we shold use this blog more!

wow nobody has written since february...

OK i would like to ask if anyone knows of academics who write on the practice of blogging because mostly what i am finding is 'how to make a better blog' from marketing people...

also, in the interests of live blogging during class (or at least the break) i would like to record my favorite quote from this class, which was Liam to Jeff:

"i have no idea what you are talking about."

:)
-brianna out.

Deal or No Deal

Adam, thanks for posting your presentation. It's really interesting and thoughtful. I'll have to postpone my comments for now, though.

I just wanted to bring up something that I was thinking about during my presentation but didn't mention in the interest of time. Have you all heard of this show, Deal or No Deal? The rules are on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal_or_No_Deal_%28U.S._game_show%29. I saw it a few times while it was on TV, and I thought to myself, this is a) so appropriate after 9/11, and b) a great example of the chaos, speculation, and chance at the heart of capitalism, couched in the rhetoric of individual agency and good ol' American risk-taking. Basically, the contestant already possesses a suitcase that has a certain amount of money in it, and he or she has to eliminate the other suitcases (held by models, of course) one-by-one. Depending on which suitcases the contestant eliminates (whether it's a suitcase of $1 million or $1 or whatever in between), the nameless, faceless, "Banker" makes an offer to buy the suitcase that the contestant possesses. The contestants take a lot of time deliberating over which suitcase to eliminate, as if it actually makes a difference. There's also a lot of consultation of important people in the contestant's life about whether or not to take the Banker's offer, etc. There are also interludes in which we get video visits from soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan, and in the background stories of the contestants there's a lot of emphasis on how they're average Americans, etc.

My point is just that this show really encapsulates for me how you get this illusion of agency, calculability, rationality, when the system is actually structured by chance and speculation.

Adam's Presentation

Hi everyone,
Here's the transcript of my presentation along with my discussion question too. I'd be happy to field any questions about the absent cause or anything else, especially now that I've had some sleep...

And Now For Something Total(it)y Different: thinking totality differently, as difference

The main thesis of Nicholas Brown and Imre Szeman’s 25 Theses is that the dialectic, totality, and utopia are perceived today as hegemonic, teleological, instruments which eliminate difference. However, the real problem is precisely hegemony and its attendant difference, which appears to the dominant trend in philosophical critique as the only possibility, while difference and multiculturalism pretend to be multiform options, but are literally uniform, empty of content. It is in the dialectic, our authors argue, that content is dynamically produced.

In the “Introduction” to this week’s readings on ideology, Szeman and Kaposy tell us that the task of ideology theory is to consider: “how […] one’s thinking and disposition [is] anticipated by and integrated within daily economic, social, and political processes that are fundamentally beyond our ability to perceive them directly?” (158). These processes are what the these hope to illuminate. They open with a quote from Walter Benjamin about how the mode of perception changes over time: and each thesis is about changing concepts based in new modes of perception, new ways of perceiving the totality of social and material conditions that condition our thought.

For Lukács, as for Hegel, totality is the sum of what is: it’s where the subject and the object, the individual and the social, where everything in fact comes together. And this sum total can be known through proper thinking, interpretation, and the proper (class) perspective. From Brown and Szeman’s point of view, we can now see that teleology was never so important. And by separating totality from teleology, which the process of reification already did long ago, the idea of the total opens up to new possibilities.

In “25 Theses on Philosophy in the Age of Finance Capital”, Brown and Szeman tell us:

“Philosophy today faces two challenges: first, it is not critical enough of its own processes and concepts; second, it is inadequate to the present.”

This is the problem of totality. In their aesthetic theories, Lukács and Jameson both tell us we are dealing with: “a situation in which the truth of our social life as a whole —as a totality—is increasingly irreconcilable with the possibilities of aesthetic expression available to us.”

