« Strong Beliefs, Weakly Held | Main | Security and Rights in Canada »
Understanding Incommensurability
(You guessed it! My latest cross-posting from I Cite.) Here is a paragraph from the middle.
Incommensurability need not be accepted or known by all involved (which would of course make it parasitic on a prior commensurability). In fact, the opposite is the case--inscribed into the situation is its own description, about which there is disagreement. So, there isn't an external point of truth or agreement that then allows for incommensurability to appear.
The whole post is below the fold (as it were).
In the comment thread here, Kenneth Rufo raises the following with respect to my evocation of conditions of validity:
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.
Incommensurability need not be accepted or known by all involved (which would of course make it parasitic on a prior commensurability). In fact, the opposite is the case--inscribed into the situation is its own description, about which there is disagreement. So, there isn't an external point of truth or agreement that then allows for incommensurability to appear.
I prefer to talk about the situation with respect to antagonism--or even with respect to the division of the one, as Zizek describes it in Parallax. Put in political terms, society is fundamentally split, and this split appears in its own description--competing or disagreeing elements describe the split differently. They have different ways of accounting for it, situating it, defining it. Some may not even recognize or acknowledge a split at all--and then they might dismiss those who do acknowledge it as recalcitrant troublemakers.
The antagonism of sexual difference also well illustrates the point: there is not one human that is divided into 2 sexes. Nor is there a fundamental way to account for or explain sexual difference (gender, desire, chromosones, genitalia, etc). Instead, we have a difference and then multiple ways of accounting for it, explaining it, dealing with, ways that ultimately want to erase or eliminate the split altogether, perhaps by demonstrating that what we really have is balance, duality.
Swifty (in the same thread) is also skeptical about the term incommensurability, suggesting perhaps the term political incommensurability, in part, I think, because he wonders about incommensurability among those who share a language. I don't think that differences between languages is central here, first, because I don't think the matter is one of understanding and, second, because of the gaps and excesses rupturing language.
With regard to the first point, as I mentioned several times in various comments, understanding doesn't tell us very much. That I understand the words coming out of a person's mouth, that I even understand why he says the words he does in the sense that I can reconstruct the conditions that make these words valid, does not mean that I accept these conditions or that I hold them to be operative. So, I may understand why an economist wants to decrease the money supply or increase demand without accepting the larger set of neoliberal economic assumptions informing his advice or recommendations. Similarly, I can know why a theorist argues for cultural rights (to protect the heritage and traditions of a minority group, say) while nonetheless rejecting its premises (that cultures are the sorts of entities that can have rights, that rights are sensical political tools). Or, closer to the worlds I travel in, I can understand when people deny things like the constitutive lack, the imaginary, the symbolic, and the Real, but I think they are mistaken to do so. I may hope that they will see the error of the ways, but more fundamentally, I don't expect them to.
Resolving these issues, moreover, is not a matter of finding the proper facts. It's not that a piece of information is missing that will decide the case. It's more fundamental than that--it's a matter of ways of looking at the world and expressing both the looking and the world--and here I think Kenneth is right to emphasize the importance of rhetoric as it helps formulate these problems as well as ways of grappling with them. I don't think, though, that rhetoric solves them--although it can solve some and create others.
And, this leads to my second point: as we try to express ways of looking at the world, we will never get it completely right. My words will say more and less than what I mean--this is an aspect of language as a set of shifting signifiers and significations, a set that is unfixed, changing, permeated with enjoyment, and embedded in a set of material conditions (not the least of which is the voice). Others' words will also say more or less than what the other means. In arguments, we often pick up on these elements of more and less--much to the outrage of our opponents, who insist that we are misreading or misinterpreting them, that we are refusing to acknowledge what they know to be true. Such arguments then become momentary enactments of the failures of language and irreducibility of incommensurability, we might even say, of the stubborn rock of the Real.
