retro-organicism

So just a quick note, for anyone still listening, regarding Gramsci's notion of the organic intellectual. I made the argument in class, albeit perhaps not very articulately, that Professor Gitlin offered us a misreading of Gramsci on this point. Whereas for Gitlin, the organic intellectual is organic to the power structure that oppresses and controls the masses ideologically, and hence is the instrument of hegemony, in Gramsci the case is just the opposite. He introduces the concept in a section of The Prison Notebooks devoted to "The Study of Philosophy", in which he makes the case that:

"it is essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic philosophers. It must first be shown that all men are 'philosophers', by defining the limits and characteristics of the 'spontaneous philosophy' which is proper to everybody. This philosophy is contained in: 1. language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of content; 2. 'common sense' and 'good sense'; 3. popular religion and, therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting, which are collectively bundled together under the name of 'folklore'." (Gramsci, 1971:323)

Gramsci's critique of philosophy as a specialized discipline arose from his revolutionary convictions; he saw at work in Italy both the ancient religious ideology of the Catholic church and the rising politico-ethical ideology of the Fascist state. His invention of the concept of hegemony was an attempt to describe the ways in which these groups managed and deployed their ideological resources in order to retain their essentially exploitative positions of power over their constituents. But Gramsci was no detatched theorist; his description of these mechanisms of power was thoroughly motivated by his deep commitment to a Marxist philosophy of praxis, which he opposes to the kinds of philosophy employed by the specialist functionaries of these privileged groups:

"The position of the philosophy of praxis is the antithesis of the Catholic. The philosophy of praxis does not tend to leave the 'simple' in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and simple it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups." (ibid.:333)

It's clear here that Gramsci's conception of the Marxian revolution reserves a central and critical place for philosophy. Not the philosophy of specialists, which distinguishes itself from and thus excludes the "common sense" of the "simple" (i.e. the proletariat), but a philosophy of praxis, which for Gramci meant a Marxist philosophy, in which the historical separation, and immanent revolutionary reintegration of theory and practice was understood to coincide with (and, crucially, to determine) an analogous historical separation (and immanent reintegration) of the intellectual (bourgeois) and physical (proletarian) workers, since both were (according to Marx's historical and economic philosophy) bound in servitude to the rising capitalists.
Consequently, for Gramsci, the immanent revolution depended upon this reintegration of the proletariat with intellectuals. Commenting on the failures of "the so-called 'Popular Universities' and similar institutions", he asserts that:

"In any case one could only have had cultural stability and an organic quality of thought if there had existed the same unity between the intellectuals and the simple as there should be between theory and practice. That is, if the intellectuals had been organically the intellectuals of those masses and if they had worked out and made coherent the principles and the problems raised by the masses in their practical activity, thus constituting a social bloc." (ibid.:329; my italic.)

And he goes on to restate his original rhetorical question:

"is a philosophical movement properly so-called when it is devoted to creating a specialized culture among restricted intellectual groups, or rather when, and only when, in the process of elaborating a form of thought superior to 'common sense' and coherent on a scientific plane, it never forgets to remain in contact with the 'simple' and indeed finds in this contact the source of the problems it sets out to study and to resolve? Only by this contact does a philosophy become 'historical', purify itself of intellectualistic elements of an individual character and become 'life'." (ibid.)

So anyway, I think that these excerpts clarify Gramsci's notion of what it means for an intellectual to be organic. That is, he's not -at least in this section of his Prison Notebooks, talking about the specialized, disciplinary intellectuals who work (either intentionally, or de facto) in the service of the ruling classes and their dominant interests as being organic to those ruling classes, but on the contrary, it is when the intellectual is able to rise naturally from the working class, and to stay in contact with these 'simple' origins, even as he -and/or she!- elaborates hir concepts to achieve properly philosophical levels of clarity and precision (a large part of Gramsci's discussion here, in between the quotes I've given, is devoted to theorizing a rigorous distinction between properly philosophical and 'folkloric' conceptions; a distinction which is, incidentally, necessary for his theory of hegemony), that he or she is able to develop a true philosophy of praxis; one which can transcend the separation between state and people to "become 'life'"; i.e. organic.

In conclusion, I'd like to make it clear that I'm not writing this in order to endorse a Marxian "philosophy of praxis", but in order to clarify what I felt was its misrepresentation; not only in Professor Gitlin's paper, but in Marcuse's work as well. I think that this persistent misinterpretation -or at least inconsistent interpretation; there may indeed be other places in Gramsci's notebooks where he describes the situation differently, and uses these terms differently, that I'm unaware of (and if so, please notify me ; )- can be attributed to a persistent incoherence inherent to the Marxist philosophical tradition itself, of which Gramsci obviously seeks to constitute himself as part. For Americans today, who can't help but occupy the weird historical bubble that enables us to see the fall of the Berlin Wall and the U.S.S.R. as a kind of belated vindication of the U.S. Cold War ideology (if not of McCarthyism; it's constitutive 'exception'), I think that the ambiguity of the notion of "hegemony" as a theory of culture/politic/communication/psychology results not so much from the complex and interdepentent nature of these disciplinary areas/spheres/fields themselves (although this is undoubtedly the case, and contributes to the confusion!) as to a pervasive uncertainty regarding not only the status of the intellectual, but the status of any reform-oriented 'praxis' in the world today. I would argue that this uncertainty is what Marcuse misinterprets as an overarching, "one-dimensional" determinacy, to which we attempt to apply ambiguous concepts such as "hegemony", not despite, but because of their inconsistencies and incoherences. I would suggest that in order to really understand Gramsci, we would have to first really understand Marxism (and presumably Marx); not in the way Gramsci himself understood it -i.e. as an infallible and necessary conceptual revolutionary mechanism- but in light of a comprehensive historical assessment of its applications; to economics, to politics, and to "life" itself. Obviously this is an impossible task, to the extent that the Cold War didn't really end, but rather mutated, so that now it is being fought in the terms of a 'global capitalism', itself a kind of delocalized cold war, in which various (American, European, Chinese, Indian, etc.) state powers and the private interests that they have demonstrated themselves to be respectively beholden to battle for the last of the planet's dwindling resources.

And I guess it's precisely in this rapidly evolving climate we might be able to adapt Gramsci's thought and reapproach it in a new interpretive context: not as a theory of hegemony-as-oppression, which has become indissociable from the cold-war politics governing the behaviors of groups and individuals across scales, right down to the interpersonal level, right down to the level of our relations with ourselves, but as a theory of praxis-as-emancipation, no longer in the service of an alternative ideology claiming the status of science, nor yet science itself, claiming to be a religion, but as a necessary condition of our collective and individual survival on this heavily-leveraged planet. Perhaps, in lieu of "Philosophy," which despite its own internal misgivings seems determined to retain its privileged institutional status as a specialized disciplinary function, we would better define such a praxis by an altogether less impressive, but perhaps more pragmatic term: education.

In closing, Gramsci again, from the end of this same excerpt:

"The active man-in-the-mass has a practical activity, but has no clear theoretical understanding of his practical activity, but has no clear theoretical consciousness of his practical activity, which nonetheless involves understanding the world insofar as it transforms it. His theoretical consciousness can indeed be historically in opposition to his activity. One might almost say that he has two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness): one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with all his fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one, superficially explicit or verbal, which he ahs inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed. But this verbal conception is not without consequences. It holds together a specific social group, it influences moral conduct and the direction of the will, with varying efficacy but often powerfully enough to produce a situation in which the contradictory state of consciousness does not permit of any action, any decision or any choice, and produces a condition of moral and political passivity. Critical understanding of self takes place therefore through a struggle of political 'hegemonies' and of opposing directions, first in the ethical field and then in that of politics proper, in order to arrive at the working out at a higher level of one's own conception of reality. Consciousness of being part of a particular hegemonic force (that is to say, political consciousness) is the first stage towards a further progressive self-consciousness in which theory and practice will finally be one. Thus the unity of theory and practice is not just a matter of mechanical fact, but a part of the historical process, whose elementary and primitive phase is to be found in the sense of being 'different' and 'apart', in an instinctive feeling of independence, and which progresses to the level of real possession of a single and coherent conception of the world. This is why it must be stressed that the political development of the concept of hegemony represents a great philosophical advance as well as a politico-practical one. For it necessarily supposes an intellectual unity and an ethic in conformity with a conception of reality that has gone beyond common sense and has become, if only within narrow limits, a critical conception." (ibid.:334)

Cited:

Todd Gitlin, "Television's Screens: Hegemony in Transition," p.240-265 in Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education. Michael W. Apple (ed.), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Quincy Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (trans. and eds.), New York: International Publishers, 1971.

The Natural Contract

“What language do the things of the world speak, that we might come to an understanding with them, contractually? But, after all, the old social contract, too, was unspoken and unwritten: no one has ever read the original, or even a copy. To be sure, we don’t know the world’s language, or rather we only know the various animistic, religious, or mathematical versions of it. When physics was invented, philosophers went around saying that nature was hidden under the code of algebra’s numbers and letters: that word code came from law.

