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Strong Beliefs, Weakly Held
(Yet another shameless cross-posting from I Cite)
In a critique of Scott Eric Kaufman's draft paper on the history of theory in literary studies (which I haven't read; I recommend, though, the terrific discussion over at Rough Theory) Eileen Joy rightly draws attention to Stephen White's discussion of weak ontology. Indeed, to my mind, Scott's emphasis (as channeled by N. Pepperell) on "an aggressive commitment to strong beliefs, weakly held" is more akin to William Connolly's ethos of pluralization and commitment to the cultivation of an ethos of generosity (White discusses Connolly's work in detail in Sustaining Affirmation; White's notion of weak ontology in fact draws heavily from Connolly and attempts to mediate between Connolly's Deleuze-indebted 'immanent naturalism' and the work of other political theorists--in particular, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, and George Kateb).
Is this interesting primarily as a matter of academic pedantry or turf warfare (along the lines of "gee, political theorists have already been talking about this for quite a while")? Perhaps. But there could be more at stake. Differently put, that Connolly has worked out these notions in several books that have been the subject of sustained discussion among political theorists for the last decade might shed light on potential ramifications of an "aggressive commitment to strong beliefs weakly held" (it is also likely that the disciplinary difference here is significant--Scott says that literary theorists are more interested in imagined worlds; political theorists, for all our engagement with ideals, remain imbricated in this one, for better or worse). Here are a few possibilities:
1. Among political theorists, Connolly tends to be associated with poststructuralism (his archive is heavy on Deleuze and Foucault and critical of foundationalist, universalist, and dogmatic approaches ).
2. Connolly's pluralism is not deliberative. That is, it is neither rooted in nor presupposes the possibility (or even desirability) of discussion. It thus accepts a fundamental incommensurability but wants to defang it.
3. This is where 'weakly held' comes in. Connolly expresses it as an awareness of the contestability of one's own fundaments.
4. To my mind, this is where the difficulties come in. It is one thing to recognize the contestability of one's fundaments when one is thinking, reading, and writing. In some ways, it is simply another way to understand good old Kantian reflexivity/universalizability. It may even be another way of 'including oneself in the picture' and recognizing that any view that one has of the whole is already part of that very whole, inside it, operating within it. Yet, it is another thing entirely to engage politically from such a view.
Or, perhaps a better way to put it is to say that different things can follow from such contestability. One can stop fighting to death, aware that one may be wrong--gee, maybe slavery is God's will or maybe women really are incapable of reasoning. Or, one can fight to the death, knowing full well that this may ultimately have been wrong and pointless. Contestability, then, may be simply another way of saying that nothing is certain, that certainty is an inhuman element.
5. An additional difficulty with placing one's political eggs in the contestability basket is a matter of political strategy. When one's opponents are possessed of an inhuman certainty, when they are motivated to realize their vision of the world, to respond by saying that, really, they need to demonstrate more humility is inadequate. That is not the way to defeat them. Instead, one needs to affirm the contest aspect of contestability, the aspect of struggle--force decides.
Addendum: Rich Puchalsky, in the comment thread at Rough Theory, doubts that argument can overcome a determined a commitment to incommensurability. I'm not sure I know what he means. For me, incommensurability isn't something one is committed to or not. It's a description of the world (I prefer the term collapse of symbolic efficiency) that one can try to refute, resolve, deny, or accommodate. Generosity toward incommensurable views or positions is one mode of accommodation. In the political world, this is rarely possible (modus vivendi is one fragile possibility). In the academic world, it is often decided/determined budgetarily, but remains as a site of conflict and contestation--actually, not unlike in the political world. Perhaps, though, conflict over the details, the working through of momentary compromises is not trivial. Perhaps it is a kind of inching forward toward a necessarily impossible and unattainable resolution.
By Jodi | February 20, 2007 in Literary Theory, Specious Rhetorical Strategies | Permalink
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Thanks so much for bringing up this topic; about two years ago I stumbled upon Stephen White's "Sustaining Affirmation" in a special issue of "The Hedgehog Review" devoted to "weak ontologies." As a result of that issue, I literally ran out and grabbed several of Connolly's books, including "Neuropolitics" and "The Augustinian Imperative," and also George Kateb's "The Inner Ocean" and Jane Bennett's "The Enchantment of Modern Life." For quite a while now, I have been plugging the work done in theory within political studies among my medieval studies peers. I am posting here because I want to share with you that I share your reservations about what might be called the political efficacy of Connolly's radical and "contestable" pluralism; his theory is ultimately utopic, of course, and while I think you are right to ask whether or not, in the end, in real-world political situations, force often decides the issue [and my god, isn't this the real political problem of our times, and of all times?] I would still maintain that Connolly's "contestability," or "strong positions, weakly held," if agreed to by all the parties within a particular system or state, or even across states, could be a powerful agent for progressive change. But again, it's an overly utopic idea--therein lies its greatest weakness: it overestimates, as you rightly point out, the human capacity for humility.
