...we need thinkers who will read slowly, setting the book down to contemplate or write a fragment, for in this disenchanted world, the pursuit of meaning can only find fragments of the past...

the first-person figure

Sun, 8 Nov 2009 19:24:45 -0700

What if there is no such entity as the ‘subject.’ Rather there is only the interior dimension to all power relations? Maybe this is why Butler calls herself a Spinozan. Maybe the problem is that I am still thinking of the subject as a definable bounded entity, when it is really more of a dimension of social processes. Kristeva’s conception of the subject in process seems very useful; but her dialectic between the semiotic and symbolic strays to far away from Lacan’s terms: following the analogy with Lacan’s terms, Kristeva gives the ego (me or moi) revolutionary potential against the symbolic, whereas for Lacan the ego is more libidinal yet also tied into knots with the unconscious (i.e. making even the imaginary realm phallic).

Lacan offers an alternative. It is correct that the subject is not unified. But neither is it a fragmentary blob effected by the intersection of discursive formations. The subject is fundamentally split between the first and third person. Now the speaking subject, the first person “I” presents itself as an autonomous unified entity. Crucially structuralist, Lacan claims this is a fundamental misrecognition: the “I” is actually nor more than the incorporation of a binary opposition between the first and second person, a grammatical distinction given by the Symbolic, that is, language. Yet, the “I” gives a semblance of stability to the ego, which is a narcissistic cathected sense of self (a set of identifications that define a “me”). The moi depends upon the je for recognition as a subject by others.

But this is as far as Lacan goes. The subject is a fundamental split between a false unity (the “I”) and a multiplicity of images (the ego). I think there is still some unexplored potential for social theory in the discovery that the “I” is a false unity. It is false because of the representational trick of language: when an individual says “I am....” we think that the “I” actually refers to some non-linguistic entity, when actually there is nothing but a semantical structure episodically offered in the instances of discourse. This is where the possibility of a hermeneutics of the subject could begin, by recognizing that the rhetorical figure of the “first person” is itself a tropological construct. And like other symbolic significations, the first person can take on a life of its own.

The irony is immense: it is as if we are living vicariously through language: the same language that makes us subjects and dupes us as fools of ostensible unity and autonomy becomes a living person for us. The movement of unconscious signification drives the structure and narrative of the “I.” We are all ‘nothing but’ puppets of the Lacanian unconscious. But we are puppets that move and dance as if independent creatures with our own mind. This is the paradox of subjectivity. Agency is founded on a lie, but that does not make it any less effective. Our subjectivity is linguistically constructued, but as Butler writes, this if the form of how agency is articulated. My contribution is that the identity of the “I” can be read hermeneutically as quasi-autonomous symbolic form, deriving its autonomy from unconscious movements in signification. No doubt, its unconscious nature makes a “science of the subject” next to impossible.

Unlike Lacan and de Man, I am not offering a materialist theory of the subject, which follows from a materialist conception of language. Hermeneutics does need to posit any interiority as essential, rather the ideal dimension is an effect of language, just as the material dimension. Hermeneutics is the needed complement to the materiality of language which otherwise would be a rather one-sided picture if literally followed. The series of subjective effects, qua series of signified-ication, is an autonomous movement not directly corresponding to the chain of signifiers. Lacan recognized the difference, the bar between the two (signifier/signified) but for some odd reason gave priority to the material word.

Agency v. Autonomy

Fri, 6 Nov 2009 21:06:44 -0700

Literature on Third World Women workers has been especially insensitive with a Marxist objectivism that treats women implicitly as “passive victims.” Frequently, Capital is given more personification than members of its reserve labor army. Mohanty critiques this tendency, along with Diane Wolf. To correct such reductive objectivism, they define the Third World Woman as self-interpreting, as Charles Taylor would say, partly constituted by self-interpretation. This theoretical correction demonstrates how important a questioning of the nature of the subject is for social science, especially studies of marginalized people.

