Saying things clearly

I thought I'd just stop a moment and recommend the great "Philosophy Bites" podcast of David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton, in case any of you haven't heard it. They do a wonderful job, and have some of the best guests: there's a great, great piece with Princeton's amazing Philip Pettit they did recently, which I finally got around to hearing, which I particularly recommend (anything by Pettit is just fascinating).

And they are also extremely, extremely clear, though not much depth is actually sacrificed in the service of this. This is on the one hand not suprising, given the immense experience and knowledge of their guests, but also extremely suprising, given the nature of the medium and indeed the problems involved. But if there is anything I miss about philosophy sometimes, it is what they keep at work in the interviews: the imperative to clearly state something, to clearly formulate it, and clearly argue about it. It's that certain plain style aspect of philosophizing which I miss, that commitment to clear reasoning which makes Warburton quip that prose of Stanley Cavell, who is an extremely lucid writer in the scheme of things, is a bit "purple." Of course, it's more than a style (though a style too is usually more than just a style): it's an ethic, which makes me particularly fond of people like G.E. Moore--and Moore perhaps a little too fond of Wittgenstein.

I know people feel hemmed in by the sort of "common language" philosophy of the followers of the latter, and people outside philosophy often cite it disapprovingly as an example of the sort of weirdness of the imperative. But the truth is (and this is why those who diss the clarity-requirement I'm thinking of nevertheless usually love Wittgenstein) Wittgenstein doesn't really submit himself to the requirement of thinking clearly so much as identify clarification with a procedure for philosophizing. And while these two things overlap often, they aren't the same.

In short, Searle's "if you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself" (which Warburton has at the top of his website) doesn't mean you need to work like Wittgenstein, even if you sometimes fall back on it and use it as a sort of guide to your thinking--i.e. using it even as a procedure isn't the same thing as identifying it with a procedure. Indeed, it means something quite broad: clear speaking and clear thinking usually go hand in hand, so if you're not speaking clearly about something, there's a good chance you don't understand it, and you need to think through it more. Hemingway spoke once somewhere of a bullshit detector, and it's basically that: a way of not confusing philosophy with poetry, even if you think the former is something of an art. But it is also a spur to thinking--that's the part people usually leave out--which encourages understanding: not unlike how Hegel thinks something is only known when you've seen both sides of it (which is all that much-maligned "synthesis" is, in the end: not grasping things one-sidedly).

And indeed, if it doesn't lead to bullshit, feeling this way about thinking through problems often leads you down certain more unsavory paths. One is the use of jargon as an excuse for technical language. Now, I am all for the use of technical language, and indeed the argument for saying things clearly could actually support this. Paul Ennis puts it best, probably, in these terms: sometimes you just need a word for something, and so the word chosen is one is weird. And that doesn't mean you don't speak clearly with it: all it means is that the word requires a special use. At the same time, and while it has been used against the cultivation of a clearer technical language (maybe I should speak intead of lingo, then), it's probably best to acknowledge a difference betwen jargon and technical language, because there is a use of specific terms that don't improve clarity (or even clearly demarcate the specifics of its use). An example of this would be theoretical discourse, of course, which is often just a way to allow thought to proceed precisely on the opposite principle of the one I'm talking about: the more you are led by unclarity, and into unclarity, the more you have thought something through. This trades on an insidious sophism--one which Searle precisely objected to, though perhaps a bit too harshly--which claims that what is thought is always going to be beyond my ability to refer to it, which isn't inherently wrong so much as wrong-headed: it smuggles in a notion that clear speaking involves direct reference to the object of thought, which as you can see from Searle's little formula is never mentioned, though it might be implied. One can't generalize from this that all clear thinking is referential, and therefore the only way to get beyond what we refer to is to use a weird term: indeed, it is often the case that when we use jargon, we precisely know what we're referring to, and just want to sound like an asshole.

The other way you go down if you don't make clarity a big part of your thought and speech, is something philosophers do all the time, actually, and isn't as insidious, though I find it unfortunate: it is gathering up what could be expressed clearly into a special "Problem," or "Argument" instead of giving it the form of exposition or even a technical term. The "mind-body problem" is one of these, though since that's more of a commonplace, I'm actually thinking more of something like what you encounter in ethics and aesthetics a lot, which usually describes a situation or a sort of crux which either amounts to an objection or something that needs to be thought around, or a position of some sort (in philosophy of mind, technical terms often do the same work: behaviorism means a position or proposition). It's a weird sort of work that is based on the same sorts of assumptions as formal logic, and while this isn't wrong, doing it in other areas than formal logic often leads to a lot of systematizing rather than sticking close to the subject matter. Sometimes, since the subject matter can be dizzying, and systematizing is precisely what you need (I don't mean to knock systems), but sometimes you'll be thinking through a problem and won't pursue a certain angle because you are too afraid it will ultimately end back in x position, in y problem, or, what's perhaps worse, that making an advancement in thinking amounts to merely getting past, resolving the contradictions in x position or y problem. And sticking close to the notion that saying things clearly often means thinking them through clearly can actually be quite liberating when this is the case. Most good philosophy I've read--especially in aesthetics, which is absolutely bogged down with -isms and formal problems of this sort--just returns to basics and tries to speak about what's going on clearly, just as most good academic work in general is, I find, remarkable for its ability to address something clearly but in a new way rather than obscurely.

David Harvey again

From Marxism 2009 last year. Though I'd heard of him and his excellent work before, I only really started to read some of Harvey when I was writing on Raymond Williams (Harvey has the single best piece on Williams--in Spaces of Capital--thinking through Williams' problematic "militant particularism"). I'm liking him a lot. Again, if you haven't seen the Reading Capital course, check that out. It's a good way to get through that book, which is one of those no one ever reads all the way through unless it's assigned (not unlike anything by Hegel). That's not always a bad thing, of course (certainly in Hegel, though only reading the master-slave passage in the Phenomenology or the beginnings of the greater Logic and thinking the dialectic is "therefore" necessary to "overcome" is pushing this way too far). I'm planning on going all the way through Capital 2 and 3 shortly (I've only really gotten through the beginning of 2 and the end of 3), so it's a great refresher and a good way to pick up those parts of the first book (especially part 7) I never made it through. I never touched anything really after the chapter on the working day (except some pieces of the machinery chapter and the amazing part on primitive accumulation), even when I reread it for exams last summer: in literary studies, due to Derrida and his specters, the focus is still on the first three chapters on use and exchange value (though not confusing the labor theory of value with the value theory of labor has enough attendant complications), often to the detriment of the theory of surplus value as a whole.

One more thing. Harvey above (and in a recent paper) talks about a transition from capitalism to socialism--revolution--taking just about as long (or at least involving as much complexity and work) as the transformation from feudalism to capitalism. This is a welcome comment (obviously drawn from Marx's sense of things itself) when revolution has always had the connotation of radical, instantaneous breaks on the one hand, and on the other has been conceptually discredited by the theoretical left itself in the US for about forty years in favor of micropolitical models of change (or a a dour sort of pragmatism, which turns quickly into a fatalism, rightly thrust to the fore for critical inspection at Planomenology--though one should also point out Zizek too often trades in this pessimism). To this, I would also just add a pragmatic remark about the relation of revolution to violence by by Fredric Jameson:

What is always at the bottom of the quarrel about the term [revolution--MJ] is the conception of revolution as violent, as a matter of armed struggle, forceful overthrow, the clash of weapons wielded by people willing to shed blood. This conception explains in turn of what may be called demotic Trotskyism, that is, the insistence on adding the requirement of "armed struggle" to whatever socialist proviso is at issue: something that would seem both to substitute effect for cause and unnecessarily to rase the ante on salvation. Rather, this proposition needs to be argued the other way around: namely that the other side will resort to force when the system is threatened in genuinely basic or fundamental ways...
 -"Actually Existing Marxism," in Valences of the Dialectic, 388