Posted by: Eileen A. Joy | Feb 20, 2007 9:31:32 PM
I should have also said in previous post: I really admire your work as well. Best, Eileen
Posted by: Eileen A. Joy | Feb 20, 2007 9:36:11 PM
Jodi: "For me, incommensurability isn't something one is committed to or not. It's a description of the world [...]"
That's a commitment to imcommensurability -- describing it as a property of the world, just a scientist might describe physical laws as a property of the world. It goes along with stances like not deciding on "alien abduction or 9/11 truth" because you're studying those discourses. Many people have no trouble studying particular discourses while also holding an opinion on whether they are actually true or not.
A commitment to incommensurability is politically useful in academic contention, in the short term, because it means that you can not really be argued with. For instance, if someone like Holbo tries to point out a contradiction in the way you are using certain terms, you can reply that the terms mean different things when you use them at different times, or when different people use them -- which is certainly true -- but this can be generalized into an effective assertion that no one can ever find a contradiction in what you write. A more sympathetic-sounding metaphor, Eileen Joy's, might be that you can "slip away" from argument to pursue your own projects.
However, in the long term, this means that academic disputes can only proceed by pseudopolitical methods; I agree with that part of your last paragraph.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Feb 20, 2007 11:29:19 PM
Eileen sends the following comment (she was having trouble with Typepad):
But I would also say, to Rich, that while "we" literary critics, whether over at
Acephalous or In The Middle or The Valve or elsewhere in the blogosphere are
debating the importance of contestability or "strong opinions, weakly held" or
icommensurability, that political theory scholars such as Jodi are engaged in
debates about questions that pertain to situations with more [possibly fiercely
detrimental] material effects: actual local and more globalized politics. I
cannot speak for Jodi, but I have read her writings elsewhere and know that she
has been willing to launch some critiques of weak ontology's "weaknesses"
[forgive the pun--is it even a pun?]. How, as political philosophy with
[hopefully] real-world applications [never mind its utlity for the purposes of a
more progressive set of theoretical debates among intellectuals] can it confront
persons & groups who wield power and hold, often forcefully, "strong opinions,
strongly held," without humility, without postmodern forms of theoretical
generosity? How, for example, would weak ontology, whether in White's or
Connolly's terms, help us to argue with, even overturn, neoconservatism? How
could it confront or alleviate the Russian government's treatment of Chechens
seeking redress for their "disappeared" [likely tortured and killed in secret]
relatives? And so on and so forth.
I am reminded of a really funny scene in Woody Allen's "Manhattan," where
Allen's character is at a benefit party with a group of very sophisticated,
artistic & intellectual types, and he asks if everyone has heard that a neo-Nazi
supremacist-type group is going to be marching somewhere in New Jersey, and
maybe they should all go there with bricks and bats, and this very obviously
anemically pinched intellectual comments that he read a "really satirical" piece
about it in the "Times," really "biting satire," etc., and Allen replies that he
doesn't know about "biting satire," but he thinks bricks and bats would be a
good idea.
Posted by: jdean | Feb 21, 2007 2:16:39 PM
Eileen--I like the Woody Allen example; sometimes there is a place for satire; sometimes for bricks and bats. In fact, I probably am taking the example too seriously (but I really like it), yet it seems that in politics we can't actually choose between them categorically, that no matter what there arise times for each, despite and because of our best intentions.
Rich--maybe I am misreading you, but what I detect is some sort of notion of 'a commitment to incommensurability' as a tactic one adopts. This is not my view. In fact, for me to assume anything else would be false, nonsense--and I say this having once held a different view, having once held the view that translatability and consensus were possible in principle.
This is no way means that I think it is impossible to find a contradiction in what I write (although I think that 'finding contradictions' is not the most interesting or effective form of critical engagement. For example, there is a significant problem that arises between Aliens in America and Publicity's Secret. In the former, I pose credibility as a problem; in the second, I treat it unproblematically as a political level. And, precisely because of this tension, I'm now working on credibility.
Posted by: jdean | Feb 21, 2007 2:25:02 PM
Jodi, I didn't mean that I was interpreting your writing as propounding this position falsely or tactically -- I'm quite willing to believe that it is truly held. The focus on tactics came because you were writing in the context of politics.
But I think that it's quite accurate to describe it as a commitment, based on the history of your writing and the "for me to assume anything else would be false" wording in your last comment. And this commitment functions to control who can contradict you. Without your agreement that those arguing against you are using the same words as you are, they can be ignored; without someone speaking within the tradition within which you work, they are can say nothing about the discourse within that tradition. And since the tradition is defined around belief in certain ideas, those ideas can not be challenged.
The problem with the constellation of ideas around incontestabilty / incommensurablity is that politically, discourses are not really incommensurable. There is always power to suppress one in favor of another; people find it quite possible to adopt a formerly incommensurable discourse when they are forced to. So a commitment to incommensurability is a form of withdrawal into a protected space, in this case an academic space. It works as well as the surrounding context permits it to work, but the person with a commitment to incommensurability can not really say anything true or false in a wider context, so they can't affect it unless they have access to non-verbal power.
