Our extended theory and art discussion seems to have wound down, but Bert Stabler got in some retty great last words which I thought I’d highlight. First:
“The advocates of method oppose the nonmethod of chance to that of proceeding by reason. But what they want to prove is given in advance. They suppose that a little animal, bumping into things, explores a world that he isn’t yet able to see and will only be able to discern when they teach him to do so. But the human child is first of all a speaking being. The child who repeats the words he hears and the Flemish student lost in his Telemaque, are not proceeding hit or miss. All their effort, all their exploration, is strained toward this: someone has addressed words to them that they want to recognize and respond to: not as students or learned men, but as people; in the same way that you respond to someone speaking to you and not to someone examining you: under the sign of equality.” Jacques Ranciere, from The Ignorant Schoolmaster.
The left-theory world has its populists, like Ranciere, Bordieu, Zizek, and Gramsci, and its formalists, like Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, and Greenberg. And it’s split up in numerous other ways too. And it’s like that in the art world as well, and in various areas of culture. But hierarchies of excellence are always conservative (even in a university), and totalizing universality is always radical (even when it’s just capitalism).
Barthes might indeed agree that image qua image needs to be recognized in some Platonic trinity of language qua language and math qua math, and freedom is the void that distinguishes and defines incommensurable multiplicities. I realize that that is a properly structuralist outlook.
But if the only true philosophy is epistemology, there immediately becomes no truth to epistemologically discern. Which I recognize as a conservative outlook– which, ironically for the feminists working with idealism, leaves them with nothing but nature and embodiment and the return to ancestral lore, the general revival of “witchcraft.”
And I have a great deal of sympathy for that, for blood and earth and haptic reflexive spasm within egoless harmonious chaos. And yet, there’s nothing about that that stands for an ethics that is itself ontological, rooted in the cosmos. I merely hope, without systematically promising, that image, the simulacrum of death, resurrected through the discursive language of art, can perhaps offer, as Caro says (echoing Hegel?), an ‘intervention that challenges the place to which poststructuralism has cast “primordial writing.”’
And here’s me in response.
In terms of your point about feminism…I think that gets at why Irigary, for example, who so radically resists the notion of biological determinism in some ways, in other ways seems so obsessed with embodiment, to the extent of seeing mathematics as gendered. Gender differences are metaphors, but there is no ontological truth beyond metaphors, so the women are not one because female lips are two, and the metaphor is the only truth there is. Bodies get erased by language and then immediately reconstituted in language. Logic is constantly swallowing bloody hunks of meat and then voiding them in a geyser of fluids, the pure grid eternally defiling itself, like Descartes pausing in his syllogisms to cut open a cow carcass, or Frankenstein birthing a shit baby. Derrida’s close reading is not an academic exercise; it’s a shamanic plunging of his orifice into sopping entrails; a violent and bloody ritual sacrifice to the hungering void.
And Bert again.
Barthes has a book about Sade, Fourier, and Loyola (called Sade Fourier Loyola), in which he describes them all as “logothetes,” inventors of languages; “It makes little difference how their style is judged, good, bad, or indifferent… all that is left in each of them is a scenographer; he who disperses himself across the framework he sets up and arranges ad infinitum. Thus if Sade, Fourier, and Loyola are founders of a language, and only that, it is precisely in order to say nothing, to observe a vacancy… Nothing is more depressing than to imagine the text as an intellectual object… The text is an object of pleasure… It is a matter of bringing into our everyday life the fragments of the unintelligible that emanate from a text we admire(.)”
This to me seems like a possibility in any discourse, to constantly defer Being through the proceas of Becoming, with the techniques of writing and erasing (sacrificing and consuming) functioning to constantly paper over the abyss on which we tread.
But the abyss itself persists only if we emerge ex nihilo, without reference to the gap that exiles us from nature. This lack that is the Real, perceived only in its effects, opposes the void, through trauma that makes necessity necessary and possibility possible. Language’s connection to pleasure is symbolic desire, which means anxiety and frustration for the phallus, but boundless freedom in lack.
Like I said, we may have exhausted this topic for now (though if people want to start off again, that would be cool too.) But in the meanwhile, thanks to Matthias, Caro, Franklin, Bert, and all those who joined in the discussion.
Noah:
“I think that gets at why Irigary, for example, who so radically resists the notion of biological determinism in some ways, in other ways seems so obsessed with embodiment, to the extent of seeing mathematics as gendered.”
And that, unfortunately, led to her becoming an international laughing-stock, particularly through Sokal and Bricmont’s derision.
That’s a shame, because her work on the sexing of language is so important. But she over-reached– a necessary thing for the progress of thought, but a dangerous thing that calls for the writer’s utmost capacities for self-critique.
Well…I think Irigary will survive Sokal and Bricmont. The folks who take their word for Irigary probably weren’t going to read her anyway.
Come on. Have you read her comment on E=MC2? That is an immortally stupid remark, and it’ll attach to her name– perhaps unfairly– for her life and well beyond.
i mean, how can you live this down?
«L’équation E = Mc2 est-elle une équation sexuée? Peut-être que oui.
Faisons l’hypothèse que oui dans la mesure où elle privilégie la vitesse de la lumière par rapport à d’autres vitesses dont nous avons vitalement besoin.»
Ah…found an english translation. For other monoglots, she’s saying that E=mc2 is a sexed equation because it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally important.
I’d forgotten that quote. I kind of love it. It always makes me laugh. And I like the idea of other, more vital speeds. It criticizes Einstein for not being sufficiently relativisitic. It’s funny and weird and makes me look at things from an angle I hadn’t looked at them before. That’s all I want from my poetry.
Like I said, if you’re Gradgrind and want the dictionary definition of horses…well, you’re not going to like Irigary. But you wouldn’t like Irigary whether Sokal was around or not. Sokal just convinced lots of people who didn’t want to read Irigary anyway that they weren’t missing anything. Good for him, I guess. But whatever. I can’t get that worked up about it.
Well, fair enough– but you’re basically laughing at, not with, her.
