No really!
OK so I've been steering clear of the battle for hearts and minds over at Larval Subjects.
I guess the debate is over who is best at escaping the chain tied to the ankles of continental philosophy: OOP or non-philosophy? Seems more like a sibling rivalry than anything else to me.
I've noticed a lot of talk in that post's comments about jargon, big-name thinkers (and bypassing them), and positive-negative philosophy (or how to escape the self-reflexive stance of contemporary philosophy).
To outsiders it might seem as if OOP and non-philosophy are totally opposed enemies firing on all cylinders; crushing the idiots who dare to strike out on their own. Yet the fact that the debate is mostly functioning on a rhetorical level suggests that these two groups are too similar to pick each other part philosophically. Both Levi and Anthony are quick to admit that they cannot move the debate forward...that an impasse has been reached.
Despite the obvious factionalism that exists at the heart of speculative realism (Laruelle it is worth noting generally appears alongside the four speculative realist names without much comment) the aforementioned three issues are worth focusing on.
The issue of jargon is key. It is clear that deconstruction(ism) & other post-Heideggerian (oh so many layers of jargon) both suffer from jargon-overload. Jargon is basically complexity. The language employed by continental philosophy is too complex and therefore difficult to translate to layman. Further the sheer weight of complexity require that students dedicate years to dissecting a thinker in order to simply comment on a thinker before they, if they even do so, decide to contribute to the development of philosophy. Hence the problem of regression. Am I, by writing about Heidegger, progressing philosophy by becoming an expert and passing on this knowledge or regressing for precisely the same reasons? It is a worthwhile question.
If you have ever had to teach a class someone like Heidegger (or Hegel or Kant) you will know how jargon is the barrier. I remember standing in front of a class a couple of semesters ago. One particularly bright student prodded me to explain what Heidegger meant by Being. The problem here is not so much that I don't know how to do this in an accessible manner but how do I do it so they also get a grip on some of the necessary jargon they will need when dealing with Heidegger...I must use Da-Sein, ontological difference and authenticity. If I don't I have not prepared them properly. Therefore the cycle is repeated. They go on to immerse themselves and perhaps give into Heidegger's jargon...and become Heideggerians (transmitters of Heideggerian jargon).
This is also the big-name issue. This issue is different and is more or less the question of time management. Do I have the time to read Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger to become adapt at German philosophy? Maybe I need to add Husserl or Schelling? OK so I want to update my portfolio to include speculative realism. I read Brassier, Hamilton, Harman etc. Then I hear new names: Latour, Serres, DeLanda. But wait there are some classics I have missed: Bergson, Whitehead. The other guys are reading Derrida, Deleuze, Zizek and Badiou. Better add those. A whole lifetime can go missing in what we do. I like reading but philosophy should come with a free voucher for reading glasses for life.
I've often wished that before a conference paper I could list all the people I have not read and put them up outside the door. Those who had attended my paper in order to see how it synced with their pet thinker could check the list and if their thinker was missing they could skip the lecture thereby avoiding the awkward moment where I tell them I have not read Badiou because I'm currently trying to play catch up with Derrida. In fact I'm often surprised how philosophers, so called champions of truth, will beg, steal and borrow to pretend they have read somebody so as not to lose face. You haven't read everything by Derrida? That's OK. I haven't either. I won't think any less of your paper for it. I'm sure you've read other people. Mind I admit I'd be less polite with someone as fundamental as Kant but you get the picture.
Then again philosophers are serious people doing serious things and talking serious stuff. Or that is the feeling I find when I walk the hallowed halls of the Ivory Tower (complete with mundane view, smell of coffee, and Windows XP screensavers whizzing past).
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
20 comments:
Point of issue. Surely Jargon is pseudo-complexity not complexity prima facie.
Neologisms are necessary and helpful where they are genuinely short hand for a new concept. However the proliferation of neologisms for the sake of novelty is to my mind endemic in bad philosophy.
