Over the last couple of days an interesting discussion surrounding religion, Enlightenment, reason, and a host of other issues has been unfolding over at I Cite between me, Adam Kotsko, Anthony Paul Smith, Discard, N.Pepperell and a few others. I’ve been approaching the discussion from the perspective of religion as a material social reality, bracketing questions of whether or not it’s true, and how that reality might come to disappear within the social field. But the discussion has touched on a number of interesting issues surrounding history and the nature of reason and grounding that are worth, perhaps, taking a look at. As always the discussion has been heated, at points less than noble, but I would say that it’s been more productive than other discussions we’ve had in the past.
I’ve found myself inspired by a number of the themes in this discussion, which led me to write the rather underdeveloped post on populations today. I have a difficult time articulating clearly what I’m trying to get at in these meditations. Perhaps it could be summed up with the word “infrastructure” or “assemblage”. Increasingly I’ve come to find myself dissatisfied with ideology critique and forms of political theory that search for the “right theory”. In this connection, I’ve begun to focus on the material dimension of how movements are formed and maintain themselves in time, and also how they pass away… That is, the material dimension of communication. Here I’m thinking about communications that circulate around the public sphere: Political pamplets, newpapers articles, public email exchanges, discussion lists, regular group meetings, blogs, certain repetitive phrases like “I’m an Oscar Myer weenie” that stick in ones head or “Gore said he invented the internet”, media stories, etc., etc. What has interested in me is not so much the content of these things, their truth value or accuracy, but the way they become formative of certain ways of conceiving the world and certain identities. I’ve tended to notice– with the help of N.Pepperell –that theorists coming out of the Frankfurt school and contemporary French political theory tend to suffer from a kind of sickness: Theoretical pessimism. Here I wonder whether this doesn’t arise from thinking about politics in abstraction and at the level of content, and ignoring the material dimension of how messages are produced and disseminated throughout the social sphere, how movements and groups are formed, and how institutions have successfully been short-circuited in the past, allowing for new institutions to be formed in their stead.
These thoughts have been on my mind for a long time… Since prior to the 2004 elections. But they also resonate with me personally having just witnessed such a transformation within my own neck of the woods. Here an utter transformation was made possible through public email exchanges, among other things, that galvanized a group of people and which had the effect of leveraging a tremendous amount of pressure on higher management, demanding a significant degree of change. Here the form of communication– email –had a massive impact on what was and was not possible. Had the very same complaints been levelled in private to management in this organization, no change would have occured as the complaints would have been seen as 1) personal, and 2) as easily swept under the rug and ignored. It was the rendering public that allowed for a collectivization of identity– there was a creation of identity that took place –that had to be recognized and responded to, lest the business explode. This was all made possible by mediums of communication, but also by forms of rhetoric that created a particular collective identity and that worked to transform concerns that might have been seen as personal into systemic problems requiring organizational change. As a result of this encounter, a new identity was formed that didn’t exist prior to this and that is now capable of things that it wasn’t before capable of.
When we treat any institution as a monolithic fact that cannot be changed, we are ignoring the manner in which this institution must perpetually reproduce itself through time through the agency of those that belong to the institution. We forget that the institution or form of social life is just as much produced by these agents as they are produced by it. We then resort to ideology critique and other forms of ingenious analysis, hoping to awaken these subjects from their attachment to the institution. What we don’t do is begin forming other institutions and subjectivities that get discourses on the table in a very public way– not academic, public, accessible –that force existing institutions to acknowledge them and into becoming through that very force. For a long time protests were able to do this but their messages are now too diluted by being filtered through media machines that frame what is heard and not heard, allowing political power to ignore their acts, while complacently reassuring those involved that they’re doing something. More recently blogs have been very effective in producing tangable and concrete results by getting information and certain themes out there to millions of people through linkages among blogs, raising money, organizing boycotts, and organizing letter writing campaigns that are very difficult for politicians and major media outlets to ignore. The impact of these media technologies on major media and politicians has been palpable and profound for anyone who has carefully followed how major stories have been broken and brought front and center in the last three or four years. This is transformation through viral infestation and contamination. I’m beginning to think there needs to be more concrete analysis, almost case studies like what Hallward is doing with his book on Haiti, or what Foucault did, or what Deleuze and Guattari allow us to theorize, and less abstract theorizing detached from context such as we find in Zizek, Ranciere, and Badiou. We need to look at those small skirmishes where profound change has been produced, and look at the mechanisms that allowed for the production of new identities, new institutions, and significant shifts in distributions of power.
