Towards the beginning of his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre writes:
“How can we accept this doubling of personality? How can a man who is lost in the world, permeated by an absolute movement coming from everything, also be this consciousness sure both of itself and of the Truth. It is true that Naville observes that ‘these centres of reaction elaborate their behaviour according to possibilities which, at the level both of the individual and of the species, are subject to an unalterable and strictly determined development…’, and that ‘experimentally established reflex determinations and integrations enable one to appreciate the narrowing margin within which organic behaviour can be said to be autonomous’. We obviously agree with this; but the important thing is Naville’s application of these observations, which inevitably lead to the theory of reflection, to endowing man with constituted reason; that is, to making thought into a form of behaviour strictly conditioned by the world (which of course it is), while neglecting to say that it is also knowledge of the world. How could ’empirical’ man think? Confronted with his own history, he is as uncertain as when he is confronted by Nature, for the law does not automatically produce knowledge of itself– indeed, if it is passively suffered, it transforms its object into passivity, and thus deprives it of any possibility of collecting its atomised experiences into a synthetic unity. Meanwhile, at the level of generality where he is situated, transcendental man, contemplating laws, cannot grasp individuals. Thus, in spite of ourselves, we are offered two thoughts, neither of which is able to think us, or, for that matter, itself: the thought which is passive, given, and discontinuous, claims to be knowledge but is really delayed effect of external causes, while the thought which is active, synthetic and desituated, knows nothing of itself and, completely immobile, contemplates a world without thought. Our doctrinaires have mistaken for a real recognition of Necessity what is actually only a particular form of alienation, which makes their own lived thinking appear as an object for a universal Consciousness, and which reflects on it as though it were the thought of the other.
We must stress this crucial fact: Reason is neither a bone nor an accident. (30-31)
Recently I’ve been making a sustained effort to work my way through Marx’s massive Capital, while also returning to Deleuze’s collaborative works with Guattari, in a sustained attempt to think in a more concrete, rigorous, and philosophical way about the nature of the social (as opposed to dogmatically making sociological and psychoanalytic claims without grounding them philosophically). In certain respects, I think questions of how to think about the social and the Other have haunted philosophy for a century. With the emergence of the social sciences in the form of anthropology/ethnography, linguistics, psychoanalysis, sociology, history, and sociology, philosophy, I would argue, found its assumptions significantly challenged. Since the 17th century the schema of philosophical thought has been relatively straightforward: there is a subject whose contents of consciousness are immanent and immediate to itself (whether one is an empiricist or a rationalist) and therefore are certain (hence the fact Hume is certain of his impressions but can maintain doubt maintaining the objects that presumably cause them), and there is an object that the subject seeks to know. The social sciences significantly complicate this schema. For example, Levi-Strauss is able to show, in The Savage Mind and the Mythologiques, that there is an unconscious thought process that takes place, as it were, behind the back of the subject, both determining the thought process of the subject and creating a symbolic-categorical web, “thrown” over the world, sorting objects in various ways that can’t simply be reduced to the predicates or properties (the “primary qualities”) that belong to the “objects themselves”. This is the significance of Levi-Strauss’s extensive, often exhausting, discussion of how plants are sorted in The Savage Mind and his analysis of how the symbolic categories of the /raw/, the /boiled/, and the /cooked/ function with regard to the sorting of objects in the world (I use the convention “//” to denote the status of these entities as signifiers rather than predicates or “primary qualities” really inhering in an object). Similar results emerge from psychoanalysis– particularly in its Lacanian formulation, though also in Freud –linguistics, economics, sociology, and so on.
read on
In all of these cases, it appears that the possibility of establishing immanence is significantly called into question, for the subject’s alleged self-immanence is here effaced, as is any particular identity in the object. Nor do I think philosophy has yet done a very good job thinking through these issues. Yes, there are glimmers. Derrida, in Speech and Phenomena, rigorously thinks through repetition, the signifier, and the trace, simultaneously subjecting the subject/object hegemony to a critique and opening the way towards thinking this third domain, the domain of the social, philosophically or conceptually, rather than simply dogmatically asserting claims drawn from various social sciences. Levinas and Others have attempted to carefully think through the Other, or that which has perpetually haunted the history of philosophy without directly being thematized. Again, Levinas accomplishes this philosophically or conceptually. Dialectics provides a number of promising avenues through its capacity to think the identity of identity and difference, or the mutual imbrication of the same and the other, but still this hasn’t been nearly worked through as systematically as it needs to be. What is here needed is a sort of borromean knot, where the regions of subject, world, and other (in all their forms) are carefully thought through in their conjunction and disjunction. I don’t yet know how to do this as, in many respect, it is equivalent to the yet unsolved “three body problem” in physics.
Anyway, back to Sartre. One of the reasons I’ve been drawn back to the rather unlikely source of Sartre’s later writings is that he seems to be one of the few places in social and political thought– to my limited knowledge –where the focus is not on the critique of social organizations, but rather on the formation, the morphogenesis, of groups. As is so often the case with works that fall into oblivion (recall Lucretius prior to the Enlightenment, or Hegel early in the last century), only to suddenly become relevant again when a shift takes place in the field of questions being posed, Sartre’s late work strikes me as being poised for a fresh reading (ask me a again whether I still think this in a few weeks). A good deal of this has to do with the way in which social and political theory is now returning to questions of group formation as opposed to social critique. Moreover, of the star of Badiou continues to rise as it now appears to be rising, there will likely be renewed interest in Sartre’s late work as a result of the decisive influence it had on Badiou’s own thought. When we look at figures such as Negri and Hardt, Zizek’s more recent works since The Ticklish Subject, and Badiou’s analyses of truth-procedures in Being and Event and elsewhere, the red thread that runs through all these works is the question of how revolutionary collective emerge. In short, it is not so much an issue of revealing the contradictions and antagonisms at work within a social field– though this is, no doubt, crucial as well –but rather of determining those conditions under which a collective emerges that is capable of transforming the social sphere. We can do all the ideology critique, all the critical theory, all the social analysis we like, but so long as there are not collective motivated and capable of transforming the social sphere, so long as there aren’t activists and collective desires that traverse the social field, these critiques have little or no impact. We’re left as academics feeling superior to all those dopes that participate (or don’t) in contemporary liberal politics, noting that this form of engagement simply reinforce the current structures of alienation and exploitation, while nonetheless changing nothing. Indeed, in Lacanian terms one wonders if this isn’t precisely the way in which the radical leftist academic doesn’t enjoy his or her symptom. As Freud often observed, the symptom is a source of enjoyment, one of the few that the analysand possesses, such that the analysand often preserves his symptom despite the suffering it causes as a way of continuing to produce jouissance. The jaded academic no doubt knows that a critical theory is going to do little to change the world, but were the world to change the academic would lose the jouissance of doing critical theory and of maintaining a privileged place (in his own mind) within the social order by comparison with all those poor dupes trapped within the fetishes of ideology while believing they are fighting it. A critical theory (I’m using the term in an extremely loose fashion that would include the Frankfurt School but also any form of social and political theory that seeks change), thus aims not at the transformation of the social but at the perpetuation of itself and the profound jouissance of doing critical theory. It is a bit like a game in which the object is to ensure that new moves are always being made, rather than to win. I suspect that an intuition of this sort was at work among those who defended Zizek’s piece on 300.
