(Many apologies for the sloppiness of everything below, and all the fulminations on the place of literary criticism etc.: I wrote it all way too fast, and with the intention of showing how what we've been up to in the last 10 years especially has really been more philosophy-friendly than in past decades, and especially friendly to the realist sort of view.)
Paul Fry's new book Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (Yale, 2008) is something that the object-oriented ontologists/realists should probably take a gander at: Fry has been defending what can be called a realist, objecty sort of aesthetics since the mid-80's, against both Derridianism and historicism, and this book pushes that argument even further. Tim Morton has gained a lot of attention in OOP circles because he understands the metaphysics of the realism better than Fry, and is just more interested in it, for good ecological as well as literary-critical reasons. And thing-theory has become a branch of critical theory, though I don't really think it is object-oriented at the moment (preferring to deal with discourses, representations, etc.). But we should look at Fry for a very fully developed account of what an object-oriented literary theory looks like (and I use the words "literary theory" precisely: that is, meaning basically a methodology for literary criticism that opposes itself to a wide-ranging, PoMo, pseudo-philosophical critical theory which most philosophers are encouraged to think is literary theory as well--mostly by critical theorists themselves).
Graham Harman has done an amazing job of working out what an object-oriented aesthetics would be, or rather teaches us what the role of aesthetics is in a object-oriented philosophy. He has also married philosophy and the use of literature quite well, much better than most philosophers (and critical theorists) who use it as a sort of mix between an illustration and a case-study and then switch back into an aesthetic concern about what art is (this goes all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, though the relation between literature and philosopy before Aristotle especially was very different). Even Stanley Cavell, who uses literature more than most, does this a bit, though his work on the marriage-plot is great (Cavell sticks with film more, though, because I think it's a more friendly medium for his reflections). This sort of attitude is not a fault, by the way (as some critical theorists would contend): I don't want philosophers doing something like literary criticism/theory, because it'd keep them away from doing good philosophy.
What I like about Harman is that he doesn't really stick with the "illustrative" end of things and moves the philosophizing back to the more aesthetic area: it's here that philosophy actually works best with literary theory, actually, because what literary theory does is to work out aspects of aesthetics by testing them against methodological consequences for literary criticism, and work out methodology by testing it against aesthetics (the purest example I can think of is William Wimsatt, though Northrop Frye comes to mind). Nothing more, nothing less, really: you either descend into literary criticism proper when you do too much of the latter, or become an apolitical criticial theorist when you do too much of the former (more on the proper, productive role of critical theory in a moment--for now I want to focus on how it screws up both literary theory and philosophy). The illustrative/case-study sort of philosophizing (though using case-studies is better than illustration, in philosophy all things on this end of the scale tend towards the latter, unless you really resist the tendency like Cavell), is good for ethics if you have the patience for that sort of stuff (Nussbaum), and for outlining more clearly what you are already saying on the aesthetic level (think Aristotle on plot). But the literature here is like flat soda, warm soda (Harman had a great post on warm soda a while back), warm beer: it has to be treated as a sort of empty vessel in order for the job to get done. You read it like a parable, and indeed I think philosophy in these moments is closer to religious interpretation than literary studies gets, for all the talk about the origin of the latter (not exactly historically accurate, more a convenient fiction) in scriptural exegesis (Ricoeur I think would support this argument: Gadamer isn't exactly the one to go to here since for him interpretation is--rightly for his argument--too vague and huge a thing). That's not entirely bad, but it often passes itself off as interpretation in a literary critical sense, either by critical theorists or literary critics looking for a sort of cheap alliance between philosophy and literary studies--one that can be and should be based on something that we have more in common than this vague thing (the goddamned badass mission of the humanities, and particularly our less-historically-minded end of the humanities). And in the end it makes us (lit. crits.) look bad, since philosophy at least has big questions to answer through this method (and is much more precise about what exactly interpretation is, while we feel what it may be more keenly because we practice it), while we seem like we're using it to do what we're always accused of doing: nothing substantial except reading or at most teaching literacy (though I know philosophers will come back with the litany of things they are accused of not doing, which is substantial--what we should take away from this is that perhaps no two disciplines are as actively marginalized as us both together since we don't do history as much, which is something we should both, together, fight against). But enough of the big talk, which I use just to sort of work out how, from a lit. crit. perspective, literary criticism can work with OOP--and why lit. crit. could actually add to the OOP enterprise.
The more immediate point is the following: this is why addressing things in a more aesthetics-minded way, like Harman, is going to be better for literary criticism. Where the literary object is brought up as an object, which is what aesthetics does, you don't do this sort of illustration. But Harman doesn't exactly confine himself to this: his definition of aesthetics is, generally, something that happens in reality amongst objects that adds to them (it is something like the touch of objects on objects, their feelings in the more literal sense of this word and of the word aesthetics), and as such can veer away from the literary object to what we might say (if we weren't Fry or a realist) are "representations" that are in the world (the ugly words "discourse" or "textuality" might be invoked here, and the former surely would be extremely inappropriate--the latter might be more friendly to the object-oriented if it was tweaked [you all know I think Derrida is ultimtely reconcilable with an OOP perspective]).
I'll say why this use of "representations" is wrong in a moment, but let me just say that this is where phenomenology comes in: because Harman lets phenomenology do the work of taking us towards what is "represented" in the literary object, as well as what is added to reality amongst objects and their sensitivity to other objects ("representations"), Harman does a much better--because phenomenology-friendly--job than Latour's realist "scientifiction." The latter outlines a neat sense of what the literary object does, or what it is (no representation layered upon the real, no dualism [no dualism at least that could be opposed to monism], no folding of reality as Latour says in Irreductions somewhere, which I would agree is a sort of folding-over, a concession to history's view of reality that I'll get to in a minute I promise), but Latour can only really use literature as a case-study to get at what he means. At his best, he does that shifting between trying to use Rick Powers as a case study and using Powers' works as an object (as I've said on the Latour blog), but most of the time he tries to sink that shifting into the former sort of interpretive use of the work. So Powers can be considered right beside the amazing Turing, and we don't have any sense where fiction begins or ends: it's all mush, when what literary criticism wants is a precise sense of where the fiction is. We don't want to know that hypotheticals or thought-experiments in philosophy or science are basically fictions, and that fictions do something a lot like thought-experiments. Granted, Latour is working in weird territory, and that what Turing does is surely more like fiction than even the richest thought-experiment (he presupposes so much more than any "experiment," and--Latour is magisterial in bringing this out--even more than this the swiftness with which he slides into these sorts of fictions is the thing that really makes them extraordinary, or more fiction-like [only Latour could make us feel the urgency of the fiction-like, by the way--even if this is a central subject of literary theory which we know a lot about and we do think is crucial] than the thought-experiment in general). But we feel there is something different between Powers and Turing, even if we refuse to say that there is less of a distinction between the science each does. There is something different, in other words, between them, even if we try and curb our desire to say that the one is an artist and the other's work traditionally is seen as computer science or engineering or whatever thing you want to characterize it as which belongs on the other side of campus (Turing just is that hard to pin down). And we want to know what that is, or rather where that is. In the grand scheme of things, in short, there might be little difference between them, but we feel something is different. And the job of the literary critic/theorist is to find out what that is, in a real practical sense. The philosopher can find out what it is too, but he's probably--and rightly--going to be more willing to keep looking at the big picture or argue against the feeling in favor of the big picture.
This is why I'm always sort of confused when I see Lovecraft as the darling of the object-oriented philosophers (not just Harman), when Wordsworth, the poet who wanted to treat words themselves as objects (see the "Essay upon Epitaphs"--written itself "upon" the epitaphic, in an object-like, "physical" sense rather than the "representative" sense), is right there. I know it's important to get at what's weird, and stick with the weirdness of reality, and even that the object-oriented view of things actually probably maps onto the amazing Lovecraftian sort of weirdness better than with what we normally associate with Wordsworth (Lovecraft may better outline the differences between a general new sort of realism and an object-oriented sort of realism, maybe). I also know that frankly Lovecraft isn't paid enough attention in literary studies, though you'd actually be surprised if you looked at just how much is actually written on him. I also know he's a figure is more popular than "high" literature.
