In response to my post on Commodities, Objects, and Persons, Andrew and I have been having an interesting discussion about Brandom and normativity. As many who have followed me for some time know, I have a nearly allergic reaction whenever issues of normativity arise. On this blog and elsewhere, discussions of normativity have easily been the ugliest in which I’ve been involved. These discussions of normativity literally give me the hives.
I’m as perplexed as anyone as to why I have this strong reaction to this particular theme. Clearly this issue is, for me, saturated with affect. In the past, old friends have said that there’s a red ethical thread that pervades all my writing, yet somehow when these issues become explicit I find myself filled with horror and loathing. The reason for this arises from a profound sense that discussions of normativity are animated by the desire to police, judge, legislate, and normalize. These are desires that make me shudder and recoil. What kind of subject, what sort of conceptual persona, is animated by these desires? What subject or conceptual persona fixates on these things in particular? I don’t think the answers to these questions are very nice, but then I’m incredibly suspicious of all moralists, whether they are moralists in the field of ethics or moralists in the domain of reason. I’m suspicious of all of those which wish to legislate. In Lacanian terms, they strike me as perverts or agents of the big Other seeking to subordinate others to the superegoic Law of the big Other and, like Sade that great agent of the Law, seeking to submit, in the cruelest possible terms, others to the ineluctable necessity of what follows from the Law (cf. Lacan’s “Kant avec Sade”, Klossowski’s Sade My Neighbor, and Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty).
Yet I would be dishonest if I didn’t acknowledge that my own reactions to discussions of normativity (as they’re dominantly posed) are themselves borne of normative commitments. My own ethical position, if such it can be called, is thoroughly pervaded by my experience of the Lacanian clinic. At the end of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan remarks that,
The analyst’s desire is not a pure desire. It is a desire to obtain absolute difference, a desire which intervenes when, confronted with the primary signifier, the subject is, for the first time, in a position to subject himself to it. There only may the signification of a limitless love emerge, because it is outside the limits of the law, where alone it may live. (276)
The Lacanian clinic is unique in its reverence for the singularity of the subject. Unlike other forms of psychotherapy, the Lacanian clinic does not begin by diagnosing patients under a set of diagnostic categories such that symptoms are treated as signs. For example, a patient may enter analysis due to the symptom of repeatedly washing his hands. The Lacanian analyst does not summarily conclude that the symptom of hand washing means or “stands for” the disorder of obsessional neurosis, but instead leaves the significance of the symptom entirely open. Only the analysand will be able to determine the significance of this symptom and the desire it embodies. As a consequence, second, the analyst does not present himself as a master that knows better than the analysand. Over the course of analysis the analyst might gain knowledge of the analysand’s symptoms in a way that renders her capable of intervening well, but the only subject that knows is the analysand’s unconscious. Unlike a psychotherapist that claims to have knowledge and a solution, an analyst begins from the standpoint of ignorance.
read on!
Finally, and most importantly, third, the analyst is not a guru claiming to have an answer as to what is best for the analysand. The analyst, as Lacan says, is a advocate for the analysands (unconscious) desire. She does not have a model of what the analysand should be, or what the outcome of analysis should be. She does not desire that the analysand should be successful at his job, that he should become a great artist, that he should be politically active in this or that way, or that the analysand should stay with his wife and family. The analyst sides with the analysand’s desire and is a midwife that assists in bringing that desire to articulation. If the analyst knows one thing, it’s that the failure to live and acknowledge one’s desire will be worse for that analysand. As in the case of the closeted homosexual, that failure will mean the intensification of the symptom, involving self-destructive activity in the form of masochistic substance abuse, abuse of others, etc., etc., etc. As midwife, the analyst thus assists the analysand in avowing his desire. The outcomes of analysis, judged from the standpoint of bourgeois society, might be less than happy, yet at least the analysand will be true to the desire that animates him.
Psychoanalytic ethics is thus a queer ethics. It is an ethics of difference, an ethics that valorizes the singular, rather than an ethics that pursues normalizing sameness. The difference between these ethics is profoundly evident in the difference between the discourse of the university and the discourse of the analyst:
The upper discourse is the discourse of the university, while the lower is the discourse of the analyst. In each of Lacan’s four discourses, the upper left position is the position of the agent, the upper left is the position of the addressee or other, the lower right is the position of the product, and the lower left is the unconscious truth of the discourse. In the discourse of the university we see S2 (the agent) addressing objet a (the remainder or difference). In the position of the product is $, the barred, alienated, or divided subject. This is the essence of the university discourse: the domestication of difference (objet a) within a system of categories (S2), so as to produce a divided or alienated subject. I am no longer this singularity “Levi”, but am instead now reduced to “depressive”, with all the institutional consequences that follow from this categorization. Within the discourse of the university, the singularity of my desire, person, and drive means nothing. Rather all that is relevant is how I can be sorted and categorized in a system of knowledge (S2) for the sake of the bureaucratic system.