Currently, Philosophy is stalled out: there’s a naïve view that because there are so many socials, ideologies, identities, positions and counter-positions, critique is built in to the system itself, and therefore it is possible for critical philosophy to be adequate to the present. Brown and Szeman define a situation in which concepts are not only reified out of an organic whole, but are treated as such by theory, which now seeks to “challenge concepts head on, dead-end in the reassertion of some primal category like ‘desire,’ ‘the subject,’ ‘the political,’ and so on. It is perhaps impossible to do otherwise; but in that case we should be aware of the limits of what we parade about as critical theory. As Nietzsche reminds us, there is nothing especially impressive about hiding something behind a bush only later to trumpet its discovery.”

And yet this is the state of knowledge production today; in the current academic marketplace, this is the dominant mode of critique. Thinking a bit further about the market, the job market, and the lack of jobs in the market, we might read a model of production contained in Nietzsche’s sarcasm: to hide something and uncover it accomplishes nothing, but to hire someone to discover it is a different story. This is, after all, the logic behind economic stimulus. During the great depression John Maynard Keynes, only-half-jokingly suggested that were the American government to put money in jars, bury them and hire people to dig them up, they would stimulate the economy and get everything back to normal. But to imagine this as a present day academic analogy articulates the inadequacy of thought to the present. This model of intellectual production, of hiding and uncovering, is of course incapable of imagining the ways knowledge is produced through intellectual labour in the age of finance capitalism. Yet it does serve as an allegory for what is called ideology critique, which seeks out hidden inequalities and injustice to trumpet and denounce the practices it has exposed. And it often ends there. This impoverished hide and seek is one of the many ways by which critique has been implicated as complicit with capitalism as the introduction to the 25 Theses points out. And another thesis of the theses is that critique doesn’t need to end there.

(This is where the spatio-temporal allegory of the absent cause comes in. Don’t look for it, but it’s there, and pointing it out won’t necessarily change anything. But more on that later.)

According to Brown and Szeman, the problem of inadequacy generates its own answer, in that philosophy’s critical power comes from its inadequacy to the present. For Hegel, that’s the condition of possibility for philosophical knowledge, the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk, only after the party’s over. But how can one then reconcile this non-adequation to the present with Marx’s inherited interpretation of Hegel’s insight: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”? So far we have a little narrative of the history of philosophy…Hegel bequeaths the inadequacy of philosophy to Marx who seeks to unleash this inadequacy, to inhabit it as Brown and Szeman suggest, saying,

“The task facing philosophy today is to examine its filiations to its most hallowed concepts

and to consider anew their productivity within a new frame of reference—

one, for instance, in which Europe is no longer the leading edge of world

history. Easy to say, harder to think.”

The task at hand is to take advantage of reification’s fracturing, atomization, and specialization—its removal of elements from an organic whole, a whole even Lukács says was alienated and never all that organic to begin with, and to recuperate old forms to new content. They point out that to reclaim or reinvestigate concepts is to risk a conservative project, so to take advantage of reification, one must take advantage of semantic possibilities, remembering “that all genuinely historical thinking is ironic through and through, setting up truth only to turn it on its head the next moment” (37). This is more than just an epistemic statement or program, it’s a definition of the dialectic. To turn something on its head after all inverts content and sets up new relations which resolve antagonisms and create new ones.

And this process happens all the time anyway, as Brown and Szeman point out, in the transvaluation of concepts—for example in the concept of the nation, the repressive state is now “suddenly seen by many on the Left as a potential bulwark against the predations of multinational capital”, while the opposite can be said of transgression.

Their example of “Civil society” is particularly rich. They mention that it gets dusted off and gets a fresh coat of paint “during inhospitable times” to act as a “magic” cure for cultural anxieties. This morning, in fact, a commentator on CNN said the protestors in Cairo had set up a whole “civil society” in Tahrir Square—presumably, then, there’s no real need now for Mubarak to step aside, as everyone gets to democratically participate in their civil society. I just turned 33, so I’m probably older than most people here, but I remember (now, after the fact, like the owl of Minerva) that the romantic idea of civil society was the way Apple first tried to sell us the internet. My family’s first computer was a Macintosh Performa “Global Village” edition, and of course this idea of the village’s “expressive community”, combined with the rights and recognition guaranteed by the state, forms the definition of civil society. And it’s how the internet has been marketed all along, regardless of the “hospitableness” of the times. (though perhaps there’s something to say about the solipsistic “MySpace” being overtaken by the friendlier-more-neighbourly-sounding Facebook, yet, the face, the primordial image or avatar of recognition, is really no less about the right of the individual than the guaranteed right to My(Own)Space). The internet’s pretension to civil society is one of the many techno-utopian narratives Brown, Szeman, and Cazdyn critique.