In fact the Earth speaks to us in terms of forces, bonds, and interactions, and that’s enough to make a contract. Each of the partners in symbiosis thus owes, by rights, life to the other, on pain of death.” (Serres, p.39)

“There are one or several natural equilibria, described by physical mechanics, thermodynamics, the physiology of organisms, ecology, or systems theory; cultures have even invented one or more human or social equilibria, which are decided on, organized, and maintained by religion, laws, or politics. But something is missing: we are not conceiving, constructing, or putting into operation a new global equilibrium between the two sets of equilibria.

Social systems, which are self-compensating and self-enclosed, press down with their new weight, that of their relations, object-worlds, and activities, on self-compensated natural systems, just as in the past natural systems put social systems at risk, in the age when necessity triumphed over reason’s means.

Blind and mute, natural fatality neglected, back then, to sign an explicit contract with our ancestors, whom it crushed: now we are sufficiently avenged for this archaic abuse by a reciprocal modern abuse. It remains to us to imagine a new, delicate balance between these two sets of balances. As far as I know, this just weighing is at the origin of the verb “to think” (penser), as well as of the verb “to compensate.” Today this is what we name thought. This is the most general legal order for the most global systems.” (Serres, p.37-38)

Both of these quotes come from Michel Serres’ book The Natural Contract. I think that Serres' work offers a beautifully synoptic perspective of the issues that we've discussed in this course. The notion of code, which figures so heavily in today's communication technologies, is a fascinating and troubling one to unpack philosophically. It seems simple; you just give things names and then you can use the names to describe the things. Ok, fine. But check it out: the things are never quite well-enough described by their names. This might be fine if we hadn't imported Platonic assumptions about the absolute ideality of truth into our modern theories about nature. Where's Ockham when you need him?!

Even when we add more and more names, the things escape; there is always more to them, there is an irreducible uncertainty that permeates, haunts, our sense of certainty, and of mastery, of control over our experiences in the world. This sense of control, argues Serres in this wonderfully concise, yet lyrical little book, is at the crux of the issue of where we have come from, and where we are going, as a species. “Cybernetics is back,” he exclaims:

“For the first time in history, the human or worldly world is united in facing the worldwide world, without play, reminder, or recourse for the whole of the system, just as on a ship. The governor and the helmsman with his governail become identified in a single art of governing. The helmsman acts in real time, here and now, on a local circumstance from which he counts on obtaining a global result; it is the same for the governor, the technician, and the scientist. When scientists, gathering their local models into a totality mimicking the Earth, plan some intervention, they speak of steering committees and pilot projects.” (Serres, p.43)

The cybernetic control is a control figured by the helmsman, who steers the ship on the basis of his best ability to gather and comprehend the information, aided by the full wits of his crew, who know that their survival depends upon everyone’s full cooperation. Another sailor-philosopher, Buckminster Fuller, coined the term “Spaceship Earth” to capture the moment that Serres is also describing; a moment in which it falls to us to “imagine a new, delicate balance between these two sets of balances.”

This image of a meta-measurement; a weighing, not between two weights, but between two balances, seems to me to offer us an excellent metaphor for relationship in general, and I would suggest using the notion of Marriage as a corrective on our tendencies to think about relationships in abstract terms, as if they were confined to their local instantiations. Marriage is relationship as a global condition: “til death do us part.” As such, Marriage figures for us a relationship that is eternal, a relationship whose unity transcends even the mortal beings residing at/as its termina. We, the undersigned, the signators of a Marriage contract, simply by agreeing to participate in something that transcends us, accept the principle of our own innate replaceability; our own mortality. Marriage is thus a relationship whose only ends lies in the ever-looming propensity for its constituents -its signators, their co-conspirators, and their inheritors; namely us (or anyway, those of us who are Married, or who desire or plan to get Married- to fail. To fail at observing and forging, maintaining and reproducing, desiring and communicating about, the set of integral balances whose inter-supportive stabilities amount to what Serres calls equilibria. Which means, again, a double- or meta-equilibrium: between our desires and our conceptions, our predictions of the effects of these desires’ realization; and with the equivalent equilibrium in our partner.

In relationship, therefore, qua relationship, we communicate. To communicate, we must adapt ourselves to the use of established lines of transmission, techniques of transcription, and codes of interpretation. Each of these factors influences the others: we interpret our experiences and desires partly according to the existing possibilities of transcription and transmission; codes that find their stability in their relatively solid infrastructural networks of transmission, from trade routes to cable lines. But the interpretations we make contribute in turn to the evolution of these collective codes; not only by changing habits of interpretation, but also by changing the ways in which we build the transmission networks that support them. The ways in which we learn techniques of inscription, like writing, are likewise influenced by the ways in which our desires and experiences perceive and engage with the structures of established codes, and the lines of transmission that may or may not support them. Successful technical innovations can find ways to manifest as improvements to this correspondence between interpretive codes and lines of transmission. All of these patterns have of course been mapped and studied ad nauseum by inspiration-seeking capitalists (which is not to denigrate their importance!) My concern here is not to find laws governing the derivation of profits, but rather those which might be applied to the metaequilibrium Serres describes.

To that end, we can define the difference between Marriage and mere relationship in terms of communication: communication-as-relationship is generally thought of in terms of single equilibria, which mappable and can thus be described as symmetries. The transferrence of signals between subjects, in which the sender’s in-tentions are symmetrically-balanced by the listener’s at-tentions, provides the basic relational symmetry structuring most philosophical and scientific theories of communication. This symmetry is precisely what allows ‘transmission-models’ to separate sender from receiver (they can now be dealt with separately-but-equally, by projecting the symmetry’s continuity over time) in order to focus more closely on the transmissions themselves. Claude Shannon’s 1948 paper defined ‘information’ according to a ratio between ‘signal’ and ‘noise', and this new abstraction allowed us to forget that we had already been dealing with abstractions in the form of symmetrically-isolated ‘transmissions,’ and set the stage for the subsequent, ruthless drive to eliminate noise and perfect signal transmission. Information became a commodity.

We can modulate from here directly into James Carey’s historiography of the telegraph, in which he identifies the demand of the nascent wire services for “a form of language stripped of the local, the regional; and colloquial. . . . something closer to a 'scientific' language, a language of strict denotation in which the connotative features of utterance were under rigid control.” (p.210) Innovation demands abstraction, but the concomitant standardization leads directly to commodification. Carey of course recognizes the parallels here between his findings and the theoretical predictions of Marx, Benjamin, and the Structuralists:

"After the object is abstracted out of the real conditions of its production and use and is transported to distant markets, standardized and graded, and represented by fully contingent symbols, it is made available as a commodity. Its status as a commodity represents the sundering of real, direct relationship between buyer and seller, separates use value from exchange value, deprives objects of any uniqueness (which must then be returned to the object via advertising), and, most important, masks to the buyer the real conditions of production. Further, the process of divorcing the receipt from the product can be thought of as a part of the general social process initiated by the use of money and widely written about in contemporary semiotics; the progressive divorce of the signifier from the signified, a process in which the world of signifiers progressively overwhelms and moves independently of real material objects." (Carey, p.222)

But we should look in detail at the connection that emerges here between commodification as “the sundering of real, direct relationship between buyer and seller” (think also: sender and receiver) and domination, which gets figured in this quote by Carey as a domination of abstractions (signifiers) over the “real material objects” that they represent. We are inclined to dismiss this oppression. We don’t even recognize it as such. We’re taken in by the humanistic tendency to define suffering as an infringement on basic human rights to, for example, food, water, shelter, and of course, more abstractly, freedom, or self-determination. Furthermore, we can see that such human suffering, where it exists, appears to result from macro-systemic patterns of behavior, which we define in a global sense, as being imposed structurally by something called “global capitalism,” which is said to pervade human behavior across scales and socioeconomic classes. Marxist rhetoric, like rhetoric in general, as Socrates was kind enough to point out, persuades us to swap one abstraction for another.

