I’ve been away from this blog for a while because basically I’m sick of all of you, a bit disgusted with humanity and academics at the moment, and have been busy as hell (more the third thing than the other two). Anyway, I’m pleased to have completed the first draft of Onto-Cartography and to have sent it off to the editors (I like this book, always a bad sign as no one else ever seems to like the things I write that I like) and just finished an article for a special issue of Speculations devoted to “Speculative Realism” entitled “Speculative Realism and Politics”. I suspect– hope –a lot of people will be surprised by this article, and also hope that it will be a productive contribution to the controversies and debates that SR, the new feminist materialism, ANT, and so on have generated in recent years.
All of this makes me reflect on the power of naming. Those who have read this blog for some time now are familiar with how fraught my relationship is with my name. I didn’t know my birth or legal name until I was about 8 or 9 years old and was told by a teacher. Apparently my legal name is “Paul R. Bryant”– which is also my father’s name –whereas my family had called me “Levi” throughout my entire life. The discovery of my real name was both traumatic and, I believe, had all sorts of bizarre effects at the level of my unconscious and with respect to how my desire is structured. That discovery effectively erased me– from the perspective of that acephalous subject that is my unconscious –from the symbolic order and, I think, generated all sorts of nasty desires. Don’t ask. At any rate, I took my name back– “Levi” –towards the end of graduate school, when I was having trouble finishing my dissertation (Difference and Givenness), despite the fact that I’d had it sitting on top of a bookshelf for two years gathering dust and only needed to edit it. Folks thought I was nuts for wanting to change my name from “Paul” to “Levi”– some actually got irate –but I found that when I returned to the name I’d grown up with I suddenly began writing like a maniac, laughed a lot more, and no longer had trouble editing my dissertation. I guess my unconscious figured that completing my dissertation under the name of “Paul”, I’d be giving my father all the credit and that it just couldn’t have that. Yeah, my unconscious is anarchistic or anti-patriarchal. And I know this all sounds nuts, but sometimes– despite what we might consciously think –that’s how it is. Read Fink’s Lacanian Subject and attend to the mathematics.
So naming, I think, is a powerful thing. The Lacanians have two expressions. First, Lacan in the Rome Discourse said “the word kills the thing”. By this he meant that an abstract kind denoted by the signifier can never capture the singularity of a thing. As Hegel joked in a way that only psychoanalysts and philosophers can appreciate, “you can’t eat ‘fruit’”. You’ll never get the object of your desire because the object of your desire is an abstract type delineated by the signifier, not a singular thing. That’s the tragedy of desire (there are other tragedies of desire as well; not least of which is that it’s never about what you want). But the psychoanalysts also like to say that “to name it is to own it.” I won’t get into all of the Freudian “thermodynamics” on this thesis, but the idea is that by narrating these things we dissipate their power and begin to take some control over them. We negate the power of the thing in the name of the signifier. This is why Lacan, in one of his early seminars, handed out elephant (memory) figurines at the end of one of the years.
All of this relates somehow. I guess I’m pleased by this article where I feel I do some naming. I don’t think I really say anything new here, but I do think I name some things. I coin the terms “semiopolitics”, “geopolitics”, “infrapolitics”, “thermopolitics”, and “chronopolitics”. In naming these different politics I don’t think I name anything that hasn’t been explored in various orientations of cultural studies and the humanities. I do think, however, that the naming of these different forms of politics– yeah I’m plugging the article –makes a difference. I think it makes the difference of simultaneously preserving the strengths of what I call “semiopolitics”, while also revealing its shortcomings, and that naming these other four forms of politics opens other domains for strategic intervention and the theorization of power. That’s the power of a name. It allows us to discern our blind spots, consolidate trends of thought and practice that haven’t been named, and to intensify those other possibilities. I see this as the promise of speculative realism. Who cares about rarified issues like the critique of correlationism and the reality of things? I don’t. If there’s a promise to SR it’s in helping us to recognize unrecognized ways in which power functions, devising new political strategies, and in discerning sites of the political that we might have before thought were apolitical.
February 6, 2013 at 2:54 am
What’s interesting Levi is of late I’ve been interspersing my reading between bouts of philosophy with those of the YA (Young Adult) dystopian fictions… just reread Lois Lowry’s The Giver, in which naming is central… the idea of the generic, that Badiou speaks of seem to come in this work where reality is so controlled that the world has been grayed out, left lifeless and void of emotiveness in which names no longer attach, or grasp their meanings: a perfectly safe society where Sameness rules. Yet, in the midst of this a young boy suddenly finds the power of words and things, realizes the connection, the moment when life, color, vibrancy of things awakens.
Badiou tells us we must choose the militancy of political courage, the ability not to repeat blindly the gestures of the great names (i.e., Communism, etc.), but to invent through creative repetition new names, generic names, localized to the moment of the future in this real.
You have always thrown the cards on the table, allowed a confessional style that shows both internal and external, subjectalist and political courage to be your own being. An honesty to one’s own integrity is about all any of us can expect. To name is to invent, to create through repetition the differences that matter. This you have continued to do, and I hope that you live long enough to formulate those generic fictions and concepts that sustain greatness. Even if I might not agree with everything you state, I will defend you right to state it no matter what. Philosophy is not a win or lose game, and the battles among differing views onto the real will continue long after we enter the dust, but one thing lasts: a life worth living, the wisdom that abides. This is philosophy. And you do it, and you do it well.