Eileen, I'm having some trouble reading your comment, but at any rate I agree that weak ontology is of little use if what you want to do is overturn neoconservatism or stop killing and torture of Chechens. Neoconservatism is based around the same commitment to incommensurability that I've been talking about, with, for instance, its doctrine that whatever the United States does is good by virtue of it being done by the United States, no matter whether we would condemn the same actions by others. They simply do not accept any universal standard of comparison.
What I tend to find useful in Scott's piece is its implicit normalization, which he himself may not agree with. I don't think that academia can really exist, long-term, with everyone in their private gardens. The value of all the arguing that Scott envisions would be to assert that the larger context of people outside your subdiscipline, outside your field, actually matters and is actually addresseable.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Feb 21, 2007 3:53:59 PM
Kuhn's idea of incommensurability was in regards to competing yet incomplete theories in a particular scientific field (generally due to conflicting/incongrous data--say traditional Darwinian natural selection evolutionary models vs. SJ Gould's punctuated equilibrium), not in regards to politics: is there some factual dispute between, say, Rawlsians and marxists? Perhaps (as when someone asks an orthodox marxist to define, much less identify the "dialectic"), but then maybe the incommensurabilists could indicate the talking points. The real incommensurability holds between researchers and writers who do work with data, specific claims, empiricism broadly construed, and aesthetes, whether left or right, who don't......
Posted by: nominalist | Feb 21, 2007 4:40:12 PM
Rich,
You write:
"And this commitment functions to control who can contradict you. Without your agreement that those arguing against you are using the same words as you are, they can be ignored; without someone speaking within the tradition within which you work, they are can say nothing about the discourse within that tradition. And since the tradition is defined around belief in certain ideas, those ideas can not be challenged."
I want to address the ideas separately.
1. "And this commitment functions to control who can contradict you." As I mentioned, I think contradiction alone is a pretty limited form of critique and engagement. But, if you want to say that my epistemological (and other kinds) of commitments determine in advance a range of arguments or propositions that will 'make sense' to me or that count (to me) as sensical utterances, then yes, that's true. And, this is the same for any worldview, discourse, language/language game, or epistemology. (I'm assuming that you would agree with this.)
2. "Without your agreement that those arguing against you are using the same words as you are, they can be ignored;" I wouldn't put it this way. I would say that what the other person says simply doesn't make sense to me; it's not that I am ignoring them, it's that their position/argument makes no sense in the terms in which I think--it just doesn't even register to me as a valid argument at all.
3. And this commitment functions to control who can contradict you. Without your agreement that those arguing against you are using the same words as you are, they can be ignored; without someone speaking within the tradition within which you work, they are can say nothing about the discourse within that tradition. And since the tradition is defined around belief in certain ideas, those ideas can not be challenged.
4. "without someone speaking within the tradition within which you work, they are can say nothing about the discourse within that tradition." I don't see how this follows. In part, I say this because it seems to me to jump from a kind of meta discussion to something more specific. So, I can 'speak' a number of different theoretical languages--Habermasian, Foucauldian, Lacanian, Marxist, Liberal, Communitarian, etc. I can recognize arguments that are convincing in one area but not in another, points of intersection and contestation, etc. So, I'm not sure what you mean at this point.
5. "And since the tradition is defined around belief in certain ideas, those ideas can not be challenged." This depends on how narrow or broadly you define tradition, in part. And, it also involves 'challenge' and how that occurs. So, Laclau and Mouffe argue in Marxist terms against fundamental Marxist ideas: the primacy of the economy and the centrality of class. These are key ideas in the Marxist tradition that are challenged. To my mind, the most persuasive critiques are immanent critiques; I say this, because they begin from shared assumptions to demonstrate error. This makes these kinds of arguments very powerful and persuasive.
Posted by: jdean | Feb 21, 2007 5:02:54 PM
I agree that commitments define in advance which statements make sense to you, yes; but some commitments have more well-defined modes of disagreement than others. I know that I keep harping on contradiction, which you don't like, but it is, if limited, at least a basic form of critique. A scientist accepts professionally that what he or she believes can be contradicted by observation and experiment; a historian accepts that new primary sources may appear; a lawyer is subject to having a legal theory disproved by a new case, etc. The problem with a commitment to incommensurability is that each person gets to define whether their discourse is incommensurable in each instance. What you consider to be an immanent critique might not be considered to be one, in your example, by a Marxist who held that rejection of the primary of the economy made the discourse non-Marxist despite other shared assumptions.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Feb 21, 2007 8:04:40 PM
It's not a matter of each person defining incommensurability; it's a matter of points where other ways of looking at the world 'don't compute.'
And, this is also the case in all the examples you mention--science, history, law; in all of these, there are points of methodological and epistemological disagreement that cannot be reconciled simply on the basis of 'new evidence' (in law, which constitutional provision or amendment applies in a case, for example; or, in history, how to understand the French Revolution, the very temporalization of the Revolution, not to mention notions of causality).
