In Praise of Irritation
For a long time I've thought that what I truly desire is a great interlocutor or someone with whom I can really discuss things and develop ideas. I often find myself bored at parties, dinners with friends, and other sundry outings as I find "small talk" exhausting and a waste of time. My eyes glaze over with peoples' reports of their day and what is going on in their life. Wouldn't an engaged theoretical discussion be far more preferable and interesting? And why is it that people engage in small talk at all? It's a bit like birds warbling on a telephone line, simply signalling that they're there. If only I had a truly engaged interlocutor! I think to myself. I despair that the discussions I do have seem fraught with miscommunication.However, as I look over my friendships, the discussions I gravitate towards, and some of my own theoretical presuppositions I advocate, and my own way of relating to others I engage deeply with, it appears that I desire something very different-- I desire irritation! Everywhere I go I seem to look for conflict, controversy, and disagreement (perhaps making me a rather unsavory character). My sense of humor is designed to shock and cause suprise, saying what shouldn't be said, and is riddled with irony so as to provoke. When reading the newspaper or news magazines, the first thing I do is turn to the editorials and letters to the editor. I enjoy going to far right conservative blogs as I have such difficulty fathoming this sort of reasoning. The friendships I've had have tended to be with people that irritate me to no end, constantly frustrating me with their claims. And my most intense romantic relationships have also tended to be the stormiest.
Theoretically, of course, it's odd that I would look for an interlocutor that I could really work with. As a Lacanian I advocate the principle that "all communication is miscommunication." In my analytic practice I see everyday how my interventions are taken in surprising directions by my analysands, and understood in ways I could have never anticipated. The systems theorist in me adopts the thesis that "all miscommunication is communication." In some respects, I think the latter thesis is more interesting. If systems are dynamic, this entails that they must reproduce themselves from moment to moment by generating further system-forming events. Systems are composed of events, not objects or things. A social system must generate additional communication on the basis of every event of communication, so as to endure in time. Agreement and consensus tend to diminish further operations or the production of ongoing communicative events as there's no necessity of continuing communications where there's agreement, whereas conflict and difference tend to promote ongoing autopoiesis of communication. Irritation (in its system-theoretical sense) generates ongoing communication.
Thus, I find Acephalous very irritating, and for this reason I had a very fine discussion with him that was generative of concepts for me (here and here). I suspect that Acephalous and I understood little of what the other was saying, but it was productive for me as it led me to develop thoughts I would not have otherwise developed-- these days I'm becoming more and more sympathetic to his position based on my aleatory materialism --and he wrote about it further. Jodi Dean irritates the hell out of me because she seldom responds to my posts on her site, which I find terrifically rude (no doubt my tone comes off as insulting as I tend to write "dissertations" like I'm lecturing or teaching), but this irritation leads me to write even more with the vain fantasy that she'll someday respond. As such, her silence generates ongoing communicative events. My friend Melanie irritates me to no end, as she's always challenging psychoanalysis and attacking my latest theoretical fetish, leading me to throw up my hands in exasperation and heatedly defend what I was claiming, thereby generating ongoing autopoiesis between the two of us. My friend Noah, in graduate school, was extremely condescending, mocking, and abrasive, while brilliantly astute theoretically in a way that diverged sharply from my own views, leading me to constantly spar with him and pushing my thought to develop in ways that it never would have otherwise. My dear friend Robert irritates me to no end, as he constantly misinterprets my claims and pushes them in directions I don't like, leading me to try to demolish him theoretically, while never really wanting to so that we might continue irritating one another. Yusef drives me up the wall with his playful writing style and rhetorical excesses, and therefore drives me to become even more rationalistic despite the fact that I sympathize with many of his positions, just to spite him.
There is a standard utopian narrative about how the internet allows us to exchange ideas and develop thought together collaboratively, by increasing nodes of communication (wherever connectivity is increased among nodes or elements of a system, that system changes qualitatively). It is not untrue that the net transforms the autopoiesis of communicative systems, but it doesn't do this in a representational way (exchanging one and the same message). Everyone knows that thought is a solitary activity, that concepts are always misunderstood when you attempt to share them, and that communication in the representational sense is impossible for all save mathematics. Rather, what the net enhances are our possibilities for being irritated, which in turn leads to further development of the structures underlying our thought. If I participate on emails lists, for instance, it is not to reach some sort of agreement, but to produce irritation within myself that will push my thought in unforseen communicative directions.