A shift from questions of critique to questions of the formation of collectives, their morphogenesis, is thus a shift from enjoying ones symptom to traversing the fantasy. It is a movement from simply analyzing the world, as Marx put it, to engaging the world. Sartre characterizes this shift in terms of the transition from “seriality” to “groups-in-fusion”, where seriality can be understood as a sort of anonymity of day-day-existence that characterizes being apart of the social field– not unlike Heidegger’s das Man and being a part of the great anonymous “they” or “us” –to a group that forms its identity through the reciprocity of its participants, distinguishing itself from this anonymous social field, such that the group sets its own goals and projects with regard to the social field. In the terms outlined by Badiou in Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, the group-in-fusion is composed of the subject-of-the-truth-procedure, nominating itself and rising out of its simple interest based existence in day to day life (where interest is broadly construed to denote needs, but also desire in Baudrillard’s sense and Lacan’s sense… As Marx already hints in the very first few paragraphs of Capital).
However, if this shift is to occur, there must be a reflexive moment within thought– whether collective or private thought –where the subject arrives at knowledge of its condition within the world. As Badiou argues in Logiques des mondes, these need not be an instantaneous moment of insight or discovery, but can be a gradual function of the unfolding of an emerging group-in-fusion (somewhat like the way in which Marx describes the gradual “education” of the proletariat earlier in The Communist Manifesto as a function of its struggles). I take it that this is what N.Pepperell is getting at in her discussions of self-reflexivity and pessimistic theory, and what Sartre is alluding to somewhat obliquely in the passage cited above.
In the passage above, Sartre argues that there is a difference between, in the case of our relation to nature, being conditioned by natural laws and having a knowledge that we are conditioned by natural laws. A billiard ball need not have any reflexive awareness of being conditioned by Newtonian laws of mechanics to be conditioned by those laws of mechanics. As Sartre puts it, “it passively suffers these laws.” This poses a question for the materialist (and Sartre is a materialist): As materialists we acknowledge that humans both have a relation to nature and is in nature. How is it that humans come to know the way in which they are conditioned by nature? This is not simply an idle epistemological question, for in knowing that I am conditioned by nature I also have a minimal distance towards nature. That is, knowledge of this conditioning is not, perhaps, a result of that conditioning. Although on this point I remain open.
This question might initially appear unrelated to questions of a social and political nature, yet it applies mutatis mutandis to questions of the social field. A short while back I posed a question along these lines to Antigram with respect to structure, before he so sadly disappeared from the blogosphere. That is, if, as Antigram contends, there are no individuals only structures (and I share his concerns about the individual), how does the theorist that advocates this position have knowledge of himself as an effect of the machinations of structure? Okay, granted the question wasn’t posed that clearly at the time, but I’m retroactively saying that’s what I was trying to ask at the time without knowing it. The theory of social-formations that speaks of social structures, systems, forces, and so on and so forth is not unlike the account of the billiard ball that passively suffers the laws of mechanics. That is, agents are simply seen as props of these structures. Yet as Sartre points out, we must distinguish between the knowledge of being and the being of knowledge (CDR, 24). That is, we risk falling into theoretical pessimism so long as we fail to take self-reflexivity into account, for we come to see ourselves as passive sufferers of these social forces. Yet, to make a Pepperellesque observation, what this proposition forgets is, namely, itself: the subject enunciating the proposition. That is, this proposition forgets that the minimal condition for the possibility of enunciating the proposition that we are effects of structure is a marginal distance from structure, a minimal deterritorialization from structure, a small crack or line of flight within structure. That is, one must have in part already have stepped out of structure in order to discern structure as an operative force of conditioning in the life of the subject. Just as the symptom must come to be seen as split or divided so that the analysand might discern it as a formation of the unconscious (i.e., the analysand must no longer see the symptom as directly the problem to be solved, but rather see the symptom as signifying something other), similarly structure must already be split and fissured to enunciate the claim that we are effects of structure. What the theoretical pessimist forgets is precisely his own position of enunciation: he treats himself as being outside of structure, even as he makes the claim that he is but an effect of structure.
Yet here emerges the question pertaining to the formation of collectives. A collective, as itself a critical entity, as itself a function of the breach in structure, must either punctually or gradually have encountered this breach in structure. Yet what are the conditions, by what confluence of forces, does this breach appear? In many respects this is the ten million dollar question. The elephant in the room that no one is talking about is the old Marxist question of the conditions under which the proletariat will be awoken to its own revolutionary vocation. Of course, social structure has changed significantly and we now know that the proletariat can no longer be identified with industrial workers tout court (this as a function of the shift to post-industrial capital and the emergence of communications technologies that have changed class relations… Indeed, Capital demonstrates that “class” is a far more fluid concept than it is often made out to me). Echoing Sloterdijk’s melancholy question, “why do we continue to do it when we know that we’re doing it?” Where is that crack that might function as the impetus for the emergence of a new people? What would be the conditions under which this crack might emerge. The fact that we’re theorizing it indicates that it is already there, if only virtually or potentially. What would it take for it to become actual? As usual, I have no answers and I’m not even sure that I’m posing the questions in the right way.
Larval Subjects . 
August 7, 2007 at 3:05 pm
[…] from Larval Subjects has written a beautiful reflection on self-reflexivity and the formation of collectives, beginning with the lovely multi-layered play […]
August 7, 2007 at 6:47 pm
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August 7, 2007 at 7:07 pm
hello Sinthome. I’ve been reading this blog and roughtheory for several months now and am really appreciative of what you two have been developing. I’m very young and have no formal training training with any of this– I feel as if I’ve learned much more here than I ever had at three (so far) years of college (that doesn’t have to be taken as a compliment).
Sven Lindqvist starts and ends his devastatingly marvelous book Exterminate All the Brutes with the quote you might “enjoy”: ‘You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.’ At first I thought this implied the possibiltiy of far too much agency, but now I’m not so sure that’s what this quote is after. I’ve been wrestling with this quote for two years now (well probably my whole life) and it has only grown richer (through Zizek, Hegel and other journeys).
Also have you read any Anthony Giddens? His work duality of structure has proved invaluable to me for working through this.