But Wordsworth is weird. He's really, really bizarre. Trust me, and trust everyone who studies Romantic poetry now or has studied it in the last 50 years or so, who, like Fry, have actually done a lot to make literary studies the place where an object-oriented view of things can really be accepted, as we sort of get frustrated with all those into representations/discourse and textuality who wanted to steer us more towards pure critical theory (the classic study of all this, its chapters published right in the thick of it all, was Frances Ferguson's amazing Solitude and the Sublime, which is extremely realist and even object-oriented--it is another bit of required reading alongside Fry for the philosopher who has the time for all this--though it wants to then ask, rightly I think, what happens precisely to what we once called representations [see Ferguson's more recent Pornography: The Theory for a more worked-out picture of the result, which recuperates much in classical Utilitarianism]). The Victorian view of Wordsworth, as well as the Modernist view of Wordsworth (and there's a lot the two eras share with each other), was just a guy who likes nature in a sort of pantheist way. But he's nowhere near that: if you read the writings with that in mind, they just don't make sense (okay, maybe the daffodil poem, but that's about it). The rest of it, the stuff that really matters, is way like Lovecraft. Morton can attest to that (listen to his course on Romanticism, and his great classes on Wordsworth, which are spot on--note: opens iTunes link to all Morton's courses), but so can Fry, whose reflections on Wordsworth lead him to a Harman-like thought in his book A Defense of Poetry:
The thinking that is accomplished by matter, to turn then to the hard-to-grasp notion of what I want to call the "embodied," appears on the face of it to be a strange transumption of the nature of matter that may or may not some day reveal its neurophysiological secret in terms that make sense within the Cartesian tradition; but in the meantime its nonuman task is to think itself as matter and not prefigured as res cogitans. Perhaps the way to do this [...] is not to think mind as matter but to think matter as mind, which, when it fails to think, can then stand revealed for what it is, like Heidegger's hammer.
-A Defense of Poetry (1995, collecting essays from the 80s), 206.
You see Fry struggling to articulate what he means, and he has lots of recourse to PoMo, textualist sorts of rhetoric in order to do so throughout his writings--which might have the stink of language-centered philosophy that the object-oriented people rightly don't like (though it's really not that bad, is it?)--but the impulse towards the object-oriented is there. It is also, yes, an impulse that very wrongly gestures towards what Harman continually tries to fend off, which is panpsychism. This too is what seems to be lurking behind Wordsworth for people, and is really what we mean when we fling the old accusation of "pantheism" at him. But precisely following Wordsworth, being led there by him, Fry stresses the "failing to think" of matter, and does so through precisely the hammer of Heidegger, through tool-being--and this, however inaptly put, is just one indication of an underlying tendency in Fry that is deeply, I think, object-oriented (or at least realist with an object-oriented sort of drive). It is obviously going to be less clear about the metaphysics, but this is because Fry isn't a metaphysician, nor does he want to be. He is outlining the consequences of a view of literature that sees its purpose as providing that sort of suspension of--he calls it "knowledge," but that's again too postmodern sounding (remember Fry is a huge critic of PoMo, but that literary theory is now dominated by a French-centered vocabulary which makes it sound critical-theoryish all the time, when it isn't). What is suspended is, as he says elsewhere in the book and all throughout the new one on Wordsworth, intention as human-centered. He also calls this knowledge or meaning, because that is what we are concerned with in intention in literary studies (as opposed to say, haptic, double-touches, lost limbs, all the great stuff of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty), and so we talk about intention in that vague way (believe me who once entertained the philosophy path for a while, that yes I know this is very frustrating for philosophers who spend so much time trying to be precise about this stuff!). But Fry means the non-human, and precisely the non-linguistic-centered (less fashionable to think around 1995, certainly):
To think the nonhuman. To stand back from the anthropocentrisim and pathetic fallacy that is built into our very language, here begins necessarily, the release from signification, not just as the already shopworn gesture of decentering the mental subject but also as the less fashionable through or around the determinate linguisticity that so quickly and suspiciously acquires human attributes in post-structuralist thought. It is only by thinking human being in its objecthood, in its continuity with being in general, that we can suspend the dialectics of reflection...
-A Defense of Poetry, 205.
He's talking about Lyotard in this moment, thus the vagueness of the last phrase: what he means is the sort of drive to interpret that we get when we literary critics pick up a poem, which is actually so different than the drive to actually write literary criticism on the thing--that is, what we normally do and do well. The first tendency is the one we share with the parable-reading people (philosophers, exegetes, everyday readers), who see meaning multiply as reality gets folded over more and more. The literary critic, whether she thinks this or not (we do a lot by intuition) brings the work closer to reality though, back away from this meaning-making, which treats the literary object precisely as a sort of extension of a man-made-intention, or essentially crystallization of it, a representation that folds it over, however much we try to water-down this New Critical, formalist, Aristotelian (that is, Aristotle of the Poetics and Rhetoric) attitude towards the work by seeing it as a chunk of language, discourse, whatever. We bring it back as an object working against and with other objects, all of which are nonhuman or just thought in their objecthood, like the hammer which discloses more, more and more, but not more human-centered meaning, when it breaks down (Harman and Fry might differ as to how this moment is interpreted, but I think Fry might like Harman's reading of it better than his own, which is vague but pretty good for a literary critic).
All this is Fry, and all of it comes from a Wordsworthian sort of view of things:
An Epitaph is not a proud Writing shut up for the studious: it is exposed to all, to the wise and most ignorant; it is condescending, perspicuous, and lovingly solicits regard; its story and admonitions are brief, that the thoughtless, the busy, and indolent may not be deterred, nor the impatient tired: the stooping Old Man cons [knows, understands] the engraven record like a second horn-book;--the Child is proud that he can read it;--and the Stranger is introduced by its mediation to the company of a Friend: it is concerning all, and for all:--in the Church-yard it is open to the day; the sun looks down upon the stone, and the rains of Heaven beat against it.
-Wordsworth, "Essay upon Epitaphs"
That's just a bit of the amazing essay: notice that it admits of a pantheism, but what matters actually are the things and their precise, definite, hard and soft interactions--you have to read the list as a list of individual things, and not just a rattling on. Because it's clear Wordsworth thought all his writings were something approximating this writing on tombstones: Geoffrey Hartman was the first to point this out in the 60's in his Wordsworth's Poetry, which first enlightened us as to just how un-Victorian, how weird he was. This was the real motivation behind his resistance to "poetic diction," which everyone knows about. That's not about encrusted phrases versus a lower, more homely language that everyone can understand. When Wordsworth says the poet should be a man talking to men, he means it quite in the sense that the person speaking is just a man and he has a just a man as his immediate audience: the humans are there in their objecthood, their hardness, in this sort of way. If this sounds too human-centered, also reflect that this isn't a sort of "let's get together in language" sort of thing: that's what 18th century poetry is like; that's why you use stock phrases like "finny coursers" (as a metonymy for fish) or invoke muses. The community he seeks is very much like the society of objects that Latour often describes (politically too, much like Wordsworth) and that Harman describes more clearly: this is why the poetic object doesn't even have men as its "audience," but just as men who are witness to it, to the talking. The phrase, essentially is a tautology--something Wordsworth defended vigorously (see his long note on his poem "The Thorn") as not a fault of language but perhaps its chief beauty. The reason is that the tautology (and he means it not logically but rhetorically, so it's not the tautology you hear rightly condemned in philosophy departments but the sort of repetitious saying of the same thing that you hear in speeches) just says what there. It gets rid of reference as representation and opens up a saying of what, well, is just said. The man talking to men is like a brute description of what poetry is; it's not what it should be like if you understand this to mean the poet should "represent himself as a particular type of speaker." Read all of Wordsworth's poems with this sort of distinction in mind, and you'll see that he's right up your object-oriented alley:
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
I think I better stop there: what's important though is not that there are objects "represented" in the poem (this is what thing theory sadly looks at most of the time, though Latour plays a big part there, and why most of the time it isn't object-oriented; but that's also why it is a critical theory more than a literary one), but how the poem works and how it is in touch with the real and with these objects. For instance, pay attention to what the word "seemed" is doing: the only representation-producing word here, is actually working to undermine the human-centeredness of feeling and touch, bring them closer to the earth, by setting them up precisely as what death--or is it death as is usually assumed (because of the sequence of poems it is in)? has anyone really died here? or is it just a sort of change of viewpoint that is being registered? you don't need to die to roll around like this--undercuts, or as what is in contrast to what the speaker "now" finds.
The other main things I wanted to note are that 1) the most explicit example of what type of fiction this realism-fiction is (it's not exactly object-oriented, but it has something like OOP's realism), then, can be seen It's Garry Shandling's Show as I said a while back; 2) that history (or a certain view of it) is the thing that prevents a lot of this realism from catching on (history opposes fiction and reality, whereas fiction considered alone just has no opposition to reality at all but adds to it: see Michael Wood's Literature and the Taste of Knowledge on this, and in a more exploratory way Fry), and that literary history is a huge part of literary studies--whereas history is never at all really an issue in philosophy departments except when it is made a philosophical issue--which is why we are more likely to view literature in terms of the representational even if we don't really criticize it that way; and 3) what critical theory does well is combine various idioms across departments, and direct them towards neglected areas, thereby politicizing the fields they join (it can easily be a reactive stance, though it seems progressive, which is why feminism and labor don't really need it, nor various groups when they get some real power behind them), and is very important if what you are theorizing is neglected. All these things can be got into more: the best thing to read on 2) is Fry and also Michael Wood (as I mentioned above). On 2) I'll also say I think philosophy does what it needs to do without much history, though history can be a great resource for it philosophically (you can dig up neglected philosophies if you look for them); and I really mean history in the history-department sense of it, which I think once it hits philosophy gets turned into what they call politics or political metaphysics (look at the work of history of philosophy people to see what happens there: it is a lot more like the bad sociology of science that Latour hates), whereas in English we marry the two a lot (no Milton without the Civil War). And I'll add that it is the historicists who really battled alongside the deconstructionists in promoting a view of fiction that was opposed to reality, that subtracted from it or undermined it, and promoted a representational sort of view of it all (Foucault, who should be the enemy of OOP, was the foundation of New Historicism, and the impact of the latter was massive; and though Derrida I think is just philosophically less of a problem for OOP, as I said above, Paul de Man's Derrida, which was hugely influential, basically turns him into a thinker of language qua representation/underminer of reality).