I think it’s really hard to tell that. Where she’s coming from is really unclear. That passage doesn’t sound entirely unironic to me….
I wish I could find the entire thing in context, but it doesn’t seem to exist on the internets, which is irritating….
Noah, Eric can probably get you a copy. Here’s the citation.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1354281
Actually, now that I think of it, I bet I can get it myself; I’ve got a university library account…that first page looks pretty entertaining.
Thanks Caro!
Cool. The translation is pretty good — it doesn’t have the playfulness of the French but it works ok. It’s just hard to translate all the slippery double-entendres that Irigaray’s writing depends so much on.
I don’t see how anybody with half a brain can misread it as badly as Sokal and his acolytes do, even out of context, but whatever. As you say, it depends on how much someone wants to get it. Have fun!
Actually, Sokal and Bricmont don’t misread it at all. They read it perfectly clearly as an intellectual disaster– a text of extreme stupidity.
The problem here is that you have an intellectual– Irigaray– who goes up against other intellectuals of overwhelmingly superior brainpower, in a culture she doesn’t even begin to understand.
Naturally, they made mincemeat of her foolishness.
Oh, and Sokal doesn’t have acolytes. That’s the privilege of Irigaray, in her comfortable academic cocoon.
Alex…we had this fight already. Go back and reread the other thread if you’re nostalgic for it.
Noah– you still aren’t at all clear on this, even since that other thread– have you actually read Sokal and Bricmont’s book?
And you seem to be on a tear against me these days. First you back up Anja’s libel, then you ignore Caro’s attack to focus on mine.
What are you doing?
I haven’t read Sokal and Bricmont’s book, though I’ve read bits.
If you want to debate my moderating, email me.
Caro– I wouldn’t say the translation is all that good. For example, when Irigaray poses the question of whether E=MC2 is a sexed equation, the English text has her answering her own question with ‘Perhaps’.
That’s a distortion. The original French is: ‘Peut-être que oui’. As you will notice, that’s far more positive than the neutral ‘perhaps’.
I think the translator was in damage control mode.
My French is nowhere near as idiomatic as yours, Alex; the difference was lost on me. I was taught to translate that idiom as “maybe so”, for which “perhaps” seemed like a good enough translation. (I also read the French first, because at that time my French was good enough; it’s rocky now.) I do see the difference between those in English, but I’m still not sure it’s that dramatic. How would you prefer it to be translated, to give a fully accurate effect?
I HAVE read Sokal and Bricmont’s book; it’s as riddled with errors and ridiculous overblown claims as any of the texts they cite as egregious examples of postmodern absurdity, because they don’t know how to shift their frame of reference to the more specialized philosophical discourse Irigarary (and others) are part of. They’ve not been trained to read advanced humanities texts and fall victim to the notion that all humanities texts are transparent to any broadly educated lay reader. They appear just as naive and hamfisted to a humanities scholar as these humanities scholars appear to them. Furthermore, their aggressive and hostile tone coupled with their obvious inexperience with and lack of nuanced understanding of the discourse they’re criticizing has been far far more destructive to productive discussion in the history and philosophy of science than anything Irigaray or any of the poststructuralists/postmodernists ever wrote. Within academic departments of science studies they do, or at least did, in fact have acolytes, and the climate after Sokal pulled his stunt was completely counterproductive, entrenched, and lacking altogether in the type of curiosity about the alternate position that makes for meaningful and fruitful academic debate.
Here’s an anecdotal example: in my PhD program, I had to do two minors, and one of them was in Science Studies. Because I’d already had several seminars in poststructuralism and applied theory through the English department, I petitioned to take regular science classes, in the science departments, to meet my minor requirement: honors molecular bio and biochem and honors organic chemistry. It was in fact the pro-science partisans in the department who objected to these courses counting for the minor — I remain unclear why.
I also had the great pleasure as an undergraduate to study with an extraordinary, Cambridge-educated, nuclear physicist who commented that one of the great shortcomings of science education in the late 20th century, particularly in the United States, is that very problem: the difficulty scientists have with understanding the difference between a representation of reality — even an experimental one — and the reality itself. He felt this caused too much reliance on proven experimental methods, that “doing science” for far too many students involved merely being able to read machines and parse the data, or merely to follow protocols rather than asking questions. He felt there was not enough dexterity with understanding how the framing of the question and the investigation itself influenced the results. He felt that students were simply too incapable of shifting the frame of their imagination — and the context in which he cast this discussion was the elucidation of DNA, which happened while he was at Cambridge, and which required great imagination and that very ability to shift the frame.
And here’s an anecdotal example of that: I have an extraordinarily intelligent PhD-in-physics friend who is doing very interdisciplinary work on cancer and routinely faces obstacles to funding and other opportunities because the people who review her proposals are so entrenched in their disicplinary discourse and frame of reference that they can’t figure out what she’s doing even enough to ask intelligent questions — and the few who can, tend to be deeply threatened by the work. I’ve seen the emails; it’s ugly.
Sokal’s engagement with postmodernism is an example of how highly positivistic and silo-ed thinking so dramatically limits scientists’ imagination — but all things considered, it’s a pretty unimportant one. The impact of this problem to science itself is far more troubling. The humanities doesn’t really need science — but as Schroedinger himself acknowledged, science very badly needs the humanities.
There are many possible critiques of Irigaray’s essay — but most of the ones that come from the perspective of science proper boil down to rhetoric rather than argument, and her rhetoric is certainly no more inflammatory and hostile than Sokal’s. Having read both, and her extensively, I believe it to be significantly less.
But Sokal himself has of course acknowledged many times that his opposition was entirely political, which may explain his tone: “I confess that I’m an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class.” However, confusing political polemic for scholarship is the kind of error that his targets generally don’t make. And considering his politics, I have no patience with him. He’s got nothing to contribute to the conversation about scientific practice and politics within the humanities that any graduate student scientist couldn’t have contributed sometime in about their second year, and his contributions have done nothing but further damage an already terrible relationship between the humanities and the sciences.
