Butler on Whitehead, Stengers, Latour

Judith Butler gave a really great lecture on Whitehead at a recent conference at Claremont (care of the Whitehead Research Project--who knew?). In "On this Occasion..." she also has a few remarks about Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour and a couple others (there is a knockdown discussion of Freud and melancholia in the Q and A section--condensing her arguments elsewhere and putting them in a different frame, as she does in general here with her previous work via Whitehead). The link here will open up iTunes, where the lecture is available in podcast form--I'll put up a more direct link if I find one.

Bad theory

Almost forty years now of theory widely practiced in the US--and we only have a general sense of what theory is. It's a notorious problem that is actually its own solution: theory is one of the only fields where knowledge doesn't know what it has to be. So perhaps we shouldn't ever have to lock down what it is. Neverthless, it has assumed certain shapes. These too should not be avoided or combated in the name of preserving continual micro-self-differentiation etc., etc. Rather, bad elements (that is, bad procedures, bad ways of writing into which we slip--bad theorizing rather than bad theoretical positions or theories) should be identified, isolated, and clipped off or left alone to wither. Here then is what might constitute the "bad theory" (and it should be clear that by "bad" I mean something like "defunct" or "spoiled") that we might just hesitate before putting into service yet again, in another empty denunciation of... what have you:

Theory gone bad is theory that tries to assure the unqualified prolongation of theory. Theory should be finite--more than that, it should continually, with each use, project the point at which it might not be of use. Thus even if you want to say theory is immanent to thought itself, and therefore finite in that respect (when thought dies out theory will die out too), it would still be avoiding the issue: the issue is that the production of something different than theory cannot just be problematized from the outside.

Ethical theory is theory gone bad. There is too much talk of ethics and responsibility now, and this produces a lot of bad theory. This is because the use of ethical terms is the quickest way to build a bridge between politics and theory, or rather the politicization that takes place as theory (as I've outlined before) and the realm of society in all its diffuseness. Perhaps it is an attempt to thicken the overquick linkages to the political realm which early theory indeed made. But there's no reason this has to take the form of ethics--except possibly because this allows theory to sound more relevant, to issue more injunctions. At it's limit, this involves the dissolution of everything political about theory into philosophy, which has always been too comfortable with staying out of politics as it is: why ethics and responsibiliy are semi-proper philosophical subjects is because politics often comes to interrupt and situate philosophical speculation, embarrassing it. Theory that strives to be philosophical (or pseudo-philosophical) shouldn't go down the same road. In this respect I agree even with the extreme assertion of Zizek that, within the period under consideration (1933 and a little after), Heidegger's politicization of his philosophy is more valuable than his outlines of the structures of proper philosophizing (in his courses especially) that borders on an ethics--which is what in general I take away from his recent consideration of Heidegger's joining the Nazis (in In Defense of Lost Causes). That doesn't at all make what Heidegger did right--as Zizek would crudely hold, himself couching things in an overblown ethical language which supposes that the value of this could have been disclosed to him personally and guided his action at the same time as that action could represent a value attributed after the fact, which we perceive as the imposition of politics on the situation (this language--increasingly Badiouian--confuses things almost completely, as I've said before regarding Zizek on this fraught issue). But to attribute such value means (however crudely or confusedly) to recognize that politics imposes itself continually and is actively contained and bracketed by philosophies as well as other forms of knowledge. Theory normally attempts to trace what is thereby left out--but with an ethical turn (which was foreshadowed in the "deconstructivism" practiced at Yale by de Man, where people preached to no end about responsibility in reading), it loses its vocation and becomes increasingly irrelevant. At the same time, and insofar as this irrelevance suffuses theory, "the political" comes up more and more, leading us to the next form of bad theory:

Reifying concepts in order to protect them from reification. Such, at least, is the strategy I see behind such ugly invocations of "the political" or "the social." This form of parody only lends itself to a high seriousness that undoes the reason for adopting the parodic gesture in the first place.

Similarly, bad theory trades in commonplaces. These include the use of phrases like "identity politics," which are most of the time just codes for a reactive movement against queer or feminist impacts upon the humanities. But "western metaphysics" is also a commonplace. Eventually, this trade in commonplaces (a dissolution of the commons?) results in a prohibition on experience itself, as each of these are traded in for something supposedly known (and never described in detail)--or turned back into their reified pseudo-philosophical counterpart by the move we just mentioned.

This is related to the bad-theoretical overuse of alterity as a concept. The dynamics in which alterity engages us are ultimately reductive and need to be reopened back up into the contexts (experiential) from which they emerge. Even if the concept is used to precisely fight reduction, to insist on irreducibility, it has become an uncreative way to reorganize a wide array of phenomena along too-familiar lines.

This is also the way that bad theory ends up relying too much on "language," and makes it into a homogenous field through which everything has to pass. Language isn't that important to good theory. Or, rather, when it becomes a crutch, it isn't language.

Next, bad theory quickly displaces social dynamics too quickly into theoretical terms. An example would be the oft cited "subordination of feminism by Marxism." What and who are we actually talking about here? It is here where Foucault's "discourse" comes in to save the day: when in doubt, say discourse does it. Theories of ideology, in comparison, have infinitely more subtlety--and that's saying something. In Foucault himself, the notion is structured (in the Archaeology of Knowledge) to get him out of precisely the dilemma this question (what? who?) produces, as it is posed to him by people who rightly were wondering just how he was able to coordinate so much information concerning the rise of the human sciences. While it's right to insist that the stratifications of discourse, as well as its effectivity (and by means of such insistence, discourse thereby becomes a richer concept in Judith Butler and Edward Said), this might not be enough to rescue the concept from its reduction to an empty field producing too many of those effects. Discourse has to be used more carefully, with more structuralist concepts brought in to thicken the mix.

Bad theory thinks of itself as avant-garde. It has an easy relationship to its own history that sadly ends up mirroring the simplistic histories of ideas which it was supposed to displace. In general, it proceeds as an arrogant new humanism by thinking of itself as a progressive adventure.

