Responding to a post of mine that I deleted because I thought it unnecessarily catty, Peter Gratton makes some interesting observations about the nature of commentary as practiced in Continental philosophy. Referring to a conversation he was having with someone about Kristeva he writes:
I was talking a bit about Kristeva and I finally just said, you know, you’re on to something, but that’s you, not Kristeva. I’ve had that problem with other figures, too: people do interesting work on these figures and then suggest I’m not getting them if they don’t see their revolutionary potential. And I think, I’ve read them. You do great work on that topic, but why do you need to say it’s some sort of thing immanent to them? At some point, to simplify, you’re not doing commentary and if someone says, I don’t agree that X figure can be read that way, don’t take it as an insult—think of it as your original contribution. To take an example I’ve used here, I’ve talked about Derrida as someone who perhaps isn’t anathema to realism as some would think. But at a certain point, do I need to read it through him? In other words, we often read arguments from authority in our circles, which is a disservice to the philosophical, essayistic work of these philosophers.
In many respects, I think Gratton formulates the point much better than I, or rather, perhaps there are two distinct issues here. On the one hand, when I was in graduate school, at least, I experienced an acute pressure from my professors to engage only in close reading. To be sure, there was no prohibition against creative readings of philosophical texts, but nonetheless there was an expectation that all writing should be on or about philosophical texts. The idea of doing something like Kripke’s Naming and Necessity was unthinkable within this context because the unspoken premise was that all philosophical work had to be parasitic on some other philosophical text.
On the other hand, there’s the tendency for Continental philosophy to work through arguments from authority. A good friend of mine drives me crazy in this regard. He begins with a terrific idea of his own but is always convinced that he is not authorized to articulate this idea himself. He then throws himself into intense research, scouring numerous philosophical texts and articles, looking for masters who have articulated this idea. And, of course, since no idea is ever entirely unprecedented, he finds all sorts of instances in the cannon where others have said something similar to what he wishes to claim (here I’m reminded of Lacan’s discussion of the analysand that was convinced he was a plagiarist, despite the originality of his ideas). And here the tragedy comes in. Believing that his idea has already been articulated by one of the masters, he loses all will to write for there’s no longer any point in putting pen to paper.
Perhaps it’s because my philosophical background primarily comes out of French philosophy– Thinkers such as Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, Badiou, etc. –but I’ve always found this dependence on authority in Continental thought rather peculiar, if not an outright contradiction. Let’s situate this in terms of Deleuze, Derrida, and Lacan in particular. In one form or another, all of these thinkers are “anti-Oedipal”. Lacan, for example, perpetually shows the split in the master-signifier, or the manner in which it is a sham. For Lacan, a big part of traversing the fantasy consists in the discovery that the Other itself is barred or split, that the Other does not exist, that it is a sort of transcendental illusion. And this is Lacan’s way of thumbing his nose at the Oedipus. Something similar takes place in Deleuze and Derrida, and when Badiou argues that the One is not he is making a similar claim. All of these thinkers vigorously submit the transcendent One to critique in their own way.
Given this, isn’t there something deeply peculiar in an academic practice that constantly repeats these arguments while situating these thinkers in the position of the One or in the position of authority? What could be more Oedipal than this gesture or way of doing philosophy? What could be more Oedipal than believing that one must refer to a master in order to feel authorized to speak? So I suppose the question is why don’t we feel authorized to speak? Why is it that we feel compelled, as in the case of Gratton’s colleague, to speak through Kristeva, to mine Kristeva’s texts so as to make them say what we want to say, rather than simply approaching Kristeva as an interlocutor and integrating elements of that position where appropriate as Aristotle did with other philosophers, while also feeling free to state our own positions and arguments? Has something shifted in our contemporary moment such that we feel we are no longer authorized to speak? I think such a thesis would be far too generalizing for certainly figures like Badiou have no difficulty adopting their own positions, and this does not seem to be a compelling problem within Anglo-American philosophy. Rather, it strikes me as a deeply entrenched effect of certain institutional structures and programs, of how we are trained, rather than the result of some grand mutation in the symbolic order. How did we arrive at this new scholasticism?