This kind of thinking, which attempts to first define (morally) ideal situations (which are always more difficult to impose in practice than to imagine in theory, owing again to the irreducibility of perspectival differences), and then define present in terms that reveal the possibility of this outcome, corresponds to what James C. Scott called Seeing Like a State, by which he meant seeing a complex reality in terms of its simplified abstract representations. Alfred Korzybski, in the 1930s, summed up this error with the pithy phrase, “the map is not the territory,” but his writings have not been very closely studied, and his influence has unfortunately been largely forgotten. One of Korzybski’s most salient proposals, that we should, on the basis of scientific findings develop and adopt ‘anti-Aristotelian’ habits of thought and behavior, was taken up, in a way, by Havelock in his Liberal Temper, when he describes the strange continuity, in the new humanistic doctrines of the Enlightenment, of the old metaphysical suppositions of the Classical era:

"when the cause of liberty was fought for in France and America under banners inscribed with the doctrine of the rights of man, the battle was conducted on behalf of those same convictions about the eternal nature of man's soul. The majestic language of the Declaration of Independence, appealing to the testimony of self-evident truths as before a bar of eternal justice, still used the formulas congenial to men who believed in a natural law written in the heavens and wished to use it to support the equally metaphysical conviction that all men as individuals have innate and inalienable rights. . . . The problems and the vocabulary were still Platonic and Aristotelian." (Havelock, p.15)

This problem is one that we could (and did, through this course) trace all the way through Western history, from Plato to Amartya Sen, whose sophisticated (sic) treatment of this subject draws out for us the implications of these properly philosophical issues to our everyday ethical and relational lives. It comes down to a basic misconception about the role of reason, of logical thought, in relationship, communication, and life. Sen makes it clear that because no one can occupy a priviledged position vis a vis their other community members, economic partners, or legal disputants, rationality needs to be understood as something much more multifaceted and complex than what any given rational agent can see from their (or any other imagined) point of view:

“what may appear to others as clear examples of ‘unreason’ may not always be exactly that. Reasoned discussion can accommodate conflicting positions that may appear to others to be ‘unreasoned’ prejudice, without this being quite the case. There is no compulsion, as is sometimes assumed, to eliminate every reasoned alternative except exactly one.” (Sen, p.xviii)

But if guiltily/angrily/prophetically blaming the imagined anti-community of “capitalism” doesn’t seem to have offered much in the way of solutions to the complex and massive set of problems that we so readily attribute to “it,” of precisely which radical interventions might our alternatives consist? For me, the answer here can’t be critical one. It will never be enough for us to point our fingers and say, “the problem is...” Critique in general, I’d argue, isn’t radical, it’s conservative; if not directly of the states of affairs and/or of discourse that it seeks to challenge, then indirectly, insofar as it is always mobilized in defense of preexisting ideological positions that get activated in response to a perception of a challenge or threat from the entity at whom the critique gets directed.

Instead, we should carry out our actions as if in adherence to a doubled-injunction: survey, integrate and assimilate -i.e. research, study, and understand- the scattered and fragmentary linguistic matrices of culture, history, science, economy, etc.; and compile, create, and disseminate novel concepts, constructions, and collaborations that emerge from this work. The balance it difficult, because it’s not a balance that can be thought of as in spatial terms (and hence abstracted) i.e. as a symmetry. In other words, it can’t be ‘perfected’ in the static sense of that term. Rather, it is a balance between (and among) balances. If it were to be figured as a symmetry, it would be as an impossible, spatiotemporal symmetry; a reciprosymmetry. Because such a symmetry cannot be represented abstractly (in any known medium), it could constitute an effectively transcendental goal for any number of co-aspirants. I would call any ensuing community simply ‘society’; not to imagine it in the way that Benedict Anderson describes, but just to indicate that this would be a community constituted by the imagination of each participant, freely, but not in isolation. Rather than reifying such an entity, we could perhaps simply agree to disagree about it. We have to realize that this agreement, as trivial as it seems, is absolutely crucial one for us to begin to understand, if we are to survive on this planet together. We need to figure out how to make room for both freedom and necessity, in our hearts and minds. We need to recognize that we are all here in this together, flying through the universe on Spaceship Earth, and it’s gonna be a matter of sinking or swimming, and the operating manual for this thing is really, really huge. I think that this is what Serres means by a Natural Contract. Married people might know what I’m talkin about ; )

“Here then, is the form of contemporary society, which can be called doubly worldwide: occupying all the Earth, solid as a block through its tightly woven interrelations, it has nothing left in reserve, no external place of withdrawal or recourse on which to pitch its tent. Society knows, moreover, how to construct and use technologies whose spatial, temporal, and energetic dimensions are on the scale of worldwide phenomena. Our collective power is therefore reaching the limits of our global habitat. We’re beginning to resemble the Earth.

Thus our de facto unified group borders the world, to which it is equipotent, just as the solid and mobile deck all but touches the surface of the waves, separated only by the stanchions of the guardrail. Everyone sails upon the world like the ark upon the waters, without any reserve outside these two sets, that of men and that of things. So here we are, underway! For the first time in history, Plato and Pascal, who never went to sea, are both right at the same time, and here we are, constrained to obey shipboard laws, to pass from the social contract to the natural contract. The social contract long ago protected mobile social subsets in a broad and free environment, equipped with reserves that could absorb any damage, but a unified, compact group that has reached the strict limits of objective forces requires a natural contract.” (Serres, p.41-42)

Bibliogram:

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso, 1991.

Carey, James, Communication as Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1989.

Havelock, Eric, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics. Yale University Press, 1957.

Korzybski, Alfred, Science and Sanity. Institute of General Semantics Press, 1994.

Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press, 1998.

Sen, Amartya, The Idea of Justice. Harvard University Press, 2009.

Serres, Michel, The Natural Contract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995.

recourse to rhetoric

thought some of y'all might be thinking about the sophists again, in preparation for your final papers, and having stumbled across this little gem by the great, but understudied, Kenneth Burke; A Rhetoric of Motives (L.A.:University of California Press, 1969), I thought I'd share a little taste with you here, as it seems to me that Burke's take on rhetoric offers us a nice glimpse not only into the Plato v. Sophists debate, with Sen at the helm, but also into the notion of hegemony, as a kind of spontaneous social self-regulation...

"In pure identification, there would be no strife. Likewise, there would be no strife in absolute separateness, since opponents can join in battle only through a mediatory ground that makes their communication necessary for their interchange of blows. But put identification and division ambiguously together, so that you cannot know for certain just where one ends and the other begins, and you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric. Here is a major reason why rhetoric, according to Aristotle, 'proves opposites.' When two men collaborate in an enterprise to which they contribute different kinds of services and from which they derive different amounts and kinds of profit, who is to say, once and for all, just where 'cooperation' ends and one partner's 'exploitation' of the other begins? The wavering line between the two cannot be 'scientifically' identified; rival rhetoricians can draw it at different places, and their persuasiveness varies with the resources each has at his command. (Where public issues are concerned, such resources are not confined to the intrinsic powers of the speaker and the speech, but depend also for their effectiveness upon the purely technical means of communication, which can either aid the utterance or hamper it. For a 'good' rhetoric neglected by the press obviously cannot be so 'communicative' as a poor rhetoric backed nation-wide by headlines. And often we must think of rhetoric not in terms of some one particular address, but as a general body of identifications that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reenforcement than to exceptional rhetorical skill.)" (25-26)

"just as God has been identified with a certain worldly structure of ownership, so science may be identified with the interests of certain groups or classes quite unscientific in their purposes. Hence, however 'pure' one's motives may be actually, the impurities of identification lurking about the edges of such situations introduce a typical Rhetorical wrangle of the sort that can never be settled once and for all, but belongs to the field of moral controversy where men properly seek to 'prove opposites'." (26)

"the rhetorician and the moralist become one at the point where the attempt is made to reveal the undetected presence of such an identification. Thus in the United States after the second World War, the temptations of such an identification became particularly strong because so much research had fallen under the direction of the military. To speak merely in praise of science, without explicitly dissociating oneself from its reactionary implications, is to identify oneself with these reactionary implications by default. Many reputable educators could thus, in this roundabout way, function as 'conspirators.' In their zeal to get federal subsidies for the science department of their college or university, they could help to shape educational policies with the ideals of war as guiding principle." (26-27)

"As regards 'autonomous' activities, the principle of Rhetorical identification may be summed up thus: The fact that an activity is capable of reduction to intrinsic, autonomous principles does not argue that it is free from identification with other orders of motivation extrinsic to it. Such other orders are extrinsic to it, as considered from the standpoint of the specialized activity alone. But they are not extrinsic to thefioeld of moral action as such, considered from the standpoint of human activity as such. But they are not extrinsic from the standpoint of human activity in general. The human agent, qua human agent, is not motivated solely by the principles of a specialized activity, however strongly this specialized power, in its suggestive role as imagery, may affect his character. Any specialized activity participates in a larger unit of action. 'Identification' is a word for the autonomous activity's place in this wider context, a place with which the agent may be unconcerned. The shepherd, qua shepherd, acts for the good of the sheep, to protect them from discomfiture and harm. But he may be 'identified' with a project that is raising the sheep for market." (27)

Just another angle on some of these things. Has anyone in the class studied Burke before?

swimming in the ocean

oh man,
this class has been overwhelming me.
...and i do really appreciate that; thanks everyone.

i've been writing a lot, but rather tangentially to the specific materials we've been dealing with in our course. as we draw to a close, and with my eye on the 'final paper' post i'll be gathering together over the next couple of weeks, i'm going to take a stab here at some rather scattered, wide ranging talking points that i've been savoring throughout the course.

