Hm, I just finished a paper on Derrida where I end up being a bit critical. And I'm afraid of doing that because (a) I really don't feel confident enough with Derrida to be certain I know what he's saying, and (b) he's far too slippery to be able to get a solid grip on, and whatever I say about him is almost guaranteed to mischaracterize him. I think I might send you a copy of the paper, but I'll say a few words here because this is where we get to share our thoughts and because I can't really expect you to read a long paper now or anytime soon, especially considering how negligent I've been in replying to you.
So the short version of my concern with Derrida is, effectively, that he seems to assume that ordinary language is inescapably metaphysical, and I don't buy that. And his own language seems only to engage with a metaphysical tradition. For instance, for Derrida, a proper name is an impossible ideal of univocity, a word that takes up its meaning into itself, and this ideal is impossible because the iterable structure of language means that every word can be repeated in ever new contexts, and so can never be fully "proper." Sure, good point, and I think that the iterability of language is something that's worth exploring and insufficiently explored in the analytic tradition. But for all that, we still have proper names. "David" is one. "Kevin" is another. In calling "David" a proper name, I'm not latching myself on to some sort of metaphysics of presence, I'm just distinguishing the way this word is used from the way a word like "horse" is used. That distinction has its ordinary uses, and I'm not sure I see how it's ineluctably metaphysical.
I guess what I'm saying is that ordinary language isn't always already caught up in metaphysics, but rather that metaphysics arises naturally from ordinary language. If a Socratic questioner were to push an ordinary person to explain just what he meant by a "proper name," that questioner might push our ordinary person into a position of making claims about univocity and all the rest. But that's not the same thing as saying that those claims about univocity were always already implicit in the way that person was using language.
Sorry, I'm short on time as usual, and I don't think I'm going to be able to flesh these thoughts out in detail. But maybe I will send you my paper, and you can feel free to respond to either the long paper or these shorter thoughts.
In other news, I just yesterday read Heidegger's "What Are Poets For?" I have to confess to having limited patience for later Heidegger, all the while knowing that I should be finding this stuff more interesting and that lots of people I respect (Derrida not least of all) think it's terrific stuff. I think part of the barrier for me is that Heidegger's writings are like these vacuum tubes that suck even the slightest breath of humour from the air, and I can't help but think, if this guy is trying to get at the meaning of life, how can he approach it without a sense of humour? Despite the difficulties I find with Derrida's writing, I'm able to persevere because he makes me smile.
But that's maybe beside the point. The thing that I found most astonishing was the context for the piece. He first wrote it in 1946, and opens by characterizing ours as a "destitute time." In what way is 1946 Europe destitute? Could it have anything to do with a genocidal fascist German regime that devastated the continent through war and slaughtered millions in unspeakably cruel ways? Well, not in so many words. The real problem, it seems, is technology. And while of course a few million dead isn't a great thing, the underlying root cause is a technological mindset that's most closely linked to the bourgeois capitalists who defeated this genocidal fascist German regime that Heidegger was uncomfortably closely allied with. And the solution to all our problems, it seems, is to get rid of these bourgeois capitalists and get back in touch with our roots the way that Heidegger is trying to.
He wrote all this in 1946. The gall!
Besides which, I think this techno-phobia that a lot of European intellectuals of Heidegger's generation share (Wittgenstein not least of all) is a bit short-sighted. It feels like grandparents complaining about how they didn't need iPods back in their day, and that vinyl worked just fine. I mean, I grant that there are a lot of things about the modern world that concern me, but I also feel a clear-headed critique of the modern world can't come from a place of totally not understanding it, and not wanting to. It reminds me of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, in which he launches an ill-advised and somewhat comical rant about Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson that shows that he's really unable to find anything interesting about pop culture, and so is unable to find anything interesting or intelligent to say about it.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
thought, language, and Austin
One of the downsides to my not writing more frequently is that when I actually do sit down to write I feel terribly out of date with everything. I mean, I feel like tell you that I've really enjoyed your thoughts on John Locke, but I worry you'll reply "John who?" while digging back through hazy memories of how you spent your summer.
But I will have three things to say. The first is to continue our conversation about poo and thoughts, which fortunately isn't linked to any particular readings we've been doing lately (though I'm curious whether your reading of Limited Inc has made my position clearer to you), so doesn't maybe feel the lag in time as much. The second is to respond to your post on Austin (though I fear that response will probably now be very much out of date). And the third is to say a few words about Derrida based on a second draft of the chapter I've been working on.
So, thought and language. I'm not quite sure what to say here. At least, I'm not sure what to say that isn't just a variant on things I've already said, so I worry that what I will have to say here won't move the conversation forward any. But here are some thoughts anyway.
It seems like your resistance to what I'm saying is at least in part motivated by the sense that I'm denying something important, that is, that I'm trying to deny that there's anything going on inside of us beyond the stuff that we can put into words. Would my position be any more palatable if I reaffirmed that I don't mean to be denying this, or anything for that matter? Rather, what I'm trying to do is to shift from looking at the mysterious things-inside-of-us to looking at the ways we talk, or struggle to talk, about them. And the reason I'm trying to do that is that I think talking about our inner life as consisting of things-inside-of-us on analogy to the way that we can talk about the world around us as consisting of things-outside-of-us is a bad analogy. On one hand, it gets my access to other people's minds wrong: it sets up a framework for other minds scepticism, where each person is a shell covering over an inner world about which we have only the indirect and unreliable testimony of their words and behaviour. One problem with this position is that it implies that there's some more direct and reliable testimony that we could access if only circumstances were otherwise. On the other hand, it gets my access to my own mind wrong: my mind doesn't consist of thoughts and moods and sensations floating about that I can point to in the way that I can point to bits of my body or bits of the world. You might say that my access to my own mind is too close to work on the sort of object-and-designation model that we use for talking about things in the outside world. When I talk about what's going on inside of me, I'm not describing inner facts, I'm expressing them. And that's why my descriptions of other people's inner states aren't some sort of second-best unreliable description: their own testimony isn't description at all.