Now, you might say that problems in that relationship are only political, just wrangling between academics in a hermetically sealed environment with no ramifications for the real world — but as Sheila Tobias will tell you, the impact of scientists having such an abysmal grasp of the ways in which verbal people think through concepts is worst in pedagogy: it has the specific, measurable, and direct result of turning intelligent undergraduate women off the hard sciences, especially chemistry and physics, due to the fact that female students are overwhelmingly more verbal thinkers than mathematical thinkers. Speaking of ways that the subject of science is sexed…
Bert said “But if the only true philosophy is epistemology”.
I don’t think the conversation was ever about “true” philosophy. There are other true philosophies — but the only truly poststructuralist philosophy is one that puts epistemology in this position. Poststructuralism does have a historical and philosophical specificity and that specificity has a particular position on epistemology. That doesn’t mean there are no other useful or interesting philosophies besides poststructuralism.
It is Hegelian — subjective truth. Even for Bordieu and Zizek, who are post-Structuralists in the slightly broader sense, and who most definitely understand that element of confining the system in a similar way that you do in mathematical logic. It is Bordieu, for example, who said:
It’s a very dicey proposition to accuse any structuralist of being anti-formalist. The differences in the cases you name are primarily matters of the degree to which they ask fundamentally formalist questions. But the existence of interesting non-formalist questions doesn’t make the formalist ones somehow fundamentally less interesting — they’re just different questions and different styles of answers.
It’s incredibly irritating, and I’m sure I’m guilty of perpetuating this, how often discussions about any particular method or approach end up turning into questions of taste, i.e., preferred method, so that no method can ever be deeply interrogated or explored on its own terms. It always feels like a battle for which approach is better or truer or more honest or more productive than the others — like if we argue long enough we’ll figure out the one right way to do these things. The countermove is always “from the outside”, rather than the more subtle and engaged countermoves that come from the inside. Ultimately I think that’s a dead end — beyond recognizing the differences between the frames, colliding them without any genuine curiosity about and interest in the alternative perspective is just as counterproductive in these kinds of debates as it was in the Sokal situation.
I don’t know Caro. In the first place, Bert is explaining what happens *if* the only true philosophy is epistemology.* He is then moving on to investigate the results of that. Which I believe is what you want him to be doing.
I’d say that Zizek and Badiou are in fact really not okay with the idea that the only true philosophy is epistemology. They both see Derrida as a big dead end, for philosophy and for Marxism. Thus their interest in theology, as re-introducing ontology, and with it some ground for collective action based in a willingness to compare and critique approaches, rather than just fiddling with technical adjustments to an agreed-upon consensus.
They are both, also, I think, really skeptical of the kind of pluralism that you’re positing as morally superior, even as you express irritation at the idea that one should make these arguments about moral issues (or taste). I mean, is the point to move from viewpoint to viewpoint, pleasurably exploring each possible framework fully for the sake of the pleasure of the exploration itself? Is it all just about pleasure and knowledge? Or does philosophy have some passing interest in something like truth — which I note you dismiss almost offhand? Bourdieu seems to think it does…at least, if I understand that passage you quoted aright.
If you agree with poststructuralism’s general tenets — as you seem to — then, sure, you should focus on exploring it further and that’s fine. But people who challenge it do so because they don’t agree with you about it’s tenets — including such things as the value of pluralism and the superiority of interior to exterior moves.
It is a battle for which approach is better or truer. That’s why people discuss philosophy in the first place! Post-structuralism radically attacks the notion that there can be a better or truer…and so you’re basically getting frustrated with people who don’t agree with post-structuralism for not being willing to engage with post-structuralism on post-structuralism’s terms. But they don’t refuse to do that because they’re confused. They refuse because they don’t agree with post-structuralism!
I think Zizek’s pretty clear that his critique of “pluralism” absolutely is not an argument in favor of some non-Hegelian Truth Term: he says a great deal about the Truth-Event in The Ticklish Subject (where he lays the groundwork for his work on Christianity), but a pretty succinct encapsulation is this:
Even the stuff that’s polemically anti-pluralist is an argument that what passes for diversity in the West — “liberal pluralism” — isn’t actually pluralist at all, coming out of on a critique of the hegemony of capitalism. There’s plenty of critique against totalitarianism and hegemony in his writing — it’s just that he thinks the version of diversity and pluralism we actually practice is totalitarianism in another guise.
But beyond the philosophical specifics, I’m just pretty firmly convinced that there is no value — here, in academia, in politics — of viewing discussions among people who disagree as “battles” for dominance rather than an opportunity to understand something non-native or non-intuitive more deeply. Critique is valuable, but critique can come from within. Hostility and entrenchment and closed-mindedness and lack of curiosity are pretty broadly destructive.
So I’m not frustrated with the lack of agreement; lack of agreement is completely unavoidable and really an extremely good thing. What I’m frustrated by is the warlike ethos of “battle”; I’m irritated when it crops up, sometimes in tone, sometimes explicitly — as if any idea can ever “win” and be viewed by everybody everywhere as better or truer, irrespective of the value of that goal period. The idea of winning especially in the context of the Internet is beyond ridiculous. That warlike ethos is profoundly gendered masculine — fighting for fun. It’s exhausting, but since nobody will ever win those battles, ever, because there’s absolutely no meaning to “winning,” it’s exhausting and pointless.
I’m fairly resistant to the idea that woman won’t fight for fun. Field hockey is a vicious sport. There’s a certain amount of anecdotal evidence, for that matter, that women are in certain situations more verbally vicious than men are. And, for that matter, you’re generally up for a fight! Which I appreciate about you actually.
In terms of arguing for dominance or arguing for greater knowledge or understanding…you seem to be making an effort to separate knowledge and power which I hesitate to accept. Knowledge is tied to power, both in the sense that it is produced by institutions and in the sense that it shapes us. Ideas are worth discussing and arguing about not just to understand other people better (which is the liberal pluralist view, I think) but because ideas matter, for good and ill. There is in any case no neutral ground outside of power relations from which to approach these issues. And there’s always *some* ideas which you’ll greet with hostility and closed-mindedness, whether it be racism or anti-semitism or what have you. The flip side of closed-mindedness is integrity — the determination to be true to oneself, and to define oneself in relation to some ideals and beliefs that aren’t negotiable.