By Jodi | February 27, 2007 in Specious Rhetorical Strategies | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/361357/16458776
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Understanding Incommensurability:
Comments
Jodi writes with regard to incommensurability that "It's not that a piece of information is missing that will decide the case. It's more fundamental than that--it's a matter of ways of looking at the world and expressing both the looking and the world." An example of this that comes to mind is from an article I read in a cultural studies reader. Airline flight controllers have to learn about how different cultures handle hierarchy and group interaction. If you're dealing with a European flight crew, you can tell anyone who's a member of the crew that there is such-and-such problem, and she will pass on that info to everyone, and someone will decide how to respond. But the same kind of freewheeling sharing of information is not the norm in Japanese work groups. Group members must worry that leaders might regard learning about a problem as a kind of criticism, and a big norm in Japan is to avoid interpersonal conflict, much less challenge authority. These two cultural locales -- European and Japanese cockpits -- are incommensurable, where that word is understood in the sense of 'incomparable.' They are two different life worlds. They "lack a common quality on which to base a comparison" (dictionary).
Posted by: Swifty | Feb 28, 2007 6:57:48 PM
That's a neat example. As an anxious flier, I would really like to know if there are statistics regarding safety rates of the various crews/airlines. Differently put, do the different ways of handling information have any impact on crew performance under treacherous or uncertain conditions?
Posted by: Jodi | Feb 28, 2007 7:12:36 PM
The emphasis of the article, as I remember it, was on sensitizing air traffic controllers to these realities so they would 'manage' them appropriately. The article bounced off of that to discuss differences in work team norms in the two cultures.
Posted by: Swifty | Feb 28, 2007 9:02:38 PM
I don't know, Jodi. The more you describe the view the less appealing I find it, because I cannot shake the feeling that the claim of incommensurability is tactical, and therefore governed by an agreed upon set of rules that govern the conditions of possibility for any debate. I don't mean to say you're being disingenuous - you seem to believe sincerely that antagonisms can vault to the level of incommensurability, that this has something to do with worldview and/or ideology, and so on. But I can't help thinking that, as I tried to hint at in a previous comment, that this incommensurability is a fetish in the sense that Zizek gives it: the lie that helps us bear the unbearable truth, or in this instance, the inability to persuade someone as to the validity of the Lacanian registers or other psychoanalytic precepts.
Let me offer a tangent as a way of example. There's a theory of the "adaptive" unconscious that predates Freud but that historically gets displaced as a result of the popularity of Freud's unconscious, and then gets ignored for being too Freudian during the rise of behaviorism. It has come back into vogue these days, and it draws a thick line between Freud's lineage and its own, and the line is largely drawn around the nature of the unconscious. There's no sense of an aggressive set of drives, for example, but rather an appreciation of the way we automate behavior that best adapts to the stimuli (symbolic and otherwise) around us. In other words, for the adaptive unconscious folks, there's no necessary constitutive lack, no harshness of the law of the father, no objet a. They make a compelling case for their model based on studies done to demonstrate the automation of behavior, new advances in brain imaging, and the usual sets of experiments. Now the validity of these things can be called into question, which is surely a good thing, but the grounds that determine the conditions of validity seem to me debatable, and to a certain extent, demonstrable. Both views, the psychoanalytic that comes from Freud or Lacan, and the adaptive view that comes from folks like Hamilton and Laycock, have much in common, but they do have fundamental disagreements. Now it seems to me that given how much ground the two share, and given that both want to understand and account for similar phenomena, that it should be possible to resolve the arguments in a way that favors one over the other. So when you say, and I think you're half-joking, but still - "I can understand when people deny things like the constitutive lack, the imaginary, the symbolic, and the Real, but I think they are mistaken to do so. I may hope that they will see the error of the ways, but more fundamentally, I don't expect them to." - well it does strike me that from the outset incommensurability might be used as a shorthand from which to deflect discussion. It is remarkably faith-based, and in a way fundamentalist.