I'm not denying that we have moods, or that they're sometimes difficult to express, but I am saying that when we do express moods, what we're doing is precisely expressing them, not describing them. It's not as if they're these cloudy regions of inner space that are difficult to find an accurate description for. It's rather that our vocabulary in many respects falls short of our desire to express how it is with us sometimes.
I should also add that moods are distinct from the sorts of thoughts we began by talking about in that they don't have propositional content. That is, I can have the thought-that such-and-such, but I don't have a mood-that anything; I simply have a mood. And one of my initial concerns was the notion that propositional thoughts are somehow able to sit in the head in non-verbal form before being given the clothing of language and sent out into the world. And part of my point there is simply that whatever ineffable something is going on inside of you, it can't be the thought-that such-and-such because if it had propositional content it would necessarily be linguistic.
I don't know if any of that helps or adds anything. I'm not feeling particularly eloquent. But hopefully it will at least keep the ball rolling. And maybe something I said will click in a way that's helpful. I think it would help if I could sit you down with the Philosophical Investigations and maybe The Claim of Reason. At least that would make you see the position I'm arguing from, even if it doesn't make you agree.
Incidentally, this all connects with Austin, so I might as well talk about him in the same post. Because one of the signal contributions of How To Do Things With Words, I would have said, is precisely that it undermines the model of communication on which language is simply a means of transmitting mental contents from one mind to another. If that were the case, "I promise" would be the description of an inward act, and you could break promises using Hippolytus' line (which Austin actually distorts by quoting out of context) about how "my tongue swore but my heart did not." Performative utterances, if nothing else, are a fine example of the fact that language isn't simply a matter of transmitting thoughts.
And then Derrida's criticism of Austin precisely takes the form of saying that Austin is still married to a conception of language that ties it closely to consciousness. I sort of half-buy Derrida's criticism. But at any rate, you can see how both Austin and Derrida share this sense that language isn't simply a matter of transmitting pre-existing thoughts. I don't know if they help you see why I want to resist that view.
As for the value of Austin more generally, well, I don't know if further study or discussion has changed your opinion of him or reaffirmed it. I think in part it helps to see Austin within his philosophical context, and in particular working at a time when logical positivism is in the ascendant and when A. J. Ayer is the big cheese at Oxford. This is a school of thought according to which utterances can be divided into scientific propositions that make assertions about the world and "non-cognitive" utterances expressing emotion or metaphysics or religious sentiment or whatever else, and that lack any real propositional content. So one of the things Austin's doing is complicating and undermining that picture. And that part of his project might be less evident and feel less pressing in a time when logical positivism isn't so prominent.
Though there's still a tendency often to assume that statements are descriptive. It's a very tempting assumption. And here I have to confess to some impatience with your remark that Austin's not saying anything you don't already know. Austin himself remarks in the very first paragraph that nothing he's going to say is particularly difficult or contentious, and the tone throughout is marked with the bemusement of someone who's not entirely sure why he's bothering to tell us all of this. This notion of saying nothing that isn't already obvious is characteristic not just of Wittgenstein as well, but also phenomenology. It's one of the similarities I remark on between Wittgenstein and Heidegger, for instance: in Being and Time, Heidegger claims to simply be describing what's before us, and that if we haven't noticed something like the distinction between Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit before, that's because it's so obvious that we often pass over it. Like Poe's Purloined Letter. So simply saying that Austin's saying things that are obvious isn't in itself a criticism. It's only a criticism if you want to say that he's saying things that are both obvious and unlikely to cause problems when we pass them over unnoticed. And I think he has some claim to make on that score.
And for my own part, I'm writing a thesis about this notion of appealing to ordinary language and I find Austin very interesting for methodological reasons. I think that aspect of his work, while on full display in How To Do Things With Words, has a more obvious critical edge in Sense and Sensibilia or "A Plea for Excuses." For whatever that's worth.
As for insults, I'm not sure I have much to add there. Except to suggest that the point of insulting people is, to borrow a phrase, to give them a tongue-lashing, that is to give them the verbal equivalent of a blow. And just as there are no conventional forms of beating people up (as there are with other physical actions, like handshakes or hailing taxis), there are no conventional forms for insulting them. "I insult you" simply wouldn't have the desired perlocutionary force. Part of Austin's interest in performative utterances is precisely that he thinks they're too often assimilated to locutionary or perlocutionary acts.
But I will have three things to say. The first is to continue our conversation about poo and thoughts, which fortunately isn't linked to any particular readings we've been doing lately (though I'm curious whether your reading of Limited Inc has made my position clearer to you), so doesn't maybe feel the lag in time as much. The second is to respond to your post on Austin (though I fear that response will probably now be very much out of date). And the third is to say a few words about Derrida based on a second draft of the chapter I've been working on.
So, thought and language. I'm not quite sure what to say here. At least, I'm not sure what to say that isn't just a variant on things I've already said, so I worry that what I will have to say here won't move the conversation forward any. But here are some thoughts anyway.
It seems like your resistance to what I'm saying is at least in part motivated by the sense that I'm denying something important, that is, that I'm trying to deny that there's anything going on inside of us beyond the stuff that we can put into words. Would my position be any more palatable if I reaffirmed that I don't mean to be denying this, or anything for that matter? Rather, what I'm trying to do is to shift from looking at the mysterious things-inside-of-us to looking at the ways we talk, or struggle to talk, about them. And the reason I'm trying to do that is that I think talking about our inner life as consisting of things-inside-of-us on analogy to the way that we can talk about the world around us as consisting of things-outside-of-us is a bad analogy. On one hand, it gets my access to other people's minds wrong: it sets up a framework for other minds scepticism, where each person is a shell covering over an inner world about which we have only the indirect and unreliable testimony of their words and behaviour. One problem with this position is that it implies that there's some more direct and reliable testimony that we could access if only circumstances were otherwise. On the other hand, it gets my access to my own mind wrong: my mind doesn't consist of thoughts and moods and sensations floating about that I can point to in the way that I can point to bits of my body or bits of the world. You might say that my access to my own mind is too close to work on the sort of object-and-designation model that we use for talking about things in the outside world. When I talk about what's going on inside of me, I'm not describing inner facts, I'm expressing them. And that's why my descriptions of other people's inner states aren't some sort of second-best unreliable description: their own testimony isn't description at all.
