Pre-Conference Rush-- Apocalyptic Meditations

This weekend I'll be in Las Vegas for the 19th annual Far West Popular and American Cultural Association Conference, where I'm presenting a paper entitled:

Enjoy Your Apocalypse! Apocalyptic Fantasies, Jouissance, and
Social Symtpoms in Life Under Post-Industrial Capitalism

Basically I'll be engaging in a lame analysis of how apocalyptic narratives are ciphers for the subject's relationship to the impossible-real of society, to the fact that society doesn't exist, envisioning the possibility of surmounting this real through a collapse of the current social configuration. Through an analysis of Armageddon and The Day After Tomorrow, I hope to show the structure at work in rightwing and leftwing versions of this fantasy, where in the former apocalypse results from the alien outsider or invader (the meteor hurtling towards earth) such that defeating this invader allows society to reallign itself in terms of an organic community no longer beset upon by intrusive government or misguided liberals (the film begins with Bruce Willis hitting golfballs at a Greenpeace boat protesting his oil drilling); whereas in the latter apocalypse results from the self-reflexivity of the social where our own acts lead to our destruction (thus films such as Terminator, the Matrix, and I, Robot belong to this genre as well), and the apocalypse functions to overcome nationalistic and ethnic tensions (the famous celebration scene in the third Matrix film, Mexico hosting U.S. citizens in The Day After Tomorrow), and re-establish familial and sexual bonds. K-Punk has argued that the films I describe as apocalyptic are, in fact, survivalist. However, I would argue that all apocalyptic narratives are survivalist, in that they all envision a form of post-apocalyptic subjectivity that now lives in peace, prosperity, and harmony. For instance, in many Christian apocalyptic narratives, a thousand years of peace are said to follow the final battle between good and evil or Christ and Satan.

Ultimately I would like to end with a brief discussion of Zizek's parallax, arguing that what these films represent is the impossibility of the social itself, or, rather, that the social is not one or the other (communitarian organic bonds versus collections of autonomous and self-determining individuals), but rather the very tension between these two conceptions of the social. Somewhere in there I plan to plug our discussions here in the academic blogosphere, but I really won't have the time or space to develop them as they should be developed.

Generally, I don't like to present at these sorts of conferences as I always feel a bit silly in my pop-cultural analyses, always finding them a bit facile (K-Punk, Jodi Dean, and Foucaultisdead are far better at this sort of thing), and feeling more at home in the arid world of theory. But a friend asked me to be on his panel and it's a chance to see Las Vegas, which I've never before visited. At any rate, I probably won't have much time to write over the next couple of days as I'm busily pulling all this together at the last minute. If any of you happen to be at this conference, drop by and have a gander. Our panel is entitled "Religious Appeal(s)" and is at 1:45 on Saturday... My paper was originally entitled "Secular Theologies" and I was going to argue that certain forms of religion are a structure of thought (it's necessary for me to defer to Anthony Paul Smith's claim that religion is not a univocal concept or that religion does not exist), not a set of ontological commitments to the divine, but rudely changed the topic at the last minute.

In the meantime, N.Pepperell has written a beautiful and challenging summation of where we're at in our ongoing dialogue over at Rough Theory, that is well worth the read. Hopefully I'll have more to say about this when I return. Siren's song indeed. I'd much rather be thinking of those issues than working on this paper.

* Picture shamelessly filched from K-Punks blog. My friend Melanie tells me that people like visual aids. The Platonist in me recoils.

Move Along Folks, Nothing to See Here!

The last few days have left me feeling despondant and without a thought in the world, though I'm dreaming a good deal, which must, from an analytic point of view, mean that I'm doing some serious thinking. I feel as if my brain has fallen out of my ear. Last night's dream involved an old friend Dan, who first introduced me to philosophy in highschool, holding a German luger pistol to my head and laughing as I squirmed. I wonder what that's all about. In the dream it turns out that after all these years he still works at Long John Silver's as a fry cook. My father has such a gun... Hmmm.

At any rate, in my quest to better understand the series of critical questions that N.Pepperell over at Rough Theory has been posing vis a vis the conditions for the possibility of critique, I've returned to Adorno's Negative Dialectics, a text that always, for some reason, fills me with guilt... The guilt of a missed encounter. Just in traversing the first few pages, I can see why N.Pepperell has been intrigued by a good deal of the work I've been doing here, as much of Adorno resonates closely with Lacan and Zizek. The following remarks are more placeholders than anything else, designed to forge a sort of translation device or lexicon, rather than to propose an argument. Of course, any translation is already an interpretation, so perhaps I should bear that in mind.

In a striking remark that cannot fail to ring significantly to the Lacanian ear, Adorno claims that,

The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy... It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived.

Yet the appearance of identity is inherent in thought itself, in its pure form. To think is to identify. Conceptual order is content to screen what thinking seeks to comprehend. The semblance and the truth of thought entwine. The semblance cannot be decreed away, as by avowal of a being-in-itself outside the totality of cogitative definitions... Aware that the conceptual totality is mere appearance, I have no way but to break immanently, in its own measure, through the appearance of total identity. Since that totality is structured to accord with logic, however, whose core is the principle of the excluded middle, whatever will not fit this principle, whatever differs in quality, comes to be designated as a contradiction. Contradiction is nonidentity under the aspect of identity; the dialectical primary of the principle of contradiction makes the thought of unity the measure of heterogeneity. (5)

This is perhaps the pithiest expression of the Lacanian borromean knot between the symbolic, the real, and the imaginary I have ever encountered. I have never been particularly fond of the term "imaginary" in Lacanian psychoanalysis, as it too readily lends itself to common usages suggesting what is false or imagined, whereas for Lacan the imaginary pertains to the dimension of the image, of our identification with our bodily image that always differs from the lived body of movement, that we can never fully assume or be identical with. Of course, this is part of the point in Lacan's use of language: It is a pedagogy that teaches the difference between signifier and signified, of their radical discontinuity, and that enjoins us not to assume the signified as inherently attached to the signifier, but to look for it among those signifiers immanently attached to it in a text or the speech of an analysand. The imaginary is the domain of identification, and marks our yearning for completeness, wholeness, totality, and identity. Dylan Evans puts it nicely in his Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis,