Posted by: Jodi | Feb 21, 2007 10:56:24 PM
I've been drafting a response to Jodi's post for two days now, and I still can't seem to come up with anything adequate. So I'll approach it roundaboutly, via Eileen:
How, for example, would weak ontology, whether in White's or Connolly's terms, help us to argue with, even overturn, neoconservatism?
I find the leap here baffling, if only because the shift from political theory to literary studies requires a series of category errors I neither did nor would endorse. Weak ontology's viability for literary studies has no bearing whatsoever on its viability for political theory or political practice. (What I see here is a recapitulation of that most common of arrogant collapses; namely, the belief that theorizing about the world constitutes political action in and of itself. But that is another complaint, for another day.) Weak ontology could be a perfectly acceptable mode of intellectual exchange and a disaster once applied to popular politics. I thought it unnecessary to state all the things to which I wouldn't apply my notion of intellectual exchange in my article. But it seems as if people want me to. So, a sample:
My argument in no way applies to: the manufacture of milk and dairy products; the staging of the Apollo moon landings; the pain in my toe when I stub it for the third time today; the noise my phone sometimes makes when people desire my conversation; &c.
I could go on, but it seems like a pointless endeavor. All of which is one way of saying that the stakes of my argument are clearly defined in the essay itself. Anyone who took the time to read my essay—not a requirement in this medium, I know, but certainly helpful in discussions about my argument—would know that I don't believe my argument generally applicable. If it I did I wouldn't sell it as a specific response to a unique disciplinary history. While one could extend my argument into other spheres, doing so would contravene my own oft-stated intent, which is that my argument isn't generally applicable.
To return to Jodi's post, I think there's evidence here of the sort of bad faith I discuss in my article. She jumps from what is ostensibly my argument to another one entirely, but not before framing it in all its provincial boredoms. First, she suggests that the essay she hasn't read is but the latest scrum in a long "turf war." Since she's valorizing some unstated bridge between theory and political action, any statements of the sort I make constitute little more than "academic pedantry." Having denigrated my claims thusly, she wonders whether there couldn't be more at stake...
...despite the fact that, in the essay she's yet to read, I'm quite frank about the scope and applicability of my argument. Perhaps there's more at stake in the Connolly/White debate, but that debate has little to do with the disciplinary history I address in my paper. I don't mean to sound too combative here—esp. considering the constructiveness of the criticism I've received from Eileen and other people who found my essay (despite no link to it) through Long Sunday—but it seems to me that if my essay is to be discussed, it should be discussed. I can't be the only one who finds this repetitive ignoratio elenchi tedious.
Posted by: SEK | Feb 21, 2007 11:33:41 PM
Jodi: "It's not a matter of each person defining incommensurability; it's a matter of points where other ways of looking at the world 'don't compute.'"
Well, no, not really. Let's take the recent dispute here about whether "theory" exists as an example. You write earlier in this thread: "I can 'speak' a number of different theoretical languages--Habermasian, Foucauldian, Lacanian, Marxist, Liberal, Communitarian, etc. I can recognize arguments that are convincing in one area but not in another, points of intersection and contestation, etc." Given that you're a political science professor, I don't believe that there are other academic ways of looking at the world that you really can't understand to the point that they "don't compute". Yet your response in the linked post centers on concepts like "Terms are markers of discursive communities" or "And then the very possibility of debate becomes impossible, again."
I would say that you don't agree, and the lack of agreement is made uncontesteable through your treating it as if it's an unbridgeable gap particular to a difference between communities. (Once again: I accept that this is a commitment, not a tactic.) But Scott is, I think, right about the elements of disciplinary history that this particular exchange is informed by, which makes it a general phenomenon rather than a singular one. I'd say that never have so many people understood each other so well and yet been ideologically invested in the idea that they do so so poorly.
Or, for another example, take the gesture towards Scott in this thread. At the start, you reference two different blog discussions, the total of which probably approaches the length of Scott's essay. You refer twice to what Scott says, first through him being "channeled" by someone else, the second time directly. Yet you make the point, in the first sentence, that you haven't read the essay. This is a distancing move, is it not? The lack of communication is pre-explained.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Feb 22, 2007 12:35:11 AM
Scott--bad faith? please. It's a complement to you that I would put you together with Connolly. Connolly's--as well as White's--concerns are with contemporary fundamentalisms along the lines of neoconservativism.
The academic pedantry point was self-referential, not about you at all--I was suggesting that maybe (since I hadn't read your piece) the link to weak ontology that I was extending past Eileen Joy's was pedantic.
In sum, what I am guilty of is using your phrase to discuss what actually interested me--Eileen Joy's link to White. It seemed to me an opportunity to explore a notion that is appearing in more than one context.
Posted by: Jodi | Feb 22, 2007 7:57:31 AM
Rich--I use Scott as a way to talk about White and Connolly because I thought the link Eileen Joy made was interesting. Clearly, my post is more about Connolly and White and that I was interested in saying more about weak ontology. It seemed to me a way to consider the notion of 'strong arguments weakly held.' I had no intention in this post of engaging Scott's whole paper and did not. I wouldn't call this a distancing move but a connecting one, via the possibility of a similarity between concepts. And, that still does not seem to be indispute.
