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.
On this blog
I don't consider this to be a great blog, qua blog. If you want a great blog, look at Bldgblog. This skillfully utilizes certain aspects of the blog format to present its content. There are other blogs, of course, that rebel against this format--like typewriter blogs, where people type on paper, scan in the entry, and then put the image where the normal post would be--but I think we can say that these utilize the format equally well (as something to work against or parody). I don't do any of this. For a couple years now, I've just been doing the equivalent of scribbling here--that is, typing out some little notes and, instead of keeping them on a file on my computer, presenting them publicly. So it's all about content. In fact I feel it is a deformation of the blog form than a utilization of it. And I'd even go so far as to say that it's not even all about content--since the content remains mere notes, half-thoughts, rather than developed ones.
The only redeeming quality of this blog has really been the naivete, or the open-mindedness, or the honesty (I'm not sure what to call it), that comes with entries which are basically fresh thoughts put out there to others just in case they might prove handy. But at a certain point this undoes even itself. I've contradicted myself hundreds of times here--something I don't say often enough. And I fear often that what I say ends up being less handy, or even misleading, when it is so fragmentary.
I have always believed that thinking is a very fragmentary and impersonal experience, a matter of putting something in language so that you and others can work off of it. It's the type of thing that happens in the seminar room (or at least the ones I've been lucky enough to sit down in). You say something and try to grind it down or build it up into the right phrase, and slip it in there to push things in a certain direction. Others either take up the bit of language you proffered and use it, or they let you use it on your own. And in a way they only gain value through this social process: the thought isn't really a thought before you make it into this tool, this lever.
So you need others to do this--which is why I call it impersonal (a better word would be "collective"). But a blog ends up, in the end, being authored by one person--however many wonderful (or crazy) comments you may get.
And this is where the form of the blog has to come back in. Only being worried about the general shape of a minor point... that ends up creating a morass of opinion only gaining coherence from the force of the author behind it all--his general tendencies, etc. A blog should be a little more shaped and shapely: posts should be more definite, completed things, users should be able to navigate through it somewhat without trouble. Of course, there are many ways to make a blog work. In fact, one can make a blog into the reflection of the opinions of its author--but by engaging its form more than I have done with this blog here.
In short, I fear the general task of impersonal, fragmentary commentary could turn into a "bad egoism" or personalism here. This might stem from the other goal I had in starting this blog, which was simply to write better. Communicating your thoughts publicly makes you think differently, and I think more clearly in certain respects: you certainly have to finish whatever you're trying to get at, which was always a constant problem for me. And indeed, looking through the blog, you'll probably witness definite improvement on this point. But, you see, this is all at the wrong level. This blog should be about paragraphs, not phrases; posts, not periods.
To that end, you see I've been trying to improve the structure of the blog, organize some of its content, and write more significant entries. But I just would like to stress here that most of the blog is still fragmentary, and that many of the thoughts here are meant to be useful only as tools or levers in the manner I described above. Thus, they might be wholly wrong. I hope they're not. But I hope so in the way that I do during a seminar that we're going in the right direction, and that whatever I say has to contribute to the discussion, or lead it down an illuminating and generally good path, rather than divert it or grind things to a halt. The exceptions, of course, will be papers and generally the longer considerations--they'll stand out. These, of course, will be offered in a different way... a way that I hope to be more like my future posts: a bit more personal, a bit more formed, a bit less faithful in the general provisionality of the space in which these ideas are offered. That merely means that they will be more responsibly formed, more reliant on the space of the blog, qua blog.
I say all this of course with you, the reader, in mind. For offering something in a class is offering it to a present participant. On a blog like this one (and not, of course on all blogs), despite all the directness, you are still there as a reader, and that puts a little more space in between us--space I can't take for granted. I feel the experience of reading this blog, now, must be something like overhearing the discussion rather than actually being addressed. What I'm saying is that I'll be trying to correct this.
But this is not to say the comments on this blog don't exist, or that no one participates in discussions here. I love the comments! They have been helpful in many many ways, and I thank everyone who has written them. And the contacts with people I have made here have been so great. I'm just taking small measures that I hope will make this wonderful state of things even more wonderful.
But in general, keep in mind my warning that things here are more like handy phrases than theses. This isn't to say I don't believe in them or they are false. Just that they're offered and will generally continue to be offered--however much I try to improve things--as (mere) contributions.
The only redeeming quality of this blog has really been the naivete, or the open-mindedness, or the honesty (I'm not sure what to call it), that comes with entries which are basically fresh thoughts put out there to others just in case they might prove handy. But at a certain point this undoes even itself. I've contradicted myself hundreds of times here--something I don't say often enough. And I fear often that what I say ends up being less handy, or even misleading, when it is so fragmentary.