The basis of the imaginary order continues to be the formation of the ego in the mirror stage. Since the ego is formed by identifying with the counterpart or specular image, identification is an important aspect of the imaginary order. The ego and the counterpart form the protypical dual relationship, and are interchangeable. This relationship whereby the ego is constituted by identification with the little other [the mirror image or image of another person] means that the ego, and the imaginary order itself, are both sites of a radical alienation; 'aleination is constitutive of the imaginary order' (S3, 146) [we are alienated insofar as we are never identical to the image, hence the identification generates rivalry and aggressivity as can often be witnessed in the blogosphere when various bloggers go to war with one another in thinly veiled struggles for prestige and recognition]. The dual relationship between the ego and the counterpart is fundamentally narcissistic, and narcissism is another characteristic of the imaginary order. Narcissism is always accompanied by a certain aggressivity. The imaginary is the realm of image and imagination, deception and lure [deception insofar as I confuse myself with what I am not, my frozen image]. The principle illusions of the imaginary are those of wholeness, synthesis, autonomy, duality and above all, similarity [images appear whole, whereas language and movement are not]. The imaginary is thus the order of surface appearances which are deceptive, observable phenomena which hide underlying structure; the affects are such phenomena. (82)

Returning then to Adorno, then, the concept can loosely be translated into the domain of the symbolic, while the totality or whole can be translated into the domain of the Lacanian imaginary. As Adorno will say a few pages later, "No object is wholly known; knowledge is not supposed to prepare the phantasm of the whole" (14). Those philosophical systems that present the whole such as, for instance, Whitehead, can be situated as the symbolic under the dominion of the imaginary. They fantasize an image without remainder, without blindspot or tain, without gaze before which they dance. And it is remarkable that variants of holism so often paradoxically generate aggressivity.

The real then, of course, would be the remainder that resists conceptualization. This remainder seems to function in a two-fold way. When Adorno suggests that to think is to identify, he immediately seems to back up, expressing hesitation, treating this remainder as the motor that propels the imaginary yearning for identification. It is precisely because the object differs from itself, that thought strives to identify. A perfect identity would leave no space, no gap, calling for the thing to be thought. The thing would reside purely within itself, never producing the distance that calls for it to be thought. It is only insofar as identity already is minimally indifferent that we're driven to try to identify. As Hegel puts it in an important passage in the Logic (and I think Adorno is pretty far off the mark in his interpretation of Hegel),

This proposition in its positive expression A = A is, in the first instance, nothing more than the expression of an empty tautology. It has therefore been rightly remarked that this law of thought has no content and leads no further. It is thus the empty identity that is rigidly adhered to by those who take it, as such, to be something true and are given to saying that identity is not difference, but that identity and difference are different. They do not see that in this very assertion they are themselves saying that identity is different; for they are saying that identity is different from difference; since this must at the same time be admitted to be the nature of identity, their assertion implies that identity, not externally, but in its own self, in its very nature, is this, to be different. (413)

Hegel goes on to argue that the contradiction embodied in the principle of identity is not simply that identity is different from difference-- though this is true as well --but immanent to identity itself as a contradiction or difference between form and content. At the level of form, any proposition of the form "x is..." calls for a predicate that enriches the subject with some new content. For instance, I say a "pen is a utensil". However, at the level of content, all we get is "A is A", such that the predicate gives us no additional content, but merely repeats, tautologously, the initial subject. What we thus get is a marking of the difference betwen form and content. It is precisely because the content fails that we are able to become aware of the form of this species of propositions. Thus, even in the most formal presentation of identity already contains the elusive remainder within it or its own resistance to complete conceptualizations or symbolization.

We might begin from an epistemic stance, arguing that this remainder is a deficiency in thought, a deficiency in knowledge, that could perhaps be surmounted by gaining more information and understanding. Here the world, in-itself, would be free of such remainders and would be complete. It would simply be a matter of a disadequation between thought and being. However, in a vein very similar to Zizek's, Adorno goes on to claim that in fact it is the world itself that is antagonistic, that doesn't have the smooth functioning of the signifier (when conceived under the dominion of the imaginary):

However, varied, the anticipation of moving in contradictions throughout seems to teach a mental totality-- the very identity thesis we have just rendered inoperative. The mind which ceaselessly reflects on contradiction in the thing itself, we hear, must be the thing itself it is to be organized in the form of contradiction; the truth which in idealistic dialectics drives beyond every particular, as onesided and wrong, is the truth of the whole, and if that were not preconcieved, the dialectical step would lack motivation and direction. We have to answer that the object of a mental experience is an antagnoistic system in itself-- antagonistic in reality, not just in conveance to the knowing subject that rediscovers itself therein...

...Regarding the concrete utopian possibility, dialectics is the ontology of the wrong state of things. The right state of things would be free of it: neither a system nor a contradiction. (10-11)

The obvious target here is Hegel, who Adorno portrays as the thinker of a complete and whole system where everything has its place. However, when Hegel speaks of absolute knowledge, it is precisely this antagonism, this remainder, reflected back into the thing itself (rather than the knowing subject) that he is speaking of. Put a bit differently, reality is already dialectical in itself, or just is this tension between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. The real is the undoing of any totality, but is also the motor that drives towards totality. Therefore it has an ambiguous status.

