Long Sunday

Unfortunately, an indictment is not a Revolutionary Paradigm Shift

" Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit. Their success therefore necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in favor of another, and in the interim, society is not fully governed by institutions at all. Initially it is crisis alone that attenuates the role of political institutions as we have already seen it attenuate the role of paradigms. In increasing numbers individuals become increasingly estranged from political life and behave more and more eccentrically within it. Then, as the crisis deepens, many of these individuals commit themselves to some concrete proposal for the reconstruction of society in a new institutional framework. At that point the society is divided into competing camps or parties, one seeking to defend the old institutional constellation, the others seeking to institute some new one. And, once that polarization has occurred, political recourse fails. Because they differ about the institutional matrix within which political change is to be achieved and evaluated, because they acknowledge no supra-institutional framework for the adjudication of revolutionary difference, the parties to a revolutionary conflict must finally resort to the techniques of mass persuasion, often including force. Though revolutions have had a vital role in the evolution of political institutions, that role depends upon their being partially extra-political or extra-institutional events."

Those Were The Days

Watergate was my first scandal, maybe even 'event.' Perhaps because the Counsel to the President had the same name as my grandfather. Or because I was a too young for Viet Nam and all the movements. Or, as most likely, because like many others in the country at the time, I was gripped by the spectacle. I mean, really, could anyone have believed Nixon when he said, "I am not a crook"? If you have to say it....

At any rate, thinking about Watergate can provide us with a little perspective, particularly around indictments. The first indictments came down on September 15, 1972 against the seven Watergate burglars. Five of them plead guilty when the trial begins in January. G. Gordon Liddy and James McCord are found guilty. McCord then writes a letter to Judge John Sirica in which he says that John Dean and Attorney General John Mitchell urged the burglars to lie. Nixon isn't named as an 'unindicted co-conspirator' until March 1974. 

Until the End of the Day

A (very young) old advisor of mine once (way back in 1993) wrote a joint review of Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community and Gianni Vattimo's The Transparent Society.  It holds up pretty well, I think.  (Though in anticipation of certain precise and no doubt singularly convincing comments, I'm happy to be corrected.)  Thanks to the generous funding Long Sunday has just received from the Association of Abstruse Kitsch and Kantians, we are happily able to make the full text available to you here right now, indeed, without your having to click anywhere for at least a full 65 seconds.  As the themes are still as relevant (and what is surely unfortunate, as dogmatically contested) as ever (though just imagine, back in 1993 nobody was yet nostalgic for the good ol' days of postmodernism), and albeit at the risk of somewhat belaboring the topic:  please enjoy.  Personally I think the essay goes a great way toward advancing this conversation, the one John S. Ransom (the "S" being silent) has so wonderfully begun (though in another direction and one with which he may, of course, disagree).

The following then, is penned by Heesok Chang and it first appeared in 1993 in Postmodern Culture:

I. Philosophical Homelessnes

    Readers of the young Georg Lukacs may recall this memorable citation from _The Theory of the Novel_:    "'Philosophy is really homesickness,' says Novalis: 'it is  the urge to be at home everywhere.'"   

    According to Lukacs that is why "integrated civilizations"--where the soul feels at home everywhere,  both in the self and in the world--have no philosophy.  Or  "why (it comes to the same thing) all men in such ages are  philosophers, sharing the utopian aim of every philosophy.  For what is the task of true philosophy if not to draw that  archetypal map?"^1^ 

    Needless to say (especially in the [virtual] pages of  the present journal) this endorsement of philosophy's  "utopian aim" would not find many adherents today.  If anything, the "task" of contemporary philosophy would be to debunk the notion of its universalizing, "archetypal" vocation.  The subsumptive mapping of the world by reason is no longer an unquestioned telos of occidental thought.

Update: Relatedly, please see Adam Kotsko's valuable new review (PDF) of Nancy's as-yet-untranslated work, Déclosion : Déconstruction du christianisme, 1, in which Nancy begins to formulate a response to the essays by Derrida, particularly "Faith and Knowledge," collected in Acts of Religion (not, incidentally, Derrida's title).

Got Dick (Cheney)?

According to the New York Times I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of  staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003. While there is nothing illegal about this discussion it would seem to directly contradict other Public statements by the Vice President:

MR. RUSSERT: Now, Ambassador Joe Wilson, a year before that, was sent over by the CIA because you raised the question about uranium from Africa. He says he came back from Niger and said that, in fact, he could not find any documentation that, in fact, Niger had sent uranium to Iraq or engaged in that activity and reported it back to the proper channels. Were you briefed on his findings in February, March of 2002?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. I don’t know Joe Wilson. I’ve never met Joe Wilson. A question had arisen. I’d heard a report that the Iraqis had been trying to acquire uranium in Africa, Niger in particular. I get a daily brief on my own each day before I meet with the president to go through the intel. And I ask lots of question. One of the questions I asked at that particular time about this, I said, “What do we know about this?” They take the question. He came back within a day or two and said, “This is all we know. There’s a lot we don’t know,” end of statement. And Joe Wilson—I don’t who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back.