Thanks so much and keep on blogging!
Sara-Maria
August 7, 2007 at 10:56 pm
This was a fantastic, thought provoking piece! I truly enjoyed thinking along with it. And i’m wondering about the following: Concerning Critical theory, you made the following observation
but, then, further down, you wrote
Now, I’m wondering what difference you envision between the “bad infinity” of a critical theory which is devoted to merely creating new moves and the self-reflectively formed fissure opening between individual and structure through the act of enunciation. Might the very self-reflectivity you raise in the latter case not be the same as the one you dislike in the former?
I ask only because my own impression of, say, Adorno’s critical theory, is that the emancipatory potential of theory just is the kind of awareness that accompanies an enunciation of one’s position within a given social structure. It would seem that Adorno’s concern, then, is not so different from yours. Do you agree, or have i missed something?
August 7, 2007 at 11:55 pm
Thanks, Alexei.
I would agree with this assessment. At the moment I’m inclined to think that the opening of a breach within the social field is a condition for praxis. By this I have in mind the thesis that we must come to see the world as something that we can act in, rather than a natural or ordinary state of affairs that “has always been this way and will always be this way”. What I’m trying to articulate or think through is the thesis that emancipatory social engagement requires a denaturalization of the social world, rendering it possible to discern modes of engagement with the world that before were completely invisible to an individual or a collective. I thus take it that there’s a sort of dialectical relation between a critical theory and praxis, such that a critical theory opens a field of praxis and praxis opens a critical theory. I want to be cautious here, however, in suggesting that intellectuals are somehow those who serve a primary role or leadership role in this process. At any rate, a critical theory is not simply an analysis of the social field but is also a part or element of that social field… Or as I’ve put it in other contexts, communications aren’t simply about something, they are something: they have a material reality.
The comments I make earlier in the post are responding to tendencies that sometimes emerge within critical theories leading to theoretical pessimism. That is, the social theorist does all the work analyzing how the social field is organized, discovering all sorts of structures, forces, feedback mechanisms that function to maintain something like social homeostasis or equilibrium, and then is crushed or paralyzed by the sense that these forces are a juggernaut incapable of being changed. On the one hand, there’s the spectre of the pleasures of theory. I do think, as Aristotle observed, and Kierkegaard too in his own way in Concluding Unscientific Postscripts under “The Philosophical Paradox”, that theoretical activity can become an end in itself, that seeks to preserve itself without changing what it seeks to target. Yet on the other hand, we can become paralyzed seeing whatever forces we’re analyzing as monolithic. What this seems to miss is that the very articulation of these forces already indicates a minimal distance with respect to these forces and is thus already a potential for change.
August 8, 2007 at 12:05 am
Great quote, Sara-Marie! That’s always the difficulty, isn’t it? I have read Giddens’ The Constitution of Society and Central Problems In Social Theory (I recently reread them, in fact), and appreciate his theory of dual structuration which strives to reconcile the macro (structural) and micro levels of sociological analysis, showing how structure is produced in and through the actions of agents while also conditioning the action of agents. I especially appreciate the manner in which he thematizes structures in terms of spatio-temporal relations surmounting absence between agents in a social field. I am leery that in his later work, Giddens was led to advocate a neoliberal politics of the “third way”, though I don’t know that a particular sociological theory necessarily entails one specific politics (as can be seen clearly in the case of Marx where debates have raged for decades as to what particular politics his social analysis entails).
This is somewhat the direction I’m moving in as I try to think about the nature of the social. Levi-Strauss, in his own claims about structure, was extremely cautious, restricting structure to a very limited set of phenomena (kinship relations, myths, certain sorting mechanisms for natural objects), and distinguishing between “hot” and “cold” societies. In this connection, Levi-Strauss was very clear in arguing that not all social phenomena are structured, and in his distinction between hot and cold societies, suggested that structures become increasingly open or loose in “hot societies” (societies characterized by a high degree of migration and communications between different societies) such that it becomes difficult to talk about structure at all. By contrast, “cold societies” are susceptible to structuration by virtue of their relative isolation and their tendency to reproduce themselves through fairly stable myths.
As is always the case with striking and productive theses, Levi-Strauss’s claims were quickly picked up and turned into a “philosophy”, pushing his theses to the extreme, leading to claims that all social phenomena are structured and that structures are the only real agency. To my thinking, this left unanswered the question of how structure reproduces itself across time (certainly we don’t wish to claim that structures are things), and when and where we can talk about structure. The failure to respond to these questions can lead to theoretical pessimism, giving the impression that structure is inescapable, that it can never be changed or transformed, and that it will always recoup agents in the end. These are some of the issues I’m trying to address, without dismissing important contributions such as those of structure, force, system, and so on.
August 8, 2007 at 1:24 am
“A critical theory . . . thus aims not at the transformation of the social but at the perpetuation of itself and the profound jouissance of doing critical theory. It is a bit like a game in which the object is to ensure that new moves are always being made, rather than to win.”
This is great stuff! As I sit here in my office reading student papers (and stealing time to read your blog), I wonder if I really want college students to write well. If they were to write well I would be denied the jouissance of feeling outraged by their bad writing! Do I avoid or not see opportunities to actually help them write (and/or read) better? In my often troubled personal relationships do I refuse to see opportunities to make them better? On another note, I can never read the words agent or agency or social structure without thinking of Burke’s pentad.
August 8, 2007 at 6:02 am
Just a few more thoughts, prompted by your reply.
one of Adorno’s remarks, which never seems to get the attention it probably deserves, concerning the concept of utopia runs roughly as follows (I can’t seem to find it at the moment): utopia would be exactly how things are now, only slightly different. I take the slight difference to be something like the self-reflective appropriation of those background conditions which typically remain invisible to our natural attitudes. It presupposes a theoretical ‘denaturalization’ (is this all that different from immanent critique?), that exposes the normative, social conditions underwriting our various activities, and the affirmation of (some) of them. It’s something very similar to Heidegger’s notion of authenticity, and consonant with Hegel’s claim to the effect that we need to pluck the rose from the cross here and now.
So, while I agree with you that some form of ‘denaturalization’ or alienation is required for any critical social theory — there’s actually a new book out that deals with the history and potential of the concept of alienation <a href=”http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=10243″ (review here) — I’m perhaps overly cautious of the concept ‘praxis.’ More accurately, I’m hesitant to invoke any kind of transformative, revolutionary action because i think that ‘transformative action’ is really a matter of transformative insight. It’s a matter of becoming an individual (in the sense of a unique subject, which can also be composed of a number of persons). It’s a matter of theory.