In the discourse of the analyst, by contrast, the analyst approaches the analysand ($) from the standpoint of difference (objet a). The analyst strives to occupy the position of the analysand’s singular differences, to allow these differences to speak, rather than alienating the analysand in a system of pre-existent categories or knowledge (S2). The product of this discourse is S1 or the analysand naming his or her own desire. What the analyst attends to is the singularity of this analysand here, refusing all identificatory knowledge.
In discourses of normativity we too often hear the desire embodied in the discourse of the university: the desire to identify, categorize, domesticate and, above all, to erase difference under pre-existent identities in the form of norms and concepts. These discourses dream of a correspondence so thorough that representation and thing would be exchangeable with one another. Put differently, the dream of a reign of identity so thorough that all difference is erased and, like good idealists, we need only deal or attend to representations.
This Lacanian ethics, this desire to attend to difference or the remainder, pervades all of my thought. This, I think, is what I find so appealing in Harman’s concept of withdrawal. It could be said that Harman’s ontology is the only ontology adequate to an ethics of difference precisely because it is an ontology that refuses idealism or the reduction of thing to its concept. Yet clearly this picture of normativity puts me in a difficult position. If I endorse an ethics of singularity or difference, then I am unable to articulate the principle upon which my ethics is based precisely because singularity disappears with articulation. As a consequence, the priests of the university will always be able to say “you have no norms, you have no ethics” because I can’t formulate a general principle that would cover all cases precisely because each case is singular.
Larval Subjects . 
June 16, 2011 at 2:30 am
Dear Levi-
I have a similar reaction to discussions of normativity. And, I think that perhaps your interest in Aristotle jibes well with this reaction. One of the things that has animated the recent revival of interest in Aristotle (as well as Nietzsche) among analytic moral philosophers has been a set of suggestions which have their origins in Elizabeth’s Anscombe’s classic paper “Modern Moral Philosophy,”
To give a crude picture of what she does there: she criticizes the ‘juridical’ model of ethics which originates in Kant. Kant wishes to understand ethical issues in terms of juridical concepts. That is, for him, what is fundamentally at stake in our practical lives are issues like unto those that come up in juridical contexts: what I am obilgated to do, what I am entitled to do, what justifications I have for the maxims on which I act, and the like. These are all concepts that seem to make sense to use only on a rule- or law- based conception of ethics.
Anscombe’s particular criticism in “Modern Moral Philosophy” is that we cannot make good sense of a particular aspect of Kant’s view: namely, that – as Kant put it – the distinctiveness in our practical lives lies in the fact that we are ‘self-legislating’ beings, beings who are capable of ‘giving themselves the moral law.’
However, Anscombe’s paper has inspired a host of criticisms of Kant-inspired approaches to ethics using insights due to Aristotle. Since Anscombe’s work, a great deal of interesting work has been done using Aristotle’s ethics, much of it driven by the conviction that we in various ways distort what is at stake in a human life when we think of it in terms of rules or laws or principles for action (e.g. by folks like Bernard Williams, Philippa Foot, Charles Taylor, Alisdair MacIntyre, John McDowell, Michael Thompson – to name a few outstanding examples).
What it is important in this context to remember about Aristotle’s ethics as he outlines it in the Nicomachean Ethics is that he gives us a thoroughly different way of thinking about what is at stake in our practical lives. He doesn’t think in terms of rules or laws or obligations. His central concept – that of eudaimonia – is not the concept of a life lived in accordance with a set of rules or laws or principles. Rather it’s the concept of a successful human life. It’s absolutely crucial to realize that he thinks success here isn’t and *couldn’t be* judged in terms of a set of rules, laws or principles. This is one of the principal lessons of his notion of phronesis – of ‘practical wisdom.’ The person who is practically wise, on his view, has a rich and deep understanding of how to live a life. But Aristotle thinks of this knowledge as akin to the knowledge one possesses who is the master of a skill or art: and, Aristotle takes pains to argue that mastery of a skill or art involves a kind of knowledge which is different in kind from the sort of knowledge one gets in many sciences – i.e. sciences in which the most fundamental sort of knowledge is knowledge of ‘first principles.’ An example of such a science for Aristotle would be geometry (taking Euclid as his model, of course), in which the most fundamental sort of knowledge consists, by his lights, in the formulation of axioms and a grasp of their consequences. In contrast, the knowledge you have when you’re the master of a skill is simply different in kind from the kind of knowledge you need to be the expert geometer. Further, the kind of learning involved in mastering a skill (what Aristotle calls ‘habituation’) is different in kind from the sort of learning involved in becoming the expert in a science guided by first principles.
The person with phronesis (the phronimos), in Aristotle’s picture, is the one who has mastered and who practices the skill of leading a successful human life. Aristotle says the the standard of a good life is person with practical wisdom. If you want to know how to live, go ask the practically wise person, for no guidebook, no list of rules or laws or first principles could ever substitute for the qualitatively distinct knowledge of the phronimos.