Then I would follow that up with how he shows, pointing rightly at Allande's Chile, just how plausible the beginnings of such a long revolution (Raymond Williams' term) actually are:

Left electoral victories are neither hollow social-democratic exercises nor occasions in which power passes hands definitively: rather, they are signals for the gradual unfolding of democratic demands, that is to say, increasingly radical claims on a sympathetic government which must now, in obedience to that development, be radicalized in its turn, unless it sells out to the appeal for order. The revolutionary process in this sense is a new legal dispensation in which repressed popular groups slowly emerge from the silence of their subalternity and dare to speak out--an act which can range, as in Allende's revolutionary Chile, from the proposal of new kinds of laws to the seizure of farm lands [which right now we find in Venezuela--MJ]; democracy necessarily means that kind of speaking out, which can also be identified as the truest form of the production of new needs (as opposed to consumerism).
-"Actually Existing Marxism," in Valences of the Dialectic, 391

So new laws, new freedoms, new regulations, alongside the building of new economic infrastructures under the emerging new state:

The legislature was passing the laws of eco-economics [...] They directed co-ops [...] to help the newly independent metanat local subsidiaries to transform themselves into similar cooperative organizations. This process, called horizontalization, had very wide support, especially from the young natives , and so it was proceeding fairly smoothly. Every martian business now had to be owned by its employees only. No co-op could exceed one thousand people; larger enterprises had to be made of co-op associations, working together. For their internal structures most of the firms chose variants of the Bogdanovist models, which themselves were based on the cooperative Basque community of Mondragon, Spain. In these firms all employees were co-owners, and they bought into their positions by paying the equivalent of about a year's wages into the firm's equity fund, wages earned in the apprentice programs of various kinds at the end of schooling This buy-in fee became the starter of their share in the firm, which grew every year they stayed, until it was given back to them as pension or departure payment. Councils elected from the workforce hired management, usually from outside, and this management then had the power to make executive decisions, but was subject to yearly review by the councils.
-Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars, 296-7

And one more thing: this sort of conception of revolution concretely situates any cultural or discursive struggle--struggle on that level is only of finite use, and takes place at that level. Cultural politics is only politics (often just politicization, often just micropolitics) unless it also hits at or ties into economic levels--as Jameson (who some might call a mere cultural Marxist) never gets tired of saying.

But then again it is also necessary to register (with Harvey--see this lecture of his for an elaboration of his point about Ch. 15, footnote 4 in the short piece above--and Jameson) that there are many levels of struggle, and that no one who seriously is engaged in cultural Marxism believes they can turn the world around just at that level. No, it's often a micropolitical model that believes that--along with people who dismiss cultural Marxism as a safe or partial form of commitment. The dismissive sense of that last word shows that its positive sense--that indeed, as applied, it is a piece in a larger situation--isn't available from this perspective, one that also believes with the micropolitics of Foucault especially (and tendencies in critical theory in general) that institutions (the "academy") are what is big and bad, and moreover are what determine and compromise the situation of cultural anti-capitalist critique (rather than capitalism, which is precisely much larger--and smaller--than any institution).

My point is that "the production of new needs" is what cultural criticism is about (finite, because representational, demands and Utopian possibilities), but is about this alongside other--indeed partial--sorts of activities and commitments that are by no means incapable of this sort of production (Jameson's phrasing here is precisely calculated to emphasize the fact that these needs can be and are produced at these other levels--even especially at economic ones). Significantly, it is precisely the cultural level (or the level of everyday life) that is most engaged by the recent statements of Zizek, Jameson, Harvey, Badiou and others to think hard about what communism might be, to imagine Utopias, to speak up out of subalternity and present alternative experiences of the world, and, indeed, to think about revolution: "carving out autonomous spaces," as Paul Ennis recently calls it, in various ways (he talks about what Badiou thinks is necessary, against Zizek, but I think Zizek too thinks this Utopian--and I use this word in an approving, Harveyian, Jamesonian sense that too few share--enclave-production occurs or is at least pragmatically necessary). And it is this cultural level that is most misunderstood by people unfamiliar with that level and what it involves (including the sacrifices that I don't think we can just say are nonexistent--unless we keep thinking all cultural Marxists are just "humanists" in a disturbing new sense). That, however, means education is necessary (both of yourself and the misinformed, as Harvey insists upon above: part of the problem is that this stuff isn't taught, or only gotten through someone like Zizek), and repeated reconnection of this level to others (an act that cultural criticism and recent ideology critique has learned to do in perhaps the most adept and tactical way).

And indeed, cultural Marxism is great at this too: what is culture but a way to reconnect while recognizing that separation of levels, rather than try and construct a one-off sort of immanent metaphysical level at which every microelement just is or is not political? I don't even think you can say cultural Marxism has gone too far--which is what the reactionary consensus in the US (indeed increasingly in literary studies) seems to be. We need more cultural studies, not less. As these studies make their way into departments dealing with urbanism, architecture, media theory and design--where some of the most radical Marxist work is now being done--I think they become more concrete and produce more connections and reconnections, perhaps, than they did when this study was done primarily in literature and film (or philosophy). But that's a development and transformation, which is also probably a shift made in accordance with changes in the system studied and the new forms reconnection to other levels is imagined to take.

Like a language

I want to go over something pretty basic here. One of the objections constantly levied against structuralism is that it treats things as languages when it should treat the things as things. It is generally a legitimate frustration with the oddness of the founding structuralist gesture, which is to say that the thing being investigated is a language, or is structured like a language, or can be understood as a language, or comprehended by using the insights from linguistics, etc. etc. etc.

The criticisms (whether they come from phenomenologists, post-structuralists, or post-post-structuralists) claim that this simplifies the thing in question, and ultimately just projects upon the thing the very terms in which it is being analyzed.

The concern is legitimate, as I said, because it wonders at an analogy being taken so seriously and worked out to the fantastic length and intricacy involved in structural interpretations like those of Lévi-Strauss. But what it fails to understand is that the main term in the analogy, language, has to be understood differently if the analogy is to make any sense.

In other words, the critics of structuralism think they know what language is when they hear the phrase, x can be understood like a language. But the structuralist emphasizes that language, when considered as a structure, looks nothing like what they are imagining.

Language for the structuralist is more like a logic ("structure" is the name for this type of logic, or rather logic working in this way), and as such already doesn't have to be made up of words used in speech, or even something like a grammar (insofar as we think we know what "words," "speech," and "grammar" are when considered independently of the logic in which, according to the structuralist, they are merely minimal units or relations between of these units). So you can't object to a structuralist by saying that x or y doesn't exhibit any features of a language--by saying that it isn't something, for example, that is determined by a culture, or exhibiting conscious organization. For if it involves something like a logic, it will have already worked something like a language.

That is, if the thing has a logic in the way that it also participates, say, in dialectic, it will have worked like a language. "Logic," in other words, is helpfully understood in a pseudo-Hegelian way here. Lévi-Strauss himself articulates the commensurability between structure and dialectic in the famous last chapter of The Savage Mind, in a hugely influential attack on Sartre's fascinating (and too neglected) Critique of Dialectical Reason. In doing so, he is making the case that structural logic is immanent to the being of things in the way Sartre (rightly) says it it is in Hegel and Marx.