I guess the intriguing thing, Tim, on the whole thing, this question of whether or not the Iraqis were trying to acquire uranium in Africa. In the British report, this week, the Committee of the British Parliament, which just spent 90 days investigating all of this, revalidated their British claim that Saddam was, in fact, trying to acquire uranium in Africa. What was in the State of the Union speech and what was in the original British White papers. So there may be difference of opinion there. I don’t know what the truth is on the ground with respect to that, but I guess—like I say, I don’t know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn’t judge him. I have no idea who hired him and it never came...

MR. RUSSERT: The CIA did.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Who in the CIA, I don’t know.

NBC's Meet the Press September 14th 2003

Did Somebody Say Pop Culture?

As is well-known, Zizek delights in obscenities, in references to toilets, pubic hair, sexual acts, in dirty jokes and examples from popular culture. Nearly every commentator on his work emphasizes his combinations of high and low culture, of philosophical engagements with the German Enlightenment combined with observations on cartoons, Coke, the Gap, and Kinder-Eier. For some readers, this engagement with popular culture marks Zizek as necessarily unserious or not worth taking seriously.

Other readers of his work criticize less this engagement with popular culture than Zizek's own self-popularization. He seems not to take himself seriously, so why should we? So, he has all sorts of popular pieces in the London Review of Books and In These Times, not to mention a feature length documentary film all about him. The moves in the popular writing seem both too simple and too hard; too hard if to defend them requires references to twenty other books; too easy in their quick reductions and simple equations. Shouldn't serious philosophers do better? If they can't make the argument in a short space, then wouldn't seriousness require them not to make it at all?

Otherness

In Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (a question the answer to which seems to be yes, in fact, Zizek does in first few books), Zizek links together Habermas and Derrida. They both "presuppose an ethical demand or norm that precedes and sustains every concrete political intervention which is never able fully to live up to it". More specifically, "each articulates what the other has to presuppose and disavow to sustain his position." Derridean (and Levinasian) otherness is irrational without norms. That is, so long as it is unconstrained by norms or customs, the absoluteness of the Call of the Other becomes an irrational demand. Conversely, Habermasian normativity reduces the Otherness of the Other: the norms and suppositions of the communicative action constitutively exclude those who reject or fail to recognize them. In sum, each resists Otherness.

I think this is right as a reading of Habermas and Derrida. But, what sort of relation to Otherness is possible? Zizek's answer of course involves the Act: in the act I am the absolute Other, object. But, the Act is necessarily a disruptive internvention, a radical change. It's a relation to Otherness that completely, traumatically changes who I was and what we will be and become.

What seems clear, then, is that the relation to Otherness is not ongoing. In the aftermath of the Act, a new world or reality is installed. And, where is Otherness here?

If this line of inquiry has merit, then it might well be that Zizekian Otherness isn't exactly otherness: it functions more like negativity. If Otherness is conceived as negativity, are we in yet another Western, racist logic?

Zizek's Symptom

“The texture of Knowledge is, by definition, always total—that is, for Knowledge of Being, there is no excess; excess and lack of a situation are visible only from the standpoint of the Event, not from the standpoint of the knowing servants of the State. From within this standpoint, of course, one sees ‘problems,’ but they are automatically reduced to ‘local,’ marginal difficulties, to contingent errors—what Truth does is to reveal that (what Knowledge misperceives as) marginal malfunctionings and points of failure are a structural necessity. Crucial for the Event is thus the elevation of an empirical obstacle into a transcendental limitation. With regard to the ancien régime, what the Truth-Event reveals is how injustices are not marginal malfunctionings but pertain to the very structure of the system which is in its essence, as such, ‘corrupt.’ Such an entity—which, misperceived by the system as a local ‘abnormality,’ effectively condenses the global ‘abnormality’ of the system as such, in its entirety—is what, in the Freudo-Marxist tradition, is called the symptom…” The Ticklish Subject(Pg. 131)

common criticisms

Critics of PM never tire of writing paragraphs like these:

"The worst of it is that this deficiency is not a matter of institutional structure, nor of misplaced priorities, nor of temporary inattention. It arises from the hollowing out of Western culture as a whole. This a sententious, even grandiose, way of putting it, perhaps, but if we avoid thinking about the malaise of our larger society, across decades rather than years, I doubt we'll be able to plumb the morass into which American higher education - and, probably, the community of scholars throughout the world - has fallen.