Hence my earlier concern, which you are responding to in this post, but not quite answering in my opinion, that there must be a prior set of mutually understood conventions that mediate and make possible any subsequent claim of incommensurability. I'm not saying anything particularly novel here, merely noting that the conditions of possibility are also the conditions of impossibility, or in this case, that the conditions of incommensurability are quite literally also the conditions of commensurability. What sort of conventions? Things like: "as we try to express the world, we never get it fully right," or even the very possibility of mutually exclusive description. And the tension can be seen, I think, because you simultaneously think, on the one hand, that people are describing the split between them differently and therefore this demonstrates incommensurability, but on the other hand you have the capacity to recognize these "fundamentally" different descriptions as relating to the same general theme, problem, or conceit. I keep trying to figure, if words - yours and mine - are always less and more than we say, how can we then announce the advent of something incommensurable? Why not assume that the gaps of which communication are made are also the gaps that make possible the dissolution of the pretense of incommensurability? You seem to want to conclude: something is missing from our exchange, we cannot commune, we cannot "get" each other, and therefore we can describe this antagonism as an instance of the incommensurable. But it seems equally, if not more viable, to conclude instead that the very fact that we cannot commune is precisely what makes it possible for antagonisms to remain antagonistic rather than rise to an incommensurability. That we can never be definitive means that we can never fully close a conversation. This in no way implies a possibility or telos of consensus, and it doesn't need to: there are football fields aplenty in the space between consensus and incommensurability, and I suspect there's some productive variation within that space.
To continue, let me ask a question, and I really am asking honestly and openly, and it may end up supporting your position (though it may not): how can you prove that incommensurability is, in an ontological sense, a component of the Real, or however you wish to describe it, rather than a rhetorical choice, a component of the symbolic, that you embrace for strategic reasons? It seems to me that faith in Lacan or whomever cannot be a satisfactory answer to this question, a) because you seem so keen to dispel faith-based decision-making when it comes to other forms of fundamentalism with which you agree, and that tension would seem problematic, and b) because even if it were true that faith was sufficient, our assessments of your claims of incommensurability would, strangely enough, still not be incommensurable, in that you would say: it can't be proven, but it's right, and I might reply, it can't be proven, and it's wrong! That's a disagreement in valence not meaning (the old polysemy vs. polyvalence debate). I suspect, though, that you'll answer this differently.
One other question, and again I mean it very honestly, and I ask it as someone who thinks investigating ideology is old-fashioned and not interesting, so full discredits on me, but: how is what you're describing, the belief in the ontological necessity of incommensurability (which is independent of the validity of that belief) as a means by which to explain social and political antagonisms, how is this structurally different than garden-variety "ideology"? Doesn't ideology (generically) function along identical lines?
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Mar 1, 2007 12:17:50 AM
Swifty, it seems quite clear that the two ways of processing information (in the two cultures) are different but not incommensurable. First of all, they're not internally split. The manual assumes that all flight crews made up of people from the same area will behave the same way. Second, the sharing/storing paradigm covers both cases, so all you have to do is recognize that sharing vs. storing happens differently in the two cultures. Both can be brought under the practical aegis of the human resources manual.
*
On its face, it's hard to accept the idea that the divide between genders is the same as the divide between political parties, or the divide between Lacanians and theorists who reject psychoanalysis. Disagreements over property taxes or universal health care cannot be analyzed through an axiom like "we have a difference." Furthermore, that axiom only makes sense for gender if gender is being defined through physical characteristics. Those characteristics may not be "meaningful" -- in other words, their integration into the symbolic may be totally arbitrary -- but they are of a different species than disagreements about rights.
Whether or not you can reach common ground on a matter like ontological lack is not itself an ontological question, though I totally agree that the possibility of disagreement hearkens back to the ontological. If the possibility of an opponent "seeing the error of his ways" exists, it is because the two worlds are only contingently different, not irresolvably incommensurate. Otherwise one would have to grant ontological status to mere stubbornness.
Rhetoric is largely the study of overcoming stubbornness in the other, and it makes sense to me that your post would move to rhetoric in the face of the difficulties that always plague efforts at solidarity. Here too, simply being pessimistic about rhetoric ("I don't think, though, that rhetoric solves [problems of incommensurability]") isn't a revelation of the essence of either subjectivity or even of rhetoric. It's the pragmatic point that rhetoric doesn't always succeed.