I'm not denying that we have moods, or that they're sometimes difficult to express, but I am saying that when we do express moods, what we're doing is precisely expressing them, not describing them. It's not as if they're these cloudy regions of inner space that are difficult to find an accurate description for. It's rather that our vocabulary in many respects falls short of our desire to express how it is with us sometimes.
I should also add that moods are distinct from the sorts of thoughts we began by talking about in that they don't have propositional content. That is, I can have the thought-that such-and-such, but I don't have a mood-that anything; I simply have a mood. And one of my initial concerns was the notion that propositional thoughts are somehow able to sit in the head in non-verbal form before being given the clothing of language and sent out into the world. And part of my point there is simply that whatever ineffable something is going on inside of you, it can't be the thought-that such-and-such because if it had propositional content it would necessarily be linguistic.
I don't know if any of that helps or adds anything. I'm not feeling particularly eloquent. But hopefully it will at least keep the ball rolling. And maybe something I said will click in a way that's helpful. I think it would help if I could sit you down with the Philosophical Investigations and maybe The Claim of Reason. At least that would make you see the position I'm arguing from, even if it doesn't make you agree.
Incidentally, this all connects with Austin, so I might as well talk about him in the same post. Because one of the signal contributions of How To Do Things With Words, I would have said, is precisely that it undermines the model of communication on which language is simply a means of transmitting mental contents from one mind to another. If that were the case, "I promise" would be the description of an inward act, and you could break promises using Hippolytus' line (which Austin actually distorts by quoting out of context) about how "my tongue swore but my heart did not." Performative utterances, if nothing else, are a fine example of the fact that language isn't simply a matter of transmitting thoughts.
And then Derrida's criticism of Austin precisely takes the form of saying that Austin is still married to a conception of language that ties it closely to consciousness. I sort of half-buy Derrida's criticism. But at any rate, you can see how both Austin and Derrida share this sense that language isn't simply a matter of transmitting pre-existing thoughts. I don't know if they help you see why I want to resist that view.
As for the value of Austin more generally, well, I don't know if further study or discussion has changed your opinion of him or reaffirmed it. I think in part it helps to see Austin within his philosophical context, and in particular working at a time when logical positivism is in the ascendant and when A. J. Ayer is the big cheese at Oxford. This is a school of thought according to which utterances can be divided into scientific propositions that make assertions about the world and "non-cognitive" utterances expressing emotion or metaphysics or religious sentiment or whatever else, and that lack any real propositional content. So one of the things Austin's doing is complicating and undermining that picture. And that part of his project might be less evident and feel less pressing in a time when logical positivism isn't so prominent.
Though there's still a tendency often to assume that statements are descriptive. It's a very tempting assumption. And here I have to confess to some impatience with your remark that Austin's not saying anything you don't already know. Austin himself remarks in the very first paragraph that nothing he's going to say is particularly difficult or contentious, and the tone throughout is marked with the bemusement of someone who's not entirely sure why he's bothering to tell us all of this. This notion of saying nothing that isn't already obvious is characteristic not just of Wittgenstein as well, but also phenomenology. It's one of the similarities I remark on between Wittgenstein and Heidegger, for instance: in Being and Time, Heidegger claims to simply be describing what's before us, and that if we haven't noticed something like the distinction between Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit before, that's because it's so obvious that we often pass over it. Like Poe's Purloined Letter. So simply saying that Austin's saying things that are obvious isn't in itself a criticism. It's only a criticism if you want to say that he's saying things that are both obvious and unlikely to cause problems when we pass them over unnoticed. And I think he has some claim to make on that score.
And for my own part, I'm writing a thesis about this notion of appealing to ordinary language and I find Austin very interesting for methodological reasons. I think that aspect of his work, while on full display in How To Do Things With Words, has a more obvious critical edge in Sense and Sensibilia or "A Plea for Excuses." For whatever that's worth.
As for insults, I'm not sure I have much to add there. Except to suggest that the point of insulting people is, to borrow a phrase, to give them a tongue-lashing, that is to give them the verbal equivalent of a blow. And just as there are no conventional forms of beating people up (as there are with other physical actions, like handshakes or hailing taxis), there are no conventional forms for insulting them. "I insult you" simply wouldn't have the desired perlocutionary force. Part of Austin's interest in performative utterances is precisely that he thinks they're too often assimilated to locutionary or perlocutionary acts.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Austin and insults
Two things to start - one, I have a parallel blog now... the same sort of thing but with friends from the French department. I couldn't decide how to go about doing both - it is the personal being addressed to you aspect of this blog that makes it interesting to me, the desire to respond to you and have you respond to me. It seems a lot less dry and a lot more fruitful than simply writing notes for myself, and though I feel I don't challenge things you say about your own reading and projects often enough (because I don't find stuff to object to), you do call me out, and I find that helpful. Still, writing about the same reading twice, and describing more or less the same reactions would be a bit tedious, even if when writing to you I'm more likely to connect my thoughts to things you've said or I feel you might said, and I do want to also have the other blog, because, of course, people in the French department having read more of the stuff on Pascal, Baudelaire, Bataille, etc, will be more likely to disagree with my readings and having something to contest. So, I think the more or less straight reading notes will more often than not go into both blogs and often be separate from the entries I write specifically to you or in response to what you're writing... there's already been a kind of division between reaction entries and reading entries anyway. What follows is the first shared entry - though this is one that is actually much more likely to get a useful response from you than from my French lit. brethren, since it is on Austin, and that's a subject that you would be more familiar with than they. I kind of hope that you can shed light on a few things - though like I mention later on, I do also expect to read Derrida's text on him next week - which I also hope that you and I can discuss...
