…People who seem to think that the only possible way you could disagree or have a different position is if you had misinterpreted their position or failed to understand what they’re talking about. “After all, any rational person who understood my position couldn’t possibly disagree!” Why is it that I often find this way of thinking among social scientists who like to talk about perspective, conceptual schemes, paradigms, etc? Is there some inner logic that inherently leads these positions into a performative contradiction in which the person advocating them is incapable of actually recognizing that their perspective is a perspective even as they make claims about how all is paradigms, perspectives, and conceptual scheme? It is odd how the most ardent perspectivists in the social sciences, political theory, and philosophy somehow become the most vehement absolutist imperialists, subtracting their own position from the very principle they claim to find in everything else.
First Order Cybernetics: Drawing a distinction to observe the world. For instance, once you’ve drawn a circle on a piece of paper, you can now indicate what is inside and what is outside the circle.
Second Order Cybernetics: Observing how the first order cybernetician draws distinctions to observe the world, or “observing the observer”. In first order cybernetics the fact that the distinction had to be operative prior to indicating what is inside or outside the circle tends to disappear. The second-order cybernetician observes how distinctions are drawn so as to construct the object that the first order observer experiences as real. For instance, looking how 19th century psychiatry drew the distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality, that did not exist before, and which effectively constructed homosexuality and heterosexuality as objects of study or research.
What these social scientists seem to forget is… Drum beat please:
Third Order Cybernetics: Observing how the observer draws distinctions to observe the observer. That is, this would be the critical and reflexive analysis of the sociological observer who purports to observe observers from a “value-free” and “neutral” standpoint.
Larval Subjects . 
October 9, 2007 at 4:45 pm
I had this sense that someone was walking over my grave… ;-P
October 10, 2007 at 4:54 am
Hi Levy,
This post reminds me of my reading your criticism of social constructivist (or was it Le Landa?) at some point when the Lacan mailing list was active. I believe it was an article or a presentation. Do you still have it and would you mind passing me a copy? I’d very much like to have a second look at it.
best
Justin
October 11, 2007 at 12:29 am
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that 2nd order cybernetics accounted for all subsequent iterations of this type of critical scrutiny. I mean it’s good that you’re bringing this up as a reminder for us to stand guard against the idea of neutrality, but I find this criticism akin to Judith Butler’s own critique of the contradiction found in the representation of the Real by words when it is often described as the part that escapes language.
October 11, 2007 at 12:35 am
I’m not sure what you’re getting at, purloined. Or rather, I’m not sure I see the parallel between Butler and what I’m talking about here. The issue I’m getting at is that second-order cybernetic approaches often behave as if they’ve attained a metalanguage or a position outside the very thing they assert. A good example of a form of investigation that tries to deal with this problem would be something like Bourdieu’s analysis of the investigator in Homo Academicus.
October 11, 2007 at 3:33 am
I had this quote from Butler in mind:
“We can agree that there is a limit to conceptualization and to any given formulation of sociality, and that we encounter this limit at various liminal and spectral moments in experience. But why are we then compelled to give a technical name to this limit, ‘the real’, and to make the further claim that the subject is constituted by this foreclosure? The use of the technical nomenclature opens up more problems than it solves.”
Both the original post and this remark seem to put forth a critique against those who inch dangerously close to claiming to have attained a metalanguage: in your case, the perspectivists’ firm grip on 2nd-order cybernetic; in Butler’s, Lacan’s formulation of the Real and Zizek’s insistent defense of it.
At the same time, I’m not too sure if I’m satisfied with Zizek’s response to this, which asserted that by calling the Real the Real, the inevitable mismatch between the word and the non-existent limit that it describes enacts the Real’s erosive effects on language — effects which both tenuously affirm language while calling attention to this tenuous affirmation by way of the phallic signifier.
That’s why I was asking if 2nd-order cybernetic already implies, in its introduction of a second term, an endless train of n-th order cybernetics. If it doesn’t, then I would imagine that that would open up the possibility of your mentioning a 3rd-order cybernetic without mentioning a 4th or a 5th as pretext for yet another charge that you’re subscribing to the belief in some metalanguage, and so on and so forth. The way I’m casually playing with these differently ordered cybernetics may itself be a reflection of my own misunderstanding the original post, and I can only hope that my concerns as expressed here aren’t completely off-topic.
If my reading of Zizek isn’t completely off, I can’t help but see a quietism or being dogmatically content with the knowledge acquired through the 1st-order cybernetic (assuming that the following ones are simple re-capitulations of the first one anyway) as being offered by him as the alternative strategy to get around the problem of metalanguage.
