Are we who you say we are?

(Another shameless cross-posting from I Cite.)

Lots of different kinds of remarks don't travel; they don't circulate seamlessly from one context to another. Instead, their travels are stained with a kind of remnant or remainder. It may well be that this stain or remainder is central to their use; awareness of the stain, an irrational nugget, marks one as an appropriate user of the term. Often, becoming aware is difficult, painful; perhaps that it why it marks membership and appropriate use.

Several years ago my father gave Paul a 'personal groomer' for Christmas (read nosehair clipper, sideburn trimmer, multi-purpose hair removal apparatus for men). Because this was so traumatic, I frequently mentioned it, making fun of the gift. Yet, I was furious when I heard Paul and his sister joking about the groomer. They were making fun of my father, my family, and, by extension, me.

Lots of different kinds of remarks don't travel; they don't circulate seamlessly from one context to another. Instead, their travels are stained with a kind of remnant or remainder. It may well be that this stain or remainder is central to their use; awareness of the stain, an irrational nugget, marks one as an appropriate user of the term. Often, becoming aware is difficult, painful; perhaps that it why it marks membership and appropriate use.

Several years ago my father gave Paul a 'personal groomer' for Christmas (read nosehair clipper, sideburn trimmer, multi-purpose hair removal apparatus for men). Because this was so traumatic, I frequently mentioned it, making fun of the gift. Yet, I was furious when I heard Paul and his sister joking about the groomer. They were making fun of my father, my family, and, by extension, me.

In the culture wars, the Right loves to trash feminists and feminism. They hate feminists in the academy, women's studies, the teaching of feminist theory. So, they bash feminism. Feminists respond in 2 ways: one, by circling the wagons and bashing the Right; two, by pointing out that there are multiple, differentiated feminisms. In fact, more important to most feminists than the stupidities of the Right are our own internal debates and disagreements. These are the discussions that matter (to us). I team teach with a gender constructivist who thinks that all differences between men and women are socially constructed. As a Lacanian, I view this slightly differently: sexual difference is real and the multiple expressions of gender are responses to this fundamental gap or antagonism.

In fact, I don't think that one can find a noncontroversial definition of feminism that would enable the term to function as a coherent object to criticize or attack. A bumper sticker version is something like feminism is the view that women are people, too. Anti-humanist or radical environmental feminists would challenge this definition because of the primacy of the human; they would argue that this very primacy is what feminism has to challenge. The same holds with respect to a claim like feminists think that human rights are women's rights. Many of us reject the discourse of rights and see feminism as providing a vital standpoint from which to reject rights talk.

The same holds when one talks about political theory. In American political science, theorists are a separate subfield and generally treated as separate by the rest of the disciple. We are sometimes considered a field among ourselves, perhaps because we read Aristotle and Hobbes while the others think that politics can be a science and try to find formal models that do something besides stating the obvious. Yet, political theorists disagree among ourselves. A big division is between those who do a kind of analytic political theory--or who are still oriented toward Rawls--and those who do continental. Yet, among continental theorists there are also huge debates and disagreements. The Habermasians don't read Deleuze or Zizek (not to mention Ranciere, Laclau, Agamben, or Badiou). And, while I'm on a journal with a bunch of Deleuzians, they are generally non-sympathetic to Zizek (they think he is not immanent enough and that the notion of the lack is both dangerous and wrong).

Can it mean anything, then, to reject or criticize political theory as a whole? If one is a formal modeller, yes. One is saying that only with formal methods can anything significant be said about politics. But, this is not a critique. It is simply a rejection. I don't critique formal modelling in my work. I simply reject it. I find it uninteresting and irrelevant. (I'll add that I do think there is an important role for a lot of empirical political science although I don't do that.)

Ray Davies makes an interesting point in a thread over at faucets and pipes:

Words aren’t solid tokens which can be extracted from one game and used in a different game while meaning the same thing. Precise definitions are important when rationally arguing against a supposedly rational argument, but can be toxic to community formation, as I’ve personally seen in attempts to establish the boundaries of “science fiction” or “poetry”. A social term is, finally, defined socially, and, in healthily varied communities, allows for unpredictable outliers.