Finally, while it is true that other people can always persist in denials, their outrage about being interpreted does not give them a legitimate quarrel with language. The psychoanalytic term for such denial is resistance, and resistance is taken seriously without being mistaken for a damning critique of either the utterance or the analyst.
Posted by: Joseph Kugelmass | Mar 1, 2007 12:42:42 AM
Resolving these issues, moreover, is not a matter of finding the proper facts. It's not that a piece of information is missing that will decide the case.
Thus, one needn't prove, for example, that the surplus labor theory holds across the board, and or demonstrate that capitalism and the booj-wah always exploit workers (or to what degree); the postmod-leftist assumes it to be true (or at least useful), and then disposes of the Oppressors in the appropriate mineshafts...........
Posted by: nominalist | Mar 1, 2007 8:53:24 AM
Swifty's example shows exactly the opposite of incommensurability. Because pilots must be able to fly anywhere in the world, the flight control system is truly worldwide. The two cultural locales -- "European and Japanese cockpits" -- are of course different, but both communicate well enough within the system.
As such, this is a fine example of the assumption that any difference is an incommensurability. The flight crews from the two cultures have the same goal: to not crash the plane. Of course they have different cultural predispositions towards how to do this. But the commitment towards incommensurability seems to involve a belief that all difference is erased if it is not incommensurable difference -- that any communsurable discourse must inevitably flatten into a bland mush.
Jodi: "I may hope that they will see the error of the ways, but more fundamentally, I don't expect them to."
Yes, exactly. Having given up on a worldview in which proof or disproof exist, and having given up on argument with people who don't already share your assumptions, and having no intention of using force, one can only throw up one's hands. That's why the involvements with politics that I see from people with this commitment are so fundamentally disengaged.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Mar 1, 2007 9:49:03 AM
Quickly, for now, Rich's conclusion that incommensurability leads to disengagement strikes me as off the mark--first, it doesn't follow logically insofar as there are other forms of engagement than discussions; second, it doesn't follow empirically from either the left or the right.
Posted by: Jodi | Mar 1, 2007 10:39:34 AM
Jodi, if you truly believe that an antagonistic discourse in incommensurable, it's more than just "discussions" that are precluded. What kind of engagement do you think is still available that is consistent with the life of an academic?
And it does follow empirically from the behavior of both the left and the right. The right says that we're special, we're incommensurable, we need consult with no one about what we're going to do -- and they do it, because they have economic and political power. The left says the same thing, and they do nothing, because they have no power. That's why the only actual opponents of the right in the current moment are the liberals and those parts of the left that do not believe in incommensurability.
Think for a bit about why the phrase "reality-based community" was so widely adopted as a term of pride. It's implicit in the situation.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Mar 1, 2007 10:57:57 AM
Rich writes: "Having given up on a worldview in which proof or disproof exist, and having given up on argument with people who don't already share your assumptions, and having no intention of using force, one can only throw up one's hands. That's why the involvements with politics that I see from people with this commitment are so fundamentally disengaged."
What do you think, in this context, of the circa-1960s generation gap? There's a dictionary definition of this that I just pulled off Wikpedia: "when older and younger people do not understand each other because of their different experiences, opinions, habits and behavior."
There might be a lot of times when it's a good idea to worry about people figuring out how to communicate with you. There's a great Doonesbury strip from long ago where student protesters are at some building occupying it or something, and a new administrator, just hired, shows up. His first line is: "I really want to talk to you about your concerns" and the Doonesbury character leading the demonstration says to himself, in the final square of the comic strip, "Uh oh." As in, "Uh oh, now the ruling class, in the form of this new college administrator, has figured out how to talk to us, but the ruling class not knowing how to talk to us was one of our best weapons against them!" I'll give you an example. I was one of the leaders of a strike at my high school during the invasion of Cambodia, and the principal of the school got up at some assembly and said the strike had to end because we had to keep "the factory" moving. He referred to the high school as a "factory." And all the students were like, "we're not products on some assembly line; we're human beings!"