1. philosophy of history: do we really know what history is? i don't think so, because i'm pretty sure that we don't really know what time is. i think that this seems like kindof a minor problem to most people, occupied with more 'practical' considerations, but to me it seems to be affiliated with the strange and compelling thematic repetition that we've been observing throughout our readings this semester, from plato to carr (quite the odd couplet ; ).

the issue of time is, i think, intrinsically bound up with the issue of communication. how? consider that all of our eminent theorists of communications base their theses, their interventions, their judgements of the techniques in question, like Plato has Thamus judging Theuth's invention in the Phaedrus, on diagnostic assessments of the effects of these techniques. and in each case when the adoption of the new technique is ruled against, it is on the grounds that its effects on the status quo will be unacceptable: writing will destroy memory; print will destroy the clergy; industry will enslave the proletariat; internet will destroy our ability to concentrate...
on the other hand, when the new techniques are celebrated, it is because they will ameliorate social conditions; writing will allow thinkers to imagine the ideal politeia; print will create a free space for universally accessible 'public reason;' industry will free the bourgeoisie; the internet will finally displace the cultural elites...

this reminds me of Derrida's treatment of the pharmakon in his essay Plato's Pharmacy, in which he draws attention to this radical ambiguity of technology; Plato condemns it, but uses it to do so! consequently, arguments that attempt to focus on one or the other 'side' of this ambiguity -through what i've been thinking of as moralizing arguments, which attempt to define the technique in question in either positive or negative terms- will always dissimulate the techniques themselves; will be unable to grasp their full range of affective and effective potentials.

so how does time play in all this?

i think that this problem of the technique as pharmakon -as an entity that resists objectification, or better, definition; encryption- rather than being a kind of historiographical anomaly, is in fact representative of a problem that haunts not only history, but all of language, and such as we are able to think them as languages, all techniques of thinking and remembering. the problem of assessing and predicting novelties, a problem that we as humans -homo fabers- seem destined to continue to face, cannot be reduced to empiricism. nor, as Sen points out, can it be reduced to principle. it must rather oscillate in the space between these polar positions, which are only imaginary anyway, and to the extent that they can be definitively described, encoded, can only be approached asymptotically. when historiography comes up against technique, even though it tries to materialize it, to locate it in the realm of the solid and definite, the known, it can only do so in such a way that it compromises its own observational neutrality in the process. in our haste to grasp the truth of language, or of technology, we end up using it more blindly than even in order to pursue its image in our minds.

and here we find ourselves faced with a temporal problem. i would call it the problem of recursion: how are we to go about pursuing the instrumentation of pursuit? what if the technique described by Husserl as epokhe can indeed never be completed, but must be observed, as a kind of categorical imperative; like Kant's own method of critique, not a solid ground, but a melete -a practice; a self-imposed discipline?!

more soon...

webbing

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1

is a story about the transformation of modality-distribution on the internet...

i got it from my friend Ghislain's site: http://etherealisation.com/

Ghislain just got a PhD from Concordia University in Montreal's Communications program, where he studied under Thierry Bardini and Brian Massumi. I think he is on his way to Harvard for a Post-Doc with Peter Galison...

Ghislain is a member of the collective SNS, along with some other very good scholars of media and communications. Their website is: http://dedalon.net/ -and you can find links to their personal websites there.

Thought some of y'all might like to take a peek into what they're upto...

pedagogy, immediacy, and imaginary nichespace(s)

rounding out this trilogy of posts, i wanted to make a note of our discussion in the last class about how print served to codify the previously much more diverse and distributed spoken vernacular languages of Europe. Resulting from this codification, as Frank pointed out, we got the advent of industrial production (the printed book as 'the first' mass-produced -artificial- commodity), the necessity of systematic education (everyone had to learn to read and write in a common language), and of course the (corollary) emergence of the nationalisms identified by Anderson.

The bourgeoisie -the emergent mercantile middle class- comes into being as the product of at once capitalism (distributed mercantilism), education (centralized cultural reproduction), and nationalism (collectivized xenophobia). There is also, lurking behind these scenes, the extremely important matter of science, but we'll just have to leave it lurking for now...

It's amazing actually, how all of these changes seem to have occurred in such perfect synchrony; a pseudo-Hegelian ideality that we should perhaps attribute to the false clarity of hindsight... Certainly though, there is something to be said for the evidence of feedback-amplifications among some of these interlocking contingencies.

Take for example the matter of pedagogy's anamorphosis. We can see in the Enlightenment a kind of recapitulation of the Platonic moment, in which the techniques that Plato associates with the Sophists seem to reemerge as the set of instructional techniques that would be required to organize and govern the new (read: secular) systems of education. Kant's philosophy is often described as having emerged from his heroic attempt(s) to reconcile the instrumental (Sophistic) rationality of the pragmatic utilitarians with the (Platonic) idealism of Christianity and its church(es).

Developing on Frank's insight into the effects of vernacular codification, it seems evident that what we could call 'contemporary' pedagogy arises as the (Kantian) necessity of fixing the meanings of texts (i.e. by appealing to transcendental categoreality), overpowering the innate interpretive divergence that Derrida called dissemination. The emergent res publica (i.e. the republic) required a homogeneous (if not universally-extended, then at least internally-consistent!) medium. Enlightenment required the immediacy of print media. 'Public reason' requires immediacy generally; as the given a priori upon which successive rationalizations might be based in common...

Lastly, in response to David's pointed concerns about the difficulties of linking capitalism with these print-technologies, I would suggest that we might attempt an escape from a kind of historicism that is itself biased by its dependence on print. Instead we can perhaps make some headway describing the linkage between rationalization and commodification. This attempt is made by Stiegler in his Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, the TC Record's review of which I sent out to the class. Essentially Stiegler thinks this linkage by way his notion of grammatization.

more on this another time ; )

antinomies /&/ economies

If communities really are imagined, as Anderson imagined them to be, we still have to ask ourselves the questions: how are they imagined differently under different conditions -i.e. synchronically and diachronically; at different ecological scales, organismic and/or societal, and in different epochs- and how do these imaginaries interact with one another?

The question that seems, along these lines of thinking, to assert itself with regard to Kant, for example, is: to what extent did his evocation of the universality of 'public reason' -and of Enlightenment, thereby- depend on a blindness to the limitedness (pointed out by Cochran) of the new print medium to a literate, (and systemically-educated) bourgeoisie?

This seems to me to be an interesting question, given the radical nature of the cultural and sociopolitical changes we've been studying with regard to their historical linkages to technical advances in communications media. How much could Kant really have been aware of the socioeconomic limitations of the new print media? How does this probable oversight (or shall we say more specifically, lack of foresight -I'm recalling the words of Aeschylus' Prometheus here!) come to bear on his notion of a universal rationality; how dependent is his characterization of Enlightenment as maturity (see his late essay What is Enlightenment -and perhaps see also Foucault's late essay of the same title!) on what we can recognize, with the benefit of hindsight, as an error?

We might summarize: in the relatively massive expansions of the economies of communication that seem to accompany the advent and spread of new media (I'm thinking of Plato as Kant's inverted forebear), can we suggest the presence of a systematic tendency to overestimate the absoluteness of the transition? In other words, in the case of each emergence of a new medium, couldn't we demonstrate that while for those involved the transition seemed absolute, and was therefore theorized and described in absolute terms, in retrospect the transition was relative; the new economy never completely replaces its forebear, but rather includes and recontextualizes it. (McLuhan puts this as: "the content of a medium is another medium").

Are we not then tempted to correct Kant by asserting that his new realm of the text is not in fact a 'universal' res publica, as I think he claimed, in which the imagined community of the Enlightenment (and Platonic!) politeia could somehow assert itself directly, but is rather merely a new form of agora, in which the instrumental politics of 'private reason' -and the dynamics of Foucauldian parresia- have shifted the locus of their distributed operations to a new field; no longer performed verbally as in the Greek agora, but now performed textually in the new agora of the res publica?!

summa onto-theologica

We have traced a very interesting genealogy from the Greek conception of community, in what we could call its global form as the politeia, to its relatively local form in the agora. The agora is, as Foucault described in his most recently translated lectures The Government of Self and Others, the scene of the politeia's actualization, via the mechanism that centers these lectures: parresia ('free-spokenness'). This has been a very interesting text for me, reading concurrently with the course, since Foucault focuses on the comparison between the events at the end of the 5th century (bc), which form the subject of works by Thucidides and Euripides, and the events at the beginning of the 4th century, when Plato is writing about contemporary events...

Leaping forward to the Enlightenment and its Late Medieval and Renaissance preliminaries, we touched briefly on Kant's rather counter-intuitive distinction between public reason, accessible as a universal function of critical rationality (of the Kantian transcendental variety, we can be sure, and albeit, as Cochran pointed out, within the bounds of the newly literate bourgeoisie), and private reason, which would encompass the machinations of private interests along the lines of a pseudo-utilitarian 'hedonic calculus'.

Next, we shall continue our quick cruise through the advent of what McLuhan called 'the electronic age' of telegraphy, telephony, radio, television, and eventually (ultimately?) computation and the 'world wide web'.