I agree. Terms are markers of discursive communities.

So, can one criticize an entire discursive community by invoking one of their terms? Yes, if one is rejecting the community per se. Here one would be making an institutional argument, that is, an argument about the group existing as a group. But one would not be addressing any of the discursive content through which the group is constituted. Why--because it is precisely the contestation over the content that designates membership in the group. (This is why I never take a stand on alien abduction or 9/11 truth; that would constitute me as a member of the group/discursive community I'm trying to understand.)

The slight of hand comes in with the shift involved in using terms with currency within the group in a different setting, for a different purpose, while denying that difference in setting and purpose. So, feminists tell the Right in the culture wars that they don't know what they are talking about since feminists disagree. Political theorists tell political scientists that most of them don't know what they are talking about since political theorists disagree. Deleuzians tell Zizekians that Zizek gets Deleuze wrong and Zizekians tell Deleuzians that they don't know what they are talking about since they don't read more than one or two things by Zizek. Finally, Zizek readers argue with each other about how to read and interpret. These are real disagreements and debates. The critic who comes in, using a term with currency within a community to dismiss that community erases the disagreements and debates constitutive of that community. Differently put, the critic fails to acknowledge the way communities form along antagonisms.

Are broad disagreements and debates possible? That is, can there be a discussion on a large scale that isn't nonsensical? Perhaps. In the same thread, John Emerson introduces a valuable typology in determining groups or discursive communities:

1. A group of people who talk mostly to each other. 2. Generally agreed-upon and
practiced criteria for how discourse should be conducted. 3. A set of canonical books or other writings honored by the community.

It seems to me that #2 is central to answering the question. Without agreed-upon and practiced criteria, a discussion isn't  possible. #1 changes: national meetings, journals, small meetings, the folks one asks to read drafts, that sort of thing. #3 is usually introduced to trump in a debate (so, a common criticism involves challenging a person's archive; for example, to discuss Zizek coherently, one should read more than On Belief; or, I am sometimes urged to read Baudrillard; finally, a major way that debates in academic feminism unfolded in the eighties was in terms of archive--white feminists were criticized for ignoring the work of feminists of color).

Of course, #2 may also be the most difficult. People accuse one another of not conducting themselves according to agreed upon criteria--of bad faith, disingenuousness, and deceit. And, when faced with this accusation, some respond by pointing out that the very accusation was raised in bad faith. And then the very possibility of debate become impossible, yet again.

Comments

[John Emerson]

You know, there is a "Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory" which has been authoritative for a lot of people over recent decade. Pp. 1000-2500 are pretty heavy in what is nominally called "theory".

[CR]

there is a "Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory" which has been authoritative for a lot of people over recent decade.

Really? Because I'm, well, in the trade and honestly I've never seen a single person assign the text and not a single person as ever referenced it or discussed it with me. Not once. Only on here do I hear about it. I'm sure somebody uses it - just no one I know.

The NA of English Literature, on the other hand, yes.

[CR]

Book of the Month Club degrees like your own

Um, Craig. That was a little bit over the line. Seriously. If you'd like me to start talking shit about sociology as a refuge for failed English majors, I am quite willing to do so. I know a few myself.

[CR]

I do think it is still important to give a kind of 'stylistic' analysis of theory,

I'm all for it. In fact, this is what I am constantly trying to get my grad students to do in seminar, though they resist. But I do think that "stylistic" analysis requires work with individual texts, particular instances. Unless you're Franco Moretti, of course.

By "stylistic analysis," you don't mean "close reading," though, do you?

[VA]

I think at this point, in spite of the relative novelty of Theory's proliferation, the ubiquity of theoretical discorses places the burden of proof of the necessity of the value-of-Theory debate squarely with those who would position themselves outside the so-called forest. Show me the argument that starts outside Theory that doesn't begin with the premise "You theory people need to stop talking" and I'll start listening. The modicum of respect ought to originate outside Theory. It may sound like I wear Theory arrogantly or with a chip on my shoulder; I would say we live in a Theoretical world and I put the chip there pragmatically. Any talk of the commensurability of our debate is secondary.