Bad theory thinks it only includes by opening itself to multiplicities. While the focus on alterity is reductive, it'd be wrong to see multiplicity as an alternative, or something that does the job better--even if one conceives of it "rightly" (that is, itself fraught with difference or composed only of differences and dimensions, as in Deleuze rather than in Laclau and Mouffe). Multiplicity might not always be the right thing to which a situation must be opened up or in terms of which it should be conceived. Something like totalization can be mobilized against universality and even unity and oneness, as in Sartre or Adorno.

This touches on another aspect of bad theory: it's unwillingness to use more than one or two theories. Bad theory is usually only one or two theories, which gets stuck to or followed to the letter. It's not yet dogma, because it has so much functionality and can in general also be illuminating. But it seeks to eliminate other theories or foreclose their imposition--which occurs often, and as an annoying conceptual muddle--precisely by extending the one position (and flattening or restricting itself so they can be assimilated without reducing them--which would require changing the current stance). Good theory is polyglot and patchwork: it knows when to shut up in one system and shift to another (in other words, it shouldn't proceed by increasing the number of prohibitions upon itself--something nearly all bad theory does--and then get angry at those who misunderstand the minimalist language). Just because the concept itself--here multiplicity--is actually structured (rigorously) in order not to foreclose something, doesn't mean everyone should see how it doesn't exclude something. Everyone shouldn't have to get on your page (or be immanent to whatever) to be on the same page. Moreover, theory should actually open itself up to other things at the edge of theory, which theory isn't--thus I insisted at the beginning on the finitude of theory, which now is rethought spatially--indeed like literary theory and literary analysis. This leads into my last characterization:

Bad theory thinks it itself is politics: while theory represents the politicization (if only by oblique suggestion) of various other fields and their materials and procedures, it has to be interrupted by something from outside itself--or, as theory, has to go someplace other than the lecture hall--in order to actually become something like activism. Along these lines, one shouldn't think that because one's theory says it does not separate a particular conception and politics (like in theoretical Spinozism), introducing the concept into an arena is not political, nor does it link the politicization that might (and only might) thereby occur to actual politics. It's not that there is a gap which we can never bridge--it is simply that politicization and politics itself requires this lack of certainty as to whether it is, in any instance, traversed, as I think Judith Butler (for one) outlines quite well.

Well, almost everything: Avatar

Let's just say (and without any spoilers), Avatar does a lot right that I said Star Trek does wrong. I was a little off in saying the movie does everything right, as I did in an overexcited tweet a couple days ago after seeing the movie. Star Trek might be the most lengthy popular meditation on what it means to stay within a world created by an SF series--and for that it deserves some serious credit, even if, by the cheap postmodern device of trauma (cheap, that is, when made formalistic--not when it appears as content) it often reduces this world to what is called a "franchise." Avatar instead is a mashup of all sorts of (properly) SF and fantasy devices (I mean to imply that trauma is not a generic-specific device, but one that typically disrupts things all across the board), from "unobtainum" to the concept of the avatar itself.

This doesn't mean at all that the movie is a ripoff--SF and fantasy, like any genre, work in this self-reflexive way (a way I don't think many commentators on the movie so far have really recognized, which is odd). I hesitate to call this way "intertextual," because that horribly vague concept precisely overlooks everything specific about genre (and more specifically form, but that's another post) which needs to be brought to bear upon any consideration of such works. Indeed, condemnations of the film as racist have to proceed as if it did not occupy any particular generic space. Thus, "Avatar is just Dances With Wolves" is the equation through which this critique makes its first steps, while it is only in reflecting upon that generic space (making allowances of course for the fact that it is pop-SF, or "scifi"--perhaps even "syfy"--that we're considering here, though that also opens up a question of genre from the inside as it were) that a condemnation really would gain its force. Of course, there are simply discursive codes that are racist, and there isn't any need to be more specific about them (one of the ways to remove the problems of racism is to suggest the accusation is only superficial): but the point is that the concept of code (when it remains only at the level of a wide-ranging discourse, and nothing more specific, like a filmic or even SF/fantasy code) may dissolve the presence of different racist elements in the work--and especially emerging elements, ones that don't fall into codified pattern.

Thus, what seems racist about the film is not the general portrayal of the Na'vi as othered in typical ways, but, I'll contend, the particular logic at work in their bodies as they intersect with the device of the avatar. The most important line of the film, for me, was the throwaway one which made this explicit: "I had to trust my body," the protagonist says. And is the properly SF situation that makes such a statement really weird and interesting and problematic: what does "my" mean when that is actually the body of something or someone else (the thing/person status of the avatar itself--a body grown for another--is really quite uncanny and disturbing when, even with the use of a pronoun, one begins to restore to it something like the capacity for its own control of itself)? Once we see that the whole colonial problem that is the main focus of the film emerges here in this scene of education in appropriation, the problems provoked by the presence or absence of racist codes have to transform.

But it isn't just appropriation that is at issue here, and this is the first way that the transformation occurs. What is almost more important than the question of who controls this body, or who is proper to this body in any vague sense (the sense in which postmodern theory stretches Heideggerian themes to sometimes foreclose less seemly questions of who owns this body--a question I'll just leave on the table, or take up later), is the way the body works in the film. The new motion capture cameras invented to shoot the picture most definitely come into play here--as well as the fact that it really a film made for 3D (I really recommend you see the film in 3D: if I saw it in 2D I think it would just be somewhat ordinary). It'd be crude to read the whole avatar concept, as deployed, as an allegory for this new motion capture technology (de Manian allegory is always a reduction of content to form masquerading as an opening of form--which mysteriously turns into language itself via a mystification of rhetoric--to content), but if this can give you a sense of the connectedness between the film's use of this technology and the issues central to the story and its development, then it might be worth suggesting. The technology quite simply signals the death of Jar-Jar, allowing for the seamless transition between closeups and full-body CG rendering of action, and then from CG to non-CG shots of the actors. The CG characters thus lose their CG-ness, and I'm actually quite certain that reports of the uncanny-valley experience still being made by people who have seen the film are really just mistaken registrations of the uncertainty produced by the concept of the avatar itself--in other words registrations of the plot. With the introduction of this technology, the valley frankly has been crossed, though of course by a sort of cheating--you are, through the CG, watching actual faces after all--which actually betrays the fact this isn't a technological "advance" (as it is being characterized and marketed, in a typical determinist manner) so much as a proper displacement of the old problem into an area where it now opens up new avenues (think of what the rumored Ghostbusters 3 would be like if it used aspects of this technology for ghosts!). And what this all allows is first and foremost--and finally!--a subordination of your interest in the CG-ness of the characters to your genuine concern with their activity. No longer, that is, do we care about the fact that a character is more or less "realistic." This is important because the suspension of the question about reality lets in fiction itself (and which makes possible something so far only really attempted by Pixar and others with natural scenery --vraisemblance).