On narrower ground — I don’t think either Bert or I is actually absolutely opposed to post-structuralism at all? Certainly not in the sense that Sokal is. Speaking for myself, I feel more like I’m arguing over the nature of post-structuralism rather than arguing from outside it per se. Specifically, I’m resistant to the notion that post-structuralism is as univocal as you sometimes make it out to be (as I’ve said, Foucault and Derrida seem pretty different to me in a lot of ways) and, relatedly, I’m resistant to the notion that post-structuralism is a coherent logical structure analagous to math when it seems to me often to me more like (to paraphrase Bert again) poetic statements in propositional form.
______________
Okay…Zizek!
I read a little more from where you got that quote. He’s there setting himself fairly firmly against Badiou, calling him a Platonist and generally making fun of him for thinking that there’s a Truth that isn’t constituted by the Void. So I’d agree with you that there he is very chary of universal truths, and is in general more aligned with Derrida than with Badiou (who’s name I find almost impossible to spell consistently,
But I think he changes his mind. That goes along with the sense I have that as (to paraphrase Bert) he’s grown more and more consumed with the nature of God his ritualistic denials of transcendent truth have become…well, not entirely convincing. In this book I’m reading, Paul’s New Moment, he’s way more friendly to Badiou, and way more critical of Derrida. He doesn’t insist on the constitutive Void behind Truth; instead he focuses on distinguishing between true Truth Events (like the October Revolution) and false Truth Events (like the Nazi revolution.) So not transcendent truth — but particular, individual truths, something like miracles, something like paradigm shifts,which create a space for faith, and truth, and being.
Zizek specifically criticizes the Derridean refusal to commit to a truth-claim:
“In the deconstructionist stance, admiration for the revolution in its utopian enthusiastic aspect goes hand in hand with the conservative melancholic insight that enthusiasm inevitably turns into its opposite, into the worst terror, the moment we endeavor to transpose it into the positive structuring principle of social reality….It may seem that Badiou remains within this framework…However, things are more complex: Badiou’s position is that although the universal order has the status of a semblance, from time to time in a contingent and unpredictable way, a “miracle” can happen in the guise of a truth-Event that deservedly shames a postmodernist skeptic.”
So if you’re suggesting that Zizek’s main commitment, at least in his theological writings, is to the broadest possible pluralism…I’m really skeptical of that. I think he (and Badiou) seem to be trying to figure out how to ground truth claims within a purely materialist worldview. Badiou is interested in keeping the egalitarianism…but the question is (or seems to me to be) the one I asked in that Trollope essay — i.e., first how do you get a communal coherent society, *then* how do you do that without abandoning pluralism? Badiou does it, I think, by arguing that the commitment to the truth event has to be the most important thing, and other identities don’t matter — man and woman, jew and gentile, are all equal in Christ because of their commitment to Christ. Diversity is accepted as a function of the truth event, rather than as a good in itself.
Which again is why both Zizek and Badiou are fascinated with Christianity, and struggle to turn it into a materialist ideology. The point isn’t that they want to avoid truth, though. Truth is what they want. The thing they want to avoid is transcendence.
Structuralism is always about formalism. And all poststructuralism is about rupture– which I know Caro compared to the inspectors in the fuselage. But once you start talking about the fact that all fuselages are cracked, nobody really wants to fly any more. Which is not really a critique of poststructuralism (which I’m very invested in), but a critique of the metaphor. We haven’t really been talking about Deleuze, but he deals with energy, force, power, operating to smite earthly illusions of substance and possibility. That’s what I’m calling pure formalism, and pretty pure conservatism.
Zizek is absolutely on board with the multiplicity/Void ontology (but it’s certainly an ontology, not a lack of one) as of the Monstrosity of Christ. In Paul’s New Moment he adopts an extremely approachable prose style and stays out of thick abstractions, but Milbank has a pretty amazing final chapter in which he takes on Badiou’s (to me identical) multiplicity/Void substrate with the very deep set theory math Badiou employs (as a Lacan acolyte, I think).
Here’s what I had in my notes about that argument, which (the actual argument, not my notes about it) might satisfy Caro’s rigor criteria. For Badiou (all of this is now as filtered by Milbank), there is Being, which is math, and potential (analogous to the Symbolic, says me). There is the world, known as Appearance, which is both “actual” and fictional– I’d say linked to the Imaginary. The Real is Badiou’s Event, which is truth, and which founds the subject. Why does Being found the Event and not vice-versa? Especially since the Event defies the math– it is the set that can belong to itself– Being and Appearance should cancel each other out with Derridean “differance,” but Event keeps it all together, connecting irreconcilable sets in Being and adding the boundless lack of reality to Appearance.
Milbank sees the Void and multiplicity as Badiou’s rather arbitrary characterization of Being, as he (up front) rejects out of hand any idea of relation or participation that might come from Platonism or Christianity. In Christianity specifically, the Trinity is a model by which Unity can still be primary, though copying itself from the Many. The Christian Trinity then gets mapped on to the Badiou and Lacan trinities: Father/Being/Symbolic, Son/Actual/Imaginary, Spirit/Event/Real. Badiou admits the primacy of reality over power, finally siding with Aristotle and Aquinas against Bergson and Heidegger, restoring particularity against virtuality, surface over depth, grace over mystery, and transcendence over metaphysics. The Event within the Void is just creatio ex nihilo, and retroacts and can act upon the math of Being.
Noah — I’m unconvinced he’s changed his mind; I haven’t read the Paul book yet, but I’m looking at The Monstrosity of Christ, where he really digs into this notion of materialist theology you reference, and he says:
Not sure how you can cast that as anything other than pretty rigorous poststructuralism — the brilliance of the essay to me is the pretty rigorously Derridean recasting of materialism to contain its traditional opposite: “This is why the opposite of true materialism is not so much a consequent idealism but rather the vulgar-idealist “materialism” of someone like David Chalmers.” (And then he basically redefines Classical Materialism into post-Hegelian idealism. It’s really quite lovely.)