Of course, we might very well think Aristotle’s ethical views are off-the-mark. But I think for someone who is dissatisfied with the ‘juridical model’ of human life, Aristotle at least provides us with an entirely different way of thinking about practical issues…
June 16, 2011 at 2:31 am
Levi,
I know nothing of Lacan so my reaction would be the same as the last comment on the previous thread: admitting that your theory of normativity is still in the making is brave, but that also means, it seems to me, that you mustn’t let your antipathetic reaction to issues of normativity cloud your judgement. As you search for your own conceptualisation of normativity, you clearly have a certain set of guidelines or rules – if you don’t know where they come from, it is understandable that you would hesitate basing a theory on them.
If I may suggest a fruitful direction/correction: norms are rules and moral norms/rules are a small subset of rules under consideration in any conversation about normativity. At least this is how I read Brandom and others who insist on norms, whatever kinds of people they are. Rules here are not moralistic rules of behavior but simple statement about how things must be done – surely you accept that rules are everywhere – the way we dress, the way we speak, the way we write in a language, the way we present arguments, and so on and so forth. To understand how something works, we ask about its rules. Legality, laws, morals and so on are all derivative of this basic notion of regulated activity. We might occasionally say that ‘the only rule is that there are no rules’ for the sake of rhetorical impact, but surely it is a contradictory position to hold and promote in any sort of consistently rational manner. Without rules, there is no rationality and therefore no real way of doing philosophy.
June 16, 2011 at 2:53 am
Andrew,
As I made clear in my post, those “other rules” you mention are just moralism in another garb. I still find myself wondering what sort of subject desires in this way or fixates on such things. I’m not necessarily claiming that such concerns are false, but only wondering what sort of person takes these things up as their theme. With respect to this question, it matters little to me whether the theme is one of morality or norms of reason. The desire is much the same in both cases. I don’t find the desire I sense in these discourses salutory, nor do I find much to admire in juridical models of thought. I see these models at best as premised on the university discourses and at worst to be exemplifications of little Eichman’s. Why make yourseof a servant of law in this way?
June 16, 2011 at 2:56 am
I would also disagree that to understand how something works we ask what its laws are. To understand how something works we use it, experiment it, grapple with it. As Aristotle argued, we learn through doing. That doing can’t be circumvented or avoided by knowing rules in advance. Only Socrates questioning the slave boy thinks such a thing.
June 16, 2011 at 3:13 am
Levi,
Are you saying that the rules of, say, English language are ‘moralisms in another garb’? Or the rules of traffic? Or the rules of proper attire? Or the rule of logic? Or the rules of argument? Our conversation started when I wondered if your demands on Brandom were perhaps too harsh. If we cannot demand anything from anyone – ‘how dare you impose your rules on me?’ – then how is this conversation possible? I write in a language you understand because I follow the rules of grammar. Of course, I can go James Joyce on you and experiment with language in order to see what happens, but it is not going to go much farther than a few nonsensical statements from me and some puzzled comments from you. You certainly have the right to suspect those who insist on rules of being control-freaks or perverts, but I find it hard to imagine how you can create a productive philosophical conversation without any rules. And you admit that some rules must be present, then how do you know which ones? One can say that A is both B and non-B; one can make all sorts of statements of fact or experience; one can claim to have seen God in all his glory; one can claim prophetic access to the very core of mystical thought etc etc. Clearly since we are making claims and we are exchanging observations and are attempted to discuss something, we both know and follow a set of rules. Otherwise, how is this exchange even possible?
June 16, 2011 at 3:53 am
I really enjoy this tension.
It seems to me things can get really complicated when scaling comes into play. For instance, at some level, it is the indifference of which particular cells inhabit our body, but only the structure of those cells that keeps this biological animal going. Though, yes, these various cells are differentiated with respect to each other, they are structurally indifferent with respect to the organism.
D/G’s route was to emphasize the dissolution of the organism in favor of intensive singularization, or otherwise – D’s affirmation of the eternal return as that which affirms everything but the identical. I see this as a form of “undermining” (in Morton’s sense), and find it somewhat untenable and unlivable except in a metaphorical sense (in the sense that one dies symbolically or one dies with regard to ones meaningful lifeworld, etc.).
For me, there are forms of social singularization that require “cancelling out” differences at lower levels. For me, the social cannot be conflated with the extensive. I think D/G are ambiguous regarding this point, sometimes considering it intensive, and sometimes not. This skirts the issue however of intensification THROUGH canceling difference at lower levels. Just like quantum level energy-density fluctuations (differences) are “cancelled” (or shall we say more correctly, are simply non-effective) in molecular arrangements, but this very “stability” allows for proteins to create other orders of difference.
So I have been drawn to investigating a kind of indescernability regarding what the singular is. This to me, also revolves around the question of authenticity, as authenticity can be re-thought as the singular (or better yet as the interaction of multiple singularities). It seems that an “intensive ethics” or an ethics that affirms difference, must also affirm the extensites that are cosubstantial with their actualization. Such that the extensity itself “leads to” and “guides us towards” the intensive “part” to which it is attached and by which it is expressed and actualized.