When this is combined with the fact that the film is made for 3D, the effect is to make the problem of the body distinguish itself from the problem of any sort of representation of that body. For in these elaborately built 3D spaces, full of palm fronds, vines, waterfalls and bugs  in the foreground that your eye avoids, and backgrounds of stars, planets, or huge mechanical spaces into which you are drawn--in a spatial sense, almost on the level of basic motility (these spaces are brought closer to you, one critic rightly said)--the avatar body can move and interact and refuse to sit there as a spectacle. In other words the 3D aspect of the film stratifies or complexifies the environment against which the body is moving as much as the new motion capture deals with the body's most important surface aspects, such that both become something you deal with rather than look at (as you would deal with a landscape as opposed to a landscape painting: there are multiple points of entry into the former, say, while the latter--even if painted in the picturesque tradition--only attempts to give you those). This differentiation achieved, the problems in the representation of the body can return as part of the problems raised by those bodies.

Thus, within your experience of these bodies on-screen, you begin to notice that the avatar body, and the alien species of which it is a modification, take on problematic shapes. Besides the fact--way, way underutilized--that the Na'vi are about twice as big as humans, they remain somewhat boringly humanoid, except for their little neural hook-ups that connect them to the planet eco-network (but I won't get too specific). This is different with the animals, which are simply the most amazing things in the film because they blend SF and fantasy so well: they remain sufficiently alien while they also behave almost like magical companions--and yet the balance always is tilted in favor of the alien (it can only be tamed through work, not through immaterial communion with it) but without the easy move of making the animal into a monster. One gets the sense--and it is the real achievement of this film--that the creatures work in many different and interesting ways. I think Cameron wanted the Na'vi to be something similar: thus their larger catlike ears, eyes, and, of course, nose (the most significant sign of differentiation), and their tails. But the film seems to founder here: a culture has to be built, and that seems to do the work of erasing the animal in them. Or, more probably, a vitalism and spiritualism--to which we'll return--comes in to take over the animal aspect, and dissolve whatever was interesting about it in the bodily realm.

And now is when we begin to notice that the aliens all remain exceedingly fit, slim, and trim--there's not a pudgy one in sight. And it is here that I think a critique can be levied--now that we have also hit a terrain also familiar to feminism: fitness is allied with race here in a weird way, to do the work of making this alien body alien. In the place of something like a completely different anatomy (always a possibility, though it is perhaps the easiest--and indeed it is explored with the animals themselves), or any other qualitative difference, we have some implication that the aliens experience their bodies more. And this sheer quantitative differentiation does not produce any significantly different "trust" of the body--which is what, I think, would be required here for a genuine experience of the alien as opposed to what it can always (and too easily) be dissolved into: race and sex. The film tries to balance this (along a technology/nature binary) by setting up the colonizers as fit and powerful (something like a different kind of fitness)--even to the extent that they make the protagonist's body get a little flabby the more time he spends as his (increasingly fit) avatar--but it's not really convincing when we gawk at sweaty seething flesh moving rhythmically in ritual (like in Riefenstahl's weird and obsessive late photos). Everything gets leveled to some sort of bodily experience aligned with a re-discovered naturalness (that is, artificiality--or rather the artificial flow between them which can magically partake of both) and then to sexuality, which--besides lacking any gender differentiation or play (women are either reduced to Amazons [i.e. men] or lusty nubile objects)--offers less bodily possibilities precisely as we're meant to think it offers more (and in a way that seems similar to how many theorists talk about "the bodily," taken as a site of pure, uninterrupted or uncitational production).

But, these problems now have to be routed through plot, insofar as the real subordination made possible by the new technology's subordination of spectacle to action is that of all the visuals to the story. What I thought was really lamentable in Star Trek was that this relationship to plot was never set up. Characters were there only, surrounded by a really interesting visual experience. And while characters can generate plot (the best example being Arrested Development), Star Trek decided to turn in circles with the most minimal story--that of trauma. In fact, it even subordinated the most interesting character to this story, as if the character himself wasn't interesting enough: we become familiar with Spock through his trauma, as if the only real relationship with a character that we could have is that of a shared and ultimately minimal void... While this perhaps cleanly avoids issues of race that the alien brings up by draining all of those problems--remember, Spock is an alien--into a trauma that is apparently pan-species (an old, and typical, postmodern displacement of humanism: the "everybody's trauma" or formalistic/constitutive trauma of Cathy Caruth) I'd frankly rather risk an encounter with that (and isn't the possibility of that encounter precisely constitutive of SF itself as a genre?) to see a genuine story--or something, at least, that will make issues out of all these minimal markers. While the plot of Avatar might be a bit too old and oversimple (Cameron himself admits as much), this is what the movie achieves. The real feeling of an "advance" in the technology I think stems from this: that now the CG people and the actors can be on the same team for once, and try to tell a story together through the technical setup. It's in this sense that Jar-Jar is really dead (along with, perhaps, Shrek and Nemo: animation itself can now go down a really interesting route that rotoscoping perhaps only really traveled on seriously before).

