"If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as it may sound) in judgments. This seems to abolish logic, but does not do so.--"
-Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 242
Regularity is Wittgenstein's answer to a certain line of Socratic questioning. The question goes something like: "Very well, this is good and that is good, but in virtue of what do we call all these things good? What allows us to do so?" The concept "good" is a "universal," it is said in the same way of many things, and so it poses the question of unity in multiplicity: what grounds our using the same word to designate many things? What is "the same" in every case?
Plato's answer-- so rumor has it, at any rate, since I have not studied Plato-- is that the unity resides in and behind the things themselves: they really participate in something which is the same in all of them, the Idea of the Good. Our language reflects an actual unity, albeit through a glass darkly. We should not be too quick to criticize this position, since we obviously have no idea what it means ("participation"?--, but as a matter of fact we are quick to criticize it, because we have a ready answer to the question of unity in multiplicity. This answer is nominalist and, one might say, "psychological": the concepts exist in us, we say things are the same because we see something in them that is the same. We have a picture of a cat in mind, we compare an object with the picture of the cat, and if it is more or less the same as our picture, we call it a cat. (This theory is nominalist because there isn't anything outside of us which grounds "catness": if we one day decided to split animals up into "is brown" and "is black" instead of "meows" and "barks," there would no longer be catness, and of course the cats wouldn't have changed.) (1)
Note what has changed here: the locus of identity. No longer in the things but in us. Note what has stayed the same: identity itself. There is something that all cats share, in virtue of which we call them cats.
Wittgenstein just fucking destroys this model. That is, he refutes it on so many levels that it's hard to keep track of which is the essential one. (Once you realize that this model is wrong, it's obviously wrong for any one of a dozen reasons; the real question is how we dug ourselves into this hole in the first place.) Still, there is an order to his critique. Wittgenstein, famously, uses the example of "games," so I'll do the same. (2)
1. There is no essence of "game" which all games share. Board games, Tetris, tennis, the games people play-- there are relationships within this series, but there is no single thing that they share.
2. It is a poor phenomenological account of language use to say that you work by applying a concept. The labor you'd have to do to check my assertion in 1 is a good indication of this: Even if you could find something that all those "games" share, would it be accurate to say that this knowledge is somehow mysteriously "present" every time you use the word? (3)
3. Even if you had such a paradigm it wouldn't help, because you'd need a higher criterion of identity to check whether any given case of "game" was "identical" to your "picture" of "game." This is the fundamental issue. Suppose I do indeed have a picture of "game," and I compare actual objects with this picture in order to figure out if each of them is a game. How am I to know what counts as a "match" between my object and my picture? What degree of unity must I seek here? Clearly, to resolve this questions I would need a rule of some sort, another concept-- the concept of "cases in which I am to apply the concept 'game.'" But this leads to an infinite regress.
Essentially, Wittgenstein's point is an application of the Third Man Argument-- Plato's refutation of the theory of the forms or ideas-- to the "subjective" theory of concepts described above. The problem we sought to resolve initially was that of identity in difference: what do all cats share such that we call them all "cat"? We gave the answer: We call them all "cat" because they're all similar to our idea of a cat. But now we're faced with the same problem on a different level: "In virtue of what do we call our idea of a cat and a cat similar?" When do we do so, and under what criteria? The problem remains unsolved.
According to Wittgenstein, "identity" and "similarity" cannot resolve this problem. This is where regularity comes in, as I'll show in my next post.
(1) I claim that this is indeed the theory of concepts you would get if you left a bright high schooler alone in the room with the Theatetus for two minutes. It's an empirical claim, and I'd like to know if you disagree: I'm interested in figuring out what metaphysics comes naturally to people of our era.
(2) Wittgenstein's use of examples is extremely complex. In discussing games, he proves (a) that there is no single concept of "game," (b) that language is a lot like a game, and (c) that there is no concept (essence) of language. Often he's doing all three in one passage.
