°Hegel
I’ve been reading a couple of books on Hegel, which seem to me at first bite, to constitute a perverse, if fascinating, labour. Werner Hamacher’s Pleroma - Reading Hegel and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Restlessness of the Negative. Both, in somewhat different ways, attempt to read Hegel against Hegelianism, against the dialectical system.
Whether that’s a worthwhile task, remains to be seen. But I’m curious about these particular ‘re/turns to Hegel’. Not least because both are explicit re-readings, as distinct from the not-so surreptitious presence of Hegelian teleology in those texts that purport to have surpassed both dialectic and system. And, I suppose, this is precisely the point in some part: to displace the arrogance of intellectual supercession (itself distinctly Hegelian in one sense) with the labour of reading. In Nancy’s case, as the labour of the negative; for Hamacher, it is the labour of cooking and eating.
Nancy’s The Restlessness of the Negative amounts to nothing less than the attempt to strip Hegel of the state, to recover in Hegel’s writings a restlessness that never stops losing the ‘fixity of self-positing’:
And this unrest that we are and that we desire (even as consciousness believes it only wants its self and its objects) is where the proximity of the absolute finds, ir happens upon, itself: neither possession, nor incorporation, but proximity as such, immanence and coincidence, like the beat of a drum. So beats the passage of sense: as the interval of time, between us, in the fleeting and rhythmic awakening of a discrete recognition of existence.
Those already familiar with Nancy will not, perhaps, be surprised by the themes of co-appearance, in/finitude, and so on - but worth reading. Hamacher’s book is, I think, more interesting a project than Nancy’s, in the sense that I’m familiar with where Nancy heads, even while I’m curious about the specific engagement with Hegel.
Hamacher’s book is also quite beautiful, in that way I find peculiar - unexpected but insightful - turns of thought to be beautiful. For him, what is at stake in re-reading Hegel is repetition as a means of finding that which has not been digested by the dialectical system - the digressions, including those which Hegel makes on the question of reading and repetition, on grammar and, not least, on food, eating and digestion. A snippet:
A reading which wishes to elude the suction of the dialectical circle as far as possible, in order to put itself in a position to descry the structure and dynamic of this circle, must begin precisely from these remnants of its own activity in the text, from that which is not yet itself, or which it no longer itself is. It must begin, therefore, not merely from the logical structure and the systematic implication of such remnants, but also from the metaphoricity of the text and the phantasmatic dimension which is at work in it, from the as it were literary character which determines their self-presentation of the absolute, and from the genesis of the system, which cannot be thought solely on the basis of the completed system’s own genealogical model.
And so, Hamacher proceeds to read - lay out as a feast - Hegel’s ‘digressions’ on vomit, intestinal canals, skin, membrane, shit, poison, flesh … No doubt some will find all this just a little vomitous, as Hamacher notes in the final pages - but I intend to go back for seconds.
hiya,
What’s motivating your turn to Hegel? I thought your point is great that supercession is a way that many avowedly anti-Hegelians end up being Hegely anyway. To my mind, one thing that’s at stake in those moments is a sort of “you must speak like I do” command, or in its more frustrated version “how can you (not) do X if you don’t speak like/use term Y?” This comes up in some friends who are very fond of Open Marxism - as if the word ‘negative’ gets at the truth of working class activity in a way that ‘affirmative’ doesn’t. That whole way of proceeding strikes me as something like a fight over whether a temperature is really X degrees Farenheit or Y degrees Centigrade. And, yet it can be so hard not to do just that.
take care,
Nate
Nate [September 23, 2005 @ 1:31 pm]
Maybe. But I do think there’s more at stake here - and in the debates around open marxism - than an adherence to an idiom. Though, it’s true that adherences to an idiom can often mean what’s at stake becomes less clear over the course of a debate, that what seems to take shape is a language of belonging (or not).
