Of thinking, thoughts and poo-metaphors

I wasn't going to write again until tomorrow, but sometimes it is hard not to respond to challenges. The best I can do is to write as little and as quickly as possible until tomorrow, when I'll have more Locke to discuss.

Well, my last post, talking as it did of 'ideas' (one could have as easily said 'thoughts' ) in animals, though determined by Locke, will, no doubt, add fuel to the poo-metaphor discussion. The relationship between thinking in thought will be a long, drawn-out discussion throughout the fall at least, imagine. You seem to acknowledge that something happens in the mind that isn't necessarily consciousness speaking English, French or German, but to radically deny that we should use a word to describe this or refer to it in any way. I never imagined that 'thoughts' sat there as pre-formed concretions, but it is interesting to think of thought in terms of digestive metaphors... rumination, digesting information, data being processed like food, another way of transforming that which has been taken in from outside the body and transforming it into something useful, breaking it into its constitutive parts and making it part of us. Anyway, the point of me trying to switch from the noun 'thought' to the gerund 'thinking' was to indicate that I was not talking about a 'thing', but about this 'what goes on'. You talk about behaviorism, and I respect the desire not to project something into the heads of children and animals and then take your own projections as observable truth. Because something seems plausible (that an infant acts for the reasons I attribute to it or views the world as I imagine it might) has no necessary truth (and this is what Proust is talking about in condemning the formal logic of the philosophers as opposed to the necessary truths revealed by desire). I tried to get a course of my own design to teach for next summer and entitled the course 'savages, noble and otherwise', making it about a continuing fascination with the state of nature, particularly as a speculative access to our own Id, as an impossible attempt to separate what is innate in us from what is acquired (they chose to go with someone else's class on monsters instead). I bring this up only because I can't pretend that what goes on in my own mind is as alien to me as what goes on in the head of an infant or an animal. We all know what is meant when someone talks about the 'mood' or the 'atmosphere' of something, and clearly there are lots of different moods and atmospheres, beyond a couple of words like 'dark' or 'sinister', the specifics of mood haven't been pinned down. We can recognize and enjoy a mood, but it's extremely difficult to talk about it. Does the fact that this is a non-verbal experience mean it isn't worth analyzing our own experience of mood and attempting to explain it? Should it be treated as non-existent, and covered over prudishly like something that shouldn't be displayed in public? Is the general atmospheric feeling I get from Dostoyevsky as opposed to Kafka like a an excrement that should be released in a private place and buried or flushed away? Think how hard it is to explain your reaction to music, or the paucity of our vocabulary in talking about scents. Should dwelling on experiences of this sort not count as thinking? Or only so far as we specifically refer to it as "that indescribable odor I noticed when I walked past a certain place that seemed somehow familiar and whose origin I couldn't quite place"? Because in our thoughts, we don't constantly have to spell things out for ourselves like that, and it isn't language that we use if we start searching through our memories trying to find another context for that smell so as to be able to figure out what it is and why it is so familiar (and perhaps why the sense of recognition gives us pleasure - now that I seem to be slipping into Proust again).

Perhaps we can know of the world only what we can be accessed through our experience, and it makes no sense for metaphysics to speculate on God, essences, or anything purely transcendent. Perhaps we can no nothing of our own thought processes what we are actually conscious of, and speculating about an unconscious mind (other the observable biological autonomic system) is creating another internal transcendent space and opening the door to a new metaphysics of mist and air. But can we know nothing of our own experience only what has already been inscribed in language? We didn't create the world, we didn't create the conscious mind, but, though we have inherited language and it has largely shaped who we are, it IS something created by us and something we continue to create. Unlike platonic essences or the working of our unconscious, experiences we haven't yet given an adequate linguistic expression to are directly accessible to us and we can express them.

As to Derrida, I'm beginning to feel you read him as much as I do, and all I can say is I agree with you. I sometimes read other people's discussion of a Derrida I don't recognize who seems to want to destroy any possibility for rational discourse or meaning of any sort, and at times these descriptions seem bound to a wider reading of Derrida than I can lay claim to and to make use of quotes I don't remember from texts I have read. Nietzsche sometimes receives this treatment as well, though not to the same extent. It will be interesting to bring this up again when looking back over 'otobiographies: the ear of the other', which is largely about Nietzsche's reception, including his being co-opted by Nazi sympathizers. Hopefully we'll get around to both reading and writing enough by Derrida in the coming year to be able to with more justice figure out what portrayal of Derrida does him justice, whether he is a reasonable and attentive observer of necessary ambiguities and the role of language and metaphor in though or whether he is the nihilistic debunker of reason of any sort. I still think that his falling out with Foucault over Descartes, and the fact that he distrusts Foucault's fondness for madness as much as he does Rousseau's fondness for the state of nature points to someone who is deeply attached rational discourse - though his love for Mallarme and Blanchot might suggest someone who enjoys obfuscation as much as clarification.

Locke, Descartes, animals

I started to read your two new posts, but decided I should first write what I opened this up to write. Not that I have anything particularly well planned out in mind, but I'm reading Locke's "essay concerning human understanding", and I've been thinking vaguely about the fact that you recently mentioned a philosophical interest in animals (thus the pork trilogy... by the way, I'm currently writing 'Notes from the underground' - not like the Borges character who writes Don Quixote, but maybe I'll explain elsewhere at some point) - I will react to your most recent posts next time - probably tomorrow.
Anyway, animals is an incredibly popular theme at the moment (and kind of always has been I guess - which is not to accuse you of trendiness, but rather to say over the past few years I've encountered the theme often, so there is a lot of reading and writing that will necessarily get mixed into anything I say (complicating and confusing the issue rather than making it clearer or more carefully thought out I fear). At any rate, who Locke is arguing against much of the time (and this won't be my only Locke entry... I'm not going to make this a one book = one post thing), who he is arguing against in certain cases isn't entirely clear to me, though I know that his stress on there being no such thing as innate ideas and the issue he takes with an image of animals as machines is targeted at the 'cartesians'... and of course, having only read the two things everybody reads by Descartes, I have no idea where a lot of what is attributed to 'cartesians' comes from, and whether it accurately presents what Desartes thought and wrote. And then, was it the Cartesians or someone else who insisted, for example, that the soul always thinks? I should have an edition with decent annotations and footnotes, but that's neither here nor there. I kind of love John Locke, both in terms of the content of his reflections and his dry way of ridiculing the ideas he disagrees with... I feel like Victorian nonsense is already present in the nonsense he makes to refute (pages and pages on the pointlessness of imagining the soul can think separately from the mind, that thought is possible without memory or consciousness, etc, or similar pages on innate ideas - God and Worship, the fact that something cannot simultaneously be and not be [once again, I have a vague interest in who initially argued this]). Of course, while reading, you periodically think that certain examples are poorly chosen, and you look ahead to Kant and psychoanalysis for complications and counters, but I sat down to write about those passages where he mentions animals... and combine them with more interesting thoughts on animals, because what I object to in Locke probably won't be particularly revelatory.
At any rate, Locke objects to the supposition that animals don't have ideas, and wants to insist that they do have ideas gained by perception and that the difference lies in their inability to further reason beyond the gathering and remembering of ideas. I think I'm sort of nitpicking when I read and, though it isn't his main argument, though he doesn't really develop it, I keep adamantly objecting to wayward comments of his (especially knowing that others have actually studied animal behavior and neurology and have a competence I don't), but Locke seems to try to attribute to animals only simple ideas, which following his own descriptions would be absolutely useless. Perhaps it is nitpicking and perhaps it is a serious internal contradiction in what he writes, but simple ideas are basically nothing but sensory impressions, not yet subject to any reworking or processing into complex or abstract ideas - it is precisely abstraction that Locke says animals lack, and yet, I'm sure he wouldn't deny that my cat knows what packages contain her treats, even when the packages are slightly different in size and color, and sealed so that no smell comes out of them. How would this be possible if she hadn't formed some abstract notion of 'package', which is something more than the vague association of door with outside and dish with food? How could animals get by if they couldn't identify a 'type' despite variations, or combine sensory impressions and recognize a certain visual impression as matching olfactory and auditory impressions and thus comprising a single complex unity? An 'Idea', basically meaning a sensory impression that is added to memory, has no value whatsoever if it is not abstracted, if it is not removed from its context and made to fit a 'more or less' pattern so that different trees, for instance, can be seen as having something in common, so that various cans of food in spite of their differences can be grouped into a single category of 'cans of food'. Without abstraction, it is impossible to imagine what possible purpose sensory impressions could serve. If every impression were self-contained and without relation to other impressions, if shades of green couldn't be seen as having a certain similarity, which suggests a process of comparison.
And to go off subject a bit, speaking of innate ideas, I remember when I was a kid being told that the yellow and black on bees was a natural warning sign and meant danger, and I had trouble believing that, thinking, how would animals know that those colors meant that, especially if I don't? As a kid I already had a notion of symbols being conventionally determined, and so I wondered how symbols could possibly arise in nature and what their point would be if they weren't universally recognized (man being a possible threat who coexisted in the same environment, if black and yellow meant 'back off', shouldn't he be born with that knowledge, rather than having to learn from his experience with bees that they could, in fact cause pain).