Of course, I’m not looking for some definitive answer to resolve this problem, per se, but having been in the doldrums when it comes to this particular issue, I was hoping that maybe some light can be cast on it.
October 11, 2007 at 3:37 am
Honestly, we share similar doldrums.
October 11, 2007 at 4:44 am
I don’t suppose either of you would want to… er… elaborate on the doldrums? :-) Sometimes I wonder if certain kinds of doldrums around such issues relate to how the question is initial posed or framed, but I may not be understanding the concern here… Please disregard if this is not a productive thing to elaborate…
October 11, 2007 at 5:17 am
I can’t tell if that’s a remark on the lack of clarity and coherence on my part or if we’re really talking about the same thing. Being a noob to these type of discussions has most certainly a way of stirring doubt in oneself.
October 11, 2007 at 3:47 pm
N Pepperell,
for me, at least, the doldrums involve figuring out what the next course of action in the light of the dilemma one faces when tackling the issue of a metalanguage. And perhaps, a “next course of action” is even besides the point seeing as how the likes of Zizek and Fish (or I daresay anyone remotely linked to Continental thought) push a rather Heideggerian diagnosis of how one is always already conditioned by ideology such that any post-ideological autonomy is rendered perhaps the most ideological of all gestures.
knowing that the discussion has generally stopped with falling back on a set of givens, how does one muster the…I don’t know…strength or pluck to as Zizek puts it, “assume the mistake to the end,” when one has that reflexive voice that gnaws away at your mind, reminding you of it being a mistake/ideological construct/ungrounded dogma.
for now, I’m just going to assume that this doesn’t belong here but to a cognitive behaviorist who will convince me that such a superegoic voice is only productive insofar as it allows me to function and be recognized as submitting to the normative standards.
As mentioned above, clarity’s not my strong-suit and if there’s any further need for elaboration on my end of things, feel free (although I’d be interested in what Dr. Sinthome has to say regarding this matter). And N Pepperell, if this is just a case of either of us shadow-boxing, please let us/me know as I’ve been so entrenched in this particular aspect of the issue to lose sight of there being a host of doldrums that come with this issue.
October 12, 2007 at 1:36 am
I suppose my impulse is to wonder whether a few things are being grouped more closely than they need to be, in the discussion? And whether this might be generating some of the experience of a dilemma? Which isn’t to say that these issues aren’t complex and mutually-implicated – just that maybe (maybe – I’m not making a strong argument here, as I’m not completely sure I understand the concern being expressed) not mutually-implicated in as direct a way as suggested above?
My gestural impression is that there are three potentially distinguishable questions that may be rolled together too tightly above: Does the concept of emancipatory social transformation require some kind of “leap outside” or complete break with the social context (the “ideology”) we currently inhabit? How can we understand the sorts of practices required to bring about an emancipatory transformation? How is any of this implicated in discussions of “reflexivity”?
I’ll leave the issue of reflexivity alone for the moment – not least because that topic has been discussed at some length recently.
But on the other two questions: the reason I asked whether at least some of the dilemma might result from how the problem is initially posed, my sense is that claims like “it’s all ideology” or “there is no meta-language”, pose problems for notions of emancipation, only if emancipation is understood as a “leap outside”. In other words, the problem doesn’t really arise from the claim that there is no meta-language, but from pairing this claim, with the (tacit) claim “and freedom requires a metalanguage” – or combing “it’s all ideology” with “and freedom requires freedom from ideology”. To me, these combinations are striving to hold onto something that their own foundation requires them to relinquish – and so a certain sense of infinite regress and vertigo tends to follow.
Reinforcing this, perhaps, is another (tacit) tendency to think of “language” or “ideology” or whatever it is that we’re supposed to be embedded in, as a “totality” that is oriented solely to its own reproduction. Once you make this move, it becomes, in fact, very difficult to conceptualise emancipatory transformation as anything other than a “leap outside” (since the context we’re embedded in is understood, in Frankfurt School terms, as “one dimensional” – as not generating any internal tensions that point in conflictual directions).