February 6, 2013 at 3:28 am
By this he meant that an abstract kind denoted by the signifier can never capture the singularity of a thing
That’s not true, when I named you the Narcissistic Cat I captured your repressed narcissism perfectly as well as your offhand studliness.
February 6, 2013 at 4:01 am
your post puts me in mind of Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea novels (Potter Predecessors) from the 1960′s. Naming is here framed as the core of magic, and the true name is not the ordinary name. I have been playing around with a correlation in dream language, which is neither word nor picture nor sound nor …. it is a kind of composite of all kinds of presence and absence of meanings and sensations, not fixable. Which then puts me in mind of Winnicott’s paradox which is accepted not resolved.
February 6, 2013 at 5:41 am
All this makes me think of the idiomatic expression “to take names” which I never thought about before but according to urban dictionary either originated from killing enemy combatants whose names you then “take” or from police control. Of course, that is the opposite of naming.
February 6, 2013 at 5:44 am
Speaking of naming, shouldn’t mass shootings be named “acts of terrorism”? So what if the perpetrators lack any sense of hope (as opposed to the hope a Palestinian suicide bomber might hold for his people)? It’s still terrorism. And calling it that focuses what’s at stake: the hope that there is still a public to hear the naming that has to come out.
February 6, 2013 at 8:56 am
Can you upload on the site a pdf file of your thesis?
February 6, 2013 at 4:55 pm
I just want to second everything that was said in the first comment. Best wishes Levi, you can be assured that I will be one of the first to read your book when it comes out.
February 8, 2013 at 12:20 am
Despite our differences, I liked this piece; very interesting and clear and moving. Emotion is often lacking in philosophy, but this piece lacks it not. :)
February 9, 2013 at 11:08 am
I wonder what you’d make of the link between naming and remediation. It seems that you’re creating a bridge between both. You’re appropriating old signifiers for new concepts – geopolitics, chronopolitics, and semiopolitics aren’t wholly new terms, per se, but I imagine you’re not using them to refer to their traditional notions of the politics of territory, the politics of time, and the politics of meaning. In a sense you’re not coining new terms as much as you’re demonstrating that the act of coding entails a reserved pure event that allows codes to be unfolded and recrafted in ways that not only undermine old usages, but are also in some sense self-undermining or at least self-agitating. That by no means takes away from what you’re saying in this post. It’s a kind of strategic theoretical semiotics that requires immense skill and referential command.
February 12, 2013 at 4:49 pm
Levi: this is an intriguing post and I will also have a piece in the same issue of Speculations [on the possibilities for SR-inflected modes of reading literary texts], and I look forward to reading your piece, but I am also puzzled by what you mean by “naming” here. I take “coin” to mean that someone has invented a phrase or term that then helps “name” discourses and activities that may already be “out there” somewhere but which have not yet been “termed” in just this particular way, and once the term is “coined,” as you aver above, new work can also emerge under the aegis of that term that may not have been possible otherwise [even while, at the same time, the new term does not invent a new discourse out of whole cloth but identified ongoing work and ushers in new possibilities]. Fair enough, but: the problem is that quite a few of the terms that you list above have been in circulation for quite a while in a wide variety of fields and disciplines and discourses. It would fill up several pages to cover the bibliography for geopolitics, but let’s take chronopolitics, which is a term I’ve been interested in for a while because I have long been invested in my own work in issues of temporality, and have takne my cues in this direction from those working especially in queer studies and feminist studies. We have, for example, a lot of work that has been done in queer/feminist studies [and also post-colonial studies] that attends to and has also used the term chronopolitics [not to mention that this is also a big term in the work of media theorists, such as Paul Virilio]. I’m thinking, especially, of someone like Elizabeth Freeman, who develops a theory of deviant chronopolitics in her work on erotohistoriography ["Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography," 2005 Social Text article], which then also gets taken up in important works such as Jasbir Puar’s “Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times,” and I could go on, but again, a quick survey shows that the term [and concept] chronopolitics [as well as the biopolitics of time] has a rich and varied history in queer, feminist, post-colonial, global, cinema, etc. studies [see, especially, Freeman, Dana Luciano, and Jack Halberstam, in queer studies, and also a roundtable on "Temporalities" edited by Elizabeth Freeman that appeared in GLQ in 2007].
If we are actually serious about the genealogy of critical terms, we might say here that chronopolitics has, as I mention above, a wide and varied usage and history in queer, feminist, post-colonial, global/international, and media studies, but that it also originates with the anthropologist Johannes Fabian in his 1983 book “Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object” [where he also uses the term geopolitics]. It may be that the term, upon further digging, does not wholly originate with Fabian, but most scholars attribute it to him, and then perform their own uses and renovations of the term. I merely share all of this because as your Speculations essay is still in the production pipeline, as it were, I would be careful to claim “coinage” of the terms you list here, especially geopolitics and chronopolitics.
February 12, 2013 at 5:23 pm
Thanks Eileen,
Alas, we are all finite beings that are not omniscient and only have access to a particular slice of the world. “Geopolitics” is obviously deeply indebted to Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy. All I mean by “coining” is naming something within the framework I am working in. Concepts often use the same names while also having very different historical lineages. No disrespect was intended, I’m simply ignorant of the things you mention.
February 17, 2013 at 12:15 pm
Reblogged this on syndax vuzz.