And so I think there's a mistake, Rich, in what I take to be the background assumption of your discussion of incommensurability. Namely that discussion and commensurability are to be preferred, perhaps on humanist grounds. Apologies ahead of time if I am wrong about that background assumption.
Posted by: Swifty | Mar 1, 2007 12:14:57 PM
It's not a matter of "to be preferred", Swifty, because I can't assume or suggest that we share similar preferences -- the commitment to incommensurability closes that off. I can only point out what's actually happening. For instance, in your latest example, no incommensurability was involved -- the principal suggested that the school was like a factory, and the students agreed that it could very well be seen as one (they had staged a "strike", after all), and that this motivated their disagreement. There was no failure of understanding involved, and not really a case of two different sets of assumptions -- the principal suggested a "realistic" acceptance of the situation, and the students an "idealistic" rejection of it, but the basic situation was agreed on. The entire clash took place within a well-understood context of student social protest, in which the respective roles allocated to you were tacitly accepted.
What might have been incommensurable was if, say, the students had truly believed themselves to be factory workers. The administrators of the school would have been nonplussed, because this would not be commensurable with the basic assumption shared by all parties -- that the students are basically irresponsible youngsters, who can run riot in protest, but must eventually be called back to the same order. Had the students persisted, force would have been called in -- not to suppress a temporary/accepted incident, but to assert the context of studenthood.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Mar 1, 2007 12:46:10 PM
Kenneth writes:
1. "I cannot shake the feeling that the claim of incommensurability is tactical, and therefore governed by an agreed upon set of rules that govern the conditions of possibility for any debate."
What makes an emphasis on incommensurability tactical and one on commensurability non-tactical? What would the aim of such tactics be? It seems odd to me that someone who begins from a premise of commensurability would need to resort to this kind of accusation/implication rather than, say, providing good reasons for commensurability. Differently put, I am not accusing the other side of engaging in tactics--in fact, on the contrary, I am giving reasons. So, what does this kind of accusation achieve?
2. Ken also suggests that incommensurability is a fetish in a sense of
"a lie that helps one bear an 'unbearable truth'"--but, the same point is reversable: commensurability is a fetish or a lie that masks the unbearable truth of incommensurability. Again, this kind of move isn't helpful. Better would be an argument that attempted to prove commensurability.
3. Ken mentions another branch of psychology/psychoanalysis and says "that it should be possible to resolve the arguments in a way that favors one over the other." It may well be possible. I don't know enough about the other way of thinking to know if the discourses are incommensurable or not. They may well not be.
4. Ken writes: "it does strike me that from the outset incommensurability might be used as a shorthand from which to deflect discussion. It is remarkably faith-based, and in a way fundamentalist." It might be. But the more important question is whether it is only that and answering that question would require a positive account of commensurability rather, again, than simply accusing one's opponent as somehow ant-discursive rather than as one who is aware of the limits of discourse.
Another way to make the point: to accept incommensurability does not mean that one thinks that argument is pointless. Instead, it means that one accepts that there are discursive limits, epistemological limits, points that cannot be said in within some discourses (conditions of truth and falsity) but that can be said in others. One way that argument works is by pointing out the limits of a mode of thinking, of showing what cannot be done within a specific set of assumptions. One can show the limits of a world view, the expansiveness of another world view, and thus provide reasons in favor of one view over another. Here, being convinced is more like conversion; one makes a decision against a previous world view and in favor of another one.
Again, not all disagreements are incommensurable. There are disagreements within worldviews. When disagreements are between worldviews, they are incommensurable. But, argument does not have to stop; one can show the limits of a worldview, what can and cannot be accomplished on the basis of a set of suppositions.
What Ken calls fundamentalist I understand as the irreducible irrationality, kernel of jouissance, tautological element in a worldview. It might be that point where one just insists, that's the way it is. Or, I think that's the way it is because that's the way it is. It is an insistence that cannot be erased or wished away. We can think about it as the point where 'law is law.'