In terms of jargon in continetal philosophy, I disagree with you. I would contend that one of the more serious points Heidegger tried to make is that we do not have a language capable of dealing with or articulating certain concepts in a meanigful way. Whether he succeeded in getting around this himself is another debate, but the problem he raises is still important. And on the issue of clarity (which I am guessing some of this comes down to) you may find this of interest:
http://www.kantinternational.blogspot.com/2009/08/clarity-and-philosophy.html
Sure, successful neologisms succeed in communicating a phenomenon that has previously gone unrecognised. That, I don't deny. The measure of their success is, I guess, disputable and possibly subjective. But that doesn't entail jargon should be proliferated needlessly. Or worse, for the sake of novelty in the hope of achieving notoriety.
I don't really have a problem with Heidegger, but the sheer number of 'riffs' on Heidegger i find staggering. Especially since they all seem to come with their own tool kit.
For example, if the idea is to discuss the crisis of concepts, their expressive inadequecy and contingency, that is fine, but such a point can be made without appeal to jargon that floats above its own abyss. By this i mean that, a set of self undermining terminology is a needless addition to a debate which already has perfectly understandable vocabulary suited to the task implicating doubt, contingency and/or purely contextual adequacy.
Thanks for the link. I agree with much that was said there, but clarity with regard to jargon merely asks that the new terms used are explicitly defined. Jargon in the current continental tradition often (it seems to me) dodges this issue by questioning the worth of definition. I ussually feel definition leads to comprehension, and comprehension should be award enough for any philosophical text. Incidently, Kant at least attempted to define his terms.
"I guess the debate is over who is best at escaping the chain tied to the ankles of continental philosophy: OOP or non-philosophy?"
Just want to say that this isn't my contention at all. I'm not interested in OOP/OOO, though OPP, yeah you know me, is of interest (sorry, I've been wanting to make that joke for ages). But seriously, I'm not making any claims about OOO vs. non-philosophy. Apparently Reid has in the past, but I haven't read that post. I was only pointing out what I see to be a misunderstanding in the way that Levi was writing off Laruelle. Nothing more than that.
If you think this little debate is about "who is best at escaping the chain tied to the ankles of continental philosophy: OOP or non-philosophy" I think it might be you who needs to indulge in some textual analysis!
Its just:
a) X person stands for this
b) No they don't.
Nothing more.
Ha Paul! This is pretty much right, though I do think the stakes of the debate are important.
@Anthony and Alex: I don't think that is what the debate is about at the level of the back and forth but what it looks like from the outside...thematically.
Also I do think the debate is important. As I write this it is at 51 comments. I suppose I was simply mining it for what issues keep popping up within the SR orbit.
And with that in mind I think I jumped the gun in making a post out of it at all. At this stage I have no idea what is going on in that long, long list of comments.
Thanks for this Paul, I have only very recently joined the OOP and SR community (still waiting for my membership card) and I think you hit some of the reading issues spot on. I teach philosophy in a very small department, on a new subject pathway, and frequently hit the jargon and big-name issues in precisely the manner that you note. Students frequently criticise jargon (at least in their first year) and I have to explain that a large part of going to university is about learning a ‘new language’, that is, a specialist terminology that serves as shorthand for a broader set of concepts or a theory. However, the question of how much to translate and the nature of the translation that you deliver still remains. The problem is compounded somewhat on several of the courses that I teach as they are thematic or topic-centred, rather than addressing a specific philosopher. The question then becomes, what concepts do the students really need and can they be meaningfully detached from the broader corpus of the philosopher’s material? Often they can, but there is always some loss of meaning.
The question of big-names and how much to read is a particularly pressing one. I am currently attempting to immerse myself in OOP and SR, but it is necessary to be very selective in who and what I read (and even the order in which one reads them can be significant). I always remember one of my professors telling me when I was an MA student to do as much reading as I could while a student, because if I was ever in an academic post I would have very little time for such luxuries. I now understand this very well, especially as I work with a quite heavy teaching workload. What you are able to read as an UG and PG often lays down the main intellectual resources with which you must work for many future years. Obviously periods of study leave can allow some innovation and development, but most academics have little time to keep up and read anywhere near as much as they might need or want to. Plus, you note the doctoral student’s dilemma and paranoia: ‘what have I missed’ and if I read X must I also read Y and Z. Sadly this problem never goes away, one just has less time to worry about it.