It is hard for me to determine which of the past two days I have more thoroughly wasted. Friday I spent a good 8 hours just watching documentaries on Monty Python (compulsively - the way an alcoholic drinks after swearing to himself he wouldn't, constantly telling himself "well, just one more won't make a difference). Yesterday read Austin's "How to do things with words", which I suppose will be the main topic of this post. I have to say that reading Austin was a similar experience to reading Benveniste or certain texts by Jakobson. I had a pervasive sense of "so what?" reading it. With all the categories and classifications he came up with (less numerous or complicated in Austin than in the others I've mentioned, and certainly easier to follow than Benveniste, but not necessarily any more interesting for that), in talking about performative vs. constative speech acts didn't give me any sense whatsoever of telling me anything I wasn't already fully conscious of or providing me with tools I could use to take me own thought further. It would seem that discussions in Descartes and Locke about whether space and/ or matter are infinite should be much less relevant to my thinking than an analysis of how speech is used, since boundaries of space and time are far outside anything that I have experienced or ever could experience and since they are purely speculative, but reading those discussions actually does excite my imagination and gets me trying to conceive models of the universe in my head (as well as thinking about how ideas are form and to what extent ideas like infinity that seem so straightforward that every schoolchild understands them are lacking any positive content - the absence of boundaries puts in our mind a sort of vanishing beyond our mental horizon, but we can't really imagine anything more specific than motion across vast empty space, we can't actually contain infinite space in our minds, not can we answer a question like - if there were no beginning of time and there was a 'forever' behind us as well as ahead of us, since infinity can not be traversed, how would the present moment ever have arrived? God knows why there should be any interest in trying to imagine the unimaginable like that, but personally I get a weird sense of satisfaction... and oddly keep coming up with images of circularity and feel closer to the eternal return, though I realize I'm mixing familiar and comprehensible images [the discovery that there isn't an end of the world that you can fall off of] with a distorted version of an unrelated theory [I'm fairly certain that Nietzsche didn't mean to say that time loops in on itself, that it is shaped like Finnegans Wake] to create a simple and not entirely convincing model which alternates in my mind with other equally unlikely and speculative pictures of the universe - more science fiction than philosophy). I clearly miss something essential in texts like Austin's - whether or not I understand what he is saying, I certainly don't get the implications or the consequences, since I can't imagine what in it inspired others or how this could be developed into something else. There's an Alice in Wonderland citation in the book (there always is when language is discussed): In order to say that Alice thinks a previous statement isn't right she starts a sentence with "I don't think...", at which point she is broken off by the Cheshire cat who says, "then you shouldn't speak". I feel like a large part of his book is making the extremely obvious point that the Cheshire cat's response wasn't appropriate. Who isn't aware that we select words from a preexistent vocabulary to convey a certain meaning (and why do we need the words 'phatic' and 'rhetic' to separate the choosing a word and conveying a meaning?), and yes it is obvious that there is a difference between what an utterance accomplishes by convention and intention (Illocutionary - promising, pleading, arguing) and what the eventual consequences of an utterance might be whether intended or not (perlocutionary -convincing, offending, etc). Furthermore, it is very clear that the circumstances of an utterance should generally be taken into account, and that while the truth-value of some statements can and should be considered apart from the context in which they appear, quite apart from the judgment of true or false with most statements, or rather utterances we consider what the utterance is meant to accomplish... and in this last statement, I even feel I'm going beyond what Austin says, since he never explicitly questions why a statement is made. Though he clearly says that very few utterances really are purely constative, he generally avoids statements and sticks with classifying his various sorts of performatives - verdictives, expositives, etc. There is something vaguely interesting that to say "I promise" is to promise, that certain words enact themselves, but beyond this what does Austin tell us? I ask in all seriousness, because I sincerely hope that someone can explain to me what the relevance or importance of the text is. I ordered Derrida's Limited Inc. and am expecting it to come later this week, and I'm looking forward to reading what he has to say about it - hopefully this might give rise to more discussion.
I will bring up one thing that did interest me in the text. I'll preface this by saying that, though the topic itself is interesting to me, sometimes the content of what a person says is less interesting than the importance the person places on it - the fact that a certain idea becomes an object of fascination, is perhaps even fetishized, suddenly changes the idea itself, whether you suddenly start looking for what it is in the idea that can illicit that level of fascination or what it is in the writer or text that draws it to that idea that leads it to find the idea so important. This is not something that Austin can be said to fetishize, but he does mention a number of times at a certain distance (though only in the first half of the book), the fact that there is not a performative "I insult you", which admittedly is an interesting idea. I suppose insults would fall into three main categories: 1) The most effective insults in terms of the effect they have on other people are those that call attention to something true or partially true, or that is at least a source of insecurity for the person being insulted. This would probably include most breaking of taboos, since something like a racial slur only works if the person being insulted really does have a self-conscious sense that people do judge him because of his race, religion, orientation, gender or what have you. 2) Inventive insults, at least in my experience, rarely come from people who are beside themselves with rage, and are rarely truly hurtful, they're usually competitive or exhibitionist and used to show off. These are the most fun. 3) Purely conventional insults can work as ready made words that can be invested with as much anger, indignation or what have you as required when the more hurtful truths and sore spots don't present themselves. These usually serve largely as a valve, a way of letting out anger - the words themselves don't have much effect since they don't really mean anything though people might respond to the emotion behind them. But since 'fuck you' basically doesn't mean anything more than "I want you to be insulted", it s worth asking, well, why can't we just say, "I insult you". There is once again a sort of taboo with curse words, though it isn't so much in effect in a lot of circles. A normal response to someone saying, in effect, "I want you to be offended" would be a calm, "well I refuse to be offended", and I think that attitude often can really piss a would-be offender off. If the purely conventional 'fuck you' gets a reaction very often, it is kind of worth asking why. I believe there is still a certain code of honor involved in terms of calling a person out, where not responding to a challenge implied in 'fuck you' (or a mother insult if it's taken seriously, or whatever else) is taken as somehow backing down or admitting defeat. That being the case, if neither side genuinely wants to come to blows and neither side manages to bring the insults to the level of a creative insult competition, there's an obligation to just sort of repeat your insults while walking away or making an excuse not to shift over into some more serious form of confrontation - which brings us back to the fact "I hereby insult you" would work just as well if convention accepted it. In a footnote, Austin mentions an old German practice in which 'Beleidigung' actually was used this was.