I don't understand your claim that people have never understood each other so well and been invested in the idea that they poorly understand each other. Several possibilities come to mind: say, Christian fundamentalists and leftists; they understand what the other is saying, but reject the deep commitments and investments. The matter here isn't about comprehension, it's about the very notion of reality. Is that like what you have in mind?
In political science, some empirical types rooted in big N small N notions of political science don't think of political theory as having any place at all. I actually think they don't understand the claims or the reasons for the discussions political theorists have at all. But, again, understanding seems to easy, like things could be cleared up if we sat around and talked about it. The fundaments of the approaches don't provide enough grounds of commonality for a discussion.
You don't buy it when I say 'does not compute.' I'll try another way. I have a set of assumptions and, to use your term, commitments that inform my work. One cluster of assumptions involves the notion of unconscious, the notion that the subject is split, and the idea that language is more and less than 'saying what we mean'. These assumptions mean that, at the level of battle or engagement, a number of the arguments of Habermasians don't make sense to me anymore. I don't find them plausible or valid because they proceed as if the cluster of notions I mentioned are simply not there. So I 'understand' Habermasian claims in the sense that I can reconstruct the conditions under which they are valid. But, they don't register to me as critical responses or engagements with the views I hold because their underlying conditions of validity are different.
Differently put, there is a difference between 'understanding' and accepting or agreeing with the underlying conditions of validity. I'll try a different direction--I can 'understand' and explain Plato and know what makes positions acceptable or not in his system. But, if someone raises Platonic arguments as criticisms of my positions, this does not compute--the conditions of validity are not the same. So, terms are markers of discursive communities--they invoke the set of suppositions of validity held by members of a community. An 'outsider' so to speak can recognize these terms as denoting these conditions without actually accepting these conditions.
Posted by: Jodi | Feb 22, 2007 8:17:48 AM
Nominalist mentioned Kuhn so it reminded me of the following passages from "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:"
"Like the choice between competing political institutions, that between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life. Because it has that character, the choice is not and cannot be determined merely by the evaluative procedures characteristic of normal science, for these depend in part upon a particular paradigm, and that paradigm is at issue. When paradigms enter, as they must, into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm’s defense."
"The resulting circularity does not, of course, make the arguments wrong or even ineffectual. The man who premises a paradigm when arguing in its defence can nonetheless provide a clear exhibit of what scientific practice will be like for those who adopt the new view of nature. That exhibit can be immensely persuasive, often compellingly so. Yet, whatever its force, the status of the circular argument is only that of persuasion. It cannot be made logically or even probabilistically compelling for those who refuse to step into the circle. The premises and values shared by the two parties to a debate over paradigms are not sufficiently extensive for that. As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice – there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists."
Posted by: Alain | Feb 22, 2007 11:16:44 AM
My response is over at Faucets and Pipes.
Posted by: Joseph Kugelmass | Feb 22, 2007 2:21:07 PM
Jodi, I prefer to model this response as a decision not to understand -- and my own assumptions, of course, mean that your description can not be termed to be better than mine, at least for my purposes. But whatever the description, I think that we can agree on the effect: you have a set of assumptions that inform your work, these assumptions mean that a number of other arguments don't make sense to you, that you don't find them plausible or valid -- and can not as long as your assumptions do not change. But your assumptions can only change either from internal causes or through a critique which you decide is immanent enough, which amounts to the same thing.
So far, so familiar. If you hold this commitment, there's nothing really more to be said; it is impossible to argue you out of it because that would contradict your assumptions etc. But do consider the context involved. Scott's essay, which you're not really writing about, was (I think) to a large extent about the broader academic context. Politics, of course, is about the broadest social context. The same assumptions wall you out of those broader contexts just as they keep other people out of yours.
For instance, one fundamental assumption of general academia might be phrased as "Projects which extend across a disciplinary boundary must make sense according to the standards of the disciplines that they touch." Since so much theoretical work contravenes that assumption, it's never going to be accepted outside of the theoretical subdisciplines, and in effect you set up a conflict between them and broader academia, which given the force on each side is inevitably going to be lost by the subdisciplines in any case where there's anything serious at stake.
Or, in the political case, you write about a willingness "to affirm the contest aspect of contestability, the aspect of struggle--force decides." But it's futile to suggest force as arbiter when force is exactly what you don't have, and have no real intention of gaining. Holding to the assumption that any argument which you can understand can potentially change your assumptions, and therefore that it is at least potentially productive to argue with people who don't share the assumptions that you currently hold, is of course false in some respects, and holds its own blind spots. But given that argument is recognized within the broadest social context as potentially affecting the settlement of disputes, it puts the terms of conflict within an area that academics are good at -- arguing -- and away from an area that their opponents in general are good at -- the use of force. Therefore I think that it's better.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Feb 22, 2007 2:32:39 PM
""""Because it has that character, the choice is not and cannot be determined merely by the evaluative procedures characteristic of normal science, for these depend in part upon a particular paradigm, and that paradigm is at issue...""""