"We not only lack guidelines and precepts to conduct us through the life of the mind, we lack the sense that such principles are even possible. The needed vocabulary hasn't vanished from our language, but it is sodden with irony, rotten from years of coarse abuse. Consider words like 'justice', 'objectivity', 'beauty', 'integrity', 'nobility', 'progress', 'honour', 'virtue', 'fairness' and 'righteousness': it's not only the postmodernists among us who reflexively snicker at these terms; all of us do so, automatically."
see: http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CADAC.htm

The above does represent a bit of an advance over the usual: at least the author does not exclusively blame postmodernists. But I certainly want to deny that all these terms are just meaningless. In fact, I would bet that postmodern types use words like 'justice' and 'fairness' all the time. Some of the other values mentioned seem like hangovers from the pre-modern period: nobility, honour, and virtue do sound strange in the mouth, and seem vague in the head. Maybe today we use other words for some version of the same thing. If someone comes to a meeting of, let's say, a department on a campus, and right after the meeting goes running to the dean to rat out someone who criticized the dean, we might not go up and accuse that colleague of 'lacking honour.' Instead we would say, "Hey rat -- I hear you went scurrying over to the dean's office to report on confidential conversations. Did you get an extra portion of rat food in exchange?" But in both cases an ethical judgment is being made.

Denying that terms like 'justice' have universal meaning is not the same as claiming that the word 'justice' has no meaning. One almost feels like saying 'duh' here, but I swear to God that's the way anti-postmodernists (APMs) think (namely, that to deny that justice has universal features is the same as to deny that the term 'justice' has any meaning at all). And pointing to the limited and even exclusionary features of a dominant notion of justice is not the same as saying "forget justice."

But also: the APMs display their ignorance of the philosophic tradition when they claim or imply that the challenge to justice is of such recent vintage. What does Hume say, for instance -- someone who I bet the APMs don't have the courage, much less the theoretical chops, to confront. All we need to do is look at the heading from _Treatise_, Book III, Section I.

Book III, Part I, 'Of virtue and vice in general'

Section I: 'Moral distinctions not deriv'd from reason'

I want the APMs to attack Hume! Hume doesn't just say that reason has nothing to do with morality. He's *dismissive* of the idea. Contemptuous. He says:

"Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life, than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates. Every rational creature, 'tis said, is oblig'd to regulate his actions by reason; and if any other motive or principle challenge the direction of his conduct, he ought to oppose it, 'till it be entirely subdu'd, or at least brought to a conformity with that superior principle."
(_Treatise_, Book II 'of the passions,' in section III, itself titled 'of the influencing motives of the will')

And here comes his contempt:

"On this method of thinking," Hume continues, "the greatest part of moral philosophy, antient and modern, seems to be founded . . . "

Let me interrupt Hume to note that he is opposing not just Platonic moral theory but also 'modern' moral philosophy; that is, the kind associated with the Enlightenment. To continue:

" . . . nor is there an ampler field, as well for metaphysical arguments, as popular declamations, than this suppos'd pre-eminence of reason above passion. The eternity, invariableness, and divine origin of the former have been display'd to the best advantage: The blindness, unconstancy, and deceitfulness of the latter have been as strongly insisted on. In order to show the fallacy of all this philosophy, I shall endeavour to prove *first*, that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will; and *secondly*, that it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will." (From Book II, Sect. III, 'Of the influencing motives of the will')

The phrase above that quickens my perhaps-too-easily-quickened heart is this: "In order to shew the fallacy of all this philosophy . . . " Hey Hume, don't hold back. Don't be so cautious. Go on ahead and really tell us what you think.

It is, then, a long established claim in the Western tradition that morality is a purely subjective phenomenon -- which doesn't mean it can't be disputed. But the APMs project this onto a much more recent philosophic turn, and confuse their readers by saying or implying that no one in their right mind has ever thought along such lines before.

Not quite a universal exception

Adam Kotsko ruined my weekend when he sent me a link to the introduction to The Universal Exception, a new collection of Zizek's popular writings and opinion pieces. The introduction, by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, is called "Slavoj Zizek's Third Way." The authors' contend that Zizek 'is absolutely in agreement with the Third Way and its desire to institute progressive social programs in the face of conservative opposition." I think the authors badly misread Zizek. In addition to ignoring and distorting specific elements of Zizek's thought, they rely, in their presentation of his ideas, on an untenable form/content distinction. I take up these points in turn.