I realize here that I am only repeating points that I've already made to N.Pepperell: That the non-identity of identity is the necessary but not sufficient condition for critique, that it is what accounts for how critique is possible in the first place. However, it is a first step, I think, in unfolding the question of self-reflexivity, or accounting for the conditions for the possibility of a critical subject. What is needed in addition to this is a socio-historical account of the conceptual web such a subject swims in at a particular juncture... A conceptual web that must already be non-identical to itself to be recognized as such. Additionally, my interest in all of this, revolves around questions of how it is possible to philosophically appropriate psychoanalysis and various other forms of social theory drawing on some explicit or implicit notion of the unconscious. These forms of thought remain dogmatic so long as they are baldly or empirically asserted as is so often the case. Moreover, it is clear that philosophical stances based on the primacy of the classical subject such as those found in Descartes or Husserl, are inadequate in dealing with anything resembling the unconscious or social systems. Finally, embedded approaches such as Heidegger's or Merleau-Ponty's seem to inevitably lead to mystical obscurantism. What a dialectical approach provides is precisely the means of thinking the identity of identity and difference... And what is the unconscious but that "Other scene" that differs from identity but which I nonetheless am?

Apologies for the scattered and random remarks.

Rough Theory-- The Apocalypse Edition

N.Pepperell over at Rough Theory has written a very nice response to my musings on the ubiquity of apocalyptic fantasies in contemporary culture, drawing on Adorno. Expressing hesitation over certain elements of my claims, N.P. writes:

Sinthome thus expresses the hope that apocalyptic fantasies manifest a desire for something other than their explicit content - something more than the desire for destruction and death. I raise this point, not to hold up Freud’s text against Sinthome’s appropriation - for we have no obligation for interpretive fidelity to Freud’s work and, in any event, even Freud’s “typical” examples contain permutations that might be amenable to Sinthome’s appropriation (Freud suggests that “typical” dreams can manifest historical content, for example - ephemeral wishes once felt, but long since rejected, etc.) - but because I think it provides a good frame for understanding Adorno’s very different attempt to merge psychoanalytic theory with sociology in the service of critique. If Freud offers two interpretive paths, one of which Sinthome has followed in the hopes that apocalyptic fantasy might signify a nonmanifest content - a longing for transcendence - we can understand Adorno’s work as an attempt to reflect seriously on the second path - on the possibility that certain mass movements might genuinely desire to achieve what their fantasies express: destruction and death.

I do not have much to add to N.P.'s excellent analysis, except to point out that I do not believe there's any substantial disagreement here between my claims and what she's drawing from Adorno. This point comes into greater clarity with regard to other fantasmatic structures. An acquaintance of mine suffers from an overwhelming sense of guilt that pervades nearly every aspect of his daily life. For instance, his wife will ask him to do something innocuous and straightforward and he'll be paralyzed by anxiety feelings of guilt, encountering her request not as a simple request, but as an accusation claiming that he failed to do something that he should have done. Similarly, whenever faced with some form that he must fill out for the government or his job, he encounters this form as implying that he's done something wrong in much the same way that Joseph K's engagements with the castle and the court all imply some ambiguous and unfathomable guilt in The Castle and The Trial. Finally, his dream life is pervaded by dreams where he commits some horrible act of crime and is to be punished.

The point not to be missed here is that the manifest content of this frame with respect to how he organizes his intersubjective relations and relations to the world-- the frame through which he views and interprets the address of others to him --is taken as a genuine and true reading of what is actually going on. He genuinely, for instance, experiences his wife as accusing him, and this leads him to act in response to these accusations, demonstrating that he is in fact innocent, that she is the guilty one (for not telling him before), etc., thereby generating conflict between himself and his spouse.

Over the course of our discussions-- which have largely been of a theoretical and impersonal nature, often about the structure of the moebius strip and rhetoric --he has increasingly come to believe that, in fact, these guilt affects have little or nothing to do with anything unfolding in the present. Rather, when he was very young his mother died of cancer and underwent a long and very painful treatment. During this there were times when he would wish for her to die. At present, then, his working hypothesis is that this ubiquitous guilt is a sort of return of the repressed wherein he seeks punishment for these wishes. Indeed, for Freud one of the central marks of obessessional neurosis, the mechanism of repression operative in repression, is a splitting that occurs between affect and signifier, such that the affect is displaced and appears elsewhere in our intersubjective relations. Freud points out that the obsessional, unlike the hysteric, is often quite aware of particular events, but recollects these events without their proper affective content. Instead, the affect becomes connected to signifiers that appear completely unrelated to the originary signifying content. My friend's repetition of this guilt in relation to events unrelated to his wish for his mother's death can thus be seen as serving two functions: On the one hand, it provides him with the punishment he believes himself to deserve. On the other hand, it gives him the opportunity to prove, again and again, his innocence by acting in the present with regard to whatever manifest content happens his way, demonstrating that he has been unjustly accused.

The point, then, that I am trying to make is that the manifest content can very well be treated as the "real McCoy", as the real problem, and we perpetually take up action in relation to this manifest content. The case is similar with regard to apocalyptic fantasies. It is both possible for apocalyptic fantasies to be expressive of frustration with social relations, yearnings for a different type of social order, and repressed wishes for all of society to collapse so that this social order might become possible, and for the subjects inhabited by these fantasies to misrecognize their desire and treat the manifest content as something to be promoted or fought against exactly as Adorno suggests. Zizek makes a similar point apropos the Jew and anti-Semitism. For Zizek, the anti-Semite's animosity towards the Jew is expressive of a series of social antagonisms that have nothing to do with Jews themselves. They are representative of the anti-Semite's own disavowed desire (for a more detailed discussion of Zizek's analysis of anti-semitism see here). However, none of this prevents the anti-Semite from targeting the Jew as a source of violence and unjust legislation, by treating the manifest content of the symptom as a genuine reality. For me, then, the question is that of how fetishistic fascination with the manifest content can be shifted so as to focus on both these disavowed desires and latent content pertaining to social antagonisms.

As a final caveat I would like to add that my basic position is that psychoanalysis is not a psychology but a theory of intersubjectivity. As Freud puts it in the very first paragraph of Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego,

The contrast between individual psychology and social or group psychology, which at a first glance may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely. It is true that individual psychology is concerned with the individual man and explores the paths by which he seeks to find satisfaction for his instictual impulses; but only rarely and under certain exceptional conditions is individual psychology in a position to disregard the relations of this individual to others. In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponenet; and so from the very first individual psychology, in the extended by entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well. (SE 18, 69)

Lacan pushes this thesis to its logical conclusion, treating psychoanalysis not as a psychology, but rather as a transcendental theory of the analytic setting... Or more properly, transference. As such, all questions of psychoanalysis are already questions of the social field, not of individual minds. This is one reason that Lacan was led to investigate topology for forms of relation not premised on outside/inside binaries, but rather continuous relations between self, Other, and world.