And I should add one more thing to this history angle, which is that I know the status of history is changing in philosophy through OOP and OOP like projects, because Latour is the one person who can write histories of objects, ideas, everything: there has been a focus on Braudel by Levi Bryant and Harman is actually making his way through Gibbon (though I know less about what he's going to do with it once he's done: it's awesome though, because Gibbon is amazing and changes the 18th century view of history radically, and well it's just an amazing read). I'd add that the reason this is able to happen is because Latour writes narratives, understands objects compose narratives or that reality is a composition of narratives, and that despite the fact that this sounds like something linguistic which the perverse PoMo critical theorist would love, it means nothing of the sort. In fact, it actually means we as literary critics are in a good position to understand what Latour means in a different way, in a more substantial way than the hard line PoMo linguistic angle, if only because that's just critical theory and doesn't really reflect what we do with narratives or even how we think of them in literary theory. To be blunt: there is a moment in the LSE event, when Harman and Latour are talking to the audience (I think it's the LSE event since it had to be, but my memory is shoddy of this), and someone brings up some possible objection to what he says about, well, reality. The objection is, well how do you know where these narratives begin or end? How are you able to tell where the narrative you are composing, the account you are giving of the way objects work and public transit systems are developed and decomposed etc., begins or ends? In short, it's a legitimate question, but it has a sort of false epistemological sort of dualism about it which Latour must destroy: he says rightly that this is a question that scientists don't ask when they try to account for their work, and so it brings you away from the reality and towards the critical sorts of histories of science that he always wants to avoid. The position is right: the narrative is just the narrative, and it's over when it's over, when you've accounted for the events. But there's a practical angle to this, which is on the level of narrative and how you compose it: when do you begin and end your narrative? It is literary criticism and literary theory that can come in and answer this question, because it is a question about the limits of fiction and how narratives work, which we can answer. This is the area that was exploited by people allied with literary studies in the 80's to undermine science for the humanities: but in practice, we deal a lot with these questions and less with the undermining, and can help with the narrative issues (see Wood again for this).
And one last note: criticism and critical are two words that get thrown around a lot in OOP circles because of Latour and it is important to note that when I talk of literary criticism I mean nothing like the sort of Kantian critical attitude. The "critical" of critical theory, or its sort of criticism, definitely are of this Kantian sort, and it is in critical theory's interest to equate literary criticism with something critical. (I've heard that what the "critical" means in "critical theory" is the "close reading" of theoretical texts: perhaps, yes, this technique is used there--though it really isn't the same thing even then, since the close reading in theory is just so much more flighty--but still we then have to say that there is a huge difference between the theoretical text and the literary one, and that this leaves "theory" undefined. Essentially we have to enforce the gap between the two senses of the term, the one implying a whole Kantian task and the other--the literary critical, literary studies sense--is actually only adopted because in literary studies we need a word for what we do when we don't do literary history, or the historiographical sort of work we also pursue, and it looks a lot like the stuff they called criticism--i.e. judgment and analysis--they did way before Kant in the 17th and 18th century). So I don't really see anything wrong with combining the words "object-oriented" and "criticism," or maybe even speaking of "object-oriented criticism," when I mean objected-oriented literary criticism--though I think it's probably good to avoid that phrase in general ("literary critical realism" might be more accurate, since we rarely hold to any precise sort of philosophical distinctions when we criticize, and only use them for practical purposes when we theorize).
Showing posts with label Harman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harman. Show all posts
Friday, September 17, 2010
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Self-reference and metafiction (and realism)
There's a distinction to be made between self-referential stories and metafictional stories. While self-reference rolls itself up into a ball, seeking to disappear in indexicality, metafiction sprawls, unfolds, and interrogates the consequences of self-reference and parody more than it engages in either. In metafiction is room for development, where self-reference aims for merely a more pithy postmodern version of the modernist paradox Frederic Jameson describes so well: resolution in paradox, fragmentation that effectively means closure--all of which announces the inflexibility of form at the same time as it mourns the loss of an unironic formal achievement. Of course, modernism can't be reduced to just that, but this is precisely the reduction postmodernism accomplishes in order to turn this fatalism into a weird schizophrenic joy, closing off all the utopian modernist alternatives in order to elaborate, rather than change, this relation to form. So the pithiness here comes from the sense that metafiction can be dissolved into a series of instances of self-reference (otherwise known as allegory), or the sense that in instances of self-reference, we are getting all that metafiction allows.
But the overturning of this relation between the two has itself to be overturned, set back on it's feet. Instead of narratives like that of "Seinfeld," which rigorously--and wonderfully, in its last episode, though everyone hated precisely this fact--stuck to its self-referential pseudo-closure, we need more stories like "It's Garry Shandling's Show," which is a wonderful example of the possibilities of meta-fiction. Where "Seinfeld" constantly got laughs because it was a parody of the sitcom's premise, a show about shows and so really "about nothing"--or, to put it more accurately, referring (via its plots mostly) constantly to its own status as merely plausible--"It's Garry Shandling's Show" allows Shandling the metafictional possibility of actually commenting upon the way the show will unfold, and motivating this moment of self-reference into a drama: plots often involve Garry trying to avoid having to do an upcoming scene, and all self-reference actually dissolves into a fiction that is actually about fiction. Rather than making fiction's status as merely probable the beginning and end of the story, the status actually motivates a story about fiction.
The difference is subtle (I have a little difficulty bringing it out here), but the effect is a completely different sort of tale: while "Seinfeld" maintains the division between fiction and reality and exploits it, "It's Garry Shandling's Show" has no use for such self-consciousness of fictionality, and spills over into reality, blurring it's lines. This produces, basically, realism's brand of fiction (it's this more than anything like the science fiction of which Latour speaks). Garry maintains the notion that you can actually come over to his show, and often invites the audience in for dip: the point is not that the show is accounting for it's status as a show, but rather that you don't know where the fiction begins or ends. Garry is a guy who can be on a stage and be fictional--fiction is something different than acting, in other words, or it is only that. The odd doubling-over that Latour describes so well as the point of a dualistic notion of reference--this is just another event in reality, and can interact with it only because reality is really not as opposed to fiction as we thought it was.
Another way of making the distinction is to say that the opposition of fiction is not reality but history, not in the sense that fictions are ahistorical (though this actually does apply in some ways), but that fictions are negated by an idea of reality that claims to be objective and different than the narratives we tell about it. Fiction has no problem dealing with reality, but when it meets the claim that the people it deals with are not historical persons (and, as Michael Wood explains, especially when they are real people who are embellished through fiction, like the heroes of Homer Aristotle has so many problems with), it then has all sorts of problems. It's only when we believe reality has anything to do with history in this sense that reality then becomes opposed to fiction in such an austere way. Otherwise, like Latour says, the world interprets itself: what's crucial is that meta-fiction tries to restore this state of things, while self-reference or the restricted play between allegory and irony, comes from that despairing state of things just described, and will preserve the distinction between historical reality and fiction at all costs.
A final note: I had a little trouble distinguishing between the self-referential and the metafictional above, partly because "Seinfeld" is only explicitly self-referential in its form, and this actually makes it less visible (thus the disappointment with the last episode came from people mistaking the show's form for something else that involved the sort of everyday comedy that was its subject, something that would be about something). A cleaner example might be a reality show, especially one about trying to get on TV: Kathy Griffin's reality show is a good one, while "The Comeback" is pretty much a perfect example, because it takes the premise of reality TV (something lurking behind both Shandling and Seinfeld's ventures, but not really crystallized yet) to the max, and shows it to be precisely this sort of infinite self-reference. But that's still too formal, even if it shows just how dead and boring postmodernism is when it's view of things really hits TV. A more direct example can just be taken from "It's Garry Shandling's Show," since it uses self-reference to get to the plane of metafiction. The direct reference in the scene above to the monologue that opens the show is self-referential, while what it implies in terms of action is metafictional: Nancy has to stop what she's doing to wait for Garry to finish the monologue, because it's a monologue, something that, in fiction, has a particular shape and has to be traversed in a particular fashion--and not just because Garry refers to the show and what he is doing in general, in the abstract. What's funny is the waiting, and then the fact that she realizes that because the monologue is this particular object (I think like the realists we might call it an "object," or at least that's my take on how to turn people like Harman towards narrative, via their excellent reflections on what is involved in aesthetics) she can go do something else while Garry finishes--it's this that's funny, not the reference. You can also probably distinguish between them if you look at the great theme song, though things get hazy when you try to distinguish between types of utterance, as Derrida a long time ago (and this realist possibility of metafiction is, in my reading of him, what he tries to preserve here) showed with Austin:
This is the theme to Garry's show,
The theme to Garry's show,
Garry called me up and asked if I would right his theme song,
I'm almost halfway finished,
How do you like it so far,
How do you like the theme to Garry's show.