Maybe you could tell me a little more about the conception of ‘praxis’ you have in mind. I’m sure its not of the revolutionary variety — especially given your expressed rejection of any kind of Leninist vanguarde — but I always have a hard time shaking the vulgar marxist conception of praxis.
August 8, 2007 at 6:08 pm
Alexei, Thanks for the book reference. It sounds like you’re using a more precise or sophisticated notion of praxis than any I had in mind. I’m using the term very loosely to refer to any sort of engagement, whether it be direct engagement with the social and physical world, or whether it be intellectual engagement with texts, i.e., I haven’t pounded the thought into a concept at present. I share your position that transformative insight is what is at issue here, though I do think there can be a dialectical relationship here, where engagements and clashes with the social world can become the occasion for critical theorizing and critical theorizing can become the occasion for engagment with the world. I do not wish to adopt the position that one is real and the other a decadent epiphenomenon.
August 8, 2007 at 10:09 pm
I’ve been thinking about many of the same problems you raise in this and other posts, all relating to the theory/praxis question. It’s clear that ‘critical theory’ can and has had an effect on ‘engagement with the world,’ if I understand correctly what you mean by those two terms, Marx and Sartre being excellent examples. But I think what you’ve suggested several times before is the best answer I’ve read to this question: begin with the concrete problems of which your subjectivity is already an effect. One of the many difficulties is in recognizing when a problem is understood exclusively in terms of some interpretive framework or other, so that you are not merely repeating its grammar. But you’re already familiar with ways around this pitfall — Deleuze’s ‘method’ of reading philosophers so that their ideas are cast in a new light, Marx’s analysis of English capitalism which also addresses capitalism in general, Freud’s development of his famous theses about the mind from interviews with patients and his own experiences — you also had an interesting meditation on biology a while ago that used a similar approach — these people pulled together what was at hand (bricolage); they didn’t spend their time comparing or adopting theories to piece together some sort of master language, every interpretive act emerged from the point of view of some problem and its unraveling. Isn’t the logical conclusion to the points you’ve been making on this blog that the problems themselves are the only worthwhile starting point? Isn’t this the direction you’ve been moving in from the beginning? It seems to me the necessity of ‘alienation’ you write about has already happened in your case, or close enough to allow you to approach problems free from a pre-existing interpretive schema. Haven’t you been doing nothing more here than showing how, from the point of view of alienation from the symbolic, the extent to which ‘critical theory’ amounts to ‘real engagement’ can only be determined over the course of an investigation?
August 8, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Thanks for the clarification, Sinthome.
I hesitate to ask, since i really don’t want to be a pest and nitpick, but what the hey, here goes:
in your last response you said, viz. the idea of parxis,
Now I realize you haven’t minted your own notion of praxis yet, so maybe this question (just below) could be taken as an impetus to do so: What, exactly, isn’t praxis?
There is, i think, an urgency to this question, because the very idea of self-reflexivity can have critical potential only if it’s somehow distinct from our average interventions in the world. Especially given this claim of yours:
I’m assuming, in other words, that the reason why a critical engagement can –instead of must — be dialetically developed from a clash between thinking and action, or can arise from theorizing, is precisely because there’s a specific mode of thinking or intellectual engagement (i.e., a self-reflective one) that does something over and above what we typically experience.
So, if we’re not to presuppose what we want to prove, don’t we need to identify a precise kind of encounter and activity? don’t we need some conception of praxis that allows us to distinguish between non-reflexive thinking, and reflexive thinking? Or might it be better to stick with a more fluid conception of thought and action altogether?
August 9, 2007 at 12:36 am
Alexei, these are all points I’d share. I think the reason I’m vacillating a bit is that your previous remarks suggested that you see the movement as unilateral, moving from transformative insight produced through critical theorizing to praxis. I would like to reserve room for the possibility of certain encounters in the world functioning as the stimuli for critical theorizing. In my own political engagements, I have found these to sometimes be evoked as a result of traumatic institutional changes that, as it were, awoke me from my “dogmatic slumber”. These encounters then functioned as an occasion of theoretical development that then rebounded on practice with regard to the institutions in question. Now it could be that I was already predisposed to respond in such a way due to my intellectual background, but I suspect this is not the case. Prior to this encounter the space was a-political, as a result of the encounter it became political.
I am not suggesting that things always occur in this way, but I do want to reserve a place for such events. They have a structure similar to what Lacan describes in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis under the heading of “trauma”, where trauma is thematized as a “missed encounter”. The idea here is that something is missing from its place, that it does not occur where it is supposed to occur, thus undermining the symbolic networks that ordinarily organize experience. Something similar can occur in the social world as well. Nonetheless, I think the distinction you’re attempting to draw attention to here is an important and clarifying one. If praxis is to be reserved for political engagement, then perhaps the contrary that you’re suggesting under the heading of “average interventions” could be labeled “everydayness”.
I should perhaps mention that I have an extremely limited background with Critical Theory as embodied by the Frankfurt school (Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer, etc). My background is primarily French theory. My use of the term “critical theory” is drawn from N.Pepperell over at Rough Theory (http://www.roughtheory.org/) who does have an extensive background in the Frankfurt School, but broadly defines a critical theory as any theory that does not simply analyze the world, but seeks to locate potentials for transformation and explain how such a transformation is possible. This ignorance on my part might account for some of the terminological vacillations you’re sensing. My forays into social and political theory really are ad hoc and works of a bricoleur, not the result of any sort of sustained engagement with this tradition.
August 9, 2007 at 12:54 am
Posting on the run at the moment, and not able to do the discussion justice. A couple of quick questions, which will hopefully make some sense:
Alexei – on this:
I’m curious whether your “more fluid conception of thought and action” might already be implied here – whether there might be more of a terminological, rather than a strong substantive, divergence of positions? I’m not in the position to make a strong claim, as I’m insufficiently familiar with your own categories – with what you’re aiming for in gesturing to a “more fluid conception”.
But you’ve posed your question as though the core strategic purpose of a concept of self-reflexivity would be, in a sense, to enable us to sort forms of thinking – dividing the self-reflexive wheat from the non-self-reflexive chaff, so to speak. I don’t wish to speak for Sinthome, but this isn’t really how I understand the strategic intention of a concept of self-reflexivity. Not that it isn’t possible to make such distinctions, but that this isn’t really the end goal, so to speak, of the notion of self-reflexivity.
Self-reflexive theories, for me, are theoretical approaches that take seriously the notion that the presence of critical sensibilities, critical social movements, and other visible tensions within the social field, tell us something about the determinate character and the potentials for transformation within the social field. This entails a fluid conception of thought and action – or, perhaps more accurately, a dis-exceptionalisation of thought as a form of action. Apologies for rushing through this point – my intention here isn’t to make an argument, but more to ask whether you’d like to expand on your position?
traxus4420 – on this:
I’m curious whether your question takes the concept of “self-reflexivity” to be a sort of mode of existence grounded in the activity of an individual thinker? I’m asking this in an open-ended way, just trying to get a sense of how you’re thinking about the issue.