Rough Theory-- Critical Subjects

N.Pepperell over at Rough Theory has written a very nice response to my recent post on recoding the social. N.P. writes:

What I want to do here is draw attention to something about the subject - the critical subject - that seems often overlooked in social theoretic discussions, but that seems to me to bear a strong importance for another question you have asked here - a question I also think is vitally important:

what renders an individual susceptible to an event in the first place?

I think you are quite right to ask whether, given the hypothesis that social relations can be defined in ordinary time, so to speak, by what you have called the encyclopaedia (by what I might tend to call a particular network of concrete social relations), we are then in a very difficult position when it comes to explaining how individuals might possess the potential to become subjects - or, as you have expressed the point:

if the regime of the encyclopaedia is as total as Badiou and Ranciere suggest, if the encyclopaedia is organized precisely around disavowing the possibility of anything that isn’t counted, then what are the conditions of possibility under which a subject might be produced at all.

You then move on to discuss the notion that our situatedness in any context is never complete - I’ll come back to this point. What I wanted to point out first, not because I think it’s something that you have missed (I take your points as, in a sense, assuming my own - I just want to take the opportunity to spell something out very explicitly here), but because it seems to be something both glaringly visible, and yet often missed in formulations such as those you quote from Badiou and Ranciere: if the encyclopaedia were complete, surely we would not be able to name it as such. Surely the fact that we are engaged in critical discourse already gives the lie to claims - even if these claims understanding themselves to be critical...

This is exactly the sort of question I'm getting at. Either critique is already itself a product of what I'm here calling the encyclopaedia (I'm more inclined to adopt N.Pepperell's language of "concrete social networks"), or the subject is never completely interpellated by the system of social relations in which its enmeshed. If the latter, it then becomes possible to both explain the subject of critique, but also to explain how one and the same subject seeks to proper up the inconsistencies and symptoms of the encyclopaedia so as to maintain its own tenuous identity... Or something like that. I need to develop what I'm getting at in far more detail, and I realize that a few of my comments towards the end of the previous post were hastey, psychologistic reductions... More placemarkers for future development, than final statements.

Rough and Tumble Theory: The Expansive Edition

N.Pepperell has written an extraordinary post, developing some of the previously made claims in directions I think highly productive. Also, a special thanks to Joseph Kugelmass for further molding the discussion in response to one of my prior posts. N.Pepperell writes,

My own approach to thinking about our context has been to try to think very carefully (almost certainly not carefully enough, and I would benefit greatly from the kind of critical scrutiny these sorts of conversations can provide) about the historical distinctiveness of “modernity” - an investigation that has led me to focus on how we understand capitalism as an element of our global social context in the modern period. If anyone has read back through the older entries in this blog, they will have seen me make at least gestural rejections of common ways of understanding capitalism - I tend not to be very happy, for example, with attempts to define capitalism in terms of class domination, in terms of the market or in terms of core and periphery. While these are to some degree empirical matters, the reason I engage in these skirmishes is because I understand them to have philosophical stakes: capitalism is, I suspect, our closest candidate for an unconscious global social relation (unconscious in the sense that it has arisen and, in spite of a great deal of conjunctural planning carried out en route, is still largely sustained via social practices that are not consciously seeking to bring the overarching system into being). I further suspect that the unconscious - the alienated - nature of this social relation may be particularly important in understanding certain aspects of the forms of perception and thought associated with capitalist history, but this point is far too complex for me to cover even gesturally here…

There's a lot here, so read the rest. Unfortunately I can't comment more at present as I'm grounded and am not allowed to play until I finish all my grading due Monday.

Rough Theory-- The Surly Edition

N.Pepperell over at Rough Theory has written a very sensitive post responding to my recent post on individuation. N.P. writes,

Sinthome’s thought on these questions is subtle and sophisticated, and I wish to be very clear that I am not trying to criticise any substantive points put forward in Sinthome’s posts. What I wish to ask, though, is whether the kind of reflection Sinthome carries out here might in its own practice remain bound to a subject-object divide: whether the practice of thinking through this issue, as carried out in these posts, is consistent with the express goal of the posts, which is to develop a system that transcends subject-object dualism.

And a little further on,

In drawing attention to these common means of explaining the rise of new concepts, I am obviously not seeking to criticise precise reasoning, or to argue against philosophical reflection on the natural world. I am, though, asking whether the form that philosophical argument takes, when it appeals to subjective error or objective empirical novelty, can be understood to be adequate when the content or purpose of philosophical reflection strives to overturn the subject-object dualism. Perhaps we need to be seeking a form of philosophical exposition that is more adequate to the content it seeks to express. I regard this as an epistemological task - where epistemology is understood as, to borrow a phrase from Sinthome, a “theory of learning”, rather than as itself a project grounded in the subject-object divide. And I think that Hegel - and, for that matter, Marx - by focussing their attention on self-reflexivity, have highlighted the need to find a philosophical path through this labyrinth.

Unfortunately I'm in the midsts of marking for the end of the semester so I'm unable to give a detailed response. First, I want to express gratitude to N.Pepperell for so thoughtfully and earnestly thinking with me in both a spirit of friendship and critical questioning, aimed, I think, at producing something or collaboratively developing something rather than simply opposing positions to one another. In a former post, N.Pepperell expressed worries that I took him/her to be criticizing or dismissing me (with regard to my claim that "the One is not") which I did not, nor do I take these remarks to be presented in this spirit. The worries I expressed about the thesis that the One is not are my own worries (here and here and here), namely that I sometimes recoil from this thesis and its implications, finding myself concerned that it is absurd or incoherent. Rather, I take N.Pepperell's comments as working notes revolving about a shared set of questions and concerns.