This is the theme to Garry's show,
The opening theme to Garry's show,
This is the music that you hear as you watch the credits,
We're almost to the part of where I start to whistle,
Then we'll watch "It's Garry Shandling's Show."
This was the theme to Garry Shandling's show.
"This is the theme to Garry's Show" is self-reference, while the amazing, hilarious turn "I'm almost halfway finished," picks up the narrative potential in "Garry called me up" and starts something metafictional, which doesn't take the plausibility of fiction for granted, and doesn't try to shore it up, but explores it, makes it spill out into and merge with reality.
But the overturning of this relation between the two has itself to be overturned, set back on it's feet. Instead of narratives like that of "Seinfeld," which rigorously--and wonderfully, in its last episode, though everyone hated precisely this fact--stuck to its self-referential pseudo-closure, we need more stories like "It's Garry Shandling's Show," which is a wonderful example of the possibilities of meta-fiction. Where "Seinfeld" constantly got laughs because it was a parody of the sitcom's premise, a show about shows and so really "about nothing"--or, to put it more accurately, referring (via its plots mostly) constantly to its own status as merely plausible--"It's Garry Shandling's Show" allows Shandling the metafictional possibility of actually commenting upon the way the show will unfold, and motivating this moment of self-reference into a drama: plots often involve Garry trying to avoid having to do an upcoming scene, and all self-reference actually dissolves into a fiction that is actually about fiction. Rather than making fiction's status as merely probable the beginning and end of the story, the status actually motivates a story about fiction.
The difference is subtle (I have a little difficulty bringing it out here), but the effect is a completely different sort of tale: while "Seinfeld" maintains the division between fiction and reality and exploits it, "It's Garry Shandling's Show" has no use for such self-consciousness of fictionality, and spills over into reality, blurring it's lines. This produces, basically, realism's brand of fiction (it's this more than anything like the science fiction of which Latour speaks). Garry maintains the notion that you can actually come over to his show, and often invites the audience in for dip: the point is not that the show is accounting for it's status as a show, but rather that you don't know where the fiction begins or ends. Garry is a guy who can be on a stage and be fictional--fiction is something different than acting, in other words, or it is only that. The odd doubling-over that Latour describes so well as the point of a dualistic notion of reference--this is just another event in reality, and can interact with it only because reality is really not as opposed to fiction as we thought it was.
Another way of making the distinction is to say that the opposition of fiction is not reality but history, not in the sense that fictions are ahistorical (though this actually does apply in some ways), but that fictions are negated by an idea of reality that claims to be objective and different than the narratives we tell about it. Fiction has no problem dealing with reality, but when it meets the claim that the people it deals with are not historical persons (and, as Michael Wood explains, especially when they are real people who are embellished through fiction, like the heroes of Homer Aristotle has so many problems with), it then has all sorts of problems. It's only when we believe reality has anything to do with history in this sense that reality then becomes opposed to fiction in such an austere way. Otherwise, like Latour says, the world interprets itself: what's crucial is that meta-fiction tries to restore this state of things, while self-reference or the restricted play between allegory and irony, comes from that despairing state of things just described, and will preserve the distinction between historical reality and fiction at all costs.
A final note: I had a little trouble distinguishing between the self-referential and the metafictional above, partly because "Seinfeld" is only explicitly self-referential in its form, and this actually makes it less visible (thus the disappointment with the last episode came from people mistaking the show's form for something else that involved the sort of everyday comedy that was its subject, something that would be about something). A cleaner example might be a reality show, especially one about trying to get on TV: Kathy Griffin's reality show is a good one, while "The Comeback" is pretty much a perfect example, because it takes the premise of reality TV (something lurking behind both Shandling and Seinfeld's ventures, but not really crystallized yet) to the max, and shows it to be precisely this sort of infinite self-reference. But that's still too formal, even if it shows just how dead and boring postmodernism is when it's view of things really hits TV. A more direct example can just be taken from "It's Garry Shandling's Show," since it uses self-reference to get to the plane of metafiction. The direct reference in the scene above to the monologue that opens the show is self-referential, while what it implies in terms of action is metafictional: Nancy has to stop what she's doing to wait for Garry to finish the monologue, because it's a monologue, something that, in fiction, has a particular shape and has to be traversed in a particular fashion--and not just because Garry refers to the show and what he is doing in general, in the abstract. What's funny is the waiting, and then the fact that she realizes that because the monologue is this particular object (I think like the realists we might call it an "object," or at least that's my take on how to turn people like Harman towards narrative, via their excellent reflections on what is involved in aesthetics) she can go do something else while Garry finishes--it's this that's funny, not the reference. You can also probably distinguish between them if you look at the great theme song, though things get hazy when you try to distinguish between types of utterance, as Derrida a long time ago (and this realist possibility of metafiction is, in my reading of him, what he tries to preserve here) showed with Austin:
This is the theme to Garry's show,
The theme to Garry's show,
Garry called me up and asked if I would right his theme song,
I'm almost halfway finished,
How do you like it so far,
How do you like the theme to Garry's show.
This is the theme to Garry's show,
The opening theme to Garry's show,
This is the music that you hear as you watch the credits,
We're almost to the part of where I start to whistle,
Then we'll watch "It's Garry Shandling's Show."
This was the theme to Garry Shandling's show.
"This is the theme to Garry's Show" is self-reference, while the amazing, hilarious turn "I'm almost halfway finished," picks up the narrative potential in "Garry called me up" and starts something metafictional, which doesn't take the plausibility of fiction for granted, and doesn't try to shore it up, but explores it, makes it spill out into and merge with reality.
Friday, December 11, 2009
A note on Orientalism
So, I divorced literary theory from critical theory a bit last time. But I did so not to knock at the latter so much as show how literary theory is really doing something else, something less critical in the sense that people have been lately been referring to this--that is, negatively, and with its Kantian overtone. This isn't to say that ideology critique isn't also what we do in literary studies sometimes or even often. It's just that this necessarily takes the form of an extended meditation and analysis (or reading), that, because it has to pass through its object and really explicate it, can really only be something like dismissing conditions of possibility if it's done superficially. And, yes, there's probably a lot of superficial stuff. But there is that in all sorts of disciplines, and you can't dismiss critique by equating its most superficial performance with its most accomplished work, unless through that very Kantian maneuver. Regardless, the relationship of literary criticism to critique in general is not a simple one (critique has so many valences, and even if you mean it in the "proper" sense--and which applies, in the Latourian area from which this talk comes, primarily to critical sociology--the import of what you're saying starts to apply to the other significations), and the similarity of the words shouldn't make us think so.
It gets a little more complicated with the rise of critical theory and postmodernism, which sought to really play on this similarity of words and tie literary analysis with critique (and even reading itself into something like critique): it's a way to make criticism in any form (qua close attention to something) seem relevant, after all. However, we shouldn't forget the reasons in America that this desire for relevance was sought. It wasn't just opportunism. Certainly the way it proceeded was a bit suspect, since it also attempted to beat American philosophy (for one) to death. But this was already a dead horse, in many ways, and philosophy's renewed relevance in America might be attributed, in some way, to the slight pressure of this postmodern challenge, which, along with new (and perhaps much more heavy) pressure from the sciences, allowed it to develop its Continental aspects--though of course it did this mostly through internal changes, with much infighting, negotiation, and thinking and reading (the sort of unbelievable fixed positions of someone like a Dreyfus or a Schacht or Searle seem symptomatic of the sort of struggles they went through).
But this is why I once said critical theory is primarily the politicization of other disciplines. Here I just wanted to show that it also politicizes literary studies--and sort of undo the general sense that this critical theorizing started and ended here, or didn't become something with its own agenda. The particular way this politicization occurs--and I should be clear that when I say this I mean that literary studies isn't apolitical, just that it might have other possibilities for politics than the critical one--has generally put people like me in an awkward position, and my interest in literary theory is first and foremost one of trying to figure out how we can negotiate the legacy of literary theory in its relationship with this critical tendency, such that it doesn't all end with the situation we're currently in. This is a situation where last generation of readers has put the next generation in an untenable position, having pissed off everyone through its too-radical-but-strangely-not-radical-enough attempts to change the system by making this theory map directly onto with a critical-political project much larger than any particular field (which end up mainly just collapsing into a weak and less political attempt to deal with increasing "professionalization" or the compartmentalizing of literary studies--see John Guillory's good Bourdieuvian account of this).