Locke brings up the subject of anthropomorphizing only in his discussion with God (where he assumes that only idiots could imagine God as being person-like), though if anyone were to object that attributing ideas to animals is anthropomorphizing, beyond his dismissal of innate ideas which sort of cuts off the only other possible explanation for animal behavior (given the admitted vagueness of what is meant by saying animals have ideas). Nevertheless, Locke does talk about experience as being the only reliable guide for establishing principles, and of course, a process very similar to anthropomorphism is necessary in dealing with other people. I have to 'Kevinize' everyone I deal with to some extent, project my own way of thinking and feeling as a sort of template on which to construct my image of the person I'm dealing with, alterations are made accordingly, some are generally assumed based on past experience of other people, and yes, purely formal rules can be applied that don't require any sympathy or empathy, but for the most part an assumption of similarity is vital for social interaction. That this should be a starting point in dealing with other animals is logical. 'Infants, foreigners and animals' would be a nice title for something or other, grouping together those whose opacity is assured for lack of a common language and whose behavior isn't necessarily subject to all the same cultural conditioning and codes as ours. I'm trying to think back to a discussion I had a year ago - about a book on animals and humans (I don't remember the author or even the title), I remember talking about the way we experience lunatics on a subway platform, the danger inherent in not understanding how or what he is thinking or being able to predict their actions. It is generally unlikely they are going to do anything violent, even the ones screaming and gesticulating violently, though with those, suspicion of violence is actually connected to codes being used which normally signify intended violence. But there's fear even with the harmless ones that just mutter and talk at people or to themselves, merely because we no longer have any way of predicting what they will say or do. I'm getting a bit incoherent myself, off the subject of animals in thinking about the mixture between formal rules and projection of self as how we deal with others and animals. On seeing an animal in the woods, one may think to oneself according to rules learned from others "X does not attack humans", or "X only attacks humans under such and such conditions", but it is testing the limits of our ability to project and imagine some sort of subjective experience of the world that makes animals interesting.
I remember being in a class on 'primate behavior' more than a decade ago. For some reason we one day saw a bit of a documentary... A snake bit a lioness and her cubs, I think, and the cubs died. The narrator talked about how after the lioness recovered, you could see her being particularly fierce in attacking the jackals or whatever, jackals having eaten her cubs after they had been poisoned, when she was still too weak to intervene. A kid in the back of the class objected saying, "how do you know she was really remembering the murder of her cubs - maybe she was just particularly hungry because she had been lain up and hadn't eaten much during her illness". I remember the kid was a swaggering jock who I particularly disliked, but when he asked that, I do remember thinking "we don't" and he was right for asking.
Why am I reminiscing about all this? I don't know. Have you read Derrida's "The animal that therefore I am"? (The title in French is "l'animal que donc je suis", and the 'suis' can be read as "I am" or "I follow" - typical French word play). Me being a kind of worshipper of cats, it is kind of nice to read Derrida's philosophical confrontation with his cat.

Wittgenstein and deconstruction

I'm working right now at a thesis chapter that deals with Derrida and ordinary language philosophy. "Signature Event Context" offers a reading of J. L. Austin that's very flattering in its attention, but also quite critical. It spawned a nasty spat between Derrida and John Searle, which is unfortunately one of the rare moments in which continental and analytic philosophy talked to one another. My chapter discusses Derrida's criticisms of Austin and asks whether these criticisms can apply to the appeal to ordinary language more generally, and to Wittgenstein in particular. Some people (Stanley Cavell and Martin Stone) take Derridean deconstruction to be sharply at odds with what Wittgenstein is trying to do, while others (Simon Glendinning and Henry Staten) find deep parallels between Wittgenstein and Derrida. I'm not yet sure which side I'm on, and I'm not sure to what extent I need to pick sides: there can be deep affinities as well as important differences. To a large extent, my uncertainty comes from my uncertainty about Derrida. That is, I don't feel at all confident in my understanding of Derrida, so I'm not sure where I stand with him. I just read a paper by Martin Stone that I think gives a strong reading of Wittgenstein, but offers a Derrida I'm not sure I recognize. I thought you'd be a worthwhile person to run all of this by since you know Derrida far better than I do. And because you'll certainly be approaching what I say from a more Derridean angle: people like Cavell and Stone, and even Glendinning, are more steeped in the analytic tradition and Wittgenstein than they are in Derrida and continental philosophy, so I worry that they might be giving me a skewed perspective.

If I want to talk about Stone on Wittgenstein and Derrida, the place to start is probably with Wittgenstein's famous discussion of rules. Wittgenstein is one of the first philosophers to give sustained attention to the question of what rule following consists in. This is particularly striking given that rule following seems to be implicit in so much philosophy: a great deal of our thinking about ethics and rationality, for instance, seems to rely on the notion of following rules. For Wittgenstein, rules also feature prominently not only in our thinking about mathematics, but in our thinking about thinking more generally: what is it to understand a concept if not the understanding of the rules according to which that concept can be applied in future instances? (As you'll see, this isn't meant to be simply a rhetorical question.)

Wittgenstein closely associates rules with interpretation. One example of a rule that Wittgenstein discusses is a signpost. Supposing you see a sign that says "Vancouver" with an arrow like this "->". The standard way of reading that signpost would be to take it to tell us that Vancouver is on the road to the right. But why do we take the arrow "->" to signify "right"? Couldn't we just as well read it as pointing to the left? (At one point he asks why we couldn't just as well take a pointing arm to signify the direction indicated by following the outstretched finger up to the shoulder.) One answer that Wittgenstein's imagined interlocutor proposes is that when we see the arrow, we interpret it as pointing to the right. But Wittgenstein finds a regress in this kind of answer: couldn't the interpretation itself be open to interpretation? That is, whatever this interpretation consists in--whether it's a mental picture, a written instruction, a spoken or thought word--is just as open to alternative interpretations as the original arrow.

(I should pause here to note that this is one of the similarities between Wittgenstein and Derrida that strikes me as really interesting. Both are very interested in what Derrida might call "the materiality of the sign." That is, both of them are highly sensitive to our philosophical tendency to avoid difficulties by imagining certain abstract processes like interpretation or meaning to take place in some inexplicably spiritual and exact medium that's free of all the ambiguities of normal sign use. And both of them combat this tendency by insisting that we treat these abstract processes in just the way that we might treat written or spoken signs.)

If rules in general are subject to interpretation, and interpretation itself is subject to further interpretation, it would seem that any course of action could count as following a particular rule on some interpretation of that rule, and that there's no absolute authority that can determine which is the correct interpretation. One climax in Wittgenstein's discussion of rules comes at §201 of the Philosophical Investigations: "This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here." This passage, and the stuff around it, has been subjected to volumes upon volumes of scrutiny, and there's still wide disagreement about exactly what's going on here.

One very influential reading, most famously advanced by Saul Kripke, takes Wittgenstein to be offering us a "skeptical paradox" and also a "skeptical solution" to his skeptical paradox. The paradox is that rules would seem to require interpretations to fix their meanings, but since interpretations are equally open to this requirement, there's no absolutely correct interpretation of a rule. The "skeptical solution" is that rules (and rule-based practices, such as meaning, understanding, interpretation, and so on) don't have absolutely correct interpretations, but nor do they need them. What makes an interpretation correct is the agreement of a community on how to follow that rule. And this answer isn't a cop-out since communities are constitutive of rules. That is, there's no such thing as a rule if there isn't a community that agrees on how to follow that rule: "It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which a report was made, an order given or understood; and so on.—To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions)" (PI §199).

I think this reading is wrong, and wrong in a way that's important to my thesis, because I think it arises precisely from a failure to take Wittgenstein's appeal to ordinary language into account. The point, I think, is precisely that we don't make an interpretation every time we follow a rule. For instance, I don't actually interpret a signpost with an arrow as pointing to the right and not to the left. If we look at how we ordinarily use a word like "interpret," we don't apply it to any and every case of rule following. Rather, we apply it in cases where there's ambiguity or room for doubt. If the sign is badly scratched up so that I have trouble discerning which way the arrow's pointing, I might find myself interpreting the sign as signalling that I should go left or right. But in ordinary circumstances I don't do any interpreting.

This isn't meant to offer a solution of any kind to the "skeptical paradox," but rather to suggest that this paradox only arises if we misuse and metastasize the ordinary meaning of "interpret."

Stone offers something like this reading of Wittgenstein on rule following, but he also uses it as a way of contrasting Wittgenstein with Derrida. Derrida, he thinks, takes much the same position as Kripke, arguing that every application of a rule (use of a sign, meaningful expression) requires interpretation, noting that there is no endpoint to the chain of interpretations of interpretations, and arguing for an essentially skeptical position on the possibility of definite meaning.