Diane Wolf also differentiates between agency and autonomy. Autonomy, often operationalized as a scale of individual freedom from institutional constraint, is often not useful for analyzing the relationships of Third World Women for the same problem as above: autonomy is determined by institutions and environments, it is granted or not to women--qua recipients. Many postcolonialist theorists argue that autonomy itself is a Western value that is imposed upon non-Western cultures. Agency is something very different from autonomy then. It is exercised even when the individual is not ‘free,’ defined as separate, from a patriarchal household. It is not scripted, but more ad hoc, emerging from processes of intrahousehold negotiating. At times it can choose to acquiscence; or, it can stimulate resistance; it can be consensual or conflictual. Agency then must be a property of the subject, of analytic necessity (even though many sociologists would not admit this out of their blind empiricism). Agency does not depend on freedom from constraints; rather it is enabled by structures in context (this is Giddens’ view).

What does agency have to do with responsibility? I think most sociologists would say nothing at all. Charles Taylor thinks that agency consists in the necessity of making strong evaluations (interpretive convictions that put one in relation to utmost values), hence it is related to responsibility, but not in a reductive blame-the-victim sort of way. Environments are still limiting conditions for Taylor’s agent. Taylor’s approach is foreign to Marxism, though it may have affinity with Durkheimian cultural studies of the sacred v. profane distinction.

the narrated subject, subjects who narrate

Mon, 2 Nov 2009 11:08:59 -0700

What is the relation between narrative and the subject?

The answer is the difference between narrative and plot (Peter Brooks).

In any statement, there are two levels of subjectivity: the explicit enunciated content of the narrative...this is on the level of the imaginary unity of the subject (Lacan’s mirror identification). The subject is split however between this identity that is spoken and the implicit subject-position that is doing the speaking. Behind the narrative is a subject who is addressing the other, the reader, the listening: hence, all discursive statements are also performances of the enunciating subject. This is the phatic dimension of communication which is not reducible or the same as the content of communication. Rather is is a rhetorical structure that communicates itself.

The key mistake to avoid is finding evidence here for a transcendental subjectivity as the narrator who speaks, that is, find it in the form regardless of its content. Lacan and Kristeva’s point is the contrary (de Man’s too): the enunciating subject is yet another subject-position. It is not the author of itself nor of its meaning. This is why post-structuralists still assert that subjectivity is an effect of linguistic structures, rather than the other way around. Chris Weedom calls this structure a misrecognition: the subject does not realize that its subjectivity is really a structural location within discourse, that precedes it and which it assumes.

The subject-position is the rhetorical structure of the enunciating subject: the implicit “I” being performed phatically. As an object of linguistics it requires a tropology not a hermeneutics (of intended meaning). Or it requires a hermeneutics (of rhetoric); perhaps this is where Paul de Man slipped by restricting hermeneutics to the understanding/communication of intended meaning, hence he had to move on to a material tropology: there are some heavy questions here about the materiality of meaning and what “meaning” is and the possibility of an unrestricted hermeneutics that is not limited to the contents of communication (how structures have a meaning, hence are meaning structures). For my purposes, I just need to defend the idea that the enunciating subject is itself a structure.

I think the point structuralists and post-structuralists alike are making about subjectivity is: even the enunciating subject, the performative "I" is a rhetorical figure, regardless of how implicit. The difference between structuralists and post-structuralists on this issue is probably a question of the specificity of language: language in general v. always historically multiple discourses.

So I guess we could say that the subject itself is a kind of meaning-structure, though not exactly a narrative (maybe more like a plot according to Peter Brooks). Maybe this is what a hermeneutics of subjectivity would like...

the social significance of the split subject

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:25:44 -0600

The “post-structuralist” model of the subject as effect reduces the subject to a one-dimensional externality. According to this framework, subjectivity is embedded and externalized as subject-positions in technology and relationships (which are discursive). The rejection of psychoanalytic thought by (post)structuralists (including Foucault) causes theoretical contradictions, which can only be resolved through a synthetic ‘science’ of subjectivity, combining the insights of structuralism and psychoanalysis.

The question I’m exploring is how this popular poststructuralism could be a sort of reductionism, which despite its current fashionableness, misunderstands the nature of subjectivity. An imprecise conception can be corrected by understanding the relations between the subject and language in general: what is the subject and how is it produced? A tradition trying to combine structuralist linguistics and psychoanalysis (Lacan, Althusser, Benveniste) has grounded subjectivity in one’s entrance into language: subjectivity is still an effect of language, but in a more fundamental way than an identity that is effected in a Foucauldian way by a multiplicity of discursive-formations and technologies of power. Lacan’s notion of the split subject, between its Imaginary and Symbolic aspect, is crucial. The Imaginary subject is the ego’s self-image constituted by one’s location in the social world, one’s relationships and traits. It is fragmentary, multiple and yet unified through the fantasy of self-identity (Lacan’s work on the mirror-stage). Is this not the subject that Foucault is a theorist of in his notions of how the individual becomes ‘deviant’ or how self-identity is produced by confessional technology?