So when it comes to plot, the problematic racial relation to the body is solved by a disturbing ending, that affirms the pleasures of conversion into this avatar body rather than make it interesting. Here religion (into which fantasy elements easily slip, though--like in Harry Potter--they don't have to) come back to interrupt whatever was properly sci-fi about the whole situation (though religion and science fiction are also not opposites: see VALIS for the most amazing, if perhaps too soft-SF and self-reflexive, example). And, more than that, they make us question what was scifi to begin with about the various biological neural "networks" that connect the whole planet together: the scientific explanation only really becomes science-fictional when it loses its ties to empty spiritualism. And while the whole movie provides an immersive ecological experience that is sure to drive the importance of biodiversity home to anyone who sees it (and counter cynical religious anti-science drivel), unless it provides something more than an optional scientific explanation for relations between the Na'vi body and its environment--for that is how it is presented--we regress. Something like a real experience of this relation (which is what is required) is, indeed, brought home right before the ending--in the planet-wide rebellion against the colonizers (I try to remain vague so as not to spoil), on a scale that is large enough to render nature itself alien (again). But then the ending kills that off and makes these relations spiritual and familiar.

Derrida, de Man, materialism

Photo by Hendrick Speck

In Memoires for Paul de Man, Derrida somehow claims that de Man's assertions about the materiality of language constitute "an original materialism:"

There is a theme of "materiality," indeed an original materialism in de Man. It concerns a "matter" which does not fit the classical philosophical definitions of metaphysical materialisms any more than the sensible representations or the images of matter defined by the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. Matter, a matter without presence and without substance, is what resists these oppositions. We have just placed this resistance on the side of thought, in its strange connivance with materiality.
-Memoires, 52

The last sentence, which summarizes de Man's position, is accurate. But I might claim roundly (despite various problems here: "matter" might also have resonance with Sache; "original" obviously also refers to how this "connivance" is immediately afterward said to relate to history, 53) that Derrida just can't be sure whether de Man's notion of matter "does not fit the classical philosophical definitions of metaphysical materialisms." This is not because de Man's concept of materiality is somehow redolent of a particular metaphysical materialism. Rather it is because the strange connivance with materiality is not an assured connivance in de Man. Or rather, it is only that, a connivance--which takes place only because de Man is indeed so assured about it. And this can't be overlooked merely because de Man's definition of matter, while it might not fit the classical definitions of materialisms, also does not fit "any more than" what we might call one of those definitions (but not necessarily merely one of them--Derrida is reserving the possibility for the sensible/intelligible opposition to be articulated otherwise) which it may or may not resemble. (Derrida is working too hard here to allow himself a way out from de Man's claims. We can't let that act in itself constitute what he also is doing, which is trying to inflect de Man differently, to deconstruct de Man's text.)

In short, we might say that, even if de Man's materialism isn't a materiality of the signifier, it is a materiality of the mark or the letter. And for Derrida, there should be no way that this mark is material, if we're going to be in any degree respectful of, or at least responsible for, the history of that word (which is how deconstruction proceeds--in a manner I might even call too historical for my taste, despite the old inane charge of ahistoricicity brought by the historicists).

For Derrida--just to go over some basics, and in too simple a language--the mark is empirical, and to the extent that the empirical is said to grasp the material (which is already not assured), the mark is therefore material. But any time this mark is taken up, it submits itself to a power of repetition, an iterability, which is ideal and which actually disturbs any notion of materiality or empiricity that we have attributed to it. For when the mark becomes capable of repetition--indeed in proportion to the increase in that power of repetition--it its history is marked in turn as already capable of repetition. And this double marking, this marking prior to it becoming a mark, means that it has already been a trace of itself, and has indeed been capable of repetition otherwise than how it is repeated in being taken up, in being assumed, we might say. As such, the mark remains, in its "materiality," always already participant in some ideality. And the trace itself, the marking of the mark, has itself only to be the possibility of materiality, and is as such "ideal." I put quotes around this because it is, qua ideal, also and only barely ideal, if I can say this: Gayatri Spivak uses the phrase "minimal idealization," and Judith Butler uses the word I've already employed, "ideality"--each of which I think describes this trace in this context of the material/ideal opposition quite well. That is, the trace is ideal to the extent that in this context) we respect the fact that it cannot be empirically determined, and thus is not material, unless of course we conceive empiricism differently--which means, of course, conceiving matter and materialism differently. This, by the way, is how that empiricism can indeed be "radical" in Derrida--in a sense in which I alluded to in my comments to a previous post, and which underlies what I say in another post on Derrida and science (though I critiqued this notion of "radicalism," which I think can be thought differently). Or rather this is how empiricism can knock away metaphysics (presupposing this latter concept is taken in a rough Heideggerian manner). The point is that this "ideal" aspect of the trace, this ideality, can also equally be described by Derrida as a "nonideal exteriority" (Positions, 65): it disrupts the notion of the ideal that we have. But what is important here is that while the trace is a nonideal exteriority, it is also, therefore, not at all material.

In no way then, can the trace, as what disturbs classical philosophical definitions of matter, be said itself to be material in any assured way (nor, then, can the mark--if these are marks of violence, we precisely have to think how far materiality as a concept allows us to think such violence). It has to remain, on some level, minimally ideal (such that it can always also be said to be nonideal). So this means that when we try to think a materialism differently (which, as I've tried to stress, is also is tied to the project of thinking empiricism differently--but which can also involve rethinking dialectical materialism, say, where the material is not so linked to the empirical but rather to the opposition to the ideal qua Geistlich), and come up with a notion of matter that is "without presence and without substance," this matter has ideality, because it is a trace, the possibility or impossibility, of such a matter. In de Man, however, because the trace has ideality we have to say that it is material ("the only word that comes to mind is that of a material vision," "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," 82). And in no way should we say that this constitutes a materialism: it is in fact, precisely an idealism which Derrida, by insisting on ideality (a nonideal exteriority which cannot yet be said to be material), resists.