Of course Zizek’s method is poststructuralist dialectics, dialectical deconstruction — he constantly undermines and decenters his own assertions so that the texts are both textually rigorous and performatively rigorous, which is why they’re so masterful: I think he alone successfully took up Derrida’s challenge to make his words do what they say. So there are places where he seems more or less Hegelian as he steps through the slowly building subtleties of his argument. But to claim that he’s no longer working from a intensely Hegelian antecedent, that he’s abandoned his post-Hegelianism for something with a more anchored notion of truth, a reclaiming of Truth from Hegel’s subjective and negative, seems to me to be quite a stretch: the subtitle of the chapter those quotes are from is “A Modest Plea for the Hegelian Reading of Christianity.”
As for the feminism, I’m just constitutionally and experientially opposed to extending the third wave’s positive and progressive POLITICAL stance on transgendering into as an excuse to ignore the fact that gender as a RHETORICAL construct is powerfully and still-oppressively binary. That should be obvious from the trouble with pronouns. What you’re doing when you say that a concept like war is no longer rhetorically gendered because its gendering is less than fully applied throughout the culture is missing the point of the rhetorical critique altogether. That’s one of the complaints the French feminists have had against the American model — for women who are relatively normatively gendered, the second wave critique still applies, even though it’s binary and in need of opening up. What you’re doing is saying that you now get to use highly gendered imagery and tactics and it’s ok because there exist female bodies who have chosen to identify with that imagery and tactic. But I don’t think the existence of girls playing field hockey de-genders your using a war analogy to describe trying to win an internet argument — a couple of millenia of historical context doesn’t disappear that quickly. Pretending that it does just re-subjects women to the same old masculinist ethics and distortions. Recasting that language as “no longer gendered” because a generation of women have now had access to its referents fails; it doesn’t make the language itself less gendered than it was before, especially to those women for whom the other side of the traditional binary is still foreign and unappealing. A proper feminism will be pluralist enough to handle progressively both the people who fit the binary and the people who don’t.
Which should bring us to the question of power/knowledge, but it’s 2am and I really have to sleep…
and likewise with Bert’s comment which I will come back to; there’s a Kindle version of Paul’s New Moment so I’ll try to check it out before I reply…
For the record, it isn’t using the metaphor “argument is war” that’s “resubjecting women blah blah”; that’s just a metaphor that I’m happy to argue with you about. I don’t think it’s a good or productive way to think about argument but I don’t think it’s sexist. What’s “resubjecting blah blah” is saying that the critique of gendered binaries no longer applies to language because progressive political activism has weakened the hold that gendering has on individual people and their options for self-actualization in the world. It’ll be a long time before the critique of binary rhetorical gender constructs has no currency at all.
Okay, feminism first because that’s easier.
You were saying that women don’t fight for fun. That’s the sort of rhetoric that has been historically used as an excuse not to allow women to play sports. It’s also used an as excuse to keep women from taking political positions. And it also, as I said, simply ignores the fact that women and girls absolutely employ language to win in a competitive manner all the time — often more vigorously and more effectively than men do.
I think you can make various arguments about rhetorical competition and how it’s gendered. Blanket stating that women are uncomfortable with fighting for fun is way too simplistic, though. And it’s not simplistic because political activism has changed things; it’s simplistic because, to the extent we have records, women have *always* been interested in fighting for fun. In fact, Barbara Elshtain (in Women and War) argues that the rhetorical alignment of men with war has made women *more* eager to participate in war in various ways, not less.
Perhaps you’re right that an ideal feminism would work for both the people who feel the binary is correct and those who don’t. I really don’t see how you’re doing that, though. If fighting for fun is masculine, I don’t see how you avoid ending up saying that people who play field hockey are masculine, or girls who like playing superheroes or war or whatever are masculine.
I mean, again, if you want to say, “Your rhetoric, Noah, is masculine, and that makes HU uncomfortable for women” — I think there’s probably some truth to that. But I think saying that that’s because women are uncomfortable fighting for fun is really problematic for the reasons I’ve explained. You need a more nuanced account if you don’t just want to reinforce the simplistic binaries you claim you’re working against.
Okay, Zizek.
First of all, I (think? maybe?) that we all agree that Badiou is both a post-structuralist and somebody who wants a more anchored notion of truth, whatever Zizek is doing.
As far as what Zizek is saying in that passage you quote…I guess I’d say two things. First, the subjective position of truth he describes seems to move in Paul’s New Moment to being Badiou’s Truth-Event. Which is not objective, but is tied closely to miracle and faith, especially when the example used (compulsively, repeatedly) is St. Paul. So the disavowal of transcendent truth is continually tied to an alignment with the trappings of transcendent truth. It may be rigorously post-structuralist…but both the rigor and the post-structuralism seem at some point to be protesting a little too much.
Along those lines…for Zizek in his theological move, the non-all, the One which is Zero, increasingly means God the father (the big Other.) The movement of the Not-All into multiplicity is seen as the Incarnation — which for Zizek means the revelation that One is Nothing; the materialist revelation that God has forsaken us because he was never there to begin with. He does this rhetorically in the name of a greater Orthodoxy; he is taking the moment on the cross more seriously than anyone else. But…once he adopts the rhetoric of theology, he ends up with a host (as it were) of implications that aren’t easily waved away by post-structuralist rigor. For example, if death on the cross is the ultimate evidence of not-all, what happens when Christ gets back up after three days?
In some sense it’s kind of a silly question…but I think it also points to the argument we were having about whether philosophy about art can be said to be philosophy being influenced by art. The language you use is not exterior to the argument you make. Zizek can be as spotlessly post-structuralist as all get out, but he’s utterly fascinated with this transcendent discourse about the nature of God. Is he holding Christ like that in order to nail him to the Cross? Or to bathe in his blood? It’s really not all that easy to tell.