5. Ken says "there must be a prior set of mutually understood conventions that mediate and make possible any subsequent claim of incommensurability." I disagree with this. Ken makes subsequent what I think of as 'prior.' It seems to me that commensurability is what has to be proven, rather than assumed. Another way to ask the question: why 'must' there be a prior set of mutually understood conventions? Why must these conventions be mutually understood? Why are these not actually the very suppositions that are contested and why should we assume that everyone understands this contestation in the same way?
6. Ken says "the conditions of incommensurability are quite literally also the conditions of commensurability." I disagree. I think commensurability requires suppositions of reciprocity, equality, and comprehensibility, at the very least.
7. Ken writes: "Why not assume that the gaps of which communication are made are also the gaps that make possible the dissolution of the pretense of incommensurability?"
Again, he makes incommensurability a pretense. But why? Why is this a pretense wherein commensurability is not? Where is the argument for that?
8. Ken writes "You seem to want to conclude: something is missing from our exchange, we cannot commune, we cannot "get" each other, and therefore we can describe this antagonism as an instance of the incommensurable."
I think that antagonism is more fundamental than incommensurability.
9. Ken asks : "how can you prove that incommensurability is, in an ontological sense, a component of the Real, or however you wish to describe it, rather than a rhetorical choice, a component of the symbolic, that you embrace for strategic reasons?"
I can't prove it. I can give arguments for it. And, one can always respond to these arguments by accusing me of being tactical or strategic.
10. Ken writes "you seem so keen to dispel faith-based decision-making when it comes to other forms of fundamentalism with which you agree"
I assume he means disagree here. I think there is an irreducible element of decision when it comes to these big ticket items of discourse and worldview.
11. Ken mentions a "disagreement in valence not meaning"--I've been emphasizing all along that incommensurability is not an issue of understanding and misunderstanding.
12. Ken asks "how is what you're describing, the belief in the ontological necessity of incommensurability (which is independent of the validity of that belief) as a means by which to explain social and political antagonisms, how is this structurally different than garden-variety "ideology"?
I don't use incommensurability to explain antagonism. So, I don't undertand the question.
Posted by: Jodi | Mar 1, 2007 2:38:34 PM
Joseph writes:
1. "On its face, it's hard to accept the idea that the divide between genders is the same as the divide between political parties, or the divide between Lacanians and theorists who reject psychoanalysis."
I agree. I wanted to turn the question to antagonism rather than incommensurability.
2. Joseph writes: 'If the possibility of an opponent "seeing the error of his ways" exists, it is because the two worlds are only contingently different, not irresolvably incommensurate.'
I disagree. There is conversion and a changing of worldviews. One can demonstrate the limits of a worldview, pointing out its failures, instilling in the other a kind of crisis. To my mind, the theodicy problem is a good example.
3. Joseph writes: "Rhetoric is largely the study of overcoming stubbornness in the other, and it makes sense to me that your post would move to rhetoric in the face of the difficulties that always plague efforts at solidarity."
I don't understand what this point is doing. I turned to rhetoric in the post as an acknowledgement to Kenneth.
4. Joseph mentions resistance. I agree with the point but the only way it applies to the discussion of incommensurability is if one posits commensurability in advance.
Posted by: Jodi | Mar 1, 2007 2:47:43 PM
Rich
It isn't clear to me that liberalism presupposes commensurability. In fact, one could say that the doctrine of toleration is a response to incommensurability. An argument for a liberal constitution, then, does not have to claim to be valid to everyone, but only to everyone who wants to live under such a constitution. So, it could recognize a fundamental incompatibility with religious fundamentalism.
With regard to the left, there are multicultural politics, green politics, feminist politics, labor politics, anti-racist politics, anti-homophobic politics, various kinds of lifestyle politics all of which have folks working for them in a variety of spheres. Whether one finds them effective is another matter entirely.