In all these cases we have seen a set of similar occurrences accompanying what in each case we have identified as an instance of technical, or technological evolution: the advent of a new medium of communication -i.e. the 'scribal culture' that sprung up around the crystallization of the Greek alphabet (for Havelock, et al.), and the 'print culture' that emerged out of the invention of the printing press and its rapid fluorescence accompanying the Reformation and the advent of the European industrial economies (for Eisenstein and Cochran, etc.)- seems to have been accompanied by a massive shift in what we might call the 'subjectivity' of those affected by the novel conditions.

This hypothesis -that the media of communication shape and govern the subjectivities of the individuals and societies they serve- has massive implications for scholarly thought; we might divide these implications into synchronic (philosophical) -What effects do our current media exert on us?- and diachronic -How might we map these transformations historically? axes. But these axes also seem to fall together, and in a deeply troubling way- under lines of questioning like: "What implications might this have for our currently accepted notions of history and historical scholarship in general?!"

more on the way...

my IGS paper, continued (last part)

Part 3: Korzybski's Style

So interdisciplinarity cannot, obviously,
be simply a matter of mastering, or overcoming discipline,
-which attempt would inevitably recapitulate
the auto-occlusive (and repressive) disciplinary gesture-
nor can it simply be a matter of simply rejecting discipline
-as if there were some procedure or method with which to replace it-
but must instead strive to find the balances between and among
the necessarily complimentary functions
of assuming, employing, and escaping disciplinary systems.

This must have been Korzybski's goal.
But the faith that he placed in symbolic logic and the mathematical sciences
is perhaps what seems most anachronistic about his work for a contemporary student.
The scientific optimism so common in Korzybski's day seems to have given way
to the widespread, if somewhat inchoate, realization that
the balance between assumption and escape -i.e. commitment and critique-
required of us in our encounters with disciplines
necessitate a fairly critical attitude
with regard our evaluation of the strong truth-claims made by scientific thinkers
throughout history.

Newton: "Hypotheses non fingo!"

The balances we seek -between contentment and freedom-
simply cannot be programmed, or preinscribed.
We can point to it, feel it, and even refer to it in conversation,
but we cannot definitively inscribe it in our languages.
Parts of its structure might emerge from analogical isomorphisms,
but it itself, since it describes their functioning, must remain, to some extent,
outside of the reach of disciplinary apparata.

I think we see this realization operating in Korzybski's work.
His famous Map/Territory distinction
is like a discipline against discipline;
it is like a metadiscipline,
which forces us, step by step, into giving up our truth fetishes,
positioning us, locating us, orienting us,
toward our individual and collective survival(s)...

Whitehead also says, in The Aims of Education, that
"Style is the ultimate morality of mind" (p.12).
I think that Korzybski's method, ultimately,
and with regard specifically to the technique that I've referred to as his
discipline against discipline,
comes down to its style.

He exhorts us both to study all that we can;
to learn all we can of the disciplines and languages that come to bear
on the problems that we find ourselves faced with,
both individually and collectively.

But he also cautions us against getting too 'caught up' in any of these pursuits;
again and again he reminds us that the map is not the territory; that we are dealing in abstractions,
and that the matters that we attempt to discuss are constantly changing,
necessitating our continual circumspection of the structures and functions of our languages,
the uses we put them to, and the world that they enter into as necessarily-imperfect descriptions.

And so this style, as Whitehead points out, is also a morality:
we must retain our autonomy as individual thinkers
without thereby losing touch with our basic continuity with the community of others
-scholars, artists, and thinkers, as well as laborers, children, spouses, parents, and neighbors-
whose ideas and actions we must, both; gratefully rely upon, and carefully scrutinize.

Freedom of thought, balanced by access to instructional resources,
represents a difficult -because dialectical; non-programmatic-
moral issue for us as teachers, scholars, students, parents,
-and generally as members of a species with cultural traditions.

Rather than thinking of our culture as a set of materials
to be passed along carefully, like so many baskets of eggs,
perhaps we can begin to think of it as what Hegel called Geist;
a spiritual essence, unbound by the specific laws of material objects;
a general semantics of partial exchanges and continual transformations.
I suspect that an educational system that was taking these notions into account
would be a much different, much more interesting one in which to live and work,
and I suspect that future generations will feel the same way...

Perhaps by recognizing that in an interdisciplinary methodology like Korzybski's,
style must play an indispensable role,
we can begin to correct the severe imbalances, not only in our systems of education,
but in our appreciation of the work of Korzybski as well.
I think that from this perspective, any function that we could recognize as the power of language
would have to lie in its ability to extract itself from the traditions that it nonetheless depends upon;
to start from scratch, again and again,
rather than always having to build on the same, insufficient foundations.
The ability to pour new foundations, to create new concepts with which to think our situations,
to devise new ways of reading the same texts, new ways of interpreting the old thinkers and ideas;
this must become an essential foundation of any system or method of education that we would be able to call moral,
and for which, geist willing, 'interdisciplinary' would become an unnecessary synonym.


Blake Victor Seidenshaw, October 31st, 2010.

General Semantics

Also this weekend, while I'm getting caught up, or at least attempting to explain this need to, I gave a paper at the Institute of General Semantics' annual symposium, called "New Languages, New Realities", and hosted by Fordham University. I was unfortunately unable to attend much of the conference, and I'm sorry I didn't give you all a heads-up about it. My head has been seriously down for the past little bit. But I did manage to get a talk together about Korzybski (The founder and Guru of the IGS) -'s method of interdisciplinary scholarship, which I'm going to reproduce for interest's sake here. You can check out the Institute of General Semantics here; they have lots of good stuff on the site... Basically Korzybski was concerned with the role played by language in human collective organization, communication, and thought. Have any of y'all heard of this guy? I read about him a lot as a young'n, in books by my favorite sci-fi authors, like Philip K. Dick and A. E. Van Vogt, William S. Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson. Also some really genius scientists, like R. Buckminster Fuller and Gregory Bateson; all really inspired and influenced by Korzybski's work. I have been reading a lot of Korzybski himself since getting involved with the General Semantics organization here in New York. They have been quite generous, inviting me to lecture frequently, and they run a really nice little quarterly journal called ETC. which is very amenable to publishing the work of students, artists, and 'non-specialists', and some neat out-of-the-ordinary kinda stuff. So it was pretty good fun, and here's my paper. Note that I didn't write the last section; I improvised that part live, lol! Which turned out well. I plan to write it up and submit it with the following for publication in ETC. I think it touches on themes we've been exploring in class too. I opened with this joke: "Happy Halloween everyone; I hope you all like my Justin Bieber costume."
Language Power: Korzybski's Interdisciplinary Methodology

Intro:

My name is Blake Seidenshaw. I'm a doctoral student at Columbia University Teachers College, where I'm working in Interdisciplinary and Cultural Studies in Education.

I'm coming to this presentation with two essentially convergent concerns.
The first is the current national -if not worldwide- crisis in education. This problem is not new, but it has recently begun to get some more attention in the media. Its roots, however, are the same ones that scientists and philosophers have been attempting to excavate for centuries.
A. N. Whitehead identified the problem as a kind 'mental dry-rot': a "paralysis of thought induced in pupils by the aimless accumulation of precise knowledge, inert and unutilized." (The Aims of Education, 1929: p.1 & 37.)
We know that Korzybski, along very similar lines, attempted to identify the stultifying effects of what he called 'semantic environments' on human thought and behavior.

But my second problem is a kind of microcosm of the first, and follows from opinions that I've recently heard expressed in the General Semantics community: GS is having its own crisis, it seems to be following closely the same pattern of manifestation.

I want to propose a way to tackle both of these problems in one go:
By focusing on education, and specifically by clarifying Korzybski's contribution to what I propose we can identify as an interdisciplinary methodology, General Semantics can at once both revitalize itself through renewed application, and contribute to the more general, and much more pressing, overall revitalization of our system of education as a whole.

Part 1: What is Interdisciplinarity?

To answer this we need to first ask: What is discipline?

On one hand, the word 'discipline' refers to a set of practices. Disciplines are comprised of things that we actually do: they are arts, techne.

But on the other hand, practices are always inscribed in registers of meaning practices are always interpretable; they are directed towards preconceivable aims.

As such, the disciplinary forms
are created as syntheses between:
systems of practice,
and systems of interpretation.

Disciplines, like signs, basically dyadic.
And we can reframe them accordingly, as consisting of:

a syntactic component;
-of dynamic, functional practices, techniques, and vehicles-

and a semantic dimension;
-of meanings and purposes; the 'feel' and style of the technical functions.

Which brings us to the reciprocal analogy:
discipline is linguistic,
and language is disciplinary.

And these reciprocal elements resonate;
The integral form of the discipline 'sets-up' like a standing wave,
balancing syntactic and semantic registers.

In other words,
sets of practices and sets of meanings
achieve
structural isomorphism

Korzybski: "[General Semantics] establishes structure
as the only possible content of of knowledge."
(p.9 in Science and Sanity, 5th ed.)