Before I'd read Stone, I was inclined to suggest that Derrida and Wittgenstein actually converge on their understanding of rules and signs, but if Stone's reading of Derrida is correct, then I'll have to change my inclination. Stone has a fair amount of textual evidence to back up his reading, but it doesn't sound like the Derrida I think I've read. Let me lay out what I think is the right line to take on rules and signs, and it's the line I think Wittgenstein takes and I less confidently think Derrida takes. You can tell me (a) if you think it's the right way to read Derrida, and (b) if you think it's right.

I said before that I don't read Wittgenstein as embracing a skeptical position about meaning because he wouldn't grant that every act of rule following involves interpretation. One danger of saying that is that it can risk making Wittgenstein out to be some sort of conservative (both admirers and detractors have read him this way). On one hand, we all follow signposts in the same way because the question of how to interpret them simply cannot arise, and on the other hand, we might follow all sorts of more politically charged social institutions in the same way for similar reasons. But I don't think Wittgenstein is trying to draw some sort of line and say that we cannot interpret the sign differently, or that it's impossible to doubt certain rules. His point is rather that, for the most part, we do not, and I think part of what's important about his philosophy is precisely that he draws our attention to the fact that there's no foundational reason for us not to doubt rules, interpret them differently, and so on. At one point, he gives the famous example of the child who's taught the rule "add 2," and starts writing out "2, 4, 6, 8..." as his teacher expects, but then gets to 1000 and continues "1004, 1008, 1012..." No matter how much cajoling and prompting his teacher gives him, he simply cannot be brought to follow the rule as the teacher expects. Part of the point to this allegory, I take it, is that there's no absolutely compelling reason that the teacher can give that will make the student see what he means: as Kripke says, every rule is always open to alternative interpretations.

However, I don't take Kripke's moral from this allegory. I think what we're supposed to learn is that we're able to do things like follow rules because we share a certain sense of what rule following consists of with others (and what teaching is, what speaking and meaning are, and so on), and that the bedrock for these shared practices isn't some rational justification--and also isn't the shared practices of a community--but what Wittgenstein calls Übereinstimmung: we just happen to be attuned with others in particular ways. He draws out the fact of this attunement by pointing out the impossibility of reaching agreement with someone who happens not to be attuned with us. It's not that a community grounds agreement, but that attunement is a necessary condition for the possibility of there being a community in the first place.

So on this reading of Wittgenstein, it's not that every rule or meaningful utterance stands in need of interpretation, and the interpretation stands in need of further interpretation, and so on. It's rather that there's nothing that could definitively halt this regress of interpretation if it were to start. That's all I'd taken Derrida to be saying as well. I'd taken his deconstructive readings to be playful exercises that undermine the aspiration to ground the meaningfulness of signs in their reaching out unambiguously to intended objects. By showing the ways in which signs can be alternatively interpreted, he wants to interrupt a certain Platonistic or idealistic conception of the relation of signs to the world. But that doesn't mean he wants to replace that conception with one in which everything is always open to (and demanding) interpretation.

That was maybe not the most elegantly presented discussion. I hope it wasn't too long-winded or unclear. And I hope it was thorough enough that you have some sense of the debate I'm trying to position Derrida in.

More responses

And then reading through the other stuff you wrote... I should note, first, that I say less in response than I maybe should. It's not that I don't find what you say interesting--completely the contrary--but that I don't feel I have much to contribute. I could say, "Wow, I should read Proust," but then I'd find myself saying that a lot. But I do really enjoy getting this overview of your reading.

You mention someone objecting to Berkeley by saying you can't really live his philosophy, and you say you're not thinking of Johnson. I wonder if you're thinking of Hume, who wasn't talking about Berkeley so much as his own sceptical conundrum. I can't remember the exact quote, but basically he says this can all seem deeply perplexing in the study, but as soon as you put the book down and step outside, you can't possibly go about the business of living while taking this scepticism seriously.

Your mention of Proust letting his characters shine through in their individuality, not letting the narrator control them too much, reminds me more than anything of Chekhov. It's the thing I think I most love about Chekhov: he's so generous to his characters. In Ibsen, the characters are caught up in this tragic momentum where they can do nothing to alter their course. In Chekhov, it feels like the plot meanders because the characters have so much freedom to be themselves, as if the author doesn't want to exert the control he'd have to in order to tighten the momentum of the tale. And yet, for all that--because of that, because the wills of the characters are put front and centre and aren't held back--his plays have tremendous tension.

I wonder about this thing about theory cheapening literature. I'm maybe not quite sure what it means, that is, what counts as theory in literature. Would Anna Karenina be better off without its opening sentence, or does that not count as a theoretical explanation of the themes of the novel? I suppose also Proust was writing before much postmodern experimentation had come along. Can Milan Kundera really be called out for theorizing about his own novels while he writes them? I suppose you could object to it, but in Kundera it's a very deliberate narrative strategy rather than simple clumsiness or preachiness.

That's so cool that your published work has earned you fan mail! What was the paper on, and what were the responses like?

As for Foucault and Nietzsche, you bring me back to the course I took on Foucault back in Toronto. I remember a friend of mine saying what he found weird about Foucault is the way that, in Nietzsche, the stuff about genealogy, will, power, and the like all has a kind of spiritual import--it's as if Nietzsche wants to sublime his soul--and in Foucault it all becomes political. Which is the reverse of what you might expect: if you simply described the two thinkers and were asked who you thought influenced whom, you might think that the more down-to-earth politically minded thinker came first, and he was succeeded by this guy who took those practical ideas and ran with them to create a project for the self-overcoming of mankind.

All that said, I seem to remember being told that the Nietzschean influence on Foucault's early work was rather slender (though I've only read bits of Les Mots et les Choses, so what do I know?). I think the suggestion was that, with his essay on Nietzsche, and following it up with Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality, Foucault entered a "genealogical" phase, and that his earlier work had been more characterized by "archaeology" and his conception of ruptures. Les Mots et les Choses, for instance, characterizes massive changes in the structure of thought, but doesn't seem to characterize them in terms of will or power enacting this shift.

You wonder why Eric A. Havelock gets almost as much mention as Proust in our tags. I think it's because I've been a little more consistent and diligent in my tagging than you have. But fear not, this post will get a tag for Proust and none for Havelock, so Proust will quickly be leaving Havelock in his dust! I'm also pleased to see Wittgenstein climbing up there. I didn't mention him at all for the first few months, which felt odd. Not that it was deliberate or anything.

Gosh, and now it's past my bedtime. It's Friday, but I'm not going to post either of these today because I'd really like to write to you about Wittgenstein and deconstruction, and I don't want to have sent out a couple posts before I do that. (If I do, I worry that the next time I find a moment to sit down with this blog, I'll be responding to your response to my stuff on thought and language and will run out of time again.) I don't know why I felt the need to flag this. Call it a peculiar sense of honesty--I'd feel oddly deceptive if I led you to believe that I'd just written this as soon as I posted it.

(It's now Monday evening and I can truthfully tell you that I'm writing this last sentence just before I click "Publish Post.")

Language and thought

Wow, lots of interesting stuff from you recently. There's actually something in my own reading that I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on, but first I should respond to some of what you said. Most pressingly, I suppose, I should answer for what I said about thoughts and poo.

First of all, you say you don't recognize yourself in my characterization of thoughts sitting in the head like poo in the bowels, there yet unformed, and then given shape as they leave the body. Maybe it was the provocative way I put it? What I meant is that you seem to have a model of the relationship between thought and language such that thought is something that exists in the head independently, and language is a tool for putting those thoughts across to others, and that this tool can shape or distort the original thought. At one point in the post I was responding to you describe language as a "vehicle for thought." If language is a vehicle for thought, that suggests that thought is a kind of substance, something that can be transmitted but that requires a medium in which to be transmitted. Later on, your write: "Thoughts have to be coded before they can be communicated, and when they are decoded by someone else, they never quite match what they started out as." Here the metaphor isn't a vehicle but a code. A code is something that can be transmitted between two people, but what the code encodes is a message that exists independently of the code. Unpacking the metaphor, you seem to think of thought as a something that isn't quite language but enough like language that it can be "encoded" in language. It's these sorts of things that made me associate you with my poo analogy.

Actually, I think the code metaphor is quite telling: a literal code is a language that is translated from another language. If we follow the metaphor out, thought itself must be a kind of language in order to be encoded. And if so, do we have any better model for the kind of language that thought is than language itself?

It occurs to me that I don't have to reach as far as Wittgenstein to object to this model of the relationship between language and thought. Isn't this really one of the main targets of Derrida's work in the 60's and 70's? In "Signature Event Context," Derrida tries to deconstruct the notion that communication consists essentially of transmitting encoded thoughts from one mind to another, and in particular that writing is simply an extension of this transmission that allows us to communicate with people who aren't present. You know Derrida better than I do, so I'll let you judge whether you think he'd find your characterization of language as "something that couldn't possibly cause any objection."