One should also add that Derrida takes up these de Manian issues again in "Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)," inflecting them through his attempt to think materiality and spectrality together--that is, to think materiality otherwise, in Specters of Marx. His remarks there (which give body precisely to what he means by "nonideal") are much more adequate and interesting. I would say though, that to pull Derrida's nonideality more in the direction of the ideal can't really be insisted upon enough in America, where the trace is too often thought of as material--given the influence of de Man. In fact, what I'd say is that everything in the following passage on "materialism" and "matter" needs to be replaced with "idealism" and the "ideal," to also understand the particular type of materiality Derrida is talking about and how it would resist a de Manian materiality:

If have not very often used the word "matter," it is not, as you know, because of some idealist or spiritualist kind of reservation. It is that the logic of the phase of overturning this concept has been too often reinvested with "logocentric" values, values associated with those of thing. [...] This is why I will not say that the concept of matter is in and of itself either metaphysical or nonmetaphysical. This depends on the work which it yields, and you know that I have unceasingly insisted, as concerns the nonideal exteriority of writing, the gram, the trace, the text, etc., upon the necessity of never separating them from work, a value itself to be rethought outside its Hegelian affiliation.
-Positions, 64-65

The social symbolic

If, then, what is called “the symbolic” encodes a socially sedimented heterosexual pathos, how ought the relation between the social and the symbolic to be reconfigured? If the symbolic is subject to rearticulation under the pressure of social arrangements, how might that be described, and will such descriptions trouble any effort to draw a clear distinction between the social and the symbolic? Has the social—within postmarxism—become equated with the descriptively given, and how might ideality (possibility, transformability) be reintroduced into feminist accounts of the social? Such a project would refuse the simple conflation of the domain of the social with what is socially given or already constituted, and reformulate a Marxian account of social transformation outside of implausible historical teleologies. To the extent that views of social transformation have relied on such teleological accounts of history, it seems imperative to separate the question of transformation from teleology. Otherwise, the site of political expectation becomes precisely the incommensurability between a symbolic and a social domain, one in which the symbolic now encodes precisely the ideality evacuated, after Marxism, from the domain of the social.
-Judith Butler, "Against Proper Objects"

To the question "Has the social—within postmarxism—become equated with the descriptively given," one can only answer yes, and it is Butler's ingenuity both to locate this problem unashamedly within the postmarxist discourse in which she works (not unlike Derrida) and resist it through a notion of power's psyche (involving insubordination through iterability and/or resistance in interpellation: see The Psychic Life of Power for the most breathtaking formulation of all this). The Lacanian and Foucauldian (and Deleuzian, perhaps) orientations only get so far in actually outlining what the social actually is: it is in their interest to displace it into some homogeneous symbolic arena or into the pure play of the social itself, placing a huge gap where the question of agency is left suspended at best, and the possibility of collective action continually deteriorates. There are two possibilities for getting out of this particular bind: I see one in Butler, and the other in Fredric Jameson (who would not do so "within postmarxism")--although the Gramscians perhaps also remain a possibility and I think they might be reconciled somewhat to Butler's position (Jameson, however, is also sympathetic to Gramsci). Both seem to recognize the same location of the problem, however--it is right here...

Heidegger, Affect, Performativity

It has always surprised me how little Heidegger's conception of mood or attunement (Stimmung) is used by theorists of affect. It's a very rich concept, and in fact it is one of Heidegger's most significant contributions to philosophy that he rigorously thought it out: he rescued it (with Husserl, and, in a different quarter, Bergson) from the oblivion to which epistemology-centered work had consigned it, arguing it had more significance than as an external accident of psychology.
Perhaps this is the case because the body doesn't make too many significant appearances in Heidegger (unlike Husserl and Bergson): the circuit between body and mood might have to be a bit more elaborated for them to pick it up. But Heidegger does indeed make inroads into this connection (especially in his seminars), so the problem seems deeper than this.
A clue is given from these theorists' reliance on psychology. It is as if we get that odd connection Husserl and Bergson were making between the psychology and a larger structure of existence, without Heidegger's development of it into an existential structure that depends on a real rich conception of being. That is, it is as if philosophy just before Heidegger has returned in this area with a vengeance, to the precise exclusion of Heidegger.
This proves one thing: people want to subtract being from theories of affect. This makes total sense: the proliferation of performativity as a conception of identity precisely junked being in the area of selfhood, where anticipation and historicity were, so what remains is to explain affect while junking its dependence on mood or attunement too.
I don't think this is a mistake, personally, but I do think since affect has been much more maligned as a phenomenon than selfhood, these theorists might be losing something significant. They are losing, first and foremost, an idea of the coherence or structuredness of affect--or, since coherence and structuredness get thought otherwise in performative theories of identity, I should probably say an idea of function. Affect functions. It leads you into other states. The biggest problem with studies of affect that I see is that, fundamentally, because everything is performative, there is no ability to distinguish between affects: shame might be different than anxiety, but there's no way to explain that, because in the end it all really just collapses into performativity. Again, this collapse is great--I like performativity--it's just that we're not able to explain affects (in the plural) as accurately as we seem to want by way of it.
Fundamentally, I think there is a problem of phenomenality involved. Performativity is a theory of identity that disturbs (delays and defers) phenomenality. This brings it beyond Heidegger. But this same disturbance cannot exactly take place with affect, though it should: the real interesting thing about performative theories of affect is that there should be no subordination of affect to identity, precisely as there is in Heidegger. But this occurs: not because studies of affect perpetuate the old subordination, but because if they don't do it, affect becomes performativity, as we were saying. The two have the same function--to subvert the subject. The subordination remains, then, but for a different reason.
What this does though is--oddly--to make affect function more phenomenally than identity. This leads to--and this is a real regression--the desire to want to explain certain aspects of how one really does feel like when they are sad, or anxious, or whatever. But this is to precisely undo the contribution that performativity makes to the study of identity: it doesn't matter how you "really are," because you are determined (subverted) otherwise than that--in other words, the basis of your identity is not in being, so the question of authenticity (which is the phenomenological question par excellence) isn't relevant.
I think we need, then, to turn the focus on affect around: this would bring us to consider the link between a particular affect and all performative aspects of a self, and why one in the end can't be distinguished from the other. It would bring us to the problem of how to distinguish otherwise--and it would do this precisely in opposition to the tendency to try and explain affect based on how we really feel in a situation.
And oddly, I think, this would bring us back to Heidegger. For what Heidegger has some very rigorous functions ascribed to affects--and different affects, by the way--which we can study. If we can somehow extricate ourselves from their focus on being, we might then see that what is performatively subverted in the realm of affect is precisely a certain understanding of the functions of various affects. This would seem to be closer to the real thrust of performance, as we find in Butler, for example: the issue is not exactly to constitute a self that is free of all constraints, but to have a self that does this only by deconstructing the particular understandings (that is, phenomenologies) of roles that exist.
This has been sketchy at best (especially the last part, of which I'm really not sure), but I hope to revise this over the next few days and somewhat make it all clearer. The important thing for now was outlining the path of the thought.