This interreciprocal structure,
-whereby sets of practices retain stable structures
by appealing to similarly stable sets of meanings-
is what allows these interdependent, 'doubled' sets of practices and meanings
to reproduce themselves,
creating what we refer to colloquially as intellectual 'disciplines', but the same principles underly the reproduction of cultural forms in general, as traditions, lineages, identities, and I would argue also, biological organisms, ecological 'scapes, etc.

Part 2: Language Power

Now,
as language-users,
or what Korzybski called 'time-binders',
we human beings tend to assume and inhabit these
disciplinary and linguistic apparatuses;
as what Korzybski called semantic environments.

disciplines are thus both:
our tools; syntactical, functional objects
that we can observe and utilize rationally and consciously,
and,
our selves; the semantic structures that unconsciously support our operations,
and enable us to cooperate with other, complimentarily-structured entities.

Thus,
when we talk about the 'power' of disciplinary entities,
we need to recognize again that
this power is essentially dual:

On the one hand, for the reasons already outlined,
disciplinary networks tend toward a kind of closure;
they occlude themselves from their larger contexts,
the more inclusive spectra of practices and meanings,
thereby inherently dissimulating events whose structures
fail to correspond with their own.

On the other hand,
language allows us to build our own semantic structures,
by assembling sets of practices, syntactic techniques,
which we can then inhabit provisionally and temporarily
(via awareness of abstraction),
in order to purposively navigate what we might call the ecosemantic spaces
of our immense, complex, and dangerous world.
Furthermore, our disciplines allow us to perform this task cooperatively with other humans, other language-using time-binders.

So interdisciplinarity cannot, obviously,
be simply a matter of mastering, or overcoming discipline,
but must instead
find the balances between what we might call
the necessarily complimentary functions of
assuming and escaping
disciplinary and linguistic systems.

Part 3: Korzybski's Style

~to be continued!

ecogradiant

hello all.
i've been sadly remiss in keeping this up.
the past couple weeks have been so busy that i haven't had time to transfer and edit my notebook scribblings into proper blog posts...
but I have a few things to share:
first, I should plug the brand new website that I have cocreated on behalf of the student organization "teachers and writers for a public voice"; the site is http://ecogradients.com and we've posted the first in what will be a series of, probably quarterly issues, thematically organized, in which we, the ecogradiant editors, will assemble and publish works in multiple media, submitted by none other than you: our diverse and enterprising readership.
seriously!
check it out: the first issue is called "ghostlines", for a seasonal vibe.
we got some really nice submissions for it.
I do really hope that some of you might like to participate by submitting work for consideration for the next issue, to be called "musicalities"; we are TC based and oriented, so we'll definitely try to reach out to and include lots TC peoples.
Its been pretty fun getting it together, and it's exciting to imagine where it will go!
=b

epistemontology

I think you pose an interesting question Ruthie (in your response to my 'Thucydotus' post). Does the fact of these works' composition indicate a major shift in the subjectivity of humankind? Are people with oral history so different than people with written history? I agree that Havelock's work -and Parry's, and Ong's, and especially McLuhan's, etc.- is/are brilliant; this is a very interesting object of study. I guess we'll get even deeper into this when we look at the printing press stuff, with Eisenstein... I wonder though, if we aren't making a kind of error here; what I've been trying to argue for is that while the means, the mechanisms, whereby culture is transmitted might change, and while we might identify a series of major epochal shifts in our historiography of these changes, this doesn't necessarily mean that what is being transmitted has changed as much as it might appear. In other words, while the means and modes of transmission have indeed undergone a series of stochastic mutations, and while this series of formal ruptures has undoubtedly had profound effects on human history, I still think that it is quite possible -and indeed, I think it is probable- that the meanings of these messages, the substance of human culture itself, its semantic content, has not in fact undergone a similar series of discontinuities, but has actually evolved much more continuously than our research would lead us to believe. I think that Latour's work supports this view, for example; I guess we're getting there...
To take another tack: when we identify these discontinuities in the technical sphere, we impute their structure onto lived experience itself, thereby seemingly to demonstrate that lived culture is not as continuous as we seem to believe, on the basis of our personal experience. So we are using history to demonstrate a level of discontinuity beneath the supposedly smooth surface level of our lived experience. This approach has perhaps emerged and constituted itself as a necessary corrective to the whiggish classical historiography of the post-enlightenment period, in which where all evidence was gathered in to the eurolinear scheme of progressive evolution...
But doesn't this approach, by taking this eurocentric, hegelian continuity of whig history its enemy, so to speak -the object of its motivating anxiety- actually privilege the very assumption of lived continuity that it purports to problematize? In effect, by saying, "look, history is not as continuous as the present!" do we not thereby fall for the 'trick' assumption precisely of the continuity of the present?!
So identifying these ruptures in history, in a way, only strengthens the basic illusion that it is intended to dispel: namely, that the present moment is immediately present to consciousness, and that on the basis of the information available to us 'here and now', we might approximately (with a reasonable, computable margin of uncertainty) make judgements about the truth of states of affairs inhering elsewhere, on whose interference our own identities must depend, and vice versa. In short, do we not have to raise this, not only as an epistemological issue, but as an ontological one as well? What are the natures of occurrence and determinacy? These questions are far from settled, especially in the realms -like physics- where they are studied in a rigorously scientific fashion... More on this perhaps, a bit later... I'm currently reading Ilya Prigogine's "The End of Certainty", which I highly recommend for a beautiful exposition of the contemporary scientific status of these questions about time and occurrence; he points to deeply-set, persistent habits of thought within which we cannot possibly handle these matters effectively, and suggests a fascinating solution...

Historicism

It seems to me that we have really cracked this can of worms open in the past couple of weeks, with regard to the questions of history and time, power and justice... And academic scholarship, of course (we can't forget ourselves ; )...
I'm unable to spend a great deal of time on this just at the moment, but I wanted to share a couple of things:
First, there is this video from one of the most brilliant dudes working on this stuff: Daniel Kahneman. He starts out here talking about happiness, but what this is really about is our relationship to time. Specifically, Kahneman describes two different ways of handling, or relating to time; an experiencing self and a remembering self. They handle information very differently, and relate with one another in very specific tendential ways...
Here is a little article about brain research that supports Kahneman's theories. Basically; the parts of the brain that we use to remember are the same as the parts that we use for imagination.
I think this stuff raises some very important considerations (I would call them interdisciplinary) regarding our study of Thucydides, Herodotus, and Plato. For example, how does our handling of history affect our experience of contemporary reality? What about vice-versa?