The point you make about putting a list of who you have read alongside your conference papers both raised a smile and also seems quite reasonable. One of the most painful parts of giving conference papers is (a) being very aware that you haven’t read philosophers X, Y and Z and believing that this is a big gap in you argument/thesis or theory, and (b) being torn into by people who are championing philosopher X, Y or Z. I’m always open to the person who constructively notes that perhaps you could consider this or that, but academics are finite beings and attaching a little sketch of the nature of our academic finitude to our conference abstracts might be a valuable undertaking. It could, of course, be a rather odd undertaking (give it a try, e.g. familiarity with Wittgenstein (later), competent in Whitehead, Bergson and Deleuze, expert in Heidegger and Harman). For those of you that have to write staff profiles (or, more importantly, cvs/resumes), there is already an encounter with having to commit to competencies and specialisms, but I always wonder just how specific I need to be.
Anyway, thanks for two great sites,
Paul (Reid-Bowen)
P.S. Shameless self-plug, you may want to check out my new OOO and SR-related blog, basically it just me thinking through some of these concepts against the inevitable background of my own interests, competencies and expertise. Not much there at the moment, but it should grow. http://paganmetaphysics.blogspot.com/
A couple of thoughts: let us be careful of not confusing the issue of jargon with the issue of complex writing style. Heidegger is not hard to read, once you've learn 'heideggerian'. Derrida is hard to read even when you got the meaning of the few key terms he employs (I'm using two standard examples, and I have the utmost respect for both the philosophers).
Heidegger's phenomenological approach leads him to either create new, necessary terms to fit the phenomena he wants to explain (for ex. zuhandenheit) or to use familiar words only in order to show how actually their complete meaning escapes our everyday usage (for example umwelt, or gegend). Derrida's textual interests lead him to push the language itself to the limits, not so much single terms.
As for the big names, I completely agree with you. As a doctoral student, I constantly feel the pressure to read all which I have not yet read. You should see my amazon basket. But I think that what one reads depends on why one is interested in doing philosophy. I think that Levi in his comments on the 'OOO vs non-phi' post said something like 'I am interested in philosophy inasmuch it helps me explaining the world and formulating new theories about it'. I think it is a perfectly legitimate stance, but I would go further and claim that there can be no 'public' reason to do philosophy. I am not into philosophy because I want to change the world, or because I want to be famous, or rich or what not, I am because I want to answer to my own questions, questions which are specific to me. If I find material to fuel (or eventually reshape) my questions (take care, not to answer them) in other philosophers' work, great, but I do not believe that the bigger one's library the better philosopher one becomes. One always philosophizes for personal reasons.
You might disagree with this, but one of my favourite bits of Nietzsche is this one, from Beyond Good and Evil:
'[i]t has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown. Indeed, to understand how the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to first ask oneself: ‘What morality do they (or does he) aim at?’'
And these considerations lead me to a question that has been bothering me for some time: how is it that the SR movement became possible in the shape it has grown into? Is it not a noteworthy 'coincidence' that a large number of people became interested in building up a non human-centered philosophical stance more of less at the same time? Is it not interesting that 'we' (and I talk about the big guns as well as the small fish) are all relatively young (I think most are younger than 45)? I think that the a philosophical movement gets momentum when both its project is openly a reaction to a certain status quo, and when the people involved in it share not only a new theoretical common ground or common goal, but also a certain socio-biographical baggage.
[Which is, maybe, a partial answer to the question 'Why Badiou did not get involved in SR?']
Of course, feel free to disagree.
@Paul Reid-Bowen: I've added your blog to the recommended reading section. I'll also take some time later to address your recent blog on OOP and theology.
@hyper:
Of course I don't want to imply that all Heidegger is *only* jargon. After all I want to get students into Heidegger although I do think that post-Kehre Heidegger descends into a full on jargon zone and I find little there to help me deal with the world (although this is really a historical question...the later Heidegger is a thinker of his time).
