Over at Circling Squares Philip has a post responding to my quandries about how to mesh realism and pluralism. He writes:
Ontologically and metaphysically the idea of realist pluralism is no longer an issue. There are (appropriately) numerous variants but the basic idea that reality is itself pluralistic is well established. The question is political-discursive. It’s what Stengers and Latour are getting at with their concepts of diplomacy and cosmopolitics.
They grant, first, that all entities exist and, second, that to say that someone’s cherished idol (or whatever disputed entity they hold dear) is non-existent is a ‘declaration of war’ – ‘this means war,’ as Stengers often says. They thus shunt onto-political discourse off of the terrain of knowledge/belief in the sense of existence/non-existence. Their basic claim seems to be that ‘respect for otherness,’ i.e. political pluralism, can only come from granting the entities that others hold dear an ontology, even if you don’t ‘believe’ in them. You are thus permitted to say ‘I do not follow that god, he has no hold over me’ but you are not permitted to say ‘your god is an inane, infantile, non-existent fantasy, grow up.’ And it’s not just a question of politeness (although there’s that too). The point is to grant others’ idols and deities an existence – one needn’t agree over what that existence entails, over what capacities that entity has or what obligations it impresses upon you as someone in its partial presence but to deny it existence entirely is to ‘declare war’ – to deny the possibility of civil discourse, of pluralistic co-existence.
I believe that it was Richard Rorty who once quipped something like claims to reconcile realism and idealism always seem to end with a triumph of idealism. We don’t, in fact, get a realism through such approaches, but rather just get a pervasive anti-realism.
I think this is also the problem with the “non-controversial pluralism” advocated by Stengers and Latour that Phillip defends here. Such a pluralism is not a realism but is, in fact, a thoroughgoing social constructivism. I think this is the central problem with Latour’s argument in Irreductions (these days I regret having ever defended it). In rejecting both Enlightenment critique and what he calls “reduction” he wants to say something like “The Pentacostal really is filled with the Holy Spirit”, that for the 19th working scientist heat really is a fluid and phlogiston really is what allows things to burn, and that for the Greek lightning really is an expression of Zeus’s anger. Latour tells us that we aren’t to reduce or explain away the entities posited by another group’s “ontology” but are to develop explanations from within that ontology.
read on!
This is indeed a pluralism and it is a pluralism that makes good sense for the working ethnographer or anthropologist. When we’re doing cultural anthropology one of the things we’re trying to understand is how another group of people thinks about the world. However, this is entirely different than a discourse about how the world is. It’s the latter that the philosopher– at least of a realist stripe –is interested in. For the realist there’s a way being is, there’s a way that it is independent of different “theories” the Pentacostal, 19th century scientist, Greek, modern day naturalist, etc., have of the world and part of the work of realist philosophy is to figure out how the world is. This will necessarily entail that some of these pictures are mistaken. Arguing that pictures of the world are mistaken doesn’t entail that people should be imprisoned or muzzled or executed, but it does entail that we shouldn’t mince words in saying that these positions are wrong or false. The materialist realist can readily maintain that something profound and meaningful is going on with the Pentacostal that’s speaking in tongues while also maintaining that what’s going on has nothing to do with the Holy Spirit.
I get the feeling that realism that dares to say that a particular world-picture is mistaken is seen as somehow being intolerant or totalitarian or oppressive. In other words, there’s a model of leftist thought that seems to see “ontological” pluralism as progressive insofar as it tolerates the “other”, and that sees belief that some pictures of being and ethics are just mistaken or wrong as a rightwing instance of oppressive intolerance, xenophobia, and so on. This seemed to be a particularly dominant framework in social and political theory during the rise of neo-pragmatism in forms such as that advocated by Critchley. During this period politics took the form of how to promote tolerance. We were told that we must recognize the Other, the contingency of our own views, and that they are narrative constructions of the world (and I think that unquestionably some version of these things are good, but I also think they have a dark side… I’ll get to that in a second). Within this framework the mere enunciation of the word “truth” was seen as oppressive because it was considered exclusionary.