It seems to me that what N.Pepperell is groping for is the expression "performative contradiction". That is, in suggesting that there is a conflict between the content of my post and the form of my post, the suggestion seems to be that at the level of content, the ontological claims being advanced say one thing, while the form in which these claims are advanced say quite another. It would be here that all the issues of self-reflexivity emerge, for if my claims about individuation hit the mark, then 1) an onto-epistemological theory of individuation must account for how it itself came to be individuated. To put this point a bit differently, my meditations on these issues perhaps suffer the old joke of a man alone in a room asked by a passing traveller whether anyone is there and responding "no", thereby missing the obvious fact that he is there. I am "counting myself out" of the very thing I am talking about, and thus suggesting a transcendence that the content of my post forbids. 2) The nature of critique with regard to other epistemologies and ontologies is significantly transformed as one can no longer say that they are simply mistaken-- which would simply be another variant of the subject/object divide, i.e., the thesis that the world has been erroneously represented --but must instead tell some sort of story as to how these onto-epistemologies came to be individuated.

N.Pepperell remarks that,

I should note that I am being very sloppy with my language here - this is not how Sinthome would express this problematic - I’ll ask forebearance on this issue because my “target” in this analysis is not actually how we can best understand individuation, but instead something more abstract: I’m trying to illustrate something about the habits of thought into which most of us - including myself - tend to fall when we seek to resolve this kind of philosophical dichotomy.

If I am understanding N.P. correctly, then s/he is referring to the habit of thought that continues to evaluate things other than itself in terms of the subject/object divide, while nonetheless having purported to reject this representational conception of the world. Thus, for instance, Deleuze argues that we must shift from a theory of knowledge to a theory of learning throughout Difference and Repetition, and must examine things in terms of how they come to be individuated or produced rather than how they are to be truly represented, and then proceeds to denounce Hegel, Kant, Plato, and others as getting it wrong without applying these very principles to their thought.

It seems to me that there are a couple of thinkers that would be very fruitful in helping to address these sorts of questions. The German philosopher-sociologist, Niklas Luhmann, develops a good deal of his systems theoretical sociology around the theme of self-reflexivity and "observing the observer". These themes are developed very explicitly in texts such as Theories of Distinction and Essays on Self-Reference, but also in his magnificent and dense work Social Systems, where he argues, among other things, that a theory of society must also self-reflexively account for its own claims. Following the obscurantist mathematician Spencer-Brown, Luhmann argues that we can't observe anything prior to drawing a distinction. For instance, we might draw a circle on a piece of paper, thereby distinguishing an outside and an inside. Once a distinction has been drawn, it becomes possible to indicate things on the basis of the distinction (I can now say something is inside or outside). The key point is that the distinction is on the side of the observer, not the thing itself. From this Luhmann draws the conclusion that we can only have system-specific knowledge and can never know the world as such. I follow Luhmann part of the way, however, my criticism has been that the conclusion he draws from this line of reasoning repeats the representationalist tradition in epistemology, assuming that there's a world "out there" in itself that can never be known-- he often draws skeptical conclusions from his sociological work --and that Hegel's critique of the ding-an-sich or thing in itself shows why there is no thing in itself. Nonetheless, Luhmann provides a number of readily available tools for handling these issues of self-reference.

On the other side of the spectrum, it seems to me that this discussion can be profitably situated by taking a page from the Marxo-Hegelian playbook. Marx argues that each age develops a specific epistemology and ontology on the basis of its economics. I am not sure that I'm ready to follow Marx all the way with his economic determinism, but what makes Marx of interest here is that he doesn't simply argue that an epistemology or ontology is wrong or mistaken, but shows how these philosophies are individuated as solutions to a problem (here and here) within a particular socio-historical field. For instance, when an analyst approaches the fantasy of an analysand, he does not do so by showing how it is a distorted representation of reality or falsehood. After all, for Lacan reality is framed by fantasy and thus functions like a Luhmannian distinction or a window through which the subject selects between what is relevant and mere noise where desire is concerned. Rather, analysis proceeds as the analysand comes to discover the manner in which the fantasy (which very well might never be discussed as a fantasy) resolves a certain deadlock with regard to the desire of the Other or solves a particular problem of desire for the analysand. In short, fantasy is not treated as an error. Similarly, the philosophical and theoretical formations of history could productively be approached not in terms of the error/non-error distinction, but as a series of individuations responding to particular sets of problems. Hopefully I have heard some of what is in N.Pepperell's marvellous posts.

Rough and Tumble Theory: The Individuation Edition

In an act of great kindness, N.Pepperell over at Rough Theory has emailed me a a series of questions that tie together various themes I've been developing on this blog since I began writing here in May. I call this a great kindness as it spurs me to try to think through some things and articulate my intuitions more clearly. N.Pepperell writes,

I've been trying to backtrack an issue through your blog (if you see fifty thousand hits from me over the past couple of days, this is what I've been trying to mine the site to find - I've really enjoyed the back posts, by the way: beautiful formulations - it's always a real pleasure, reading your work...).

What I've been trying to tease out if the strategic purpose of a distinction you periodically make between your approach - which you characterise as making "ontological" claims about, e.g., the impossibility of totality, and other approaches, which you criticise for making similar claims, but only at the level of "epistemology". Your strategic intention would probably be clearer to me, if I were more familiar with the works to which you are replying. My guess - but this may simply be ill-informed - is that you are concerned to distinguish your approach from approaches that view totality just as being something that humans (with their limitations, etc.) could never *know* - whereas you are trying to assert that totality is something that could never *be*? But I may be completely missing the point - apologies if the question seems exceptionally obtuse...

My question - and I think this would still be relevant even if I've misunderstood your strategic intent - is: given that you wish to make ontological claims (I'm sympathetic to this desire), isn't it then necessary also then to move into an epistemological theory, in order to explain how it becomes possible for us to achieve a particular ontological insight - if that insight can itself be demonstrated to be historical in character (if the insight, in other words, has not always been available to humans cross-culturally)? In other words, questions of how we can make ontological assertions - of what I would tend to call our standpoint of critique - necessarily imply the need for an explicit epistemological theory, at least if we remain within a materialist (in the sense of secular) framework.