This is what bothers some people about Kuhn: he seems to suggest some method of confirmation or truth process other than, well, analytical and/or synthetic "truth process" (for lack of better terms). When Einstein argued with Bohr and Heisenberg about the "incommensurability" of the Copenhagen Interpretation with classical determinism he wasn't merely using some persuasive arguments, or some strange holism: he was pointing to data, to experiments, to observable events, or at least inferences made from events (if subatomic)--that's still synthetic a posteriori (induction, broadly conceived of, even if conceived in terms of fallibility instead of verificationism). The question for postmods --or for those who fancy themselves pragmatists--is what do they use in place of synthetic a posteriori or axiomatic knowledge (most references or criticisms of political or economic events are synthetic a post., and thus the postmod. or prag. contradicts himself, generally without admitting it.....)
Posted by: nominalist | Feb 22, 2007 3:00:29 PM
Es Toot mir leid for barging in, anyway. But the incommensurability chat seems somewhat philosophical, if not epistemological, and Kuhn himself often touched on epistemological themes. (Perhaps Kuhnian relativists, marxist-postmods or pragmatists might do well to refer to some of Doc Bricmont's thoughts on similar issues, and deal with him (or tell him he's full of sh**t, vichy etc.) instead of another comment box battle, denouncing determinists or "scientism"....). Our representation of the world is not the world itself.
"""But Laplace does not commit what E. T. Jaynes calls the “Mind Projection Fallacy”: “We are all under an ego-driven temptation to project our private thoughts out onto the real world, by supposing that the creations of one's own imagination are real properties of Nature, or that one's own ignorance signifies some kind of indecision on the part of Nature” <16> ([57], p.7). As we shall see, this is a most common error. But, whether we like it or not, the concept of dog does not bark, and we have to carefully distinguish between our representation of the world and the world itself."""
Posted by: nominalist | Feb 22, 2007 3:46:09 PM
Ok, I'm sure this is new territory for me, but I'm actually quite intrigued by Rich. He and I have had some rather vitriolic disagreements, but reading the exchange thus far between him and Jodi, it does raise a rather fascinating question about the ontological validity of incommensurability, not because it is either strategic or factical, but because it is both, and because at some point some sort of expository, probative move will me made to make explicit the exact contours of what is subsequently understood as incommensurable.
In the context of this conversation we have the idea of "conditions of validity," which provides a solid catchphrase for exactly the sort of maneuver that must happen for incommensurability to be known as an ontological or existential fact, but of course the exact delineation of those conditions will always be rhetorical. SO questions of disciplinarity, hegemony, boundary-work - in short, all the questions of sociological distinction - serve as the technical operations that divide two (sets of) discourses.
But therein seems to be a tension, because for the incommensurability to be known, either a consensus on that incommensurability is necessary (which does seem to involve a certain paradox), or an act of force or coercion must be undertaken that successfully draws the line that separates the condition of validity from that of invalidity. This latter option makes practical sense, but it seems reliant on extant modalities of power and identification that simultaneously appear (though perhaps "masquerade" is a better word choice) to be the subject of incommensurability rather than the more fundamental condition from which incommensurability is made possible.
I know Jodi is on her way to the Nether-Netherlands and so probably won't be able to respond soon, but I am curious what she (and Rich, and the rest of you) think about this...
And SEK, what's up with that parenthetical aside? "(What I see here is a recapitulation of that most common of arrogant collapses; namely, the belief that theorizing about the world constitutes political action in and of itself. But that is another complaint, for another day.)" You can't be serious here. By necessity, theorizing about the world constitutes political action in and of itself. It might not be the sort of action you'd like to see, but that action ain't happening without "seeing" the world in a way that "sets up" the conditions of response, and thus action. Maybe theorizing isn't action, but that's an entirely different kettle of French thinkers.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Feb 22, 2007 8:24:37 PM
Joseph, I'll thank you to remember that the correct name for the Valve - that is, Lewis Carroll-wise, what the name is called - is not 'faucets and pipes' but 'the Democrat Party'. (This has been a public service announcement.)
Posted by: jholbo | Feb 22, 2007 9:07:24 PM
Kenneth, there's something odd about incommensurability. Take one of the standard examples of it (quoting Jodi):
"Christian fundamentalists and leftists; they understand what the other is saying, but reject the deep commitments and investments. The matter here isn't about comprehension, it's about the very notion of reality."
But in the societies that we appear to be speaking within, Christian fundamentalists and leftists are very familiar with each other. The more thoughtful representatives of each discourse understand the discourse of the other. There is a history of at least a century of engagement and coexistence. Individual members of each group can imagine how they would move from one group to the other, either through a "conversion experience" or a "loss of faith" (or perhaps a "radicalization").