I can’t find the exact passage, but there’s a really funny moment in the book where Zizek talks about Lenin reading Hegel and making notes, where Lenin would say things like, “The first part of this sentence is a brilliant insight into the dialectic; the second half is theological nonsense.” Zizek predicts that someday someone will do the same with Paul, writing “the first part of this sentence is a brilliant insight into the dialectic; the second half is theological nonsense.” The joke, of course, is that this is exactly what Zizek is doing; mining Paul for post-structuralism and winnowing out the theology. But the bigger joke (which Zizek may well be in on as well) is that the whole project is on its face absurd; the theological nonsense is intertwined with the insights, struggle against it as the marginalia may.
I didn’t say biological women don’t fight for fun. I said that using fighting or warlike metaphor/imagery to describe competitive activities and to cast that kind of aggressive goal-oriented competitiveness as fun is rhetorically gendered masculine. The gendering of metaphor is always an act of power — it is not and has never been a reflection of actual experiences of gender by individuals. That’s why it’s uncomfortable. The gendering of war as masculine most likely post-dated actual women actually fighting — it’s largely a chivalric construct. You’re saying because it isn’t grounded in actual behavior the language isn’t actually gendered, which is bullshit, because the gendering of language is never grounded in behavior, it’s never an “observation of nature” — it’s always a way of asserting power and organizing both bodies and ideas.
The metaphor “argument is war” is the next step from “competition is war” and it’s also a gendered metaphor; lots of feminists have critiqued it; it’s in Lakoff and Johnson’s book. But the consequences of the gendering of this metaphor are not just stopping actual women from participating in war and other kinds of contests or competition like sports. Use of the metaphor “naturalizes” aggressive modes of argument and argument-as-competition by implying that all argument follows the competitive ethos appropriate to war and contests where there is a clear winner and where winning is the point. But discussion isn’t “naturally” aggressive and warlike any more than any other form of competition other than actual war is — that’s a choice in the way you conceptualize and approach those interaction. I realize you’re trying to be third wave, but failing to recognize that is not feminist — third wave or otherwise.
Pointing out how gendered your language is emphasizes that it is not natural, but a particular construct, associated with a particular construction of power. Title IX has nothing to do with it. Pointing out women’s interest in and increased access to sports as justification for your eliding the differences between “discussions” and “battles” is a rhetorical game I have no interest in playing. That is not an either/or situation.
I still want to dig into Paul’s New Moment before I respond to you and Bert, but Zizek’s chapter on the Truth-Event in that book is a “slightly adapted” version of the one from The Ticklist Subject I quoted above. He’d have had to have changed it a lot to get it to where you’re saying he is.
You still seem to be trying to pin him down to a particular set of assertions, whereas his method is to make you see the voids — constantly, behind each and every assertion, including the ones you want to grab onto. As soon as you “see” a void, it stops being the Void, so you have to recast your vantage point to seek the void that you’ve pushed aside in order to see the one you just saw. That’s the thing that makes Zizek so hard — he rarely makes claims; he mostly performs positions. When you do get assertions that are not subjected to that treatment, they tend to be very bluntly post-Hegelian.
You never get to stop those shifts, so he’s always giving you the assertion — and then undermining it by means of its own supplement. For every assertion. It’s a sleight of hand that I think his joke gets at pretty interestingly — and that probably provides the answer to both the question about the resurrection and the theological insights — but I can’t find it in the book either. Neither “theological nonsense” nor “Lenin” has pulled it up…is it in the previous book maybe?
I guess I’m being unclear, but I’m stifling a feeling of being miffed that my declaration that Zizek endorses the multiplicity-Void in Monstrosity was summarily ignored, as was the entirety of my painstaking sumary of a transcendent critique of Badiou. Sigh. Pity.
Are we presuming that violence isn’t a part of any area of philosophy? Hegel especially– constant progressive overcoming, largely through bloodshed? Deleuze says that all the mental faculties “communicate a violence” to each other, which in turn decimates the “cruelty” of the subject.
Language, on the other hand, it’s a form of pleasure, in particular in the jouissance uniquely afforded by Lacan to femininity. Not that brainwashing and belittling women has any place in civilization, but there’s a lot of unique leverage for women to overturn the brutality of ideology.
At any rate, telling me that art can’t be used for theory and theory can’t be used for art hits me where I live. I apologize if I’m vicious– I don’t mean to be. But I think there has been a great deal of line-in-the-sand drawing and profound pronouncing all around.
No; the Lenin and Hegel thing is in Paul’s New Moment. I read it yesterday.
RE: the gender stuff…*you* were the one who made the argument/fighting metaphor to begin with! That wasn’t me! At least I’m pretty sure it wasn’t…I went back and looked and didn’t see me saying anything like that? Unless you think that suggesting that arguments are involved with power automatically means that arguments are like war? That seems like a bizarre leap. There’s lots of power moves that don’t involve war. And thank goodness, because otherwise the only way to affect the world would be to go to war.
I actually don’t think argument is the same as war at all; metaphorical violence is really, really different from actual violence, and I think critiquing the first by linking it to the second is really problematic. Which is why I contested your decision to do so!
I mean, it is possible I don’t understand what you’re saying exactly, or that I”m glossing over my own invidiousness… but…to me it seems like you made a metaphor between fighting and a certain kind of argument, I said that that metaphor doesn’t work, — and then you attacked me for using the metaphor you introduced and for saying it works when I was arguing it didn’t!
Also:
“you’re saying because it isn’t grounded in actual behavior the language isn’t actually gendered, which is bullshit,”
Are you telling me you are not playing to win here? That’s more aggressive than anything I’ve said in this discussion. Not that I have a problem with the aggressiveness! I am feeling a little like I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t, though.
You say you’re pointing out that my language is gendered…but the only thing you’ve pointed to is a metaphor of argument-as-war which you used, not me. So…you think argument as involved with power is itself helplessly gendered? Or the suggestion that argument has something to do with truth is? I’m fairly skeptical about that…unless you want to claim that any transcendental truth claim is gendered male, which (maybe?) Irigaray might say (?), and which I don’t really agree with…but I guess we could talk about it if you wanted. I just feel like you’re arguing vociferously with someone who isn’t me, so it’s hard for me to figure out how to respond other than by saying, “I don’t think I said that,” which is probably more annoying than helpful.