But I also wanted to do this all in order to show that critical theory isn't something to be avoided. It just has its particular purpose, which I'd like to make clear is distinct from the purpose of literary criticism. This doesn't mean either that critical theory means "forgetting literature," as some people (Jonathan Culler, though reluctantly) have put it--cultural studies (which we can say is something like a side-by-side critical adventure which we can't quite reduce to the theorization, along with AfAm, Feminist, PoCo, more explicitly Marxist studies, and Queer Studies) certainly doesn't do this, though it sees literature primarily as taking place beside other media, and I see no reason to say critical theory does this either.
So--the general field of things sufficiently stratified or differentiated (and I'd rather insist on this stratification than in the way it's now all organized)--I'd like to suggest that one can jump into critical theory when necessary or even when not (though I'd personally show more hesitance to do so than in former times and not ask whether there were other ways to articulate what I'd say). One can even do so as a literary theorist (or, for that matter, as a literary historian). And I'd like to show the relevance of that particular jump (which can again be made by architecture students, philosophers, etc. etc.) by just presenting again a little contribution to the little spat around an essay by Harman, which I dealt with perhaps a little too roundly a while ago (though not, I think, as roundly as others). It comes up again as a sort of afterthought in Paul Ennis' next-to-last post explicating the essay in question. The posts are excellent by the way (here they are: 1, 2, 3, 4, and again 5), mostly because they show what I thought was obvious but I guess needs more stress (in a way that makes me for the first time doubt the supposed ubiquity of phenomenology as the main background against which most Continental philosophy works), which is that there's a lot of phenomenological ways into the issues discussed and that Harman is in a way making a contribution to them as well: as Paul says early in the first post, "in order to understand Harman's metaphysics one also needs to understand his motivations and these are tied to an overcoming of the overcoming-of-metaphysics in Heidegger." Anyway, as I suggested last time I spoke of this, going through all this as Paul did was one of the most helpful ways to address the larger concerns that dealt with the internal aspects of Harman's project.
But then there was that issue of Orientalism. Paul addresses it, as he nears the end of Harman's essay:
Harman makes an important claim next: “We must ignore the usual connotations of sensuality and fix our gaze on a more primitive layer of the cosmos” (Collapse II, 206). Here I think we can go some way to dispelling the idea that Harman is projecting sensuous qualities upon exotic objects – at least from the strictly philosophical mode. The question of the aesthetic employment of exotic metaphors is a different issue to be addressed later in the round-up. Within the orientalist lens one might also question the notion of a “primitive layer” but this too is a major theme of Western philosophical thinking from Schelling to Heidegger (and already problematic for Jacobi in his depiction of German idealism as a step toward emptiness/nothingness).
It's the last point that was the issue, as I gathered, but in a way had to also deal with that "aesthetic employment of exotic metaphors," though only vaguely. To recapitulate, Harman was accused of Orientalism, or Orientalistic thinking--and that you can't really be "accused" of this will be my point below--for asking us to fix our gaze in the way he does in Paul's quote: on "a more primitive layer."
Now, its the last sentence of Paul's here that will probably give us only cold comfort, since it doesn't really oppose the charge of Orientalism as--to whoever is interested in such charges--show it is more diffuse than ever! In short, making the primitive in this sense into a theme which is traditional doesn't really combat the charge and sounds like an argument from authority (which doesn't have much clout, however sensible it may indeed be).
What does oppose this charge is, however, the critical theory of Orientalism itself as formulated by Edward Said! In other words, it is the charge of Orientalism or Orientalisticity or Orentialisticalismicality which is precisely not proceeding along the lines which Said (alongside his literary theory and literary criticism) developed--as the parties involved to their credit said was the case. And so far from attributing the attack to an interested critical theorist, a critic critiquing, say, we should really understand how critical theory actually, in this case, comes to help philosophy figure out what's going on and, indeed, defend itself.
For, as my quote from Paul was meant to show, it doesn't always have the resources with which to account for things. That's no essential fault--as over-interested people might have said in the past--but just the sign of a place where it can turn to others, and others can be ready to help out.
So in a comment on Paul's blog, I made my contribution, and I'll make it again in more detail here: I said that Orientalism, for Said (one can find this in the first pages of his book), is more of a locus for the operation of power, not a one way dynamic with good and bad sides. So this is why you can't accuse someone of Orientalism. Orientalism is not something like a property of a thought or a taint upon it. Rather, Orientalism is a thoroughfare. Or, more vividly put, Orientalism is like a panopticon. And Said does this because he thinks that seeing orientalism as some taint of exoticization which needs to be expunged from whatever someone says--according to the weak and reactionary protocols of political correctness--are missing what is really at issue. One can always link exoticization with anything. The issue is larger, more collective or more widespread than that, but also has less to do with the character of the ideas themselves as the linkages to the relations between East and West that are the most hard to pin down. And so the concepts, as such, are not good or bad, either because they are old concepts that have come from something like a tradition of oppressing the Near or Far East, or because they carry their exotic flavor. This is because because the association of exoticization with the Orient, and the use of concepts in such a tradition, is the symptom of a more complex dynamic actually playing out between East and West--one that doesn't simply produce the oppression of the former or work in one way, and which never really stops if the concepts in which we see it most manifested disappear.
You see how this relies on Foucault's employment of that nice structuralist notion of discourse (Said himself says this). Now, you can disagree with this, with Foucault's ontology or whatever you want to call it, all you want. You can say it's too based on language (and I'd agree with you), but that's not enough. It's not enough here, because the theory allows us to begin to understand what is going on. Just because we knock away at that the notion of discourse (or language) doesn't mean we can't see how it helps us here, because at least negatively it shows us there can't be anything like a one-to-one correlation of concepts with political or social ramifications. Philosophy has a hard time arguing when this fact comes to the fore, because it means it has to creep past the interior of the concepts, just beyond their edges, and show their formative requirments--in short their historical character. Harman has actually been pretty good about trying to historicize his own concepts, at least on the personal level (I've never heard a person so frankly admit exactly when they really figured out Husserl before, as he does in Prince of Networks)--and philosophy, as history of philosophy as an area of study grows, is no doubt getting better in general in this area. But here we have a critical theory that works pretty well, and so why not use it? It doesn't always have to entail some agreement at bottom with the whole "system," and the efficacy of the notion doesn't always fall away with an attack at its foundations--simply because it might not so philosophically be "based" on such foundations.
It's also a theory that is trying, primarily, to get beyond the alleged crudeness of the Marxist way of going about this, which is through ideology. I think, though, we might see the Foucauldian notion of discourse against this Marxist background, almost as a modification of it rather than anything radically different than it--along with Derrida's much maligned talk about Western metaphysics. What's going on there is some attempt to not just dismiss philosophical concepts as tie them to the tendencies that shape them, their typical directions. If this then has ramifications on the interior, as it were (I'm using a poor conceptual scheme here, as if concepts were black boxes, but whatever--that's Latour's contribution). I think fundamentally, too, it is in this Postcolonial context (as it is called) that the arguments are the best: that is, I find Derrida's talk about Western metaphysics most convincing when it comes out of his attempt to deal with the historical ramifications of France's relation to Algeria--as I think it often does (and not just because he was Algerian). I think of what Foucault does as addressing a similar--though perhaps less starkly drawn--set of relations. Orientalism works too by trying to map the dynamics--not just in philosophy--that obtain at this crossroads. It might not be the best way to go about this, but in this case I think it works, in the sense that the theory makes us grasp how quickly we are moving from something like the content of the philosophy to statements about its general contours, by way of invoking the Orient itself (these large concepts often do too much work, as some people, in other situations, point out well). This is what Said was trying to account for with Orientalism--which is not one such big concept so much as the name for a dynamic which we can trace.
It gets a little more complicated with the rise of critical theory and postmodernism, which sought to really play on this similarity of words and tie literary analysis with critique (and even reading itself into something like critique): it's a way to make criticism in any form (qua close attention to something) seem relevant, after all. However, we shouldn't forget the reasons in America that this desire for relevance was sought. It wasn't just opportunism. Certainly the way it proceeded was a bit suspect, since it also attempted to beat American philosophy (for one) to death. But this was already a dead horse, in many ways, and philosophy's renewed relevance in America might be attributed, in some way, to the slight pressure of this postmodern challenge, which, along with new (and perhaps much more heavy) pressure from the sciences, allowed it to develop its Continental aspects--though of course it did this mostly through internal changes, with much infighting, negotiation, and thinking and reading (the sort of unbelievable fixed positions of someone like a Dreyfus or a Schacht or Searle seem symptomatic of the sort of struggles they went through).