Reading Foucault

The following articulates of course the fundamental thesis of Surveiller et punir and La Volonté de savoir: power is productive, not repressive; it sustains instead of kills off; it directs rather than impedes; it disperses rather than gathers:

In defining the effects of power as repression, one adopts a purely juridical conception of such power, one identifies power with a law which says no, power is taken above all as carrying the force of a prohibition. Now I believe that this is a wholly negative, narrow, skeletal conception of power, one which has been curiously widespread. If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it?
From "Truth and Power" in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 119.

But the last sentence here--"If power were never anything but repressive... do you really think one would be brought to obey it?"--lets us come away with two very different views of all this, two views that, because of how Foucault has been interpreted in America, we continually need to distinguish between. (This is not just corrective: it is also good practice. If theoria had connections with eudaimonia once, it was precisely because it was as much exercise as it was contemplation. Thinking as production of the new is quite a limited conception of thinking.) This sentence of Foucault can mean,

1. That a system (let's just posit a system distinct from power for now to keep things straight) in which power only said no, where it was only repressive, could not really allow for people to obey power. People obey power when they are suffused, sustained, stretched across the span of power's distribution, precisely insofar as they resist power or (what is not the same thing) free themselves from all sorts of constraints.
2. That a system in which power only said no could not allow for people to obey power, so power is crafty, cunning. How could one obey power if it were merely repressive? It must be more devious than that.

The second reading is the popular view of Foucault, thanks to the way we now read him: our emphasis is upon punishment and upon institutions much more than on knowledge and on the body. This is not to say we don't read and think about all the other dimensions of power: it is just that our understanding of Foucault on things like the production of knowledges in their more abstract forms (the human sciences, the sciences in general) and the exercise and attention to the body in a less immediately violent way (dieting, etc.) are so thoroughly colored by this emphasis that we do not see how, for Foucault, the first reading already contains the second. The second reading is, in fact, extremely superfluous, and verges on a crude personification of power--precisely when power is for Foucault something extremely non-human. There is no cunning going on, for Foucault. Power does not find new ways of making its way into ways of resisting it: it is not that inescapable, this inevitable, even if it is this pervasive. Power is more technological, even more mechanical than that.
But an objection is raised: if power isn't cunning, then we, we who affirm this, we must not be acquainted with the horror of power being actually exercised. We would never say that power was not cunning, was not something that contrived to crush bodies even when bodies resisted power--we would not say this if we saw power being used in certain ways. We make Foucault seem rosy precisely when he is talking about something that works in prisons.
My reply would be that this objection is made from the standpoint that Foucault is trying to break with by talking about power. It is a standpoint that needs to see power exercised, if not as repression, then as violence. In short, power must remain insidious from this standpoint--for all intents and purposes, bad--even if in order to analyze it we have to look at it more complexly than as repression. But this, I hold, is merely displacing repression, sticking it into power. There is a more rigorous way to read Foucault which does not do this. For this view wants to escape power. One has to think of ways of designing schools, organizing communities, building spaces that precisely are full to the brim with power, not shy away from this task as if power in itself was something evil, something that, if it did not make people repress it, marked them with its violence. Power is indifferent, and that is why it is so dangerous. And it does not really get dangerous for any other reason.

Now, don't get me wrong: power produces violence--it sustains violence of all kinds. But the viewpoint in question here and from which the objection was raised--that power can only not be repressive if it is some sort of cunning, some sort of pervasiveness or weight that invades even attempts to resist it--misses the point: that the production of knowledge can even exercise violence without being insidious. Far from evading issues of the most horrific violence--like trauma--ours is in fact a statement that precisely seeks to account for them. Violence without intent, purpose, meaning: this is a possibility of power, but it does not immediately make power bad, and that is why we must analyze it. In short, we do not need to see violence in order to see power, and we do not immediately need to see power as the direct cause of violence where we see violence. Rather, power is light, it is a subtle web, it is barely there, it subtends both blows and caresses, precisely when one is not equatable the other (when a caress is just a caress, and a blow, a cut--just that). But why is it so hard for us to look at things this way? Why do we need to see violence in order to verify that power has been at work?
Because we (in America) are, in a sense, still getting used to reading without suspicion, still getting used to the break with hermeneutics that Foucault and others have allowed us to make. Historicism and crude deconstruction (and not just these, but a whole set of silly factors and tendencies that supported them) have made us so suspicious of various texts, so eager to see the violence that they perpetrate, to bring it to light as testimony to the complicity of a party in the textual process that we are extracting, that we cannot in fact talk about the systematicity of violence, its indifference to interpretation at the level of its most organized, routinized, and ghastly unfolding. Only recently are we figuring out that terms like "power" were precisely used by Foucault for indeed talking about precisely this systematicity, about the way violence may be perpetrated but not experienced. If we realize this, we realize what Foucault means by talking about the "positivity" of power. Power can produce an object that is not violent, nor seeks violence. It doesn't mean that everything is complicit, but that we indeed can account for both violent and nonviolent acts. (I know this sounds ridiculous from another perspective, but indeed there are those who generalize so much that they say nearly every act is violence--this betrays a crude ontologizing of the violent which, while not wrong in principle, definitely subverts any ability to see degrees. On the other hand, from that very perspective this sounds indifferent to violence and betrays a willingness to classify some acts as violent and others as not. What I would say to these people is that even and actually primarily Derrida is the one who asserts the necessity of this precise classification to occur. The point is to make it strategic--there won't be a way of escaping it.) In the end, one needs to think of the power in the caress: not as its assault upon another body, but as the control and lack of control subtending every motion, every force within the hand. Only then will we realize--and not the other way around--how thin a line would indeed be needed to turn this into a blow.