I want to suggest that the Imaginary subject is constituted and shaped by subject-positions, including those of the labor process, but not the Symbolic subject, whom technology is designed to control but always fails because of the nature of the subject of the unconscious. The Imaginary subject is the enunciated subject which is given its hermeneutical content through its interrelations with a discursively-constructed social environment. In contrast, the enunciating subject, which emerges with the unconscious when the person enters language according to Lacan, is the mechanical assumption of an “I” in relation to the “other,” a necessary binary opposition of speaking: in every act of discourse, an “I” is performed whether or not it is referred to. This “I” does not have continuity or self-relating unity; Lacan calls it the internalization of the Other/Symbolic order and the subject of the unconscious is not masterable, frequently not understandable either due to repressed chains of signification. If the irreducible gap between the enunciated subject and the enunciating subject is not maintained, theoretical references to subject production become meaningless.

I'm not sure how hermeneutics fits into this, I'm worried Lacan is actually another anti-hermeneut like Foucault, even though they conceive of the subject differently. And I'm also not sure if Lacan's unconscious has the same "depth" as say Freud or other modernists. Maybe both Foucault and Lacan think language is a surface phenomenon that does not need interpretation; both also seem to agree about the complexity and contingency of movements of significations (or "strategies" for Foucault); maybe next semester we can figure out why they are wrong to dismiss hermeneutics. Can a split subject not have depth though? I do not know....

the paradox of social self-reflection in epistemology

Tue, 6 Oct 2009 09:29:20 -0600

For the sake of not repeating ourselves, let us give a name to this problem that all social theory tries to conceal. This problem, is very similar to the problem constituting literary theory, the paradox of language on language. Likewise, in the human sciences, the reflexivity is killer. Interestingly enough, both literary theory and social theory owe much to German idealism for the first problematic rendition of the paradoxes. Both disciplines have since re-formulated the terms without the transcendental subject who knows itself. But this has not done away with the problem, even if it has been transformed into a sociological lexicon of culture and practices.

Not surprisingly, Foucault commentators can grasp what’s at stake: “Given such formalizing techniques, normal social science might, indeed, establish itself; it would only do so, however, by leaving out the social skills, institutions, or power arrangements which make the isolation of features or attributes possible. However, such skills and the context of social practices they presupposes are internal to the human sciences, just as the laboratory skills of scientists are internal to the history and sociology of science, for if the human sciences claim to study human activities, then the human sciences, unlike the natural sciences, must take account of those human activities which make possible their own disciplines” (Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 164).

Charles Taylor apparently makes the same case for the necessity of dealing with the paradox in his essay, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in which he presents an argument for a hermeneutic social sciences. Dreyfus and Rabinow are convinced that hermeneutics of an actor’s meaning is still inadequate: they value the trope of sociological irony too much, i.e. actors are not even dimly aware of what their activity really means, how it is situated in “a complex strategical situation” as Foucault puts it. Hence, D&R elevate what they call interpretive analytics instead of hermeneutics. I’m going to do an independent study on precisely this question next semester...

Derrida on science

Mon, 5 Oct 2009 13:16:29 -0600

If I could only understand this passage, I would be the next Nietzschean blow to the philosophical foundations of empiricism:

“What I want to emphasize is simply that the passage beyond philosophy does not consist in turning the page of philosophy (which usually amounts to philosophizing badly), but in continuing to read philosophers in a certain way. The risk I am speaking of is always assumed by Levi-Strauss, and it is the very price of this endeavor. I have said that empiricism is the matrix of all faults menacing a discourse which continues, as with Levi-Strauss in particular, to consider itself scientific. If we wanted to pose the problem of empiricism and bricolage in depth, we would probably end up very quickly with a number of absolutely contradictory propositions concerning the status of discourse in structural ethnology....