Again not wishing to speak for anyone else, but I would take the notion of “self-reflexivity” to be more an attempt to reflect on the nature and potentials of a collectively-constituted social field – and I’m therefore not sure how it would relate to an ideal of approaching “problems free from a pre-existing interpretive schema”?
Apologies that these questions are a bit undercooked, and also posed with reference to some of my own curiosities – hopefully they won’t draw the discussion of the line of flight Sinthome was trying to trace here.
August 9, 2007 at 1:24 am
N.Pepperell writes,
It seems to me that Sartre’s distinction between seriality and groups-in-fusion has a lot of relevance here. Mind you, I don’t have any special commitment to Sartre but am just experimenting with his vocabulary as I read The Critique of Dialectical Reason. In the original post I really mess up the distinction. For Sartre, seriality refers to social relations defined by alterity, where the idea is that there are no special relations between ourselves and others in the social field but we just go about our ordinary business in day to day life. By contrast, groups are defined by reciprocity, where the relations to others are interiorized and our practice with regard to them is exteriorized, both producing a special subjectivity for ourselves and producing the group as well.
Now, there are going to be a variety of groups and not all of them will be self-reflexive and political, but this is a start in thinking about two very different ways of thinking the social. Thus, for instance, there’s nothing especially political about certain religious groups, though being a part of a religious group is nonetheless a departure from “seriality”. The case is similar with being a student or a faculty member at a college in many, though not all, circumstances. This isn’t seriality, but it’s not yet political either. The question then becomes how we distinguish those groups that might be referred to as “critical”, from those that are a-political… Though that’s not quite what I’m trying to say. This is also a start in distinguishing everdayness from praxis.
August 9, 2007 at 2:01 am
I’m curious whether your question takes the concept of “self-reflexivity” to be a sort of mode of existence grounded in the activity of an individual thinker? I’m asking this in an open-ended way, just trying to get a sense of how you’re thinking about the issue.
Again not wishing to speak for anyone else, but I would take the notion of “self-reflexivity” to be more an attempt to reflect on the nature and potentials of a collectively-constituted social field – and I’m therefore not sure how it would relate to an ideal of approaching “problems free from a pre-existing interpretive schema”?
N. Pepperell — I think these questions push ‘self-reflexivity’ to its limit, maybe even further. If we don’t define self-reflexivity as having to do with an individual, whether an individual human or an individual organization or group, then what more use does the term have? It seems to me that it always already individuates whatever it is used to describe in a particular way, regardless of whether we use it in a ‘knowing’ way, in scare quotes, or not. I take something that is self-reflexive to be referring to something about/inside itself, rather than being an act in itself. I’ll again use the sort of over-used example of Deleuze’s style of reading — in that sense you could say his only ‘preconceived framework’ was that he was going to take the thinker precisely on their own terms, expanding on their ideas and exploring their structures. I would say the fact that he produced unmistakably ‘deleuzian’ readings of those thinkers does not mean he was hiding secret motives or biases that we need to root out in order to separate ‘artificial’ from ‘legitimate’ arguments within his reading. So, to complete the example, I would not call Deleuze’s reading style at all self-reflexive. My suggestion is that self-reflexivity forecloses immanence.
August 9, 2007 at 5:18 am
traxus4420 – I suspect that some issues may be terminological here; others may be more substantive. I’ll need to speak tentatively, as I suspect it would be easy for us to speak past one another.
A bit of background – and apologies if this take us away from the issues you wished to be discussing – I just offer this as a way of contextualising how I am approaching the discussion.
The original post above was responding, in part, to some things I’ve recently written – definitional posts, for the most part – about the concept of “self-reflexivity” as deployed in a particular kind of social critique. Sinthome was of course doing more than just responding to a few of my gestures, so I want to be careful not to reduce this post to any issues I might raise. My argument, though, was simply that, in the sense in which the term “self-reflexivity” tends to interest me, it is related to a claim that a particular social field generates determinate potentials that it also constrains. By pointing to those potentials – by explaining how a specific social field can both generate such potentials, but also deflect the eyes and the hearts of individuals (persons, collectivities, institutions, etc.) from those potentials, creating grooves into which practice tends repetitively to fall – the critique does two things: (1) it explains its own ideals (the potentials it explores and voices) as a potential within the context that it analyses; and (2) it explains why those potentials might not have been recognised or realised – why it is plausible for certain potentials to be passed over in social practice.
Over at roughtheory, I argued that, when these sorts of standards are applied within a social theory, there are already a set of strong (and potentially contentious) claims being put forward about the determinate nature of the social context – I argued that there is no particular reason to assume that any human collectivity or context would necessarily have the determinate attributes this kind of theoretical approach presupposes. So, in a sense, my post was both meant to remind that the notion that critique can be socially immanent is not something that can be taken for granted or asserted unproblematically, while still holding open the possibility for engaging with some form of socially immanent critical theory.
Any approach, though, that operates within a broader notion of immanence (and here I am not speaking about immanence to the social, as in the paragraph above, but in the broader sense of approaches that attempt to operate without reference to notions of transcendence or objectivity or similar concepts) wrestles with a somewhat similar issue, which I also tend to refer to as an issue of “self-reflexivity”: the issue of exploring the determinate potentials the philosophy is voicing and, to the extent that other approaches are being criticised, the issue of explaining what determinate potentials these other approaches are voicing – why the eye and the heart, why the collectivity in motion, can become bound in ways that prevent them from seeing or even stumbling into the potentials articulated by the critical philosophy. I am a relative newcomer to Deleuze, and can of course be corrected on this point, but I see him – certainly in Difference and Repetition – unfolding a philosophical approach that is self-reflexive in this broader sense: he makes a specific point of explaining that the critique of negation must also explain the appearance of negation – and the movement of his argument then seems, at least to me, to interpret negation as a sort of shadow cast by a determinate positivity – thus both expressing, and disguising, the existence of the positivity to which Deleuze is trying to draw attention. This framework permits a critique of approaches that embrace negation – from the standpoint of an approach that, without the need to break any immanent frame, can capture the relationship between negation and other phenomena, and therefore reveal the partial and limited character of other approaches.
I realise this doesn’t speak to Deleuze’s reading style – I’m not sure in which sense immanence or self-reflexivity interests you in that context? Certainly, though, I’m not operating within a framework that involves reducing theorists’ work back to their interests or motives, whether in order to unmask and debunk, or in order to sort the true from the false – by the same token, I don’t really see questions of self-reflexivity to involve an interrogation of why an individual theorist does what they do – I see self-reflexivity more in terms of whether the theory accounts for itself as a possibility of the world whose potentials it seeks to express: whether the account of the world makes sense of the potentials for transformation that the theory asserts or implies, such that the theory can then facilitate, rather than impede, the exploration of those potentials.