But this is why I once said critical theory is primarily the politicization of other disciplines. Here I just wanted to show that it also politicizes literary studies--and sort of undo the general sense that this critical theorizing started and ended here, or didn't become something with its own agenda. The particular way this politicization occurs--and I should be clear that when I say this I mean that literary studies isn't apolitical, just that it might have other possibilities for politics than the critical one--has generally put people like me in an awkward position, and my interest in literary theory is first and foremost one of trying to figure out how we can negotiate the legacy of literary theory in its relationship with this critical tendency, such that it doesn't all end with the situation we're currently in. This is a situation where last generation of readers has put the next generation in an untenable position, having pissed off everyone through its too-radical-but-strangely-not-radical-enough attempts to change the system by making this theory map directly onto with a critical-political project much larger than any particular field (which end up mainly just collapsing into a weak and less political attempt to deal with increasing "professionalization" or the compartmentalizing of literary studies--see John Guillory's good Bourdieuvian account of this).
But I also wanted to do this all in order to show that critical theory isn't something to be avoided. It just has its particular purpose, which I'd like to make clear is distinct from the purpose of literary criticism. This doesn't mean either that critical theory means "forgetting literature," as some people (Jonathan Culler, though reluctantly) have put it--cultural studies (which we can say is something like a side-by-side critical adventure which we can't quite reduce to the theorization, along with AfAm, Feminist, PoCo, more explicitly Marxist studies, and Queer Studies) certainly doesn't do this, though it sees literature primarily as taking place beside other media, and I see no reason to say critical theory does this either.
So--the general field of things sufficiently stratified or differentiated (and I'd rather insist on this stratification than in the way it's now all organized)--I'd like to suggest that one can jump into critical theory when necessary or even when not (though I'd personally show more hesitance to do so than in former times and not ask whether there were other ways to articulate what I'd say). One can even do so as a literary theorist (or, for that matter, as a literary historian). And I'd like to show the relevance of that particular jump (which can again be made by architecture students, philosophers, etc. etc.) by just presenting again a little contribution to the little spat around an essay by Harman, which I dealt with perhaps a little too roundly a while ago (though not, I think, as roundly as others). It comes up again as a sort of afterthought in Paul Ennis' next-to-last post explicating the essay in question. The posts are excellent by the way (here they are: 1, 2, 3, 4, and again 5), mostly because they show what I thought was obvious but I guess needs more stress (in a way that makes me for the first time doubt the supposed ubiquity of phenomenology as the main background against which most Continental philosophy works), which is that there's a lot of phenomenological ways into the issues discussed and that Harman is in a way making a contribution to them as well: as Paul says early in the first post, "in order to understand Harman's metaphysics one also needs to understand his motivations and these are tied to an overcoming of the overcoming-of-metaphysics in Heidegger." Anyway, as I suggested last time I spoke of this, going through all this as Paul did was one of the most helpful ways to address the larger concerns that dealt with the internal aspects of Harman's project.
But then there was that issue of Orientalism. Paul addresses it, as he nears the end of Harman's essay:
Harman makes an important claim next: “We must ignore the usual connotations of sensuality and fix our gaze on a more primitive layer of the cosmos” (Collapse II, 206). Here I think we can go some way to dispelling the idea that Harman is projecting sensuous qualities upon exotic objects – at least from the strictly philosophical mode. The question of the aesthetic employment of exotic metaphors is a different issue to be addressed later in the round-up. Within the orientalist lens one might also question the notion of a “primitive layer” but this too is a major theme of Western philosophical thinking from Schelling to Heidegger (and already problematic for Jacobi in his depiction of German idealism as a step toward emptiness/nothingness).
It's the last point that was the issue, as I gathered, but in a way had to also deal with that "aesthetic employment of exotic metaphors," though only vaguely. To recapitulate, Harman was accused of Orientalism, or Orientalistic thinking--and that you can't really be "accused" of this will be my point below--for asking us to fix our gaze in the way he does in Paul's quote: on "a more primitive layer."
Now, its the last sentence of Paul's here that will probably give us only cold comfort, since it doesn't really oppose the charge of Orientalism as--to whoever is interested in such charges--show it is more diffuse than ever! In short, making the primitive in this sense into a theme which is traditional doesn't really combat the charge and sounds like an argument from authority (which doesn't have much clout, however sensible it may indeed be).
What does oppose this charge is, however, the critical theory of Orientalism itself as formulated by Edward Said! In other words, it is the charge of Orientalism or Orientalisticity or Orentialisticalismicality which is precisely not proceeding along the lines which Said (alongside his literary theory and literary criticism) developed--as the parties involved to their credit said was the case. And so far from attributing the attack to an interested critical theorist, a critic critiquing, say, we should really understand how critical theory actually, in this case, comes to help philosophy figure out what's going on and, indeed, defend itself.
For, as my quote from Paul was meant to show, it doesn't always have the resources with which to account for things. That's no essential fault--as over-interested people might have said in the past--but just the sign of a place where it can turn to others, and others can be ready to help out.
So in a comment on Paul's blog, I made my contribution, and I'll make it again in more detail here: I said that Orientalism, for Said (one can find this in the first pages of his book), is more of a locus for the operation of power, not a one way dynamic with good and bad sides. So this is why you can't accuse someone of Orientalism. Orientalism is not something like a property of a thought or a taint upon it. Rather, Orientalism is a thoroughfare. Or, more vividly put, Orientalism is like a panopticon. And Said does this because he thinks that seeing orientalism as some taint of exoticization which needs to be expunged from whatever someone says--according to the weak and reactionary protocols of political correctness--are missing what is really at issue. One can always link exoticization with anything. The issue is larger, more collective or more widespread than that, but also has less to do with the character of the ideas themselves as the linkages to the relations between East and West that are the most hard to pin down. And so the concepts, as such, are not good or bad, either because they are old concepts that have come from something like a tradition of oppressing the Near or Far East, or because they carry their exotic flavor. This is because because the association of exoticization with the Orient, and the use of concepts in such a tradition, is the symptom of a more complex dynamic actually playing out between East and West--one that doesn't simply produce the oppression of the former or work in one way, and which never really stops if the concepts in which we see it most manifested disappear.
You see how this relies on Foucault's employment of that nice structuralist notion of discourse (Said himself says this). Now, you can disagree with this, with Foucault's ontology or whatever you want to call it, all you want. You can say it's too based on language (and I'd agree with you), but that's not enough. It's not enough here, because the theory allows us to begin to understand what is going on. Just because we knock away at that the notion of discourse (or language) doesn't mean we can't see how it helps us here, because at least negatively it shows us there can't be anything like a one-to-one correlation of concepts with political or social ramifications. Philosophy has a hard time arguing when this fact comes to the fore, because it means it has to creep past the interior of the concepts, just beyond their edges, and show their formative requirments--in short their historical character. Harman has actually been pretty good about trying to historicize his own concepts, at least on the personal level (I've never heard a person so frankly admit exactly when they really figured out Husserl before, as he does in Prince of Networks)--and philosophy, as history of philosophy as an area of study grows, is no doubt getting better in general in this area. But here we have a critical theory that works pretty well, and so why not use it? It doesn't always have to entail some agreement at bottom with the whole "system," and the efficacy of the notion doesn't always fall away with an attack at its foundations--simply because it might not so philosophically be "based" on such foundations.
It's also a theory that is trying, primarily, to get beyond the alleged crudeness of the Marxist way of going about this, which is through ideology. I think, though, we might see the Foucauldian notion of discourse against this Marxist background, almost as a modification of it rather than anything radically different than it--along with Derrida's much maligned talk about Western metaphysics. What's going on there is some attempt to not just dismiss philosophical concepts as tie them to the tendencies that shape them, their typical directions. If this then has ramifications on the interior, as it were (I'm using a poor conceptual scheme here, as if concepts were black boxes, but whatever--that's Latour's contribution). I think fundamentally, too, it is in this Postcolonial context (as it is called) that the arguments are the best: that is, I find Derrida's talk about Western metaphysics most convincing when it comes out of his attempt to deal with the historical ramifications of France's relation to Algeria--as I think it often does (and not just because he was Algerian). I think of what Foucault does as addressing a similar--though perhaps less starkly drawn--set of relations. Orientalism works too by trying to map the dynamics--not just in philosophy--that obtain at this crossroads. It might not be the best way to go about this, but in this case I think it works, in the sense that the theory makes us grasp how quickly we are moving from something like the content of the philosophy to statements about its general contours, by way of invoking the Orient itself (these large concepts often do too much work, as some people, in other situations, point out well). This is what Said was trying to account for with Orientalism--which is not one such big concept so much as the name for a dynamic which we can trace.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Clarity, simplicity
In philosophy in America you're usually either for clear arguments, or you're against using the standard of clarity to judge all argumentation. While the former position excludes much good argument by saying it's not clear, a lot of ink is spilled trying to show how the latter position also demands some sort of rigor, rather than an "anything goes" form of argumentation. A lot of this is predicated on a stodgy sort of suspicion of rhetoric, but also on a real and pressing need to show how philosophical discussion itself works at a certain sophisticated level, and doesn't gain its technicality or professional status just through the robustness of the objects or issues it tackles or the sorts of insight into those issues ("results") it generates.