Yet when levels of scale are involved, is it possible to know whether singularity is being affirmed or negated, and if negated if other singularities are being affirmed at other levels of scale? (this is dangerous isn’t it? Justifying all sorts of social violence, etc.).
I’m inclined to say that this is where humanism becomes non-anthropocentric and also becomes speculative. Our being-human affords creative capacities to engage with singularities at different levels of scale. At some point Deleuze says that freedom and destiny converge because one can “choose the levels” at which one operates (the most intensive or the least). This is where I am inclined to explore a kind of speculative humanism that explores this Deleuzian relationship between freedom and destiny as a meta-ethics which is itself based on, I believe yes, some noramtive valorization of difference (as different differences, not diversity).
What this entails to me as a “human” practice is being able to hear no and mourning. Being able to affirm another’s difference (a differently different) is ultimately a means expanding my capacity to hear their no and honor it – which turns out to affirm their difference as is actually a yes. As colonists were unable to hear the no of the natives, we now have almost lost a wholly differently different cultural system and its material basis (in hunting and gathering). This to me also means that an intensive ethics and valorization of difference also entails nonviolence. Much more to say about this, though I will stop here for now.
Very curious about what emerges from this.
June 16, 2011 at 4:13 am
That first paragraph is fairly undecipherable. All I mean to say is that the cells die one by one many times over, and this sustains “our life.” Although the cells are swarmed with differences with respect to each other, they all sustain an organism that IS these differences, and is for the most part a stabilization of these differences = X. Hope that’s more clear.
June 16, 2011 at 4:45 am
I think we can see something of the problem with law in the juridical demands made on language. Normal speech—the language of open discourse, is profoundly unsuited for legal usage, which, in its obsessive need to eliminate ambiguity (think of the requirements of writing a binding contract), create what amounts to a form of anti-speech—all ‘information-without- remainder.” One need only contrast this with the language of natural story tellers and good gossips to see what sadistic perversions the LAW wrecks on language! (An aside… I distinguish ‘gossip’ from ‘ loshen harah’…which is all about establishing hierarchies and drawing excluding borders) Good gossips (this is not a solitary skill) employ the very genus of language to do pretty much what clinical psychoanalytic theory does—render an imaginary understanding of a problematic Other! I’m a great admirer of Gossip!
Where was I? … Ah, story tellers! And I don’t mean professionals… the kind—if you’ve ever known one—you might be working the most miserable job… dishwashers in big restaurant—those who have the power to make you look forward to coming to work just to listen and learn and shoot the breeze with them . Masters of multiple meanings…who surprise and amaze you saying the most ordinary things! … which is what language is really best suited for… and that’s my point.
Law … (and too often, philosophy, for that matter) deals with language—like trying to tame and domesticate a wild animal. I guess what initially clicked for me.. I’m not able to clearly identify. Had to do with the elimination of the ‘remainder’ … the academic and legal need to domesticate—to un-Queer the queer, make familiar and useful the strange. That this is apparent at the level of HOW they treat language, as well as with what they use it for.
June 16, 2011 at 8:05 am
How can we be a midwife to Helen Keller’s articulation of her own desire?
Perhaps we all wonder if Coca-Cola bottles truly desire to deliver medication to African villages. Without attending to the process of the disclosure of their desire, who can in good faith presume to impose norms on Coca-Cola manufacture?
Is Socrates on to something when he calls himself a midwife guiding the birth of Alcibiades’ true desire to become an international philosopher, beyond the dictates of his adopted father Pericles, beyond the norms of Athenian paideia? Or is Socrates’ version of midwifery covering for the truly hegemonic motives of another twisted philosopher?
I see no end to the suspicion we must project onto all thinking. The duplicity inherent in thought with no recourse to representation resembles the normativity of correspondence. There is a residue of hegemony even with this democratic revolution.
June 16, 2011 at 8:25 am
I listened to Werner Herzog last month speak to his bafflement that the cultural styles depicting in cave paintings, with some modifications of course, remained basically the same for something like ten thousand years.
The question of normativity in barely linguistic hunter-gatherer bands is an interesting one at the edges of this debate about Brandom. Is the emergence of cave art somehow mapped onto the emergence of hegemonic normativity, perversion, and the like?
June 16, 2011 at 8:59 am
Hi Levi,
It’s been a long time. Interesting post and some very well made points. I think, in the service of the same argument you’re advancing, that we need to force an absolute distinction between ethics and normativity. Ethics, as Lacanian keeps insisting, cannot be reduced to law. I write about this in my new book, which I think might interest you (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/023029409X/ref=redir_mdp_mobile/179-0503839-9404903).
Cheers,
Calum
June 16, 2011 at 10:02 am
@3 “I still find myself wondering what sort of subject desires in this way or fixates on such things.”