In your defense, you insist that we can't simply say that thought = language and condemn children and others who don't think to thoughtlessness. I don't think I want to say anything as crude as that. But I do want to say that our concept of thought is closely tied to our concept of language, so that we're only able to ascribe thoughts to infants and animals by virtue of giving words to those thoughts. I think it's unproblematic to say that the infant wants its mommy even if it can't yet cry "mama." The mistake, I think, comes in then reifying this "thought," and thinking that there's a something in the infant's head which is the thought-that-I-want-mommy, and which we're identifying when we say the infant wants its mommy. That leap--from saying the child wants its mommy to saying that there's a definite thought in the child's head to the effect that it wants its mommy--then leads us to suppose that when the child learns to speak and says "I want mommy," it then too has a thought in its head, only now it's able to put that thought into words.

What I'm saying when I question your characterization of language is that I question this leap from how we talk about thoughts to the ontology of thoughts. Ascribing thoughts to infants, animals, and even other talkative people, is simply a way of talking, a way of describing behaviour that we find useful and illuminating. But if you think about how we use this language of thought ascription--and especially how we first come to learn to use phrases like "he's thinking..."--you'll see that this language doesn't really consist of descriptions of inner states, but descriptions of behaviour. Which isn't to say I'm a behaviourist--I'm not saying that thought is behaviour--but just that we learn how to talk about people's mental lives by seeing how they behave, not by seeing into their souls.

This might also explain what I said about thoughts on the tips of tongues. I (and Wittgenstein) wasn't denying that we can often have that experience, and that often we then find the words we were looking for. The point, rather, is that that expression ("it's on the tip of my tongue") isn't a description of my consciousness, where I can as it were see the thought sitting there, but through a thick enough haze that I can't accurately find words for it. Rather, it's a way of expressing the fact that I don't quite have the words I want, but I hope to come up with them soon. As Wittgenstein suggests, if no one ever then came up with the words, we wouldn't have use for this expression.

So yes, I agree with you that thought and language aren't the same thing, and that it's perfectly legitimate to talk about thoughts I can't find words for or what have you. But I want to resist the further inference that these thoughts are things of a sort, mental things, or even mental processes as you suggest.

Signs

According to the little tags next to our blog, there have been as many posts about Eric A. Havelock as there have about Proust, though I find that hard to believe. Anyway, I'm sure I've told you before that years ago I picked up Deleuze's "Proust et les signes", already knowing Proust very well and not having read anything at all by Deleuze, and when I read it, it was a revelation... I had read things on Proust by Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Ernst Robert Curtius, Beckett, plenty of people you've never heard of and probably a couple other you have, and the actual experience of reading Proust was the only thing that had left any strong impression on me. Beyond being lucid, Deleuze was the only person I read who actually altered my initial experience and fundamentally changed my way of thinking about the the book. If afterwards when approaching more difficult, more obscure and less instantly enlightening books by Deleuze, I've generally stuck with them and paid attention, confident in the fact that there was a pay-off coming, it was largely because of this first experience (which, I might clarify, didn't have to be stuck with or struggled through and didn't delay the pay-off). Now years later, reading the Proust book again, for me not surprisingly I guess, I'm less convinced by the book as a whole... as a short aside, having spoken to you and written so often about Proust, I'm never sure what goes without saying, what's been covered, and what might be misunderstood if I don't clarify. As always I'll simply guess, probably both repeating the obvious and leaving out the necessary, but there you have it... Anyway, Deleuze's book is actually kind of two separate books written at different times on different subjects with an extra chapter tagged on that was a paper for some conference or collective book. The first half is making the point that Proust's book is not primarily about time or memory (as most people up until the sixties assumed it was) that it was about signs and apprenticeship ('apprentissage' which can also just mean the process of learning). He picks up on Proust's insistence throughout the book on all the things that the hero didn't know or understand, the multiplicity of people and things around him that he approaches as puzzles and mysteries, and his increasing adeptness at interpreting things (words, behavior, looks, feelings, works of art, etc). Deleuze makes the undeniable point that 'la recherche' basically recounts the formation of an accomplished semiotician. Making signs is of course a counterpoint to interpreting them - particularly to ensure a position in society where the ability to respond to signs in the correct way guarantees status. Jokes aren't really made as often as people signaling that they are being amusing and others giving signs that they've understood and appreciated in place of genuine laughter - signaling rank as an initiate, knowledge of the code, etc. Doctors decode symptoms, diplomats learn to interprets signs given off both intentionally and unintentionally by their counterparts (a rule in the recherche is that signs given off unintentionally are always more telling and important than those made on purpose). Of course the jealous lover is the ultimate paranoid sign-reader, trying to unravel every blush, sideways glance or cast-off comment, almost always without a sufficient information to make any sense of what they are interpreting, or even to separate the meaningful signs from the meaningless ones. But Deleuze gets alchemical and strange dividing Proust's world into arcane categories and ordering it according to rules often not spelled out by Proust. The four categories of signs he signals out are hard to take issue with - there are signs of 'mondanite', or of the social world, signs of love and jealousy, sensible (or sensorial signs) - the name he gives and the way he describes them is a bit surprising, but still not shocking, and finally signs belonging to the realm of art. He sets these four categories in a set hierarchy which is justifiable. In Proust it's clear that socializing and even less frivolous friendships are based on empty interactions - Deleuze claims that the signs of the social world cause a sort of nervous excitation and that the signs given off refer to nothing but themselves and places most of the value of socializing in it being a kind of entry level introduction to decoding signs... of course this milieu wouldn't be necessary if that were all it were. In the structure of la recherche, besides being a gathering place for characters, society is the perfect forum for showing the passage of time and the effects of time on society and the individual, which Deleuze isn't ignorant of and deals with later on. For Deleuze, from 'empty' signs in society we move to 'deceptive signs' of love. The meaning of the signs the beloved gives off is always opposed to what it claims to be. Love provides the best training in the reading of signs because of the violence the signs do to the lover, the constraint it puts on him/ her and the intensity it instills. From this we move to sensorial signs, by which Deleuze means the sudden ecstatic feeling conjured up by a stray sensation which often links a present moment to a moment in the past, a memory unlocked by a stray taste, a sound, a smell, etc that we've come across before (though at moments this doesn't seem to be attached to a memory and simply excites something in the imagination). For Deleuze, though these 'signs' do point to an essence, and are thus 'superior' to signs of society and love, they are still tainted by being material signs in that it is a concrete sensation that awakens them and that their 'meaning' (i.e. the memory they awaken) is also material. Finally signs of art use 'spiritualized' matter (whatever that means), the sounds or words or colors used to embody them being chosen and not constraining the essence they reveal... I'm not going to try to unravel or defend the whole explanation of this 'material/ spiritual' divide, which to me seems silly. In the second part of the book he'll try to look into what exactly an essence is, but at this point in his argument he's actually doing okay insofar as art DOES have the role of retrospectively giving meaning and order to the signs of the other levels, and though the 'sensible' signs, as Deleuze calls them, in the book are the most intense links to 'essences', it is true that they are rare, they can't be controlled or held onto and their meaning isn't fully revealed except insofar as they feed into the creation of art. The argument starts getting a bit weirder when he divides up the sorts of time that correspond to each of the sorts of signs. First there's time that is wasted (qu'on perd) which goes with society... this is simply frivolous and empty. Then there's 'lost time' (temps perdu), which goes with love - and this is a sort of tragic dimension of irreconcilable loss, jealous going with an understanding of death and disappearance, that things can't be held onto. Realizing you will one day be indifferent to the current object of your obsession is a sort of experience of dying... not that Deleuze spells it out in quite this way, but I believe this is what he is getting at. The time that is rediscovered (qu'on retrouve) is linked to sensible signs - the past surging up in the involuntary memory with all of its initial force is an experience that things aren't lost quite as irretrievably as you might generally believe. And then finally time rediscovered (temps retrouve) belongs to the signs of art, where pure time is uncovered - eternity in an instant, not immortality after death but a sort of slipping outside of time. Though each time corresponds to a certain milieu and a certain class of signs, Deleuze stresses that they bleed into one another and the walls between experiences aren't as solid as his alchemical formula would lead one to believe. I'm no going to go into the divisions of corresponding machines and forms of production, because I would never finish. Though I feel I haven't yet hit on where it gets particularly weird... I will say that there IS something appropriate about strange schema... I think Proust would kind of love that. Anyway - I keep talking lately about necessity and contingence... in one of my recent entries I mentioned being necessary didn't mean inevitable. Deleuze was making more or less the same point in Proust, except where I said 'necessary', he said 'inevitable', and where I said 'inevitable' he said something else, at which point I realized that I have been kind of sloppy in my wording. Once again, of course, he was talking about the fact that contingent encounters do violence to consciousness and make ideas necessary and vouch for the truth of discoveries while thought driven by logic, precisely because it chooses its own way is not constrained, has no necessity and deals with only propositions that are logically tenable but not necessarily true (at some point in talking about all the ways in which Proust was opposed to Plato, being platonic, but against dialogue, against philos and sophia, etc, Deleuze suggests that Plato/ Socrates was able to provoke the sort of violence of images that Proust requires from encounters from outside, but its a sort of offhand comment).
I'm going to save a discussion of essence being 'pure difference' and expressed through difference and repetition. I hope to hit the book 'difference and repetition' soon. Of course Deleuze is extremely interested in a sort of initial irreducible multiplicity at the root of existence. I thought it wouldn't take me so long to say so little, but of course it's kind of madness to try to tackle a whole book in a single entry. I had actually hoped to talk about Deleuze on Proust yesterday and Deleuze on Nietzsche today, but I'm behind schedule, and tomorrow I go away on vacation for a week. I'll have to rethink how to make entries when I come back.
Hope all is well with you.