But maybe this situation can be changed if we distinguish clarity from simplicity, and say that good arguments are simple. Now, clarity presupposed a sort of guiding rationality and openness of discussion, along the lines that Popper (always enjoyed by Anglo-Americans) outlines in his nice 1959 preface to his Logik der Forschung: here, proper philosophical work proceeds by
stating one's problem clearly and examining its various proposed solutions critically. [...] Whenever we propose a solution to a problem, we ought to try as hard as we can to overthrow our solution, rather than defend it. Few of us, unfortunately, practice this precept; but other people, fortunately, will supply the criticism for us if we fail to supply it ourselves. Yet criticism will be fruitful only if we state our problem as clearly as we can and put our solution in a sufficiently definite form--a form in which it can be critically discussed.
That is, in a clear form. When either rationality or criticality become compromised, then, the discussion becomes unclear--irrational, and something like the sharing of mere beliefs about the world.
But instead of privileging these opposites--or, since we never really have to go that far in order for Popper's edifice to appear too constraining, showing that discussion doesn't immediately become these opposites if it lacks rationality or criticality--we might just say they both rational discussion and irrational discussion can either state the problem simply or not.
But why simplicity? Frankly because it allows that sort of critical refinement or processing that clarity calls for, without clarity itself. It allows criticism to become something like elaboration, rather than the attempt to try as hard as we can to overthrow any particular solution, etc. etc. And I think that, really, this is what most attempts to be clear already try to accomplish: the elaboration of a problem along finer and more specific lines. Thus, there's a sort of alternate history of simplicity lying underneath all that lip service paid to clarity.
Of course, this all is opposed to complexity--complexity becomes the bad term here. But is that really so unfortunate? I remember an ethics class where my professor scoffed at the word "problematize," because it is used so often now to denote the process of making rigorous consideration of something possible. But--and you all know I'm quite an avid reader of some serious problematizers--I've always been quite inclined to agree with him. Complexity and contradiction might be interesting for architecture, but the best and most creative American philosophy often proceeds by simplifying (thinking, often, that it is being clear). This philosophy's greatest weapon here is the coining of some particular word that is useful, that shifts the argument, that is just metaphoric enough to make the rest of the discourse pull towards it and use it--and allow the rest of the discourse to avoid multiplying unnecessary (because not really used, tinkered with, reused) metaphors. This all perhaps appears naive to people in the Continental tradition, but I don't think that's because such they think such simplifying overlooks the complexity of various issues: it's just because such minimal problematization sounds that way, or has something of an over-humble quality to it (which can often turn around into a sort of tablethumping growl that "that's all there is to it," etc., which is just dogmatism).
Now, much bad American philosophy works with the same sort of tone, but it can obviously now be dismissed as just trying to be clear while it multiplies problems needlessly. Word-coining can multiply things here too, unfortunately (though often because a new word is not coined, and the word loses its usability--which does not mean, either, that it has at that point become technical: in reality, the discourse has just become nominalist). But if simplicity is good argument, we shouldn't have much to do with micro-issues piled upon micro-issues as is prevalent in, say, philosophy of mind--though there are also a lot of great game-changing, simplifying maneuvers here.
Especially if we don't think of avoiding complexity in any old Occam's razor sense--something again that falls perhaps in the clarity-box, oddly enough (and makes the effort to say nothing at all seem like the goal of certain arid essays by Putnam, for instance--however much they are occasionally lit up by crazy flashes of weirdness). If we could make complexity the enemy in a Latourian sense--we shouldn't multiply causes before we've followed the actors (which is how I read him, perhaps a bit against the grain: let's get complex in only the right ways!)--then keeping things simple would mean something slightly different and less agonizing. It would allow us to say that keeping things simple involves not letting too much needless detail take over the presentation of even detailed issues, or understand how specificity (which I referred to earlier) can be simplifying (something we often forget). Thus, issues can get small and fine, but they often will be expressed and discussed with a goal of reducing complexity, rather than creating it. And if this means using a technical language, that's okay too, isn't it (especially if we refrain from equating nominalism or un-use with technicality, as I did above)? It's use should just have similar goals (and that might make the American language, when it is simple, sound less naive).
In short, a lot of what we privilege under clarity can be chalked up to privileging simplicity. Some of the best American Continental philosophers seem to work in this way already (Graham Harman's "overmining" is a great example of what I take to be a very Anglo-like phrase-coining), combining, as it were, the best of both traditions. Here, I'd just like to emphasize what their work has to say back to the Anglo-American love of clarity.
But maybe this situation can be changed if we distinguish clarity from simplicity, and say that good arguments are simple. Now, clarity presupposed a sort of guiding rationality and openness of discussion, along the lines that Popper (always enjoyed by Anglo-Americans) outlines in his nice 1959 preface to his Logik der Forschung: here, proper philosophical work proceeds by
stating one's problem clearly and examining its various proposed solutions critically. [...] Whenever we propose a solution to a problem, we ought to try as hard as we can to overthrow our solution, rather than defend it. Few of us, unfortunately, practice this precept; but other people, fortunately, will supply the criticism for us if we fail to supply it ourselves. Yet criticism will be fruitful only if we state our problem as clearly as we can and put our solution in a sufficiently definite form--a form in which it can be critically discussed.
That is, in a clear form. When either rationality or criticality become compromised, then, the discussion becomes unclear--irrational, and something like the sharing of mere beliefs about the world.
But instead of privileging these opposites--or, since we never really have to go that far in order for Popper's edifice to appear too constraining, showing that discussion doesn't immediately become these opposites if it lacks rationality or criticality--we might just say they both rational discussion and irrational discussion can either state the problem simply or not.
But why simplicity? Frankly because it allows that sort of critical refinement or processing that clarity calls for, without clarity itself. It allows criticism to become something like elaboration, rather than the attempt to try as hard as we can to overthrow any particular solution, etc. etc. And I think that, really, this is what most attempts to be clear already try to accomplish: the elaboration of a problem along finer and more specific lines. Thus, there's a sort of alternate history of simplicity lying underneath all that lip service paid to clarity.
Of course, this all is opposed to complexity--complexity becomes the bad term here. But is that really so unfortunate? I remember an ethics class where my professor scoffed at the word "problematize," because it is used so often now to denote the process of making rigorous consideration of something possible. But--and you all know I'm quite an avid reader of some serious problematizers--I've always been quite inclined to agree with him. Complexity and contradiction might be interesting for architecture, but the best and most creative American philosophy often proceeds by simplifying (thinking, often, that it is being clear). This philosophy's greatest weapon here is the coining of some particular word that is useful, that shifts the argument, that is just metaphoric enough to make the rest of the discourse pull towards it and use it--and allow the rest of the discourse to avoid multiplying unnecessary (because not really used, tinkered with, reused) metaphors. This all perhaps appears naive to people in the Continental tradition, but I don't think that's because such they think such simplifying overlooks the complexity of various issues: it's just because such minimal problematization sounds that way, or has something of an over-humble quality to it (which can often turn around into a sort of tablethumping growl that "that's all there is to it," etc., which is just dogmatism).
Now, much bad American philosophy works with the same sort of tone, but it can obviously now be dismissed as just trying to be clear while it multiplies problems needlessly. Word-coining can multiply things here too, unfortunately (though often because a new word is not coined, and the word loses its usability--which does not mean, either, that it has at that point become technical: in reality, the discourse has just become nominalist). But if simplicity is good argument, we shouldn't have much to do with micro-issues piled upon micro-issues as is prevalent in, say, philosophy of mind--though there are also a lot of great game-changing, simplifying maneuvers here.
Especially if we don't think of avoiding complexity in any old Occam's razor sense--something again that falls perhaps in the clarity-box, oddly enough (and makes the effort to say nothing at all seem like the goal of certain arid essays by Putnam, for instance--however much they are occasionally lit up by crazy flashes of weirdness). If we could make complexity the enemy in a Latourian sense--we shouldn't multiply causes before we've followed the actors (which is how I read him, perhaps a bit against the grain: let's get complex in only the right ways!)--then keeping things simple would mean something slightly different and less agonizing. It would allow us to say that keeping things simple involves not letting too much needless detail take over the presentation of even detailed issues, or understand how specificity (which I referred to earlier) can be simplifying (something we often forget). Thus, issues can get small and fine, but they often will be expressed and discussed with a goal of reducing complexity, rather than creating it. And if this means using a technical language, that's okay too, isn't it (especially if we refrain from equating nominalism or un-use with technicality, as I did above)? It's use should just have similar goals (and that might make the American language, when it is simple, sound less naive).