Surely a subject bent on the equal autonomy of all subjects! A law in this sense derives its legitimacy from subjects freely accepting it as legitimate, freely making it bind on them. No one should impose laws on others, at least not if those others haven’t implicitly or explicitly accepted the authority of that law. Of course, it is possible to implicitly accept the authority of a law without explicitly saying so. But this is still, at heart, a case of the exercise of freedom. The defenders of normativity, of “juridical models”, are the defenders of a conception in which thought is the provence of free persons, in which the correctness of a claim is determined by the free act of assenting to certain standards of correctness, and thus of freely making oneself liable to being held responsible in terms of those standards.
We are not servants of the law, but its masters. It is through the collective practices of accepting the legitimacy of sets of norms and their inferential entailments that the law has any binding force upon us. This is what it means for norms to be rooted in “community”: it is the community of free persons and the commitments they freely undertake that makes the law.
June 16, 2011 at 10:41 am
Andrew,
You’re setting up false alternatives here:
Basically you’re saying that either one makes philosophy a discourse about rules or one advocates a position in which there are no rules. As a consequence, you make a strawman of my position. I have never suggested that there are no rules or that there shouldn’t be rules. I have asked, rather, what tyoe of subject or person chooses to focus or normativity and rules as their primary topic of philosophical investigation? What desire does this embody? What conception of the world, society, and interpersonal relations does this indicate? It’s not self-evident that normativity should be a central or core topic of investigation in philosophy. It takes a certain sort of desire to focus on this as the root out of which everything else grows, and I think that that desire, as you put it, is the desire of the control freak that is obsessed with correcting others. This comes out clearly in your reference to grammar, your strange denigration of Joyce, your reference to violations of the law of non-contradiction, and your telling reference to God and mystical experience (I say telling because I think the reference to religion here gets at the real stakes of the issue for you).
In drawing attention to the desire to correct am I suggesting that we shouldn’t strive for correctness? Am I saying that we shouldn’t strive for grammaticality, follow traffic laws, obey the law of non-contradiction, etc? Not at all. What I wonder about is the sort of subject that thinks that incorrectness, violations of such things, are the most significant perils of thought and social relations. Such an attitude smacks of that of the bureaucrat at the Department of Motor Vehicles or some other government position that sees the ultimate value in the form neing filled out correctly, thereby ignoring all sorts of other values that are arguably more fundamental (here I’m thinking of an insurance reviewer that refuses coverage of a much needed surgery because a form was filled out incorrectly).
All of the things you mention are rather trivial in the grand scheme of things and can be ironed out in the course of discussion and interactions. The person who violates a traffic law can be pulled over. If I speak in a non-grammatical way that generates ambiguity amd confusion you can ask for a clarification. If I contradict myself you can point this out amd the contradiction can be ironed out or the proposition can be abandoned. If I make extraordinary claims about God you can ask how I am able to know such things or what evidence entitles me to such claims.
In the grand scheme of things, I just believe error is pretty trivial on the totem pole of those perils that threaten thought and social relations. This is perhaps the central lesson of Kant where, in the Critique of Pure Reason, he sees the central dangers that afflict thought are not simple errors or refusals to follow rules, but rather ineluctable transcendental illusions. Likewise, for figures such as Lucretius, the danger is myth that haunts and terrorizes thought and life, while an analogous function is served by Hegel’s concept of alienation or Marx’s conception of ideology. And to all of this we can add the desire to master and control which seems to be at the heart of juridical models of thought despite “the Brandomizers” insistence elsewhere in this thread that these discussions are somehow about freedom.
June 16, 2011 at 12:39 pm
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~erich/misc/nothing_to_admit
June 16, 2011 at 2:08 pm
Levi,
I am somewhat lost in all of these back and forth comments, so forgive me if I just jump in. You say “Basically you’re saying that either one makes philosophy a discourse about rules or one advocates a position in which there are no rules.” No, that is no my alternative as you are correct in suggesting that this is an unfair way to phrase the issue. Ignoring your question “what person asks about rules” as irrelevant to what I am saying (but not as unimportant, just not for my point), I simply said that you must be accepting some rules, and you do, therefore you must have an understanding of normativity, of why you accept the rules and follow them. Therefore your decision to ignore other rules is also a conscious decision – if you wanted a counter-question to yours, I would ask “what sort of person concentrates on breaking or ignoring the rules” – and I simply wanted to see what that decision is and how you explain to yourself as you do philosophy why some rules are to be followed and some are ignored or broken. I don’t think I ever suggesting that philosophy is a discourse about rules, but I did say that without a discussion of rules there cannot be a productive philosophical conversation – you can give everyone a ball and make them run on a football pitch and see what happens (the way kids play at school), but that’s not the game of football and no one is going to come and watch it.