I sing a hymn to gadflies, trolls, and cranks everywhere! May they be blessed and loved for upsetting the closure of my thought process and making me so uncomfortable.
posted by Sinthome at 11:28 AM
17 Comments:
hi Levi,
i'm glad that this post gives me an opportunity to note that a lot of the phiosophical positions you take piss me off, and sometimes i don't know why i keep coming back to read your blog. actually it's not the positions themselves that irritate me but the underlying intellectual propensities: often you just seem like a closed box, so concerned with what to put in the box and so anxious over what slips out, and angry at the fact that the box is there and that you can't get away from it.
i say this, of course, with much love...
lately i've been taking to heart a memorable quote from badiou, appropriate here:
"A human is that being which prefers to represent itself within finitude, whose sign is death, rather than knowing itself to be entirely traversed and encircled by the omnipresence of infinity." (B&E 149)
Thanks Bobo. I sure wish I could see how I'm a closed box or what that box is.
I've heard a similar argument in favor of the internet on my own blog, in which it was proposed (under the lamentable banner of a marketplace of ideas) that blogs and other such electronic forums give us space to develop our ideas in response to oppostion. I think this is true to some extent - as evidence, I can attest to your (well deserved) criticism of my rah-rah Deleuze commentary a month or so ago as having thoroughly quashed my desire to write about Logic of Sense before having finished the book. As a practicing Lacanian, though, I hope you'll welcome my suggestion - and I would hesitate to call it more than that - that the experience of blogging is a narcissistic one; that the situation in which one confronts one's own writing displayed onscreen supports a sort of self-in-place-of-the-other satisfaction. And, at least for me, the blogging experience can become destabilizing if and when the grounds of my argument come under fire or are shown to be fallacious - and in this case I am loathe to view the page again. When I feel I've written something of merit, however, I return to read it often, even if no one has commented.
Several months ago, it was my pleasure to speak with Michael Hardt, who suggested that we, his readership and peers, spend far too much time picking nits and raising tactical objections. We're all on the same side, right? It was my opinion that if we are, indeed, on the same side, we should spend a bit more time discussing aims and aspirations, and without all the posturing. I will probably continue to find reading and writing more satisfying than the martial arts of theoretical discourse, but I welcome eagerly any and all talk of the future - what's to be done? - and talk of the stakes of theory, the stakes of supporting Deleuze or Badiou. To this extent, I applaud your openness in having turned the space of your blog towards such questions.
This is purposeful and honest stuff. But which is more nauseating - tea and biscuits politeness to skirt around conflict with, or conflict for its own sake? I hope your post doesn't mean you lose sight of the following:
1) It's an objectified view of people
2) In balance, bloggers are generous with their time
3) While your Heideggerian sentiments about trivia are very real and understandable in an age where no sentence must be forged without a celebrity in it, a lot of conversation requires a) a suspension of judgement for b) non-antagonistic subject matter for keeping civil war at bay.
On the subject of narcissism that kushakov mentions, and to badly paraphrase Levinas: the Other is an interruption to my ownership of the world.
Hi Jeff,
I worried about giving precisely the impression you express concern over when writing this. In systems theoretical terms, an "irritation" is just any event that a system uses to produce information according to its own distinctions. Of course, I was playing on the more common connotation of the term as well. I do not like conflict for the sake of conflict or argument for the sake of argument. What I'm basically claiming is that I find my most productive moments of thought where there's some sort of tension and misunderstanding that unsettles my familiar world and understanding. This leads me to go back and look at my own assumptions and turn what is implicit in my thought into what is explicit. That is, I don't think thought takes place without some sort of encounter or disturbance.