This is what Gayatri Spivak just a few years ago (and she was one of the first in America--along with Judith Butler, who did an immensely better job with all this) found out to her amazement, only to conclude precisely the wrong things about it: Foucault was breaking with hermeneutics! Was breaking with the need for us to explain or tease out a meaning that we experience in a text! She then composed "More on Power/Knowledge," and, more recently, in her A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, which immediately link Foucault with Derrida. Even though she tries to respect the difference between them, this impulse to connect or even place side by side shows the poverty of the American academy in its reception of an anti-hermeneutic tradition (the same goes for me below, when I did this as well a little in a post or two). Two people couldn't be as far apart as Foucault and Derrida, and yet we think they are on the same page. Moreover, as usual, this leads her to think of Foucault as somehow not facing up to the Derridian truth of things--the impossibly insane standard that Derrida's ethics/metaphysics-nonmetaphysics has set for any interpretation. This leads her in the A Critique to dismiss Foucault when he says the following:

One can perfectly well not talk about something because one doesn't know about it, not because one has a knowledge which is unconscious and therefore inaccessible.
-"Questions on Geography," in Power/Knowledge, 66.

First, Spivak (and this is a revised version of "Can the Subaltern Speak?"--the position hasn't changed in 15 years) quotes Foucault out of context. Second, she submits him precisely to the Derridian standard. Third, she thereby doesn't actually listen to what he is saying or the fact that this is precisely one of the places she could have--mistakenly, again--seen Derrida and Foucault precisely on the same "side."
The important thing about this quote (which I will reproduce in full below) is the part "which is unconscious and therefore inaccessible." Why? Because Foucault is talking precisely resisting the impulse to think of not speaking about something, about being silent, as an instance of repressing something one should have said. A statement can just indeed reside there, and others can just simply remain absent. The fact that both are this way does not mean that they are lacking something else. This is the whole point of discursive analysis: merely to describe the things there and their possibilities for being different than they are without resorting to the language of lack to fill out how these possibilities are possibilities. This is why the whole quote goes like this: he is responding to geographers who said he should have included geography in The Order of Things and Discipline and Punish, but lacked it, and says in reply to them,

I hesitate to reply only by means of factual arguments, but I think that here again there is a will to essentiality which one should mistrust, which consists in saying, "if you don't talk about something it must be because you are impeded by some major obstacle which we shall proceed to uncover." One can perfectly well not talk about something because one doesn't know about it, not because one has a knowledge which is unconscious and therefore inaccessible. You asked if geography has a place in the archaeology of knowledge. Finding a place for geography would imply that the archaeology of knowledge embraces a project of global, exhaustive coverage of all domains of knowledge. This is not at all what I had in mind. Archaeology of knowledge only ever means a certain mode of approach.
-"Questions on Geography," 66.

What Spivak does, like those who conceive of power not as repression but as violence, is displace the repression they really do attribute to Foucault (because Foucault should have been talking about X--in Spivak's case it is because Foucault should have just been Derrida, who is nearly always right), into a sort of violence that hangs about along with the fact that there is a non-address of something. But what Foucault is saying is that supposing, on the one hand, repression, and on the other (which we can read into this), the inability to conform to an infinite ethics (tout autre est tout autre, the nonstatement should have been in itself a statement beyond its being a nonstatement), both move to quickly to dismiss the ability for a statement not to be there and be sustained (only) by a positive, light force--a force or power that distributes itself all about. They also therefore make violence into everything, and do not see the specificity of its tenuous relationship to the said and the unsaid precisely in that statement or nonstatement that was there or was not but was there as possible (i.e. not in its possibility, but in its being there as possible).
In the end, because power is everywhere this precisely does not mean that we have to be suspicious. It means that we need to be descriptive. I will find the Spivak and quote it in full in the near future (my book is away from here now). But the point of all this is to promote, ultimately, a reading of power into The Order of Things: we are too hesitant to see power operative in this book as it does in the later works or, more crudely (not as the fully theorized form of power) in the earlier works. Foucault periodizes his thought so much that we in America, who are seeking a representative Foucault, only look at the one period we think is most "mature." What this does is exile a whole domain of thinking about knowledges precisely in their systematicity and transformation as sustained by power. While one can't do this totally rigorously (the concept just isn't there), it would be better to do this than find new domains where power just is violent and bad and oppressive, like so many historicists have done.

The body of Jean-Luc Nancy performs

Nancy's magnificent essay "Corpus," in The Birth To Presence, would do much for anyone trying to link a more phenomenological tradition of thought about the body and embodiment, culminating in the reflections of Merleau-Ponty that seem today to be gaining in popularity (and will be gaining even more, with the upcoming publication of Sean Kelly's new translation of The Phenomenology of Perception), to those reflections on embodiment that have perhaps more recently arisen (though, through Foucault, one could say that their origins are the same) in work on performativity. Nancy essentially could be said to--like Derrida--take the theses of the latter tradition and elaborate them in the language of the former--though perhaps with more intent than Derrida to elaborate, rather than focus on the resistances or misreadings this elaboration would also constitute. In short, Nancy makes the performative body thinkable in terms not of performativity but of the body "itself:" that task which Judith Butler attempts so nobly and rigorously within terms of performativity (and power) in Bodies that Matter.