s0metim3s [September 23, 2005 @ 6:02 pm]
Hello. I have been thinking a bit on what Nate wrote above. I have some comments that is maybe a bit out of topic, but anyways… From my experience the tool-metafor of concepts is very strong among activists. It seems to be like an activists attitude towards theory, or maybe an attitude that reproduces their being as activists in relation to theory. I have not understood DandG properly, so maybe im just way of mark here, but from what i can tell this conception of theory as it exists in a couple of activists i met is not unproblematic. What i would like to see is a kind of study of what kind of tool the conception of concepts in terms of tools constitute. What im thinking of is the accentuated role of a sorts of subject “behind” or “under” theory. The argument that there is an analogous relation between negative/affirmative and farenheit/centigrade seems to me to imply that there is a given subject who has a given conception of a temperature or an object or whatever and concepts is a matter of words of the subjects “choosing” that is secondary to the nature of the experience of temperature or the object. When people say that theory is only a matter of “what we can do” if we say this or that, it seems to me that they imply a given conception of a problem and how the effectfulness - the “what we can do” - of the intervention in this problem can be evaluated even before theory comes into the picture. It seems to me that the “what we want to do” that constitutes the selection between different “what we can do”:s is founded in an unthoughtthrough or atleast unspoken idea of justice or equality or somesuch. Or else, when it comes to most people ive met, there is some sorts of marxist problematic of relations of production that falls outside of the toolbox-theory; a problematic that seems to be valid regardless of its usefullness and constitutes the foundation according to which other theories are evaluated as useful or non-useful.
It is a attractive idea that maybe this “subject” behind the tool-of-theory is not one or another academic or activist, but movements themselves, that theory could constitute tools to adress, work through and intervene in problems as they are given to these movements. But is it possible for one or another partiular academic or activist to immediately situate themselves in movements; to be - in their cognitive labor - be one with movements… so that the subjective foundation of the choosing of tools is not constituted by any ideological apparatus beyond the same movements?
What is it i should read to counter these sorts of doubts about the tool-metafore?
Franz Bieberkopf [September 25, 2005 @ 6:38 am]
If I’m reading your comments right, I agree that there’s often something wrong about the way activists approach theory - the problem being on both sides of this: ‘activists’ and ‘theory’. This might be relevant, or maybe not.
I’m not sure that I would try and persuade you that your doubts about an instrumental (tool) approach to concepts should be set aside. I think it’s useful to consider the work that concepts do, and that they are not simply neutral - the way they choose ‘us’, as in constructing a sense of who ‘we’ are, but also in the sense of how they relate to the structures and processes of cognitive labour (in the academy, publishing, etc), its relation to movements, etc.
I will have a think about readings.
There’s a well-known phrase of Marx’s which talks about ‘theory seizing the masses’, which has usually been taken as an argument for propagandising to the ‘masses’. But, if I recall right, I think there is a condition he places here: that theory can only seize the ‘masses’ when they are ‘moving’, therefore no longer actually an inert mass. Does anyone recall where the reference for this is?
Btw, is that a homage to Fassbinder or?
s0metim3s [September 25, 2005 @ 1:09 pm]
hi Franz, A,
I tried to write a bit on matters connected to this here . I’m happy to have a discussion about this here at the archive, or we can move it over to mine (I’m not invested in either, though I do sometimes worry that I’m a houseguest who doesn’t know when to go home). In brief, to my mind, I’ve yet to see a convincing argument for a final or “world’s own” vocabulary, the god’s eye view or whatever one’s chosen metaphor is for a correspondence theory of truth kind of argument. And I’m not at all convinced that it’s possible for any position to account for all of its own details (a la Hegel’s desire to produce a presuppositionless philosophy.) Therefore, to my mind, the final court of appeals for an idea is its efficacy, as decided by, well, me, based on my own contingent and relative (but deeply held) values and convictions, with the input of friends I care about and respect. I’m happy to have my mind changed, though.
take care,
Nate
Nate [September 26, 2005 @ 2:56 pm]
Nate, my basic rule about guests is that after the second visit, they know where to find the coffee pot and brew some up for themselves and others if they want. Which is to say: you can hang out here or wherever.
And I have to admit that people talking to eachother here without my having to play an always-present host on my own blog is quite pleasant (particularly as I’ve deadlines to chase, and may be not so attentive as I might otherwise be). So, here or elsewhere - up to you. There’s the coffee, the cutlery, the cups … I don’t feel a burning need to be included (or addressed), so if you want to make a coffee for yourself and Franz or whomever, go ahead.
s0metim3s [September 26, 2005 @ 10:10 pm]
Nate. I will apply to what is customary in these situations and say that if it works for you then go ahead. The problem with me though is that I don’t trust my own values and convictions. I dont trust them enough, anyways, to feel comfortable with relying on them in such a fundamental way.