The tricky thing then becomes how one thinks this within a framework sympathetic to Enlightenment ideals - how we can relativise our insights historically, without the experience of vertigo that often follows from relativisation. I've had a few conversations back and forth with Kerim Friedman on this, relating to the possibility for cumulative knowledge- my working concepts involve trying to think about the ways in which exposure to particular historical experiences make certain things easier to think, cause certain concepts to be readier-to-hand. (Ironically, my recent volley into a Derrida discussion at rough theory seems to be pointing in a similar direction, which I wouldn't specifically have expected when we selected those readings...)

My instinct would be that this form of historicisation leaves open questions of truth - it doesn't automatically debunk a concept, just because we make a case that a concept leaps to mind more easily in a particular period. Recognising how we might find it more tempting to think in specific ways at specific times, though, can make it easier- at least, this would be the hope - to obtain a useful degree of working
scepticism that better positions us to think about the validity of our concepts and insights...

This may simply be an unworkable tangent on my part... Among other things, I find it difficult in particular to communicate the very abstract level of historical experience at which I expect such "priming" of perception and thought might take place - such that a number of different (and, at times, conflictual) categories of perception and thought can nevertheless be recognised as homologous due to their implicatedness in specific forms of social practice... In spite of these problems - and they may ultimately be insurmountable... - I keep circling around this issue, because I can't get past the problems historical specificity can cause for ontological claims - with the challenge of how we make ontological claims (and how we then adopt, for example, a particular critical standpoint in relation to matters of truth or goodness), while still not resorting to metaphyics...

At any rate, you may already have thought these things to death - I'm always very conscious of the breadth and depth of your background compared to mine. I was just struck by your periodic criticisms of others for engaging in claims about epistemology, rather than ontology - and, among other things, I suppose have used the email to write myself through to a sense that you might have been criticising epistemological theories that have a somewhat different "target" than the sorts of epistemological theory I tend to worry about in my own writings...

Sorry to pepper you with an essay. And all the best with the job search!

Let's see if I can make some sense. There's a lot here and I can't respond to it at all, but the short answer is that I'm not myself entirely sure where I'm going with the distinction I draw between ontology and epistemology with regard to the non-existence of the whole. In part I'm simply making a stab at a new beginning in philosophy and seeing where it leads, and quite honestly I sometimes find myself thinking it all a bit absurd. There are two distinct issues here: On the one hand, there's the issue of the distinction between ontology and epistemology, and my hostility towards epistemology. I feel better able to defend my animosity towards what I loosely refer to as "epistemological stances". On the other hand, there's the thesis that being is not One, that it does not form a whole or a totality. This I find far more difficult to think about, though I will say that much of this follows from my Lacanianism, as a consequence of my take on the real and the non-existence of the Other.

In a vague sort of way, I think three intuitions are at work in this impulse: First, I take it that the epistemological tradition which I mark as beginning roughly during the 18th century has today come to an impasse with various forms of skepticism or relativism. Unable to establish any determinate ground of knowledge, we're now in the position where knowledge is thought as construction and no claim to knowledge enjoys any more privilege than another. Knowledge has become sociologized, while nonetheless maintaining a distinction between being-as-it-is-in-itself and being-as-it-is-for-us. Second, despite the fact that this distinction is made and we are forever unable to know being as such but only being as it is in and through our distinctions, the fantasy of being-itself is nonetheless maintained. There is a being as such, but it is thought as forever out of reach. I take it that this is what sustains the thesis that all "knowledge" is on par as a sort of fiction or construction, as the idea of construction implicitly evokes the idea of the unreachable, unconstructed. Ideologically I see this discourse as allowing the theorist to maintain distance from all knowledge constructions by devaluing them, thereby maintaining an imaginary illusion of mastery. That is, it works as a sort of metalanguage. Third, I take it that the discourse of epistemology implicitly maintains a distinction between the knowing subject and the known object that treats the subject as outside the domain of being.

I take it that the sociologization of knowledge is based on the correct observation from sociology and anthropology that when we examine different cultural configurations, the categories defining the relationship of the agent to the world differ from culture to culture. This was a thesis that Hegel masterfully articulated in a variety of his writings, such as the Phenomenology, as well as his writings on history and the history of philosophy. You will notice that much of what I've written on in past months has to do with the problem of individuation in the history of philosophy. What I'm trying to get at by shifting these questions from epistemology (how do we represent the world) to ontology, is the thesis that there is no further object beyond our engagement with that object insofar as subject and object are simultaneously individuated through their interaction.

A good deal of what's lurking in my thought here is Hegel's discussion of Essence in the Science of Logic and force and understanding in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hopefully I can clearly condense a good deal of difficult material to make these points. Without going into too much detail, in the second magnificent volume of Hegel's Science of Logic, Hegel writes that,

Essence that issues from being seems to confront it as an opposite; this immediate being is, in the first instance, the unessential.

But secondly, it is more than merely unessential being, it is essenceless being, it is illusory being [Schein].

Thirdly, this illusory being is not something external to or other than essence; on the contrary, it is essence's own illusory being. The showing of this illusory being within essence itself is reflection. (394)

The translation of "Schein" as illusory being is unfortunate. "Schein" can just as easily be translated as "appearance", and has connotations of what is "on the face of something" or "keeping up appearances". The point that Hegel is making is that a distinction has been drawn between how a thing appears or shows itself and what is in the true nature of a thing or its essence. That is, we come to encounter being as containing a true nature that accounts for its appearance. For instance, I no longer encounter my coffee as just the bundle of properties it presents to me such as its color, taste, scent, and so on, but now see these properties as reflecting a nature that makes this coffee what it is. There is thus a distinction between the "coffee-in-itself" and "coffee-for-us".