[Anthony Paul Smith]

Scott,

I know you hate him now and all, but if you could put your emotions aside I'd think you'd find that Craig has a valid point. I myself have also never met anyone who says "I do theory." It's always political theory, critical theory, etc. I don't consider what I do to be 'theory' by the terms that you and Holbo seem to think are obvious, though I'm sure if you read any of my work you'd think it was (because you wouldn't like it).

John,

To say that Husserl is a Romantic is just wrong. It's a send up and nothing more, deployed to try and make a point through performative rhetoric and not through analysis. The fact that you basically include the canon of ‘Continental philosophy’ (Marxism to Phenomenology and beyond) shows that you are still well within the stupid and boring debates about analytic v continental.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Craig:

you are showing more than a little bit of ignorance

You’re right, I am. I chose the Parsonian example because I happened to be talking to a sociologist the other day about the disconnect between foundational aspects of academic sociology and what she’d heard at the “theory” lecture we’d both just attended. So, my bad. Still, note how you’ve grasped onto a single example, made in passing, in part of a much larger argument. I bet you wet yourself when you saw my flip example happened to fall in your area of “expertise.” Fine, good sir, this round to you. Of course, you’re still not making the argument you think you are. The statement “this is an interesting problem in itself” glosses over the very thing I’m discussing, namely, the impact of foundational statements on the future shape of a discipline. An “interesting problem,” isn’t it? I wonder, then, why you’re so averse to all attempts to confront it.

But I digress. Back to your “point”:

Your ignorance is, once again, getting ahead of you. For the vast majority of sociologists, "doing theory" means what is called "theory construction" and "hypothesis testing."

Yes, that’s exactly what someone leaving a seminar on Derrida and Theories of Justice means when they say they “do theory,” Craig. It’s exactly what someone who leaves the Badiou/Balibar mini-seminar last night means when they say they “do theory.” Hate to the harbinger, Craig, but you’re inventing contexts to score rhetorical points. Shall I continue? Do you want me to run down the course description for Irvine for the past six years and demonstrate how, in every single instance, you’re wrong about what the person who says they “do theory” means?

What you call "theory" by and large does not exist in the social sciences in the same way they do in Book of the Month Club degrees like your own.

My “Book of the Month Club degree”? I can see the spittle running down the screen here, Craig. What next, are you going to insult my mother? (Hint: Call her a “two-dollar whore,” as it’s the accurate statements that sting the worst.)

CR:

I've never seen a single person assign the text and not a single person as ever referenced it or discussed it with me.

Really? I know they assign it here now at the undergraduate and graduate level, and the impression I got at the MLA – granted, it was from the editors, so they may have been selling me a line – was that it had quickly become the, um, “Norton” for introductory theory classes. I looked up the sales ranks for the three most popular theory anthologies on Amazon:

Norton #10,903
David Richter #57,244
Hazard Adams #194,956

And was about to say something, but then I realized that you can only look at new sales, so of course the newer Norton, without its well-established backlog of used copies, would outsell the Richter and Adams. Still, I’d love to get hard numbers on this, you know, for that thing I’m writing.

VA:

Show me the argument that starts outside Theory that doesn't begin with the premise "You theory people need to stop talking" and I'll start listening.

Um, hello? Is this thing on?

Anthony:

I'm sure if you read any of my work you'd think it was [theory] (because you wouldn't like it).

I think the causality’s a little weird there, but I don’t think I’d dislike it for those reasons. For instance, I find much of what you write at The Secret Blog interesting, just as I find much of what Sinthome writes interesting. Sure, I have methodological problems with both, but that doesn’t mean I’d dismiss it flat.

[jholbo]

Anthony, when you deny that it is possible that Husserl can be read as belonging, in an odd but significant way, to the same philosophical lineage as the post-Kantian German romantics, exactly what CLAIM are you so sure is false? In short, how do you know that my position is wrong?