“Totalization can be judged impossible in the classical style: one then refers to the empirical endeavor of either a subject of a finite richness which it can never master. There is to much, more than one can say. But nontotalization [non-totalizability] can also be determined in another way: no longer from the standpoint of the concept of finitude as relegation to the empirical, but from the standpoint of the concept of play. If totalization no longer has an meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite gland or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field--that is, language and a finite language--excludes totalization. This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions.”

“Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences” - by Jacques Derrida (Writing and Difference, pp. 288-289).

Foucault on sociology

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:22:48 -0600

To the extent that sociology is empirical is a non-historicist fashion, it is subservient to the State. The human sciences arose as a demand of the new political rationality which need empirical methods to assess the State’s scope of power and way to increase it.

The difference between Foucault and Weber’s methodologies: for Foucault, the historian has no need to construct ideal types of ‘essences’ in general, because strategies are superficial and visible. In other words, the logic of a strategy is present in history even if it is not realized; not because it deviates from actual empirical content a la Weber, but because it provokes resistance through counter-programs which prevent its realization.

Sociology in mired in the Analytic of Finitude: when Man is considered both constituting subject and empirical object of Knowledge. The gap between the two is most evident between standpoint theory or Kuhnian sociology of knowledge (Man qua Subject) and the multitude of qualitiative ethnography and quantitative research (Man qua Object).

Foucault develops a post-hermeneutical social theory: what are the social effects of discursive formations? Emphasis on social effects, which necessitates a discussion of power; more precisely, the power of meaning as a deployment of a strategy, which is what hermeneutics forgets. Yet, Foucault repeats the classical sociological trope: actors do not understand what they do and why they do it, i.e. the reason actors give for their actions do not refer to the actual mechanisms of their consent or resistance. Foucault’s break from depth hermeneutics is that the investigator cannot discover the actual mechanisms by exposing the distortions present in the actor’s speech (contra Freud and Heidegger). Rather, it requires some de-familiarization through archaeological methods.

a problem

Fri, 4 Sep 2009 10:29:08 -0600

Within Marxism there is an unavoidable tension between the notion of ideology on one hand, and the idea of true interests on the other. In fact they are closely related: ideology prevents the workers from realizing their true interests through united class consciousness. In Marx’s writings, ideology is not yet the problematic category that is has become today. In other words, ideology can be overcome, its shroud of mystery can dissipate to reveal material reality: things as they are in a system of exploitation of workers. Hence the opposition between ideology and science, especially prominent in Althusser: science is the epistemological counterpart to ideology and its cure. Marx sometimes hints that the only reason he could rise above ideology to see the inevitable destruction of capitalism, is because the time was ripe. In other words, the right social conditions made possible scientific knowledge.

What has happened after Marxism, is the heavily influential idea of ideology has been extended even further than Marx ever intended. Despite Foucault’s hatred of Marx, discourse is the new reincarnation of the category of ideology, though it has reformulated the premise in much more advanced ways: discourse is the structure of values determining what is and what is not considered possible. Hence the original tension in Marx between true interests and ideology has now been exploded in favor of the latter: ideology is insurmountable, i.e. discourse is the condition of our experience/perception/consciousness. The very of idea of true interests is analogous to the highly unfashionable Archimedian point that anchors knowledge. How can one know the true interests of the workers? If one assumes they do know so, then surely they are just imposing a foreign framework upon the cultural world of another people.

This is a pertinent problem. It arises all the time in organization theory, often as an unquestioned premise, which can be seen in statements such as this: workers within a large depersonalized organization, often accept the framework of their oppression--such as low wages, awful hours, surveillance, etc--because they have re-negotiated their immediate goals. For example, a worker might focus all their creative abilities on obtaining rewards from the company, such as a small promotion in pay, so that he/she can have extra money to send to his/her family. Focusing on this goal, makes the worker complicit with the system of exploitation, such that they are consumed with personal strategies rather than pursuing a more radical course of action according to their true interests, so goes the premise of the ethnographer’s argument. In non-revisionist Marxism, acting upon true interests always includes: establishing solidarity with other workers and over-throwing the establishment in revolution. Only a revolution could function as the proper means of achieving the true interests of a working class.