Difficulties begin to emerge when this relationship between essence and appearance are treated as external and opposed to one another, such that the essence of the thing is something held in reserve. We only ever relate to appearances, so how are we ever to form a relationship to essence or the internal nature of a being (note that Hegel uses the term "essence" in a very unique and unexpected way, that shouldn't be confused with abstract form)? The essence of the thing is thought of as its inner nature in distinction from its appearances, yet what is this inner nature? In an enigmatic and famous passage from The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes that,

The inner world is, for consciousness, still a pure beyond, because consciousness does not yet find itself in it. It is empty, for it is merely the nothingness of appearance, and positively the simple or unitary universal. This mode of the inner being [of Things] finds ready acceptance by those who say that the inner being of Things is unknowable; but another reason for this would have to be given. Certainly, we have no knowledge of this inner world as it is here in its immediacy; but not because Reason is too short-sighted or is limited, or however else one likes to call it... but because of the simple nature of the matter in hand, that is to say, because in the void nothing is known, or, expressed from the other side, just because this inner world is determined as the beyond of consciousness. (88)

When we draw the distinction between essence and appearance we also try to determine what belongs to the object as such and what is contributed by us (or language, or culture). Hegel's point seems to be that we quickly discover that we must subtract all predicates from the object of knowledge to get at the being-in-itself as it is unrelated to us, yet in doing so the object evaporates into nothing or becomes a void. The question of epistemology can be treated as the the question of how we get to the thing itself, while skepticism and relativism can be seen as positions arguing that the thing in itself is unreachable. It's notable that skepticism does not reject the idea that there is a thing in itself-- indeed, it is crucial to its position --but it does claim that we are forever unable to reach this thing in itself.

Hegel's strategy is to argue that 1) essence is relation. This is a part of the idiosyncracy of his concept of essence I mentioned. The second volume of the Science of Logic is a careful analysis of the various types of relation structuring being, and makes a case in which beings must be understood as networks of specific and embedded relations. And 2) that essence must appear (478). In short, Hegel makes the obvious point that essence is only encountered in and through appearance, and that there is no quality-less essence beyond appearance. I cannot go through all the steps of this argument, but in a representative passage, Hegel remarks that,

A thing has properties; they are, first, the determinate relations of the thing to another thing; property exists only as a mode of relationship between them and is therefore the external reflection and the side of the thing's positedness. But, secondly, this positedness is in itself; it maintains itself in the relation to the other and is, therefore, admittedly only a surface with which Existence is exposed to the becoming and alteration of being; but the property is not lost in this. A thing has the property of effecting this or that in another thing and of expressing itself in a peculiar manner in its relation to it. It demonstrates this property only under the condition that the other thing has a corresponding constitution, but at the same time the property is peculiar to the first thing and is its self-identical substrate; it is for this reason that this reflected quality is called property. In this the thing passes over into an externality in which, however, the property is preserved. Through its properties the thing becomes cause, and cause is this, that it preserves itself as effect. Here, however, the thing is so far only the quiescent thing of many properties and is not yet determined as actual cause; it is so far only the implicit reflection of its determinations, not yet itself the reflection which posits them.

The thing-in-itself is, therefore, as we have seen not merely thing-in-itself in such a manner that its properties are the positedness of an external reflection; on the contrary, they are its own determinations through which it enters into relationships in a determinate manner; it is not a substrate devoid of determinations and lying beyond its external Existence, but is present in its properties as ground, that is, it is identity-with-self in its positedness... (SL 487-488)

In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel will discuss this relatedness of entities producing properties in terms of the "solicitation of force". Things "solicit" one another evoking properties in relation to one another. For Hegel the thing can never be thought in isolation from its relationship to other things, and moreover, while we may talk about entities containing potentials-- indeed, Hegel himself does so in the cited passages --we cannot speak of a thing in-itself that does not appear. The thing exhausts itself in appearing and appears in and through relation. For instance, in psychoanalysis there is not one thing, the unconscious, that is in-itself, and another thing, the symptoms/parapraxes, that are appearances. Rather, the two are on a mobius strip with one another and the symptom is evoked in relation to the Other and others. Lacan is very Hegelian in this regard.

So this brings me to a first point: There is a tendency in epistemological frames of thought to subtract the knowing subject from these basic principles, rather than seeing the subject as an element in these interrelationships. This creates the irresolvable problem of how it is possible to know the thing itself. However, everything changes once we recognize that the subject itself is caught up in these networks of relations, and it becomes possible to see knowledge as an ontological result of a process of individuation (here and here and here and here). To try to put the point a bit more clearly, knowledge must be seen as resulting from the milieu in which it is individuated, or its field of engagement. I take it that this responds to your remarks about material and historical conditions. If this is ontological rather than epistemological, then this is because there is no further being in-itself beyond these interactions and relations that would be a true object of knowledge. None of this is to suggest that I am a Hegelian or that I follow him in all the claims he makes. I do find, however, that the Doctrine of Essence in the Science of Logic, is a model of clear thinking (though not clear writing), and of great interest to anyone committed to relational ontology and fatigued by ineffectual epistemic critiques.

Consequently, my proposal is that rather than asking which is the right form of knowledge or claiming that there is no knowledge, we instead look at how knowledges are individuated and produced in a specific field of relations. This would also amount to a theory of learning rather than a theory of representing. Of course, this raises significant questions with regard to the Enlightenment project of critique and demystification that I have not yet worked through.

Fatigue is overtaking me and I find that I'm no closer to giving a persuasive account of just why I think it is important to advance the thesis that being is not One. The intuition lurking in the background seems to be the point that since the conditions of individuation are always specific and unique, and since there is no self-identical thing in-itself that would serve as a measure for ways of relating to beings, there is no one being or whole in which all beings are contained. Rather, we just have divergent topologies of networks of relations that perhaps converge at points but which do not form a totality or whole. If you go back to my very first posts in May you'll find some attempts to make formal arguments for this claim in relation to my discussions of the death of God.