I’m probably obsessing overly, but:
“I said that using fighting or warlike metaphor/imagery to describe competitive activities and to cast that kind of aggressive goal-oriented competitiveness as fun is rhetorically gendered masculine.”
I didn’t use fighting or warlike metaphors to describe arguments. I really didn’t argue that the reason to argue is to have fun. I mean, I’ve been known to say that I enjoy a good troll battle on occasion which I guess is gendered masculine in your formulation…but I also generally say that if that was the only kind of argument happening I’d be fairly depressed and exhausted. But I didn’t say anything like either of those things here. So…help?
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Zizek:
“he rarely makes claims; he mostly performs positions”
I’ll buy that…but if the position he performs keep being Christian, what then? Or, to put it another way, is the point solely that he has no position? Or do the positions he undermines have some content, some relevance for his thought, not entirely captured by his undermining of them? Is the pleasure/meaning of the text encapsulated by the logical/formal play? Or is there content there too? When he says, with some poetry:
Am I supposed to assume he doesn’t mean that because he’s paraphrasing Badiou reinterpreting Paul? Are faith and love here just arbitrary markers to be dumped into the void as soon as you hold him to them?
Bert had a conversation where he suggested that Zizek was constantly trying to shore up his materialist cred, and his interlocutor said, “he’s not trying to shore up his materialist cred! He’s a materialist!” And he is a materialist. But he’s also kind of constantly trying to shore up his materialist cred. His void has an awful lot of supplements which undermine it, is what I”m saying.
Bert, sorry I ignored your Badiou description. I”m looking forward to using it when I read that chapter and don’t understand it.
Does it help that I keep paraphrasing you?
Hmmph. Okay, I feel better.
I would be happy to hear Caro describe feminist dialogue. I’m not being sarcastic, I just know that I don’t truly know how to resolve conflicts with words, especially about abstract things which become personal in obscure ways.
My Milbank thing was essentially saying that somebody has read Badiou against Badiou (hardly a violation of poststructuralist doxa), and thus reading Zizek against Zizek shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. I think plenty of people are blowing him off as being too “theological” nowadays– the Lenin story was without a doubt a barely-veiled reference to his own drift over the past few years.
The guy Adam Kotsko who told me (with hysterical all-caps emphasis) “Zizek IS a materialist!” is an atheist who wrote a book called “Zizek and Theology,” and just goes around looking for Christians who like Zizek in order to pick fights. He wouldn’t answer any questions, he just kept saying he didn’t know what I was talking about and Zizek is an atheist you idiot. Hardly a radically open interpretive field. I was deeply traumatized.
Bert, I wasn’t ignoring you — I wanted to look at the book and then reread what you wrote. I just haven’t had time to dig into it yet. It’s not easy to do while multitasking.
Noah, you said “It is a battle for which approach is better or truer. That’s why people discuss philosophy in the first place.” It was in response to my protesting that it often feels like one, but you didn’t back away from it at all — you asserted it in full embrace! That’s pretty much the metaphor in its most straightforward form, and I’m not sure how to interpret that italicized verb as anything other than your acceptance of the metaphor. I’m also not sure how anybody is supposed to respond to that except to fight back or shut up.
And it’s relevant for the Zizek, because you’re also situating him in that same contest over and for specific truths, a place I think he would greatly resist being without a lot of qualifications. We’re talking about those qualifications (especially in Bert’s comment and so we will do more so when I get back to it, which I will!) but the point I was initially trying to get at is that metaphor of battle, the idea of a winner, is so completely incompatible with poststructuralism that when poststructuralism is the object of study, insisting on that model of engagement is an act of power and aggression. The mode of engagement and debate is implicated by and in the philosophy.
So yes, you’re right, people can disagree with poststructuralism and approach it the way Sokal did, as a contest between competing truths, because they don’t buy it or respect it, but doing so is an instance of the same aggressive rhetorical power plays that much of poststructuralism critiques. Zizek’s recent criticisms of Foucault’s power/knowledge as inherently violent are very closely related to this.
I’ve only read one book by Badiou, the one on ethics, which is why I want to do a little more reading before I respond to Bert. In that book Badiou does not really anchor his notion of truth much more than Zizek does; he says
The treatment of truth in this context, to me, is not very different from the rest of the poststructuralists, this is still the place of the supplement, of immanence, of Void, of the Real, and I think in many ways is less anchored than Foucault. But it’s the only thing I’ve read by Badiou, so it might not be representative.
Well, thus the whole “reading Badious against Badiou” thing. And I don’t think doing so makes Milbank escape the orbit of poststructuralism– it’s all a matter of hybrids and flavors. Like this website I found with all these metal playlists organized on an applique-fabric (jean-jacket?) map: http://www.mapofmetal.com/#/home
Badiou is critiqued by Roland Faber, a Deleuzian/Bergsonian/Whiteheadian guy in this very poststructuralist book Apophatic Bodies, which I also lent Noah, for reifying the egoistic subject, being too static, not orgiastic enough, etc., while he’s being critiqued by Milbank for not following up on the full implications of the Event, and trying to have it both ways– full freedom in meaning (truthiness?) without the messiness of truth-claims.
I would go out on a limb here and say that if truth really is irruptive and heterogeneous, if it acts against nature as Zizek and Badiou claims, it stands in for the gap in the not-All, and reminds us that math is not the fundamental base of reality, but the fact of nature that the reality of truth must disrupt.
Ah! There’s the smoking gun (as it were). I should have known you’d read me closer than I read myself. Thank you for finding it; now I know what I’m talking about! (At least vaguely.)
I still think it’s true that philosophy is a battle between opposing viewpoints — not always, not necessarily, not unmetaphorically, but fairly frequently. And I just don’t see that at all as antithetical to post-structuralism in practice. I mean, I would agree with Zizek that Foucault’s philosophy is violent — but Foucault’s one of the most important post-structuralists!