If the only way to respond to the conception of concepts in terms of tools is to present a convincing argument for a final or “world’s own” vocabulary, for a presuppositionless philosophy, or for correspondance theory, then ofcourse I can’t respond. But there is something in the way the alternative is posed between on the one hand ”worlds own vocabulary” and on the other ”my own vocabulary” that seems problematic to me. It seems to imply that there are two possible sources of vocabulary, or, more precisely, two possible locations of the court of the validity of a given vocabulary – either the world or else myself. And since the idea of a worlds own vocabulary is problematic then one arrives at the ”myself” only because there are no other alternatives. In a way it seems like a method of doubt, or method of exclusion: I can doubt everything said about the world, but not my own values and convictions, since they are given to me in such an immediate way, their existence is the most obvious of the obvious; ”I am!”.
(If it really is a method of exclusion I guess there are other conceptions of truth than the one of correspondance to be excluded)
Even if I can’t argue for a presuppositionless philosophy I will try to argue against a total withdrawal of critical relations/engagements to the presuppositions of theoretical statements (useful or less useful).
1. My first argument is that posing the ”my values and convictions” as a court of the validity of statements still imposes a structure to knowledge according to which some questions are not possible to ask, most notable those concerning ideology (the constitution of the ”I” and its values), images of thought, and those kind of things. I tried to argue in the previous post that there is some kind of experience, of what constitutes the problem of a politial engagement, which terms must be left unexamined.
2. My second argument is that this kind of withdrawal strikes me as a way of stopping thought. I gather this from the moments which this argument is usually posed.
a) It seems to me that this ”my values as court” constitutes a method of selection between different statements, but not a method of production. What kind of knowledge or theory could one produce on the foundation that its only validity is its usefulness? It seems to me, but I’m just guessing here, that this would involve a sorts of expressive relation of causality of what one already knows to be useful. Is it possible to concieve of a sort of critical study that would involve some sorts of transformation of the critical subject? I would like to stick to the importance of in one way or another study stransformations of the laborprocess, class/re/compositions, border policy, etc., etc.. But must not this necessearly imply that different conceptions of these things can be more or less adequate (even regardless of if someone after different conceptions are formulated, chooses one over another on the foundation that it is more useful)? Is it not, paradoxically enough, from the perspective of usefulness more useful to stick to a strategic/temporary dogmatism?
b) If we take the diskussion of negative/affirmative. If these discussions are about what you call ”working class activity” then I would argue that what is at stake in these discussions is the mode of existence of that activity. Then there is one thing to say that maybe there are more urgent matters to think about, it is another thing to say that the whole discussion is invalid since the meaning of the concepts under discussion doesnt differ from one another (since they both fall back on the foundation of the value that autonomous working class activity = good, or somesuch). (Isn’t this the sorts of reduction we find in the relations of causality in humanist epistemology?) It’s a way of ending the discussion not by way of turning it in a more productive direction, but by killing it off. One is left with what I would call – using an hegelian word of abuse - an ockultist conception of proletarian subjectivity. Its mode of existence and determinations are left largely unexamined. Id argue that parts of the autonomist marxist crowd (most notable those that are neither spinozists nor hegelians) have a quite ockult conception of working class subjectivity. I think its motivated to ask whats the use of at all using concepts such as negatie affirmative if one isnt the slightest interested in the way they work together with the sorts of problematic within which they where formulated. I dont need an engagement with theory to find a ”word” for working class autonomous activity.
Speaking of this negative/affirmative business, doesn’t JLN in the book Angela mentions above try to leave this opposition behind? I have a hard time understanding JLN, but maybe Angela can tell us something about this?
And the name… it’s just me needing a nick, and I came to think about a joke in fox and his friends (rather than alexanderplatz).