At its most basic level, we have to deal with the contradiction between the later two faces of power: Power as domination (when the oppressed do not realize their interests because they are blinding by ideology) AND Power as subjectification (when a subject acts upon their desires, which are constituted by a discursive framework). Why are these two faces of power incompatible? Because the notion of discursive framework prohibits the articulation of a class’s ‘true interests’ externally to that class, unless the standpoint of the external framework is explicitly recognized. Then, we are still dealing with the problem of why the values of one culture should be imposed on another culture. The answer to this latter problem cannot be found within hermeneutics, it is barred from it. Hermeneutics works precisely at disentangling the cultural values to their respective frameworks/communities.

There is no neutral science to adjudicate between discourses. Hence, we live in an epistemological world in which the category of ideology has triumphed. It is tempting to think then, that the only way out is to stop treating ideology as anathema, and rather embrace it and take on its epistemological attitude: the belief in true interests, wielded to put an end to the futile activities of strategic-subjectivity. This avenue would then subsume hermeneutics as a domain within Marxism that deals with the epistemological reflexivity of Marxism (in surrogate for the death of science). The next problem that arises is again of the subject: who really can simply “take on” ideology and wield it as their sword? Certainly not the communitarian subject, as Zizek has critiqued. Who is this person? And how did they come to transcend the conditions of their experience to discover the true ideology?

retour de Sartre

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 12:00:43 -0600

Wouldn’t it be surprising if was Sartre alone who opened up a new thinking traceable through the 20th century, appearing in the void and negativity in Badiou and Zizek’s theory of change, even influencing Agamben thought on potentiality, re-working Sarte’s dualist ontology into a problem of modality.

The reasons Sartre is important is because he drew the connection between freedom and nothingness. He is essential thus for any theory of the subject and especially the subject’s ability to escape from structural-causal determinations, even if in the ability to reflect as an intellectual (Bourdieu), not too mention the possible basis for collective political action (Badiou). Without the negating freedom of the subject, change would never occur--only the endless rearranging of meaning-formations. This is why hermeneutics by itself is inadequate if it locates all interpretive possibility within the site of tradition, demanding a lockdown on what has already happened in the past. For true heterogeneity to occur, the subject must collect itself in the cracks and failures of the already-existing structures of power as determination.

Meaning. Power. And once again, Freedom. Any social theory can be mapped along these three axes, exposing the deficiencies of imbalance. Some theorists manage to entangle all three (and her name is Judith Butler).

the dispossessed 2

Mon, 6 Jul 2009 09:54:47 -0600

Now twenty pages from the end, I want the novel to never end. More reading has reinforced my assessment that this book should not only be read as a work of fiction but also as a treatise in political theory. It is, perhaps, an allegory for the events of the 20th century, including a fable about our distant future. The binary codes that Le Guin establishes in her narrative appear to be code-names: Urras’ Io for the United States; Thuv for Russia--kind of a Cold War dynamic between them; Benbili located in the Southern Hemisphere, blantantly stands for the Third World, which is a battleground for foreign super-powers who are too decent to bring war to the door-step of higher civilization. It is impossible not to read this invented mythology hermeneutically, that is, with imaginative leaps between the story and our contemporary situation.

In my last post I thought that Le Guin’s story necessitating a commentary on human nature. But now I am not so sure, because the condition she is investigating is the fear of otherness, the fear of the stranger, the fear of difference. This may be a tendency of ‘humankind’ but cannot be discussed without the possibility of overcoming it. Hence, I think I prefer an existential reading now, a turn like Agamben’s, to the potential being of human being, not its Sartrean nothingness, but its (in)capacity to be. What defines human-kind is its ‘plasticity’ as many social theorists have remarked. Or maybe Le Guin would state, what defines human-kind is its difference. One of the architectonic analogies framing the text is between sexual difference and the xenophobia between the two sister planets, as well as being a motif constantly re-occuring in Le Guin’s writings. In The Dispossessed, the fear of otherness haunts the anarchist society of Anarres through their demonization of Urras, producing a scapegoat effect. In scapegoating, the violent is not just directed outward, but also inwardly precisely through the unification that quells internal conflict. Such conflict is then perceived as the worst treason and betrayal, and accused of thwarting defensive attention from the external enemy to rebellious ‘egoizers’ of the body. The problem with anarchism on Anarres is the over-valuation of the Neighbor’s opinion, everyone is horrified of being labeled a ‘propertarian’ or an ‘egoizer’ by the general will that produces its own subtle form of tyranny.