Foucault, Genealogy, History

A couple of months ago I read a pretty convincing book on 'Foucault's Nietzschean genealogies'. It's no longer fresh in my mind and it was recalled to the library so I don't have it on hand to consult, but last night I read the most important essay Foucault wrote on Nietzsche - "Nietzsche, genealogy, history'. Foucault is almost remarkable in his generation for NOT having written a book on Nietzsche. At the same time, he's perhaps the most consistently Nietzschean. As the book I just mentioned (by Michael Mahon) argues, the main project that took up most of Foucault's career was a genealogy of morals. His essay on Nietzsche presents an extremely familiar and straightforward Nietzsche. He focuses mainly on the untimely meditation on the uses and misuses of history and the genealogy of morals, and he doesn't take many liberties with his interpretation. At times it feels like he's just paraphrasing Nietzsche. At the same time, when he's outlining what the aim of genealogist is, appropriate methodology. etc., you could forget he was talking about or through Nietzsche and imagine he was just explaining his own books, from the history of madness to the history of sexuality. The essay does place a lot of unnecessary emphasis on a dubious distinction to make its most basic (and obvious) point - it tries to distinguish the words 'Ursprung' and 'Herkunft' (or 'Entstehung')... the problem being not that he's wrong about what the words mean in German, where they come from and what distinction could be made, but rather that, as Foucault himself makes plain, Nietzsche actually uses Ursprung with both the negative meaning Foucault wants it tied to and the 'good' concept that Foucault is associating with 'Herkunft'... not that it matters all that much, since the concepts he is dealing with are indisputably present in Nietzsche.. 'Ursprung' is used by Foucault to designate a set point of origin that determines something once and for all, a mythical beginning before the fall or pretty much any a-historical/ trans-historical essence, where as 'Herkunft' is used to designate origin as a slow process of coming into being and transformation that shows all the accidents of history that explain how something got to be what it is at this moment, without any pretense of knowing what it will be or any particular interest in what it once was, except insofar as that contributes to its current state of being (or rather becoming). Of course, Nietzsche's anti-platonism is kind of old hat, and among historians in general, there is a general awareness of the dangers of creating a teleological narrative, of trying to eradicate chance and make everything leading up to the present seem inevitable (As a side note, something in both Bataille and Klossowski, that I haven't really explored enough is the conflating of chance and necessity of embracing chaos as a necessity - everything leading up to this moment being necessary not because a carefully laid out plan is being followed through but because allowing all the possibilities of chance to unfurl is necessary, because if all the things leading up to now hadn't been possible there would have been no chance, chance being life and becoming... not that this is exactly what's said by anyone anywhere, but it is pointing in the right general direction - necessary and inevitable are not the same, and there is a strong connection between the necessary and the arbitrary, the two are not mutually exclusive and this is part of the meaning of the eternal return - which has nothing much to do with Foucault). Anyway, Foucault and Nietzsche are unite in denying an essence of man, in looking into the construction of the self and in believing that beliefs, values and basic assumptions of all kinds are historically determined, that institutions, ideas, words and so forth do not necessarily keep their original meanings, that they are invested with new meanings by those who turn them to their own purposes, and both believe that this history is mainly driven by struggles for sovereignty and domination. Both believe that explaining values held by society today means revealing shifting constellations of force. Neither believes that there is some truer absolute system of values that has to be rediscovered or finally obtained that is being obscured by this interplay of forces and investment of institutions and ideas by interests. Neither wants to have anything to do with transhistorical constants like 'human nature'. In his book on Nietzsche and Foucault, Mahon at some point notes that Nietzsche is never closer to Foucault than in the passage in Genealogy of Morals where he talks about the different meanings societies have given to punishment, which he ties to an analysis of the word 'Schuld' - punishment initially being repayment for a debt, the joy that the creditor got seeing the debtor suffer being recompense for the property loss or pain inflicted, with a very belated idea of a person being punished because he was responsible for his actions (guilt being linked to responsibility), and punishment as a deterrent. I've never found the passage particularly convincing, but the basic idea of the same punishments being used by different societies with different intentions and different justifications inevitably makes you think of Foucault's book 'Discipline and punish' (which is a bad translation - it should be 'punish and surveil'), though Foucault is interested in shifting penal practices and what that says about intentions, and, of course, he actually does a lot of research and doesn't speculate as wildly... as you can see with the 'Schuld' and 'Herkunft' distinction, he isn't reading too much into a word and its origins (the idea that 'repayment' is a straightforward joy in the suffering of another), he's using those words as a logical way of maintaining a very clear conceptual distinction... of course, now that I think about the violence he does to 17th century theatre and renaissance paintings to make statements about how society deals with madness, I retract what I just said - Foucault goes at least as wild as Nietzsche on occasion, making baseless claims, and however much use he makes of the archive, he is guilty of considerable distortion and simplification. But still...

Vicious circle

More than usual, i'm going to have to accept a certain level confusion and incoherence talking about a couple of books about Nietzsche. First a couple of words about the book that isn't the subject of this entry - that I don't really mean to talk about, not here, not yet. Earlier in the summer I read Bataille's 'On Nietzsche', which is a baffling book of which Nietzsche is more the theme than the subject. Occasionally in the book Bataille mimics Nietzsche, adopting his style, especially through aphorisms. Occasionally he interprets and explains Nietzsche, sometimes he argues with him, often he develops his own idea at length, ideas that are related to Nietzsche tangentially or not at all (when they aren't in direct opposition to Nietzsche - though Nietzsche is held in reverence above all other thinkers and writers). Parts of the book are a sort of journal, in which he's chronicling his daily life near the end of the second world war, amid strange evacuations and dislocations, much of it focusing around an affair with an unnamed woman, who's probably someone else's wife, an affair that doesn't seem to have a possible future. The books not fresh in my mind, and I'm not sure what the value of it is. I was planning to go back to it once I've read another book of Bataille's that might help me make a little bit more sense of some of his central ideas. I'm not sure why I bring the book up exactly, except to make a distinction between two different sorts of difficulty. Finishing Bataille's book, I would have found it difficult to write much, except, of course, focusing very specifically on certain illuminating passages, because the book is mystical and obscure. I've just finished Klossowski's book 'Nietzsche and the vicious circle', and I know I'm going to be a bit jumbled, and that my understanding isn't quite what it should be just because it is the sort of dense, difficult work that needs to be read through a few times carefully, whereas I only had time for a single quick read-through. It does seem to me to merit all the praise and attention it's received over the years - it is the product of decades of writing on Nietzsche - it influenced and was influenced by just about everyone. I don't know how much you know about Klossowski... Polish... he comes out of the College de sociologie, along with Bataille, Leiris and Certeau. He wrote a couple of well-known and strange novels, and of course his book on Sade. That Bataille actually got Klossowski started on Nietzsche shows through, perhaps, in his interest in embracing chance - making chance necessity and placing that near the heart of the eternal return. A certain closeness to Deleuze comes about in the interest in the relation of forces (I know there was a sort of cross-fertilization there. Deleuze's book on Nietzsche comes out in the early sixties, and the actual book version of the vicious circle comes out near the end of the same decade, though Deleuze had read Klossowski's earlier essays, which were subsumed by the book, and he was heavily influenced by the vicious circle in some of his later writing).
Anyway, at the heart of the book is Nietzsche's revelation of the eternal return at SIls-Maria, and the texts that are most carefully pored over are posthumous fragments (there's also a certain amount of correspondence brought in - the published works are taken into account, but kind of secondary... I think I'm going to jus sort of list off some of the main things that he draws out of Nietzsche's writing:
- the self is a sort of meeting point of a multiplicity of impulses... in previous posts we have begun to touch on thought in relation to language and whether there is anything prior to language... here thought is largely a translation of impulses into language (or codes of everyday communication). Image turns into idea turns into concept. Before language comes a tonality (which is a slightly unexpected translation of Stimmung, though 'mood' does lose some of the musical resonance of the German), or an intensity..
- All that happens and all we do derives from the meeting of and conflict between competing impulses. Impulses and energies have no goal or aim beyond themselves, they mean nothing. They cannot, however, just endure, remain... energy is always in movement and always aims to increase.
- Consciousness needs a goal or an aim, and must interpret its own impulses in such a way that they are given one - one that would correspond to the further excitation and increase of that impulse.
- The various strengths of different impulses determines which ones will win out, the self is not a separate and stronger arbiter that can change this and make decisions about it, it is a result of impulses, that interprets, and can choose to will what is already a necessity.
- The eternal return of the same is an event that stands for everything that can ever happen and ever has happened - it is embracing the entire set of all possibilities (numerous but finite), including those that have led to the formation of the self that recognizes the eternal return. It is the recognition that the eternal ebb and flow of impulses that constantly circles in on itself is without meaning or end, and that life requires it constantly be given a meaning through fabulation... it is possible logically and theoretically to believe in determinism, but in order to live it is necessary to act as though will and choice exist (and on some level to believe it)
- Recognition of the eternal return must be forgotten, and rediscovered. The words, the signs of the experience can persist but the actual experience of recognition can't.
- there are two ways an impulse can develop (here my distortion and confusion is definitely picking up pace and things that don't belong together are getting mixed together)... there's a vertical development of the individual impulse being strengthened... the cultivation of the individual/ the exception, of intensity... or the horizontal gregarious flow that strengthens the group at the expense of the individual (sort of like entropy, except not). Here I really should stop, since I'm aware I'm veering off course. I'm not sure I should be talking about impulses here where all the discussion of the cultivation of the exception at the expense of the norm cuts in, where society should exist for the individual rather than the other way around. To be honest, discussions of Nietzsche's thoughts on health and sickness, on conspiracy, on real masters verse apparent masters, those things are straightforward and easy to follow in Klossowski's book, but what's most important and most interesting really are the most difficult aspects - and I know I'm only starting to unravel the actual explanation of the eternal return - each moment being in a sense the goal of the whole, the need for fabulation, etc. I hoe I get a chance to come back and clarify the whole thing before long... but I'm pretty sure it won't happen before Christmas, and even then, I know there's other stuff I kind of have to read. I'm horribly behind where I'm supposed to be, and I'm stuck in a system that puts a premium on quantity of things touched on rather than depth of understanding (though had I made use of my time this summer, I could have devoted a month to understanding this one thing or something else really well, rather than simply goofing off and not doing anything productive at all - the system maybe a bit perverse, but I guess it does actually aim at both - massive quantities balanced by a few things that it is assumed that you will pay more attention to, which is somewhat sensible. It's my own fault I've spent a lot of time not working in any way shape or form - surface or depth).