In short, a lot of what we privilege under clarity can be chalked up to privileging simplicity. Some of the best American Continental philosophers seem to work in this way already (Graham Harman's "overmining" is a great example of what I take to be a very Anglo-like phrase-coining), combining, as it were, the best of both traditions. Here, I'd just like to emphasize what their work has to say back to the Anglo-American love of clarity.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
We have never been...
...blogging. My colleague Evan and I (and maybe Grant too) will be reading Bruno Latour (who I have been much too hard on in the few posts I have made on him here), Graham Harman, and others related to ANT and SR over the next few months. You can follow the reading group's discussion at wehaveneverbeenblogging.blogspot.com.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Radical philosophy, conservative philosophy
There are certain distinctions that have a greater payoff on the methodological level than on the theoretical or philosophical level, but which nevertheless belong to theory and philosophy. In literary studies, especially in the early New Critical times, we used to have plenty of them, but they have been replaced slowly by all-encompassing concepts like "text." Right now, we need more distinctions. We need to be able to assert something about a work that becomes only more clear insofar as a very fine, isolated contrast is entertained. This distinction can be applied elsewhere--it isn't small or powerless. And the assertion one makes isn't entirely beholden to its correctness. The thing simply works, and thereby allows us to work better. Multiply tools, create contrasts. Avoid efforts that require one vague, homogenizing concept to make things clear, and stand or fall with the coherence of this concept--like "affect," as it is used by Sianne Ngai, which, however internally complex, ends up working just like that big behemoth "text." Let me just add that Marxist literary criticism (along with the related fields splintering off of a massive, conflicted cultural studies) seems to me to be the place where this criticism full of helpful distinctions is most prevalent right now.
However, there are other places where this sort of concept is in play. In the last chapter of Prince of Networks, Graham Harman makes one of these distinctions--and I find it to be one of the most useful things around for my thinking lately. This is between "radical philosophy" and "conservative philosophy." Harman takes up the sense in which we might at first read these terms and inflects it dexterously. One thing I should note is that the distinction ultimately reaches to philosophy as a whole, but its concern is first and foremost the treatment of objects. While the move from the latter to the former is wholly legitimate, one would have to recall many of Harman's arguments about objects in order for it to be fully appreciated (that is, why philosophy should be object-oriented). I won't do all that now (I just want to explain the way it appears) so I'll reconstruct only the immediate context (though it does gives you enough of a sense of the connection already). For the full story, read the excellent Tool-Being and Prince of Networks.
Harman begins to talk of what objects are, or rather what we really need to affirm about objects in order to have any real sense of them:
Whatever sense of the word "object" we might consider, it always refers to something with a certain unity and autonomy. An object must be one, and it must also have a sort of independence from whatever it is not. An object stands apart—not just from its manifestation to humans, but possibly even from its own accidents, relations, qualities, moments, or pieces. Furthermore, insofar as an object is more than its relations it must stand apart from any supposed monism of the world-as-a-whole, since a homogeneous universe of this kind merely gives us the most radical form of relationism—with everything dissolving into everything else in a vast holistic stew.
-Prince of Networks, 152
Simple enough. But philosophy has proceeded in a peculiar way when faced with such requirements:
Now, any distinction between objects and the other terms mentioned above can also be rejected, provided good reasons are given. Indeed, most cutting-edge philosophies are distinguished precisely by their denial of one or more of the differences just mentioned.
-Prince of Networks, 152
You see the level at which Harman is working: he's showing us that various philosophies have gained their coherence by eliminating something that we might really think twice about. But he's not doing this to fault anybody on small points. He's doing it because he's showing how the process of forming concepts involves many tacit compromises on issues--points at which we'll just leave the thing as it is because we've made good progress in another direction. This is why the reasons given here are "good reasons," even though they have to do away with some of the requirements. I was talking to Paul Ennis, and he rightly said that you rarely encounter such frankness--at least in print--about the way philosophy works. Regardless, my point is that the level at which Harman is looking at all of this allows him to say the following:
Let’s use the phrase "radical philosophy" to describe any claim that the object is nothing over and above one or more of the terms to which it might be opposed.
-Prince of Networks, 152
That is, Harman finds a logic behind a particular way that the various denials of the differences proceed. He then shows us many instances of this logic: Spinoza's divine substance, for example, denies that objects are separate and autonomous in the world, or isn't anything more than its relations, and so is a bubble in the holistic, monistic stew. He rightly says that this particular sort of hyper-relationism characterizes much French philosophy (153). A more commonplace denial of this difference is the commonplace move of science: deny that the object can remain anything other than its parts or accidents, such that the object just is, somehow, its atoms, etc (154). But the point, remember, isn't the classification, but the logic, which is radical. And at this point he really says what this involves:
These approaches can all be called "radical" for reasons of etymology. While not all are radical in the sense of being new and unforeseen, all are trying to identify the single radix, the root of reality as a whole. By taking one side of any opposition as primary and the other as derivative, they resolve an apparent paradox by collapsing everything into one of two opposed terms.
-Prince of Networks, 154
I find this fascinating and so useful because it cuts across so much--we can see that so many philosophies are out there to get at the reality, even if this involves weird postmodern de-ontologizing maneuvers of all sorts. One understands it as a maneuver, and also something that is more than a maneuver. For then, we get the reaction to it:
By contrast with such radical gestures let’s use the phrase "conservative philosophy" to refer to those doctrines that leave initial oppositions in place rather than radically reducing them to one term, but with the major drawback of not giving adequate explanation of how the two terms interrelate.
-Prince of Networks, 154
So of course you have mind-body distinctions, but also things like the phenomenal/noumenal, which weirdly stay in place: "all of these theories try to conserve two sides of the story, if at the cost of failing to link them effectively" (155).
Now, Harman goes on to say that we usually will adopt a general take on things that is either radical or conservative, but then have elements that end up a bit of a mix of both ("Most treatments of most philosophical problems adopt either a radical or a conservative strategy and most thinkers are radical on some points and conservative on others," 155). Regardless, because this mixing happens doesn't mean that the distinction is useless--one can see plainly how much it already pays off. In fact, it makes possible a third way between the two, which Harman says OOP takes. But it also shows us what we're doing constantly--and for me that is almost enough in itself:
Stated differently, radical philosophy holds that there is no problem of communication between opposites in the universe, because everything is ultimately of the same nature. [...] Meanwhile, conservative philosophy holds that there are absolute gaps or dualities that must be respected, and which are generally only described or else solved by fiat.
-Prince of Networks, 155
For at this level of generalization (we have now reached the point where we are implicating philosophy as a whole in terms of its orientation--or lack thereof--towards objects) I feel we're getting at something that remains hidden under so many of our basic ways of working, and which only seem to come out in the philosophy classroom (if at all). (Physicalism, I think, would be neat to view through this lens, even as it deals, however, not with objects per se [everything would need to be shifted around here regarding consciousness if we are to try and take the OOP point about it correctly]. It starts out conservative in this loose sense but then ends up in all sorts of radical claims. Non-reductive physicalism itself announces in its very name that it will have this trajectory, and that this trajectory will lead to a lot of strain: many headaches are involved in trying to conserve hard and fast distinctions and at the same time point out how the nature of consciousness, rightly thought beyond these distinctions, will solve everything.) I would caution that we shouldn't overgeneralize the distinction.
In conclusion, though, I would like to say something about how its more general aspects bear, not on philosophy, but on literary study. In literature, we're way too excited by radical philosophies. When philosophers (among others) complain that literary studies just colonizes other discourses, this is what they are getting at. When people also complain that literary studies just looks for what's new and fashionable and then applies it to various texts, this is what they are talking about. People are out there and trying to say that, because someone has said that everything is of the same nature--in whatever way--we can say x or y about a particular literary text. This isn't such bad reading--though it may be that--as it is attraction to the wrong type of philosophy. Or rather, attraction to only one type of philosophy--that is, I think, the important point. It isn't that radical philosophy is wrong: it is that there is no other tradition, no sort of other tendency within literary studies (and why would there be? we're not philosophers!) that deepens the divisions, that respects the differences. This is to say that I think we can really begin to understand this criticism people levy at literary studies by using Harman's distinction: for no longer are we "colonizing," or really trying to ultimately be philosophers (indeed what's clear from this is that we aren't in the first place!), but that we are weirdly only attracted to one sort of tendency within philosophy. And indeed, this would be the primary reason that when we do philosophy, we're really horrible philosophers--not because we're lacking some sort of counterbalance all the time, but because even if we tried to be conservative we would end up pushing it all towards a radical end. Too quickly, the conservative solutions become for us "historical" views. And in the meantime, the "radical" views aren't really historicized enough--which is, I think, the one thing we can bring to philosophy (a certain sense of how the philosophical argumentation relates to other linguistic maneuvers in history). But I'm becoming too speculative--I'll stop here.
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