There's a fine line here, however. For me the primary aim is to keep sequences of communication alive, so that new communicative events are produced. Clearly I failed in the instance of Kushakov as I squelched his desire. I suspect Bobo is referring to something along these lines with his closed box metaphor. Bobo often surprises me with his responses to my posts here and elsewhere. I admire Bobo tremendously, but also experience his interventions as castrating or revelatory of my impotence. I thus madly dash about to put him in my box, squelching his interventions or indicating that I've already thought these things, terminating ongoing communication as a result, while desiring that communication to continue (this is my transferential take as to what he's getting at when he says I get mad that I can't escape my box).
Communication continues so long as there's some tension or disturbance at work between the speakers; or rather miscommunication produces communication. But if this is pushed too far, it leads to a termination of any further communicative events. On the other hand, agreement leads to a destruction of ongoing communicative events as there's no need to communicate where agreement is present.
I guess what I'm trying to do is a sort of "healed by the spear that smote me" gesture. I get irritated a lot. "No, no! That's not what I meant!" and feel frustrated that I don't make my points more clearly. However, these very failures are productive in that they cause me to try again and shed light on my own blind spots, which is the activity I really enjoy anyway. So rather than valuing agreement that seems to lead very quickly to a termination of continued writing, thinking, and communicating, instead it seems worthwhile to value those things that perturb me and keep me moving. If this post were conceptualized as a sort of experiment working with conditions of ambiguity (the two sense of "irritation"), and counter-intuitively arguing that it is irritation rather than, I don't know, "calmness" or harmony that should be valued, it seems to demonstrate the point in that these ambiguities produced further exchanges that have led to the clarification of ideas and claims. That is, the ambiguity functioned as a catalyst for producing further communicative-events (a far cry from Habermas, I think, in that the ongoing production of such events wasn't premised on shared meaning, agreement, or even staying on topic... A "unitas multiplex").
Kushakov, I feel bad for squelching your desire in this way. I throw myself entirely into whatever thought system I'm inhabiting at the time and sometimes draw lines as I'm working through ideas, becoming overly polemical. In order to understand something in Badiou, I have to put on my Badiou cap for a while and earnestly wear it, and look at Deleuze through the eyes of Badiou. And so on.
Deleuze is a big and massively influential figure for me, but I often feel constrained by a sort of dogma that seems to surround Deleuze. Why should I have to choose between Deleuze and Badiou? If I think about the nature of a neural network, I think of a system that draws all sorts of connections willy nilly, creating something new in the process. If I find something of value in Badiou (I'm fascinated by his discussions of multiplicity, and am less interested in his theory of the event and truth-procedures), why can't I take this and think it along with what I find valuable in Deleuze (and Hegel and Lacan and Descartes and Plato and Epicurus and Hume and... you get the idea). That is, with Deleuze I often feel as if I'm supposed to artificially stunt my thought, drawing a line between "bad guys" and "good guys", rather than lifting things where I find them and developing a new unity as I try to resolve tensions between these various positions. If I focus on problems and questions, I'm led to think in this way, treating figures like Badiou and Deleuze as providing tools that assist in thinking those problems. If I think in terms of identifications with major figures, then I'm forced to draw lines so as to fit into the mold of these figures, treating all problems as subordinate to the conceptual framework these figures embody. I'm not, of course, suggesting that you're advancing these prohibitions.
I like Hardt's suggestion that we focus on talk of the future and what is to be done; though I'm a little less keen on his criticism of criticism. It seems to me that one of the ways in which things get done and are built is through the activity of producing good arguments and concepts, and examining where concepts and arguments fall short. On the other hand, there's a strong case to be made that this is an obsessional activity, always preparing to do something while functionally insuring that nothing ever gets done (as conditions are never perfect). Theoretical martial arts then becomes a sort of game that's designed just to perpetuate itself, not to do anything.
A darker thought that makes me feel guilty-- why do I care so much about politics? Do I really share these aims? I worry about things like torture and standard of living and equality and whether or not I can be whisked away for the books I order or whether our educational system is maimed by certain agendas... But do I really care about Politics with a capital "P"? Do I use Politics with a capital "P" as a pretext for telling myself that it's okay to think about the things that fascinate me in ontology and epistemology and thinking them important, so as to avoid acknowledging that I'm really like a botanist or an astronomer who just delights in examining certain things without them being a part of some grand, world-changing project?
