a response: Social Construction + The Being of Stuff

The responses of Professors Bremselhäcker, Twinglebrook-Hastings and Benway have been, in their respective ways, of inordinate value to me at what feels like a formative point in my own journey of the thinking about of stuff, and the synoptic conclusion – that Latour, Hacking, Schaffer and Shapin et al are where it is at – is well taken. There will follow a short redemptive testimony about my personal acceptance of Latour, but first I think I want to stick to my guns a little bit. And these guns are arranged on the frontiers of cognitive anthropology, and they are aimed as one at the dark forces of cognitive twattery.

Let me start by clarifying, as I think was well-taken, that my initial remarks were not intended as a rebuttal of Foucault per se, but against the notion of making things “appear against a background of emptiness”, as I felt that this phrasing neatly encapsulated what I felt had become a default position among anthropologists. This tends to result in relativism, it is true, but I did not mean to cast relativism as the central problem, but rather an epiphenomenon of the underlying issue, which is an underlying assumption among many anthropologists and, I suspect, critical theorists more generally, that thought is language-like.

Let me start by distinguishing two approaches to thinking about cognition that seem to encompass most of the thinking that people who identify as anthropologists do. One I would call evolutionary cognition, the other, as the dedicated LSE Msc program calls itself, 'Anthropology of Learning and Cognition'. It is my feeling that the arguments raised by Twinglebrook-Hastings, in particular, apply much more strongly to the former than to the latter.

The evolutionary-cognitive approach tends to set the question up thus: what is the explanation for [apparently irrational behaviour/belief/cognitive trait]? Answer: [irrational cognitive trait/belief/behaviour] arose in response to [particular threat to survival of species] on the Savannah. Porblem disappears. This is not even slightly a caricature. The Avatar of this approach is of course Pascal Boyer, Cognitive Twat in Residence, Paris Institut des Conneries. Boyer built his name on the argument that all religious behaviour arises as slippage between cognitive domains which arose for straightforward evolutionary reasons. Principally, that in order to predict the actions of enemies/women/sabretooth tigers we needed to have a 'theory of mind', and that this 'theory of mind' gets misapplied well beyond its 'intended' evolutionary domain, leading us to believe that rocks and rivers and badgers are alive and intimately interested in our personal destinies. All religious belief/activity is spandrelly epiphenomenon, porblem solved.

(I must admit I think that the comparative study of, say, witchcraft, could be greatly enriched by attention to possibly innate understandings of intentionality. I also don't think the theory of domain specificity is totally without promise, as I shall briefly suggest below. it's the reduction of the problem to an evolutionary question that is objecitonable, or, as Prof T-H so cogently put it, the reduction of the problem to itself.)

The learning-cognitive approach is significantly different. It's central question picks up from Bourdieu, whose main concern could be summarised as: “how is it that people make culture, while culture makes people”. The observation which arose in the 80s, partly under the influence of the Selfish Gene, and partly among those troubled by what we call the 'writing culture' movement, was that without a richer empirical understanding of how children actually learn a culture, we were at something of a dead end. That is, if you wanted to see how inculcation, enculturation worked, including for major concerns of critical theory like the construction and maintenance of ideology, then you needed to look at how children learn. This is where my problem with the 'background of emptiness' becomes clear. nonetheless, I think my views, and the better parts of this school of anthropology, are entirely consistent with Twinglebrook-Hastings's conclusion that

“Foucault's formulation need not imply that humans are blank slates. Rather we would like to have a look at the slate, at where it was mined and manufactured, at the chalk, the schoolroom and how it gets written on.”

An anthropology of learning and cognition then, is an attempt to do exactly this. And if done properly, far from performing a vanishing act on the contingent and variant content of cultures, should add enrichment and nuance to our understandings, one could happily say our descriptions of them. I will try and give an example:

Rita Astuti of the London School of Economics wrote her PhD thesis on the Vezo of Southwestern Madagascar. One of the most interesting things about the Vezo is their decidedly fluent and contingent account of ethnicity and person-making (one which is, as it happens, shared to some extent by the Amhara). In short, the Vezo are fishing people. They live on the coast and are skilled makers and pilots of Malayo-Polynesian style canoes. This is as opposed to the Masikoro, who are cattle herders and ploughsmen, and know little of fishing and canoeing and are thus slightly inferior. However, Astuti argues, all a Masikoro needs to do in order to become Vezo is to move to the coast, and learn to fish and to build canoes. This is pretty unusual, as generally even the more open small societies require you to at least marry someone in order to gain group identity.

Anyway, after this fairly standard enthnographic thesis, Astuti becomes increasingly interested in cognition and conducting field experiments. One of her questions surrounds Vezo ideas of heredity. It seems that Vezo insist that children gain their physical features not form their birth parents but from the people who are around them most as they grow up. Vezo tend to downplay ideas of parental 'ownership' of children, and rather see it as the part of the whole village to raise every child. Astuti's question is, to what extent can the Vezo actually be said to 'believe' that children get their physical characteristics from pater/mater rather than genitor? If you ask them about children, they reply almost without exception according to the cultural norm. However, when she conducts a serioes of experiments asking people about animal reproduction, results are strikingly different. She asks questions like – a chameleon with thirty teeth gives birth, and the child is raised by a chameleon with twenty teeth. How many teeth will the child have? She is careful to use weird animals rather than domestic ones, so as to try to lead people to reason based on some find of organising principal rather than refer to specific ideas. Adults invariably say that the child chameleon will have thirty teeth, in line with Western expectations. So people appear to have some kind of understanding of heredity which does not conform to their – universally agreed-on – stated beliefs on the matter.

The point I'd like to make is that the kind of question Astuti is asking here, while still 'cognitive', is radically, radically different from the kind of question asked by Boyer. Astuti's results challenge me to a more nuanced approach to what a cultural 'belief' might be, and hints at possible different levels of meaning and understanding on which the Vezo can call in order to make sense of life. It unquestionably enriches our description of the Vezo world, and Vezo ideas, as well as provoking more general questions on the relationship between ideology and belief, or even on the viability of a notion like 'belief' in general. This sort of question is very similar to the old ding-dong about whether Trobrianders actually 'believe' that fathers have nothing to do with childbirth.

Now, the patchiness of my knowledge of the Western philosophical tradition is well-known, and embarrassing, but it seems to me that Wittgenstein would not disapprove of this kind of work, and it does seem to me that for good anthropologists, Wittgenstein is the man with the plan. Indeed, Malinowski's early work about 'phatic communion' (otherwise known as maintenance speech, or language not meant for the transferral of propositional content) would seem to conform very closely with Wittgenstein's foundational stuff on speech acts (I beg forgiveness for the clumsiness of this analysis; I don't know a better way to raise this connection but it seeeeeeeeeems to me that good cognitive anthropologists and Wittgenstein have a lot in common and I'd like to hear esteemed colleagues' thoughts, be they ever so brutal.).