I think this form of philosophy and political theory might aptly be called “First World Philosophy” and that this way of thinking the political was reflective of a particular class position (notice how I’m using the very resources of this neo-pragmatist pluralism to develop my critique here). The 90s were a period of relative prosperity for a particular segment of the population (at least in the United States). As a result, economic issues fell off the radar (economic Marxism was all but invisible during this period, which is why OWS was such a shock to many when it unfolded). For this reason, politics took the form of semiotics, of culturally formed identities. The leftist project shifted from one particular form of emancipation (economic emancipation) to another form of emancipation: the recognition of Otherness, different identities, different cultural practices. This recognition would, in its turn, generate tolerance and prevent horrific crimes of hatred directed at the marginalized. Accomplishing this, however, required– so the argument went –recognizing the socially constructed nature of all identities, i.e., pluralism. Here I hasten to add that this political project has been incredibly valuable and still has a long way to go. I am pained when I hear others that share my own Marxist commitments dismissing “identity politics” as if emancipation of women, people of various sexual orientations, race, various religious positions, etc., were not also important struggles on behalf of justice. Nonetheless, it’s worth recognizing that the primacy of this style of politics might require rather privileged socio-economic conditions.
However, there’s a dark side to all of this. In arguing that everything is a social construction, the pluralist undermines the possibility of public deliberation about truth. Everything becomes an optional narrative or story about the world, an optional picture of reality, where we are free to choose among the various options that most suit our taste. It’s not a surprise that so much of the philosophy during the 90s in both phenomenology and post-structuralism culminated in a theological turn. For where everything, including science, is just a narrative or story about what being is, why not just go ahead and take a leap of faith?
The theological turn, I think, is fairly harmless (I enjoy my theologian friends); however, I do think the left was caught with its pants down following 9-11. In the lead up to the Iraq war it will be recalled that one prominent Bush administration official reportedly said “we don’t need to heed reality because we make reality.” He was basically defending the position of an ontological pluralist. If reality is just a simulacrum, if it’s just a construction, then why not just narratively construct whatever reality you find most amenable to your aims? There are facts, you say? Yet those facts are themselves just narrative constructions. Doesn’t that follow directly from Latour’s irreductionism? Something similar occurs with climate change denialism. Where we treat reality as being nothing but a discursive construction, the words of the climate scientist no longer have any greater claim to truth than any other claim. Why heed them at all? Or finally what about economics? If it’s all just a construction, why should we heed the majority of economists who repeatedly point out that trickle down economics doesn’t work, that austerity kills economies, etc., etc., etc. Their words too are just a construction, one “reality” among others.
In recent years, in relation to economics, climate change, and global war I think we’ve increasingly had what Lacan called “an encounter with the Real”. What we’ve encountered, I think, are the limits of pluralism or the view that everything is just a story or narrative. What we’re encountering, I think, is the truth that at a certain point one must choose, that in some matters there is a truth of the matter that isn’t simply a “point of view”, and that this will involve rejecting other accounts of being. Someone might ardently believe in faith healing, but their child still dies from meningitis. In a smooth space where world-pictures floated free of existence, such pictures would be of no consequence. But they have very real consequences (and I do wonder how serious people are when they claim to advocate the sort of pluralism Phillip describes above; is their “ontology” reflected in their actual practices such as what doctor they choose?). Is this exclusionary and oppressive? I don’t know. When I talk to my friend Tony the Catholic Bishop (who throws great dinners and who is a wonderful drinking partner) I don’t think I’m oppressing him by disagreeing with him, nor do I think he feels oppressed by our debates. He seems to like me well enough having honored me by inviting me to a number of family dinners on holidays over the years.
Perhaps the premise of pluralism is that we are our beliefs. However, as thinkers such as Zizek, Johnston, and Sartre argue (and even the Buddhists?), perhaps we are instead a void, a sort of excess over any predicates that might be attributed to us, that we might attribute to ourselves, that always makes us minimally distant from our own beliefs, that we can never be our beliefs. If you advocated a sort of crude psycho-ethnographicological thesis that the person and the belief system are identical, then it would follow that some sort of violence occurs when we question another’s beliefs. We would literally be stealing their essence, their being, divesting them of who they are. However, as Lacan suggested, subject is itself inherently hysterical. By this he meant that subject never knows what it is and finds itself minimally at odds with any predicates or descriptions that might be attached to it. As Zizek likes to say, following Hegel, “the mysteries of the Egyptians are mysteries to the Egyptians.” By this he means that Egyptians do not themselves know what it means to be Egyptians and are themselves perplexed by Egyptian culture. This perplexity, he argues, is precisely what makes understanding of otherness possible for the reason that everyone’s relation to culture is “void” or hysterical; no one ever quite fits. This is also what makes transhistorical and cross-cultural universality possible. There are universals of justice and whatnot not because of a “substantial content” but precisely because of the absence of content. In disagreeing with an-other do we not, in fact, recognize their dignity as subject by attributing to them the capacity to both decide their own being and act according to reasons? Isn’t there a sort of denigration of otherness in pluralism insofar as it thinks of people as mere products of their cultural horizon or world-picture?