I think the most important of the continually transvalued concepts is that of totality: which “was surely an alibi for a will to power,” yet which the authors go on to say “may be our only tool for grasping the new functioning of global capital” (37).

Daily, Totality or totalizing gets a bad rap—often with good reason, but often too it’s like “socialism” or “feminism” in America. Totality is a crucial process and a term that is as semantically pliable and as full of possibility as “Utopia”, which is itself another potentially conservative term, or a pejorative. There are two ways to think utopia that I want to mention here: 1) is simply to imagine an alternative to the totality presented by present social and material relations, as in the Jameson essay we read the other week. But 2) and this is more Lukacsian, utopia is the name of a related desire to bridge the distance between thought and its object, between subject and object, between experience and representation. The idea of an unalienated existence is the utopian essence that animates all change, either progressive or conservative, and that’s why while anyone can call their political opponents “utopian” they are, in that very act, expressing their hope for a different way of being. Utopia is as inescapable as reification and totality, in fact, they’re all part of the same dialectical movement.

These theses we’re looking at are utopian; they attempt to imagine an alternative; they “imagine the role and scope of philosophy in the age of finance capitalism”. Maybe in this age it’s impossible to imaging unmediated, or less mediated, or considerably less mediated relations to one’s mode of living, but the first step is to imagine what Brown and Szeman call “a mediating code”, that is, a political rather than plainly conceptual philosophy that can match the “dynamism” of finance capitalism, that can be adequate to finance capitalism, and engage it dialectically.

(The next step will be found in the absent cause, which answers capitalism on its own terms, but not yet)

Let us look at a few of the theses to get started.

Liam, I know you have an issue with the presentation of the first thesis, but I think that it’s all there, no qualification is necessary, this is descriptive. The alternative to the dialectic is relativism; that’s the predominant way of thinking about difference and change. But we can talk more about this later.

Unburdened of its teleology, which is presented here as particular and outmoded historical content rather than a transhistorical essential feature of dialectical mechanics (and I have my reservations about this, maybe we can talk about the unteleological dialectic in the discussion), the Hegelian system is not so scary, not essentially of a piece with any of the historical totalitarianisms with which it’s been associated.

In Thesis 5 (and also thesis 19), I’m not sure what this thought of the 1,2,or 3 is, but the diagnosis explains why dialectical thinking does not eliminate difference, and why teleology is absurd. The Hegelian split between the subject and the object is thought a little harder (as Lacan did), and we find that there can never be a purely utopian correspondence between identities, so any claims that the Aufhebung is a difference killer belongs in the past, to the historical moment when in fact it was—it’s not anymore. Also, difference is uniform, and this is something that many people have said over the years, I’m thinking in particular of Paul de Man, but as far as I know no one has ever used that argument to argue for the dialectic as a producer of “real” difference, so I think that’s pretty cool. And this mode of difference production is what drives history.

To rethink totality and utopia, the key is thesis 21: totality is simply to think about the whole, not necessarily some perfected whole, but the sum of what’s at work in the present conjuncture.

To imagine how the sum could be configured differently is the work of utopian thinking, and totality is always the essential feature to such thinking, the frame or the horizon against which thinking can be measured. The utopias we are most familiar with (all good, no bad) disregard the totality—Brown and Szeman compare this to the Hegelian “bad infinity”, but it could also be understood as textbook Sartreian bad faith, perhaps the worst faith of all: an appeal to an ultimate unmediated essence that denies any contingency, any decision; it is precisely this impulse that underwrites the elimination of difference, the totalization that is totalitarian. To put it another way, it’s the death drive.