It is only after this that he overturns Sartre's notion of dialectical reason, grounding it in what Sartre calls analytic reason, ultimately leading him to conclusions which are more familiar, and which involves further qualifying the way this logic or structure works. Sartre says:

[Scientific, Analytic] Reason is the mind as an empty unifier... Dialectical Reason transcends the level of methodology; it states what a sector of the universe, or, perhaps, the whole universe is. It does not merely direct research, or even pre-judge the mode of appearance of objects. Dialectical Reason legislates, it defines what the world (human or total) must be like for dialectical knowledge to be possible; it simultaneously elucidates the movement of the real and that of our thoughts, and it elucidates the one by the other... It is therefore, both a type of rationality and the transcendence of all types of rationality. The certainty of always being able to transcend replaces the empty detachment of formal rationality: the ever present possibility of unifying becomes the permanent necessity for man of totalising and being totalised, and for the world of being an ever broader, developing totalisation.
-Critique of Dialectical Reason, 20

In short, dialectical reason does not remain one-sided: it is speculative, and therefore not a function of the understanding. Lévi-Strauss replies simply that:

all reason is dialectical... since dialectical reason seems to me like analytical reason in action; but then the distinction between the two forms of reason which is the basis of Sartre's enterprise would become pointless.
-The Savage Mind, 251

If we understand the logic established by dialectical reason's "legislation," or, in Sartre's terms, the totalizations, as the crucial thing, it does seem legitimate to say that analytical reason can establish them just as much as dialectical reason, if we add something to the former.

This is the other crucial aspect of structure, which is that it is not a logic that can be taken over by consciousness:

Linguistics thus presents us with a dialectical and totalizing entity but one outside (or beneath) consciousness and will. Language, and unreflecting totalization, is human reason which has its reasons and of which man knows nothing.
-The Savage Mind, 252

This, then, is the usual claim which we recognize in structuralism, and to which the objections usually are directed, since it makes the subject a mere function of "language." Thus, Levi-Strauss' immediate response:

And if it is is objected that it is so only for a subject who internalizes it on the basis of linguistic theory, my reply is that this way out must be refused, for this subject is one who speaks: for the same light which reveals the nature of language to him also reveals to him that it was so when he did not know it, for he already made himself understood, and that it will remain so tomorrow without since his discourse never was and never will be the result of a conscious totalization of linguistic laws.
-Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 252

But notice that such claims about language only make sense when we understand the more basic claim that "language" here is fundamentally like a logic. Thus the structure gets its non-internalized character because it is a logic immanent to things, not just because it is so determining (which is nearly always read as constraining) of the subject's role. The fact that the subject is a function of language here does not have to do with how determining the structure is, but how language is a logic. It is only in this sense that we can really understand why such a language resists internalization: for even if it were internalized, made conscious, it would still only be operative or produce effects because it was a logic. In short, making it conscious doesn't matter. The logic matters. And it is in this sense that the analytic reason can, when active, produce dialectic effects of totalization, because in that instance this only means what is always the case is indeed the case: the logic, the structure, is producing effects.

Let me just say that this fact complicates dismissals of poststructuralism as well as structuralism which rely upon the fact that, in absence of a deconstruction of something, one falls back upon structures and thereby remains within a certain cultural, linguistic sphere, or just involves deconstructing "cultural" structures--as if all taint of structuralism had to be removed. Such things are said of Foucault, Derrida, and even Lacan (leading to a move away from the tensions between the symbolic and the imaginary and a sole focus on the symbolic and the real). All of this is complicated if the critic understands that in each case language as a structure means something different than language--especially if we take language in its Heideggerian sense. By this I don't just mean that it is made up of binaries, either (though of course this is involved). I mean that it is a logic in the sense I explained earlier, and one which Lévi-Strauss is not so quick to immediately call "cultural" (that is, unless we reconsider our notion of that latter term).

Best of... Marxism

Nothing truly interesting is possible without negativity; error or ideology, false appearance, are also objective facts that have to be reckoned back into truth.
-Fredric Jameson, "On 'Cultural Studies'" in The Ideologies of Theory, 633

I know I said a phenomenology collection would be next, but returning to Marx and Hegel recently in my reading has given me a fondness for my (somewhat more sketchy) writings on Marxism:

Marx, Hegel, Feuerbach: A very, very lengthy attempt (it extended into six posts, and still remained incomplete) to piece together some basic characteristics "Theses on Feuerbach" and comprehend the level at which Marx's "overturning" of Hegel proceeds. I'm not as technical here as I should be, especially in explaining Hegel, but I hope my simplifications (especially the use of Foucault, who I toyed around with as an explanatory mechanism, and, quickly after this, threw away) are generally helpful in making the problem Marx encountered clear. I should add that in short, I am generally trying to outline something like what Fredric Jameson says (as usual, excellently) here, or find out why and how exactly it is the case:

...it is a mistake to think that Marxism is simply a type of interpretation that takes the economic "sequence" as that ultimately privileged code into which the other sequences are to be translated. Rather, for Marxism the emergence of the economic, the coming into view of the infrastructure itself, is simply the sign of the approach of the concrete.
-"Towards Dialectical Criticism" in Marxism and Form, 322

...and Here are the other posts in the series: post 2, post 3, post 4, post 5, post 6, and some rough notes on where I am going after the sixth post.

On Hoarding and Specters of Marx: a detailed analysis of the "hoarding" chapters in Capital and the Grundrisse, and a general perspective on the usefulness of Marx, via a somewhat unorthodox (or at least less Marxist) take on Derrida's Specters of Marx.

Marx, Economics and Law: explaining the "Critique of the Gotha Programme."

Spivak v. Derrida on Value: A look at "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" and a localization of differences between Spivak and Derrida when it comes to Marx. I should say that Spivak seems closer to what Marx says, which refuses analogies between capital and subject, and insists on analogies (in order to demystify them) between capital and society (the demystification proceeds by then seeing society in terms of the means of production), if I can speak loosely.

Gramsci on Hegemony: my presentation for a class with Spivak on Gramsci (and, in a shockingly productive pairing or contrast, W.E.B. Du Bois--whose Black Reconstruction I can't recommend enough), which tries to explain in detail how the concept of hegemony emerges in Gramsci's analysis of history.

Structuralism and finitude: I touch on structuralism mainly, but I have a nice part on the famous "effective causality" passages in Althusser and Balibar's Reading Capital.

You can also expect in the future more detailed treatments of Raymond Williams than the ones I have written so far, as well as considerations of Althusser and Fredric Jameson.

Hegel and aesthetics

I'm starting off my study for field examinations this summer (which you all will have the benefit of witnessing, as I post some of my notes) with a little remark on Hegel. He says the following at the very beginning of his introduction to his lectures on the aesthetic:

The name "aesthetic " in its natural sense is not quite appropriate to this subject. "Aesthetic" means more precisely the science of sensation or feeling. Thus understood, it arose as a new science, or rather as something that was to become a branch of philosophy for the first time, in the school of Wolff, at the epoch when works of art were being considered in Germany in the light of the feelings which they were supposed to evoke — feelings of pleasure, admiration, fear, pity, etc. The name was so inappropriate, or, strictly speaking, so superficial, that for this reason it was attempted to form other names, e.g. "kallistic." But this name, again, was unsatisfactory, for the science to be designated does not treat of beauty in general, but merely of artistic beauty. We shall, therefore, permit the name aesthetic to stand, because it is nothing but a name, and so is indifferent to us, and, moreover, has up to a certain point passed into common language. As a name, therefore, it may be retained. The proper expression, however, for our science is the "philosophy of art," or, more definitely, the "philosophy of fine art."
-Introduction to Lectures on the Aesthetic, Bosanquet's (actually very nice) translation.

Hegel does not like the name "aesthetic." It is insufficient, ungenügend. Yet he preserves it since it is "nothing but a name, and so is indifferent"--or, since indifferent is a significant "technical" word for Hegel, and he does not use it here, the name is therefore no matter, all the same, gleichgültig--"to us." And, as if that weren't enough, we can keep it since it "has passed into common language," die gemeine Sprache.

He then notes, as if in passing, the more appropriate word for this; he suggests, almost casually, another name. The proper word is not "aesthetics" but "'philosophy of art," or "philosophy of fine art." And in this apparently minor gesture we find he announces that his study of art, his science of it, is differentiated from all others: the new name, as it were, signals how we will approach things, as unsere, our, Wissenschaft, our science deserves this other name. In this little name game is, then, there is a certain oblique attempt of Hegel to differentiate his treatment of a common subject matter--which is nothing less than the philosophic, scientific consideration of that subject matter, the demonstration of the actuality of the idea through and by its spiritual development in this area.