Franz Bieberkopf [September 29, 2005 @ 1:55 am]
Franz, re: JLN: the short answer: kind of. There is, as he would put it, both anxiety and joy in being without ground, being in the world. He displaces the supposed options of negation or affirmation with the concept of manifestation in RotN. I think though what’s at issue here might be made clearer by comparing Negri and Nancy on singularities - but more on this later.
s0metim3s [September 29, 2005 @ 4:08 pm]
Dear Franz,
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I’ll have to have more of a think about all of this. Off the top of my head, I’d like to start just by saying that I’m very sympathetic to the concerns you’re raising and the problems you’re pointing out. I was too glib before with the “my vocabulary”. A better formulation is something like the following -
first, the inability to give an exhaustive or final account of why one uses the theoretical vocabularies and metaphors one uses does not, and I think should not, preclude their use. That said, use should not preclude reflection and revision. I’m fond of a phrase from somewhere in Kierkegaard. He talks about living as if atop 40,000 fathoms of water. If we are treading water in the ocean we can be forgiven for using leaky, fragmentary, or otherwise inadequate bits of buoyant debris to keep ourselves afloat. That doesn’t in any way mean that we can’t or shouldn’t trade one bit of debris for another. Put differently, there’s a Rorty quip (which, understandably, gives some people pause), something like “I’m not a relativist, I’m ethnocentric”, which makes a similar point.
Also, the term ‘use’ above is problematic, for the reasons I take you to be noting: the ‘tool’ and ‘use’ metaphor implies a pre-formed tool and a pre-formed tool user. It also leaves out the fact that uses of toos impact the tools and the users (I worked at a place once building the trusses that go in the roofs and floors of big buildings. After a while the head of the hammer I used to pound nails began to come loose, and my elbow began to hurt. One could say something similar of concepts as tools as well, though I don’t know how to account for or what to do with this admittedly important observation.)
It’s also very problematic to say “concepts are tools” in a way that implies that the metaphor ‘tool’ gets at the truth of concepts in a non-metaphoric (or non tool-like) sense. I’ve certainly encountered Deleuzians who talk as if they think something like this, and I will sometimes mistakenly make similar claims myself. At one point I got very excited about Schelling and others from roughly that era, pretty much exclusively due to the work of Andrew Bowie. It seems to me that the problems you’re pointing out are being worked on in that era. If I have time I’ll see if I can think it through further and maybe do some reading. It’s almost exactly the same set of questions - matters of being in the world without ground, as Angela put it, and the attendant joys and anxieties - that make me interested in Nancy (well, it did after I heard Angela’s thoughts on him). In the meantime, I’d love to hear more from you on the problems of the tool metaphor.
Best,
Nate
Nate [October 2, 2005 @ 4:47 am]
Franz, Nate, s0m3times,
Fascinating discussion. I’ve often encountered enthusiasts of Deleuze and Guattari who fixate on the toolbox metaphor as well, which I’ve always found to be perplexing as I think Deleuze and Guattari have a far more structured relation to theory than they’re often given credit for and because it’s such an isolated statement in their work (I’m pretty sure it only occurs once). For instance, there are certain constants of their ontology that, while the vocabulary changes, nonetheless remain, such as the virtual and the actual, individuation, intensive factors, subrepresentational differentials, singularities, etc. These constants are the filter through which they approach whatever it is their talking about at the time.
Anyway, a few years ago I got in a passionate email discussion with a fellow professor from the rhetoric department about the nature of pedagogy. This rhetorician was enamored with expressivists theories of teaching, where students are encouraged to express their own ideas and experiences, drawing on significant episodes in their life such as romantic breakups, deaths, encounters with racism/sexism, etc. Being the ill tempered and polemical person that I am, I argued for what I then called “the pedagogy of alienation”. Now, what I had in mind by the pedagogy of alienation is that the aim of education is the exact opposite of expression, but rather separation (I was going through a deeply Hegelian period at the time, and was intrigued by his remarks on the function of senseless memorization in the encyclopaedia Philosophy of Spirit, as a preliminary stage in the acquisition of language, i.e., nonsense must precede sense so that the signifier might separate from the thing). Students enter the classroom, filled with all sorts of “conditioning”, customs, ways of perceiving the world, etc., that they take as being common sense or obvious, and which therefore renders them largely incapable of reflexive self-analysis (reflection presupposing a minimal self-distance, mediation, or “negativity” with regard to lived experience, a gap). A pedagogy of alienation aims at introducing a division into the student between this “habitus”, this self-immediacy (which is really not a *self*-immediacy at all, but rather their being as a mere fractal iteration of their culture or socialization) and their “common sense”. Put otherwise, the pedagogy of alienation aims at introducing the void into the subject, so that the student is no longer a subject-position, but rather a void that isn’t immediately identical to their cultural habitus. This is done in a variety of ways. Mathematics separates us from the immediacy of perception or sense-experience, by training us to think in terms of long chains of reasoning and abstract objects that can’t be intuited. Literature brings us to inhabit other minds in the form of the characters and strange acrobatics of language, which invites us to see our own identity as a “character” and our own use of language as a “style”. Indeed, the study of grammar separates us from the naturalness of ordinary language, introducing reflexivity into language itself by transforming it into a senseless object studied purely in terms of its structure. Philosophy introduces void in an ethics class, for instance, by raising the stunning thesis that right and wrong might demand grounding, or in a metaphysics class by raising the bizarre possibility that we’re unsure of what being or reality are (calling into question the obviousness of everyday reality we take ourselves to grapple with everyday). In each case, the process of education introduces a sort of speed bump or interval into immediacy that undermines this immediacy.