It is hard for me to determine which of the past two days I have more thoroughly wasted. Friday I spent a good 8 hours just watching documentaries on Monty Python (compulsively - the way an alcoholic drinks after swearing to himself he wouldn't, constantly telling himself "well, just one more won't make a difference). Yesterday read Austin's "How to do things with words", which I suppose will be the main topic of this post. I have to say that reading Austin was a similar experience to reading Benveniste or certain texts by Jakobson. I had a pervasive sense of "so what?" reading it. With all the categories and classifications he came up with (less numerous or complicated in Austin than in the others I've mentioned, and certainly easier to follow than Benveniste, but not necessarily any more interesting for that), in talking about performative vs. constative speech acts didn't give me any sense whatsoever of telling me anything I wasn't already fully conscious of or providing me with tools I could use to take me own thought further. It would seem that discussions in Descartes and Locke about whether space and/ or matter are infinite should be much less relevant to my thinking than an analysis of how speech is used, since boundaries of space and time are far outside anything that I have experienced or ever could experience and since they are purely speculative, but reading those discussions actually does excite my imagination and gets me trying to conceive models of the universe in my head (as well as thinking about how ideas are form and to what extent ideas like infinity that seem so straightforward that every schoolchild understands them are lacking any positive content - the absence of boundaries puts in our mind a sort of vanishing beyond our mental horizon, but we can't really imagine anything more specific than motion across vast empty space, we can't actually contain infinite space in our minds, not can we answer a question like - if there were no beginning of time and there was a 'forever' behind us as well as ahead of us, since infinity can not be traversed, how would the present moment ever have arrived? God knows why there should be any interest in trying to imagine the unimaginable like that, but personally I get a weird sense of satisfaction... and oddly keep coming up with images of circularity and feel closer to the eternal return, though I realize I'm mixing familiar and comprehensible images [the discovery that there isn't an end of the world that you can fall off of] with a distorted version of an unrelated theory [I'm fairly certain that Nietzsche didn't mean to say that time loops in on itself, that it is shaped like Finnegans Wake] to create a simple and not entirely convincing model which alternates in my mind with other equally unlikely and speculative pictures of the universe - more science fiction than philosophy). I clearly miss something essential in texts like Austin's - whether or not I understand what he is saying, I certainly don't get the implications or the consequences, since I can't imagine what in it inspired others or how this could be developed into something else. There's an Alice in Wonderland citation in the book (there always is when language is discussed): In order to say that Alice thinks a previous statement isn't right she starts a sentence with "I don't think...", at which point she is broken off by the Cheshire cat who says, "then you shouldn't speak". I feel like a large part of his book is making the extremely obvious point that the Cheshire cat's response wasn't appropriate. Who isn't aware that we select words from a preexistent vocabulary to convey a certain meaning (and why do we need the words 'phatic' and 'rhetic' to separate the choosing a word and conveying a meaning?), and yes it is obvious that there is a difference between what an utterance accomplishes by convention and intention (Illocutionary - promising, pleading, arguing) and what the eventual consequences of an utterance might be whether intended or not (perlocutionary -convincing, offending, etc). Furthermore, it is very clear that the circumstances of an utterance should generally be taken into account, and that while the truth-value of some statements can and should be considered apart from the context in which they appear, quite apart from the judgment of true or false with most statements, or rather utterances we consider what the utterance is meant to accomplish... and in this last statement, I even feel I'm going beyond what Austin says, since he never explicitly questions why a statement is made. Though he clearly says that very few utterances really are purely constative, he generally avoids statements and sticks with classifying his various sorts of performatives - verdictives, expositives, etc. There is something vaguely interesting that to say "I promise" is to promise, that certain words enact themselves, but beyond this what does Austin tell us? I ask in all seriousness, because I sincerely hope that someone can explain to me what the relevance or importance of the text is. I ordered Derrida's Limited Inc. and am expecting it to come later this week, and I'm looking forward to reading what he has to say about it - hopefully this might give rise to more discussion.
