Pop-matters has weighed in on the issue of difficult texts on his blog. I’m still trying to articulate what, exactly, constitutes a difficult text. I think that there are different sorts of difficulties and that they shouldn’t all be lumped together. Recently, for example, I picked up Simon Duffy’s Logic of Expression. I had high hopes for this text as it deals heavily with Deleuze’s use of the calculus in Difference and Repetition. However, I confess that I’m very disappointed with this text, despite the high praise of Smith, Patton, and Balibar. Why? I simply can’t penetrate it. This isn’t entirely Duffy’s fault. The work presupposes a lot of background knowledge in mathematics which I simply don’t have. As a result, it is difficult for me to penetrate what he’s discussing, or even know why it’s relevant. This work, I would say, is clear, but only insofar as one has a particular background knowledge. It is thus not a difficult text, though I find it impenetrable. I do think, however, he could have done a better job shuttling back and forth between concrete examples and mathematical abstractions. I’m of the view, regardless of what purists like Alexei say about metaphors and examples, that we should always use examples to illustrate points as a crutch for intuition and imagination in reaching “the concept”. This is part of what makes Badiou such a brilliant writer, regardless of what one thinks of his thought. It is also part of what makes Zizek great.
By contrast, it seems to me that there’s a different sort of difficulty that isn’t about background knowledge or familiarity, but about style. When confronting Hegel’s Science of Logic or certain texts by Derrida, the issue does not seem to be one of background knowledge, but appears to occur at the level of sentence structure itself. Marx might be added here as well, in some respects. Hegelians sometimes speak of the “dialectical sentence”. The dialectical sentence is inherently difficult stylistically, regardless of one’s background knowledge, perhaps because of how it seeks to evade the simplifications of the understanding (abstraction, thingly thought), making it very difficult to determine what, exactly the sentence is saying at all. In Marx there are similar difficulties. Marx wants to unfold the logic of what he’s dealing with, to make you experience it. Often you don’t know where you’re going or why it’s important. For example, in the first chapter of Capital, we begin with the commodity, but we have no idea how the commodity will be unfolded or analyzed or where this analysis is leading. Instead it’s as if Marx wants you to encounter the experience of the commodity itself.
Popmatters makes some good points about commodification of thought. S/he claims that any form of writing that slows down easy transmission is already a blow against the dominance of the commodity. There’s something to this very Adornoesque thought. I respect this thesis. I understand it. By the same token, as we’re struggling against a particular form that capitalism has taken today, I wonder if this is truly the most pragmatic strategy. We need weapons. We need careful analyses of our situation. There is a certain sort of style that turns you into a scholar by necessity, because you have to work through the intricacies of these mysteries. Are these stylistic approaches that we find in later Levinas, Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, Adorno, etc., the most effective tools in such struggles, or do they end up inventing/making scholars that turn away from these struggles? I think, for example, that we could do better with Marx and that a certain sort of academic work should be strongly discouraged. The verdict is out for me.
May 8, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things. The latter ‘method’ of philosophy is the same as the ‘method’ of utopian politics or revolutionary science (as opposed to parliamentary politic or normal science). The method is to redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it, thereby causing them to look for appropriate new forms of nonlinguistic behavior, for example, the adoption of new scientific equipment or new social institutions.
This is from Ch. 1 of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. He says philosophers like Derrida use language the way poets or certain fictional stylists do, almost as if he’s talking to himself, trying to create a self as well as a philosophy out of this idiosyncratic way of expressing himself.
May 8, 2008 at 4:33 pm
This sounds somewhat on mark. I disagree with the manner in which Rorty makes this an issue of subjective poetry or “talking to oneself”. Deleuze and Guattari speak of “incorporeal transformations”. These are transformations that take place through speech-acts. When, for example, a priest pronounces two people man and wife, or a judge metes out a sentence, or you say “I love you”, nothing physical has changed in the bodies involved, but their nature as subjects has changed significantly. For example, the sentenced criminal now has a different social and legal status. Founding speech– whether in philosophy, science, the political realm, etc –plays a similar role. It reorganizes bodies in a new set of ways and relations and opens the world in a different way, initiating new political processes, new areas of research, and new philosophical problems and questions. It introduces something that wasn’t there before. This is why a philosophy is better understood as a set of orders or order-words, than as a representation of reality. Just as a recipe is written in the imperative (“mix this” “add that” “cook at this temperature”), a philosophy, even in its phenomenological mode, is a set of imperatives directing us to relate to world in a particular way rather than describing a world that was already there. Not only does a philosophy create a type of self– the conceptual personae or subject that inhabits the world –but it also breaches a world, a set of values, and a body of practice.
May 8, 2008 at 5:38 pm
More often than not after I’ve read contemporary philosophy and psychoanalysis, the image of a long table in a laboratory comes to mind. Covering the table is a complex of connected beakers, tubing, retorts, etc. At the very end is a value. With much fanfare, the value is opened and a small drop of common H2O plops into a glass.