March 26, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Levi,
Great post. I’ve reading a bit lately about “memes” as a way of describing how ideas/bundles of information get passed along and reproduced according to generally darwinian laws of natural selection (the central “law” being that of reproducibility: the ideas that get traction are not those that are “best” but simply those that are best at getting themselves reproduced). I’m curious about how useful you find the idea of “memes” to be in thinking about these questions.
My best,
Adam
March 26, 2007 at 5:13 pm
this position sounds very similar to what Bruno Latour has been defending for a while — you’ve discussed him on your blog before, but I think not in the context of religion, or the in the ‘science wars’ (a closely related debate). ‘Militant atheists’ like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Stephen Pinker certainly phrase their arguments in terms of an appeal to the transcendent, a ‘metaphysical naturalism’ which they have to assume to make their arguments against belief in metaphysical entities. It’s an extremely divisive group, with an extremely divisive set of arguments. Though we might agree that their arguments lack the sophistication and self-reflection of someone like Latour who suspends the metaphysical question of ‘truth,’ is there any better way to force certain key issues, like the teaching of evolution in schools and due attention to global warming, than an a priori naturalism? Latour himself has over the past few years expressed regret at some of the consequences of his earlier position of aggressively politicizing science and sought to revise it, even to the point of acknowledging the need for a kind of content-less ‘irrational supplement’ (as you put it at i cite) as a necessary condition for grounding discussion. I would respond that I find it unlikely that subtracting all positive content, all ‘excess,’ from this apparently necessary guarantor is either politically likely or productive, and is tied to a particular set of class interests and prejudices as well (where ‘discussion among equals’ is the only acceptable way to settle problems, for example). There’s a way in which I think that by representing/explicitly theorizing a political epistemology/ontology Latour renders the actual practice of it impossible (because certain key positions are made off limits). But I’ve rambled long enough:
http://www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/historyandclassics//pdfs/Latour2004WhyHasCritiqueRunoutofSteam.pdf
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/087.html
Apologies if you’ve already read these; I post them just in case (and for your readers).
March 26, 2007 at 6:08 pm
In practice, you aren’t bracketing the truth. You seem to have the assumption (which is quite reasonable) that “religious” claims tend to be false, and that they’re bad insofar as they are deployed in order to get people to believe false things. If you aren’t starting from the assumption that religious claims are false, then nothing you’ve said in any of our conversations makes any sense at all.
Your meta-claims about what you’re trying to do in these conversations rarely if ever match what you in fact are doing — in fact, the conflict often arises in the course of one sentence.
March 26, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Traxus, on the one hand I’m not certain that divisiveness is necessarily a bad thing. Over at I Cite I’ve occasionally made reference to Voltaire who was a divisive figure, yet ultimately that divisiveness and commitment to a set of principles produced profound results. There’s been a tendency in our current socio-political context to suggest that divisiveness should be avoided at all costs. Conservatives seemed to recognize that this was counter-productive and, up until more recently, have been fairly successful in their willingness to be divisive. I think the left could learn from this.
I am not willing to go all the way with Latour and suggest that truth claims should be entirely bracketed or that they’re entirely irrelevant, so I should moderate or soften my claims a bit. What I’m trying to do is draw attention to how group formations and movements are formed that eventually transform balances of power and the field of discourse. Consequently, I’m interested in any movement that’s managed to do this, positive or negative, true or false, to see what they did that was successful. As I said in the post, I’ve increasingly come to feel that ideology critique, while of value, is perhaps asking the wrong set of questions where concrete change is concerned. This is one of the reasons I think both Badiou and Deleuze and Guattari have been such a breath of fresh air: All three thinkers focus on how assemblages are formed rather than the critical evaluation of assemblages.
March 26, 2007 at 6:25 pm
In practice, you aren’t bracketing the truth. You seem to have the assumption (which is quite reasonable) that “religious” claims tend to be false, and that they’re bad insofar as they are deployed in order to get people to believe false things. If you aren’t starting from the assumption that religious claims are false, then nothing you’ve said in any of our conversations makes any sense at all.
Your meta-claims about what you’re trying to do in these conversations rarely if ever match what you in fact are doing — in fact, the conflict often arises in the course of one sentence.
Adam, as I see it these are distinct issues. On the one hand, there are my own ontological commitments or my commitment to materialism and immanence and what I believe this entails. On the other hand, there are those questions of how group formations or assemblages come to emerge and transform the social field. For instance, I’m very interested in how the early Christian church went from being a minority fringe bordering on a cult, to overturning dominant Rome. How did they organize? What communications did this involve? What were the material social conditions that fostered the attractiveness of this way of life, and so on? These things can be evaluated, I think, without making judgments about the truth or falsity of these claims or where these questions are bracketed. And, I believe, such analyses are of value for both enhancing strategies in the present (clearly this is what Badiou is interested in with Paul) and understanding group dynamics. I find that there’s a sort of tragic tone in a lot of continental political theory, as if nothing can change. Yet when you look at history you discover that all sorts of things have changed that seemed impossible to change. How did they do it? I said the post was inspired by the discussion, not that it was necessarily about the exact themes of the discussion.