For that matter,feminism uses the metaphor of struggle and battle too — explicitly, and with some regularity. And for the same reason; because feminists think there are some truths, and that they’re worth (metaphorically) fighting for. Along those lines…while I guess I can live with being labeled a sexist, I’m really reluctant to wholesale give the rhetoric of struggle over to guys. This is probably exactly the sort of struggle (ahem) you have between American and French feminists, I guess. The French say, that language is contaminated with masculinity, and the American’s say, this is the language you use to seize power, and the French say well then you’ll be just like the men and the Americans say being just like the men is what equality is. And back and forth it goes. But I still feel fairly strongly that proscribing language and accusing people of being masculinist or sexist is a maneuver that has something to do with power — which makes it worthwhile, not verboten.
And, you know, Zizek like many post-structuralists, is a Marxist. And Marxists tend to believe that they are in a fight. As for instance:
Zizek isn’t talking about actual battles there; he’s using a metaphor for philosophical/intellectual activity. The essay that’s from (A Meditation on Michelangelo’s Christ on the Cross) is about as straightforward as he gets; it’s a pretty clear statement of faith and commitment. And as such it ends with a determination to fight. Which to me doesn’t seem at all incompatible with Zizek’s theological work, or with poststructuralism more broadly.
I’ve only read Badiou on Paul. I think you’re sort of missing the point when you say that Badiou’s truth isn’t anchored. It *isn’t* anchored…but what he and Zizek are trying to do is to find a way to allow for a truth that is unanchored but is still worth fighting for. It’s not an accident that Zizek is juxtaposing the holy spirit and battle in that quote at the end. The problem they see with Derrida is a *Marxist problem*. They’re using theology to attack the idea that the point of philosophy is to sit in a text and eat your own tail. They want to keep a lot of the post-structural insights, but do it in such a way that they can (to use Zizek’s term) “fight” against capitalism and fundamentalism.
I think they’d actually agree with Sokol in a limited way that the (dare I say?) aggressive insularity of Derrida and co. prevents them from intervening meaningfully with politics or the world. John Milbank (who I think has to count as a post-structuralist?) has a priceless footnote in this vein where he accuses Derrida of being a liberal because he (Derrida) believes only in bodies speaking words and has no resources for conceptualizing community or (therefore) radical political engagement.
I guess I feel like in the name of post-structuralism and feminism you’re resisting the validity or the necessity of speaking political struggle. I don’t at all deny that there are many post-structuralist writers who support that view in various ways…but I think it’s actually a really, really hotly contested part of post-structuralism, both from outside post-structuralism and from inside. Which is why, I’d argue, contemporary art’s ontological questioning is relevant to the current issues in post-structuralist philosophy.
Of course Caro made note of Zizek critiquing liberalism and pluralism through the lens of post-structuralist philosophy, but I want to say that that critique, just as much as his critique of Foucault (which I’ve not read– and would really like to… wonder if he gives in to “false consciousness” claims like he does with Nazism) is a critique of post-structuralism from within post-structuralism.
I think we need to admit that this is a possibility that is not only not heterodox, but at this point just about orthodox. The ever-shifting Void that remains perpetually out of sight is a topic in post-structuralism, but not a method- an object of knowledge, not an instrument, as Badiou said. It’s pretty hard to erase your shadow (even when we try to hide in other people’s shadows), but it’s even harder to get it to do your bidding. And it trips up poststructuralists specifically by suggesting that there may actually be a light source.
So having read Milbank on Badiou and (as anticipated) not really understood it, I can at least tell Bert that his notes are helpful. I wonder what Sokol would say about the set theory stuff? (Oh, here we go.)
Anyway, this is I think the point:
And this from the same page is helpful:
So the point, as far as I follow it, is that Badiou, rejecting the linguistic turn (I think by name) is looking for a way to escape the (in his view) philosophical dead end which separates everything into appearances (which are perceived but not necessarily there) and the Void behind them (which is real but nothing.) To do that he turns to the Event, which is self-creating, not an appearance, and which does not collapse back into the void. The Event is specifically modeled on the Incarnation and on Christian theology and experience (in terms of the Trinity, faith, grace, and other terms) but Badiou disavows the Christian content. But Milbank argues that the Christian content is not so easily disavowed, and argues that Badiou’s Event is not just modeled on, but actually is, the Incarnation, and that Badiou’s philosophy makes most sense if seen as a restatement/rejiggering of Trinitarian theology.
This isn’t that different from Zizek’s claim that Badiou is a secret Platonist in that passage you quoted, Caro, except that Milbank feels this is a good thing while Zizek (at least in that passage) felt it wasn’t.
I used that “to speak of grace without God is to speak apophatically of God” quote in the thing I wrote comparing Paul’s New Moment and Apophatic Bodies– I really wish the Apophatic Bodies writers looked for more apophasis outside of their own navels. In language, in philosophy, in the world.
Karl Barth: “…the activity of the community is related to the Gospel only in so far as it is no more than a crater formed by the explosion of a shell…”
In the unlikely event that anyone else is reading this, apophatic theology is negative theology, where you define god by what and where he isn’t.
Save you having to look it up like I had to.
Caro said: “I don’t think the conversation was ever about “true” philosophy. There are other true philosophies — but the only truly poststructuralist philosophy is one that puts epistemology in this position. Poststructuralism does have a historical and philosophical specificity and that specificity has a particular position on epistemology. That doesn’t mean there are no other useful or interesting philosophies besides poststructuralism.”
And I can just repeat (is this begging the question? I’m never sure what that means…): “But if the only true philosophy is epistemology, there immediately becomes no truth to epistemologically discern.”
Not sure Caro didn’t prove my point.
Bert:
“And I can just repeat (is this begging the question? I’m never sure what that means…): “But if the only true philosophy is epistemology, there immediately becomes no truth to epistemologically discern.””
Well, yeah. That would imply that the function of epistemology is solely to analyse epistemology.
That’s masturbation on a cosmic scale!