If, for example, you weren’t aware of any rules of discourse and simply wrote without any awareness of what and why you say it, it wouldn’t be a philosophical discourse, I hope we agree here. But since we do agree that some rules of engagement exist, there is nothing wrong with correcting others when they break rules – isn’t it what is going on here in the comments? I state a position and you correct me by suggesting an alternative take on the matter. I state another take and you correct me by suggesting that, following the rules of engagement, I was not fair in my presentation of your position (setting up a strawman) and I must do it differently. That’s the sort of minimal rule-regulated conversation that I was talking about and, despite your own insistence that we shouldn’t concentrate on rules or correctness, you are very keen to point out when others violate the rules and are also keen to correct them. I see nothing wrong with that, but I find your desire to have the proverbial cake of rebellious rule-bending and eat it too somewhat strange. If there are rules to our engagement, and I break them, I take your corrections with gratitude because they help me better formulate my thoughts, yet when I ask about the rules as such (abstractly), you imply that I am too obsessed with rules and normativity (not I personally, of course, but in a general sense). That is far from fair. Is it not the classic example of ad hominem when instead of the argument, the person who is making it (‘what sort of person would make such an argument’) become the focal point of discussion. Do you think that ad hominem is a legitimate error to avoid? Perhaps that is one of the rules you do not mind breaking? I don’t know at this point.
June 16, 2011 at 3:33 pm
Andrew,
I think the question of what sort of subject desires such and such as these aren’t merely abstract theoretical questions, but are also ethical and political questions about the sort of social world we want and the sort of life we want to lead. Take the example of the racist. The racist can say all sorts of true things about the group that he hates (that a disproportionate number of said group are in prison, poor, and below average in academic performance, for example). However, we would be remiss if we just interpreted that person’s statements at the level of their truth and falsity. We should also interrogate the desire that leads the person fixate on these particular things to the exclusion of all sorts of other things. Likewise, I believe that all sorts of negative things are produced as a result of juridical subjectivity that should give us pause with respect to these discourses. Given that these discussions are deeply axiological, I do not see it as ad hom to point such things out. As someone who has worked in the clinic, I have seen firsthand what is produced as a result of juridical subjectivity and I also believe we can readily see the social results of juridical subjectivity in bureaucracies, fascisms, and destructive religious practices.
You continue to mischaracterize my position. Where did I ever talk about rebellion or rule-breaking? I haven’t. This is another false dilemma into which you’re placing me. Like the religious person who claims the atheist’s religion is science (thereby revealing that he interprets the entire world in terms of religion and can’t imagine a subjectivity outside or religious categories), you’re so thoroughly entrenched in a discourse of norms that when I raise the question of why we should focus on this you can only imagine me making a case for breaking rules or for normlessness. But I’ve suggested no such thing. Rather, I’ve made the claim that I see these issues as rather trivial. Again, you’ve turned my position into a strawman.
Finally, a friend of mine, reflecting on this question, raised the question of whether it’s even appropriate to discuss many of the issues you’re raising in terms of rules. Take the example of grammar. Is it true that language competence is a matter of rule following? Why not rather habits? The concept of “rules” seems to be based on the idea of explicit linguistically formulated principles. In English grammar, for example, we say “i before e, except after c”. Now the question here is whether this is really how the mind of a competent language user works in speaking and writing. Clearly grammar books contaon such rules. Yet aren’t these rules, in truth, formalizations of habits or dispositions of competent language users? What I’m getting at is the question of whether or not there are competent language users that have never taken grammar courses? And, if such competent language users exist (and I suspect there are millions of them) do they have anything resembling formalized language rules at work in their mind as they use language? I suspect not. Why is this important? It’s important because it suggests, as Bourdieu has argued in texts like Pascalian Meditations, that the defenders of the juridical model of thought and social relations are prey to a sort of transcendental illusion wherein second-order formalizations are projected back into the mind and community as if they were already there and as if this is how cognitive and social relations are themselves structured. Yet a habit needs no explicit formulation to function. I am not suggesting that we can’t formalize such habits, transforming them into rules, and that these rules cannot then make a difference. I am suggesting that the naive and unreflective stance that treats such things as being a sort of a priori of practices thoroughly distorts what goes on in those practices.
June 16, 2011 at 5:21 pm
I’m a bit confused on what’s meant by ‘rules’ in these comments–maybe someone could explain this. Before there were stop signs traffic lights and ordinances enforcing how they were to be observed, those who stopped at intersections to watch for traffic before crossing had a better chance of surviving than those who didn’t. There may be ‘laws’ involved here–the way we speak of the laws of nature, but I don’t see that there are any ‘rules’ involved. The rules come later in an attempt to further control and reduce accidents by discouraging and punishing risky behavior.
Isn’t behavior in a discussion analogous? Is it really the codification of logical fallacies that saves discourse? Doesn’t the codification follow observed consequences, like traffic laws for intersections? Aren’t the questions of what makes some consequences desirable and others not, of an entirely different order than those having to do with social structuring of behaviors in favor of some consequences and in opposition to others?
One could say the same for the ‘rules’ of grammar (usage rules) –which tend to go well beyond protecting expression that supports understanding, Ain’t nobody don’t understand ain’t and double negatives… where ‘rules’ introduce shibboleths of class, preferences of taste and style… almost always unexamined as to actual genesis and consequences.
Am I missing something here?