So, in a lot of really important (and possibly fairly obvious) ways, thought is not like language. Now, at least in anthropology, this to me is by far the most important knock against the culture-as-text school, and specifically against Geertz. And I don't think t is too much of a step to say that it is the assumption that culture is language-like (even among those plenty familiar with Chomsky who should know better) that allows 'stupid-foucauldians' to perpetuate stupid-foucauldian relativism.

But to bring it back to domain specificity, and as an example of how culture does not float free in the way language does, there is evidence suggesting that cognition is more compartmentalised than was once thought, and that humans may have things called 'modules', of which one would deal with 'folk physics', one with 'folk biology' (the names are hideously unfortunate), one with face recognition etc. All I want to point out for the moment is that it appears to be a universal fact that children at a young age make a distinction between things that are alive and things that are not. this distinction would appear to be genuinely innate, along with certain other aspects of concept-formation, to do with fairly well-known experiments on how many parts of an elephant you have to take away before a child no longer recognises it as such. Now I am not being too precise here, because I only want to make a fairly general point here, which is that if all children innately think differently about animals and other objects, then whenever we look at cultural ideas surrounding living things, it would be incorrect to treat those beliefs against a 'background of emptiness', because the background is a significant difference in the ways humans cognise stuff. So it's not a search for the 'steady hand' of cognitive science, just towards a more accurate account of the mechanism which makes and is made by culture. That is my problem with cognitive relativism, and it is one which colours a lot of the work to which I am exposed. Whether it represents a problem with Foucault himself, I do not know.

I think the best parallel I can offer to make it clear what I am advicating is with literary studies. I hope it is becoming clear that the cognitivism I support has little or nothing to do with literary Darwinism, or the search for evolutionary 'explanations' of cultural forms, which, as Bremselhäcker notes, inevitably results in the impossibility of differentiating between different kinds of cultural content, and so ironically introduces a supreme sort of relativism. Rather, a literary parallel to the cognitivism I like would be precisely that advocated by Bremselhäcker in his post 'Further thoughts on Foucault': “a refocusing of humanistic inquiry in which regarding literature as a social construct does not imply regarding it as merely a social construct, that is to say in which charting the social forces which brought it into being as an object and an experience does not imply its hollowing out, its loss of specificity, or its reduction to a vehicle of identity construction”.

And thence to Latour. I first properly attempted to read We Have Never Been Modern one year ago. I didn't get much of it. After teaching one term of advanced social anthro, focused around demolishing the nature-culture divide, I go back to We Have Never Been Modern and suddenly it all starts to fit together in a way not incomparable to the descent of fleets of heavn'ly angels singing praise. If I can put the question somewhat flippantly as Social Construction+Real World=What?, then it is tremendously heartening to see the kinds of answers that are emerging, even if I personally needed some time to grow into them. For that, for the beginnings of a new kind of approach, I am eternally grateful to my friends and co-travellers. It's been Real, let us keep it so.

Civilized Tulips

This study has its roots in an internship I did at the Skagit Valley Bulb Company in 2006. I shortly realized that what I thought was training in the tulip industry was in fact participant observation and thus began my initial investigation into tulip agronomy, global tulip trade, particularly that between the Pacific Northeast of the United States and the Netherlands, and the tourism associated with tulips in both regions. Trade networks linking Washington State and the Netherlands, where tulips are popularly perceived as a commodity indexing national identity on the order of Anne Frank, marijuana and windmills, are extraordinarily precise and strange networks of various kinds of capital.

Standing in front of a field of 100,000 tulips, holding invoices in my hand and standing next to an older couple taking pictures of the field before returning to the local B&B, I knew what I was standing in front of an answer without a question. At the same time as I was myself entering into as it were the tulip field I had become impressed with new methods coming out of science studies, particularly those associated with Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law, Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer and Annrmarie Mol. I set about tracking the tulips, trucks, container ships, airplanes, postcards, farmers, agronomy publications, tourism data, tourists and dollars that move along the Washington-Netherlands axis.

My aim was to investigate these networks and generate an account of the tulip that would be based entirely on local practices, on real agents, human and non-human rather than on the universal categories of commodity and circuit of capital that formed the basis for my social analysis to date. It seemed to me at the time that there was no capitalism (see "The Tulip Industry Does Not Exist." Ag(r)on 3.4 (2007) p. 352), but that there was the construction of something worthy of being called the tulip circuit, but which was at no point the mediation of certain economic or social universals but that was itself that which was capable of explaining the existence of the tulip industry. I felt it vital to the future of this precarious industry of hybrids to not only denaturalize it but desocialize it as well. The deployment of Actor-Network Theory in the Dutch Agronomy Studies was needless to say far ahead of those efforts made in Pacific Northeast research universities. However, as I hope to show in this book, the conclusions of the Dutch academy are in need of dramatic revision.

To my surprise, I discovered that in fact the tulip represents a stable essence across geography and varied though regular (and ultimately Newtonian) temporalities. The divers elements of the tulip trade under the microscope of Actor-Network Theory are revealed to be more or less simple assortments of particulars, albeit organized as a complex social system of managed resources and independent actors, that exist according to general social laws but which are not however explicable in terms of the construction of individual social orders and moralities. To put it bluntly, human beings construct (or "grow") not the other way around and an investigation of the relevant actants will reveal precisely how eliminable individual actors are. With tulips there is indeed no transportation without translation, however I quickly realized that there is such a thing here as a perfect translation absolutely faithful to the fully concrete and immediately mobilizable intentions of the author.

It was a genuine surprise to find that the tulip is Natural in the fullest sense of the word, admittedly one that is cultivated and refined by Men. I have judged as a consequence that with the social study of the sciences we have landed on a truly scientific method, one capable not merely of mirroring the prejudices of the scientist but of generating truly novel results and real discoveries that bear little trace of invention, except perhaps as a sort of frame for the real content (in this case, tulips). This happy conclusion I will inspire other historians, economists, agronomists and sociologists to adopt the latest methods in science studies so that they might produce unthought results of their own.

Further thoughts on "Foucault"

One of the points I was attempting to make in my previous post was that it is somewhat hard, at least initially, to get excited about Foucault if you are interested in shaking things up in literary studies, my primary field of training and activity (I take this to be one aspect of TT T-B's initial salvo as well). Now, I do get excited about Foucault, but usually only insofar as I place myself at some distance from the general scholarly "conversation" of literary studies and resituate myself in other discursive fields (e.g the critique of neuroscience journalism or U.S. drug policy). As I indicated previously, at this point "Foucault" (I am using "Foucault" in scare quotes much the way we have used "Judith Butler" previously) might as well denote the hegemonic ideology of the humanities professoriat. The humanities seem to be the place where exciting modes of critique go to die, or at least go to become commodified. "Foucault" could also be shorthand for the product demanded by the most prestigious journals and university presses, at least those associated with English departments, which compose the dominant sector of the literary humanities (comp lit and foreign language departments are more fractured, and therefore somewhat less predictable, but they also enjoy far less prestige and funding within the university). My impression from the Brown English department was that a certain type of (sometimes but not always "stupid") "Foucauldianism" - generally consisting of: an understanding of literary discourse as producing rather than reflecting or describing power relations (by the way, I generally agree with this approach), some degree of attention to (or at least ritualistic invocation of) "the body," a vaguely liberationist rhetoric buffered by the claim that power invests and pervades (and therefore can be contested within) all fields, no matter how apparently obscure, "minor," and/or scholarly - was literally compulsory for any graduate student who wished to stay in the program. At the end of their six years or so, they all go off to compete for the handful of available jobs at the MLA armed with a shtick that sounds more or less like this: "I work on (discourses of) x [where x=some apparently marginal theme ideally associated with "the body": e.g. "hygiene," "nervousness," "orality," "embodiment"] in y [where y=a period, ideally designated by some at least faintly revisionist phrase, e.g. "early modern," rather than "Renaissance" or "Baroque," "long eighteenth century" rather than "Enlightenment"]. My dissertation shows that x subtends a cluster of rhetorical strategies permitting the y subject to contest/reimagine/naturalize submission to [insert relevant power structure]. This negotiation played a pivotal role in the reconfigurations of the [insert relevant area of power/knowledge] regime characteristic of y. Whereas previous scholarship on y has largely failed to interrogate x, I demonstrate that this silencing has perpetuated the naturalization of x as a function of [insert epistemic/sociohistoric shift relevant to previous scholarly reification of y]."