My impulse is to say that emancipatory change doesn’t require a concept of a “leap outside” – as long as we aren’t conceptualising the context in which we are embedded as a “one-dimensional” context oriented only to its own reproduction. I don’t personally tend to like the vocabulary of “language” or “ideology” to describe the context in which we’re embedded, because I think it can be difficult to use these terms to metaphorise the internal ambivalences and contradictions of a given situation. Perhaps other metaphors – including the metaphors of “situation”, “constellation”, and such that Sinthome has been exploring recently here – will better facilitate the sorts of visualisation required. But the idea is to begin to think: okay, let’s say we’re embedded. What are we embedded in, exactly? Is it a uniform thing, that can be folded in only one particular way? Or might other folds, within the same basic topological shape, be possible? If other folds are possible, might we – as creatures individuated within this topology – be able to develop some practical sense of these possibilities – an awareness that this particular configuration of an immanent situation isn’t the only one possible? And might we be able to use this practical, felt, experiential, tacit awareness, to develop a more explicit and conscious politics to achieve a different kind of fold?
Questions of reflexivity then do enter in, in extremely complex ways – but at a different level and, ?perhaps?, without the infinite regress issue, because we aren’t actually assuming that emancipatory change requires the attainment of some kind of external Archimedean point from which the context can be viewed, and we also aren’t assuming that transformation needs to take the form of an absolute break with what is.
But I may have mistaken the nature of your questions… Apologies if this is off-point…
October 12, 2007 at 3:23 am
[…] of immanent critique (and this perhaps touches on some of the issues currently under discussion in another thread over at Larval Subjects) is precisely not to debunk, but rather to liberate and free up for […]
October 13, 2007 at 12:54 am
N. Pepperell,
if anything, this was too on-point and seemed to provide a way for me to reconsider the ways in which I framed the problem from the beginning. I agree that the pairing of these two claims about meta-language and freedom keeps one stuck. And through either my own personal blinders or just plain bad luck, I would find a good deal of the literature I’d come across simply digging up the same old determinism and free-will debates to either take sides or to claim one side as a mere articulation of the other. Thanks for the this comprehensive response as I know I’ll benefit much from it for some time to come.
October 13, 2007 at 11:23 am
I don’t think it’s bad luck – I think there is a tendency for a great deal of literature to revolve around this kind of dichotomy. Which isn’t to say there aren’t theorists who have… er… leapt outside this formulation. I’ve always been drawn to Benjamin (although some of his metaphors also fall back into the dichotomous formulation – even using the very phrase leap into free air… No theorist is perfect, I suppose… ;-P), but passages like this one offer some interesting suggestions for thinking about desires and potentials for emancipatory transformation:
October 14, 2007 at 6:39 am
[…] features a discussion on the aims of and possibilities of reflexivity for philosophy / critique: here and here. I’d like to wager a modest contribution in the form of a mutant […]
October 14, 2007 at 9:05 pm
True…
The first wave of Cybernetics involved mostly the Hard-Sciences and Mathematics toward modeling and control of systems (Machines and Neural Arrays) with regards to ultimate navigation toward well defined destination/purpose.
The later wave of Cybernetics involved many of the main concepts and still do toward more what we would characterize the ‘Soft-Sciences’. Fact: Weiner turned down appeals of various Psychologists and Social-Scientists on the grounds that the work could simply not go far with regards to his efforts due to the early phase of questioning in these fields – these fields at the time he termed the ‘Infant Sciences’. He instead turned his work toward the Hard-Sciences and further Mathematical refinement with a deep tie-in to our military-industrial war projects department; where his capacities of genius could better undergo exploitation for the greater benefit of humanity.
This later wave of cybernetics especially with regards to psychology and anthropology during the preceding time came a long way and there exist stand-outs. These sciences one can easily term as young yet and thus limited in the full understanding of humans and human groups. Statistical procedure helped a lot with the rapid advancement our understanding on these matters.
The main issue lays primarily within the confines of two issues:
1. Lack of a precise language with which to explicitly and as abstractly possible describe the phenomena and to by this means identify the observer-feedback systems. Though with proper use of statistics and modeling various analogs these groups have made advances with regards toward a type of functional understanding.
2. Lack of functional terminology to describe most non-linear events within human activities and higher-order interactions which we customarily term the ‘metaphysical’, transcendent, or spiritual.
So while the social-scientist or psychologist may carry a well-read portfolio in his or her personal opinion; the language they use provides for them a structure of only limited use. They rely on this language (Most often English) and use it to dissemble the incoming information and this sets huge limitations on the parameters of total conscious sense-perceptual streams of reception to the point that the observing nervous-system of the operator retains a sparse matrix of blunt, fractured and primitive filtering.