I think I'm feeling defeatest right now, wondering if there's much that can be done. I read this post over at Pinnochio Theory, describing "Adornoesque Despair" and found myself thinking "yes, this is right": http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=514
The concept of "functional differentiation" where no subsystem of a society governs all the others makes me feel further despair, as I wonder whether Politics has the capicity to transform social organization in a directed fashion. And then I found myself thinking, that perhaps Zizek's talk of revolution is narcissistic posturing, and that it is used as a pretext simply for doing what's really loved, analyzing pop culture. These were very depressing thoughts.
I think I tend to share a lot of your sentiments on here. It's in fact why I don't comment on your blog as often as I would like to. That is to say, I often find myself predominantly agreeing with your posts (in no small part because I am making my way through similar texts), or on the other hand, because I don't feel quite knowledgeable enough to make any worthwhile criticisms. Which leaves me only the option of repeating my agreement - which can be a nice gesture, but when it's overly repeated it devolves into meaningless-ness. I much prefer to bring up criticisms or different viewpoints, which is why I enjoy Benjamin's posts on my own site - his vastly different background clashes nicely with my own I think. I guess, to paraphrase a common saying, I agree on disagreeing.
hIGH, may I irritate you and your readers with a blast from the 'pure past'? Maybe this bumps any narcissistic concerns back up to another level?
Remo Bodei's PLI 2002 "Logics of Delirium" suggests that "In all ages of life, suffering that exceeds a certain threshold produces ... disturbances of thought that prohibit the processes of translation... The past thereby manifests itself in two ways: either as dissolved in its recodification within a new system of signs, or as encapsulated in the space carved out by a traumatic event" (69).
When Bergson & Deleuze talk about how the 'pure past' is co-mingled with the present they are echoing Freud's claim that, as Bodei puts it, "coexistence and succession are interlaced... the past lives on with the present and the immobile (or that which moves more slowly) stands alongside what flows". This 'pure past' however, is distilled from the idea that "in psychic life nothing can perish once it has been formed and everything is in some way conserved". However, this "in some way", it would seem, is the opposite of something "pure"! "Logics of Delirium", of course, underlie shamanic & sorcery practices: This is "a demiurgic work of remodeling the universe, analogous to artistic creation or to the work of dreams ... an attempt on the part of one who is lost to make himself at home in a strange world" (72).
Bodei concludes: This "hyperawareness of the delirious individual... is diametrically oposed to the hypothesis - which Jung took over from Pierre Janet". Rather, "Like dreams and other unconscious phenomena, delirium is for Matte Blanco attributable to such SYMMETRIC logic, which is moreover present in all of us alongside NORMAL (ASYMMETRIC or HETERORGANIC) logic... Both logics coexist there, incompatible with each other yet each in competition to assert its own truth. A cohabitation of this kind does not imply their being founded in a higher order structure" (77).
sinthome,
I feel ya. I too have little patience for the lines in the sand and hero worship that accompany the theoretical bent. One of the most refreshing things I've read lately was a book by Jacques Barzun, a scholar who has nothing but contempt (which he channels into excellent historical criticism) for populism and flag-waving. I found myself nodding in agreement as he skewered Marx's scientistic aspirations and faulty logic, and again when he praised Proudhon (not something I'm pleased to admit).
I will certainly write again about Deleuze, but a huge reading list stands in my way at present. So don't feel bad about being a quasher. Your quashing in some way accounts, I think, for the current state of my thinking, which is, like yours, favorable to both Deleuze and Badiou while bowing to neither. In fact, I think a pretty strong argument could be made for combining their texts in unity - Badeuze, or something like that. For me, they both strike at the same set of problems and pragmatics while remaining utterly distinct as writers.
I want to say more but I am being pulled towards a radical exteriority, a delirium both pure and timeless - to lunch.