Now, I should make clear I am not dismissing scholarship in the mode I have just caricatured as worthless or pernicious. In fact, I find quite a bit of it cogent, powerful, and illuminating, often like reading it, and have learned a great deal from it. To a large extent, I believe I am primarily allergic to the academic environment itself and especially to the particular forms of commodification it requires of its would-be denizens, rather than to the particular formulae in vogue at this juncture. On the other hand, I think that both the enforcement of what I am calling the "Foucauldian" formula as a kind of academic rightthink and the very fact that certain propositions associated with Foucault have taken on such a stultifyingly formulaic quality are highly troubling given the way they coincide historically with the increasing disrepute and socio-political irrelevance of the humanities over the past two to three decades (a fact made painfully clear by the savage cuts enacted in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.). The problem, as Michael Bérubé recently demonstrated, is not a dramatic decline in enrollments, which apart from a blip in the sixties have remained largely stable around 10% throughout the postwar era, but rather a clear sense on the part of the power elite that the humanities have become expendable and even embarrassing (I would suggest that this sense is in no small part derived from the manner in which the culture industry has expanded to perform ideological functions that were previously to some extent the province of the academic humanities, but I would have to expand on this claim to make it more plausible). I suggested in my previous post that the main anxiety provoked among humanists by Foucault - put simply, his apparent claim that resistance feeds power rather than contesting it - allegorizes a highly justifiable, to varying degrees unconscious concern that their own endless lip service to resistance serves power by providing elite institutions with the convenient appearance of a commitment to equality, liberation, and other things ideologically important to the sectors of privilege they serve.

My point here is that if there is something specific to the kinds of inquiry carried out in the humanities that deserves preservation and perpetuation, I think the currently hegemonic "Foucauldianism" has probably not been helpful in making the case for them. There is, I would contend, a specific domain of experience that we can or even must talk about in terms of "the literary" or the aesthetic, and Foucault and his followers and fellow travelers have helped us understand how that experience might have been the product of specific, identifiable historical and political forces, and for this they deserve great credit. However, the gesture of unmasking implicit in this enterprise has as its potential consequence a leveling of that experience, and even a hollowing out of it. Let us formulate the basic proposition as follows: "literature is a social and historical construct linked to bourgeois white males' accumulation of symbolic capital at the beginning of the modern period; its proclaimed 'universality' masks the silencing of subaltern voices, just as the language of aesthetics that emerges with it becomes and persists as an exclusionary tactic by which hegemonic sectors mask their violence." Now, the question we must raise about this formulation (which I have little trouble accepting, in a broad sense) is where its emphasis lies. Is the point that "literature" is merely this, merely a mask or a shibboleth? This is certainly the lesson drawn by many, if not most, of the people whose work I am somewhat crudely lumping together.

Once this reading has been accepted, the necessary consequence appears to be that we are no longer interested in the literary object, or the kind of experience we might call "literary" or "aesthetic," and instead are interested in how and by whom and to what ends these kinds of objects and experiences are made. But my first question at this point is, what is the point of having this take place in a specific department dedicated to "English" or "literature"? British Marxist scholars' invention of cultural studies responded precisely to this problem, but it has never taken hold institutionally in the U.S., with the somewhat strange result that English Ph.D.'s still churn out endless dissertations on Shakespeare, but they make every effort to treat Shakespeare's plays in the same way as they do contemporary legal and medical discourses, let's say. There is nothing necessarily illegitimate about such an approach, but what is problematic is that it occurs in the absence of any attempt to redraw disciplinary boundaries (in part because humanists probably correctly assume that any such redrawing will come at their expense). Here is where I think the social constructivism of the humanities differs at least from the best of what seems to be happening in science studies: science studies people, even as they document their artifactuality and constructedness, do not at the same time cease to pay attention to the specific kinds of objects and experiences associated with, say, endocrinology or astrophysics - in fact, their central motivation seems to be to generate a more adequate account of those specific objects and experiences. My second question is: could there be a refocusing of humanistic inquiry in which regarding literature as a social construct does not imply regarding it as merely a social construct, that is to say in which charting the social forces which brought it into being as an object and an experience does not imply its hollowing out, its loss of specificity, or its reduction to a vehicle of identity construction?

Allow me to express a final ambivalence here: I am genuinely not certain if the institutional humanities deserve to be maintained in anything like their current form (particularly since I have decided that, on a personal level, I have little interest in continuing to participate in them in their current form, even though I will not deny that I gained a great deal from specific work done under their auspices). I also find most of the current efforts of humanists to defend their turf about as uninspiring and uninteresting as I found the sad recent riots of French youth desperate to maintain the retirement age at 63. On the other hand, the humanities do not deserve to be dismantled for the reasons that university administrators and politicians think they deserve to be dismantled. In any case, I am inclined to think that the apparently methodological questions I was posing above are, in fact, identical with these existential ones.

The Splash of Horses

OK, in the spirit of Christmas I have two offerings for you all (three if you count the picture above, which documents a failed Allied plan to blow up German boilers by introducing explosive dead rats into coal supplies in the hopes that they would be absently tossed into the fire). 

First, a short quote from JBS Haldane, the American naturalist who is justly famous for his reply to the question of what might be inferred about the mind of the Creator from examining his Creation ("an inordinate fondness for beatles,") which needs no explanation:

 

To the mouse and any smaller animal [gravity] presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.

JBS Haldane, "On Being the Right Size" 

Possible Worlds and Other Essays (1928)

Second, a rather extended quotation from the terminal paragraphs of Richard Lewontin's fourth Massey Lecture, "Science as Social Action," which requires a little bit of explanation.  (I wish I had Marshal Sahlins' The Use and Abuse of Biology with me as well, since I suspect that Lewontin would have had trouble saying what he says without both Haldane and Sahlins, but I don't, and nobody gave it to me for Christmas).  I am not offering this as a citation of authority to quash further comment, but rather to elicit it.  Lewontin is talking about genetic cognitive determinists, with whom I want to stress I am not grouping any of the illustrious contributers to this forum, but he makes two points which I think about a lot, which I find salutory to the line of inquiry under discussion, and which I would like to hear your thoughts on: 1) that what we know from history and biology mainly tells us what is possible for human consciousness and culture, not what its limits are, and 2) (and this is the point on which I think he must be in some way connected to Sahlins) that social reality exists at a different level of causation from the neurophysiological pheomena which can be studied in laboratories.  