Bersani on Baudelaire

Two days ago, I said I would be talking about the thinking subject in Proust as well as Nietzsche when writing about what thought is. What was going through my head at the time, were passages in the Bersani book on Proust and Klossowski on Proust that seemed to jump out and touch each other, where certain details could have been in either book, though a somewhat different end was in sight in each case. I mentioned - and Bersani mentioned - that Sartre hated Proust, and yet, Proust like Sartre doesn't allow any direct access to a thinking subject. In order to describe oneself, have any idea at all about oneself, one has to make use of the external world. A self is projected onto a face in the mirror, you deduce things about the self from the objects it is attracted to or repulsed by and the way it reacts to the outside world. When you try to find something prior to or independent of the outside world, you come up blank. Of course you are familiar with the famous statement in Nietzsche that the doer is just a fiction added on to the deed. Proust doesn't go so far... both Nietzsche and Proust talk about a lack of stability in the self. Proust, in talking about love notes that in the future we will be indifferent to the woman who means everything to us now, that rather than caring only about what she is doing and who she is with, even the most insignificant fact will seem more interesting than who she's with, and this is because we will be a different person. We are countless people throughout our lives... but he contradicts himself on this point more than Nietzsche does (though, Nietzsche also talks about his past self in a way that suggests continuity as well as insisting on a complete lack of continuity). While Sartre and Nietzsche are both extremely anti-Socratc and suspicious of any sort of essence or essentializing of the self, I've explained to you countless times that Proust IS socratic, and moments of pure time allow a certain access to the pure self, as does the creative activity of art. When I spoke of the Compagnon book on Proust the conflict between dissolution and unity came up a few times... oddly, that's also coming up in the Bersani books and in Klossowski on Nietzsche. I suspect that a large theme for me in coming entries (though not this one) will be the role of style in the determination and formation of self.

I should state that it disturbs me how often I can't make sense of something I'm reading or I suspect that I'm missing something important. This periodically makes me question whether I ought to throw in the towel and find another line of work (last night I was also in cold sweats about being in my mid-thirties and still basically a teenager with no solid accomplishments behind me. (It should give me a little boost that I've been getting s bit of fan mail for the article I just published, but it's just a short article and I didn't put much into it. It doesn't make me feel better.) All this is neither here nor there - it's brought up by the fact that reading Bersani's book "Baudelaire and Freud", I'm painfully aware that I should have clearer knowledge of all the psychoanalytic backdrop. I'm not bothered so much by not being up on figures like Pontalis (though he's the one who published Wolfson), Laplanche and Melanie Klein, but with certain basic things - I have to admit that I couldn't explain Lacan's shift from the imaginary to the symbolic, which is important for Bersani's analysis, and, equally important, I have a pretty weak grasp of the death drive in Freud.

Anyway, before attempting to make sense of what Bersani does with Baudelaire and general reflections on using psychoanalysis to approach literature (which I think people thankfully don't do so much any more), a word or two on Baudelaire himself (who Sartre also hated, though he wrote a book on him - Sartre generally had no use for poetry). Baudelaire was a kind of sick bastard. The poem 'A celle qui est trop gai' ends with the poet envisioning opening a new hole in the overly light-hearted woman's thigh, fucking that hole and releasing his 'venom' into it, at which point he can address her as 'sister'. In all fairness, this probably does cry out for a psychoanalysts attention. The prose poem 'assomons les pauvres' (let's beat up the poor), is kind of great - the narrator has been cloistered in his room reading books of basically political science and sociological commentary, explaining how to fix the world. He goes out and a beggar asks him for money - he turns and starts beating the beggar, and won't stop until the beggar is forced to fight back. At the end, he tells the beggar "you have shown you are my equal", splits his money with him 50-50 and asks the beggar to go out and spread his lesson - imagining that once all the beggars are driven to fight back and no longer accept their position society will be transformed. What Bersani does with this last piece, and with Baudelaire's later writings in general doesn't seem that interesting to me. He interprets the prose poem as an expression of narcissism... the beggar is meant to mimic the narrator, and drive others to mimc him in turn - ideally ad infinitum. This is in a sense the ultimate projection of the self onto the world, an attempt at infinite expansion and conquest, where "you are my equal" hides a second, "you are my reflection". The one topic that is more interesting in Baudelaire's later works is the attempt at impersonality - the loss of affect on the part of the speaker, the projection of the self onto the world outside, so that desire is always ascribes to others... it's just unfortunate that this is discussed in relation to developmental phases and psychosis/schizophrenia, etc. It's odd, because in other books, and even at the beginning of this one, Bersani doesn't fall into that sort of silliness - rather than trying to use literature as demonstration of psychoanalytic theories, he tries to understand what is unique and interesting in a work, and uses psychoanalysis, sparingly, as a prop to help elucidate a very particular structure. The beginning of his Baudelaire book focuses on the mobility of desire - desire as something that resists stasis. The influence of Deleuze keeps coming up in his discussion of the nature of desire. Desire is not initially a desire for something - it is free floating and given content. The self is inherently unstable, free-floating desire, and when the poet writes about sexual impulses, he doesn't fixate on one thing, one detail - the object of his interest keeps getting fragmented and transformed - the desire follows metaphor. It floats between the poet and the woman, is shared by them both and carries them both in all directions (Again, the constant mobility of desire and the inability of the will to ever attain stasis comes up a lot in Klossowski's discussion of Nietzsche - which I'll write about tomorrow). Bersani writes that ironically, when Baudelaire is writing about seual desire, there is no straightforward sexual representation - straightforward sexual representations come in poems like 'A celle qui est trop gai', which are about violence and death - or rather stasis as the end of desire. A search for unity is equivalent to a search for immobility, and is always included in desire, which is the opposite, driving toward dissipation. Death/ stasis/ unity, is given as an orgasmic finish inseparable from all desire, and the death drive can not be separated from the pleasure principle.
I can't be blamed for all of this psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo. Surprisingly I recognize lots of parallels and dynamics that tie it to texts I can take more seriously... but you remember the statement in Proust about theory in literature cheapening it - well most of this does seem like an excessive application of theory to literature where both theory and literature seem to me a bit degraded - even if Bersani is bright and can be convincing in passages (again, his other two books, which didn't have Freud in the title, were less heavy-handed, and to me more enlightening).