June 16, 2011 at 8:07 pm
Levi,
I feel that this particular conversation has come to its logical conclusion. I admire your admission that you are allergic to the discussion of norms and you don’t really know why, but I also cannot follow you in the discussion of those who discuss norms. I think that inferring hidden motives and desires in your conversation partners is not conducive to good friendly debate. And I find your perplexing stance – normativity is trivial and yet normativity really irritates me – to be visibly contradictory. As I have mentioned, I have been reading your blog for a bit and I saw the sorts of ugly accusations directed at you and your motivation for pursuing the object-orientated approach, especially the uncivil ad hominems such as ‘what sort of a lonely pathetic person would choose to create a whole philosophical system around non-human things like mugs?’ Now I am surprised to learn that you find such questions to be completely legitimate and invite them as part of the conversation. So it is acceptable to ask what sort of a person would want to talk about normativity, what kinds of psychological problems they might have and so on. I feel that I cannot play by this particular rule because I don’t think it will lead us to any positive and mutually enriching discussion.
Andrew
June 16, 2011 at 11:38 pm
Andrew,
For a guy who talks so much about norms, you certainly seem to relate to them in a rather underhanded way. The very diary you’re responding to here gives an explanation of why I respond so strongly to juridical discourses, yet you blithely ignore that explanation. It’s not as if my critique of juridical psychology is particularly new or innovative. It can be found as early as St Paul’s discussion of the relationship between sin and law in Romans, it’s a key theme in La Rouchefoucauld’s analyses of the motives behind moral discourses, and it is core theme in Nietzsche, Freud, and Lacan. These are things I believe the moralist needs to take seriously and address, formulating a model of normativity that doesn’t generate warped, cruel, and masochistic persons; not to mention persons filled with fascist desires to dominate and punish others. Haven’t you ever noticed that the worst atrocities ever committed on on other humans are endlessly done in the name of the good and the moral law? We need only think of the Inquisition and witch burnings in this connection.
Setting all that aside, it’s telling that you bow out of discussion at that precise moment where it’s pointed out that you’re reifying rules or norms and treating what is derived as if it were an a priori condition that’s always already operative in social relations and cognition. In this regard, wjacobr’s observations are exemplary and to the point. Finally, it’s odd that you see a contradiction between the observation that some particular way of thinking about the world is trite, trivial, or superficial and that such a thing can also be extremely destructive. Such would be the case with, for example, neoliberal economic thought where we both have a very superficial conception of economic phenomena and relations and a way of thinking that is extremely destructive for millions of human lives.
June 17, 2011 at 12:49 am
Levi,
Your vicious and unprovoked personal attack on me (or rather on whatever you can gather of ‘me’ by my comments which is clearly enough for you) only confirms me in my decision to stop this conversation as it is clear that you are not in it to talk or exchange ideas but only to hit people on the head with your blind self-righteousness. It’s really sad that it had to end this way. I have seen you do this to other new commenters on many occasions but for some strange reason I thought that it would be different with me. I really do hope that a part of you does see the incredible (and sad) irony of the situation: you open up by complaining of unprovoked personal attacks on you by mysterious ‘Brandomians’ and slowly but surely you go there yourself (again and again). You have twisted my words around, made me say things I didn’t say, provided the most uncharitable interpretations of my most simple suggestions and now you send me off with a loud ‘fuck you then’ instead of simply parting in peace and perhaps thanking me for wasting my time trying to talk to you. I expect you will need to say the last word, so please be gentle.
Andrew
June 17, 2011 at 1:13 am
Andrew,
I’m not talking about you but a structure of thought that accompanies juridical models of normativity. Apparently you believe the analysis of these issues– that is the analysis pf the position from which certain enunciations are made –is irrelevant to analyzing the content of positions. I will say, however, that over the course of this discussion you’ve largely confirmed my meta-analysis of the desire implicit in juridical models of thought. You’ve endlessly asked me to confess, endlessly asked me to submit, endlessly situated me in the position of a subject being interrogated by an inquisitor (you’ve said very little substantial about your own position, while perpetually asking me to confess and defend my position), and have perpetually misrepresented my position as merely the negation of your position (apparently I’m a normless, anarchistic, breaker of all rules). In short, you’ve proceeded like a brownshirt asking me to show you my papers when I’m out past curfew. You talk about civility and what makes for civil discourse, but look at your entile style of discourse from the very beginning: that of the police interrogator that presumes guilt before innocence. When I point this out you then get bent out of shape as if some massive wrong has been done to you when you were the one abusing from the outset! This is the way it always is with the moralists and legislators that are obsessed with correctness. Like the Pope that claims that the Catholic church is being assaulted because victims of child molestation demand justice, you recoil when presented with a mirror of the immanent logic of what you’re doing. Of course you don’t want to talk about motives because when they’re brought to the fore the logic and desire behind this form of engagement turns out to be truly ugly. This mode of comportment is ugly both in its inqisitorial nature that refuses to outline any positions of its own, but also in attributing the ugliest possible positions to the person you’re interrogating (your remark that I advocate normlessness or see myself as bound by no nroms because I confess that I’m still working on these issues, and constant suggestions that I’m advocating norm braking rather than pointing to more fundamental, yet also more amorphous values). It takes real moxy to talk about civility in that context…. Especially when you haven’t taken the time to carefully read your own guy Brandom and recognize his central tenants concerning language, the exclusion of the prediscursive, etc. When the facile nature of your idea of social and cognitive regularities is pointed out and it’s indicated that you’re cinfusing reifications of habits with transcendental conditions you then flip out. Brandom talks about reasoning as “point keeping” and a game of giving and asking for reasons, which has the air of the bureaucratic bean cou ter. This is exactly how you’ve behaved here. You then draw a false analogy been charges levelled against me vis a vis the coffee mug example, and my claims about what obsession with laws and norms generate. You proceed as if claims about structures of desire are non-falsifiable. But you see, we can see exactlythe same things I describe unfolding in your actual discourse. This stuff doesn’t come out of left field and is not mere idle speculation. In the suggestion that I hate humans because I make a rich place for nonhumans in my ontology we find no such evidence in my discourse as I endlessly talk about humans and the welfare of humans. In other words, there are times when observations about motives are right and times when they’re not. You’re free to prove me wrong about the claims I’ve made about juridical subjectivity, but so far my observations are entirely justified by your actual behavior.