Apologies if these comments miss the centre of your concerns: I’m just feeling my way toward a sense of whether we’re speaking about the same things…
August 9, 2007 at 2:59 pm
A few things before i get started. First, this has been an excellent series of exchanges. Thanks again for the opportunity. I should also note that I think N Pepperell is probably right about our discussion (at least the exchanges between me and Sinthome) revolving around terminology more than any substantive disagreement. (Perhaps that’s the pitfall of being new to each other – new styles, new thought-processses…) Finally, I’m going to make this quick — I’m out of smokes!
Anyway, in response to Sinthome: you’re right to point out that i sometimes sound as if I’m advocating a strictly lateral movement from insight to activity. I don’t intend to assert any necessary, serial progression, but of course, what one writes, and what one intends come into conflict in all kinds of ways. So, thanks for noting this tendency of mine. I also agree with what you say concerning trauma, and its political resonances. (and, for the record, my grasp of French philosophy/theory after Sartre is terrible. So i think we complement each other nicely)
In response to N Pepperell: I think we basically agree. for my part, I was seeking clarification, rather than attempting to critique Sinthome’s piece. On the whole, the notion of self-reflexivity you offer is one i would accept — and adopt for myself (Ok, I want to add a few footnotes, insert a few accents, you get the picture. but i don’t think these ‘editorial’ changes are differences that make a difference).
For my part, if I may take up a few lines to to expand on my position (as Peperell requested), I can only say that i’m not really sure I have a stable “position” yet. When you write for example,
I completely agree. It’s not that I want to use the concept of ‘self-reflexivity’ to merely “separate the wheat from the chaff,” but that such a conceptual distinction is implicit in the concept in the first place. I just wanted to be clear on how that distinction operated, whether its conceptual countours were porous (and if so to what extent)etc.
(PS: I’ll think about how i would articulate my own position a little more, and then maybe post it ‘at home’)
August 9, 2007 at 7:19 pm
N. Pepperell: Thank you for your extensive response — I also checked back to the posts you referenced on your own blog and think I have a better idea now of what you (in dialogue with sinthome) are getting at.
I’m starting to think that the question of self-reflexive critique is blurring two different objectives: one, the accounting for the critic’s ability to criticize, for the ‘rupture’ that must have occurred in order for that critique to be formulated in the first place (thus countering pessimistic critique), and two, the more vague, mostly implied goal of finding the possibilities for the emergence of bodies of resistance — critical bodies, revolutionary bodies, etc. I don’t think these two are reducible to each other — that is, I think that understanding how the critic is able to criticize necessarily helps us understand how a group that *structurally* resists the structural object of the critique can be formed. I agree completely that we should ‘dis-exceptionalize thought as a form of action,’ but we also have to be able to understand what thought as a form of action is actually capable of within the context of its emergence, and what it is not. That is, we have to treat thought as we do other actions: in terms of its effectiveness to accomplishing its respective aims.
So, I think a critique that is adequately self-reflexive already goes beyond that term, in that it takes itself as just another part of its ‘object’ — it does not ‘take itself into account’ so that it can achieve or assist in the achievement of some other task. I know the way I ‘m expressing this makes it seem merely semantic, but I really think it’s an important distinction.
An example might be this: the academic critic can study how academic criticism is possible within the social field of academia (which necessitates understanding how academia relates to things like capitalism and political institutions) — what factors led to its emergence, why critique is carried out, for what ends, what it achieves, etc. In this it would be a very ‘first-person’ account. Or, the academic critic could study the emergence of another group, say an activist group, or even something like ‘activist groups in the U.S.,’ which would be ‘third-person’ but, because of its stated aims, no less immanent (immanence is only meaningful within a context). In both cases, the fact of the subject’s possibility is already established; it is the starting point of the critique. In neither case is the critic ‘calling revolutionary groups into being’ or whatever; he or she is simply understanding what already exists, providing others with that knowledge who may then use it as they will. In other words, the theory can only be conceived as equal to its object (a speculative theory can only ever be speculative). I think the position of a critic, both in terms of enunciation and the actual limits given by the critic’s specific mode of institutionalization, does not allow much more than this.
August 9, 2007 at 7:23 pm
I confused subject and object in that last paragraph — subject of critique and object of critique meant the same thing in the sense I used them. Sorry.
August 10, 2007 at 12:39 am
Alexei – On this:
You and me both… I note with some amusement that I always seem to try to write on this stuff from scratch, changing the way I express it slightly (or, sometimes, dramatically) every time I back way into it. You’d think I’d just pick one of the times I think I express the issue well, and stick with it… But I look forward to seeing how these sorts of themes unfold in your work.
traxus4420 – I agree that there are different issues being suspended in the discussion – some are probably blurred, others are probably more short-handed or abbreviated, presupposing some distinctions that have been unfolded in earlier stages of the conversation, when I should have outlined them more clearly for present purposes – I’m an adherent of the notion that blog discussions should have a “Hic Rhodus! Hic Salta!” dimension, and should unfold what I’m discussing more carefully.
I should also stress again that much of what I’m raising relates to my own idiosyncratic interest in seeing whether there might be any way to make good on a concept of theory that, in the Frankfurt School folks, led to an impasse – I don’t see any particular reason other people should share this interest, certainly not before I’ve done more with the concept that I have to date, and I therefore want to be particularly cautious that my comments not be read back into Sinthome’s post, which needn’t be bound to some of my more perverse distinctions and definitions.
All this said, my impulse is to think that you are perhaps still positioning the discussion as though what is primarily at stake is an analysis of how critical sensibilities arise. Without contesting that this is an interesting thing to analyse, I wish to suggest that there may be a prior (although closely related) question: what are critical sensibilities? Are they something that stands outside the thing being criticised? Are they something generated by thing being criticised? In other words, the issue is not simply one of “how are ruptures produced“, but “what are ruptures, exactly”…
This is one of the reasons that I’ve argued that the notion of a self-reflexive social theory already makes extremely strong claims about the nature of a social context – claims that the social generates its own ruptures, that the qualitative character of these ruptures can be theorised by the same process through which we theorise the reproduction of the existing social context, and that critique therefore need not be a process of criticising the social with reference to something else (nature, for example), nor does critique need to be a process of “abstract negation” (of criticising the context from a standpoint whose relationship to the context is not specified), but can instead be a process that expresses the potentials or explores the lines of flight that unfold within a context. (I’ll note, again, that one can have a commitment to immanence in a broad ontological sense, and reject the notion that an immanent social critique is possible.)