I will bring up one thing that did interest me in the text. I'll preface this by saying that, though the topic itself is interesting to me, sometimes the content of what a person says is less interesting than the importance the person places on it - the fact that a certain idea becomes an object of fascination, is perhaps even fetishized, suddenly changes the idea itself, whether you suddenly start looking for what it is in the idea that can illicit that level of fascination or what it is in the writer or text that draws it to that idea that leads it to find the idea so important. This is not something that Austin can be said to fetishize, but he does mention a number of times at a certain distance (though only in the first half of the book), the fact that there is not a performative "I insult you", which admittedly is an interesting idea. I suppose insults would fall into three main categories: 1) The most effective insults in terms of the effect they have on other people are those that call attention to something true or partially true, or that is at least a source of insecurity for the person being insulted. This would probably include most breaking of taboos, since something like a racial slur only works if the person being insulted really does have a self-conscious sense that people do judge him because of his race, religion, orientation, gender or what have you. 2) Inventive insults, at least in my experience, rarely come from people who are beside themselves with rage, and are rarely truly hurtful, they're usually competitive or exhibitionist and used to show off. These are the most fun. 3) Purely conventional insults can work as ready made words that can be invested with as much anger, indignation or what have you as required when the more hurtful truths and sore spots don't present themselves. These usually serve largely as a valve, a way of letting out anger - the words themselves don't have much effect since they don't really mean anything though people might respond to the emotion behind them. But since 'fuck you' basically doesn't mean anything more than "I want you to be insulted", it s worth asking, well, why can't we just say, "I insult you". There is once again a sort of taboo with curse words, though it isn't so much in effect in a lot of circles. A normal response to someone saying, in effect, "I want you to be offended" would be a calm, "well I refuse to be offended", and I think that attitude often can really piss a would-be offender off. If the purely conventional 'fuck you' gets a reaction very often, it is kind of worth asking why. I believe there is still a certain code of honor involved in terms of calling a person out, where not responding to a challenge implied in 'fuck you' (or a mother insult if it's taken seriously, or whatever else) is taken as somehow backing down or admitting defeat. That being the case, if neither side genuinely wants to come to blows and neither side manages to bring the insults to the level of a creative insult competition, there's an obligation to just sort of repeat your insults while walking away or making an excuse not to shift over into some more serious form of confrontation - which brings us back to the fact "I hereby insult you" would work just as well if convention accepted it. In a footnote, Austin mentions an old German practice in which 'Beleidigung' actually was used this was.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Machine Animals
For such a straightforward, lucid philosopher, Locke can be really bizarre sometimes. I'm making incredibly slow progress reading him. Sections are tedious, with him stating the obvious at length and getting hung up on ideas like infinity that he finds important enough to necessitate repeating his key argument over and over again. I ought to be reading specifically for passages that will be picked up by Condillac and that can be useful for thinking about the relationship between thought and language, and about language acquisition, but, of course, the passages that catch my attention are often the ones that have nothing to do with my current project.
Animals come up again, this time with the Cartesians mentioned and attacked explicitly. As far as I can tell, the famous Cartesian body/ soul duality - and I don't know where it is spelled out in Descartes, nor can I remember who later referred to his conception of man as 'the ghost in the machine' - but this duality of an immaterial soul inside the body controlling it and giving it orders, leads to animals being purely mechanical, since they don't have souls. ANimals are thus, nothing but pure reaction to stimuli. I believe that part of this distinction is tied to free will: When an animal is confronted with a certain set of stimuli, originating from within or without, it is only possible for them to react on way - responding to the strongest stimulus. Locke, taking a counter position, has a strong case to make (which will lead him into a number of strange side roads), and all the necessary arguments to make it with, but he keeps going too far, or conceding things he doesn't need to and creating these strange passages. First, Locke initially seems to deny the existence of free will. He says that the will is what makes us prefer one thing over another, and freedom is the freedom to act on our will. We can't be free to will or not to will or to choose what our will is going to be, because absent a will, what could possibly give us a preference one way or the other? He even has a nice section where he seems ready to deny that our actions tend toward any good other than what our desires dictate, or that our desires would necessarily change if we had a better understanding of what the Good is - taking the example of the drunk who is very well aware that it is in his best interest to stop drinking, and declares his intention to do so, but is unable to resist when the thirst and uneasiness at not being with friends in the pub lead him to break his vows and knowingly act against his own interest. He then backtracks in order to preserve a Christian world order, where there is justice in the dispensation of reward and punishment for mens actions after death, deciding that we are actually able to decide between acting precipitously for a present good or holding off to consider what actually is for our eventual greatest good - virtue and vice is all about holding off and thinking things through. This seems that much less convincing considering his odd attempt to describe actions as being controlled not by 'desire' but by 'uneasiness' over and absent good. I don't really see a difference between the too, except that, as he spoke at length about pain being more powerful than pleasure and a greater incentive, highlighting the negative emotion of 'uneasiness' does seem to be adding to a sense of compulsion - of a forceable problem that needs to be addressed. Not that this can't be contained in the word 'desire' just as well, but in context the word 'uneasiness' seemed contaminated by talk of pain, sickness and necessity, and I couldn't conceive of any other excuse for insisting on it.
Locke also denies that a person is his soul exactly... sort of. He makes clear that we have no idea what substances are, that we only know things through the accidents attached to them that we are capable of perceiving. We are familiar with our own thoughts, but we can't say what it is that thinks exactly. He doesn't want to give an opinion on whether it is material or immaterial, or whether matter is capable of thought, but he does define persons and self in such a way that animals are not necessarily denied selfhood. He points out that if you take a sapling and then years later take the full grown oak it has turned into, it will still be the same tree, though most of the particles will be different and perhaps none of the same particles remain, and he talks about this as being because of a unity of life. For a person it is not unity of life, but unity of consciousness that determines the self, and the self owns all those actions it can remember, but no others - and whatever substances, material or immaterial, body or soul, that the consciousness is attached to count as the same person and can be held accountable. Should different souls pass through, this would make no difference, just as, should the soul pass out of the body and be reborn without memories of its past life, it could no longer be counted as the same self. Much of the weirdness in this part of the book comes through things like his story of a parrot who was able not only to say human words, but to have a conversation and give witty answers to questions put to it... basically trying to state that it was outward form and not inner experience that makes us a call a man a man or an animal an animal. Presence or absence of cognitive abilities does not change the species a creature belongs to. He also talks about things like - first off, if limbs get cut off and a person is mutilated, he is still the same person, which leads him to a theoretical discussion of consciousness remaining in a cut-off finger and a new consciousness taking hold in the rest of the body (in which case the person could no longer be held accountable for what the other person born into his body did). While refusing to claim knowledge of what thinks and pointing out that the Cartesians have no better proof than their assertions for the soul as seat of self and origin of self, Locke does show a strong preference for an immaterial source of thought, which I suppose is neither here nor there, except that, as with free will, it felt like Locke's entire reason for challenging the Cartesians was partly undone, since an immaterial source could be called a soul, and if it doesn't rely on the body, than why shouldn't memory and consciousness adhere to it? The main difference, I suppose, would be that the thinking substance would be in animals as well (substance once again being according to Locke a meaningless word which simply marks the fact that we don't know what it is that is capable of thinking).