March 26, 2007 at 6:28 pm
Great post. I’ve reading a bit lately about “memes” as a way of describing how ideas/bundles of information get passed along and reproduced according to generally darwinian laws of natural selection (the central “law” being that of reproducibility: the ideas that get traction are not those that are “best” but simply those that are best at getting themselves reproduced). I’m curious about how useful you find the idea of “memes” to be in thinking about these questions.
Hi Adam. I like the idea of memes, but I try to avoid the term. It seems to me that Dawkin’s et al have basically discovered the idea of materialist semiotics. I think the idea is useful in allowing us to think about how a certain repetitive bit of information, whether true or false, comes to proliferate through the social sphere like a contagion. A long while back I wrote a silly post on the introduction of cane toads into Australia and their subsequent proliferation in analogy to communication, trying to get at exactly this point. I was wondering why certain communications are so successful and, in Badiou’s language, take on such a high degree of “intensity” or existence in a particular situation. I worry a bit, however, about all the comparisons to natural selection.
March 26, 2007 at 7:02 pm
I think I’ve gathered what you think about ideology critique and the value of divisiveness — I brought up Latour because he does exactly what you want to be doing — understanding how assemblages are constructed — though as his emphasis is on the lack of meaningful division between human and non-human ‘actors’ it is not a political analysis in the strict disciplinary sense of the term. But I think Latour argues that ontological and epistemological questions are inseparable from understanding these assemblages and how they move through the social world, especially given situations where rationalist commitments are explicitly involved — i.e. one cannot bracket these questions temporarily to neutrally observe assemblages with the underlying motive of eventually strengthening some prior set of commitments — to really pursue a thoroughgoing understanding of assemblages requires that all such commitments be submitted to the task, i.e. understanding assemblages itself involves a commitment to a neutrality that cannot be regarded as ‘merely’ methodological, which may have regrettable consequences for whatever one’s prior attachments are. Something like how Kant’s critiques bracket God ‘provisionally,’ making thought possible without him, and inadvertently making atheism possible. This is the problem Latour has run in to, as I see it, and it seems like one you may encounter, unless you had in mind a kind of empirical and pragmatic common sense approach that would leave the structure of your own commitments unquestioned (not necessarily a bad thing, and perhaps even necessary).
March 26, 2007 at 7:45 pm
Thanks for the comments Traxus. I’ll have to think on them more. I have very limited familiarity with Latour, having only read portions of his book on the social sciences and getting irritated with what I took to be his agnosticism in evaluating a number of claims. A further difficulty with what I’ve been articulating would relate to certain claims I’ve made about Hegel in relation to his critique of the “thing-in-itself”, where some of the claims I’m made seem to recapitulate something like a Kantian division between the phenomenal and the noumenal. Incidentally, Delanda attempts to develop a realist account of the social in and through assemblages based on Deleuze and Guattari that perhaps tries to avoid some of the concerns you’re raising in his most recent book, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. I have not yet read it, though it’s short and sitting here on my pile of books. If anyone has I’d be interested in hearing their thoughts.
As for ideology critique, it really depends on the day you’re talking to me. I think a strong argument could be made that ideology critique is part and parcel of the emergence of certain types of movements and thus cannot be dismissed. One need only think of Voltaire’s Candide or Spinoza’s Theologico-Politico Treatise and the role that texts like this played during the Enlightenment (assuming that these can be thought of as quasi-ideology critiques). My antipathy towards ideology critique more recently has had to do with discerning a lot of it going on in academia– film analysis, literary analysis, etc –while not seeing a lot of movement building taking place. Consequently, you get a sort of theoretical pessimism that moans about the intractability of power structures, ideology, capitalism, biopower, etc., which leads one to say “well of course, if you don’t do anything at all then nothing changes.” It’s almost as if there’s a holding fast to an all or nothing ideal where one’s political aspirations must be maintained in their pristine purity and protected against contamination by falling into material practice that always leads to unexpected results. It could, however, be that I’m not looking hard enough for the practices connected to these critiques.
At any rate, as Adam observes, I’m far from being consistent in my thoughts on these matters. It all depends on where I’m at conceptually at a particular moment.