(3) The best possible proof of this is a note given under roughly passage 69 of the Philosophical Investigations: "Someone says to me: 'Shew the children a game.' I teach them gaming with dice, and the other says "I didn't mean that sort of game." Must the exclusion of the game with dice have come before his mind when he gave me the order?"[I don't know why he spells "show" that way either.]
Monday, November 15, 2010
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Lacan, Language and Objects
So Freud ends up saying that we build the ego out of identifications with loved objects. We eat what we like, and we are what we eat. We make an identity by patching together the things that we've loved-- mostly because if we don't keep them inside they're always wandering off and having sex with our fathers, or whatever. Identification is a way of hugging someone so tight you never let go. Object-relations psychoanalysis follows the track of this intuition: your ego works if the objects you make it from are adequate, if you can hold them together so that they hold you together.
We've all done this consciously enough and recently enough to know how it happens: someone else's voice in your head and the feeling of admiration fade as the object sinks in until you can't tell where it ends and you begin. To say that this is how we build our personalities from the outset, though, is to say some very strange things about the relationship between self and other. That the relationship is porous-- does she want that, do I want her, or is it just that she wants me? Or that I want to be like someone who would like her? Who ever knows? Second, that it's porous because the "self" is born out of the "other," and this is just about the strangest thing one can imagine. What, after all, does it mean to "identify with" at this level? After all, you're not saying "I guess this is kind of like me" or "maybe I'd like to be like this"-- you're saying "that's me!" in a way that creates the me. (French and German are a lot more crunchy here because what gets translated as "ego" is actually "I" or "me": "Me is created out of identifications with others.") How can this possibly happen? And what does it have to do with love? We know that love and identification are close enough that they slip into one another, but why should it be that way?
These impasses are a wonderful entry-point into Lacan. The problem of identification seems to defy explanation, or even clear formulation-- and really, it's because he tried to sort it out that Lacan is so very difficult. Lacan accepts the object-relations idea that we build ourselves out of identification, but his fundamental contribution is to ask a rather obvious question: "What do you mean, 'object'?" What exactly is this thing with which we identify? Of course it's a person-- certainly not a "subject," but a very strange object indeed. In particular it's the kind of object which inscrutably desires, and really, when we love a person we're concerned with his (inscrutable) desire.
When we recognize this, the question of why identification and love are so close together gets a little bit clearer. What do I want? Well, I want her. What part of her? Her body, no, that's not it... Ah, her desire! I want her to want me, which is to say that I want to be what she wants, whatever she happens to want, which is to say that I want-- well, I want to have what she wants so that she'll want to have me. Or I want to be what she wants, maybe-- or maybe I want to be her, so that I'll have her desire? When we want a desiring subject we can begin to think why wanting and being are neighbors.
Everything else, of course, gets murky-- for one thing because we know very little indeed about desire, for another thing because it's hard to see from the description above why humans aren't absolutely porous-- how can any identity form at all if I want what she wants? Why aren't I absolutely determined by the flow of desires around me? (The answer to this question is "the phallus.") For another thing because it's clear that the object hasn't disappeared from the equation entirely-- I still want to be or to have what she wants or has. (The answer to this question is "objet a.") For yet another thing because, which other? Who is it and why? What does she want, and how do I think of her? (The answer to this question, obviously, is "the big Other.")
So this is all to say: I don't know any of Lacan's answers, but to get his answer you have to get his question first, and the question is that of identification. This is the place to start.
We've all done this consciously enough and recently enough to know how it happens: someone else's voice in your head and the feeling of admiration fade as the object sinks in until you can't tell where it ends and you begin. To say that this is how we build our personalities from the outset, though, is to say some very strange things about the relationship between self and other. That the relationship is porous-- does she want that, do I want her, or is it just that she wants me? Or that I want to be like someone who would like her? Who ever knows? Second, that it's porous because the "self" is born out of the "other," and this is just about the strangest thing one can imagine. What, after all, does it mean to "identify with" at this level? After all, you're not saying "I guess this is kind of like me" or "maybe I'd like to be like this"-- you're saying "that's me!" in a way that creates the me. (French and German are a lot more crunchy here because what gets translated as "ego" is actually "I" or "me": "Me is created out of identifications with others.") How can this possibly happen? And what does it have to do with love? We know that love and identification are close enough that they slip into one another, but why should it be that way?