It is indeed the case that human social and political organization is a reflection of our biological being, for, after all, we are material biological objects developing under the influence of the interaction of our genes with the external world.  It certainly is not the case that our biology is irrelevant to social organization.  The question is, what part of our biology is relevant?  If one were to choose a simple biological property of human beings that was of supreme importance, it would be our size.  The fact that we are somewhere between five and six feet tall has made all of human life possible as we know it.  Gulliver's Lilliputians, who were said to be six inches tall, could not, in fact, have had the civilization that he ascribed to them because six-inch-tall human beings, no matter how they were shaped and formed, could not have created the rudiments of a technological civilization.  For example, they could not have smelted iron.  They could not have mined minerals, necause a six-inch-tall being could not get sufficient kinetic energy from swinging a tiny pickax to break rocks.  That is why when babies fall they do not hurt themselves.  Nor could the Lilliputians have controlled fire, because the tiny twigs that they could bring to a fire would burn up instantly.  Nor is it likely that they could have htought about mining or been able to speak, because their brains would be physically to small.  It probably takes a central nervous system of a certain size to have enough connections and enough complexity of topology for speech.  Ants may be terribly strong and terribly clever for their size, but their size alone guarantees they will never write books about people.  

The most important fact about human genes is that they help to make us as big as we are and to have a central nervous system whith as many connections as it has  However, there are not enough gnees to determine the detailed shape and structure of the nervous system nor of the consciousness that is an aspect of that structure.  Yet it is consciousness that creates our environment, its history and the direction of its future.  This then provides us with a  correct understanding of the relation between our genes and the shape of our lives.

Our DNA is a powerful influence on our anatomies and and physiologies.  In particular, it makes possible the complex brain that characterizes human beings.  But having made that brain possible, the genes have made possible human nature, a social nature whose limitations and possible shapes we do not know except insofar as we know what human consciousness has already made possible.  In Simone de Beauvoir's clever but deep apothegm, a human being is "l'être dont l'être est de n'être pas," the being whose esssence is in not having an essence.

History far transcends any narrow limitaitons that are claimed for either the power of genes or the power of environment to circumscribe us.  Like the House of Lords that destroyed its own power to limit the political development of Britain in the succesive Reform Acts to which it assented, so the genes, in making possible the development of human consciousness, have surrendered their power both to dtermine the individual and its envirnoment.  They have been replaced by an entirely new level of causation, that of social interaction with its own laws and its own natre can be understood explored only through that unique form of experience, social action."

Richard Lewontin, "Science as Social Action"

Biology as Ideology, (1991)

I'll leave it at that for the moment, and await your comments with anticipation.

What Isn't The Undefined Work of Freedom?

Sir Tedward Tevan Tevans-Britchard's straight-shooting challenge to the idea of the undefined work of freedom, answered in different ways by Dr Benway's reflections on Science Studies and Bremselhäcker's helpful remarks on extreme social constructivism in literary studies are replies, are occasioned by some enthusiastic correspondence from me about the concept of the undefined work of freedom. When I first read this phrase in Foucault I thought, "Exactly."

[This critique] will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom. ("What is Enlightenment?" in Foucault Reader p. 46)

He says this over and over. The statement of it in "Friendship as a Way of Life" is particularly dear to me.

There ought to be an inventiveness special to a situation like ours and to these feelings that Americans call "coming out," that is, showing oneself. The program must be open. We have to dig deeply to show how things have been historically contingent, for such and such reason intelligible but not necessary. We must make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness, and deny its necessity. We must think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces. (Foucault Live p. 203)

I am forever a Foucaldian in spirit if not in method. This desire to find a way out, to find a way to be different, is for me the motivation for thinking. My sympathies with certain kinds of Christianity came out of my longstanding impression that there is something profoundly wrong with the world, some error so deep that it almost cannot be corrected without unmaking the world. It follows from this that what is wrong with the world is inside you and it seems to me that there is some deep error in me too. To be someone else, another me but still me.

This kind of thinking is what I like best in Nietzsche and Deleuze too; it reminds me of my favorite passage in A Thousand Plateaus, the one where Deleuze and Guattari give a definition of love.

What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates, whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to find that person's own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person's. (p. 35)

You can see here some deep connections to Foucault that are especially visible in the "Friendship" essay. In Deleuze this being different comes in small parts, in bits, here and there, as the notorious becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-vegetable, which are not about acquiring a new identity, gender or species. I recently ran across a marvelous little example of this in Charlie Kaufman's film Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) There's a delightful scene where Sam Rockwell and Drew Barrymore are deeply in love and a montage shows their happy life together in an apartment in New York City. At one point she's sitting on the edge of the bathtub putting on stockings and you can see him in the doorway watching her with intense affection and desire. She sees him, smiles, and the movie cuts to him rather ridiculously sitting in the same place on the edge of the tub pulling up his plain socks in an exaggerated manner. Becoming in D&G has more ontological uses and diverse roles in something like social and ontological construction, but like with the term "intensity" it's important that becoming is personal and accessible as well as technical.

There's a good example. The point is not the imitation of femininity, but becoming another person. We all know doubt know what this is in a thousand ways—but one is too modest to mention particulars, so there are books and movies as third parties. This is not just a personal modesty, but the keeping of secrets so that they don't become despoiled nonsense by being taken out of the lives in which they have meaning.

And there is an intellectual version of this process of expression and mediation through third parties that is for me very much alive in textual and visual jokes and forms part of the point of using movies, books and music in philosophy. Uh oh! is a good example of this, as are the Adorno christmas writings and other recognizably funny and sincerely unscholarly little writings. Speaking someone else's words, adding an image and making a variation for the sake of allying myself with some piece of thinking is a kind of becoming-different. This is not instead of any scholarship, science, social work, revolution or anything recognizably political but is unapologetically for me and other people who might come along. A shift in gears and not a complete conceptual break moves us from this kind of intimate theorizing, joking, sympathizing and quoting to recognizably philosophical, historical, literary and sociological thinking.