[Anthony Paul Smith]

I didn't say it was wrong, I said it was stupid (in a technical sense). Seriously, if you claim to be doing rigorous intellectual history (or moving toward RIH or however you want to put yourself in relationship to RIH) and try to make the claim that Husserl is, at all, a German Romantic (or in their lineage) you need to rethink your definition of rigor. Husserlian phenomenology shares more in common with positivism than it does with romanticism. The only possible way I can even conceive of you coming to this conclusion is by way of a very bad, non-rigorous and ahistorical reading of the Crisis texts.

If this isn't a send up, I don't know what is. So I guess I know you are wrong but you don't seem very serious about this. Which is fine, if you weren't trying to regulate.

SEK,

You're missing the point - I think when you say theory you mean something specifically coming from the literature departments. When I talk to people outside my discipline (broadly lets say what I do is religious studies and philosophy of religion of a certain stripe) I don't understand it as talking to other theorists. I understand it as a general orientation in the humanities, a 'trans-disciplinary' conversation. I don't read Lacan (never have) but I'll have a conversation with a Lacanian from which I may take new insights (or maybe not, depends obviously) into my own studies. The same goes for historicists of all stripes (in fact many of the actual theologians I talk to are essentially historicists).

[Anthony Paul Smith]

SEK,

Oh, and the blog isn't secret. Any one can visit An und fur sich and comment on my vitalism posts, I just don't want to get in pointless discussions about my methodology. You want to be a historian, that's fine, but I do not. History is good and valuable and all that, but I don't treat it as the new Queen or, what it really is, Police Officer of the disciplines. And, as I'm sure you know, I have serious misgivings about what I call your common-sense rationalism (probably not a good term).

That said, I'm open to historicists and historians and all manner of historically minded people educating me about some historically aspect of vitalism (or any of the subjects I'm interested in).

I am most interested to see if I'm considered a 'theory blogger' by you and the other haters.

[jholbo]

I'm reading Husserl not just through the crisis text - though there is that - but through Derrida and Heidegger. (I'm not sure what angle you prefer. You may prefer to NOT read Husserl through these inheritors, as it were. But I would hope you would acknowledge Heidegger and Derrida as possible inheritors of Husserl's phenomenology. Is that fair?)

Ask yourself: why did Frege become the father of analytic philosophy and Husserl become the father of 20th Century continental philosophy? Frege and Husserl had much in common. But then again, in many ways they were different. How so? The features of Husserl that attract the likes of Derrida and Heidegger to Husserl seem to me to be many of the distinctive features he shares with German thinkers of the immediate post-Kantian generation. A focus on transcendental experience, and on crisis (yes, there's that.) A refusal of natural science as a model for philosophy. I don't know how much Husserl you are familiar with, actually.

Anthony, let me be frank with you: when I make serious claims you simply bark in my face that I am wrong. You spew abuse and accusations at me. Can you imagine why I might find that tedious. I have certainly never attacked you. The worst I have done is, when abused, ironically responded by nit-picking at the extremity of your ill-temper. If you want to have a conversation, then calm down. Consider what I have to say on the merits. Don't just scream that I am a narrow-minded analytic philosopher or that I never read enough Zizek. You yourself don't believe the first thing and could hardly have any way of knowing the second. When you have gotten to the point where you are so annoyed at me that you are making accusations even you yourself don't believe, it's time to back off and calm down. Breath. Relax. Now decide whether I'm worth talking to or not. If not, fine. But don't confuse annoyance at the fact that I have these intellectual interests with knowledge that my intellectual interests are confused. How could you possibly know a thing like that?

[Anthony Paul Smith]

I think reading Heidegger and Derrida as inheritors of Husserl's phenomenology is at best very vague. Heidegger pretty much leaves behind Husserlian phenomenology half way through Being and Time and all his later work is more 'in the spirit' than actually phenomenology (he says as much). Derrida is certainly within a certain tradition of French phenomenology, but he is not a phenomenologist. It is Fink and Merleau-Ponty (if you want to stick with a German and Frenchman) who are of the true lineage of Husserlian phenomenology. Surely you must know that there are many, many phenomenologists who think that both Heidegger and Derrida wrote 'nonsense'!