June 3, 2010 at 8:59 am
Your question seems to point at the conditions where continental philosophy was institutionalized. The way its practiced might have been a solution to certain environmental problems. For instance,if disciplines are to have a place in capitalism then they have to guarantee some consistency in production. Normally testing is important for regulating academic work – it allows education to be run as a didactic simulation and minimizes systemic uncertainty. But that is not how continental philosophy has been done. It inherited a bunch of intuitionist and romantic traditions, so it had to be defined (and marketed) against the formality of testing. Where tests normally unite and separate students and teachers, keeping them in their place, it seems post-structuralists had to find another way to fit into the spatio-temporal constraints of industrialism. If we put a text on the table, then everyone sitting around the table can do a gloss on it, and the professor who has read it rigorously is fairly assured of their position. Doing philosophy as hermeneutics makes it consistent so it can take its place in a liberal division of labor. The peculiar tables where continental philosophy takes place may have arisen due to the need to avoid testing. The move beyond this might require a reconsideration of assessment…no?
June 3, 2010 at 12:53 pm
This is very intersting. I worry though, from the opposite direction. The art world is filled with people who ‘engage’ with continental philosophy as a kind of flavouring to sprinkle over their practice, a spice that adds some kind of legitimation. I agree with everything you say, but I find that the opposite condition – whereby nobody feels that they have to engage with the thought of thinkers like Lacan, Derrida, or Deleuze, it being enough to merely ape their style – far more galling. It’s not that continental philosophy should be protected knowledge, accessible only to ‘masters’, but without experts around or at least commited engagement we’re in the realm of cargo-cults…
June 4, 2010 at 3:50 am
@market cosmologist – that’s a compelling theory about how continental philosophy got to this point. Although there are university systems that are more insulated from this kind of marketization, it’s definitely something to think about as a factor in what is written and how we’ve been trained. I don’t think the story is that simple, but I think something like what you describe is definitely a part of the story.
June 4, 2010 at 10:12 am
‘…he finds all sorts of instances in the cannon where others have said something similar to what he wishes to claim (here I’m reminded of Lacan’s discussion of the analysand that was convinced he was a plagiarist, despite the originality of his ideas)’
haha!! I love it!! Who authorised you to talk about arguments from authority anyway?
June 4, 2010 at 11:22 pm
Market cosmologist is on the nail. It’s testing and assessment that tended to produce this ‘new scholasticism.’ I’m not sure whether they still have it, but The Univ of Technology in Sydney used to have a ‘pass/fail’ degree in the Humanities.
There were no grades between…This made getting scholarships diff so they introduced honours…
There were still essays and ‘marking’ but a lot of creative writing as well!
Having said that there was still a lot of deference to Foucault and ‘discourse analysis’. Students still ended up having to situate their work somewhere but it wasn’t just exegesis.
June 5, 2010 at 4:57 am
[…] en lo relativo al quehacer filosófico y académico. El primero de ellos es el post de Levi Bryant (Who’s Authorized to Speak?). Dicho post era una continuación a otro que borró (Thoughts of Consolation). Graham Harman, por […]
June 6, 2010 at 12:53 am
The catalogue of ‘Les empecheurs de penser en rond’, the publishing house established by Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, is a good example of an escape from a new scholasticism. I imagine that Stengers’ research group in Brussels would be another:
In french: http://www.ulb.ac.be/rech/inventaire/unites/ULB640.html
and:
http://dev.ulb.ac.be/geco/
They situate their ‘constructivism’ in explicit contrast to deconstruction or ‘the american linguistic turn’.
There are surely many other tentatives – perhaps including the work of Brian Massumi and Erin Manning in Montreal with the SenseLab – and the journal Inflexions….notable for its recent interview with Stengers…
June 8, 2010 at 1:04 pm
In addition to factors already pointed out, one should not forget that the practice of continental philosophy in countries dominated by analytic philosophy is reactive. When analytic philosophy was seen to be ahistorical and incapable of understanding the importance of reading original philosophical texts, people turned to close reading of the classics, especially those recommended by masters like Derrida or Heidegger. But since the continentals also were driven by the idea that philosophy should be radical and revolutionary (in a way quite different from the narrow scientistic conception of revolution in philosophy that once animated analytic philosophy), it was not enough to just do close readings of historical texts (as done by experts in early modern philosophy for instance). There had to be also a spirit of decisive breakthrough in thought, such as one finds in Deleuze, Derrida, Heidegger etc. As every person isn´t a new Deleuze, however, the result could easily be a historically and textually well-versed commentator trying to be as brilliant and innovative as a Foucault but lacking the capacity to go beyond echoes of the masters´styles.
June 11, 2010 at 4:02 pm
[…] announcing the first issue of Speculations. Over at Critical Animal, Scu has a post up riffing on my earlier post on the new scholasticism. At the risk of having caused confusion, I hope I didn’t there give […]