Stupid Foucauldianism, stupid cognitivism, and just plain stupid

Readers of What is Symbology? will not take long to recognize that the salutary challenge Tedward Tevan Tevans-Britchard has just issued to, at least, a certain kind of Foucault-derived social constructivism, in particular his remark that "making 'the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness' seems to necessarily imply a blank slate view of human cognition, which would obviously be wrong," ties in directly to a point made by Twinglebrook-Hastings some time ago about Benway's and my initial and mistaken identification of "ourselves" (while at work on the Generative Grammar) with what we later identified as the paragnostic-"Judith Butler" subject position: that which denies the referential function of the code, but asserts its social efficacy and relevance. That is to say, the position adopted in the average anthropology seminar, according to our colleague, is indeed precisely that of "Judith Butler." That same position coincides, essentially, with the hegemonic ideology of contemporary literary studies, which I assume to overlap in a number of ways with that to which Tevans-Britchard alludes in anthropology (the fact that the predominant operative mentality of the post-Saussurean humanities matches up exactly with the excluded subject position of the symbological novel, of course, neatly recapitulates our founding opposition of Symbology and Semiotics). Judith Butler (the theoretician, not the subject position) is, at least for propadeutic purposes, a useful concrete universal here: it is hard to read her as adopting anything other than a "blank slate" model; concretely, she explicitly denies the claim that something socially constructed and contingent like gender has any constraints placed on it by any fixed and empirically verifiable body of the sort known to biology, and argues, more or less, that the body itself is historically and socially produced by the intersecting discourses that inscribe it in social reality. Now, I think there are meaningful and interesting ways of talking about the body being a social product (Margaret Lock's work could be read in this way), but the cast given to Butler's claims among literary academics is generally vigorously and axiomatically anti-biological and assumes that any consideration of biological data is inherently heteronormative and reactionary. I am genuinely not sure if Butler herself would agree with this, but it is certainly the way most literary studies people read her. It is also the way they read Foucault, for the most part, and in fact I think they see him mainly as the originator of Butler's position. This is of no small importance since Foucault is probably the most read and cited authority in literary studies at the moment (as a somewhat arbitrary but not unmeaningful test of this claim I just verified that the latest edition of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism dedicates 55 pages to Foucault's writings, beaten only by his sometime nemesis Derrida with 62 pages [cf. Plato with 53, Freud with 46, Aristotle with 35]).

Interestingly, the main problem Foucault presents to literary scholars, committed as they all claim to be to liberation struggles, is that his model of the social field does not seem to present the possibility of a meaningful resistance that is not always already co-opted by power, since power, in the regime of "micro-physics" characteristic of modernity for Foucault, thrives precisely on the proliferation of resistance. We can debate whether this reading is correct or not, but it is certainly widely understood to be a dilemma, and people ranging from Butler to Spivak tend to be brought in as a kind of supplement to show us how, in fact, there can be meaningful resistance to power after all. I have always found it instructive to read this entire endlessly debated pseudo-problem of power and resistance as an allegory of the "schlechtes Gewissen" of the academic humanities: that is to say, all of the tedious hand-wringing concerning whether discourses necessarily carried out under the auspices of hierarchical, oppressive institutional frameworks can, in fact, alter those frameworks for the better or whether they must ultimately be reducible to the control agendas of the institutions in which they operate, primarily concerns the evident impotence and irrelevance of this debate itself, and the fact that, whatever we make of Foucault's inability to account for social change, the entire discourse of "transgression" invested with such ethical force in the contemporary humanities is pretty transparently a mask for power, or at least a bid for symbolic capital on the part of a class and institution whose prestige has been in decline for some time.

My main point is that there is clearly a problem here, akin to that alluded to in anthropology classroom, and that problem is what we might call "stupid Foucauldianism," in allusion to Tevans-Britchard's reference to "stupid cognitivism"; whether or not MF really deserves the association I am assigning to him, he is certainly invoked and relied upon extensively enough by "Judith Butler" (I refer here to the subject position and not the individual) that it is hard not to regard him as the founder of that particular discursivity. In any case, there appears to be a suggestion that (at least in anthropology) attention to biological facts and structures in addition to cultural facts and structures may provide a salutary response to the prevailing tone of conversations in the anthropology classroom. The question, then, is what is the nature of this "in addition to": clearly not in the sense of reducing the historically and socially contingent to the "hard-wired" (or vice versa, a la Butler). Inevitably, I think here of Latour's critique of strong social constructionism as still operating within the constraints of the modern constitution. So the next question for me is what the specific implications of "hybridizing" the humanities in order to escape the "Judith Butler" trap might be. From within the constraints of literary studies, three possibilities come to mind, the first two dishearteningly familiar, the third somewhat nebulous but attractive:

a) students of the Geisteswissenschaften work hard to familiarize themselves with the latest research in cognitive science, brain imaging, etc. On one level this seems to me a laudable goal, if for no other reason than the fact that the cultural prestige such research currently enjoys behooves students of culture to be aware of it (I would say something similar, of course, about why people should read Dan Brown). However, and with a mind to actual applications of such research within literary studies itself I have encountered literally nothing in the way of research projects based upon a familiarization with, e.g., evolutionary biology which are not both preposterously tendentious and depressingly reductivist (see Kramnick on literary Darwinism) in exactly the way vulgar Marxism and vulgar Freudianism were when they were prevalent in literary studies 50-70 years ago. Thus, poor David Copperfield, who was once reduced to either his status as a participant in the class struggle or his position in the Oedipal matrix, may now be appreciated largely in terms of his attempt to pass on his genes (reading about which attempt apparently somehow enhances the reading public's "fitness" too). The question, I suppose, is once we have familiarized ourselves with the vast and controversy-ridden literature, how precisely is it to be put to use. The literary Darwinists certainly give us a good example of what not to do, but this is a lesson we did not really need to learn again since the argument has been made over and over again across the twentieth century, in response to various psychologizing and historicizing agendas, that knowledge about literature should engage with the specific qualities of the literary object, rather than attempting to decode these qualities with reference to the allegedly more solid ground provided by another area of knowledge. The very genealogy of our modern disciplines portends a certain inevitability that the encounter of the "human" with the "hard" sciences will generally be understood as the reduction of the terms of the former to the terms of the latter. For Baumgarten, aesthetics was the science of "confused ideas" as opposed to Descartes's clear and distinct ones. While he and other early students of aesthetics were convinced that the "confused" sensations associated with aesthetic cognition could not be resolved into the clear and distinct, the modern truth regime has generally placed this position under a permanent suspicion (this is more or less the subject of the interesting and neglected oeuvre of Brazilian cultural critic Luiz Costa Lima).

b) students of the Geisteswissenschaften alter some or all of their research practices in order to find ways of integrating/allying themselves with, say, the biological and cognitive sciences. We find a version of this, of course, in Joshue Knobe's experimental philosophy project (which we have already made fun of pretty extensively). Beyond Knobe's imbecility, the main problem here would be that any imaginable research program of this sort could already be carried out within a cognitive science department anyway, so it is unclear what the point of having a separate discipline of literary studies would even be at this point. The objection obviously applies to literary Darwinism, which if it has to exist at all as far as I can tell is best suited to be a kind of journalistic ancillary discourse to evolutionary psychology (again, if it has to exist at all). The point is that all of its "truths" (adaptation, fitness, selection, etc.) are drawn from research carried out in other realms and can clearly in no way be derived from the object supposedly under examination. Thus, this approach, rather than entailing any hybridization, leaves the modern constitution intact, to the detriment of the humanities.