My point? Hegel wants to preserve the old name as if it is of no consequence--which is why he obliquely introduces his new name. Why? Because of what the old name designates: the science of sensuous feeling. The new name can supervene upon the province of what the old name designates, the sensuous, but it only supervenes: in other words, the aesthetic (qua science of the sensuous) appropriately considered is going to be designated by the new name, which, significantly, does not refer to the sensuous but to spirit (Geist, which is not only not sensuous, but also not supersensuous--i.e. it exceeds the opposition sensuous/non-sensuous, which is defectively conceived). And in this gesture, I'm claiming, we can already see what is at work in Hegel's consideration of the aesthetic which will follow: on the one hand he will derive the specificity of art from its sensuousness--the way it embodies the spiritual in the sensuous, in fact representing it there--but on the other saying that art is never purely reducible to this sensuous work. The study of art, then, is on the one hand the study only of sensuous embodiment, and on the other is only a philosophic study (science) of spirit.

Why does this matter? Simply because it begins to show Hegel's unique position with respect to the aesthetic: he is remarkably rebellious against any notion that art should be studied based upon how it presents itself to our direct sensuous intuition. In that respect, he carves out an area for the study of art that is completely anti-aesthetic. At the same time, this is accomplished precisely by making intuition itself non-sensuous, spiritual: at no point is there any break with the notion that art is not able to be intuited. Thus Hegel can say that art, like all things of this world, demonstrates its actuality precisely through its manifestation, through its ability to be intuited, if we consider manifestation or intuition rightly--that is, otherwise than as the grasping of an appearance that is distinct from the subject, that is a sensuous object opposed to a non-sensuous subjective spirit. In other words, as in work or labor (the birth of objective spirit), but explicitly, sensuousness itself is shown to be a function of the non-sensuous, such that it (the sensuousness) can no longer be considered the realm of manifestation and intuition. Art, more than work, is in fact precisely the sphere where we are taught explicitly to consider manifestation rightly, where manifestation and intuition are most explicitly shown to be spiritual as much as they are sensuous (since the former is the truth of the latter).

The anti-aesthetic is then pulled back into a process of demonstrating the truth of the aesthetic, and thereby remaining, just as the old name can be unproblematically preserved, still akin to aesthetics.

Building, dwelling, thinking...

A reading of "Bauen, Wohnen, Denken," which proceeds roughly along the path of the introduction and first part of the essay, with general comments meant to make Heidegger a bit more accessible interpolated. Thanks to my friend and colleague Emily for giving me the opportunity of writing this finally! I hope it is a little bit helpful:

Building (Bauen: constructing, structuring, to house something) and dwelling (Wohnen: residing, living, to stay with somebody) are the terms of the question. The question focuses upon building. It asks: If our inquiry "traces building back" into the place where we can see it working in the way that is most proper to it qua building, if we trace the way it looks like it works back into this "domain" (Bereich), then does this place, this domain, this original coherence of the phenomenon of building have anything to do with another sort of place that we call a dwelling? Looking into the way building is properly building, which means looking at the way it is building (that is, looking at it ontologically, in its be-ing building), does this resonate with how dwelling is properly dwelling? Does this building be-ing building resonate with dwelling being dwelling?
To understand this, we will ask 1) What is it to dwell, or how does dwelling be? and 2) How does building resonate with [gehört] or belong with dwelling?
To put it in more simple terms, Heidegger looks at a phenomenon: as Merleau-Ponty would describe it, the way that something coheres as it appears to us, its structured appearance to our lives (so like, a room appears to us as a usable space before it appears as a rectangle we inhabit, to the extent that the space of the room warps around the objects in it. Sartre said once a room taken phenomenologically is a lot more like how a blind person "sees" it: the room is a set of objects for him to use--the fact that it has corners is really irrelevant because they're hard to touch, nothing he needs is there, etc.). Thus what will follow is a phenomenology of building or construction. But his phenomenologies are phenomenological ontologies: they look at the coherence of something appearing precisely as how it exists, in its being (taken intransitively, as be-ing or is-ing: Levinas said helpfully once that Heidegger's contribution to philosophy is in restoring an intransitive character to being). So the being of building is a sort of coherence, its remaining proper to itself as a phenomenon--but doing so not in the aspect of how it looks or feels, say, but in how it exists, how it just remains there in its activity as an activity, how it "just works" as we like to say, implying some process but at the same time implying that it just does this process in being typically itself. So he's looking at the way building is properly being building. This is why he contrasts what he's doing to some aesthetic, architectural treatise on construction to giving rules or architectural ideas: this couldn't be further from looking at the being of building (for him--for me, this move in Heidegger is always suspect, because its dickish, as if his way of doing things is the only real way). He's also going to do this phenomenological ontology with dwelling, or, translated a little less pompously, "living in" something (his translators are also pompous sometimes). In fact, he's going to look at this first, to try and see if living in something is going to end up having any relation to constructing something. This makes sense because, of course, we live in the things we build. But the uniqueness of Heidegger is to pose this banality in ontological terms.
Part I:
At first it looks to us like we can only reach (gelangen, get to, as in: get to that place where there is)--it looks like we can only get to dwelling, or what dwelling is, through building, by means of building, or what building is. This is why we asked what dwelling is first--to try and work against the way things seem when we don't see them as structured appearances or as phenomena (and chiefly when we don't see them as appearances structured by their being, as ontological phenomena). In fact, we work against this because the mode of our presentation of building looks like it informs our way of considering it. That is, if we do look at things in this mistaken way, we'll think that dwelling is merely an end of building. This makes dwelling look like it is just having shelter in something, in being located inside a place that is reserved by building for this purpose. But this is not right: just because we fulfill the purpose of something doesn't mean that we are properly dwelling, that we are, in our being, in our remaining what we are, dwelling. In fact, I can dwell by precisely not fulfilling the purpose of something. To look at building as a means, and dwelling as an end--and thus to look at dwelling through building--is to avoid the question. We'll come to this below in how the question about housing problems is brought up.
For Heidegger, thinking about a dwelling in terms of its ability for us just to be located within it is, like thinking about the room as a rectangular box in space, to miss the phenomenon, is to miss how it is structured. It's no mistake that this is how science, in the use of physics in engineering and architecture, thinks about a dwelling (according to Heidegger). What's interesting is that for him this is reflected in how the problem of living-in something or dwelling in it is usually approached. His resistance to this approach will govern the structure of the rest of the essay: it especially governs what will happen next--his turning to language. When Heidegger does this, he supposes several things that are a bit farfetched and which I tried to bring out below: 1) that language itself can give us the phenomena if we hear it right, 2) the right language in which we hear this is German (here he is in serious danger of becoming a Black-forest patriot and/or Nazi) and that this is the case because, 3) like Hegel, he believes that German has a relationship to the way that the Greeks, the proper thinkers, thought (also a Nazi conception, but again, Hegel thought it too, so what this means is, on a certain level, tough to say). What he is trying to do, though, is significant: he's trying to think of construction or building not as a means, which means thinking of it not as something involving machines and technology. So he tries to pull that back out of the language. What he's claiming though is pretty profound: because we think of a dwelling through construction, this means of presenting it itself makes construction a means. In other words, the way of presenting the problem duplicates the way we consider the terms of the problem.
However, if we look at language, the German language, the language proper to thinking and in which nothing less than the spirit of the West, as it was handed down from the Greeks, is preserved as such, then to build, bauen, is already to dwell: that is, dwelling has a relationship to building that is not of a means-end nature. For building, in German, in this proper language, especially if we go back and look at its older meanings, in fact looks a lot like it simply means being, which is preserved in the German word for "am:" bin. When I say I am (ich bin), I mean "the way in which... I am." That is, I mean: I have cultivated myself, constructed myself, taken care of myself in this particular way. I have precisely not *made* myself or manufactured myself, as if I were a performance. "Here building, in contrast with cultivating, is a constructing." Cultivation is an art, but is not something technical: it is closer to the art of trimming vines and shaping a plant. In short, building itself is not properly something technical, precisely because--for reasons we state most clearly in "The Question Concerning Technology" but which we'll get to below--the technical is not technical: the technical is much closer to this cultivation, to this taking-care-of, to this sort of protection, which we'll come back to. Building is not properly manufacturing, it is cultivating.
We have not yet answered how this cultivating is dwelling, but we can see that this view of building as a sort of manufacturing is precisely what the means-end view of building and dwelling has done to our thought. It has turned us away from all that in building already could mean something else. (This means that, in truth, it has turned us away from Germany, from German language.) It has turned us away from how building and constructing can mean something like cultivating, and cultivating in a pure, proper, German sense: that is, without recourse to an idea of cultivation as performance, as fakery, as tricks, as technique and art that is a technology in the vulgar sense. To think of cultivating as something other than a manufacturing, to hear it even in our language itself: this is what being attentive to the phenomenon, rather than reducing it to a means-end relationship, had allowed us.
So perhaps we can look at our German language again, this time precisely at dwelling, and see whether it too could mean something like cultivation. Then there would be a relationship that would not be one of means-end. It would remain then for us to inquire into what the nature of this other relationship would be. But first let's get to dwelling now without building, without going through building: which we now know means, without seeing building as something that has an end.
We don't hear that wohnen, dwelling, means cultivating directly. That is, we have to take a detour in order to hear cultivation in dwelling. (It will take us to what we will call the fourfold.) For like building, it means remaining as something, but it means this more immediately, in terms of preserving and guarding, not cultivating. In fact, it means something closer to freeing-up. When I say I dwell, what I really mean is that I am free to do whatever. It does not mean, like cultivating, a sort of gathering together and holding together as protection, but a setting loose, a sort of freeing up. So we have gathering on the one hand and a setting free on the other—but we will come back to this opposition.
What we should note now is that if dwelling means being free, a dwelling would therefore be something like an object that is set free so that it can exist within this type of freedom. In fact, this freeing up of the thing is a lot like saving it from becoming a mere end, something that is just an object located within a techno-scientific or objectivized space. It is, as we will see, to really treat it as a thing, before it becomes an object, a point in space. This is not just a change in terminology that will oppose something good (a thing) to something bad (an object), although we will indeed exploit this opposition. What we are getting at is more fundamental: a dwelling is a freed object, or a thing that is more originary, more proper than an object because it is free. When something is left to its own, it is dwelling: “to dwell means… to remain at peace within the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its essence,” that is, to its being properly itself.
To clarify: what Heidegger is doing is distinguishing something that is objectivised and scientific from something that, he says, is more basic, more properly itself. To call the dwelling a thing here means the same as regarding the room not as a rectangle but as a livable space. This will come back more explicitly in the second part. But this distinction allows him to launch himself into a meditation on how the world looks when it is full of things, not objects, and how the dwelling fits into this world made up of these things.
Put differently, dwelling is when something’s thingness takes precedence before its objecthood because, as we said, dwelling is precisely this freeing. A dwelling is only a concatenation of dwelling itself, therefore, which is a setting free, a making free, an allowing of what surrounds me to come before me unburdened by how it logically is supposed to fit into my business. Dwelling is more free than the space in which I carry out my business. In fact, it fits into a whole world that is more properly itself than the space of my business, the space of technical and scientific objecthood. In this non-technical world, the dwelling is on top of the earth, before this earth is considered a set of resources, a set of minerals. It is also under the sky, before it is considered the space of physics. It is on top and below these, in this world, which also remains in front of gods and the holiness that pervades the phenomenality of things as such. And in this world are mortals, who is capable of being properly himself in his being-towards-death, in his dying qua dying, as we explained in Being and Time.
Each of these obscure terms—earth, sky, mortals, gods—all these are essentially what we see around us considered phenomenologically: that is, with concern for their being properly themselves, grounded or structured by their being. They are not just the things that we see but the larger “regions,” as Heidegger occasionally will call it, in which more specific things can appear. They are like the ur-phenomena, in which the things appear. Something coming out of the sky will appear to us as a sort of sky-phenomena: for Heidegger the phenomena of the sky include the length of the day and time, basically time-management. Something from the earth appears to us as an earth-phenomenon: it is that out of which we create things and make things. The gods or divinities are the realm in which we try and relate to both earth- and sky-phenomena as such: something from this region appears to us as our expectation about a thing. The sphere of mortals or men is where we live out our lives, where the phenomena like the continuity of one’s self-history appears. This continuity is ensured by death—but that is an issue I can’t get into here because it takes too much time: one has to summarize a lot of Being and Time, in which it is first fleshed out. Regardless, you see what is going on. What is being explained here by looking at the regions in which phenomena appear is that the coherence of the world, which is the world being properly itself as a world, and which he in a vatic manner describes as its oneness—this coherence is only possible if man dwells in it, in the sense of dwelling that this essay is pursuing. For dwelling will fit together these ur-phenomena or regions. That means that man takes up the earth, the sky, the holiness of the world as well as his own mortality, and makes them actively fit together, gain the structuredness that is proper to them as phenomena, through his own dwelling. The world could indeed take up space without man, but only man can give it the significance of a phenomenon: that is, an appearance that is structured and meaningful insofar as it is.
Each of these four aspects or regions of the world fits together, to borrow a metaphor we used in Basic Concepts. But this fitting together, this oneness of the four, can only take place if there is dwelling, and if man, the mortal, is the one who does this. How is this possible? Well, it is possible in that the fitting-together is precisely what is allowed by a sort of setting-free of the things within these regions. If you set something free, it is set free so that it can find its proper place, so that it can find where it can most be itself, so that it can fit together with its most proper situation. This, we know, is precisely what dwelling does: it sets a thing free.
So we now understand the ramifications of this setting-free of the thing. To set a thing free, to keep its freedom, is to allow it and other things to find their proper situation. This situation is one that occurs within one aspect of the fourfold. And insofar as it is free, it allows the fourfold to fit together, to become one or have a oneness—a oneness that simply is the world being properly the world. But we also understand how dwelling is cultivation, as building is. For to allow all these regions, all these fourfold, to fit together, is to care for the whole world through the setting free of the things. Indeed, dwelling might deal immediately with things, with the setting free of things—but this setting free is a way to ultimately cultivate the world as such, to preserve and save and nurture the world as its proper self. And insofar as this is so, we understand how Dwelling is building: “dwelling, insofar as it keeps or secures the fourfold in things”—that is, sees things as part of the fourfold, of the world itself—“insofar as it keeps or secures the fourfold in things, is, as this keeping, a building...”

Contre-mémoire and fröhliche Wissenschaft

A new title for the blog, but one which, I think, revalues the old: countermemory. Revalued, that is, if you consider it precisely as Foucault's translation of fröhliche Wissenschaft.
Wissenschaft, which my colleague, friend, and overall genius Sand Avidar-Walzer has proposed, quite rightly I think in many respects (I only say "many" and not "all" only because the term is designed, like so much in Nietzsche, to escape nevertheless into many other valences--an aspect which I think Sand's choice actually is designed to capture), be translated as "inquiry"--Wissenschaft is precisely the practice (which the term "inquiry" brings out excellently--I have become more and more fond of this translation!) of internalizing-memory, or Errinerung, not only according to Hegel, but to many many others in the history of philosophy. This internalization is a process of self-development, of regulation as control or repression, of exposure to the determinate negative, of the resistance to memory by the taking up of memory--not by any hypermnemic devices or activities but by the synthesis of these hypermnemic devices into natural, organic, biological memory (that is, by effacing the difference between them)--that is, by the process of domesticating and making amenable to internalization the development of one's own thought, activities, etc. At the limit of this--which we find in Heidegger, who thereby opens up the revolutionary potential of formulating things otherwise via Nietzsche--it is the modification of the historicity of this process of internalization by reducing (under the guise of an expansion) its alterity.
This memory constitutes, at this limit, an enormous effort to--in Nietzsche's own words (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, IV, 327)--"take things seriously:" more literally, to perceive them, to internalize them (nehmen) with respect to their alterity. The opposite task or possibility is therefore the practice of fröliche Wissenschaft: the exposure to alterity by an indifference (i.e. the development of the difference between the hypermnemic and the mnemic, the technical and the biological) to internalization--that is, joyously. Insofar as this task takes a more practical form of an overturning or forgetting of tradition so as to attain this exposure, it is therefore, within the task of constituting genealogy, contre-mémoire, countermemory. Nietzsche's task, as you can see, is therefore amazing and immense. But perhaps an understanding of it can only begin by establishing (with Foucault, who coins the term) this semantic transit.