My tender-hearted rhetorician friend was apalled by this idea, thinking that it meant that the students were to be divested of their individuality and personal insights by being contaminated by, say, the abstractions of mathematics, and that they were giving up their inner-most personhood by encountering themselves as a void. However, my point was that without this introduction of the void that undermines immediacy, genuine self-expression is impossible, as the subject never gains the requisite distance from the cultural milieu required to begin to truly develop one’s ideas and genuinely express oneself (rather than simply repeating the cliches of their socialization). Alienation makes one alien to one’s culture which is the first step towards freedom.
I think a similar principle applies in the case of theory. Perhaps I’m uncharitable, but when I hear the toolbox metaphor thrown about, my first impression is that a person is subjectively picking up whatever strikes them as “making-sense” or intuitive. But there’s a certain discipline to the alienation of oneself in theory that leads thought to unexpected places, allowing for both a critique of oneself and the world about us, and which enables the theorist to take a distance from the immediacy of what previous seemed obvious to them. That is, theory is a way of engendering reflexivity and reflexivity is a way of producing a free subject. However, I think the more important point is that it is precisely because I approach the world through the lense of a theory, that I’m able to recognize anomalies that allow for the genesis of new theorizations. A “toolbox” that never takes on any degree of systematicity, is also a toolbox that is incapable of generating anomalies (or deviations from what’s expected by the theory) which, I think, does more to reinforce ideology or “common sense” than to overturn it. Franz, it seems as if you’re getting at something like this in your observation that treating the matter of talking about temperature as either affirmation or negation as optional assumes that it’s already obvious that we know what temperature is and that theory is just a way of putting that common sense into words. But in point of fact, it makes quite a bit of difference. I wonder whether the attitude towards Hegel might not be far more positive if the word “relation” were substituted for each occurance of “negation”. Seeing the world in terms of negations as in Hegel or Marx is seeing the world in terms of interdependencies. Although Deleuze and Guattari have a rich theory of relation, it’s not clear that they quite capture this sense of interdependency and the difference these interdependencies make in strategizing practice and activism.
At any rate, I often wonder whether the [often smug] evocation that one relates to theory as a toolbox isn’t also a defense. The production of reflexivity is also a challenge to one’s identity in the imaginary, which, in turn, is also anxiety provoking. Theory sets us loose from our moorings in both ourselves and the world, leaving us without our familiar compass. But it seems to me that that this unmooring is the condition for discovering something of the world at all.
Just my two cents.
Sinthome [September 13, 2006 @ 2:34 pm]
Oh, as an amusing (or not so amusing) aside, I finally prevailed in the discussion and the rhetorician gave up his expressivist pedagogy, and started wearing black to symbolize that he’d given up his nurturing persona. No doubt this was to get me to stop obsessively arguing with him and developing my points in excessive theoretical detail ;)
Sinthome [September 13, 2006 @ 2:38 pm]
The “toolbox” thing is especially common on “Foucauldian” or “governmentality” work in the social sciences - likely for the same reasons that it is common in the “Deleuzian” corpus. (The metaphor arose, if I recall, in the “Intellectuals and Power” discussion between Foucault and Deleuze.) It seems Foucault - to his detriment - might take it a bit further then Deleuze. Throughout the mid- and late seventies, Foucault’s works, especially the interviews and lectures, are filled with variations upon, “I refuse to lay down the law” and “It doesn’t really matter to me what you do with what I say.” His point isn’t so much that the concepts don’t matter, but the specific meaning of the concept is open and, to use another word of his from the period, “polyvalent.” Were he to attempt to impose his own interpretation upon the concepts beyond the provisional or the “local,” his concern was that it would lay the ground for something akin to “Foucault-ology.” Of course, despite his worries, we have that all the same.