January 24, 2014 at 6:24 am
I like where you’re going with this: ” This is also what makes transhistorical and cross-cultural universality possible. There are universals of justice and what not not because of a “substantial content” but precisely because of the absence of content. In disagreeing with an-other do we not, in fact, recognize their dignity as subject by attributing to them the capacity to both decide their own being and act according to reasons? Isn’t there a sort of denigration of otherness in pluralism insofar as it thinks of people as mere products of their cultural horizon or world-picture?”
Your materialist critique of pluralism is spot on.
I remember your post Hylephobia in which you state: ” Again and again we see a privilege of the discursive, the signifying, the experiential, the textual, the semiotic, over the material. What I would like to understand is why philosophy and the humanities (and academia more broadly) are pervaded by this strong tendency towards idealism.”
Isn’t this still it? Isn’t social constructivism and this form of pluralism trying to erase the truth of matter, the Real in the Lacanian sense. It’s as if let’s all put on the Emperor’s New Clothes, and pretend we’re not naked, even though we know full well that we are… we’ll just play along with each other, not mention the fact to anyone else that they are really naked. Isn’t this pluralism… a sort of Idealism that fits Zizek’s framing of Ideology: “Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our ‘reality’ itself; and ‘illusion’ which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel. The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel.”
So is pluralism asking us to just except everyone else’s right to their social fantasy reality, pretend that we very well know that it’s wrong but because we all want to get along, be tolerant, etc. we’ll just pretend that have a right to their illusions? Where would that leave philosophy then? Would philosophy become nothing but the a new fantasy genre?
No philosophy is here to remind us of the traumatic truth of the Real. It’s not a red or blue pill, there is not matrix hiding under the hood… there is something much more profound. It’s as if the pluralist want us all to live in the Tower of Babel, accept the fate of the dissipation of our linguistic nihilism and the dispersal of languages into a thousand pluralistic tongues. Forget that there was a time we one sought the truth of reality rather than our fantasy pop-cultures.
January 24, 2014 at 7:46 am
The theological turn, I think, is fairly harmless (I enjoy my theologian friends);
Dr Sinthome you’re one SMOOTH FELINE OPERATOR
However, as thinkers such as Zizek, Johnston, and Sartre argue (and even the Buddhists?), perhaps we are instead a void, a sort of excess over any predicates that might be attributed to us, that we might attribute to ourselves, that always makes us minimally distant from our own beliefs, that we can never be our beliefs.
Dr Sinthome this is exactly where the Catholics get it wrong. That we are ”nothing” implies a disconnect between the soul and the body.
I was watching with amusement how the good Catholic dr. Zizek interpreted ”The Last Temptation of Christ” in his latest movie, the Pervert’s guide to ideology. According to the slovenly superstar, Jesus actually recognizes that there is no God. He is ”subjectively destituted” on the cross.
Kazancakis’s novel however is one of the more important modern Eastern Orthodox texts, and its main point is that Jesus had the body and the life of a man, that he experienced to the fullest all of man’s sins. And it is ONLY and SOLELY this journey through matter that makes Jesus a God – nothing else. Without the embodiment, Jesus is not a God.
However since the body is repulsive and scary to the Catholics, they must repress it using any means necessary. This among other things results in the Academia suffering from the linguistic virus.
The idea however that matter is imbued with transformative energies, which is only possible if body and soul are mingled, presents a much more interesting challenge than the assertion that we’re ”nothing”, which only faces one with utter nihilism. It opens the possibility that we can build something out of nothing; it sets the stage for creativity,
I am reading the book of a Greek theologian about Lacan and Eastern Orthodoxy; apparently I am not the only one who noticed the link. It is not available in English, but I will report with a summary.
January 24, 2014 at 5:12 pm
i’d like to see how you develop that last paragraph in combination with the Deleuzian-Spinozist theory of subjectivity along the lines of gradients in your other post. for as you pointed out, the subject-as-void theory can’t quite account for how a void, an emptiness, can be a seat of agency.