In cases like these it appears to me that the concept of incommensurability is used as a kind of exoticisation; a transformation of an ordinary political relationship (two fuzzily defined groups of people have different value systems and want different things) into a sort of mysterious gap. There appears to me to be a sort of desire for unbridgeability -- treating the fundamentalist as if he or she were a member of a preliterate tribe, or a newly discovered advanced civilization, or some other group with really different basic commitments. When it gets to the level of "theorists and analytic philosophers who are both part of the Western academic humanites have incommensurable discourses" then I think that the commitment is no longer tenable.
But, yes, I would guess that the history of incommensurability is inseperable from the history of acts of force that define boundaries between groups.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Feb 22, 2007 9:14:56 PM
Two responses. First, I think I'm trying to also stress that there is by necessity no instance of incommensurabilty without either prior consensus or the use of force/coercion, whereas you seem to be stressing that incommensurability often produces reactions that have naught but force and coercion on which to rely. This difference may be slight in terms of practical consequences, but for some reason I suspect it significant.
Second, I think the example you're citing from Jodi is an interesting one, as to me the incommensurability (if we call it that) exists at the level of subjective destitution, which is to say at the level of identification whereby something fundamental gets selected as the fundamental antagonism that grounds the subject's lack. For leftists, it tends to be the material, with related concern for class, economics, inequality, etc. For the Christian fundies, it is the spiritually transcendent Godhead, with related concern for evil, impiety, immorality, etc. Both are essentially processes of recuperating and sustaining enjoyment, and while the two do operate through the explicit opposition to each other, I remain undecided whether we can productively describe the relation as incommensurable.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Feb 22, 2007 10:11:08 PM
"""incommensurableness"""
That might describe the difference between William E. Connolly's theories and political reality. Not too many cowboy capitalists were present in Westside El Lay when the shekelmeisters had their boy Obama up on stage.
Posted by: nominalist | Feb 23, 2007 12:30:34 PM
This post is a reponse to Joseph's post [cited above] at The Valve, which is partly related to the discussion unfolding here, and partly a response to Joseph's critique of my critique of Scott's essay, but also to his critique of what has been discussed here:
First of all, let me say that, the conversations that have been spurred at Acephalous, In The Middle, I Cite, Long Sunday, and here at The Valve regarding Scott’s in-progress essay on the past/present “s[S]tate of theory” have been, for me, anyway, really interesting and invigorating. But to my mind, there are also a lot of tempests brewing in teapots that may or may not aid Scott at all in attending to what, for him, is obviously an important intellectual project. While I appreciate the fact that on the more “cooked” blogs like The Valve, posts are often highly-polished and often read almost like pre-publication essay drafts, with few exceptions, I try to stick to a more stream-of-consciousness mode of typing/writing/thinking out loud, and I fully accept the risks inherent in that, and assume that in pursuant comment threads, collectively, we’ll work out some of the kinks of thought. Yes, I invoked the term “totalitarian” in my on-the-fly-one-Sunday-morning critique of Scott’s essay, as Joseph rightly points out, then pretty much withdrew it [as Joseph also points out], but here it is on The Valve, “s[S]ticking” to me, anyway. Likewise, my exchange with Jodi Dean and Rich Pulasky over at Long Sunday regarding “weak ontology” is also, I believe, being unfairly misrepresented by Joseph as somehow having been unfair to Scott’s intent[s] in his essay, when, in fact, on one level, we weren’t really talking about Scott anymore [although in a sense, we were, because if Scott is going to invoke the method/means of weak ontology, he will want, I believe, to acknowledge its genesis/history in political theory, while also maybe explaining how his use of it in literary theory is a different matter altogether]. I never accused Scott’s essay of being “politically” weak or of even of being about politics of any kind [unless we consider a debate about what literary theory or “pure theory” should be about as “political” in the sense that it represents the intellectual politics of a particular discipline or set of disciplines].
Having said all that, however, let me clarify my own thoughts here a bit more regarding totalitarianism and theory, bricks and bats. In his post, Joseph writes that, “To call a thinker totalitarian is to suggest a close sympathy between their work and the history of genocide and bloody repression that includes the Holocaust and the Stalinist gulags.” Further, Joseph writes,
“Truly totalitarian writing is an accessory to violence, to murder, and to every other kind of misery that a governed people can undergo. If a substantial allegation of this kind were made about my writing, I would have no choice except to submit to the most painful and unrelenting kind of self-scrutiny, in the face of the possibility that I had turned out to be the monstrous inverse of my hopes and values. Do not imagine that this kind of anguish has anything to do with ordinary self-awareness: we are talking about a slim chance of escaping lifelong purgatory.”