These impasses are a wonderful entry-point into Lacan. The problem of identification seems to defy explanation, or even clear formulation-- and really, it's because he tried to sort it out that Lacan is so very difficult. Lacan accepts the object-relations idea that we build ourselves out of identification, but his fundamental contribution is to ask a rather obvious question: "What do you mean, 'object'?" What exactly is this thing with which we identify? Of course it's a person-- certainly not a "subject," but a very strange object indeed. In particular it's the kind of object which inscrutably desires, and really, when we love a person we're concerned with his (inscrutable) desire.
When we recognize this, the question of why identification and love are so close together gets a little bit clearer. What do I want? Well, I want her. What part of her? Her body, no, that's not it... Ah, her desire! I want her to want me, which is to say that I want to be what she wants, whatever she happens to want, which is to say that I want-- well, I want to have what she wants so that she'll want to have me. Or I want to be what she wants, maybe-- or maybe I want to be her, so that I'll have her desire? When we want a desiring subject we can begin to think why wanting and being are neighbors.
Everything else, of course, gets murky-- for one thing because we know very little indeed about desire, for another thing because it's hard to see from the description above why humans aren't absolutely porous-- how can any identity form at all if I want what she wants? Why aren't I absolutely determined by the flow of desires around me? (The answer to this question is "the phallus.") For another thing because it's clear that the object hasn't disappeared from the equation entirely-- I still want to be or to have what she wants or has. (The answer to this question is "objet a.") For yet another thing because, which other? Who is it and why? What does she want, and how do I think of her? (The answer to this question, obviously, is "the big Other.")
So this is all to say: I don't know any of Lacan's answers, but to get his answer you have to get his question first, and the question is that of identification. This is the place to start.
Monday, February 15, 2010
This is Your Daddy's Existentialism: Notes on a Dead Orthodoxy
There was a time when the word "existentialism" meant something here in America. I estimate that time to have been roughly 1950 through 1965, and during that time existentialism meant Sartre and Camus. It meant that life is absurd because there is no God, but that humans can create meaning in the face of the void through decision, dignity and decency. It meant the antithesis of bourgeois conformity, seen as an attempt to mask the essential absurdity of life; it meant an aesthetics of political engagement largely ungrounded by a politics. And as far as I can tell it was at some point an orthodoxy among the literary thinking classes.
The most recent piece of evidence that has come my way on this point is Blanche Gelfant's really-quite-embarrassing 1966 reading of Clarissa Dalloway as Sartrean heroine in "Love and Conversion in Mrs. Dalloway," an essay whose laughable self-assurance-- it complains that the novel fails because the bourgeois, conventional Clarissa is unsuited to embody the radical sense of the absurd Woolf was "trying" to express-- could only exist on the foundation of firmly established thought-cliche. Evidence from the other side is Cavell's 1969 essay on Beckett's Endgame (republished in Must We Mean What We Say?), where he crushes a then-existing Camusian orthodox reading of Beckett wherein Beckett "expresses" silly things like "life is absurd" by showing some people who seem to be living absurdly. To my knowledge this radical orthodoxy produced no novels which are still read, but many of its proponents also seem to admire the Beats. "Beat," by the way, isn't what I always thought it was-- syncopation-- but turns out to have to do with getting the shit kicked out of you. The vision of life as something that kicks the shit out of you for no reason, and the kind of joy and sense of power one can achieve merely by facing up to this fact in its full glory, is the heart of the aesthetic I'm trying to pin down-- an aesthetic that has left us entirely, leaving behind only the vaguely derogatory connotations of a term like "existential angst." One sees it pop up now and again-- there was one old-fashioned Camusian activist in my freshman dorm, and the film Waking Life has an old professor defending Sartrean authenticity against "postmodernism" -- but I think it's fair to say that on the whole, this whole macho-decisionistic outlook on life seems to us either melodramatic or faintly laughable.