herodides/thucydotus

We could, perhaps, draw a contrast between the approaches of Thucydides and Herodotus with a statement like; if Thucydides was our first historian, Herodotus was our last mythographer. Along the lines of such a statement, we could tabulate and emphasize the differences between Thucididean and Herodotean techniques and/or styles, compiling these differences as a proxy for our notion of a discontinuity, or rupture, in the evolution of rational thought. This would perhaps accord with Thucydides' own presentation of his work as a factual account: "Anyone . . . will conclude that my research, using the clearest evidence available, provides a sufficiently accurate account considering the antiquity of the events" (27 / p.12); his complex, analytic style (very difficult to translate, we heard from Mary Beard in her review of Kagan and Hornblower) furnishes a project which, in many ways, seems to take its stance in direct opposition to the work of Herodotus.
As for Herodotus, he seems to take a kind of delight in conflating what we would today identify as historical and mythical elements. His account in many ways hinges on the appearances of omens -portents of fate, or of divine int(erv)entions- and their interpretation. See for example the account of the omens that appear to Xerxes in the form of dreams before the war (12-18 / p.421-424) and strange births directly prior to the invasion (57 / p.438), or the extended account of the Priestess Aristonice's prophecy beginning at 140 / p.460-461. The gods are very much present in Herodotus' history, if indirectly, through the agency of the human agents who believe in them, or fail to take their messages, in the form of omens, into account.
But as much as Herodotus appeals to fate and divinity, Thucydides works as hard to dispel myth and replace it with rational explanation. Interestingly, given the course of our reading so far, Thucydides' own conception of his efforts seem to parallel Plato's in this regard, particularly in his emphatic criticism of the oral poetic tradition: "All men show the same uncritical acceptance of the oral traditions handed on to them, even about the history of their own country." (20 / p.11); "...anyone accepting the broad facts of my account on the arguments I have adduced will not go wrong. He will put less faith in the glorified tales of the poets and the compilations of the prose chroniclers, whose stories are written more to please the ear than to serve the truth, are incapable of truth, and for the most part, given the lapse of time, have passed into the unreliable realms of romance" (21 / p.12); "It may be that the lack of a romantic element in my history will make it less of a pleasure to the ear..." (22 / p.12).
So while there is much, particularly in Thucydides' work itself, to support our notion of a rupture in the development of rational thought, I think that on the other hand, there are a slew of fascinating continuities between these works; similarities that would tend to be obscured by a Thucydidean emphasis on the differences. First, with regard to method, it is clear that the works share many important features. Indeed, when Thucydides describes how he derived the contents of the speeches on which his prose so heavily relies, he appeals to his "laborious research" (22), and to the relative recency of the events described as proxies for the accuracy of his admittedly inexact account. His methods here do not seem to differ all that greatly from those employed by Herodotus, who also -though, interestingly, dealing with less recent events- collects various accounts and relies on his own judgement and experience to compile them (see for example his account of the Persians' discovery of the secret cart-track which led to the defeat of the Spartans at Thermopolae; 214 / p.490-491).
But Herodotus spins his tale like a true storyteller; he follows the development of Xerxes' thinking, and we identify with him despite his tyrannical outbursts. The Persians come to Greece as an "incalculably great" force (147 / p.465); and Xerxes is no straw man: "There was not a man who, for stature and noble bearing, was more worthy than Xerxes to wield so vast a power" (197 / p.481). This makes it all the more astounding when the fragile Greek alliance is eventually able to triumph. Herodotus' tale is spell-binding; despite the fact that it is written, it reproduces the characteristics of the oral tradition as Havelock describes it; the audience is drawn into the story, and is thereby compelled to accept it uncritically. This is presumably what makes Thucydides, like Plato, so scornful. But doesn't Thucydides' own account reproduce these same dramatic structures? Don't Plato's dialogues, for that matter, draw us in as entrancingly as Herodotus' histories? If there is a rupture between these modes, it seems to be drawn more from the accounts of the revolutionaries themselves than from a clear reckoning with the materials themselves. Perhaps, with this in mind, another, more tacit reason for this rupture can be found in the question of religion.
Following our line of thinking about Greek drama, whereby the gods are taken to represent the passionate, unconscious, and/or chaotic forces motivating human behavior while remaining beyond the scope of rational control, we could read Herodotus' omenological account of the Persian war almost as a proto-psychoanalytical study. How can history be objective if its agents -Xerxes, Leonidas, Artabanus, Demaratus- are not only inspired by rational considerations, but also by dreams and ideals; of revenge, conquest, glory, fate, and wealth? Are the unconscious realm of human passions not worthy of the attentions of historians? The answer of Thucydides, as it turns out, may not itself have been motivated by the clear light of reason alone; doesn't it seem obvious that his and Plato's emphasis on the novelty of their approaches, and rejection of the oral and religious tradition, were political maneuvers, motivated, in all likelihood -at least in part- by the same unconscious drives and forces that Herodotus so aptly -if not exactly objectively- describes? I am not trying to argue that the development embodied by the texts of Herodotus and Thucydides do not represent an increment of progress in the evolution of reason. Perhaps they do; the truth emerges from them as that which can be verified independently, presaging the emergence of our modern scientific method; certainly these are very important developments. I am only attempting to suggest that this rupture, this increment, is skin deep; it lies on the intelligible surface of what is in fact a seething, chaotic mess of historical causes and effects, influences and sympathies. I think that our academic quest to identify particular movements in this symphony is wonderful, so long as we don't lose sight of the relative triviality of our abstractions vis a vis the immeasurable vastness of the totality from which they are derived.

Anti-Aristotelianisms

I'm sorry to stir up so much trouble, but I'm seeing a basic philosophical problem in the foundation of this line of thinking: when we study history, when we objectify it, and we thereby necessarily affirm a kind of Platonism. We implicitly affirm our own position at some ideal point; a place from which our gaze originates, and at which our soul resides. The present. This location must always lies beyond, outside of the surrounding pattern of worldly events. This point allows us to frame what we observe; to measure 'outer' ('other') events from a fixed perspective, and thus identify definite patterns of interrelationship between and among them. These are the patterns that Plato identifies as the Forms. They are the definite, mathematical functions describing patterns of interrelationship we see manifested in the goings-on of the world around us. These patterns are the only true object of knowledge; at least any knowledge conceived as transcendental familiarity.
The simplest Form as such is the dialectic: binary code! It can compile iteratively and collapse back upon itself to produce all manner of forms. In fact, due to the ordered infinity recognized by Cantor as the Form of the set of all integers, we can literally model any mathematical pattern in binary code. This magical mathematical reducibility underlies the early development and conception of the computer -i.e. by Turing- as a universal instrument; a metamachine. The computer, because its hardware instantiates a dialectical language, can simulate -or model, we could say; mimic- the functional apparatus of any other machine. Including other computer programs, which are really just more limited, more functionally heterogeneous instantiations of mathematical thought, thought of as the continuity of functional syntax...
So does privileging the mathematical necessarily mean that we should devalue more naive kinds of experience? This is an important point to clarify, and Whitehead is one of the best when it comes to this point. In his later work, particularly Modes of Thought, he insisted that Form should not be exclusively identified with thought. Rather, he insists on the relative superficiality of conceptual thought to the totality of our conscious experience:

“The pitfall of philosophy is exclusive concentration on these manageable relationships, to the neglect of the underlying necessities of nature. Thus thinkers repudiate our intimate vague experiences in favor of a mere play of distinct sensations, coupled with a fable about underlying reality.”

And I'm not trying to start a quarrel with Whitehead. On the contrary, I think he raises precisely the point that we need to realize: outmoded linguistic forms can't be dispatched with weapons that they themselves have supplied. The clear conceptual divisions of Aristotelian logic have fascinated our epoch as surely as the songs of the Homeric poets fascinated the public of Plato's and Socrates' time. This is emphatically not to say that it should be abolished, or replaced by a superior form. Just as the transition from oral to literate forms of thought and social organization are and were much more subtle and complex than mere replacement, so does the transition heralded by digital and electronic media today need to learn to include and incorporate the advances made by its predecessor.
When we attempt to negate Aristotelian logic, or to categorize definitively Platonic Idealism, we are actually engaging in nonsensical linguistic operations, we are building programs with recursive loops in them, that will not be able to ever stop, to ever arrive at a solution, but will instead spin around in circles forever. Not that this is necessarily always a bad thing! A trans-Aristotelian-and-Platonic logic would have to learn to perform its data-processing operations without relying on negation, and to think the Forms of things without relying on outmoded categories.
Perhaps to sum this up: in our critique of idealism we are forced to rely on idealism, i.e. in our assumption of categorical formations -idealist/pragmatic, visual/acoustic, spatial/temporal, etc. Derrida, working a little after Havelock, and in a much different milieu, identified a set of similar formations as essential metaphysical binaries of Western Philosophy. Perhaps it is, after all, only through something like the Derridean method of Deconstruction that we could truly achieve the return of a Protagorean, or even a Socratic Pragmatism...?

afterthoughts

"The difference that shows itself as creative is the passage that leads the nightmare back to the dream, and the dream to a project (which is fully aware of the difficult and limitation) of life. If difference is resistance, the dream can live its historical projection in a fully aware and conscious manner. If difference is a mode of life, it identifies the mode of life as productive. No one here is putting critical and transcendental action into question: but we should pity it, comprehend it in the radical aporia that gives rise to it, and which does not allow it to take root in the only natural and temporal difference that counts: that of power. As a matter of fact, in the theory of creative difference there is something like an extremely strong return to an origin that is not burdened with nightmares and repressive violences. This is not an illusion but the very thing which is here at stake. Difference does not become creative when it identifies itself with an origin (burdened by the past), but when it confounds itself with a power that is always new open onto what is to-come. Difference destroys every determinate ontological foundation because it is the creative determination of an ontology of freedom."
Antonio Negri, The Italian Difference. P.22.



"In some sense the eidos, which is the cause of the being of entities, is made of the substance of the ideal, or at least exists in a medium homogeneous with soul or mind. Aristotle himself suggests as much in De Anima 3.8, where he writes that 'in a way the soul [psyche] is all existing things' because the faculties of the soul must be 'identical' with the forms of things. The intellect (nous) is the form of forms (eidos eidon). The homogeneity of intellect and being is also suggested by the way in which Aristotle sometimes uses logos interchangeably with eidos (Metaphysics 1039b20 ff; De Anima 412b10-413a3), so that entity seems to be not just correlative with logos but in some way the same as logos.
The intraphilosophical question of being with respect to Plato and Aristotle addresses the relations between the intelligible form and the sensible thing; what is significant from a deconstructive viewpoint is that the sensible thing, even in a 'realist' like Aristotle, is itself unthinkable except in relation to intelligible form. Hence, the crucial boundary for Aristotle and for philosophy in general does not pass between thought and thing, or between word and thing, but, within each of these, between form and formlessness or indefiniteness.
All of philosophy works on the other side of the line that separates being according to the logos from the indeterminate, and for Derrida the full weight of this separation comes to rest on the role within philosophy of the third-person present infinitive of the verb 'to be'. The word 'is' speaks the being of the thing, and so marks the relation of language to what is outside language (Margins p.183); it is on the linguistic passageway between form as what is knowable and speakable and form as the presence of the entity. Though it is still a word, the 'is' seems to be the thinnest membrane, offering almost no distortion or deformation of the being it brings to expression, so that thought by its means could come into the closest relation with being. But thought and being have already been teleologically predestined to meet, since they are part of the same mutually determined circle of concepts: 'One might think then that the sense of being has been limited by the imposition of the form which, . . . since since the origin of philosophy, seems to have been assigned to Being, along with the authority of the is, the closure of presence, the form-of-presence, presence-in-form, form-presence. . . . on the other hand, that formality . . . is limited by the sense of Being which . . . has never been separated from its determination as presence' (Margins, p.172)."
-p.7-8 in Henry Staten's Wittgenstein and Derrida. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

temperments

In his introduction to The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, Havelock again draws our attention to what I referred to in an earlier post as the epochal structure of history:

"The order of priorities in political thinking had been security and authority, law and order first, and liberty, freedom of choice, individual decision a bad second. When under pressures historical and economic the emphasis began to shift towards the second, it could do so only under the aegis of concepts derived from the first. The Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the English and French and American Revolutions, introduced a host of new political demands, all of them generally slanted in favour of a greater freedom for man at the expense of an increasing limitation of the political powers placed over man to govern him. But even if we discern in these demands the first programme of a future liberalism, none of them were framed in independence of the previous classic tradition. Human society and the human individual remained ideally fixed quantities. Aspirations for personal liberty, demands for commercial freedom, and rebellions to gain religious and national independence still sought to ground themselves on conceptions of morality and society which derived man and society from a priori principles, outside time and space and historical inspection." (p.14)

Here we can discern a kind of 'fine structure' of epochal, or we could say cultural evolution. The subtle problem that Havelock describes is not so much one of the complete absence of "historical inspection" as of a limitation upon our ability to inspect, located in our obligatory dependence upon the linguistic and cultural (or perhaps syntactic and semantic) structure of historical inheritance. In the burst of intellectual development known as the Enlightenment, radical philosophical, political, and scientific theorists sought to describe and epouse radical new political structures based on freedom and tolerance of diversity, but this development was constrained by the structure of the languages spoken, that "aegis of concepts" which Havelock traces back to Athenian antiquity. Such limitations are not easily shed. They are indicated not so much -or, to be fair, not only- by direct political oppositions that emerge in the form of 'class conflicts' -these do indeed appear to have emerged- but also in the forms of the arguments employed; the intellectual and conceptual and argumentative structures whereby these political battles are fought, or evaded, or deferred. Thus:

"when the cause of liberty was fought for in France and America under banners inscribed with the doctrine of the rights of man, the battle was conducted on behalf of those same convictions about the eternal nature of man's soul. The majestic language of the Declaration of Independence, appealing to the testimony of self-evident truths as before a bar of eternal justice, still used the formulas congenial to men who believed in a natural law written in the heavens and wished to use it to support the equally metaphysical conviction that all men as individuals have innate and inalienable rights. . . . The problems and the vocabulary were still Platonic and Aristotelian." (p.15)

This situation leaves us in a peculiar bind. On the one hand, by studying Platonic and Aristotelian thought, we might be able to identify habits of thought uncritically inherited therefrom, and this might give us an edge in critical scholarship of others in whom we can find these ideas active and but unattributed. On the other hand, the pernicious influences of 'Platonism' seem to be surpassable also by simple, original, and honest inquiry. From a historical perspective, we can identify in this regard many contemporary parallels with pre-Platonic thought; which Havelock suggests, citing the American Pragmatists "are easiest to ceive where the influence of classicism, so-called, has been weakest." (ibid., p.18) We can benefit from good, critical scholarship, but we can also benefit from thinking for ourselves, and following our own intuitions.
This forces us to associate liberal politics, and the enlightened habits of thought that it purports to represent, in an uneasy balance between disciplined study and free thought. In my opinion, this work raises a truly a crucial arguement for interdisciplinary scholarship, conceived as a student-centered mode of contemporary education.

anxieties and their discontents

In response to Ruthie's perceptive comment on my last post:
I don't mean to imply via the generalization of this theory 'about art' that critical succession and the influential 'complex' that 'drives' should necessarily trivialize our theories 'about reality'. But doesn't the very idea of 'externally verifiable' reality imply a point of access independent of tradition? This is Plato's conjecture, right? If art is all there is, then Protagoras is basically right; education is basically the inculcation of civic virtue as a set of techniques. The technicality of virtue necessitates a submission to the tradition, to the teacher from whom you can learn these skills. The anxiety of influence implies both an attempt to escape from, and a critical engagement with the 'influence' of a tradition. The anxiety of submitting oneself completely to the authority of a teacher, representing a tradition thought as the reproduction of a set of technical proficiencies... I think the value of this line of thinking lies in its encouragement of critical, skeptical engagement with authority. The tricky part nowadays is that, within a(n American) political context that tends to value critical thought and individual freedom above obedient submission to authority -albeit theoretically- authority tends to want to present itself dissimulatively; as antiauthoritarianism. Cf. Republican populism a la Bill O'Reilly. This means that to really rebel, we should submit ourselves to a constructive engagement with history, rather than succumb to our anxiety about failing to embody the ideal of rugged individualism. Paradoxically, it is through abandoning this anxiety that we really individuate ourselves from the similarly (because ideologically-conditioned en masse) anxious crowd. Platonic rationalism and scientific empiricism can as easily be included in this category of 'ways in which we believe we should be critical, because we have been told to.'
I agree that this is a dangerous distinction; I think because of its subtlety: I just think that sometimes critical traditions are precisely the ones that need to be questioned, and that the only way to do that is to (provisionally) assume contrary beliefs. Perhaps this can be done in a pragmatic way, so that an artistic engagement with the past might allow us to experiment with new ways of being critical, by showing us new realities that we can be critical of. ?B

anxieties of influence

in this post I would like to approach not only Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, but also the article that Prof. Moretti sent out last week about language's effects on thought.
I'd like to suggest a concept that these pieces and the matters they have us considering might be profitably understood in common through the use of a little idea that we can attribute to the Yale Literary Critic Howard Bloom: the anxiety of influence.
the anxiety of influence is a generalizeable concept; Bloom employes it as a lit crit tool, but you can see in Havelock a very similar notion with more overtly philosophical, or even metaphysical connotations. Plato's attack on poetry provides a paradigmatic example of Bloom's concept.
whereas Bloom's work is explicitly concerned with poetic creativity, we can see his point thru a the more generally Freudian lens of the Oedipal complex, whereby the father becomes the enemy through a poorly-integrated incestual impulse. The Oedipal complex is unconscious, and thus expresses itself symptomatically; it cannot be perceived directly, but can only really be inferred from the set of distortions it introduces into its local field of actions and experiences...
all of this talk about Whorf and how he obviously got it wrong carries, by my reading, a strong Oedipal signature. Whorf is the deadbeat father of analytical linguistics (Sapir is perhaps its codependent mother), whose legacy must be forcibly appropriated (by Chomsky?), much like Zeus has, in Aeschylus' tale, usurped the throne from his father (Kronos), and Titanic retinue. But in all cases, such violent usurpation leads only to further trouble, to what Emerson called 'secret retributions', which become necessary, either as the fallout from divine politics -as in Aeschylus, or Homer-,or as internal deviations from the moral rectitude of dispassionate philosophy -for Plato-, or by simple virtue of the mounting anxiety of symptomatic deferral -for Freud or Bloom. It's like a deferred, karmic version of Newton's second law.
but as we see in all these cases, this little literary/theoretical problem quickly becomes a great historical/socioeconomic one. The anxiety of influence belies a dissimulative tendency in our comprehension of ourselves and the natural world we inhabit. This dissimulation (or misapprehension) occurs as a function of what we could call epochality, a notion which receives an interesting treatment in Heidegger's work, but the general concept -that we are somehow culturally predisposed to an erroneous conception of history- motivates in an interesting way the work of a wide range of thinkers -usually historians and philosophers of science- including Whitehead (in Science and the Modern World), Kuhn (The Structures of Scientific Revolutions), and Foucault (who draws from Canguilhem, and is drawn on by Agamben)...
this is not a simple problem. With regard to Deutscher's NYT article, his early dismissal of Whorf turns out to be a ploy for our attention; he closes on the note that, "We [do] not know as yet how to measure these consequences [of language on thought] directly...", effectively undermining his own smug assertion, expressed earlier in the article, that Whorf's theory had "crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims."
this kind of waffling seems symptomatic to me. The whole point of Whorf's theory (and Deutscher's, as it turns out), is that the seeming solidity of 'common sense' can be mistaken. And the much more interesting (than political games of attribution and usurpation) question that arises from all of this is: what could possibly constitute 'hard' evidence for an epochal (and this is also the preeminent theme in Husserl's work) structure of language? In the final analysis, I think Aeschylus' story serves as an excellent allegory for the overreliance on fact and reason. Prometheus never shows any 'hard facts' to support his prognostications, yet his foresight is a gift that even Zeus will eventually be unable, either to extinguish, or to do without.