In response to my recent post, “The Fate of a Signifier“, my interlocutor Dan writes a kind yet critical response worth discussing in detail. Hopefully my response will do Dan’s post some justice as I’m pretty tired and emotionally worn down this evening. Dan writes:
You say, ” The problem emerges when the person arguing in this way shifts from the thesis that our access to the world involves language to the thesis that language makes the world what it is.” I think I agree with this though I might qualify it a way that I think you could accept with provisos, something like “language can be one of the things that makes the world what it is.” I am less sure if you would accept that ” language is a thing that sometimes predominates in human interactivity with other things.” This last is not, I think, your focus since I think OOO wants not “decenter” but — what? — un-center (or a-center) discursive and philosophical practices that were “humanistic.”
Quite the contrary. I don’t at all deny that language is a thing that often dominates in human practice. Moreover, part of my ontology is designed to take account of semiotic entities as real actants in the world. First, I see this as an issue for regional ontology, i.e., how one particular ontological domain (language) translates another. Second, and perhaps more prosaically, I see the focus on language as a covert or implicit Cartesian holdover in the tradition of philosophy. In other words, what we’ve done is replace one “immanence” (immanence to consciousness as in the case of Descartes) with another immanence (immanence to language). What we haven’t thought is immanence as such, or something akin to Spinozist, Bergsonian, or Deleuzian immanence where we don’t have one actor in the field of being hegemonizing the rest, but rather we just have the field of actors within being altogether such that that field is composed of actors like language, consciousnesses, trees, rocks, etc.
read on!
Although I’ve could give, and have given, strictly ontological and epistemological arguments as to why I think this is mistaken, I’ll opt for a normative argument this time around. In my view, this move is premised on a will to mastery on the part of folks belonging to the world of cultural studies broadly construed. Descartes’ desire for “immanence” was premised on the desire to master or prevent anything from escaping. I see something similar at work in the shift towards granting language hegemony with respect to the world. Here I get by with a little help from Bourdieu. Those of us in some branch of the humanities or cultural studies tend to deal primarily with texts and to engage in “talk about talk” or the analysis of how others discourse about the world. As a consequence, our tendency is to reduce the world to text, treating text, the signifier, language, as what is “really real”. As Bhaskar puts it, there is no one who isn’t a realist in some respect or capacity, where people differ is in terms of what they treat as primordially real. One sort of “realist” wants to treat something like subatomic particles as the only real thing and to show how everything else is an epiphenomenon of subatomic particles. Many in the humanities want to treat texts, language, signs, and signifiers as the only real things, and show how everything is an epiphenomenon of these entities or actants. The appropriate response, when confronted with these idealisms, is Latour’s in his article “Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please?” (.pdf), where we reject all these idealistic reductivisms (reductivism of any sort always being a reductivism).
As I see it, this tendency towards textual materialism/idealism issues from two sources: On the one hand, it is a peril, completely unconscious and thoroughly structural, of the position one occupies in the academic system such that we tend to treat as real only that with which we engage as the object our investigation. For those of us in cultural studies, this would be texts. On the other hand, it is a will to power or mastery in the sense that were the world reducible to text it would 1) grant the cultural theorist a privileged place within the social order as we would be masters of textual analysis, and 2) would render the opacity of the world masterable as it could always be traced back to text which we cultural theorists have the tools and techniques to analyze. With respect to this second point, the textual turn– or what my rhetoric friends call the “rhetorical turn” –would be a way of undermining the alterity of objects, their, to take up Bogost’s nice label, alien phenomenology, so that we have to deal with nothing but texts and are thereby aptly defended against any aleatory difference that might arise from something other that text. The point then is not to banish language, semiotics, textual analysis, but to practice a double operation where its pretension, in both the sense of pretentiousness and presumption, is blunted and neutralized, while simultaneously allowing these forms of analysis to have their proper place in a meshwork that acknowledges the contribution of difference from a variety of domains both linguistic and non-linguistic. Should one think only in binary terms that grant only the option of either “textuality” or “natural being”, this move will appear incomprehensible as one is here not adopting the stance of a pluralistic ontology, but instead practicing metaphysics in the bad Derridean sense where the aim is to raise one element of the chaosmos to the status of ground for all the rest. And that is precisely what linguistic idealists try to do, even as they rant and rave about metaphysics.
I’ll leave off for the moment as I think this much makes clear that for me what is at issue is the multiple contribution of difference, and that so long as language or consciousnesses are treated as ground, this cannot be accomplished.
December 4, 2009 at 5:20 pm
I’m really glad you posted this post because, having been a reader for a few weeks now, I think it really clarifies where I would agree and disagree with your position – and as luck would have it, it is precisely the sort of disagreement I have with just about everyone at the moment (on both/all sides of the argument), philosophically I mean.