May 8, 2008 at 6:19 pm
The question of whether the theorist’s style alienates potential converts to the struggle these writers are ostensibly writing about (or fashions hermetic scholar indifferent to any struggle other than interpreting the texts themselves) does seem the key issue here. Often “dialectical sentence” techniques make it seem that the point of theory is its austerity and the mental decoding exercises, as if the substance were ultimately arbitrary. Those willing to puzzle through are often those who are already likely to be convinced, and the heavy investment of labor into understanding the texts can then make that conviction uncritical. Only those who are already true believers are going to make it to the end of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy; skeptics will stop reading and then base their criticism on the impenetrable prose. So it sometimes seems that the dense style is a defense mechanism to forestall substantive critique; it was certainly my approach to seminar papers.
Dialectical sentences assume that the reader needs to undergo the same thinking process as the writer. But expressing an idea is a different problem than absorbing it, so making a reader undergo that effort to express seems pointless — reinforces the suspicion that the writers are working hurriedly to keep pace with their thoughts and then refusing to go back and edit what they wrote afterward.
May 8, 2008 at 6:19 pm
I agree with everything you say here. Invoking an idiosyncratic way of expressing oneself can be an effort to break free of the linguistic territorialization imposed by the Big Other. And Rorty insists again and again that language can never represent truth that’s out there, that truths make sense only within a particular language system. New language makes possible new truth statements.
In the passage I quoted, Rorty points toward the sociopolitical ramifications of new language schemes, but later he tries to disavow this assertion, denying any valid political relevance of Nietzsche, Gadamer, Derrida, etc. This inconsistency seems to be an artifact of Rorty’s political liberalism, where society consists of free individual self-creators agreeing not to be cruel to one another.
Still, the subjectivity of individual philosophers’ creations is a theme that Nietzsche emphasizes both in what he says and in the very personal and idiosyncratic ways in which he expresses himself. “I am many,” says Nietzsche — as if a different version of himself emerges from inside each reality he writes down.
May 8, 2008 at 7:32 pm
This idea of escaping common sense or the Big Other is very important. We seem to agree that changing the language game may be critical to finding a critical standpoint.
Yet this creates difficulty right away. It’s the ‘private language’ problem. Not just Rorty but Wittgenstein struggle against ending up in ethnography. Making sense to each other requires patterned relationships, ways that sense can be made and can’t be made, moves that are legal and illegal, community. It can’t all be intentional and new for everyone or there’d be nothing but babble. There’s a residue of the social no matter what.
I wonder how much of this boils down on the one hand to new sacred languages and priesthoods, as we’ve discussed before and Rob alludes to; and on the other to conceptual avantgardeism and entrepreneurship. The art world has itself in a real bind at the moment: see Aliza Shvartz. Is what she’s doing novel enough to be ‘good’, or is it old hat and therefore ‘bad’? To what degree are we complicit in structuring the conceptual market so that we need our theoretical commodities to toe the same line?
May 9, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Since I’ve been mentioned by name, I figure I should at least try to clarify my position a little. I am, I suppose, against examples in philosophy — but I think that metaphor is perhaps the most powerful force in thinking, so long as metaphors are not confused with concepts, analogies, etc.
Viz. examples: I honestly think that, in philosophy, they complicate things more than they clarify. At best, they illustrate, or exemplify a particular conceptual network, or what have you. At worst, they mystify things all the more. But in both cases, examples rely upon some kind of analogical transfer between the conceptual sphere and the example domain, which is usually never clarified. It’s taken for granted. Examples, in short, introduce a further problem, rather than explicated a preexisting one — namely what’s the ‘third thing’ underlying and allowing for the relation of concept to example, which is neither contained in the example or the concept. And it’s a huge detour to take — one that introduces a series of consdierations that might have nothing to do with the problem space being investigated, and which might even require an ad hoc metaphysics — in order to ‘clarify’ something. (NB that immanent critique bypasses the problem by trying to develop concepts out of concrete, ‘intuitive’ situations; this kind of thinking actually is its own example — hence my initial questions to you, Sinthome, concerning style as a necessary evil — and hence doesn’t have to illustrate how its concepts are to be applied, or what traction they have on ‘real world’ problems).
So it’s worth saying again, even if it sounds like a 1st year intro. to philosophy point: immanent critique renders examples otiose because it doesn’t posit a difference between ‘theory’ and ‘practice,’ between form and content, between analysand and analyst, etc. It’s only when you make the distinction that examples are helpful. but in making the distinction, you’ve almost surely already lost the war (hence the anxiety about better weapons, etc).
Viz. Metaphor: As I’ve said, this is perhaps the most powerful way of thinking (especially since metaphors can’t be easily divorced from rhetoric, and hence can’t be divorced from style). Treating metaphor seriously is also one of the reasons I think so highly of Blumenberg.