After Globalization is a provocation against narratives that say that there is a distinct category called globalization, that pulls together different phenomena such as microtechnology and world-wide mass travel, and assumes that the hodgepodge assembled in this category is what collapses space and time and ends history. Cazdyn and Szeman argue that there is only capitalism.

In the “Something’s Missing” section, Cazdyn and Szeman continue to think beyond simple reification by introducing the Spinozan-Althusserian-Jamesonian spatio-temporal allegory of history as “absent cause”. Education, morality, nation, the future, history, capitalism, common sense—none of these will save us from the globalization which consists in nothing and after which there is nothing. But these nothings are in fact structured by something. Literally, nothing is there, and yet its effects are everywhere. Capitalism is located nowhere and yet it affects everything everywhere.

“A relation is the perfect figure for nothing” (58).

In The Political Unconscious, Jameson explains Althusser’s revision of the traditional Marxist conception of relations of production as levels in a structure that somehow interact with each other synchronically, and also change over time. Althusser revised these in part in order to get around the problems of interpreting history referentially, seeing as he did teleology as a Hegelian cover up of Stalinist dogma, and influenced as he was by Lacan’s formulation of “the real as that which resists symbolization absolutely, as well as Spinoza’s idea of the absent cause”. Jameson proposes: “history is not a text, not a narrative master or otherwise, but that as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form” (35). Jameson is showing how Althusser solves the problem of mediation between the levels in the base/superstructure model. The solution is to see relations as the structure itself. There are no levels, just relations. And this resolution to the problems of mediation is of course a utopian achievement, and the model of history as absent cause is to be sure a model of totality par excellence (though I get the feeling Althusser himself may bristle at this!).

Cazdyn and Szeman cleverly apply this model of Marxist Ontology to capitalism itself in order to highlight how despite our acute ability to identify reification, capitalism nevertheless appears invisible, as well as to suggest how absurd it is that capitalism can occupy such a utopian, totalizing position, that of, as Szeman says, “Capital-O Ontology”.

But more than this, Cazdyn and Szeman’s use of the absent cause refers back to (or totalizes?) the greater project of the “25 theses”: introducing the theses Brown and Szeman say “A meaningful existence: this is the goal, after all. It could be a long march” (39). Though we detect a distinct note of sarcasm covering an existential weariness, here is a good place to remember the purpose to which Jameson puts Althusser’s theory of structural relations in The Political Unconscious: it is to create a framework for interpretation; it is the structure that underlies the horizons of interpretation in which texts may be dialectically read against history “in the vastest sense” where the destiny of history becomes apparent as the progression of modes of production (84-9). Here interpretation and thereby existence become (more) adequate and meaningful, and as Brown and Szeman quote Benjamin to tells us “during long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence”…. These theses are meant to give us a glimpse.

Question: Everything totalizes; that is, everything presents itself as understandable, comprehensive and self-contained, at least enough to be comprehended. Any notion of representation presupposes a totality, as it requires some sense of adequation grounded in a relation. Jameson says (somewhere) that any ideology, any language totalizes. And perhaps my favourite part of the 25 theses is the quote in which Jameson calls his method “a ‘translation mechanism,’ a theoretical machine that makes it possible to convert other discourses into the central political problematic that animates Marxism” (39). I’ve always admired Jameson’s ability to read Derrida and say things like “the trace is just another way of saying ideology” or to read Deleuze and say “territorialization is what another tradition would call reification”. But I’ve never heard Jameson himself comment on it. A translation mechanism? It’s a totalizing mechanism! And this mechanism is precisely what allows critique to become adequate to its object, what makes utopia possible. So, what do you guys think about totality/totalizing? Is it naïve to think it can be harnessed as a force for positive change, or is it always going to be a mechanism to control and to perpetuate more of the same?