January 24, 2014 at 5:51 pm
[…] R. Bryant has a couple of thought full posts on his blog Larval Subjects (here) and (here) dealing with the twined subjects of philosophy’s work and reality probing. In the first post […]
January 24, 2014 at 7:56 pm
What am I missing? What more are you saying–than what’s in the line of this poem…
Recorded church bells
aren’t real
bells
real nonetheless
in what they are.
Why does saying that a narrative is real entail that it it is true in anything one would have it claim about any reality outside itself? Are we dealing with an aesthetic question here? That is, doesn’t making the narrative–any narrative, function as a statement about something else, reduce that to a mere statement dependent on its truth value, and so, stripped of its aesthetic reality? My idea of aesthetic imagination here is a bastard mix of Blake–in his claim religion was created from poetry by those who had lost the power of imagination… and the Buddhist void, in the sense you’ve used it here. Blake, of course, doesn’t concern himself with truth value outside of the domain of Imagination. But that’s where my question here began.
January 25, 2014 at 3:32 am
God, I thought you were done with blogging already and fucking gone and died. Why did you have to come back? No one gives a shit about your fucking opinions. Can’t you get a hint? You will spend the rest of your miserable days at your community college. Just fuck off already – you have no original ideas, you never had and never will. Accept it and move on.
January 25, 2014 at 5:16 am
That’s fascinating, MH! You seem rather interested in what I have to say or to give a shit about it. One would think that if what you said were the case, you’d be entirely indifferent.
January 25, 2014 at 1:37 pm
I’ve tried explaining what “performative contradiction” means to MH before (in this case, giving certain people lots of attention in order to vitriolically denounce them as being unworthy of attention), but I don’t think he really gets it.
Anyhow, great stuff here and in the follow up. I’m thinking about them now.
January 26, 2014 at 6:44 am
Dr Sinthome, an excerpt from the book PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ORTHODOX THEOLOGY by Nikolaos Loudovikos
(…) I will name a few such ‘principles’ that show how deeply the intellectual is connected to the bodily, to desire, emotion and generally to the real man. In other words, how much the essence of man is deeply connected to his concrete existence.
When we talk of intimacy, we all connect it to warmth. We could say that the experience of warmth is an indicator of intimacy on the plane of emotional movement. The first experience of closeness is the warmth of a mother’s embrace. In the same way, what is ”interesting” is also big. In this case, on the plane of emotional movements, we have the sense of big size. And the child’s first experience are those ”big parents” – that are so important for his life. In the same way, happiness is ”high”. When he;’s feeling happy, the child stretches his body. Inner affinity is closeness. Evil is ”dirty”. Logical categories are containers, the organism is a natural structure, since the child gets to know the world by means of objects. (…)
There is understanding only in the body. Any understanding, any grasp on the world, of oneself and of others, can be expressed in notions that are causally connected to the body. Our basic understanding is a system that Carthes rejected, the system of imagination and nerves. Truth and knowledge are ”embodied” systems of understanding. This means that the way we make logical conclusions has a biological metaphorical basis and we are not dealing with some cosmic mind without a body.
January 26, 2014 at 6:56 am
(…) thus all metaphysical principles are unimaginable without biological metaphors. So, God is the first cause, the all-mighty, the father, the pastor, the mother, lover, breath, life. This means that spiritual life is deeply ”embodied” and that God is not only transcendent, but also immanent and the One who is a part of being (the One Who Is Immanent). (…)
The ;last I want to say today is the importance of this approach for Western philosophy and theology. I would like to summarize it as follows: human nature has no absolute essence. It has an essence, but this essence also contains coordinates like diversity, changeability. development and in any case not just human properties. Using the language of St. Maxim the Confessor: man’s nature is NOT, it is BECOMING. (…) The nature of being is the subject of a dialogue between God and man and only in eschaton, at the end, when this dialogue is complete, shall we know what man is and what world is. This means that whether by science, or by asceticism, or by spiritual life, we create man and the world together with God.
January 30, 2014 at 6:01 pm
[…] a couple month hiatus Bryant is blogging again. He has a few new posts on plurarlism but this one caught my attention. He is concerned that pluralism has lapsed into cultural relativism, where […]
February 18, 2014 at 8:53 pm
Levi
Could you kindly point me to the Lacan text that produced the quote above, about the ‘encounter with the Real’? Thanks much.
Jeff