June 17, 2011 at 1:47 am
Andrew,
Returning to the issue of triteness, do you guys really believe philosophical rise or fall with contradictions or the occasional bad argument here or there? Is that how you evaluate Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, or Brandom? That seems rather trite and points to a rather impoverished engagement with philosophy.
June 17, 2011 at 1:55 am
And here I’ll add that your denigration of Joyce is incredibly revealing. Not only do you ignore the fact that Joyce manages to generate all sorts of meaning despite his violations of the “rules” of grammar, but your remarks about grammar reveal a classist, elitist, racist attitude. The place to look for the “norms” of grammar is in the actual way in which people use language, not among the formalist grammarians. It’s i teresting, however, that you side with the formalist grammarians. A linguistics class would do you some good, yet armchair philosopher legislators think they can ignore other disciplines.
June 18, 2011 at 12:55 am
Thanks to dmf for the link to the Deleuze article (and all the other links you share). I think one quote in particular really speaks to this discussion: “The depth of what we don’t know, the deepness of our own underdevelopment is where we talk from.” Without getting in the midst of the argument here, it would seem to me that Levi’s point is that– following certain rules and maybe breaking or bending others– there is no *real speaking* or *real being* that doesn’t *retain* an element of this not-knowing (this remainder of knowledge/desire that animates us unto death).
This resonates with someone like Lyotard writing that the function of *theory* is to ‘suspend’ or ‘interrupt’ ‘sense’– i.e., what ‘makes sense,’ what is obvious or self-evident. Or Jean-Luc Nancy– what constitutes ‘common sense’ doesn’t necessarily constitute a ‘sense’ in-common.
Lastly, (and in an attempt to tamp the fires), I would simply return this to the question of ‘world-disclosing.’ James Joyce, or any other poet worth naming, discloses a different world from a Ph.D. dissertation that discusses the tendencies or whatever in his work. It’s always been obvious which is more relevant to a reader. I think a real laudable attempt in poetry or philosophy is the kind of document/text that leaves open enough space for any and anyone who is willing to engage and risk the limits of rules (social and grammatical). That’s why the argument between Levi and Andrew is lost on most of us, but why the original post about Lacan and the university vs. analysts’ discourse seemed to me to be especially clear as to the question of normativity. As well as to the question I asked on the ‘function of philosophy’ thread, namely, what kind of “Ethics” arises from Levi’s thought, which seems *answered* here– only a philosophy of difference, of the remainder, of love in excess of the love, of multiplicities of intensities, etc…
June 18, 2011 at 2:56 am
Wow, a friend told me you went berzerk, but this is so much worse than what I imagined. Racist? ‘Classist’ and ‘elitist’ I can see, but ‘racist’? Did you just throw it in for good measure? I’m struggling to put this nicely, Levi, but you need professional help. No, not the Lacanian type, clearly it did nothing for you. I mean drugs and counseling. If so many people keep running into the same issues with you, it’s very likely that it is not them, but you. Part of me felt responsible for this falling out, but now having read your insane rants at the end of this exchange, I am actually relieved: I am not crazy, you are a paranoid and insecure man-child.
Since people told me of your incredibly restrictive comment policy, I don’t expect this to actually appear on your website, so here’s a bit of personal advice: beware of ruining your career with your temper, your lack of pause and reflection will one day lead you to an unfortunate situation in which you will do and say things you will later regret.
June 18, 2011 at 12:03 pm
@TL, my pleasure to add what I can, I tried to raise some of these issues here:
http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/06/continental-connections-thursday-4-pure-experience.html
but got no takers, my related (or so I thought) concerns didn’t seem to fit into the local politics/concerns of academic philosophy but that’s why I exited into clinical work a long time ago
June 18, 2011 at 3:15 pm
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