Which brings us nicely to our day and age and why now speculative realism has emerged. I'm totally stumped at what the answer is. My intuition tells me it is something to do with our hyper-technological age but I can't offer anything better than that at the moment.
In response to hypertiling: completely agree with the distinction between jargon and complex writing style. Pedagogically it is always relatively easy to help students with jargon during lectures and seminars, but a complex writing style is a different matter. Typically, I might simply stress that some writers are worth persevering and struggling with. However, I am uncertain about the investment to reward ratio, both for some philosopher’s work and some student’s abilities. It may –as you note – depend upon what you want from your philosophy that determines both what you read and persevere with. Increasingly, I don’t have the time to struggle with certain authors and very much appreciate clarity and a good style.
As to the Nietzsche quote, I tend to agree that philosophy amounts to a form of confessional; although I have perhaps always perceived this more clearly with regard to theologians. Arguably part of the reason that academic theologians outnumber scholars of religion by between ten and twenty to one is probably the biographical and confessional element, which is more permissible, closer to the surface and attractive too. Some philosophers may admittedly distance themselves from their “socio-biographical baggage” – probably another means of separating Anglo-American vs. Continental approaches– but it is always present on some level. Not sure of the Speculative Realist demographic, but I was certainly surprised by certain affinities between its membership (and myself). I also certainly don’t see it as a fad, I was just pleasantly surprised to discover it a few months ago, particularly after arguing for the last ten years that continental-influenced feminist philosophies need to take metaphysics seriously, rather than rejecting the discipline in a knee-jerk fashion or as some kind of fait accompli.
@PRB: What do you think the affinities are? As you may know this is the million dollar question in SR: what binds us?
Go to http://dontpickuptheturd.blogspot.com/ to read my comment.
I knew the day would came when an actual Dasein would send a comment.
Paul (both of you),
some very random thoughts about possible social influences on the demographics of SR, especially valid for us 'small fish', which I suppose be in the 25-35 range. I apologize if this will appear too 'sociological' and too little 'philosophical', but as I said, I do not belive in philosophical positions chosen for philosophy's sake. Before becoming 'philosophers' we were all 'people'.
First, as Paul E. hints towards the hyper-technological world. I agree. Sounds obvious, but most of the continental thinkers of the past generation never experienced what we today take for granted. To name just two, Levinas and Deleuze died in 1995, and the popular boom of the internet was, approximately, from 1996. Baudrillard is the exception, not the rule, in his generation. The information overload is an unprecedented flattening of the resources of knowledge (I like 'flattening' more than 'democratization'). And it is the ultimate concretization of the possibility of human dependency on technological means. I'd say that the development of intellectual figues such as Ian Bogost are possible only after the early 90s.
Second, we are the 'Hubble generation' (the telescope, not Edwin). The HST, launched in 1991 but actually working only after 1993 opened the doors of astrophysics to the lay public through the medium of a cascade of previously unthinkable pictures (and the nebula on the cover of After Finitude could easily be one of them), not to mention the post-1998 discovery of 'the expanding universe'. The massification of astronomical knowledge through images and catchy formulae had severe effects in popular culture, bringing the awareness of the layperson regarding his or her place in the cosmos much more than the Apollo project did in the 60s.
Third, and this might sound more controversial, we in the western world have not witnessed any major political uheaval. This does not mean that we have no political consciousess but that the ways of public engagement with politics have radically changed and that perhaps the focus of active struggle has moved from Europe to other parts of the globe. I speak for myself here, but I am very aware of my privileged position in global society, included my facilitated access to the cultural influence of the first and second point above. This does not mean that I am a 'spoiled philosopher' but it certainly means that my own biographical experiences are far from those of a thinker who had his or her intellectual development in the 60s and 70s, and this is probably reflected in what I perceive as important issues (I wasn't existing in 1968, so I guess that for me is an arche-fossil? :)I know too little of contemporary marxism to give informed opinions on that, but I would say that the most 'political' contemporary intellectual movement is postcolonial theory (of which I know a bit more and which I try to be engaged with when doing any kind of philosophy, or comparative philosophy) which in turn was built through an application of poststructuralist and postmodern positions.
