The Problem With Historicism?

In response to my post entitled "Interventionist Rhetoric", a friend of mine wrote me remarking,

I keep mulling over the phrase “strategic interventions” here. I so often I feel my writing is hopeless and decadent, that the limit of what can be said at any given time has always-already been determined by the historical moment, and that my two-cents are derivative at best. But I love this post so much because you posit so beautifully the act of writing itself as an essential process of letting out the hemlines of doxa and expanding the field of what is possible. The act of writing in and of itself becomes the most important revolutionary work, creating singularities in the fabric of the social that pull other actors and events together. I love it. But I wonder about the phrase “strategic interventions.” What did you mean by that? Wouldn’t it be closer to the overall logic of what you are saying if you didn’t use a phrase that suggests such agency? But perhaps you aren’t talking about writing—“strategic interventions at all levels of the social sphere.” I’m just not sure what you are thinking about there, but I want to pick at it. I like the idea that your work as a contemporary philosopher is a daily process of writing simply to “irritate” the limits of knowledge, but once philosophical interventions become “strategic,” doesn’t that delimit the process, like saying ego dictates all my decisions?

I think a lot of us feel this sort of despair with regard to writing and thinking. In my case, I suffer from the fantasy of wishing to be "before myself" or to "have my ideas before I have them" and to know in advance that they are original. I await my ideas and concepts. However, I think the more accurate truth is that genuine ideas function according to the logic of apres coup. They are something that will have been and can only be produced through the process of making something explicit. If they take place, they do so retroactively, and perhaps as the result of an accident.

I find these remarks interesting as they contain a number of ontological presuppositions pertaining to how writers (and persons) are individuated. What seems to here be assumed is that the "historical moment" is something that is simply there, present-at-hand, and is there for all of us in one and the same way. Here the historical moment is conceived as conditioning and the writer and person are conceived as conditioned. In this relation there is a unilateral direction of development from the historical moment to the conditioned individual. That is, it is the historical moment that is doing all the work and the individual that is being passively formed by this milieu. The historical moment is thus conceived like a cookie cutter and the individual is conceived as the passive dough. The individual formed by this milieu is then thought as developmentally internalizing the historical milieu into which their thrown through biological reproduction, and is thus unable to think outside this milieu, but only according to its constraints and rules.

I think the most problematic aspect of this thesis is that it conceives the environment (in this case, environment as historical milieu) as a container that is just homogenously there, and not as multi-dimensional, divergent multiplicity. Here I find the metaphor of a hologram, or Holbein's painting The Ambassadors instructive. One of the lesson to be drawn from Holbein's painting and the Lacanian concept an anamorphic shift, is that the world appears differently to me depending on how my perspective is organized. A shift in perspectives renders some things visible and other things invisible, and thus functions like a hologram. To play with a Lacanian expression, just as one might say "the Other doesn't exist", it can equally be said that "history doesn't exist". My relation to the historical milieu is always going to depend on what element of that milieu I've foregrounded. For instance, Christian Nationalists foreground a particular religious struggle against secular humanism to the foreground of their relation to the historical milieu and thereby experience the world in these organizing terms. It is on these grounds, for instance, that they're able to encounter a cashier from Target saying "happy holidays" as an attack on their faith and an example of persecution. Another person wouldn't even notice that the cashier has said "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas", and would think nothing of it.

Similarly, many on the left encounter their historical milieu not in terms of the "culture wars" (this is seen as an ideological mystfication), but rather in terms of the phenomenon of globalization and the march of capital. Under this view, an economic treaty between two nations is not seen as simply an activity designed to benefit these two nations (as it might be seen by the Christian Nationalist), but rather as a symptom of globalization negatively impacting workers and further diminishing sites of resistance. My point is that the conditioning relations we enter into are going to be very different on what element we elevate to the status of the whole and this elevation of this element to the status of representing the whole (S1/S2) is a creative act, that cannot be anticipated by relations among the elements themselves, and which requires all sorts of subsequent creative elaborations so as to account for how the remaining parts relate to the exemplary part that relates to the whole.

Second, in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze, following Bergson, argues that each actualization in the present is expressive of the entirety of the past, and that actualization takes place by selecting a level in the cone of the past to be actualized in the present. Nick, over at Accursed Share, has a picture of Bergson's "cone of memory". While I'm not sure I share Deleuze-Bergson's particular conception of time and memory, information systems (such as ourselves and social systems) have the curious feature of maintaining a relation to the past through the inscription of texts. This has the curious result of upsetting linear order of time. It seems to me that one of the presuppositions of the above conception of historicism is that time is conceived in terms of one moment following another moment. In this way, the prior time determines what is thinkable. While it is clearly true that I cannot experience Plato or Cicero or Descartes in the way that their contemporaries were able to experience them, nonetheless, my encounter with these thinkers can put me out of step with the time in which I live. Yes, I read these texts through the lense of my time (which is one reason why no repetition is precisely a repetition of the same), but also these texts contaminate my relation to the present, producing a minimal distance between the predominant doxa of my time. A person is able to repeat Plato in the present, and in doing so must reconfigure their relation to the present. I take it that this is one reason that the theme of repetition has been so important for thinkers such as Zizek and Deleuze, where the repetition in question is a repetition of the missed or unactualized potentials of a particular political event or text (Zizek has done this in an exemplary fashion with his readings of the German idealists and Descartes, which are certainly out of step with both predominant post-structuralist attitudes towards these thinkers and pre-dominant scholarship sympathetic to these thinkers).

Finally, third, the key thesis pertaining to the Lacanian subject is that, as split, the subject itself is never at home in his milieu. The assumption of ecologically oriented theories is that the various others know what it is truly like to be a member of their particular group. This or that tribe, for instance, understands their symbolic universe in a way that an outsider will never be able to understand. The Lacanian turns this on its head, arguing that the "mysteries of the pyramids were mysteries to the Egyptians themselves". That is, members of their own group maintain a fraught and antagonistic relation to the Other or symbolic universe to which they belong, wondering what the Other truly wants of them. Their relation is mediated as well. It is precisely due to this split that we're both led to passionately identify with the Other (identify as Christian, American, academic, etc), hoping to provide the correct answer to this question, and that all identifications are fraught and perilious, functoning as potential sites of contestation. Since that which I can be conditioned by is always going to result from my identifications, the way in which I'm conditioned is, in fact, a creative act on my part... I choose my influences and enact my conditioning. Under this threefold model, the act of writing becomes a creative act that introduces or "emerges" singularities into the social field capable of diverging from the dominant strains of that field. Perhaps the more interesting question is that of why one might desire to see it as impossible to say anything that isn't already said... How does this sustain ones desire with respect to the Other, and what danger might there be in speaking?