My question is, why? Sure, I know, the whole enterprise is based on a trivially flawed reading of Heidegger, willful ignorance of the social and an amateurish theory of "value," but intellectual bankruptcy is no reason for abandoning an intellectual orthodoxy as long as it seems timely; we've all been reading Zizek for like 5 years now and haven't yet grown out of it. The kind of answer I'm looking for lies elsewhere. I would say to begin with that Sartrean existentialism is the flip-side of the conformism of the 1950s. I have no idea whether the 1950s really were conformist, but I'm sure that they saw themselves that way; cf. The Lonely Crowd (1951), White Collar (1948). The sense was of a crushing normalcy that one could abandon only at enormous cost; community was dead, and authenticity meant loneliness.
Directly correlative to this is the emptying out of affirmative political possibility. Which is not to say that Sartre and Camus were not political, but that the ideal of political engagement looked more like the Spanish Civil War or the Resistance than it did like anything the 1950s had to offer: an evil enemy, overwhelmingly powerful, with no chance of success and so no question of a positive social ideal. Politics was precisely the place in which one engaged oneself "absurdly"-- which meant that politics meant nothing. Politics can play the important role it plays in existentialism only if there are no serious and meaningful political choices to make, which is to say only if the battle is already lost. (The recurrence of this valorization of suicidal political engagement for itself in Zizek+Badiou today is, as the Marxists say, "symptomatic.")
We might say, then, that with the opening up of social alternatives in the mid-1960s existentialism naturally disappeared, as there seemed the prospect of something better than angst-ridden freedom: genuine social transformation, the creation of a community in which individuality could thrive. What I take to be an effect rather than a cause of this, the structuralist / post-structuralist interest in social determinations of subjectivity, killed existentialism intellectually in France on or about June 1, 1966; in America the winds shifted as a new generation of serious young men joined SDS.
What complicates this story, to my mind, is that the American 1960s didn't replace existentialism with anything quite as serious as, say, Marxist-revolutionary engagement; what we retain from the 1960s, in the novels that have lasted and in the culture at large, is a kind of Yippie playfulness tinged with the sense of impending apocalypse (Vonnegut, Pynchon)-- and that's what makes Sartre laughable. He takes himself so entirely seriously. The political possibilities of the 1960s have long receded, the oppressive conformism of the 1950s hasn't after all changed that much (we may go to BDSM bars but we don't do it on Tuesday nights, since we'd be tired at the office the next day), but what we've retained is the inability to imagine ourselves staring into the void, entirely alone with the absence of God. Things have become too ordinary. The graffiti of May '68 already announces a revolution whose goals are childish. If those goals are far more comprehensible to me, far more inspiring because far more real, than those of Sartre... Well, I'm not sure that's a good thing.
I'd like to understand the Sartrean orthodoxy better because (1) it emphasizes the individual, whereas modern thought-cliche avant-gardism remains political in an era with no serious politics; (2) it takes things about as seriously as they might actually be, and we don't do that anymore. What do you think? What is living and what is dead in your daddy's existentialism?