I realize now that I've probably built those points on my own interests and influences, and I do not expect everyone to agree with me. There are probably more which I have not mentioned. But I do believe that somewhere along these lines we can find some hints to trace the historical development that led to today's SR.
One cautionary note. I am not trying in any way to undermine the importance or momentouness of SR. I find it an extremely exciting movement, one with which I want to conversate for my own philosophical development. I am not depicting SR as a philosophical current in its 'teenage years' rebelling against the predecessors without self-awareness. But I do believe that it is always good to promote a healthy dose of historical self-consiousness.
Hoping not to have offended anyone,
Fabio
This is only a hypothesis, because I certainly haven’t read anywhere near enough of the people who shelter under the SR umbrella, but one might consider a form of epistemological and metaphysical claustrophobia to be at work as philosophical and psychological driver/motive. There seems, to me at least, to be shared desire to break out of the Kantian bubble (and the shackles of antirealism and its various offspring) and a general willingness to try and think and theorise the world otherwise. The image of the Chief’s escape in the final scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest springs to mind for the SR movement, but I wouldn’t want to push the analogy too far; I suspect I would equate Kantianism with the asylum. One could probably do some interesting sociological and psychological survey of those who identify as SR, but I have mostly been struck by an eagerness to get back to world (I particularly like Meillassoux’s term the ‘Great Outdoors’) and a willingness to simply embrace the ‘weird’ and ‘speculative’. It was, for example, interesting to discover Graham’s interest in Lovecraft. If I were to offer a more measured response, though, I would probably need to evoke the notion of a family resemblance rather than a single essence.
Piggybacking on Fabio's terrific observations, I don't think we should underestimate the magnitude of the technological revolution through which we are currently living. I am 35 and was born in 74. I still remember the first computer that my father brought home from work when I was in the fifth or sixth grade. And I distinctly remember my first encounter with the internet in the 90s. In short, those of us in the 25 - 45 age group have lived in two worlds. In the meantime, we've also lived in the shadow of a looming and growing environmental catastrophe, an awareness of the massive destructionn of ecosystems, we've witnessed the extermination of all sorts of species (narratives about ecodestruction was especially prevelant in the 80s as I recall), we have lived with a consciousness of diminishing resources, we have witnessed famines all over the world through media, we have lived through the birth of cable and satellite communication, and we have also experienced the impotence of political engagement when faced with state powers that both control the media and which command weapons and surviellance technology that seem omnipotent. We saw the fall of the Berlin wall, the explosion of a few space shuttles, and a triumph of capitalism that dwarfs anything the Socialists were dealing with at the turn of the century.
When contemporary thought is situated in the context of these events or this milieu of individuation, correlationism and postmodernism look like a sort of madness or like a set of philosophical tools that are woefully inadequate to our historical moment. Is much light really shed on the ecosystem by discussing it as a correlate of a transcendental subject or by analyzing it at the level of signs, language, and the play of the signifier? Can we really make much sense of the dynamics of technology by conceptualizing it as simply a materialization of human intentions or human uses when increasingly technology transforms our Dasein and becomes something that we adapt to not something that adapts the world to us. I see OOO as trying to develop a set of conceptual resources for simultaneously thinking phenomena through a multi-faceted set of lenses without having to commit to one ground (language, lived experience, history, etc). Ian brings this out nicely in his latest where he talks about the multiple levels at which games must be thought, without hegemonizing everything to one level.
Piggybacking on both Levi and Fabio's comments...
It seems to me that philosophical exploration is often expanded by the new metaphors and paradigms that become available to us. In the case of the 25-45 group, the new metaphor/paradigm is the network - a primary concept in our ideas of both the ecosphere and the internet. We are aware of ourselves as networked objects in a way that no previous generation could have been.
For some people, OOO and SR might be a reaction against continental thought, but for me it is a reaction against the computer/functional paradigms of analytic philosophy.
Post a Comment