If anything, rather than opening up the possibilities of the concepts developed by Foucault, the “toolbox” has led to their stagnation. Take as an example the popular book by Nik Rose, Powers of Freedom (which is, in my mind, at best a textbook for graduate students; but most don’t seem to read it that way). The first few pages are priceless: citing Foucault as his authority, Rose decides that the entire conceptual apparatus of political science and sociology is a load of crap and what we really need is, well, some Foucauldian concepts; most specifically, the idea of “governmentality” and, where governmentality fails us, we can draw upon Latour and Deleuze at will. Afterall, I assume, the three are French, so, really, the concepts must go together.
The point in all this is that the “toolbox” has been interpreted as “take what you want” and “do whatever you want with it” to the extent that the concepts have been evacuated of all meaning and critical force. People in the social sciences can now do “genealogies” or “histories of the present” and it is rather hard to tell the difference between this “Foucauldian” history and nineteenth century whig history!
Craig [September 13, 2006 @ 4:05 pm]
Synthome,
I disagree with you on this:
“A “toolbox” that never takes on any degree of systematicity, is also a toolbox that is incapable of generating anomalies (or deviations from what’s expected by the theory)”
and I think your own evocation of literature as potentially void-inducing/producing supports my argument. The power of individual works of literature (historical works as well, I’d say) to produce/induce void demonstrates that systematicity is not a precondition for generating anomalies. I am here assuming that “generate anomaly” and “produce/induce void” are the same, and that literature does not have systematicity. If the former is not so, then I don’t understand what you mean by “generate anomaly” and I’m not convinced that it’s necessary (ie, I’m happy to settle for voids rather than anomalies). If the latter is not the case, that is, if you take literature to have systematicity, then I see no reason why bodies (clumps?) of theory describable as toolboxes can’t also be described as having systematicity.
The important point to my mind about the toolbox metaphor is that theoretical practice has an aleatory relationship to other practices, that ideas have underdetermined effects such that they can be put to uses antithetical to the uses made or envisioned by the fashioners and other users of those ideas. Marxism is a prime example, I think. One might be tempted in cases of uses which are really outrageous to say something like “that use violates the spirit of X idea!” That ’spirit’ though doesn’t seem to me to be anything beyond the preference of those of us with other investments in how that idea should be used, however deeply held. (By ‘preference’ I’m not trying to say these are unimportant - they’re tremendously important and we should align as friends and enemies in relation to them - but rather that they have little higher or deeper ground than what is already asserted in their initial assertion.)
take care,
Nate
Nate [September 14, 2006 @ 8:36 am]
Nate,
Good points. I take it that the systematicity in the case of literature isn’t to be located in the literary object (though authors, I think, do have a sort of systematicity in their style), but rather in the habits of the reader. One thing a literary text does (potentially) is separate from habitual identity. My thought here is that this doesn’t produce a new identity (though it can have that effect as well), but rather indicates the absence of any determinate identity at all. Or rather, it reveals that my identity as such is this void, not the various personae I adopt. I must already be non-identical to myself (an embodiment of negativity, the void) to read a first person novel, or to undergo suture with regard to the cinematic gaze. This void thus precedes any positive qualities.
It sounds like you’re objecting to dogmatic relations to theory, where theory comes to undermine the possibility of invention. I take it that sound theoretical practice involves invention. Galileo declares that nature is mathematical. But this doesn’t tell us how. Hundreds of years of science following Galileo required countless inventions of new tools (both literally and conceptually) in unfolding this thesis. I take it that this is what Badiou is getting at with his concept of “deductive fidelity”. Similarly, I take it that Marxism perpetually requires invention as we encounter new situations. What remains the same is perhaps the economic thesis. And, ideally, the same is true of Lacanian practice. Each new analysand is a call for invention and deductive fidelity. What is not relinquished, in the case of Galileo for instance, is the thesis that nature is mathematical.
Sinthome [September 14, 2006 @ 9:17 am]