Time and Derrida

Here are two points to grasp about time as Derrida sees it. Perhaps the best way to think of them is phenomenologically, despite the impossibility of this thought from this (or any) perspective. What would the phenomenon of temporality and temporalizing be if we understood time this way? How does one have an intention (let alone a self) in such a time? Or, perhaps taking an less phenomenological approach, we can ask whether there can be any coherence of representations or signifiers (in terms of the self, can there be a self as the faking of an interiority, as mere exteriority, as performance understood without citation, as enacting a self that is simultaneously coherent and stable as an identity over time)? It is obvious that the answer is, for Derrida, no. But let's get to the two incredible, impossible points:

1) Time can "flow" backwards as well as forwards: time for Derrida ceases to be unidirectional. This already is an unbelievably profound, absolutely impossible thought. For it does not mean that time can be "rewound" or that we can re-enact the past. We see the immense differences with Lacan asserting themselves already. For Derrida, time isn't haunted by trauma in a typically Freudian sense. If we are not in the present, it is not because we are repeating some past unexperienced/traumatic moment (or lack thereof--i.e. repeating a lack or what is not there) or that (to put it another way, and, again, quite crudely) that moment has come to usurp our experience of the present, making it (again) a non-present or something. The Lacanian move backward in time here still presupposes the unidirectionality or forward-flowing of time. Or a unidirectionality in general. For Derrida, we don't jump into the past (or have the past return); time flows backwards. The "stream" is simply reversed. Or rather, it is reversed while still moving forward--and of course this makes it less simple. Time flows forwards just as much as backwards, and never "returns" upon itself in the sense that it rewinds and undoes itself, going back to the moment that is not yet. The return indeed is completely different, if you conceive it this way: one has to rethink what "repetition" means (essentially, it cannot be "caused" even by a non-cause, the Real, as Lacan holds: cf. "Tuche and Automaton" in Four Fundamental Concepts). And with respect to Heidegger, this means that time does not temporalize out of the future, or does not do so any more than it according to Hegel temporalizes out of the past (cf. Phenomenology of Spirit, §801-2: "In the Notion that knows itself as Notion, the moments … appear earlier than the filled [or fulfilled] whole whose coming-to-be is the movement of those moments..." etc. etc.). If this is grasped, the second point will need less comprehension:

2) There is no "proper" (eigentlich, "authentic") or primordial (ursprunglich) temporality, or rather this primordial temporality of which Heidegger speaks in Being and Time is precisely only also the everyday calculable time or clock-time that Heidegger says this primordial time alone makes possible. Being and Time, then, is shocked by this fundamental upheaval of one of its most basic theses (William Blattner has much to say about this thesis): in short, authentic time would be, according to Derrida, calculable. This also means, however, that calculable, everyday time is authentic, and not derivatively or in a "falling" (verfallen) way. In other words, the time of mere representation (or the signifier), of mere counting-off of instants (one second, two, three), of a whole life composed perhaps of mere passing the time, of bare life or mere sur-vival, is authentic or proper, is Dasein's ownmost. Indeed, in the later writings of Heidegger, the temporalizing gets thought on the level of the history of being out of the opening up of the different ecstases to begin with (and this thought is indeed right there in Being and Time, just less explicitly thought in this particular way), which is closer to Derrida because (even though priority is still given to it) the future itself is less important as such (cf. On Time and Being)

Marx as defender of the dialectic

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx defends the Hegelian dialectic. Or rather, he defends it against the attempt to break with it that is concentrated in capitalism. He exposes this attempt as really only a dialectical redoubling that does not escape from the dialectic.

We can see this in the passage where he recasts the Hegelian master/slave relationship into the bourgeoisie/proletariat relationship. The second is actually the truth of the former--that is, in less Hegelian terms, the bourgeoisie/proletariat relationship is the dialectical overcoming of the antagonism or contradiction between the master/slave relationship. Instead of exploiting the slave, the master here tries to take care of the worker so that the worker can continue to work. This allows both master and slave to work for the master's master, work itself. But what is crucial about this is that the "taking care of" here or "feeding" of the slave is only feeding the slave such that the worker's work--and not the worker himself--can continue. The emphasis is upon work abstracted from the existence of the slave that provides the work. Thus the slave sinks below the conditions that he would be under if he were wrapped up in the feudal master/slave dialectic, because the master here is not concerned with his existence--the master is "incompetent to assure the continued existence" of the slave, as Marx puts it. The slave cannot properly be a slave under capitalism. That is, it cannot be assured as to whether he will exist as a slave: his bare existence is threatened in the face of the abstract labor-power he temporarily embodies.

Thus what is going on is the attempt to dissolve the dialectic into a relationship where there will be no conflict, no dialectical conflict, between the master and the slave. A critique of capitalism, then would be the reassertion of the conflict or antagonism between the worker/slave and the master, and furthermore the assertion that the bourgeoisie is not a proper master. In other words, it would be a defense of the dialectic--not in order to resolve it again in the abstractions of Hegel, but to then direct it from this false escape from the dialectic into a socialist, and then communist, actual escape. I'll elaborate this more later. Here is the passage from the Manifesto--I've italicized the portion of the text that is explicitly under consideration:

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

...so gilt es...

Insofern Anschauen oder Denken hier erwähnt werden kann, so gilt es als ein Unterschied, ob etwas oder nichts angeschaut oder gedacht wird. Nichts Anschauen oder Denken hat also eine Bedeutung; beide werden unterschieden, so ist (existiert) Nichts in unserem Anschauen oder Denken; oder vieldmehr ist es das leere Anschauen und Denken selbst; und dasselbe leere Anschauen oder Denken also das reine Sein. -- Nichts is somit dieselbe Bestimmung oder vielmehr Bestimmungslosigkeit und damit überhaupt dasselbe, was das reine Sein ist.

-Wissenschaft der Logik (Lehre vom Sein), Kap. 1, B (Nichts)

I'll never get over this odd turn in Hegel's Science of Logic. It appears when he says "so gilt es als ein Unterschied:" it will count for us as a distinction or difference. Insofar as we can speak of Anschauen oder Denken, intuition or thinking, it will count for us whether something or nothing is intuited or thought. We'll count the difference between thinking of nothing and thinking of something (nichts oder etwas), that we can only suppose. And suppose specifically by speaking, by mentioning or referencing: erwähnen, seeking out or referring to something. Insofar as we can refer to intuition and thinking here, it will matter for us that either something or nothing is intuited or thought. Insofar as we can seek out a distinction, the distinction will count for us. By virtue of the distinction's merely being possible, it will count. The faith in the rationality or cunning of logos and dialectic here is a little too much for me. We'll seek out this distinction, and if we can seek it out--regardless of whether it actually counts or not--it will count for us. Therefore, nothing is or exists (es ist, es existiert): if there is this distinction for us, nothing exists at least in that distinction. Therefore it immediately passes into being. Nothing is not nothing just as much as pure being is nothing, because and only because this distinction between something and nothing in thinking is possible. Where does this distinction come from? Derrida will inscribe it precisely in this unthought possibility that Hegel seems so confident will begin his dialectic, in its pure virtuality without being and even without nothingness--but precisely not as a thought. For Derrida, this "...so gilt es..." is Hegel thinking differance.