Some of the nicest parts of the texts are those that Locke dedicates to showing the limits of knowledge and his wonder at all the things he is sure he'll never know. When talking about whether thinking necessarily arises out of matter and explaining that it is a mystery either way, he spends some time saying we don't really know how matter holds together at all, and when you look at it under a powerful enough microscope, it always consists of countless disparate particles, and who knows why they don't just fall apart? He talks about the possibility of having senses other than the five we have that could provide just as much information, but which we have no way of even imagining, and he takes a second to imagine what it would be like if our eyes naturally saw things magnified hundreds of thousands of times (praising God for not giving us such impractical vision, which wouldn't help us much in getting around or going about our business, but also showing a kind of excited wistfulness in evoking all that would be revealed and the wonder of things blown up to reveal more secrets).
Anyway, that's still the main thing I'm reading. I read the first 30 pages of a book called "the decadence of the French Nietzsche", which is the sort of dubious book that you can probably get something out of if you read it with a grain of salt, but which I almost certainly won't finish. It's claiming that philosophy is built on the sacrifice of thinking for truth, taking its cue from a quote in which Nietzsche says something like "we seekers after truth" share a faith with plato and with the Christians, that faith being the belief that Truth is an absolute good. Of course the guy writing this book doesn't seem to realize that it is weird for him to take truth as meaning basically any concrete assertion. He seems to think that whenever you state something is true, you are making a decision not to question that assertion any longer, and the decision "this is where I will halt my train of thought and this is the conclusion I will draw" is what he refers to as the sacrifice of thinking - and I guess he wants to show that Nietzsche and Deleuze make their most bombastic statements provisionally and proceed to contradict themselves, thus refusing to fully sacrifice thinking. The whole thing seemed dubious to me - as I said, implicitly defining 'Truth' as being any assertion whatsoever and imagining that most philosophers DON'T revise and question their own previous assertions seems silly, particularly considering the fact that the guy didn't seem to realize there could be any issue there. Still, the quotes would have been good for something, and I mean, it is a guy who read a lot of Nietzsche and Deleuze, and following his reading couldn't have been utterly useless, but I've got better things to read, and most of it is mandatory.
What were the questions you asked that I wanted to address? You asked what and where I published - it was a revised version of the Louis Wolfson article I showed you a year ago, it just took about a year for the publication to come out (Cabinet magazine)... I don't know whether the interview was already part of it when I showed it to you way back when. It was HUme I was thinking about with not being able to actually live according to what he was writing - and then, you asked, would Anna Karenina be better without the theorizing, which isn't what the point was in the discussion of theory debasing literature - or perhaps it is. I suspect that Proust probably would have included that in the whole, "like an article that still has the price tag on", though he was at least as guilty of it as Tolstoy - the difference perhaps being that rather than the narrator confidently telling how it is, the character is often struggling through theories that aren't necessarily true. At any rate, the main point as far as the Bersani-related discussion is more that writing theory and writing literature are two separate activities, and merely putting theory into application would create something lifeless and hollow. Whatever theory a writer might subscribe to and write before or after his fiction, or even include in his fiction, he needs to disregard and even go against it when composing the fiction, he needs to pay attention to the dictates of his prose, which is something no theory can really encompass or even fully account for. Whether this is true or not, and whether this was Proust's understanding, I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure it was what Bersani had in mind.
Animals come up again, this time with the Cartesians mentioned and attacked explicitly. As far as I can tell, the famous Cartesian body/ soul duality - and I don't know where it is spelled out in Descartes, nor can I remember who later referred to his conception of man as 'the ghost in the machine' - but this duality of an immaterial soul inside the body controlling it and giving it orders, leads to animals being purely mechanical, since they don't have souls. ANimals are thus, nothing but pure reaction to stimuli. I believe that part of this distinction is tied to free will: When an animal is confronted with a certain set of stimuli, originating from within or without, it is only possible for them to react on way - responding to the strongest stimulus. Locke, taking a counter position, has a strong case to make (which will lead him into a number of strange side roads), and all the necessary arguments to make it with, but he keeps going too far, or conceding things he doesn't need to and creating these strange passages. First, Locke initially seems to deny the existence of free will. He says that the will is what makes us prefer one thing over another, and freedom is the freedom to act on our will. We can't be free to will or not to will or to choose what our will is going to be, because absent a will, what could possibly give us a preference one way or the other? He even has a nice section where he seems ready to deny that our actions tend toward any good other than what our desires dictate, or that our desires would necessarily change if we had a better understanding of what the Good is - taking the example of the drunk who is very well aware that it is in his best interest to stop drinking, and declares his intention to do so, but is unable to resist when the thirst and uneasiness at not being with friends in the pub lead him to break his vows and knowingly act against his own interest. He then backtracks in order to preserve a Christian world order, where there is justice in the dispensation of reward and punishment for mens actions after death, deciding that we are actually able to decide between acting precipitously for a present good or holding off to consider what actually is for our eventual greatest good - virtue and vice is all about holding off and thinking things through. This seems that much less convincing considering his odd attempt to describe actions as being controlled not by 'desire' but by 'uneasiness' over and absent good. I don't really see a difference between the too, except that, as he spoke at length about pain being more powerful than pleasure and a greater incentive, highlighting the negative emotion of 'uneasiness' does seem to be adding to a sense of compulsion - of a forceable problem that needs to be addressed. Not that this can't be contained in the word 'desire' just as well, but in context the word 'uneasiness' seemed contaminated by talk of pain, sickness and necessity, and I couldn't conceive of any other excuse for insisting on it.