I prefer to read Husserl through Husserl and the tradition from him, not Husserl through Heidegger and Derrida. So I read the Husserl who was for more pre-Kantian and Kantian than post-Kantian. Even his 'refusal of natural science as a model for philosophy' is an attempt to make philosophy more scientific, to give it the ability to ground science not to reject it in favour of the same kind of ‘transcendental experience’ present in German romantics.

You can think I'm barking at you, but I think this has far more to do with a contention on your part that people have these debates on your terms than on my actual tone. I'm not saying you are a narrow-minded analytic philosopher, I'm saying you're doing a very weak and contentious reading of things. I can turn around and say that I'm not really sure how much Husserl you've read.

I think you are the one getting excited. I've been perfectly calm this whole time. Being calm does not mean I have to be polite, I think your reading is wrong and built upon a history of thinking about these issues in a wrong way. In a certain way I don't think you are worth responding to because you will always assume I'm just being overly aggressive or that you know more about the topic than I do, but it is precisely because of this attitude that I can't but help respond.

[John Emerson]

Frege, Russell,and Husserl all trace back to Brentano, directly or through Meinong. Brentano was a Viennese Reform Catholic working in a late-Leibnizian tradition. Brentano's uncle was Clemens Brentano, the Romantic poet. Of course, this makes Frege a Romantic too.

Mach and Schlick, the first positivists, were also from the Vienna of that period. So everything is Viennese.

In Wittgenstein you do see both the Fregean and the Romantic sides.

Ernest Gellner's book "Language and Solitude" and Toulmin's "Wittgenstein's Vienna" both talk about a sort of "Science / Emotion" dualism expressed in different ways by different Viennese. (For example by expressionist poets on the other side. Wittgenstein financed Trakl and also Rilke). Se also Johnston's "The Austrian Mind" and Francis's "The Viennese Enlightenment").

That's the genealogy of the phenomenology / positivism split.

[Anthony Paul Smith]

Brentano was a bit of a Thomist as well, no? That is interesting about his uncle, not sure it means what you are trying to say it means but interesting.

Holbo,

Just because I think you're wrong doesn't mean I think you are a bad person or that all your work is bad. Hell, I'm romantic enough to think that work I consider wrong can be good work as well. You're clearly a better writer than many (myself included) and I do admire some parts of the way you think. I assume a certain amount of friendship with anyone I enter into conversation with for an extended period of time. This often leads me to be more blunt than I would be and I am sure that I shouldn't assume it. But, yeah, I still think you are really wrong on this Husserl thing. Obviously we’d have to write huge, proper ‘papers’ to get to the heart of this and that is why I approach this as if we were in a non-academic setting.

[Adam Kotsko]

John,

Can we find someone influential in theory (other than Austin) who isn't a Romantic?

[John Emerson]

I'd say Levi-Strauss, Jakobsen, and the other structuralists were non-Romantic. But "Theory" has something to do with "post-structuralism".

[Jodi]

John Emerson--

a Foucauldian account of a discursive formation that might be called 'theory' in terms of its productions of power/knowledge, generation of rules governing truth, falsity, and the admissibility of statements, constitution of objects etc would be fascinating. It occurs to me that one way such a project would unfold is not through readings of major figures, but through minor ones.

It would also be interesting to do such a project in different Foucauldian ways, so, one way would be in keeping with the archaeological method of The Order of Things, sort of like a next chapter.

Another way might be more genealogically: here it could be interesting to add an account of interdisciplines to his notion of disciplinary knowledge. Do interdisciplines discipline even more, constraining their objects even more tightly? and how do these constraints fit in which changes and adaptations to the university overall? or, do interdisciplines free their objects, providing them a different sort of mobility? and, better, isn't it likely that interdisciplines free and constrain at the same time, enabling objects to travel because of the constraints upon them?