Bersani on Proust

I've read three books by Leo Bersani this summer - one one Mallarmé (the Death of Stephane Mallarmé was a particularly short book that I could only get for a week or so before it had to be returned. It was about Mallarmé's 'becoming impersonal', the moment in his career when he ceased to be a person and became what he called an aptitude the universe had for observing itself... I ought to go look up the quote. It will come up again elsewhere, but for the most part I can't really remember Bersani's argument, and I'm not going to try to write about the book that I almost might as well have not read for all I've retained), one on Baudelaire (which I'll try writing about tomorrow), and one on Proust, which I should have a decent chance of describing here. Bersani comes out of a moment before the structuralists were 'in', when two dominant influences in literary criticism were psychoanalysis, which continued to be Bersani's main influence, and Sartrean existential critique, which was a secondary but still important presence for Bersani - particularly in his book on Proust. Sartre is, of course, as anti-psychoanalysis as you can get - in his autobiography he stresses that he never had a super-ego (he grew up without a father), and he's always against discussing 'inner lives', convinced that a person IS their words and actions. Sartre, as Bersani points out, hated Proust.

There is a line the narrator drops in la recherche, which states roughly that a novel with theory in it is like an article from which the price tag has not been removed. This insistence that displaying the theory underlying the creation of a novel is cheap and unworthy is puzzling in Proust, considering how much is in la recherche that is hard to understand as anything other than theory underlying the novels construction. Bersani writes "The narrator's theorizing about his own work often seems inadequate to describe what he has done; his intellectual claims seem both pretentious and thin [...] in comparison to passages written from deeper levels of his mind than the one at which the would-be metaphysician operates". Talk of a 'deeper level of mind', is of course kind of dubious because it is so vague, and impossible to demonstrate (this sort of statement isn't really typical of Bersani), but the tension between theory and practice in the writing of the novel is related to a number of other tensions that he discusses which do point to some of what makes Proust 's work what it is. The narrator, and the hero in la recherche (the same person decades apart and distinct in voice and even interests), are both almost obsessive about finding general rules to explain the world and people's behavior. There clearly are dynamics driving almost everything in the book - the most important and well-known rule underlying human behavior in Proust is that people are attracted to and place value on what resists them, which is why love is more or less equated with jealousy. When everyone is driven by the same set of principals, when a small number of simple rules is altered and varied to make politics and war, social success and love all resemble each other, all be useful to make one another comprehensible, it would be normal to worry that a book would end up deadened by a universal sameness, that at some point you would get the point and reading onward would be a monotonous experience. Either in this book or in the Baudelaire book (I can't remember), Bersani says the same thing Proust always does about Balzac, but in an even more pointed fashion: when Balzac presents a character, he tells you everything you really need to know about who the character is and what drives him. From that first description, you have the necessary information to determine everything he'll do in the rest of the book and how he would react to any given situation - If Proust's general laws were absolute and comprehensive, it might not be one character, but all characters and the entire world whose actions and developments could be predicted without having to be recounted. This might seem even more of a danger when you take into consideration another central aspect of how the narrator interacts with the world. The only things or people that interest the narrator are those that he can project some aspect of himself or his imagination onto. Things and people interest him because he has romantic images of how they'll be, and because they never conform to those images, they always disappoint. Things and people that are truly alien can not be known - the very strong desire for the other is generally a desire to assimilate and control the other, the joy of reducing the strange to the familiar (and thus comprehensible)... right now what I'm saying is straying a bit from exactly how Proust describes things, but the idea is there. So, as Bersani points out, all other characters risk being no more than a projection of the self at the center of the book. What we know of them is a mixture between what he projects on to them, and what he can identify with in them. Extending this, keeping basically with the sense of what Bersani says but veering a bit further off what Proust explicitly says... thinking of Descartes and Berkley... who was it that said Berkeley stated something that may logically hold up but which no sane person could honestly believe (I'm not thinking about Johnson)? Basically the idea that, yes, our knowledge of the external world may not be objective, we can never know that the outside world perfectly conforms to what we imagine it to be, but whether it can be fully known or not, we recognize that out perceptions are necessarily of an outside world that objectively exists - we are not making it up, even if we project certain things onto it or slightly distort aspects of it. The outside world resists us and forces itself upon us - that force and that resistance changes us and changes what we project and how we perceive. Bersani remarks that in Proust, it is amazing that a work that is so dominated by certain general laws, where the only love is jealous love, etc. should end up having such a large number of strongly differentiated characters, who feel real, who cohere, and resist what the main character thinks or says about them. He compares the number and clarity of characters to Tolstoy, and takes as an image from the early chapters of la recherche, the 'magic lantern' the hero has as a small child - a sort of projector that casts images from stories onto the walls of his room, where you can continue to see the doorknob at the same time as you see the light image of Golo that is cast over it. The projections of the main character never seem to be cast out into the void, the book does not give the impression of a single psyche, but of a psyche wrestling with a concrete world that resists him and remains larger and more complex than what he can ever fully grasp. If there is theorizing throughout the book, the theories are the main character trying to make sense of his experiences, but the experiences are not created out of those theories, and they don't ever fully conform to the theories. The book does not read as a controlled experiment.
Proust was obsessed with John Ruskin for a very long time, and I remember a passage in Ruskin... I imagine it was about the Pre-Raphaelites, in which he talks about how in a painting with symbolic imagery, one might, for instance, paint the birth of Christ taking place in the ruins of an old temple. The temple symbolizing Judaism which had fallen into disrepair and which would be supplanted by Christ's coming. In a painting like this, he said, the temple and any other symbolic elements should be painted absolutely naturally and convincingly, so that someone unaware of the significance of those elements would simply accept it as a natural scene. Bersani also talks about the use of simile over in metaphor - two objects brought together in such a way that each maintains their original character...
But I'm trailing off here. Presenting an entire book in a little blurb like this is always an act of violence, but I suppose the couple of central ideas I'm taking away from the thing are here... I'm sure that others will be reactivated in the next Proust book I read. I think the biggest thing missing is the importance and meaning of style, which I can try to address some when I talk about Deleuze on Proust.

Fecal thoughts

I'll just take a moment to address the way you think I envision thought (as fecal matter, sitting in the bowels of the brain and waiting to be discharged). I certainly don't recognize myself in this description. You say I have a kind of fuzzy notion of what thought is, and this is fair enough, though I think it is far too simple to believe thought = words. How can you believe that there is no thought prior to language? If a pre-linguistic child didn't think, how could it come to recognize the function of language or the meaning of words? Do you really think there's no work of sifting, sorting and analyzing feelings and sense impressions prior to having definite ideas about them? Can't you have a strange sense of something having meaning, being familiar, etc. before you can put into words why or even the fact that it seems to have some significance? I never said that thoughts were inert things, and I most often probably ought to use the word 'thinking' instead of 'thought' to make it clear that I'm thinking of a process and not the separate individual products of that thought. Thought can only be recognized by its contents, it can't do anything if it isn't given some sort of content to work with (a baby born deaf, dumb, blind, without taste or feeling of any sort not receiving any information at all from its own body would be incapable of thought - what could it possibly think?), and yet, to some extent, as a process, as a way of dealing with information it has to already be there as a capacity, a potential or what-have-you, even if the process changes and develops according to experience and training. I'm sure this all sounds rather trite, and possibly without value - though I'll inevitably bump up against it again and again. Yes, what this structure or process is can only be vaguely described (by me at least) and I can't have more than a very rough notion of what it consists of, but to me it is nonetheless important that, however closely related the development of thought and language are, the two things are not identical. There is also a lot of knowledge that really can't be put into words - little signs you pick up on in someone's facial expression that tell you a lot about the way they are feeling or thinking - with two many details and subtle clues for you to really express how you know what you know - what led you to that conclusion. Of course there's knowledge about how to use your body to do certain things - in sports, playing an instrument, etc, acquired knowledge that you can't explain (and not necessarily autonomic since these are things you do intentionally and with thought). And besides saying that thought is more than just the words with which we express thought, one of the points that I kept making, which I think led to your though/feces description, is that creation and the expansion of language often works through the attempt to express a unique experience using conventional language (which, by definition, is not equipped to express what is unique). You are of course capable of having and recognizing unique experiences before you figure out how to express them, though I don't doubt that understanding is clearer and more can be done with them once you figure out how to communicate them.