Basically, as I understand it, you are arguing against the position (let us, for argument’s sake call it ‘postie-ism’) that, allegedly, reduces everything to ‘textuality’ – that is, says that language is the be all and end all; language is the ‘really real’; all that materiality is just a product of discourse, of ideas. This is the typical critique of postie positions and it is one a great deal of their writings reinforce by, I would wholeheartedly agree, emanating from cultural studies and literature departments that would dearly love to see the whole world as one giant intertext and adopt the ‘sacred texts’ (/’sacred cows’) of postie-ism as writ (that is to say, unreflexively and uncritically). However, I believe that it is an over-simplistic and, if not ‘incorrect’, then certainly disagreeable characterisation.
I think a good place to explain what I mean is Derrida’s most (mis)quoted phrase “il n’y a pas de hors-texte”, usually translated into English as “there is nothing outside the text”. From this sentence alone one would surely draw the conclusion that you have – that everything is to be reduced to textuality; that textuality is ‘the really real’. However, my Francophone friends inform me that this is a bad translation that loses much of the sense of the original. The phrase is often translated, conversely, as “there is no outside-the-text”. At first glance this may appear to say basically the same thing. I believe that this is a big mistake.
The clearest way I can articulate this point (in my own mind at least) is through William James. In his epic work ‘Psychology’ James describes a hypothetical baby’s perception of the world as “one great blooming, buzzing confusion” – in other words, at that stage in a baby’s physical and cultural development it cannot perceive anything of what is around it as we would understand it. It must be just flashes of colours and sounds and textures and abstract patterns with no way of assembling the stimuli into any kind of coherent ‘reality’. Of course, we can never know how a baby ‘sees’ the world; it is pure speculation – but this is allowed in these parts, isn’t it?…
Taking this as a thought experiment let us suppose (with every sci-fi series ever – see ‘Dollhouse’ for a good recent example) that one were to take a fully formed adult and wipe away all trace of enculturation and make them a tabula rasa (of course this is an impossible Cartesian manoeuvre, epigenetics alone shows biology and culture to be irreversibly interwoven, but lets just pretend). Would this person then not be like James’s baby? Would ‘reality’ then not be “one great blooming, buzzing confusion”? Just textures and colours with no way of understanding it — effectively no way of establishing a ‘self’ or a ‘reality’ at all? It is not that the external world no longer exists – I can still see this poor brain-washed person; I can still make out his form, his limbs, the colour of his hair, etc. – it is that, from this particular, ‘brain-washed’ subject position no knowledge of the world can ever be said to properly exist; ‘reality’ is thus only my ‘property’, not his. This is an extreme thought experiment but it, I believe, holds for less extreme examples too. To put it simply, language is always already ‘there’ (and, by consequence, ‘there’ is always already ‘here’).
All of which is a longwinded way of saying that we can know nothing of anything without enculturation. Of course this was probably never in doubt – who could deny this?
Further, then, it is my contention that the postie attitude towards language follows much this same formula – it is not that language is the totality; language simply cannot be dispensed with. My favourite way of putting this is that it is ‘necessary but insufficient’ (as is so much in life).
Of course this brings to the foreground the most important issue. The above discussion to which I am responding fails to say what ‘language’ is. Of course this seems like common sense. This is language. And so is this. And this. Yet where do we stop? Is body language language? Is emotion language? Is volition (in the psychological sense)?
It would be an extraordinarily ‘thick’ definition of language to include all of the above. And this is perhaps where I can pull the rabbit out of the hat and (finally) make my point: the ‘text’ in Derrida’s aphorism is not meant to be taken literally, or at least not as literally as it almost universally has been (by both those faithful and hostile). To say that “there is no outside-the-text” does not mean, therefore, that there is nothing besides language (language defined in any sensible way). It means, I believe, something akin to James’s baby: that we can never, ever subtract language from our experiences; that without language ‘reality’ is nothing and therefore language must always have an effect on our perceptions of, well, everything. That language is ‘necessary but insufficient’. Of course we need bodies and those bodies need food and water – this is a given; why would anyone doubt this? The question is whether any of this means anything – indeed, whether any of this can even be comprehended on even the most basic level — without langauge (or, as it should be clear by now, I would prefer to say ‘enculturation’ as the ‘thick’ definition encompassing affect, volition, etc.) Therefore, whether or not objects possess ‘transigent’ and ‘intransigent’ qualities, language can never be legitimately bracketed or set to one side.
From this position, with language being an ever present necessity – the only means by which we can think and certainly the only means by which we can communicate our thoughts, however imperfectly – one must have recourse to transcendental reason to ascertain the ‘really real’. One must somehow pierce this shield of language to get to what is outside of it and then represent this in some clear manner. One must entertain the transcendent; that is, provide a spectacle to cite it, to bring it forth, to make present, in some form, this sublime experience.
In other words, language must possess some quality of Reason by which utterances may be objectively distinguished in terms of truth or [insert your value distinction here]. That’s a whole other story. I’m not going to bore anyone with that now, least of all myself.