c) (and I hope it is evident that I regard this as the only promising possibility) we continue the interrogation of disciplinary boundaries demanded by people like Latour. In other words, the founding definition of aesthetics as a science of "confused" ideas, in direct opposition to the clear ideas of nature obtained by Newtonian physics, is an obvious manifestation of the fundamental gesture of the modern constitution. The distinction has held fast in literary studies more or less to the present day, as indicated by various of the ideologies by which it has defined its own agenda: in an earlier era, as "humanizing" by valuing imagination over hard fact; or, more contemporarily, as having to do with the construction of social (ethnic, gender, etc.) identities, ultimately regarded as a liberating practice of creative self-invention (and that is where bad Foucauldianism sometimes enters the picture); its persistence is also evident in the various reductivist agendas described above, in which the soft, pliable, "confused" material of the literary text may be translated into the lucid language of science, be it quasi-Freudian ego psychology, quasi-Marxist economics, or quasi-Darwinian evolutionary psychology. In any case, examining, as Latour and Schaeffer and Haraway do, how the actors, concepts, and practices that make up the "hard sciences" are always "material-semiotic," in fact involve a tremendously mixed traffic in "clear" and "confused" ideas, narrative and data, imbricated in material, social, and semiotic networks, starts taking us in new directions, undoubtedly. I am inclined to think we have the beginnings of some pretty good answers about how to think about science. What I am still not sure of his how similar attempts to to think in new ways about texts, or for that matter, rituals or architecture; that is, I have seen, for instance, how the study of narrative or ritual might be usefully incorporated into an account of how scientific facts are produced, but I am still trying to figure out how scientific facts, understood as the products of social processes and compacts but no less factual for that, might contribute to the study of narrative or ritual (which, I would think, it should in some sense, if we are to take the dismantling of the modern constitution seriously).

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Science Studies

This is a response to TTTB's post entitled For a Cognitive Something Something.

It is because of what I think is a fairly similar dilemma to yours, Dr. TB, that I have been getting so much out of science studies recently (by which I basically mean the cast of characters in the David Cayley series How to Think About Science), particularly Richard Lewontin, Bruno Latour, and Steven Shapin.  

My dilemma was something like this: the quotidian anthropology of clinical medicine, which I doubt I need to rehearse my impression of to any of you, is basically neurosymbological.  (I should pause briefly to clarify exactly what I mean when I use this wonderfully concise if rather inaccessible term: when I talk about neurosymbology, I mean "discourse which uses the implicit authority and rhetoric of science to obscure and/or legitimate the operations of ideology," and I mean ideology in the fairly strict Althusserian sense of "cultural formations which function to maintain the relations of production in their present configuration.")  Right: so my dilemma was that the anthropology offered by clinical medicine is neurosymbological, but the alternatives (e.g. postmodern medical humanism, phenomenological re-imaginings of the mind-body dichotomy, etc.) are often equally bankrupt in that they tend to imply, as you put it, a "radical divorcing of thought form any grounding in humans as a biological species."

The two sides of the aporia appear to me to be summarizable as follows:
Culture is infinitely plastic and unconstrained, and all biological explanations are " politically creepy as well as empirically misguided" :: Human consciousness is strictly determined by biology (read: genetics), and all appeals to cultural determination are wish-fulfillment fantasy.

What I've come to believe is the two positions are essentially congruent with the two sides of Latour's "Modern Constitution," in that they represent "purifications" which are both always inadequate to reality.  Latour in We Have Never Been Modern puts in an extremely concise form what I think is essentially the animating proposition of "science studies" generally, which is that any separation of the "natural/material/scientific/empirical" and the "cultural/psychic/humanities/philosophical" is sufficiently artefactual as to have only instrumental utility.

What abandoning the possibility of a distinction between, say, Science and Society means to me is that a non-ideological study of the mind, or of a culture (I'm know I'm mixing methodologies here but I hope this is still coherent) is prima facie impossible.  There is no conceivable vantage from which you could conduct anthropology, or neuroscience, or any related inquiry without simultaneously practicing and elaborating ideology.

But this isn't paralyzing to me in the way that I used to think of the postmodern agon as being; my understanding of Foucault's call to "make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness, and deny its necessity," (which, incidentally, I have on the inside cover of my copy of the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine) is not quite what you're arguing against, (and, I admit, not quite what the text appears actually to say).  I think of the undefined work of freedom as a project of extending my own literacy in whatever I can convince myself is an accurate determination of the character of the various discourses that structure my life and that I continually interact with and/or strive to liberate myself from.  A case in point would be my ongoing engagment with neurosymbology specifically, where I am attempting to get to grips with the operations and interpellative strategies of a specific, scientifically enacted narrative about the constituents of the human mind which I think has a more or less clear set of nefarious subterranean commitments. 

I think this is something like what you're saying when you write that "there is no fundamental discontinuity between the part that is culturally constructed and the part that has some sort of intrinsic, significant difference," but it helps me to say it from a of view which explicitly isn't invested in either side of the Modern Constitution (not that I'm saying yours necessarily is).

It should be plain that none of this excludes the possibility of studying the mind scientifically (so long as science is understood to be a social activity, and scientific truth a thoroughly cultural product), nor am I so cynical as to presume that all conceivable studies of the mind will be, at bottom, rehprehensible in their narrative underpinnings and the messages the bring back from the fMRI room. 

for a Cognitive something something

"We have to dig deeply to show how things have been historically contingent, for such and such reason intelligible but not necessary. We must make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness, and deny its necessity." (Foucault Live p. 203)

This is a helpfully direct statement of what the course I've been TAing is arguing against, so I'm going to sort of parrot it for a second because it's a counterargument that I think is important. Bear in mind that this all tends to look a bit different if your main social engagements are anthropology seminars, because it often does feel like anthropologists' only trick has become "Hey! See this thing you thought was natural? Well I am going to show you that it is in fact cultural and contingent". So it does become a bit tiresome and brings about the final relativisation of the discipline etc etc.

But the thrust of the anti-Foucault argument (or at least, anti-Foucault as represented by the quotation) is that making 'the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness" seems to necessarily imply a blank slate view of human cognition, which would obviously be wrong. Because the human brain does have limits, or something like a structure, or maybe tendencies. And this is important for anthropologists because without some account of the tendencies of human cognition we have no way of accounting for the remarkable cross-cultural similarities in ritual practice, kinship, witchcraft etc etc. Obviously I don't think Foucault believed in a blank slate, but the implication does seem to creep in all over the place, which makes his radical freedoms just look like radical divorcing of thought form any grounding in humans as a biological species. The starting point here is that it is obvious that eg. gender, sexuality, mountains are historically constructed, but that they are also something else, and that there is no fundamental discontinuity between the part that is culturally constructed and the part that has some sort of intrinsic, significant difference.

I'm quite torn over this, since if your aim is to explore the limits of the thinkable, then setting out as if there were no limits seems like a brave and liberatory thing to do. And assuming limits on human possibility, particularly given the manifestly unsound state of many of cognitive science's current propositions, always seems to end up being politically creepy as well as empirically misguided, and they somehow always turn out to have their basis in common sense. But it's still just wrong to make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness, and I sort of assume the reason we all take such a healthy interest in neurosymbology is because we recognise this; not because we are against cognitive sciences, but because we are against stupid cognitive sciences.