An academic who rejects the idea that all philosophical, economic, and political disagreements are in principle reconcilable can do all sorts of things. I can engage in anti-war politics, trying to convince the middle ground of people even as I recognize that hard core hawks will not agree. I can try to convince the middle ground of people who may not have a firm position on homosexuality that homophobia is wrong, again, even as I know that there are some people I will never convince. In politics, there are so many different constituencies, that one doesn't have to convince, persuade, or even coerce everyone. Just some people.
Posted by: Jodi | Mar 1, 2007 2:58:23 PM
Jodi: "I can engage in anti-war politics, trying to convince the middle ground of people even as I recognize that hard core hawks will not agree. I can try to convince the middle ground of people who may not have a firm position on homosexuality that homophobia is wrong, again, even as I know that there are some people I will never convince."
But you aren't really examining what you are doing closely enough, I think. You previously specified that for purposes of your work, you have certain assumptions -- I don't want to find and quote them, so let's just say that some of them are Lacanian. You've already said that your work makes sense within these specific assumptions, and that it doesn't really matter if it doesn't within others. The "middle ground of people", which you repeatedly refer to, does not share these assumptions. Therefore, when you speak to them, you can not be speaking out of your academic work, or as a public intellectual, you can only be speaking as an individual of no particular expertise. In other words, you are disconnected from your particular source of strength, like the factory worker who is not concerned with union organizing but who is concerned with tax issues. I mean this to be a general critique, not one for your particular case, but it seems relevant to illustrate it with your case since it is close at hand.
As for liberalism, it can deal with either commensurability or incommensurability. It values discussion and understanding, and tries to use communsurable discourse whenever possible, and uses toleration to fit in incommensurable discourses whenever possible. The important point, from my point of view, is that there is not a default assumption one way or the other. As I've said before, it's this assumption -- which you may prefer to describe as the truth of antagonism, the words used are not important -- which I'm criticizing.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Mar 1, 2007 3:21:48 PM
Rich--ok, we agree about liberalism. There is not a default assumption. And, we disagree about incommensurability. You reject one default assumnption and I reject the other.
On politics: you are correct that I don't use Lacanian categories at anti-war demonstrations. There, I am not speaking as a public intellectual but merely as a citizen. When I give invited lectures, I sometimes use Lacanian categories and try to express in different ways.
I am good friends with a Dutch academic who uses the terms 'public' in a way incommensurate with how I use the term. She anchors her work in a combination of Deweyian pragmatism and social studies of science and technology. She emphasizes immanence, ontology, and objects and rejects discussions of psychoanalysis and language. In fact, our disagreements cannot be clearly stated in either her discursive framework or mine. We begin from different concerns and assumptions. Yet, our conversations are fruitful--precisely because the discourse of the other enables some things to be said that can't be said in one's own discourse. We might have a point of convergence on the notion of the object and the possibility of thinking a politics of the object. But, we don't know yet.
Posted by: Jodi | Mar 1, 2007 3:42:48 PM
I'm not sure what you mean by "You reject one default assumnption and I reject the other." My assumption is that observation makes it possible to come to an informed decision about whether two discourses are incommensurable or not. These observations convince me that, out of a host of proferred cases, some people seem to be seeing a lot of incommensurability where it does not exist.
Note that when / if I speak as a public intellectual, I make no concessions towards nonuniversality. If I'm speaking at e.g. an environmental activism occasion, I speak as an expert about the subjects that I know about, and no industry person is going to derail me with anything about how maybe it's true that we see things a certain way and that they see it differently. It's the same for all politics, really -- tolerance is a great liberal value, but if I'm speaking against homophobia (as a non-expert) I'm not asking for tolerance of homophobes, I'm demanding that their discourse be argued against and that any actions that it produces be forceably suppressed.
Speaking "merely as a citizen" puts you on the same level as any caller to Rush Limbaugh. I'm not into vanguardism, but that's not a full use of one's abilities.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Mar 1, 2007 4:57:05 PM
Post a comment
Please note: comments are published at the discretion of the post's author and will not appear immediately. Do not submit comments more than once.
