, 2007 at 8:46 pm
Bill, the far from equilibrium systems described by complexity theory, systems theory, and autopoietic theory would be the systems I primarily have in mind. My primary points of reference for this type of theory are Maturana and Varela, and the sociologist Niklas Luhmann.
December 18, 2007 at 9:45 pm
Thanks, LS.
I’ve been strongly influenced by Walter Freeman, a neurobiologist at Berkeley. He uses complex dynamics to model neural systems — I believe Maturana and Varela are in that general territory as well — and his work is at the basis of my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (Basic 2001). There I use it to develop a notion of something like collective agency or subjectivity in the music-making group.
January 5, 2008 at 11:59 am
Out of curiosity:
Would you say that there is something flawed with the approach to this problem advocated by for instance Manuel Delanda and John Protevi? Meaning, an approach combining Deleuze and Guattari with advances in complexity theory.
Admittedly I haven’t read Delanda’s latest book, but “Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy”, as well as Protevi’s “Political Physics”, seems geared towards dealing with precisely the kind of problem you pose here. I read an essay by Protevi the other day (in the “Deleuze and Science” issue of Paragraph) dealing with precisely types of emergence, assemblages and crisis points. He is also explicitly promoting it as a way of avoiding the kind of “abstract opposition” you mention. On the one hand, you seem to be developing the problem in a way that would be favorable to such theories. On the other, you are probably aware of this Deleuze/complexity project, and it is kind of surprising to me that you don’t bring it up explicitly, so that’s why I’m wondering if you see some shortcoming in that kind of approach.