March 26, 2007 at 8:24 pm
We’re in complete agreement about the problem of theoretical pessimism, and Latour’s agnosticism – which takes the form in his writing/argument style of a kind of faux incredulity which I find intensely aggravating. I’ve been meaning to read DeLanda, since about the time I realized all the Deleuze commentary I’d read was mostly crap. Looking forward to seeing your thoughts develop…
March 26, 2007 at 8:26 pm
oh, and sorry about the hit-and-run comments I’ve left in the past, I have this bad tendency to post impulsively without allowing time for follow-ups.
March 26, 2007 at 8:46 pm
Sinthome – Just very quickly on ideology critique: there are a couple of different senses in which ideology critique can be considered “pessimistic”. The first – which is close, I think, to what you’re pointing to above (although I’ll apologise profusely here, as I’m on the run this morning and haven’t had the chance to read this discussion with the detail it deserves – so I’ll ask forebearance for the inevitable simplifications and missed points in my own response, as well as for the repetitions of points made above) – but the first issue is the fundamental asymmetry in how ideology critique treats its object of critique, and itself: when an approach focusses exclusively on its object of critique, it tends to miss that, from another point of view, both the object being criticised, and the forms of critical subjectivity being directed at that object, are both “realities” in a larger world. This tends to drive critique in a pessimistic direction, because it tacitly exempts the theorist from the frame, therefore making “reality” look more one-dimensional than it ought to look, once we take the existence of critique into account. I take it that this is the primary sense in which you’re speaking above? (Again with the caveat that I am not able to focus on the nuance of this discussion as I should…)
There is a second sense in which ideology critique drives toward pessimism: ideology critique tends to be reductive in its form of analysis – trying to criticise its object by dismissing its qualitative form as “appearance”, and pointing to some “essence” underneath. This fails to capture why the “essence” should ever take on that particular “appearance” – and therefore leaves a great many aspects of the object of critique fundamentally incomprehensible to the theoretical approach. To take just a very crass example (and I know there are forms of ideology critique that are far more sophisticated than this – I’m in a rush… ;-P): if someone criticises a discourse of “universal reason” by pointing out how this discourse functions to advance particular class interests, they haven’t explained why those class interests should have decided to advance themselves in this particular qualitative form: why not something else? Why should a particular legitimising rhetoric… legitimise successfully? When you mention wanting to step back and understand things in terms of assemblages and how they come to be produced and propagated, I take at least part of your point to be directed here – to a desire to understand the qualitative specificity of successful discourses and practices, rather than always pointing back to something less qualitatively specified.
I would agree with all of this. In the passages above, though, in places it sounds as though you might think it necessary to separate this kind of analysis from judgment – you’ve positioned it above (and, I think, in other posts on this subject as well) as though the process of understanding assemblages and such would, in a sense, involve some kind of neutral sociology or ethnography, to which we would then bring in our ontological commitments and normative standards and such – as though the form of analysis is not itself bound in any intrinsic way to these sorts of critical activities.
To me, this actually depends on the object of analysis. If the object of analysis itself is a contradictory object, then the process of understanding assemblages and such in their qualitative specificity can simultaneously be a self-reflexive process of understanding the conditions of possibility for critique. If, for example, a hierarchical and inegalitarian object of critique sits suspended in a broader social context in which, in some other dimension of social practice, we are also rountinely enacting the practical potential for human equality, the context contains a tension – and that tension marks one condition of possibility for critique.
This is so rushed that it may not make any sense… At the very least, I just wanted to toss in a placeholder that I don’t think it’s necessary to take the arms-length stance suggested in comments such as:
It’s not that I disagree that wee can bracket issues of truth and falsity – just that I think it’s actually also possible to continue to pose questions of truth or falsity in a different way, one which is more closely and directly aligned with concerns about transformative practice than is sometimes the case, so that the measure of the truth or goodness of a movement arises from our practical awareness of the potential that things might be other, and better, than a particular movement allows them to be.
March 26, 2007 at 11:12 pm
It always seems to me that Memes as a pure concept does not usefully extend any of the concepts already existing in sociology, literary theory, semiotics, philosophy of language etc. In fact, it seems to be a foolish attempt to further ontologise Darwinism by extending its logic to the field of the social (which evo psychology surely already has done).
As an actual concept that is currency of everyday use, it is largely tied to negative metaphors (eg viruses) and used to disregard positions you dislike (eg religion) in a kind of very weak ideological critique. Using the term seems to end an air of science to the postulation of Dawkins et al regarding the distrubution and stubborness of religion, yet is unbelievably thin.
March 30, 2007 at 6:11 pm
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