This may have some implications for your observation here:
I actually do tend to treat critique this way – as something that, as I’ve expressed it somewhere in another thread on this blog, “lags” the constitution of potentials. (Note that I don’t think this is the only possible way to conceptualise critique, but this is reasonably close to how I conceptualise what I personally am doing.) I also tend to think that potentials are constituted in alienated form – by which I mean that I tend to think that we generate potentials unintentionally in collective practices that are “aimed” at doing something else entirely. Critique is therefore a bringing-to-awareness of what we have unintentionally and inadvertantly taught ourselves might be possible. However. Critique (and I do tend to lump social and intellectual movements together into this term) also can have a productive effect – particularly when you think of potentials as being constituted in alienated form, and therefore ambivalent in the sense of bound intrinsically (but not inevitably) to the reproduction of the existing context – critique is part of the collective process of shaking things loose from the forms in which we have inherited them, of turning things over and around in order to gain greater insight into how the reproduction of the existing context is effected, and the determinate tensions through which we are beginning to learn that other and more is possible.
Apologies for not being able to develop this further – it may not even be clear why I thought this was relevant to say in response to your post (and I may be wrong that it was relevant!). I unfortunately have to run to a meeting, and can’t bring things together in a better form… Sorry about this…
August 10, 2007 at 7:12 pm
N. Pepperell –
Again, thanks for your thoroughness, which does not at all require an apology. I suppose I’m of the opinion that the only way to answer the question ‘what are critical sensibilities’ is to understand the process of how those groups which identify themselves as critical arise and what the effects of their activities are. In other words I don’t think one can begin to question the definition of a concept before first tracing the ways in which that concept is deployed in the world. The same goes for ruptures. Maybe this is what you are doing, I don’t know. I took sinthome’s reference to you in his broad working definition of critique to mean that you were discussing that and not specifically the frankfurt school (that they were a symptom of ‘pessimistic’ critique, against which you were trying to theorize something else).
But since this conversation seems only to include the two of us, maybe it would be better if we picked it back up on your blog at another time. I’ll keep an eye on your future posts. Thanks again for addressing my questions here.
August 11, 2007 at 9:03 pm
[…] August 11th, 2007 A few days ago, Sinthome, fromLarval Subjects posted a very interesting piece on Self-Reflexivity, which responds to some of the issues N Pepperell raised here. During the discussion of […]
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August 15, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Synth,
This is a really good post, very thought provoking, thanks, and the discussion is great as well. Here are a few thoughts, questions etc I had.
When you said that the “the proletariat can no longer be identified with industrial workers tout court” what do you mean? In one sense, the proletariat can still be identified this way – people do so, they’re just wrong. To my mind, this identification was always wrong. So, do you mean that that idea is largely discredited, or do you mean that that idea is no longer adequate to present reality whereas it once was?
I like your/Pepperell’s definition of “critical theory as any theory that does not simply analyze the world, but seeks to locate potentials for transformation and explain how such a transformation is possible.” I’m not sure why this should be called “critical” theory, though, as opposed to any number of other possible terms – say, “transformative theory” or “potential-locating theory” or whatever. It also seems to me that there are at least two ways to do the explanation of possibility. One is to simply demonstrate some possibility – some phenomenon X exists at some location, therefore phenomenon X is possible – then make claims about the transferability or replicability of that phenomenon or an analog thereof. Communists around the world did this with the bolshevik revolution (and still do), anarchists did and do the same with Spain in the 30s. The other way to do so is more properly philosophical, addressing conditions of possibility and the like. This I think is where questions like your “Where is that crack that might function as the impetus for the emergence of a new people? What would be the conditions under which this crack might emerge?” fit.
I’m not opposed to the latter, not at all, but I think this relates to a question of what counts as theory, as when you write “there can be a dialectical relationship here, where engagements and clashes with the social world can become the occasion for critical theorizing and critical theorizing can become the occasion for engagment with the world.”
As I read Badiou (partly through Ranciere), any clash involves/embodies thought and reflection, either in an identifiable prior moment or in the middle (clashing involves thinking, say). And these experiences of course tend to change how people think afterward, that’s one way to read Badiou’s assertions about events conditioning the production of truths which condition changes in philosophy. Much of the thought involved in these clashes, though, in the operations of this dialectic, often go unrecognized and unvalued as thought let alone as theory.
There’s also a temporal difference between the two types of theory I hamhandedly distinguished – one is looking forward asking about what might be possible, what could come about, the other is looking backward (or elsewhere in the present) for inspiration and examples. Both sit in the present and both can play roles in future oriented projects, but I think this is an important difference between the two types. Among other things, I think questions about conditions of possibility of political change can lead to questioning if that type of change is possible at all.
take care,
Nate
August 16, 2007 at 1:29 am
Nate – Just a very quick note that I’ve replied (in long, incoherent trundles of prose) to your question over at roughtheory, and am currently reaching the “could someone just please shoot me now” stage of my cold, so I won’t reply at length here. I just felt a twinge of guilt about one of your questions, and didn’t feel it fair to leave it for Sinthome. When you ask:
My guilt is because I don’t believe Sinthome likes the term “critical theory” either – he’s basically using it, because I use it. He has on a number of occasions… er… criticised my tendency to frame what I’m doing using the vocabulary of “critique”. So I suspect he’d happily ditch the term – and with a joyous “I told you so” to me, as well :-)
I tend to use the term critical theory because, in the sociological circles in which I tend to travel, it’s generally been the clearest, briefest way to express roughly what I’m doing and, thus far at least, I’m generally happier to clean up the misunderstandings the term sometimes causes, than to use a term without prior referents. So I find that I have to fend off assumptions that I’m talking, either about the literary version of critical theory, or about the Frankfurt School – but the people I’m speaking to (offline) generally “get” that the term “critical theory” means that I’m trying to talk about emancipatory transformation, which has made it a pragmatically useful shorthand. Of course, I generally don’t have to worry (again offline) about the sorts of associations to “critique” that might arise when speaking to people with closer ties to philosophy…
One of the many points of online interaction, for me, is to get a feel for the impacts of terms across disciplinary boundaries. There will never be a perfect word choice, but minimising associative fallouts is good whenever possible.