The most recent piece of evidence that has come my way on this point is Blanche Gelfant's really-quite-embarrassing 1966 reading of Clarissa Dalloway as Sartrean heroine in "Love and Conversion in Mrs. Dalloway," an essay whose laughable self-assurance-- it complains that the novel fails because the bourgeois, conventional Clarissa is unsuited to embody the radical sense of the absurd Woolf was "trying" to express-- could only exist on the foundation of firmly established thought-cliche. Evidence from the other side is Cavell's 1969 essay on Beckett's Endgame (republished in Must We Mean What We Say?), where he crushes a then-existing Camusian orthodox reading of Beckett wherein Beckett "expresses" silly things like "life is absurd" by showing some people who seem to be living absurdly. To my knowledge this radical orthodoxy produced no novels which are still read, but many of its proponents also seem to admire the Beats. "Beat," by the way, isn't what I always thought it was-- syncopation-- but turns out to have to do with getting the shit kicked out of you. The vision of life as something that kicks the shit out of you for no reason, and the kind of joy and sense of power one can achieve merely by facing up to this fact in its full glory, is the heart of the aesthetic I'm trying to pin down-- an aesthetic that has left us entirely, leaving behind only the vaguely derogatory connotations of a term like "existential angst." One sees it pop up now and again-- there was one old-fashioned Camusian activist in my freshman dorm, and the film Waking Life has an old professor defending Sartrean authenticity against "postmodernism" -- but I think it's fair to say that on the whole, this whole macho-decisionistic outlook on life seems to us either melodramatic or faintly laughable.
My question is, why? Sure, I know, the whole enterprise is based on a trivially flawed reading of Heidegger, willful ignorance of the social and an amateurish theory of "value," but intellectual bankruptcy is no reason for abandoning an intellectual orthodoxy as long as it seems timely; we've all been reading Zizek for like 5 years now and haven't yet grown out of it. The kind of answer I'm looking for lies elsewhere. I would say to begin with that Sartrean existentialism is the flip-side of the conformism of the 1950s. I have no idea whether the 1950s really were conformist, but I'm sure that they saw themselves that way; cf. The Lonely Crowd (1951), White Collar (1948). The sense was of a crushing normalcy that one could abandon only at enormous cost; community was dead, and authenticity meant loneliness.
Directly correlative to this is the emptying out of affirmative political possibility. Which is not to say that Sartre and Camus were not political, but that the ideal of political engagement looked more like the Spanish Civil War or the Resistance than it did like anything the 1950s had to offer: an evil enemy, overwhelmingly powerful, with no chance of success and so no question of a positive social ideal. Politics was precisely the place in which one engaged oneself "absurdly"-- which meant that politics meant nothing. Politics can play the important role it plays in existentialism only if there are no serious and meaningful political choices to make, which is to say only if the battle is already lost. (The recurrence of this valorization of suicidal political engagement for itself in Zizek+Badiou today is, as the Marxists say, "symptomatic.")
We might say, then, that with the opening up of social alternatives in the mid-1960s existentialism naturally disappeared, as there seemed the prospect of something better than angst-ridden freedom: genuine social transformation, the creation of a community in which individuality could thrive. What I take to be an effect rather than a cause of this, the structuralist / post-structuralist interest in social determinations of subjectivity, killed existentialism intellectually in France on or about June 1, 1966; in America the winds shifted as a new generation of serious young men joined SDS.
What complicates this story, to my mind, is that the American 1960s didn't replace existentialism with anything quite as serious as, say, Marxist-revolutionary engagement; what we retain from the 1960s, in the novels that have lasted and in the culture at large, is a kind of Yippie playfulness tinged with the sense of impending apocalypse (Vonnegut, Pynchon)-- and that's what makes Sartre laughable. He takes himself so entirely seriously. The political possibilities of the 1960s have long receded, the oppressive conformism of the 1950s hasn't after all changed that much (we may go to BDSM bars but we don't do it on Tuesday nights, since we'd be tired at the office the next day), but what we've retained is the inability to imagine ourselves staring into the void, entirely alone with the absence of God. Things have become too ordinary. The graffiti of May '68 already announces a revolution whose goals are childish. If those goals are far more comprehensible to me, far more inspiring because far more real, than those of Sartre... Well, I'm not sure that's a good thing.
I'd like to understand the Sartrean orthodoxy better because (1) it emphasizes the individual, whereas modern thought-cliche avant-gardism remains political in an era with no serious politics; (2) it takes things about as seriously as they might actually be, and we don't do that anymore. What do you think? What is living and what is dead in your daddy's existentialism?
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