Mourning after citation: re-membering

What is the connection in Derrida's oeuvre between mourning and citation? That is, between something like the remembering of the deceased and the quotation of another? How can this event surrounding death be so textual? Or, more generally, how can a more "ethical" concern of Derrida towards the end of his career (even though it appears in some of his earliest work) find itself already implicated in the logic of his earlier "metaphysical/post-metaphysical" writings (even though it is featured even in his last interview) via the particular transit or opening that the shoring up or juxtaposition of these terms constitutes?

It isn't by mistake that we are able to investigate these matters within a text that, in its name, is fascinated with death and life or death in life, and, in its opening (at least), is obsessed with quotations marks. "Living On" ("Survivre," in French, with the emphasis on the disjunction possible between "sur" and "vivre") links the dismemberment of the body (a condition of death or dying, an act that forces the passing from life to death or the dying in life) to the innermost workings and unworkings of quotations, as they disturb (among other things) speech act theory's popular "use-mention" distinction. This theory would make a quoted phrase--"In other words on living?"--into an act of mentioning, as opposed to a using of the phrase: when you quote, you don't use language but rather mention an instance of its use, they say. "In other words on living?" is (they continue) a sort of quotation or citation, purporting to explain the phrase "who's talking about living?" ("Living On" begins: "But who's talking about living? In other words on living?") while it elaborates it in another use that is not a use but a mentioning. However, Derrida contends that this mentioning never stops just with the whole of the phrase: it passes down to the instance of every word in the phrase. This disturbs the distinction between use and mentioning, because each instance of a mentioning would be indistinguishable from a use: each word, insofar as it refers (either uses or mentions), would be able to be a mentioning as well as a use. I'll clear this up later perhaps, but the point is that the language that can be used also always can be a mentioning. In other words, everything becomes quotable, and in doing so dismembers or disjoins in its rendering mentionable any use of language, word by word:

If it [the phrase "in other words on living?"] is a sort of quotation, a sort of "mention," as the theoreticians of "speech acts" feel justified in saying, we must understand the entire performance [or "mention"] "in other words on living?" as having quotation marks around it. But once quotation marks demand to appear, they don't know where to stop. Especially here, where they are not content merely to surround the performance "in other words on living?": they divide it, rework its body and its insides, until it is distended, diverted, out of joint, then reset member by member, word by word, realigned in the most diverse configurations... For example, several pairs of quotation marks may enclose one or two words: "living on," "on" living, "on" "living," on "living," producing each time a different semantic and syntactic effect; I still have not exhausted the list...

-from "Living On," in Deconstruction and Criticism, 62-3 (translation modified)

Now, dismemberment and disjoining, as the taking apart of a text through the assertion of citationality or infinite "mentionability" within what seems to be its coherent, closed, use, also resets these members that have been disjoined, "member by member" as Derrida says. What is this act of resetting through citation, through making citation not only surround but penetrate to the interior of every use of language? In other words, what is this act of resetting words at the point of there being infinite citationality or performativity in the use of words? "Member by member" it works what is unworked totally as a re-membering. Re-membering indeed describes this whole structure of taking apart and resetting, resetting indeed right at the point at which the disjunction or disjointedness between words is extended infinitely, so that any use of language is also its performance. In other words it is mourning, the remembrance of the dead, the putting back together of the person who has been taken apart in death, the preserving (one can even say materially, if one grants some materiality to thoughts of remembrance in one's head) of the other within one and yet only precisely at the point at which she or he can only exist through citation, through the performance of themselves, no longer in any fully constituted bodily presence. Mourning is citing, infinitely, so that each citation still has to refer to the deceased--who precisely is no longer there in the act of (or because of the act of) citing. Dis- or re-(these two prefixes are now synonymous, because the lack of the referent or the other that needs to be replaced is itself installed by the very interability in the "re")membering as this particular citational structure (citation infinitely extended, every bit and everywhere performative, so that in fact this mentioning, this performing of the referent/other without the referent/other, is its only use) is mourning.

Hopefully this connection is a bit illumined: it is hard to be faithful to Derrida and you see the necessity of his "obscurity" in his texts when you have to try and reconstitute them (especially amidst other work!)--namely, because you can't use the word "is" (in the speech-act sense of "use"), and because this very prohibition also manifests itself and is operated by how all the terms transform themselves. One can perhaps see two consequences of all this, though, which perhaps are one at their root (and yet of course everywhere and never fully able to be captured with a single word). 1) Derrida's opposition to and yet respect for the necessity of (perhaps more than Heidegger, who seeks to destroy this in Seinsgeschichtliche denken yet always grapples with how he can't) Hegelian Erinnerung, internalizing and self-appropriating acts of memory or memorialization in the negative movement of the Aufhebung. The consequence is that there is no appropriation or gathering up of the other into identity/sameness, no resolution in further work of the negative to the contradiction or difference between the same and the other. In other words, 2) it is wrong to say that mourning is the use of language (to recollect or memorialize the other, to bring him or her back into the sphere in which they can live with us but not as us, to reappropriate them and yet respect them in their death, in their otherness) at that point at which it is its performance, its mentioning. That is, the use of language to respect the other (or the referent) at the point at which this language is performance of the use of language to respect the other is not the  the performance of this language only. Language does not refer only to itself in being always a mentioning. If there is only mentioning, it is not the mentioning of one use, of one respect for the other. It is always indistinguishable, as a citation, from every other citation. To put it quite simply: every act of mourning is always not just my act of mourning. This does not mean it is communal: it means that it is never mine, my own. Why? Because every act is always only a performance: it is on par with anyone else's remembering of the other. In the "textual" terms we are also employing, every use of a word would be a mentioning, but then every mentioning would be indistinguishable in its use: the use would be only one--mentioning--but one only in the sense that there is no one use (there is only mentioning). No appropriation, no Erinnerung, and yet the necessity for appropriation as the only way to memorialize and mourn: this is the double bind. Every mourning then, must fail in its appropriation, must not appropriate enough or must appropriate too much of the other. But--and here is the "ethics" of this "textual" logic--mourning must fail to begin again, to begin in failing to begin, to begin more, to fail more: to fail to repeat the mourning is at once a crime and what always takes place, both an ethical failure and the only ethical injunction. One must always mourn more.

Mistakes in Class, or Herrschaft und Knechtschaft

A very wise professor today asked the class to define what Hegel means by the master and slave dialectic. I started to respond (with little attention to my words) that it is about two "subjectivities" that confront each other in a relationship where what is at stake is their self-sufficiency. She stopped me there and said, "the master-slave dialectic is not about two subjectivities. It is about the dialectic." And she's right, and not just because--as I too quickly concluded--that she is of the school that reads the section on mastery and slavery in a  Derridian way and not in a Kojevian way. I was stupid for saying "subjectivity," right off the bat. That is where she was correcting me, and this is where the Derridian way of reading it (along with Heidegger and Hyppolite, though Heidegger may take this too far in this direction) is really useful.

"Subjectivity" is a really misused word in general. I meant something like "self," but even that is not what is at stake in the master-slave dialectic. Nothing like it even appears or presents itself there throughout the whole passage. What presents itself is, as she said, the dialectic, but also and more specifically, self-consciousness. And what gets staked--that is, either lost by the master-slave relationship or relieved/superseded by it-- is life. Hegel says:

Die Darstellung seiner aber als der reinen Abstraktion des Selbstbewusstseins besteht darin, sich als reine Negation seiner gegenständlichen Weise zu zeigen, oder es zu zeigen, an kein bestimmtes Dasein geknüpft, an die allgemeine Einzelnheit des Daseins überhaupt nicht, nicht an das Leben geknüpft zu sein. Diese Darstellung ist das gedoppelte Tun; Tun des Andern, und Tun durch sich selbst. Insofern es Tun des Andern ist, geht also jeder auf den Tod des Andern. Darin aber ist auch das zweite, das Tun durch sich selbst, vorhanden; denn jenes schliesst das Daransetzen des eignen Lebens in sich.