I have always believed that thinking is a very fragmentary and impersonal experience, a matter of putting something in language so that you and others can work off of it. It's the type of thing that happens in the seminar room (or at least the ones I've been lucky enough to sit down in). You say something and try to grind it down or build it up into the right phrase, and slip it in there to push things in a certain direction. Others either take up the bit of language you proffered and use it, or they let you use it on your own. And in a way they only gain value through this social process: the thought isn't really a thought before you make it into this tool, this lever.
So you need others to do this--which is why I call it impersonal (a better word would be "collective"). But a blog ends up, in the end, being authored by one person--however many wonderful (or crazy) comments you may get.
And this is where the form of the blog has to come back in. Only being worried about the general shape of a minor point... that ends up creating a morass of opinion only gaining coherence from the force of the author behind it all--his general tendencies, etc. A blog should be a little more shaped and shapely: posts should be more definite, completed things, users should be able to navigate through it somewhat without trouble. Of course, there are many ways to make a blog work. In fact, one can make a blog into the reflection of the opinions of its author--but by engaging its form more than I have done with this blog here.
In short, I fear the general task of impersonal, fragmentary commentary could turn into a "bad egoism" or personalism here. This might stem from the other goal I had in starting this blog, which was simply to write better. Communicating your thoughts publicly makes you think differently, and I think more clearly in certain respects: you certainly have to finish whatever you're trying to get at, which was always a constant problem for me. And indeed, looking through the blog, you'll probably witness definite improvement on this point. But, you see, this is all at the wrong level. This blog should be about paragraphs, not phrases; posts, not periods.
To that end, you see I've been trying to improve the structure of the blog, organize some of its content, and write more significant entries. But I just would like to stress here that most of the blog is still fragmentary, and that many of the thoughts here are meant to be useful only as tools or levers in the manner I described above. Thus, they might be wholly wrong. I hope they're not. But I hope so in the way that I do during a seminar that we're going in the right direction, and that whatever I say has to contribute to the discussion, or lead it down an illuminating and generally good path, rather than divert it or grind things to a halt. The exceptions, of course, will be papers and generally the longer considerations--they'll stand out. These, of course, will be offered in a different way... a way that I hope to be more like my future posts: a bit more personal, a bit more formed, a bit less faithful in the general provisionality of the space in which these ideas are offered. That merely means that they will be more responsibly formed, more reliant on the space of the blog, qua blog.
I say all this of course with you, the reader, in mind. For offering something in a class is offering it to a present participant. On a blog like this one (and not, of course on all blogs), despite all the directness, you are still there as a reader, and that puts a little more space in between us--space I can't take for granted. I feel the experience of reading this blog, now, must be something like overhearing the discussion rather than actually being addressed. What I'm saying is that I'll be trying to correct this.
But this is not to say the comments on this blog don't exist, or that no one participates in discussions here. I love the comments! They have been helpful in many many ways, and I thank everyone who has written them. And the contacts with people I have made here have been so great. I'm just taking small measures that I hope will make this wonderful state of things even more wonderful.
But in general, keep in mind my warning that things here are more like handy phrases than theses. This isn't to say I don't believe in them or they are false. Just that they're offered and will generally continue to be offered--however much I try to improve things--as (mere) contributions.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Reading Heidegger
(See the very helpful response to this post by Paul Ennis. Everything Paul says I'd agree with: I even left a little comment in favor of "Heidegger-speak," which I oppose to the Heidegger jargon--empty parroting in order to keep agreeing with or defending Heidegger--that I mention below. Indeed, the whole post here owes a lot to Paul: it was a sort of meditation on what Paul meant when he talked about reading Hegel on his own terms. It also, of course, owes a lot to my discussions with Jethro Masís, who is thinking deeply about all that is involved in reading Heidegger.)
Reading Heidegger is always a remarkable experience. It can be, at times, absolutely exhilarating. Other times it is a real slog. What's remarkable, though, is that none of this occurs in the regular way: what's exhilarating isn't typically exhilarating, what's a slog isn't like your usual slog (if I can say such a thing).
That is, what's exhilarating isn't happening upon anything new--though of course the first time you read Heidegger it is (if not confusing) unbelievable. It is rather that the sort of steps that you make unfold something to you concretely, and in a way that is somewhat unexpected (even if you know Heidegger). This is why I wish certain parts of Being and Time were longer... even though rereading these parts, or looking in other passages in Heidegger, will do the job of explicating whatever is at issue (and giving you deeper, even different insight). The analysis of space and Ent-fernung is one of these places.