Merleau-Ponty held that the body was a basic disposition or structure of intentionality constituting a particular point of view. This has the effect of reversing the oldest conception of the body in the way Nancy describes:

...one had to dispense with the body, with the very idea of the body. The body was born in Plato's cave, or rather it was conceived and shaped in the form of the cave: as a prison or tomb of the soul, and the body first was thought from the inside, as buried darkness into which light only penetrates in the form of reflections, and reality only in the form of shadows. This body is seen from the inside, as in the common but anguishing fantasy of seeing the mother's body from the inside, as in the fantasy of inhabiting one's own belly, without father or mother, before any father and bother, before all sex and all reproduction, and of getting hold of oneself there, as a nocturnal eye open to a world of chains and simulacra. This body is first and interiority dedicated to images, and to the knowledge of images; it is the "inside" of representation, and at the same time the representation of that "inside."

-"Corpus," The Birth to Presence, 191-2

Merleau-Ponty shows that the body itself must, prior to being this inside, create this insideness. In other words, it must be outside its inside, ek-statically, as an interface with the world that juts out into it. The body is outside, for Merleau-Ponty (for some merits of this view and the amazingness of Merleau-Ponty more generally, see one of my earlier posts on him).

But can this body itself be viewed by itself? It is here that the question of performativity would come up: one would be viewing one's own body from the outside. The difficulty of this for Merleau-Ponty is that viewing as such requires that the body precisely be unable to view itself. It turns back on itself, but can never quite slip out of its own grip on itself to fully, coherently, see itself. This would require it remove itself from its bodily, embodied perspective (to the third-person perspective that he says science studies), which Merleau-Ponty holds to be impossible. And it would have to do this precisely without overshooting itself or viewing itself past or beyond or outside itself. This is really the crux of the problem, and why the impossibility is there in the first place. Merleau-Ponty thinks intentionality can only be unidirectional, fundamentally, because (this is ultimately a Heideggerian claim which Merleau-Ponty does not make well in The Phenomenology of Perception; precisely because he is not trying to run into the problems Heidegger encountered in expanding and refuting Husserl's "Internal Time-Consciousness" essay; in other words, he sticks close to Husserl against Heidegger to be more Heideggerian than Heidegger) the body is temporal and finite. It temporalizes itself, or bursts forward towards the world temporally from... the inside. Or rather, an outside that can only gain coherence by equally being the most inside of insides. By being outside, by structuring the Platonic inside, Merleau-Ponty is really positing just an inside that is prior to the inside. At least in The Phenomenology of Perception. He moves beyond this in his later work, most notably The Visible and the Invisible. Of course this view might be the only one that makes sense to some people, most notably those just discovering Merleau-Ponty and using him to counter representationalist theories of perception and action either phenomenologically or in computational models (cf. Dreyfus, Taylor, Kelly, even Davidson etc.).

But it cannot account for performativity. This is probably why, despite the affinity that one might think resides between Butler and Merleau-Ponty in their concern for the bodily (and that some unthinking critics looking for new theoretical combinations have mistakenly asserted exists in their statements about the body), Butler does not engage him.

Merleau-Ponty holds an interesting and somewhat controversial (though, upon some reflection, completely intuitive) view regarding the objects that our body intends towards: they can be viewed (or, in general, related or intended to) from all angles. This means that when I am outside and my body sees a house across the street, I am seeing the back of the house as well as the side "facing" me. Why? Because my intention must already be relating beyond what is represented to the general presence of the house which my body recognizes. The house is part of a field of action or intention that could include me going behind the house: thus my body (perhaps more dimly) can be said to perceive the "back" of the house when I perceive its "front."

The question Nancy is asking, then, would be about how the body itself could be viewed like this. And viewed like this while also remaining that body that is viewing. In other words, how can the body view (we are using vision, because it is the easiest example) itself? This is the question of performance: the body must somehow remain itself at the same time as it performs or makes viewable (to this very body and to others--and we should note that we are only loosely using "viewable" here as a synonym for performance: we mean viewable only in the sense that the body is "viewing" or "seeing," not that performance has to do with mere exhibition as such) this self. To use a different sense: it would be like trying to hear oneself speak in the first and third person at the same time about oneself. And another (and this is a famous example): it would be like trying to touch oneself touching (take one arm and with a finger touch the other, trying to be touched in the second arm and feel the touching in the finger of the first arm at the same time).

Nancy claims throughout "Corpus" that this is precisely what the body does--and, we must add, thoroughly fails to do. At the point at which the body would see itself (and see all of itself, every angle of itself, like the house), it would precisely be failing to see itself: not because it is really still "inside" itself in being beyond itself and thus misses itself, but exactly for the reason that it does not miss itself and sees itself. It actually does hear itself speak in the first and third person, and this is why it becomes, as it were, deaf to itself. Or, with the example of touch, it touches itself touching and yet touches as itself: it touches itself and is touched by itself. Because this means it is no longer an "itself:" the body is external to itself, then, but not because it is beyond itself by virtue of some intention. It is because this "itself" is ("itself") an externality. In other words, it is "shared out of itself," partes extra partes:

...here, at the body, there is the sense of touch, the touch of the thing, which touches "itself" without an "itself" where it can get at itself, and which is touched and moved in this unbound sense of touch, and so separated from itself, shared out of itself.

-"Corpus," 203

The body would have to be some residue of both itself moving outward from inside (towards what the inner considered outer, that is, the outside that is related to in terms of the inside, thus when what is taken to exist or matter is only "insides") and coming back inside from the outside (towards what the outer considered inner, that is, the inside when what is taken to exist or have sense is only "outsides") at the same time. It would not be a membrane or an interface, however, that had consistency as a point by itself. Rather, it would be the trace of both inside and outside, first and third person, as they made their respective movements (holding that only insides and outsides, respectively, had sense) into their opposites. It would not exist at that point at which it would perform itself: this would have only the consistency of a performance. Thinking this point is the hardest because it lacks any density whatsoever, but, as I said, Nancy will help both those who think of performance to think phenomenologically and those who think of phenomenology performatively.