More Rough and Tumble Theory

N. Pepperell over at Rough Theory has written a terrific and challenging diary in response to my recent post on Enlightenment and diacritics (here and here). N.P. writes,

In the post on “The Diacritical Production of Identity”, Sinthome tackles several elements of Lacan’s thought that are often cited as particularly controversial - the use of mathematical metaphors, the concept of the woman as the symptom of the man, etc. Sinthome traverses these elements of Lacan’s thought lightly, bracketing problematic readings, while teasing out a reading productive for critique. My question - and the reason I won’t write at length on this topic here - is whether these elements of Lacan’s thought, even read for their highest critical potential, ever move beyond being a very elaborate theoretical justification for what, at base, I suspect is a fairly noncontroversial ontological claim: that no form of domination (or, for that matter, freedom) ever fully succeeds in subsuming all aspects of consciousness or practice.

I’ve never found this claim controversial and - I confess this may be a fundamental conceptual failure on my part - I haven’t yet understood how any of the various theoretical elaborations of this claim contribute more to critical practice than the simple empirical experience of nonsubsumption ever could? I’m not so much critical of the theoretical framework, as I am uncertain whether this is really a battle that needs to be fought… Does theoretical reflection on this kind of abstract contingency give us any greater insight into the potentials for specific kinds of political action, in the particular contexts in which we must now act?

Unfortunately exingencies of time (things are a madhouse here right now) prevent me from responding at length right now, but I thought I'd cross post her diary here for anyone who might be interested. I think N.P. is right in suggesting that I need to develop these claims and their critical potential in more explicit detail. As a prelude, when advancing the thesis that no form of domination ever completely subsumes the dominated, I am specifically thinking of historicism and Foucaultian power structures. With regard to historicism, I am objecting to the common thesis that everything is determined by its historical context, such that nothing new can appear that isn't already saturated by this context. With regard to Foucault (perhaps one could add Butler), I have in mind the thesis that all social relations are determined by structures of power. Foucault, of course, complicates this with his thesis that all structures of power produce their own resistence; yet these structures of resistance are nonetheless part and parcel of the field of power. Consequently I suppose I am asking whether an outside is possible. This question is relevant in a [Lacanian] psychoanalytic context as well. Middle Lacan-- Lacan during his high symbolic period --often argued in such a way as to suggest that there is no outside to the language. However, as his work developed he increasingly discovered an outside in the form of either the real, drive, objet a, or an exemplary signifier subtracted from the network of signifiers such as the "sinthome".

Rough and Tumble Theory

N.Pepperell over at Rough Theory has written a truly terrific post musing on some of my recent attempts to work out Lacan's logic of fantasy. Apart from the fact that it responds to things that I've recently written and therefore affords me narcissistic gratification and provides some evidence that I exist, I think what I like most about this post is the way that its both generous in its reading while also remaining critical in a productive way. Responding to some of my comments about objet a and the remainder, N.P. writes,

Sinthome then relates the persistence of this “remainder” to the possibility for critique, arguing, if I’m understanding correctly, that the remainder retains the residue of a presymbolic realm from which the symbolic realm is necessarily constructed. The symbolic realm - including fantasy as desire expressed in symbolic form - therefore necessarily drags along in its wake its own “outside”.

I'd like to suggest that there's another way of understanding Lacan's concept of the remainder that doesn't resort to treating it as a sort of pre-symbolic residue. Rather than treating the remainder as a residue of the pre-symbolic that resists symbolic integration, remainder could be taken in a much more literal mathematical sense as the result of an operation. Suppose we take a simple act of division such as the division of 3 by 5. Our solution is 1.666666667. Here there's something that escapes the operation, something that is left over when 3 is subjected to 5. Lacan often liked to liken objet a or the remainder to the golden ratio and irrational numbers. He develops this comparison or analogy in detail beginning with the unpublished Seminar 14, The Logic of Fantasy, and makes passing allusion to it in Seminar 20, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, when he remarks that,

If there is something in my Ecrits that shows that my fine orientation, since it is of that fine orientation that I try to convince you, is not such a recent development, it is the fact that right after the war, where nothing obviously seemed to promise a pretty future, I wrote "Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty." One can quite easily read therein-- if one writes and not only if one has a good ear --that it is already little a that thetisizes the function of hast. In that article, I highlighted the fact that something like intersubjectivity can lead to a salutary solution. But what warrants a closer look is what each of the subjects sustains, not insofar as he is one among others, but insofar as he is, in relation to the two others, what is at stake in their thinking. Each intervenes in this ternary only as the objet a that he is in the gaze of the others.

In other words, there are three of them, but in reality, there are two plus a. This two plus a, from the standpoint of a, can be reduced, not to the two others, but to a One plus a. You know, moreover, that I have already used these functions to try to represent to you the inadequacy of the relationship between the One and teh Other, and that I have already provided as a basis for this little a, the irrational number known as the golden number. It is insofar as, starting from little a, the two others are taken as One plus a, that what can lead to an exit in haste functions. (48-9)

I cannot get into a careful analysis of this dense passage at present, as my mind is mush and it would require a close commentary on Plato's various dialectics of the One and the Other in the Parmenides, along with a discussion of certain elements of set theory. Perhaps Bobo or Austin are up to this work. I do give an extremely simplified version of what Lacan is referring to with respect to logical time in a comment replying to Anon, where I discuss the intersubjectivity at stake in mowing my lawn. In addition to this, the Japanese analyst Shingu Kazushige has written a very nice book meditating on this enigmatic line entitled Being Irrational: Lacan, the Objet a, and the Golden Mean. What is interesting about this metaphor of objet a as an irrational number or the golden ratio is that it evokes the notion of a twist, distortion, or ripple in the symbolic that isn't a hold-over from a mythological pre-symbolic past (how could such a past fail to be mythological, given that we can only approach the world through language?), and that results from operations in the symbolic itself. Perhaps the "cash value" of this concept would be that it offers the possibility of a form of resistance immanent to the symbolic itself... Which is to say, that it shows the manner in which the symbolic is unable to produce closure.