[The presentation of itself, however, as the pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as the pure negation of its objective mode, or in showing that it is not attached to any specific existence, not the the individuality common to existence as such, that it is not attached to life. This presentation is a twofold action: action on the part of the other, and action on its own part. In so far as it is the action of the other, each seeks the death of the other. But in doing so, the second kind of action, action on its own part, is also involved; for the fomrer involves the staking of its own life.]

The master-slave relationship is about dialectic because it it the form of this relationship that gets constituted and is proper to the appearance of self-consciousness (its phenomenality): this is why Hegel focuses on what is shown or presented in the confrontation: or rather this is why he says the (twofold) confrontation is itself a Darstellung (diese Darstellung ist das gedoppelte Tun). The only thing that perhaps functions like (though still does not appear similar to) a self or a subjectivity that makes its appearance here is life, and this is the reason why I wanted to say "self" and said "subjectivity"--and, I'm thinking, why this mistake is made more generally in talking about this famous passage in Hegel.

Life in Hegel is an interesting thing: it is thought about constantly in his earlier writings in a similar way to how he thinks, later on, about Geist. Life in the Phenomenology, however, seems a little more bare: it becomes something like bare life, the functioning of Spirit at a natural level. It is what must be superseded, essentially, because it is the most basic thing that challenges self-consciousness in the other: that is, his bare existence as foreign to self-consciousness, to consciousness' being-for-itself. But notice that this bare existence is not itself something foreign to self-consciousness in general. It itself is an appearance or a mode of manifestation of a self-consciousness: in other words, life is not something with some significance outside of remaining just another way that self-consciousness appears here to a self-consciousness (whether it be one's own or the other's). What I'm getting at is that life just another form of the dialectic operating as a form of or within (for lask of better words) self-consciousness, and we mistake it for something else, something more vague, if we think of it apart from its dialectical structure--that is, by what we normally might mean by it.

Thus, though her ultimate reason might be more Derridian, my professor was absolutely right: that is, she was right not even because the dialectic, as Derrida shows in "From Restricted to General Economy," is what gets arbitrarily (and yet also, for other reasons, necessarily) preserved by Hegel throughout his rendering of the master-slave relationship--in other words, not because the dialectic is what is at stake for Hegel--but also because what is being talked about in it is only the dialectic, not something external to it or itself other than it that we designate by life or self-sufficiency. This is the hard part about thinking about Hegel: getting outside of his own verbiage to explain him--as I tried to do--inevitably makes one betray the phenomenon (in Hegel's sense, the self-showing of Spirit) that one seeks to convey: it takes one also outside the form of spirit (in this case, self-consciousness) that one is discussing or bringing to language.

So, in the master-slave dialectic, what is at stake is the ability of the dialectic to appear or show itself as a Darstellung, and in doing so, risk something about that Darstellung that structures and is structured by this ability: life. In other words, the self-sufficiency of self-consciousness is what is challenged by the life of the other, which must leads one to stake one's own life (or rather, present one's life) to him in mortal combat. This is the better way to put it. Because the other exists, because their phenomenality appears (a redundant way to put this, but I'm just trying to be clear), I am threatened as anything that must be more than just living, more than bare life--namely, self-consciousness. Thus, I must present myself against them in a fight.

The big Marx, Hegel, Feuerbach post, part 6

To continue from last time, this entry being the culmination of the encounter between Feuerbach and Hegel, and having the promised appearance of some music:

...This all may seem tedious, but it is necessary to grasp in order to see where Marx is coming from when he refers to “materialism.” For what Feuerbach does next is show that Hegel did indeed ground the necessitation of the relationship between Spirit and the Absolute, but merely did not emphasize it: he grounded this necessitation precisely in what is seen by Feuerbach as material “nature,” that supposedly non-Spiritual category that is both prior to and outside of significance. This “nature” proves to be nothing other than what Hegel must refer to in Feuerbach’s eyes in order to fully develop the consistency of his God: not the Absolute in Spirit, but the principles that compose Spirit itself. It is thus clear to us why this is such a revolutionary overthrow of Hegel, and why this changes the whole essence of God “as a religious object:” if Hegel specified what “nature” was, then God, the culmination of Spirit, would issue forth necessarily not from His own essence (the essence of the Absolute), but only from the completion of Spirit insofar as Spirit itself completes itself only in accordance with its presuppositions. Instead of the existence of God and the meaningful found within the self-developed principles of Spirit (the layerings of meaningful action that produce later layerings), God would be the result of the “nature” that exists before and outside of these principles—in what makes these principles possible. To put it yet another way, if the principles that direct and propel Spirit’s development are shown to lead Spirit to a state of culmination, then calling this state of culmination “God” will not be arbitrary. Nothing will exist other than this culmination, and since it culminates necessarily, it will be full, final, perfect. Thus the preconditions of Spirit, the structure that effectuates and provides for its development, its “nature,” are what are to be elucidated for Feuerbach, because they are what, instead of Spirit alone or by itself, will be considered real, since they make up God. All that needs to be done is lay the emphasis on “nature” instead of the Absolute when asserting the identity of the Absolute and Spirit, and Spirit will be organized from the ground up, and its culmination (God, significance itself) as well.
To digress shortly, we may remark that a good example of the difference between the two—an example one can experience for oneself—can be culled from the sphere of music. Hegel’s God is a symphony by Beethoven. Notes appear in one of these symphonies and move in both harmony and discord based on the genius of the compositional ideas that form them and break them apart: Beethoven composes a symphony to articulate and bring into a vocabulary of notes various ideas and feelings, letting them take shape in accordance with their meaning and intention. Take Beethoven’s third “Eroica” symphony. Composed in 1803, it is a grand statement about the nature of heroism and the hero, dedicated to Napoleon. Throughout the symphony, heroism as an idea is brought to music such that when the idea ceases its movement, when it is completely stated, the notes stop, and the symphony is over. Each section, each movement in one of these symphonies is one such statement of the author regarding heroism, organized around a discrete and distinct notion that occurs in his head, and together they make up nothing less than an epic series of articulations that convey this general idea. Led on by his own intentions, the symphony is Beethoven’s statement regarding Napoleon—this is such the case that after Beethoven (like much of Europe) witnessed Napoleon’s coronation of himself in late 1804, he supposedly scratched out the dedication to him on the title page of the symphony, giving the symphony itself a different meaning, a different intention. Now, turning to Feuerbach, we might say that he is advocating a type of articulation of meaning that would look like a composition by the British composer Steve Reich. In his “Music for 18 Musicians” (1974) Reich assigned various instruments a particular series of notes to play, a particular tempo to play them at, and a particular way to play them, and then simply had them begin and maintain that particular assignment. The result is a massive series of noises that are merely the collection of various instruments each keeping to and repeating their individual utterance. At any moment of the work, the 18 musicians are busy combining together their individual sounds in different permutations, and doing so only really because they are playing in the same room together. In fact, the entire work is the result of an exhaustion of all the possible permutations of the various instruments: when each individual instrument’s series of notes are over and played, they simply stop, and the end of the work is achieved when they all are simply done with. Thus, each movement of the music is a product of the maintenance of the original presuppositions assigned to each instrument. Each moment is organized from the bottom up, and does not express any idea other than that produced by the mathematical combination of the instruments. Far from being something led on by the genius of a divinely inspired mind articulating a vast meditation on the nature of heroism in his historic era, the composition of Reich is about the beauty of the ability of individuals to combine and create harmony out of nothing more than their own movements, out of their own natures. These works give some weight and definiteness to Hegel and Feuerbach’s ideas of God, embodying them, as it were.