Which is a sidepoint because I personally think UWF is an awesome title. Although it seems like for Foucault the line between being someone else and fucking someone else was also fairly undefined also. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind.

uh oh!

Rail: Do you have any thoughts on how having [Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics] in English might change things? Or what could change as a result of them?

Robert Hullot-Kentor: Nothing special. The rubbish in the world’s oceans will rise to the surface and dissolve harmlessly, like fresh baking soda tablets; global warming will reverse into global mellifluousness, with an intermittent, pleasing drizzle; and the 184 million people that Hobsbawm estimates were shot, bombed, starved, gassed, and marched into mass graves and who were bulldozed over in 20th century conflicts, will send off postcards saying they feel better now.

* * *

via National Parks Service

* * *

She saw Archimboldi walking the desert, dressed in shorts and a little straw hat, and everything around him was sand, one dune after another all the way to the horizon. (Bolaño, 2666 p. 878)

* * *

...uh oh!

Annals of Neurosymbology: Letters

In response to the last post, Dr. Twinglebrook-Hastings writes:

I had held Lehrer in contempt because of the title of Proust was a Neuroscientist (if that book is any good, then his title is doing a lot to disguise the fact) and his appearances on that misleading, vapid, obscurantist and extremely well-produced organ of neurosymbology, obscurantism and Dawkinsian fundamentalism, Radiolab. His final paragraph is facile and trite, but we can just pretend it's not there.

"[Reforms in the reporting of study results] still wouldn't erase the decline effect. This is largely because scientific research will always be shadowed by a force that can't be curbed, only contained: sheer randomness."

This isn't the result of any investigation, but an a priori feature of the ontology of RCTs. I don't say ontology lightly and I do not mean epistemology. Lehrer's example of Crabbe's experiments injecting mice with cocaine are an allegory for clinical medicine. The "noise" and "randomness" in the research data are actually existing lives the concrete particulars of which can be expected to depart wildly from our expectations not because people operating with RCTs don't know enough, but because decisions made by constructing RCTs out of samples and statistical analyses and then constructing clinics out of RCTs and patients means that in every case the actual mice and actual patients will differ from their model, no matter whether that model is conceived as contingent and provisional or universal. I am, to be clear, not talking primarily about the way researchers or practitioners think about this, but about "matter" or, better, things or actants.

It is nothing less than completely fucking startling and totally predictable that Lehrer places the randomness outside of statistics and outside of science. Scientists are "learning more about the world" and the truth they've unearthed is that the truth is more slippery than they thought. Why? Because the world is more unstable than they thought, not because their methods guarantee an instability. What's great here is that, rather unsurprisingly from a certain point of view, statistical reasoning is discovering its own ontology in the world. And that is precisely what it means for something to be a priori. This "discovery" is the felicitous pairing of statistical ontology and actually existing large sets of data and the research apparatuses that build them.

There isn't any reason pure and simple that things are completely determinate but that we just don't have all the variables. In fact you get the impression in Lehrer's final paragraph that he actually thinks this, despite the fact that randomness is incarnate in the lab and the clinic.

Annals of Neurosymbology, Volume I, Issue 1

 I recommend reading Jonah Lehrer's piece in the penultimate New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer
I like to make fun of Lehrer for his silly, pandering books (e.g. Proust was a Neuroscientist) and his general superficiality, but I think he does a reasonably good job here given the constraints of his science-journalist Weltanschauung.  In general, the conundrums described in the article offer a salutary reminder of various statements by Latour to the effect that the framework scientists adopt for thinking about what they do in accordance with the modern constitution makes certain things into problems that, from another angle, do not have to be regarded as such.  
-Bremselhacker

Annals of Biopolitics: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Edition

I usually like to tell myself that although press coverage of neuroscientific research lends it such a simultaneously naïve and dastardly profile, the neuroscientists themselves must be nuanced, humane, upright and rigorous researchers, with occasional exceptions. Then I read something like this LA Times article, which informs us in its headline that "erasing traumatic memories may soon be possible," and I nearly choke on my coffee. For sure, the article proceeds by way of the usual formula of neuroscience journalism, in which the bold pioneer (in this case, Richard Huganir of Johns Hopkins) informs us that what we took to be an intractable problem (in this case, post-traumatic stress disorder) is in fact reducible to the manipulation of proteins in the amygdala, as demonstrated by some stuff he did with rats; we then get the predictable array of caveats about the practical applications of this research, in this instance from a mental health professional in addition to the obligatory bioethicist (it is really high time to launch a campaign of dada terror against these bioethicists, perhaps by releasing armies of cyborg rats or mutant fruit flies into their offices). But what is remarkable here is the way in which this line of research by all appearances spontaneously offers up a concrete solution to one of the few stumbling blocks faced by the current military industrial complex, viz. that although it has become possible by various means to almost entirely shield the general populace of the aggressor country from the impact of war, such that military actions are experienced primarily as a media event, there is still the sticky problem of the soldiers themselves. Since they are in general drawn from poor and marginal sectors of the population, and since the reigning political discourse shrouds their activities in an aura of the sacred, their experiences usually do not enter into the public sphere except in a highly sanitized form, but the fact that those experiences exist at all represents a problem of sorts, to which Huganir et al are proposing a no doubt elegant solution. We all recall Baudrillard's scandalous claim that "the Gulf War did not take place." The only obvious objection to his argument that war has been reduced to a media event was the testimony of those many thousands of soldiers and many millions of civilians for whom it was not; we may now look forward to the day when that testimony will have been reduced to a few manipulable proteins and duly obliterated. I should add that these efforts offer a convenient way of dispelling the ever-troublesome specter of Freud once and for all. In other words, the official conviction of the psychiatric and neuroscientific establishment that the relevant determinants of mental and emotional disturbances are primarily biochemical and genetic, and thus that such conditions are therefore best treated by direct chemical intervention often runs into trouble in the instances (like PTSD) in which the role of subjective experiential determinants is indisputable. Once those experiential determinants themselves become subject to direct chemical intervention, this little difficulty would appear to be solved.