"the beautiful soul is in effect the one who sees differences everywhere and appeals to them only as respectable, reconcilable or federative differences, while history continues to be made through bloody contradictions." (D&R 52)
much of what i can't stand in critical theory/contemporary continental philosophy is the undercurrent of federalism that one senses in much of the academic writing: as if all theorists must be reconciled with one another in one grand metatheory. in many ways academia is a federal state, representative of all theories and the organization of their respect for one another, in such a manner that one cannot make a statement within academia without first making peace with a certain number of thinkers. i think that this is what you're getting at, Levi, when you criticize the academic appeal to the master. (<-- this last sentence of mine is an example of what i'm talking about--blechhh!!)
why is federalism valuable? what is there for an alternative? this is the most paramount of political questions. what kind of community is realizable in which people make their militant commitments clear and do not cede on the desire within them, even at the risk of being impolite? how do we escape the kind of mutual respect for one another that stifles such desires, without falling into a chasm of violent conflict and affect? is this possible?
If, by "federative differences", the idea is that "everyone gets" along, I fully agree. My gripes with the role of the master are a bit different, I think. Here's what I'm objecting to is how discipleship functions in continental philosophy, which I see as crippling thought and putting us at a distance from our questions. I can think of few things more unLacanian that calling oneself a Lacanian, yet nonetheless, Lacanian organizations are organized in such a way that they vigorously police the sorts of questions that can be asked and the sorts of inquiries that can be undertaken. For instance, you'll very quickly be excluded from these organizations if you begin making forays into neuropsychology, even if done in a Lacanian spirit.
I think this way of proceeding is highly destructive and counter-productive. Years ago the Discovery channel had a series called "Connections", that showed how various inventions and scientific discoveries where made possible through relations among things that were unrelated. For instance, the show asserted that it was perfume spray bottles that made fuel injected engines possible. I think this proceed in a similar fashion in the world of theory. First, you set out by posing a number of questions or a problems such as you do at the end of your post. On the basis of the dynamics of this question, you're led to forge concepts and tools, and you also lift a number of diverse conceptions from disparate thinkers and fields. I think theory under the model of pastiche is far more productive than theory under the name of a master... For instance, I draw a lot of inspiration from Badiou's account of multiplicity, but I think his account of situations (even in Logiques des mondes) is underdeveloped. Because Badiou has a poor understanding of the dynamics governing situations or worlds, there are a number of problems with his account of the event and truth-procedures as well (if he doesn't have a sound understanding of situations, his theory of the event and truth-procedures is going to be a tool forged on the basis of the wrong questions and problems and therefore is going to be a poor solution to those problems). This doesn't mean that one throws out everything in Badiou, just that one doesn't swallow everything in Badiou (likewise with Deleuze, Hegel, Lacan, etc). Dogmatic identification to a master can lead us to be more concerned with dogmatically defending the master than with solving the problems that attracted us to the master in the first place. This is why I feel that there are certain advantages to Anglo-American approaches, as their focus on problems and questions, along with positions (deontological ethics, anti-realism, etc), minimizes the primacy of charismatic figures and texts, and places the emphasis on issues an questions.
Mark, This is an interesting quote, though I'm having trouble following what the author is getting at when he talks about "disturbances that prohibit processes of translation". I've been thinking of questions about how new forms of organization are engendered in thought, or how complexity is introduced into thought. One way, it seems to me, is to promote "encounters" or disturbances (as described by Deleuze in chapter 3 of _Difference and Repetition_). The production of encounters requires the introduction of something alien to the categories of one's organization. For instance, those steeped in French literary theory ought to take a vacation and spend two years studying Anglo-American philosophy of language, not to be cured or corrected of their conceptions of language, but to be introduced to a way of thinking about language that is so foreign to dominant paradigms in semiotics and Saussurean linguistics that they might begin reflecting on the presuppositions of their own discourse, making them explicit, and posing questions about their own chosen paradigm in a new way. The issue here isn't one of exchanging on paradigm for another, but of creating a contrast that allows one to see their own paradigm in a new light (Feyerabend, for instance, recommends, in _Against Method_ creating an imaginary, fantastic world, following very different laws or patterns as a way of *becoming capable* of observing our own world). Lacanians and phenomenologists should give up their tools entirely for a period, and focus only on something like neuroscience or quantum mechanics or sociobiology. Once again, this is not for the sake of exchanging one theory for another. The point wouldn't be to become a neurologist or a sociobiologist, but to disrupt one's own patterns of thought so that those patterns might become visible and new questions might be posed. I suppose I'm generalizing the principle sometimes suggested with the value of travel-- that we should travel to foreign locals so as to see our own societal customs for the first time.