This is going to be a long drawn out discussion, but I do feel you have been distorting the things I say about thought and language... I'll quickly mention three things that I'll address in my next posts (on Proust, on Freud and Baudelaire and on Nietzsche - and then eventually on Derrida, Rousseau, etc). In books I've just read on Proust and Nietzsche, I found interesting and almost diametrically opposed (or perhaps very similar) discussions of the 'subject', which ends up being very similar to what I'm describing using 'thought'. Proust and Nietzsche end up dealing with some similar issues concerning the subject, though Nietzsche generally attacks the idea of a continuous subject, while Proust, even when talking about the intermittencies and inconsistencies in the thoughts and feelings of a subject posits a unity recognizable through memory (voluntary and involuntary) as well as in style (which brings out structures and patterns unique to the individual, almost like a fingerprint). But, on the subject of Derrida (and Freud), everything I have been saying is rendered a little more problematic when we confront the fact that the words people use really do present a complete world and give us access to countless assumptions and pretty much everything we could want to know about another persons thoughts. I never questioned the fact that you should always approach thought through language, and only through language - just the idea that language is the ultimate origin of thought (which I considered a pretty unproblematic idea).

One last thing - as far as "a word at the tip of my tongue" goes... I stick to the fact that sometimes something unexpressed can be extremely valuable. Even just a feeling of irritation that something is missing or not quite right that keeps you going over something again and again until you find what it is that is bothering you, what doesn't add up or needs to be altered. Has it never happened to you that this sort of intuition or call it what you will has led to you substantially improving something or clarifying your ideas? When I think of Socrates' interlocutor saying to him (roughly from memory) "As often happens to people talking to you, I can't object to any specific point, but I find I'm not convinced"... of course, if he had the text in front of him and could carefully go over it, he would be able to put his finger on the forced analogy, the over-simplification or the root assumption that would undermine Socrates' argument...

From Vancouver, many months late

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As usual, I've read and thought far less than I should have in the months since I've written, so I have far less to report on that I should.

I have, however, read Of Grammatology for the first time, and tomorrow I'll finish Henry Staten's mostly excellent book, Wittgenstein and Derrida, which essentially (and I think rightly) aims to identify something like a deconstructionist method at work in Wittgenstein's writings (he calls Wittgenstein unique among Derrida's predecessors in having developed "a consistently deconstructive standpoint").

I was reading Of Grammatology more just to get a sense of what's in it and get a feel for Derrida's style than to do a detailed and critical reading. The stuff that's most relevant to my thesis are some of the essays in Margins of Philosophy (especially "Signature Event Context," "The Supplement of Copula," and "White Mythology") and Limited Inc. But I figured I really should at some point read Derrida's big book. I still think I should just read "Plato's Pharmacy." I read the first twenty pages before other things took over, but it still strikes me as the most lucid thing of Derrida's that I've read.

Still, it was good fun, even at a skimming pace that didn't allow for much careful rumination. Derrida's a wonderful reader of texts (and the attention he gives to Rousseau reaffirms my sense that I really need to get to know Rousseau a lot better) and I'm often impressed by how convincing his readings are considering how strikingly original they are too. There's a lot to learn from his intense attention to neglected details. I think my other reading in recent weeks has been affected by it (more on that in a bit).

I might as well say a few words about why Derrida's relevant to my thesis, which will also tie into my wanting to pick up the thread of our now long-stale conversation about logic and language. The starting point is Derrida's reading of Austin in "Signature Event Context," which will help me develop a question about the appeal to ordinary language in philosophy, which is whether and how "ordinary language" is supposed to exclude other forms of language. One easy answer to that question is that they're contrasting it with "metaphysical" language, which the heroes of my thesis are trying to expose not as an alternative form of language, but as nonsense, a misfiring attempt to say something that in fact results in saying nothing. But, as Derrida points out, Austin also seems to want to exclude all sorts of other "fictional" discourse, from words spoken on a stage to jokes to recited poems. This all seems innocuous enough within the context of Austin's project, but again, it's part of what's impressive about Derrida, that he can pull on the innocuous side remark and make the whole edifice collapse. To Derrida, Austin's exclusionary gesture is an attempt to retain a totalizing control over the words we utter, to be able to say and mean exactly what we want to say and mean, without risk of infelicity. This is all the more interesting as a line of criticism, since it implies a kind of psychologism--locating meaning in the mind of the intending speaker--that Austin very deliberately criticizes. So if he's at fault here, he's very subtly so.

I could go on at great length about all this. One thing it does for me is to help me distinguish Austin from Wittgenstein around the concept of ordinary language as home. Both Austin and Wittgenstein register sin-inflected expressions of disgust at philosophical language as somehow corrupting us and drawing us away from our ordinary inhabitation of the world and of language. But Austin seems to believe that there's such a thing as a fully satisfactory inhabitation of the world and of language that his appeal to ordinary language is supposed to get us back to. It's this nostalgia for a home that never existed in the first place that I think Derrida is essentially attacking. Wittgenstein, by contrast, also uses this metaphor of the ordinary as home but, I argue, is also aware of the ordinary as fundamentally unstable, not as a place of rest, but as a place of recognition of the impossibility of a place of rest.

In this respect, he shares with Derrida a sense of dynamic play being always at work in the workings of language. This notion of play is what I take to be central to the argument of my thesis. I can only envy Derrida's ability to read texts: his genius consists in large part, I think, of being able to find just the detail that will show that the most totalizing texts are constantly at play despite themselves.

This all ties in only tangentially to some of the stuff you said about logic and language many moons ago. As you know, I think I'm mostly in sympathy with most of what you say, or at least the spirit in which you say it. But I still object to the way you conceive of thought as something we struggle to put into words, and that's often distorted or enhanced or diminished by the effort of being put into words. What I'd suggest--and I draw this largely from Wittgenstein--is that you're working with a conception of thought that doesn't seem to me to be fully coherent. At least, it seems like you're operating with a picture of thoughts as these definite things that exist somewhere in the head, and which then take on a particular form when squeezed out of the mouth. Sort of like feces sitting in the bowels, which then take on the shape of distinctive turds when they come out the anus (I thought you'd appreciate the comparison). I'm not sure we can coherently talk about thoughts without their being linguistic. Or at least, if you ask yourself where this idea comes from, that there are thoughts in the head, it's because we sometimes say things and then claim we'd been thinking about them before and couldn't find words for them, or talk about things being on the tips of our tongues, implying that the thought's there but the words haven't come yet. But these manners of speaking aren't descriptions of thoughts bouncing about in our brains like turds in our bowels. They're just ways of speaking about the ways we speak. Or, to quote from the master:

"The word is on the tip of my tongue." What is going on in my consciousness? That is not the point at all. Whatever did go on was not what was meant by that expression. It is of more interest what went on in my behaviour.—"The word is on the tip of my tongue" tells you: the word which belongs here has escaped me, but I hope to find it soon. For the rest the verbal expression does no more than certain wordless behaviour.
James, in writing of this subject, is really trying to say: "What a remarkable experience! The word is not there yet, and yet in a certain sense is there,—or something is there, which cannot grow into anything but this word."—But this is not experience at all. Interpreted as experience it does indeed look odd. As does intention, when it is interpreted as the accompaniment of action; or again, like minus one interpreted as a cardinal number.
The words "It's on the tip of my tongue" are no more the expression of an experience than "Now I know how to go on!"—We use them in certain situations, and they are surrounded by behaviour of a special kind, and also by some characteristic experiences. In particular they are frequently followed by finding the word. (Ask yourself: "What would it be like if human beings never found the word that was on the tip of their tongue?")

I'm very tired and running out of steam, so I'll just say a few last things about animals. The first is that I've been reading some interesting stuff, starting with Coeztee's The Lives of Animals, moving on to a short collection of essays called Philosophy and Animal Life, with contributions from Stanley Cavell and (most interesting among them) Cora Diamond that deal with Coetzee's book, and now a book by my supervisor called The Wounded Animal. I won't go on at length here, but will hopefully return to it all sometime soon. Part of what I find fascinating is that the discussion deals on one hand with our relations with animals, and on the other hand with the tension between philosophy and literature and the "difficulty of reality" they both confront. And I don't think the two are just coincidentally related: part of my interest in animals comes from the difficulties they throw up for our own sense of our place in the world and our attempts to make sense of it.

I'm also trying to write a companion piece to Pork. The ultimate plan is to have a trio of short plays called Three Little Pigs, which are Pork, Ham, and Bacon, respectively. One of the things I've been reading is Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Pigling Bland, which is fascinatingly full of contradictions, which Potter herself must have been at least partly conscious of creating (it's in noting these contradictions that I think my recent reading of Derrida has heightened my sensitivity to such things). We have these pigs on a farm who behave for all the world like normal pigs until it's decided that they're too much hassle and are sold off. Pigling Bland then becomes an anthropomorphic pig who has to dress up like a proper young man and go off on his own into the world as young men in such stories so often do. Except he has to go off to the market, and we all know why pigs go to market (there's a similar tension in "This little piggie went to market..." which is all the more odd for the fact that one of the piggies eats roast beef). He even carries a note permitting him to cross county lines, which one would need if one were meat, but not if one were a person. And the story continues along these lines, with Pigling Bland ultimately escaping from the clutches of his (never explicitly named) butchers to start a life of farming potatoes. A Bildungsroman where the animal grows up into humanity. All very strange stuff, especially for a children's story. Though I guess children's stories are always deeply weird.