A far more coherent and profound description of what I’m trying to say here is offered by Ernesto Laclau in conversation with Roy Bhaskar here:
http://politicaltheology.com/ojs/index.php/JCR/article/viewFile/3611/2272
Here Laclau shows why what I am calling postie-ism (he calls it discourse theory) is not idealist – it is explicitly opposed to idealism. I don’t think Bhaskar really ‘gets it’ but its an interesting exchange.
While I would agree that a great deal of the writings on this postie-ism betray a certain idealism implicitly, if not explicitly, this is because, those that do…well…aren’t very good.
If this is the version of postie-ism that you have left behind recently, Levi, I can see why you did so; its fairly empty of merit as a philosophy goes. Unfortunately I really don’t recognise it; at least not in the major texts. In the multitude of followers, yes, sadly, but this is not an indictment of the whole philosophy.
For what (little) its worth, I see Derrida, despite his status as the archetypical postie-ist poster-boy, as a thinker who does not deny things. He is best read in his deeply ethical, wholly political sense of maintaining the total contingency of discourse and everything else. Everything is ‘to come’. Everything is promised, nothing is wholly delivered and this is fine. All it means is that we can’t take anything for granted and we shouldn’t ever accept being told ‘that’s the way it is’ (Isn’t this the Socratic ideal? Isn’t this why those who teach philosophy teach philosophy?).
The world was no less ‘real’ the day after he published Of Grammatology. The sun was as warm, food tasted the same. He just demonstrated that it needn’t mean the same things all the time. I don’t even see him as that much of a skeptic. If one is to read his interviews he would say much the same (of course its impossible to know if at any moment he is being honest or contrary, but still, its there as a plausible interpretation).
Having said all of that (and golly-gosh, this comment has reached, dare I say it, Levi-esque proportions) I am completely dissatisfied with the prevailing postie-ist positions too. My own personal intellectual project(/hell) is to produce an historical methodology that is consistent theoretically, ethically and politically with deconstruction but notes that it is, in itself, insufficient (there is that phrase again ‘necessary but insufficient’). This is not new. Gayatri Spivak, for one, says that ‘deconstruction cannot found any political project’ (I’m paraphrasing) – deconstruction is therefore, on its own, politically insufficient. Judith Butler (paraphrasing again) says that ‘deconstruction is not a necessary part of any political project’ – it may, therefore, be excluded. It is insufficient and non-necessary; if it is part of a project it cannot exist alone and it need not be a part at all. What ‘idealist’ could maintain this position? Read Butler’s lectures on Spinoza (‘Giving an Account of Oneself’) to see why the idealist label simply doesn’t fit in any way towards (the more brilliantly argued) postie-ist writings; she argues against the opacity of self-knowledge, this refuting any charge of ‘idealism’ (an idealist must presume autonomy and authority over one’s self-perceptions, something which is alleged in Levi’s post above).
Anyhoo, I’ll stop writing now, for the main reason that in the post this morning, I received a fresh, new copy of Meillassoux’s ‘After Finitude’. Also there’s a good chance this will all seem regrettably ignorant to me one day. I hope, soon, to be able to comment on these issues from a position of only partial ignorance rather than total.
Until that halcyon day, a caveat must be added, for my own self-protection:
Of course, I could be wrong.
December 6, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Levi,
As usual, my debt to you grows even as I feel that almost all of what you wrote has little direct contact with what I would wish to share with you or understand better. Indeed, the greater portion of what you say I would agree with, and those positions you criticize, mostly I would too. So, while I have interest and sympathy with what Perc says, he is, if anything, further from me than you are. Therefore, while I feel the force of your statements I think the best way — for me anyway – to go on is by focusing a bit on that lovely and previously unread by me brief article by Latour, “Can we get our materialism back, please?” To me the title is the worst part, raising many questions and inconsistencies but I am willing to let it slide as part of his style. I took it that you mentioned the article because you largely agree with it, and I would say that I do too as far as it goes though that seems not far enough.
It may seem philosophically irrelevant, but I have had a long personal history with VWs for reasons implied by their name, “people’s car.” At first, I could afford nothing other than old ones. The first I bought for $50 did not run at all. I will belay the whole novel length development to focus on one “part” (obviously you are to keep the central conceit of Latour in mind). The valve gap needs to be set in the standard horizontal opposed engine well and frequently. This is done with a “feeler gauge” which is a deck of incrementally thickened thin sheets of metal. These the mechanic-want-to-be inserts between an adjustable screw and the valve stem. Sounds easy, but aside from the smell and dropping detritus, the feeler blades are often slightly kinked, and there is inevitably junk build up that can masquerade as valve. Further, the “feel” of the right gap changes with the viscosity of the oil, and for me, my thumb sensitivity is qualified by a saw injury, Etc. All these peculiarities seem not fully counted in Latour’s “thick” thing and even then it is about an artifact and one whose contiguities with others may be limited by its artificiality. Is it unfair to wish to know how these very non-ideal realities are to be parsed in an ontics?