And then the parts you slog through aren't exactly boring or confusing or difficult. They're just gaps where Heidegger seems just to need to get to someplace. Now, I'm not talking about the regular big chunks that everybody says are typical overgeneralizations of Heidegger--the way he will push an interpretation of someone (Nietzsche, say) onto a certain track, and then unfold the argument predictably, according to the general "status" he confers upon that track. I don't think that's really a productive way to see Heidegger working--you end up thinking he's always saying the same thing, when, even if he is (and I'm not sure of that), there's actually a lot of weird and interesting stuff all over the place. No, what I'm talking about is much smaller, and ultimately much less significant. I'll give an example. Heidegger is talking about how sleeping is not the same as not-being-there, and not-being-there is not the same thing as being unconscious:
After all, what we generally know about things, we know in terms of an unambiguous either/or. Things are either at hand or not at hand. [...] Human beings have a consciousness, and something can be at hand in them on which they know nothing. In that case it is presumably at hand in them, but not at hand in their consciousness. A stone either has a property or does not have it. We, on the contrary, can have something and at the same time not have it, that is, not know of it. We speak, after all, of the unconscious. In one respect it is at hand, and yet in another respect it is not at hand, namely insofar as it arises from the possibility of being conscious of something unconscious. This distinction between not being there in the sense of the unconscious and being there in the sense of what is conscious also seems to be equivalent to what we have in mind by awakening, specifically by the awakening of whatever is sleeping. yet can we straightforwardly equate sleep with the absence of consciousness? After all, there is also absence of consciousness in being unconscious (which cannot be identified with sleep), and a fortiori in death. This concept of the nonconscious, therefore, is much to broad, irrespective of the question as to whether it is at all suitable. Furthermore, sleep is not simply an absence of consciousness. On the contrary, we know that a peculiar and in many cases extremely animated consciousness pertains precisely to sleep, namely that of dreams, so that her the possibility of characterizing something using hte distinction "conscious/unconscious" indeed breaks down. Waking and sleeping are not equivalent to consciousness and unconsciousness.
-Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (GA 29/30), §16, p. 61 [91-3]
Now, everything is fine here--I'm not questioning Heidegger's point at all. But the "a fortiori in death" seems foreign to things, along with the fact that dreams, suddenly, are cases of "extremely animated consciousness." Where did this last point (that dreams are cases of consciousness) come from? It proves the point, yes, but where did Heidegger get it? I suddenly know I'll have to start hunting elsewhere for a better explanation, tying together the corpus. But, again, I'm not objecting, it all makes sense, I know why it is here: all this is here because the point we're getting to is the following:
To awaken an attunement cannot mean simply to make conscious and attunement which was previously unconscious. To awaken an attunement means, after all, to let it become and as such precisely to let it be. If, however, we make an attunement conscious, come to know of it and explicitly make the attunement itself into an object of knowledge, we achiever the contrary of an awakening. The attunement is precisely destroyed...
-Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (GA 29/30), §16, p. 61 [91-3]
That is, we had to go through the rigmarole to get here. Thus, this doesn't make the points about consciousness and unconsciousness and sleep invalid--indeed they can be seen as essential. I refer to the way of taking Heidegger's writings as a way or path that confers on certain parts of the presentation (the text or, here, lecture) a significance insofar as they develop the question at issue. But on this path, there are certain foreign elements, that just seem pulled in from elsewhere, say, in order to keep us on the path--like how dreams are suddenly cases of extremely animated consciousness. To me, these bits make reading a slog (perhaps in lecture they were more interesting).
All this is leading to a sort of distinction I want to make, which involves not just this experience of reading but the appearance of what I'm here calling foreignness in Heidegger's texts (and which makes me feel like reading is ugh, not exhilarating at all). What do we do with those moments that seem on the way, but only on the way--or rather really somewhat off the way, not even on a Holzwege? How do we see what is not on the way? Heidegger himself points out how certain phrases, say, like "die Sprache als die Sprache zur Sprache bringen," can look differently when seen on the way (to language, here) and not (where they become formulaic). But where do we draw the line?
Another way to think about this is that it troubles the notion of "reading Heidegger on his own terms." This, of course, doesn't mean reading only to agree with Heidegger--the confusion of the two is often the fate of dogmatic Heideggerians (sticking with the jargon, etc., in a way eerily similar to the way Derridians stick to the jargon, etc.). But it might at times mean something like stepping off the path or the way. That is, isn't there a difference between following the way, the path, and reading someone on their own terms?
Reading Heidegger is always a remarkable experience. It can be, at times, absolutely exhilarating. Other times it is a real slog. What's remarkable, though, is that none of this occurs in the regular way: what's exhilarating isn't typically exhilarating, what's a slog isn't like your usual slog (if I can say such a thing).