Locke also denies that a person is his soul exactly... sort of. He makes clear that we have no idea what substances are, that we only know things through the accidents attached to them that we are capable of perceiving. We are familiar with our own thoughts, but we can't say what it is that thinks exactly. He doesn't want to give an opinion on whether it is material or immaterial, or whether matter is capable of thought, but he does define persons and self in such a way that animals are not necessarily denied selfhood. He points out that if you take a sapling and then years later take the full grown oak it has turned into, it will still be the same tree, though most of the particles will be different and perhaps none of the same particles remain, and he talks about this as being because of a unity of life. For a person it is not unity of life, but unity of consciousness that determines the self, and the self owns all those actions it can remember, but no others - and whatever substances, material or immaterial, body or soul, that the consciousness is attached to count as the same person and can be held accountable. Should different souls pass through, this would make no difference, just as, should the soul pass out of the body and be reborn without memories of its past life, it could no longer be counted as the same self. Much of the weirdness in this part of the book comes through things like his story of a parrot who was able not only to say human words, but to have a conversation and give witty answers to questions put to it... basically trying to state that it was outward form and not inner experience that makes us a call a man a man or an animal an animal. Presence or absence of cognitive abilities does not change the species a creature belongs to. He also talks about things like - first off, if limbs get cut off and a person is mutilated, he is still the same person, which leads him to a theoretical discussion of consciousness remaining in a cut-off finger and a new consciousness taking hold in the rest of the body (in which case the person could no longer be held accountable for what the other person born into his body did). While refusing to claim knowledge of what thinks and pointing out that the Cartesians have no better proof than their assertions for the soul as seat of self and origin of self, Locke does show a strong preference for an immaterial source of thought, which I suppose is neither here nor there, except that, as with free will, it felt like Locke's entire reason for challenging the Cartesians was partly undone, since an immaterial source could be called a soul, and if it doesn't rely on the body, than why shouldn't memory and consciousness adhere to it? The main difference, I suppose, would be that the thinking substance would be in animals as well (substance once again being according to Locke a meaningless word which simply marks the fact that we don't know what it is that is capable of thinking).
Some of the nicest parts of the texts are those that Locke dedicates to showing the limits of knowledge and his wonder at all the things he is sure he'll never know. When talking about whether thinking necessarily arises out of matter and explaining that it is a mystery either way, he spends some time saying we don't really know how matter holds together at all, and when you look at it under a powerful enough microscope, it always consists of countless disparate particles, and who knows why they don't just fall apart? He talks about the possibility of having senses other than the five we have that could provide just as much information, but which we have no way of even imagining, and he takes a second to imagine what it would be like if our eyes naturally saw things magnified hundreds of thousands of times (praising God for not giving us such impractical vision, which wouldn't help us much in getting around or going about our business, but also showing a kind of excited wistfulness in evoking all that would be revealed and the wonder of things blown up to reveal more secrets).
Anyway, that's still the main thing I'm reading. I read the first 30 pages of a book called "the decadence of the French Nietzsche", which is the sort of dubious book that you can probably get something out of if you read it with a grain of salt, but which I almost certainly won't finish. It's claiming that philosophy is built on the sacrifice of thinking for truth, taking its cue from a quote in which Nietzsche says something like "we seekers after truth" share a faith with plato and with the Christians, that faith being the belief that Truth is an absolute good. Of course the guy writing this book doesn't seem to realize that it is weird for him to take truth as meaning basically any concrete assertion. He seems to think that whenever you state something is true, you are making a decision not to question that assertion any longer, and the decision "this is where I will halt my train of thought and this is the conclusion I will draw" is what he refers to as the sacrifice of thinking - and I guess he wants to show that Nietzsche and Deleuze make their most bombastic statements provisionally and proceed to contradict themselves, thus refusing to fully sacrifice thinking. The whole thing seemed dubious to me - as I said, implicitly defining 'Truth' as being any assertion whatsoever and imagining that most philosophers DON'T revise and question their own previous assertions seems silly, particularly considering the fact that the guy didn't seem to realize there could be any issue there. Still, the quotes would have been good for something, and I mean, it is a guy who read a lot of Nietzsche and Deleuze, and following his reading couldn't have been utterly useless, but I've got better things to read, and most of it is mandatory.
What were the questions you asked that I wanted to address? You asked what and where I published - it was a revised version of the Louis Wolfson article I showed you a year ago, it just took about a year for the publication to come out (Cabinet magazine)... I don't know whether the interview was already part of it when I showed it to you way back when. It was HUme I was thinking about with not being able to actually live according to what he was writing - and then, you asked, would Anna Karenina be better without the theorizing, which isn't what the point was in the discussion of theory debasing literature - or perhaps it is. I suspect that Proust probably would have included that in the whole, "like an article that still has the price tag on", though he was at least as guilty of it as Tolstoy - the difference perhaps being that rather than the narrator confidently telling how it is, the character is often struggling through theories that aren't necessarily true. At any rate, the main point as far as the Bersani-related discussion is more that writing theory and writing literature are two separate activities, and merely putting theory into application would create something lifeless and hollow. Whatever theory a writer might subscribe to and write before or after his fiction, or even include in his fiction, he needs to disregard and even go against it when composing the fiction, he needs to pay attention to the dictates of his prose, which is something no theory can really encompass or even fully account for. Whether this is true or not, and whether this was Proust's understanding, I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure it was what Bersani had in mind.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
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.
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.
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.
Monday, August 30, 2010
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.
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.
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