I think 'different' perspective makes more sense then 'better' (it also usefully avoids the problem of determining how better is assessed, better in terms of what?).

On who Deleuzians talk to: there are some pretty good reasons for Zizekians and Deleuzians to talk together: a fundamental disagreement over psychoanalysis. So, Lacan provides a nodal point for the conversation. There is also the issue of Capital and how to understand it and overcome/overthrow it. So, there are some points overlap that make conversation not only possible but important and interesting.

I know some Deleuzians who engage Habermas and Rawls. But, the deliberative democrats don't pay any attention to them, they don't address them at all.

[John Emerson]

Interdisciplinary stuff I've seen, thus defined, usually is doubly constraining and gets theorized as a subdiscipline of each parent disciplines. I think rather of non-disciplinary thought. Non-disciplinary people couldn't have method uniting them into a group, and by definition they'd be skating on thin ice in everything they do. On the other hand, they might be quick at picking up the blind spots of the institutional disciplines.

Deleuze talked about nomad thought, and I sort of liked that, though I think he meant hnter-gatherers rather than nomads. methaphhorically, you would look at the uncultivated hedgerows between "fields" -- ecologically the meeting of two zones is always more diverse than either zone by itself.

[Sean McCallahan]

Marxistas--or ex-Marxistas--capable of understanding or criticizing Rawl's Theory of Justice: C'est Theorie. (as Marx understood Hobbes as well). No need for spook-phenomenology chat.

[Jodi]

JE--the idea of uncultivated hedgerows is fascinating.

SM--the claim that someone influenced by Marx couldn't understand Rawls makes no sense to me. Most graduate programs in political theory in the US require close reading and engagement with Rawls and the debates around his work. Reading isn't the same as understanding, of course, but being a marxist or a poststructuralist doesn't mean one doesn't or couldn't understand Rawls. For example, I had to take a graduate seminar on Theory of Justice, going through the book in detail, as well as the criticisms and debates, and then the later articles that became chapters in Political Liberalism. Actually, I don't know any political theorists who haven't read and understood Rawls. And, finally, rejecting, say, the premises of the original position (which I do) doesn't mean that one doesn't find other elements of the theory helpful. I think the idea of the difference principle can be used quite radically.

[Sean McCallahan]

Tho' what is more astounding about this chat (plzzzz delete if this offends) may be how Xtians invoke Vati Heidegger--whose DaseinSpeak falls to the right of Nietzsche hisself--- with nary a peep of protest from anyone--"theorist," progressive, marxist, or lit-person.

[warszawa]

"This is why I never take a stand on alien abduction or 9/11 truth; that would constitute me as a member of the group/discursive community I'm trying to understand."

Well, of course you take a stand on it!

Firstly: a) by admitting that the Bush administration *lied* about the 9/11 attacks; b) by pointing out that it blocked the work of its own Commission; and c) by asserting that the Commission's report is simply not credible.

Secondly (and paradoxically): by describing all and any critics of the Bush Gang's farrago as "hysterical", "paranoid" or "psychotic":

http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2007/01/index.html

In short, you admit the main premise - that your government is lying about a matter of enormous importance (i.e., its Universal Casus Belli) - yet you pathologise and marginalise anyone with the temerity to question that "official account" persistently and to demonstrate its falseness and mendacity. (And in this post, you do so once again, by bracketing what you call "9/11 truth" with alien abduction.)

What is this if not "taking a stand"? De facto, and quite obviously, you are taking your stand with the Bush administration, which also endeavours to pathologise and marginalise any critics of its grotesque "official account".

P.S. It also goes without saying that you cannot *avoid* being a member of that "group/discursive community" - any more than any educated adult in the Western world can avoid it.

[Sean McCallahan]

""the difference principle""

OK. At the very least discussions of distribution (how to implement it politically and economically, and related matters--the "ought" issue), and efficiency would seem relevant to, like, about any political blog. Yet any such discussions are rare.

[Kenneth Rufo]

SM, don't be silly. No one was talking about Dasein.

[John Emerson]

SM is a well-known guy, I'm afraid.