We get into problems, however, when we start to literalize metaphors, when we start conflating them with concepts, or with analogies, or models of lived experience (say as Ricouer et al. do). IN fact, I think the biggest mistake in Philosophy is to define philosophy as “concept creation,” since that literalizes, naturalizes, and theologizes everything we do. It’s a step in the wrong direction. Metaphors are, as i see them at least, protests against conceptual identity, against harmony, against straightforward, simple-minded, propositional thought. Metaphors are affective, disruptive, and inherently broken. Concepts aspire to the exact opposite
And all of this — i.e. immanent critique, which makes examples otiose, and metaphorical formulation, which binds rhetorical techniques with an aversion to thing thinking, point to the irreducibility of style. It also make failure more common. But those are the stakes in any endeavor worth pursuing: succeed or fail; there’s no ‘in-between.’
May 9, 2008 at 8:30 pm
You’re a very odd dialectical thinker Alexei. I don’t really see how you establish your point about examples beyond merely asserting it. At any rate, we find examples all over the place in Hegel, Adorno, Derrida, Deleuze, Marx, Husserl, Kant, works of mathematical theory, etc. The example functions as a site of theoretical elaboration out of which concepts grow. Concepts then rebound back on examples, transforming them and opening up beyond the example. In a work of mathematics, for example, the specific mathematical problem functions as a launching point for discovering a rule behind a series of problems, but also for grasping the rule that is being proposed or thought.
As for “the biggest mistake in philosophy”, I can think of many others far more serious than defining philosophy as “concept creation” (it’s noteworthy that you treat the concept of “concept” as self-evident, as if we can simply proclaim, without further ado, what concepts are within all philosophical spaces. It’s especially odd that you would suggest that such a position “literalizes, naturalizes, and theologizes” what is being done when we’re talking of creation (i.e., something that can’t be measured against a pre-established identity or referent). I can’t say that I’ve seen much that resemble immanent critique in your remarks, though I have seen a lot of atemporal and transhistorical normative pronouncements from transcendent positions on high as to what is and is not the case.
May 9, 2008 at 8:36 pm
And, of course, it’s clear that in evoking the “biggest mistake of philosophy” as concept creation, you’re evoking Adorno’s critique of conceptuality in works like Negative Dialectics. However, does not Adorno’s critique presuppose that the concept of concepts is itself identical, or that this critique can function univocally across all references to concepts? It’s rather odd to take a philosopher who devoted all his work to thinking difference (Deleuze) to task for asserting the primacy of identity… One would imagine that the first step in evaluating such a philosophers position would be to determine whether or not his concept of concepts falls within the scope of what Adorno is referring to in reference to thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, etc. So much for “immanent critique”.
May 9, 2008 at 9:18 pm
To paraphrase Montaigne: If I can’t be good at what I do, at least I’m different.
And you’re right, of course. I merely made a bunch of assertions; I don’t have enough time or typing space in this little comments box to run through the entirety of the argument. But at least there’s less confusion about where we stand viz. one another.
May 11, 2008 at 1:08 am
How does “an example” serve to ground a theoretical assertion if by the very nature of making an example we raise it above all other instantiations? It might be useful, but I don’t think why is so well understood if we stop at thinking it’s just because the example “comes out” of the concrete world. That an example is made does not explain how it can be made, which means a theoretical assertion is no less concretely grounded than if baldly asserted.
May 11, 2008 at 6:35 am
Joe, I’m not sure I understand your question. Did I say examples ground theoretical assertions. Your talk of “the concrete world” strikes me as very problematic as it seems to suggest that there is, on the one hand, theory, and on the other hand a world that theory represents. I do not think the world or theory can properly be thought in this way. I see examples as essentially functioning in two different ways. On the one hand, examples can function as “larval theories”. That is, by working over the example the theory gradually comes into being and is developed. Experiments in the sciences often have this structure, just as Kant’s example of “7 + 5 = 12″ serves this function in his development of synthetic a priori judgments. This, then, would be the role of examples from the theorists side. The example brings to light, reveals, shows, the salient features of some conceptual space. On the other hand, from the readers end, the example functions as a sort of passageway into the theory or a way of making that intuitive leap that allows for the elaboration of the concepts in their own terms. Following Burke, I suspect there’s no such thing as a theory without its privileged examples or examples raised above all other instantiations.
May 29, 2008 at 11:05 pm
[...] the only sample of this I could find in words is, from Larval’s sentence, “Marx wants to unfold the logic of what he’s dealing with, to make you [...]
June 13, 2008 at 7:48 am
[...] Alexei I’ve been mulling over an aborted exchange that almost took place between me and Sinthome over at Larval Subjects, concerning the role examples (ought to) play in philosophical writing and [...]