That is, what's exhilarating isn't happening upon anything new--though of course the first time you read Heidegger it is (if not confusing) unbelievable. It is rather that the sort of steps that you make unfold something to you concretely, and in a way that is somewhat unexpected (even if you know Heidegger). This is why I wish certain parts of Being and Time were longer... even though rereading these parts, or looking in other passages in Heidegger, will do the job of explicating whatever is at issue (and giving you deeper, even different insight). The analysis of space and Ent-fernung is one of these places.
And then the parts you slog through aren't exactly boring or confusing or difficult. They're just gaps where Heidegger seems just to need to get to someplace. Now, I'm not talking about the regular big chunks that everybody says are typical overgeneralizations of Heidegger--the way he will push an interpretation of someone (Nietzsche, say) onto a certain track, and then unfold the argument predictably, according to the general "status" he confers upon that track. I don't think that's really a productive way to see Heidegger working--you end up thinking he's always saying the same thing, when, even if he is (and I'm not sure of that), there's actually a lot of weird and interesting stuff all over the place. No, what I'm talking about is much smaller, and ultimately much less significant. I'll give an example. Heidegger is talking about how sleeping is not the same as not-being-there, and not-being-there is not the same thing as being unconscious:
After all, what we generally know about things, we know in terms of an unambiguous either/or. Things are either at hand or not at hand. [...] Human beings have a consciousness, and something can be at hand in them on which they know nothing. In that case it is presumably at hand in them, but not at hand in their consciousness. A stone either has a property or does not have it. We, on the contrary, can have something and at the same time not have it, that is, not know of it. We speak, after all, of the unconscious. In one respect it is at hand, and yet in another respect it is not at hand, namely insofar as it arises from the possibility of being conscious of something unconscious. This distinction between not being there in the sense of the unconscious and being there in the sense of what is conscious also seems to be equivalent to what we have in mind by awakening, specifically by the awakening of whatever is sleeping. yet can we straightforwardly equate sleep with the absence of consciousness? After all, there is also absence of consciousness in being unconscious (which cannot be identified with sleep), and a fortiori in death. This concept of the nonconscious, therefore, is much to broad, irrespective of the question as to whether it is at all suitable. Furthermore, sleep is not simply an absence of consciousness. On the contrary, we know that a peculiar and in many cases extremely animated consciousness pertains precisely to sleep, namely that of dreams, so that her the possibility of characterizing something using hte distinction "conscious/unconscious" indeed breaks down. Waking and sleeping are not equivalent to consciousness and unconsciousness.
-Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (GA 29/30), §16, p. 61 [91-3]
Now, everything is fine here--I'm not questioning Heidegger's point at all. But the "a fortiori in death" seems foreign to things, along with the fact that dreams, suddenly, are cases of "extremely animated consciousness." Where did this last point (that dreams are cases of consciousness) come from? It proves the point, yes, but where did Heidegger get it? I suddenly know I'll have to start hunting elsewhere for a better explanation, tying together the corpus. But, again, I'm not objecting, it all makes sense, I know why it is here: all this is here because the point we're getting to is the following:
To awaken an attunement cannot mean simply to make conscious and attunement which was previously unconscious. To awaken an attunement means, after all, to let it become and as such precisely to let it be. If, however, we make an attunement conscious, come to know of it and explicitly make the attunement itself into an object of knowledge, we achiever the contrary of an awakening. The attunement is precisely destroyed...
-Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (GA 29/30), §16, p. 61 [91-3]
That is, we had to go through the rigmarole to get here. Thus, this doesn't make the points about consciousness and unconsciousness and sleep invalid--indeed they can be seen as essential. I refer to the way of taking Heidegger's writings as a way or path that confers on certain parts of the presentation (the text or, here, lecture) a significance insofar as they develop the question at issue. But on this path, there are certain foreign elements, that just seem pulled in from elsewhere, say, in order to keep us on the path--like how dreams are suddenly cases of extremely animated consciousness. To me, these bits make reading a slog (perhaps in lecture they were more interesting).
All this is leading to a sort of distinction I want to make, which involves not just this experience of reading but the appearance of what I'm here calling foreignness in Heidegger's texts (and which makes me feel like reading is ugh, not exhilarating at all). What do we do with those moments that seem on the way, but only on the way--or rather really somewhat off the way, not even on a Holzwege? How do we see what is not on the way? Heidegger himself points out how certain phrases, say, like "die Sprache als die Sprache zur Sprache bringen," can look differently when seen on the way (to language, here) and not (where they become formulaic). But where do we draw the line?
Another way to think about this is that it troubles the notion of "reading Heidegger on his own terms." This, of course, doesn't mean reading only to agree with Heidegger--the confusion of the two is often the fate of dogmatic Heideggerians (sticking with the jargon, etc., in a way eerily similar to the way Derridians stick to the jargon, etc.). But it might at times mean something like stepping off the path or the way. That is, isn't there a difference between following the way, the path, and reading someone on their own terms?
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