That’s quite a leap, and I hope Joseph didn’t hurt himself jumping over it. My initial invocation of “totalitarianism” and Scott’s argument was mainly intended to create a jolt, let’s say, in Scott’s thinking—NOT [get real, okay?] to accuse his argument of somehow being in league with the violence and murder necessitated by totalitarian states—but to prod him to think a little bit more about the ways in which his desire for the critical dialecticism espoused by W.J.T. Mitchell would necessitate a certain “watching” and “watchfulness” that, while on one hand could be beneficial to the “making stronger” of criticism, on another hand brings to mind a kind of surveillance regime that “polices” and “disciplines” its citizens. It would also necessarily collapse, in my mind, to just another critical theorist celebrity culture in which radical thought would be quickly run over by the big dogs—but never mind that, because that’s a whole other argument. Ultimately, however—and this is the important part—I DID withdraw the term, and replaced it instead with “totalizing.” This is an important distinction. I think Scott’s argument in his essay does aim, on one level, to articulate the necessity [for the future, strong development of theory’s sake] of creating sites, publishing-wise and discipline-wise, in which a more “whole” view of theory could emerge, and under the aegises of which, theoretical thinking could be disciplined, and somehow made more “whole,” less “fragmentary” and “fragmen-tizing.” In my mind, the future of theory will be dependent on two things happening at once: what Scott advocates, and even more sub-disciplinary processes of fragmentation [to include “underground” theories that develop out of sight and mind of theory’s so-called virtuosos—let’s call this idiot savant theory].
I hope Joseph also understands, however, that I also understand that he is trying to draw my attention, too, to the fact that the term “totalitarian” carries such heavy [and deadly] historical baggage, that I should not invoke the term too lightly. Did not my immediate withdrawal of the term not signify that I understand that? Just because I left Hegel in there does NOT mean that I intended his name to trail behind itself the dark cloak of totalitarianism [implicitly]. I did not. I wanted to urge Scott to explicate more fully what he means by “Hegelian seriousness.” I want to know why he needs Hegel to argue for critical “seriousness” or Mitchell’s “dialectical criticism.”
Regarding Joseph’s thoughts on the exchange between Jodi Dean, Rich Pulasky, and myself at Long Sunday [and really, it was more between Jodi and Rich], to claim that either Jodi or I were making some kind of claim about the “necessary recourse to force” as a consequence of “the irreducibly incommensurate nature of belief,” is so utterly ridiculous, that I’m not sure this even dignifies a serious response. The discussion had more to do with how weak ontology might work [or not] in political theory/real politics as opposed to how it might work [or not] in literary theory, than it had to do with either Jodi or I fantasizing about “street violence” as an appropriate response to hate speech. Are the readers of The Valve familiar with Jodi’s very extensive work in political theory? I’m hoping they are. In short, allow me to simply refer this entire matter to a special issue of “The Hedgehog Review” (Summer 2005), “Commitments in a Post-Foundationalist World: Exploring the Possibilities of ‘Weak Ontology’,” which featured essays by Stephen White, William Connolly, Charles Taylor, George Kateb, Jodi Dean, and others. In the meantime, can we maybe respect the caliber of scholarship that stands behind some of the participants in this debate? That would be refreshing.
My most recent work [forthcoming later this year] is actually centered upon Levinas’s ideas of hospitality in “Totality and Infinity” and Derrida’s engagement with those ideas in “Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas,” in relation to Anglo-Saxon law codes regarding the status of the foreigner/stranger and outlaw in early English history, Grendel’s violence in “Beowulf,” and the situation of female Chechen suicide terrorists in contemporary Russia. My epigraph to that essay is this quotation from Simone Weil’s essay on “The Iliad”:
“He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance has separated from him by an abyss. The variety of constraints pressing upon man give rise to the illusion of several distinct species that cannot communicate. Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.”
My essay argues for the cultivation of an ethical regard for the suicide terrorists, or a type of welcoming of them, that would allow us to forge a politics of Levinasian hospitality that would help us to move beyond violent confrontation and the idea that we cannot “speak” or communicate with terrorists to a site of peace born from what Levinas would call the “absolute adventure” of “pluralistic being.” Because I know that, on a practical level, I actually cannot accomplish any kind of real politics vis-à-vis the now-dead suicide bombers, I also argue for considering their exploded bodies, especially even their heads [and Grendel’s decapitated head in “Beowulf”] as sites of wonder and ethical marvel that, once generated, hold open the possibility of different futures. Probably impossible to accomplish, but this is just to say that, if you don’t know the larger context of my work [which I am guilty of not having shared in the course of all this, of course], please be careful what you “brush” me with. I actually share with Joseph the idea that the only real ethical possibility of a “politics of alterity” is, in his beautiful words, “an ever-more gentle mode of deference towards others,” or what Levinas termed “la petite bonte” [the little act of goodness]. On this, we agree. On the idea that satire can actually have a force of its own, we also agree.
As to Joseph’s criticism that my critique of Scott’s argument is at odds with itself, and perhaps unfair, for accusing that argument of being both weak and overly “aggressive,” mea culpa. He’s on to something here, and it would be worth debating further. But to attach my critique of Scott’s “universalizing” desires with anti-Semitic or racist discourses is as bad as me brushing Scott with “totalitarianism,” which term, again, I withdrew.
Best, Eileen Joy
Posted by: Eileen A. Joy | Feb 23, 2007 3:51:57 PM
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