I have an impulse to say that there may be more than the two options you outline above, for understanding what might be meant by “potentials” – but to be honest, I’m feeling too wretched to develop the point. I’ll leave it cryptic and, who knows, maybe someone will come up with something better than the half-baked thought I might have written about… ;-P
August 16, 2007 at 3:54 pm
hey NP,
I hope you feel better, that sounds rotten. I’m not at all opposed to the term ‘critical theory’. What I meant to say and forgot to actually type out is that I’m under the impression that the term ‘critical’ is sometimes associated with reflections on conditions of possibility (in my head this is associated with Kant but I’m not at all sure, I’m rusty on that stuff and was never super up on it in the first place). In that sense, Synth’s perspective is precisely a critical theory, asking after the conditions of possibility of systemic change and/or the formations of collectivities. That seems different to me than what I laid out as starting from examples – though of course questions of possibility could recur, like ‘is this example really portable into our situation?’. I’m also not making any claim for there being two and only two options, those are just two general approaches I can think of and have run across.
take care,
Nate
August 16, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Synth sorry to double post, I just want to add real quick because I don’t know that I was clear – it seems to me that one way to identify a potential for transformation is to start from some actual change or event. In that case, talking about what made that event possible involves talking about where the event came from. If the potential is unactualized (this includes to some extent the proceeding by examples that I suggested, like when Gramsci praises Lenin and the bolsheviks in Russia as part of his activity in Italy), then it’s a bit trickier – if one says that some potential for transformation exists then sets about to explain its possibility then it’s not clear where one is starting from – is one starting from this particular potential (all this is vague, it’d be helpful to have some examples) and then moving to its conditions of possibility, or is one starting from more general conditions of possibility then looking for particular potentials? Synth’s post here suggests the latter, and this is much of what Badiou and Negri do as I read them. I think there’s a continuum between these types of approaches rather than a hard and fast distinction, but I do think the distinction is worth noting.
take care,
Nate
August 16, 2007 at 5:53 pm
Nate, thanks for the thoughtful comments! With regard to your alternatives pertaining to industrial workers, can I say “yes”? On the one hand, I agree that this is a misinterpretation of Marx. This is especially the case with Capital where he pays a great deal of attention to how classes are generated, no longer reifying them in the way his writings sometimes seemed to suggest in his earlier work. On the other hand, I wish to say that this characterization of the social and political field is not adequate to present reality.
I like your suggestions of “transformative theory” and “potential-locating theory”. With regard to your most recent post, I’m a little nervous about talk of “conditions for possibility”, as this seems to suggest an ahistorical universalism which is at odds with other commitments I possess. I would like to argue that we cannot generalize in this way across history, but must instead locate potentials within specific socio-historical constellations, in much the same way that Marx argues that commodities do not exist in all times and places, but rather belong to a very specific economic and social constellation at a particular point in history. If I’m able to argue in such a way, then theory is no longer a universalizing move, but rather is situated with respect to a time and a particular social organization. The question then becomes one of locating those potentials within a specific field that contain the possibility of transformation rather than simply re-inscribing the reigning and dominant structure. Consequently, there is a transcendentalism here as it’s not simply a question of what is actual, but it is a transcendental empiricism centered on what exists or is, rather than all possible experience as in the case of something like Kant’s transcendental idealism.
August 17, 2007 at 8:09 am
hi Synth,
I really want that reading of Marx (the sort of factoryist concept of class) to be wrong, because I’m invested in Marx being right and good, but if it’s not wrong then so much the worse for Marx, I guess. I had to ask, though, as it’s a preoccupation of mine particularly with regard to Negri, who I think says basically that this reading is _no longer_ any good, which is very different than saying it was always a problem.
I share your unease with conditions-of-possibility talk. I think I’m fumbling for two questions. One is about the orientation toward time – is the attempt to theorize future change (the crack which has not yet … umm cracked) or is the attempt to theorize past change in a way which is useful and make some rough estimations at where and how to employ the lessons drawn. The second is whether one is looking at this or that condition or situation or at conditions and situations more generally. (I have very similar questions for NP, unsurprisingly.) Here’s a try to be better on the second, using the analogy of prisonbreak. The first issue is whether we’re looking at past prison breaks and drawing lessons for use in our attempt — like maybe some of Ranciere’s work, or if we’re looking at the present arrangement of the prison and trying to see when the guards’ backs are turned etc — like maybe Negri’s work in Empire and Multitude? The second issue is whether we’re talking about this prison that we or others are in (like in a memoir of prison break, say) — like with Marx’s political/programmatic writing, or if we’re talking prison break in general (like a manual, say, or some meditations drawn from this or that or many prison breaks) — I feel like much of Badiou’s work is doing this last.
That doesn’t feel any clearer, sorry, best I can do for now.
take care,
Nate
August 17, 2007 at 2:45 pm
Nate –
Just quickly – I’ve meandered on quite a bit about some of these questions back at roughtheory, in relation to my own work. Seeing how you’ve phrased some of the issues here (or perhaps just being more alert than when I was replying), I might not have been completely on target with everything you are asking – but we can follow this up over there if you like. I just wanted to say here, though, that I really love this:
That’s a lovely way of parsing the field! :-) In terms of the divisions you outline above, and speaking personally, I’d be thinking in terms of that specific cell, based on an intimate exploration of its unique and distinctive points of vulnerability. Not a memoir, though, but more of a proposal of targets for future action – placing me more in line with where you place Negri – although I personally find Empire and Multitude too ??descriptive?? for what I’m after – which may not really be much of a problem, in that these works can be read as a sort of “rally the troops/change the narrative” intervention, where certain kinds of analysis are arguably inappropriate.
On readings of Marx – you would probably already know from earlier discussions that I think Marx is doing something more complex than he’s sometimes read to be doing… Or, since I’m more concerned with what we can get from Marx, than with what he meant – I think that, whatever he meant, we can get more complex things from him than the “factoryist” reading of class with which you’ve expressed discomfort above…
But I don’t want to prattle on both at my site and here :-) Just wanted to say that I enjoyed your forms of expression above, and that it gave me a better sense for what you were after, than I might have had when I replied on my own blog. Sorry about that…
August 19, 2007 at 8:13 pm
[…] Following the recent reflections on reflexivity at Now-Times, Roughtheory and Self and World and Larval Subjects I want to pursue a connection between two of the senses of reflexivity distinguished. Since a fair […]
August 20, 2007 at 12:32 am
[…] then initiated the conversation proper, with a beautiful post over at Larval Subjects titled “Problems of Self-Reflexivity”. This post provoked a vibrant discussion, which eventually led Alexei over at Now-Times to chime in […]
August 20, 2007 at 6:26 am
[…] any other title either. I’ve been in a bit of interbloggal conversation lately. Partly with Larval Subjects and mostly with RoughTheory about critical theory, which relates tangentially to the argument Jodi […]
September 4, 2007 at 3:31 am
[…] the URL for the theoretical pessimism post, for example, it generated this. For Sinthome’s Problems of Self-Reflexivity, which was the more proximate epicentre of this discussion, it produces this. Some moments of the […]
December 23, 2007 at 9:15 am
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