So I'm wondering, do disturbances really prohibit processes of translation? I suspect that I'm misunderstanding what he means by "translation" here.
Kushakov, Love the Badeuze condensation!
Bobo, Or to put it a bit differently, if I identify with Heidegger, I now have to find some way to fit everything I might wish to think about into Heidegger, and now I have to draw lines between Heidegger and Hegel, Badiou, Deleuze, etc. However, if I say, I'm interested in "differential ontology" or "aleatory materialism" or "process ontology" or "relational ontology", my relationship to other thinkers changes significantly. Suppose I say I'm interested in relational ontology. Now I draw on all those thinkers that have something of interest to say about relations-- Peirce, systems theorists, category theory, Lacan's use of topology, Badiou's later philosophy, umwelt theorists, Deleuze, Whitehead, Leibniz, Heidegger, Hegel's Logic, Foucault, the structuralists, Marx, etc., etc., etc.
That is, simply by a change of identification I've widened my field of influence exponentially because I'm thinking in terms of a question ("how might I conceive being in terms of relations") rather than a figure. In shifting identifications in this way, I'm now able to draw on all of these things to *assist* me in thinking this problem. This isn't a matter of a federative differences-- one doesn't agree with all of it --but of delineating a field that assists one in thinking through something in much the same way that Deleuze and Badiou have created their own histories of philosophy to assist them in thinking their own respective problems. I think we often forget that what draws us to a particular thinker is that they respond to a question we were already asking. The question should be before the thinker, not the thinker before the question.
I found Toronto irritating (&c), so, not having to take courses and thus not required to be near campus in any way, I moved to a small town about fifty minutes from Ottawa. (I'm originally from Ottawa.) I had hoped that the change of scenary and environment would amount to the destruction of the previous irritants - pollution, noise, people, traffic, etc. I ended up discovering what should have been plainly obvious before this adventure: there would be a whole new set of irritants - pollution (downwind of a soap factory), noise (train goes through town and cross four roads, all of which are signalled by a horn), people (rural people are just as annoying as urban people), traffic (farm machines cause as much traffic as buses). While I'm generally happier here than in Toronto (I find stereotypically small-town things gratifying: growing vegetables, raking leaves, chopping wood), I'm no less irritated.
One thing I have found to be greatly conducive to an improvement of my life: no one here considers themself (except me, I suppose) an intellectual, so I'm not burdened by people talking about themselves under the guise of their "research" and don't have to put up with the generally crude disposition of academics and those who would seek to govern them. Going into campus - at my undergrad/masters institution - to retrieve books and talk with friends is now actually pleasurable.
Aside from the lack of income, being an "independent researcher" seems to have its merit. (I'm not about to take up lens-grinding like dear old Spinoza.)
"If the child is prepared to be difficult, he is at least hoping that there is a world he can live in as himself, with all his love and hate."
http://pasaudela.blogspot.com/2004/09/nuisance.html
Sinthome,
We are putting together a special issue on blogging and I would like to include you in a section of bloggers writing about why they blog--this would work if you are interested, or you could write another post--either way (or not) this is a great blog...
Here is the official invitation:
I would like to extend an invitation to you to join in on a collective blogging section of our upcoming winter issue of Reconstruction. The issue is the “Theories/Practices of Blogging.” In addition to the special section of posts on blogging there will be about a dozen essays on blogging.
The deadline is October 20th.
Our intent in this section of the issue will be to collect a wide range of bloggers and link up to their statements in regards to why they blog (something many of us are asked) and any statement they have on the theories/practices of blogging.
If you already have a post on this you can feel free to use it, or, if you are interested, you can submit a new one.
We will link to each statement from the issue at our site, with the intent of creating a hyperlinked list of statements on blogging that can serve as an introduction to blogging (or an expansion of knowledge for those already blogging).
If you are interested please contact me at mdbento @ gmail.com
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