Example: Most of what we term English forms a Hybrid of several different world views from bits of Latin, Greek, Old-Galiaec and we merely added to this mess until it became one of the largest language aggregates in the world. The last formation of it came into full and final formality with the rules of the English Grammar of turn of the century colonial England. During this period the culture of England revolved around finding an absolute this or that; nouns were stressed and verbiage diminished. The normal world-view consisted of a standard and static model of the universe and any change from this format fell under the heading of defective or deviant world views. The instructor wore a habit and carried a switch. The status quo of the world-view of the time with all its absolutes demanded harsh constraints on language and corporeal punishment on any who looked outside of these limited set of parameters.
The world view changed yet we keep the language structure produced during this era. Meanwhile within the fields of science and technology Jargon and language systems underwent development to describe the observed phenomena and procedural arrangements within these activities. The complete understanding of these separate disciplines involved learning entirely differing world-views and languages, some of which filtered down into the general uneducated population.
The general population carries an implicit call to submit to the constraints of an obsolete and stifling thought pattern generated by the excessive use of absolutes: IS, To-Be statements; excessive and unnecessary use of All and Only; and the unconscious vortex of a black and white deterministic approach or worse, either or logics that drown out anything other than simple 2D Models.
To carry a more precise terminology and thus use Negative Entropy to its fullest requires a more precise language. In order to do these Absolutes must not generate the finality of ones modeling and descriptive activities. To remove error requires a structure of thought-language-pattern that defies the static noun-like behavior of conventional English.
The Hard-Sciences carry an evolved perspective and sophisticated set of models and descriptors to describe they observe, model and control. They provide something beyond the determinism of Copernicus and Newton. Quantum Physics at the cutting edge and the laws were relied on so heavily in the past break down and we find experience and phenomena possess nothing static about them except the models themselves. The models become ever increasingly unitary and we enter into verbiage of description. We find that negation of the noun effect in languages produces an effect of allowing for movement and dynamic change within the models we use.
The allowance we permit for change within the model (or even the changing of models) and possible non-linearity dimensions within our generated frameworks begin the movement away from simple and static thought. This provides the quality of Negative-Entropy (precision of use of terms) necessary for the average student of English to learn to effectively communicate the analogs and even master routine application of these systems of control within their life for change, communication, and control.
You can make a social-psychological model – the likelihood of success generated and thus ‘work’ of the system to direct our activities becomes negligible should we retain self-limitations within your words and thoughts to ourselves and others when it comes to static noun-like subroutines countering our best intentions.
General Semantics should form a foundation for basic understanding of these issues. Your average social-engineer and psychologist most often lacks the necessary background in mathematics and far too many course in English for their own good. NLP forms another basis for a good start.
I agree with you totally.
Give it time and Effective-Work, cultures can change.
October 14, 2007 at 9:16 pm
Forgive me:
E-Prime does limit my latitude in discription and cutomary-English standard approaches toward getting my point accross curtailed my more creative ambitions it seems now that I read all this, my work.
Oh, well…
Blurry is as blurry does and maybe I should work on my procedures of concept arrangement. (ie…Basic Writing Skills)
;)
October 14, 2007 at 9:36 pm
Refinement:
Language provides a filter and thus definite constraints on the modeling process.
Embedded within the deeper formatting of the English language reside functions of accepted procedures that limit the mobility of the modeling process. This encodes within the linguistic framework of the nervous systems debilitating limitations and habit forming valuations of incoming data.
The way to allow for motility and rearrangement of perceptual modeling of conscious systems away from static postures comes with possible loss of orientation to the operating system. This can come with a great deal of anxiety and even confusion.
Deterministic Model = Static Noun-like Absolutes like ‘IS’, To-Be’, and the excessive use of ‘All’ or ‘Only’. Either-or-Logic and Black and White thinking.
This sort of language attempts to eliminate Verbs. Verb-function forms the basis for accurately observing change and then the NEXT step comes to the eventual evolution toward observation and control over the model making process and actual command and control.
LAST POST unless requested…
October 20, 2007 at 5:08 am
Wow the first paragraph of this post is a really incredibly clear statement of something that I’ve repeatedly run into and that makes me almost speechlessly irritated – the continual repetition of “you misunderstand” in response to “I disagree.” I’m going to plagiarize the first and last lines of that paragraph.
“People who seem to think that the only possible way you could disagree or have a different position is if you had misinterpreted their position or failed to understand what they’re talking about (…) subtracting their own position from the very principle they claim to find in everything else.”
My blood boils again just thinking about all the times this has happened. It’s nice to have better words for it, at least.
take care,
Nate