On "Casual Nihilism(s)"

The following is an attempt to respond to a question I posed to myself several years back in relation to Dr. Benway's ongoing project of critique of the reigning intellectual ambiance of the medical sciences. The dilemma is the following: "casual nihilism," the pithy lemma the aforementioned illustrious correspondent of Undefined Work coined some years back (private correspondence) to refer to the form of bowdlerized, fourth-hand positivism that, at the time of the term's coinage, appeared to him to have gained ascendancy in the hallowed halls of Her Majesty's schools of medicine, could all too persuasively be appropriated by myself to refer to precisely the set of premises whose assumption of hegemony in my own field of training and professional activity I have elsewhere floridly and farcically mythologized as the triumph of Saussure over Symbology. In other words, I would not be surprised to find the description "casual nihilism" applied by, say, a traditional humanist or a conservative cultural critic to the modes of inquiry prevalent in the humanities, informed as they tend to be by a conviction of the arbitrariness of the sign, an understanding of truth as a rhetorical effect and an at least nominal commitment to some relatively form of class or related struggles, even as none of these positions prevent most of those who espouse them from looking conventionally middle class on first estimation.
It may be worth pausing for a moment to consider the rather fraught, to say the least, geneaology and reception history of the term "nihilism" itself. The aforementioned lexeme was a moniker adopted with pride by the generation of openly and unabashedly philistine Russian youths devoted to pure, hard, unpoetic scientific knowledge immortalized so memorably by Turgenev in the figure of Bazarov. For these strapping lads, the "nassing" of "ve beleef een nassing" could be glossed as "nothing that people believed before the dawn of the positive sciences" – with the problematic but in all probability quite titillating addendum that in Tsarist Russia, instituting such a position as the basis of the new society had little hope of being realized without the violent and total liquidation of the existing order.
I suppose it is largely the inconvenience and simultaneous romance of the latter situation that separated these gaunt, haggard, pallid fanatics from, say, the smug, plump, serenely confident French "positivists" of the same period (as immortalized by Flaubert in the figure of Homais, whom we might see as a kind of grotesque cousin of Bazarov's) with whom they otherwise shared so much.
But what I am getting at here is how unlikely present-day proponents of the brand of positivism Benway has critiqued as "nihilistic" would be to adopt a posture comparable to that of the
Slavic "nihilists" of yore. That is to say, those who today adhere knowingly and enthusiastically, rather than casually, to the mythos he has labels "nihilist" would almost undoubtedly be loath to identify themselves as such, convinced as they are that they are pursuing true and authentic knowledge of something, viz. the empirical world, using the only reliable methodology available. Hence, persuading such people, who in a limited sense are probably fully justified in holding the beliefs I have just attempted to characterize, that the gesture of excluding from the sphere of possible knowledge those realms of experience that do not lend themselves to quantification contains the kernel of a quasi-religious iconoclastic violence that might be described without extreme inaccuracy as "nihilist" (this is my claim, rather than Benway's) would probably be an uphill battle. In fact, Daniel Dennett had the idea, either quaint in its smug cluelessness or alarming in its unabashed self-admiration, to propose "brights" as the collective self-identification for secular people with "a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist worldview"; that is to say, the difference between his position and that of his opponents (defined a priori as "supernaturalist") is simply that of the difference between light and darkness. There is also the claim, on the part of some of the militant atheist crowd, that, say, natural selection is a much more "inspiring," "life-affirming," or even ethically superior manner of conceiving of human origins and essence than any myth or scripture could ever provide, and even the idea of forging a new unifying species-mythos on the basis of the wondrous "drama" of the rise of homo sapiens sapiens – in other words, a will to the mythification of human origins as evolutionary biology understands them.
Now, this endeavor suggests to me two perhaps contradictory things. One is a general sense, even among many of the more vociferous would-be extirpators of non-scientific based modes of thought, that actually they also conceive of the modes of thought whose exclusive efficacy in the pursuit of knowledge they are eager to enshrine as purely in and of themselves insufficient, at least for inculcating the sacred truths of science into the minds of the vulgar masses. The other is a concession that what is at stake is not altering the mode of apprehending truth – which I would assume to be the central enabling claim of the scientific method, and indeed the basis of its appeal - but desire to replace a given set of doxa with another one, by any means necessary.
Hence Dawkins arguing for the need to create an "atheist lobby" equivalent to the Jewish lobby to find coercive ways to promote its agenda, principally via the various Ideological State Apparatuses. And, I suppose, here is where the "casual" comes in in the phrase "casual nihilism": Benway's point would be that most of the individuals who espouse some version of this ideology, even if they are practicing physicians, do not assume it as a set of beliefs in a manner distinguishable from the adherents of any eminently non-scientific belief system – they assume it as what Barthes called a "mythology," a complex of "falsely obvious" ideas taken for granted, naturalized, hardened into an unquestioned, knee-jerk orthodoxy. And so the agenda of the evangelists of this "casual nihilism" would be to universalize this mythology qua mythology rather than to instill scientific modes of thought in the general populace.
Here is where I come to a curious parallel with my own "humanistic" area of activity and the broader institutional sub-grouping within which it operates. There, conversely, it would be far easier to get someone to assume the self-identification "nihilist" than, say, "positivist." Or to put it differently, and reiterate a somewhat caricaturesque but by no means inaccurate earlier observation, it would be relatively easy to get someone to reject unequivocally the possibility of any truth claims that are not the function of the will to power of a particular hegemonic group (a position I would not be likely to disagree with entirely). Further, many if not most (again, myself included) would be almost guaranteed to understand the justifying claims under the rubric of which our discipline operates – the idea of literature and culture as "humanizing" entities crucial to instilling essential values in the youth, the program most eloquently summed up in Schiller's "Ästhetische Erziehung der Menschheit," some of Matthew Arnold's writings and later those of F.R. Leavis and the New Critics, in other words, traceable to the institutionalization of literature and the humanities in the Anglo-Saxon sphere, broadly understood – as a cluster of ideological masks convenient to the perpetuation of bourgeois hegemony. And again, those who do espouse such a position more often than not manage to combine a relatively casual, knee-jerk assumption that the latter is the case with a comfortable existence within institutions – i.e. humanities departments at elite universities - which rely precisely on a more traditional rhetoric of humanism in order to subsist, receive funding, attract students, get grants from the Mellon Foundation or NEH, etc. In other words, we assume as the basis of our scholarly work a set of anti-humanistic propositions – or, indeed, our own brand of "casual nihilism" – which, were we to truly desire the logical consequences of our assumptions to be realized, would presumably undercut the institutional basis of our continuing to practice the disciplines to which we are committed. And indeed, the right-wing attacks on the contemporary humanities – by Roger Kimball, David Horowitz, Dinesh D'Souza, and others – thrive on precisely this contradiction and this apparent hypocrisy, and despite the general loathsomeness of these people, I must concede that they have identified a blind spot which, although certainly on some level acknowledged, has come to constitute a kind of elephant in the living room, or rather, faculty lounge. A second question, then: what does it mean that professional academic humanists have to adopt as an argument for their continued existence and relevance arguments which they repudiate in their scholarly and pedagogical practice?
A further irony of the situation is that the conditions of late global capitalism appear to be far more effective at bringing about the abolition of the official cultural apparatus of the bourgeois state than the surviving remnants of soixante-huitard rhetoric which remain so resilient in our professional discourses – that is to say, if we desire to expose the institutionalized humanities as a cluster of ideological masks for the perpetuation of particular configurations of hegemony and, presumably, radically restructure or even abolish them, we had better hurry, because funding cuts and an increased perception of frivolity and irrelevance on the part of technocratic university trustees will likely accomplish these goals more effectively and with less liberating results. The irony becomes particularly acute when self-proclaimed radicals complain about funding cuts and marginalization of the humanities in the contemporary university, thus engaging de facto in a nostalgia for an earlier and quainter form of bourgeois capitalist hegemony, more or less coinciding with the postwar era of mass prosperity, suburbanization, the G.I. Bill, etc., when literature departments enjoyed enormous prestige and popularity and public literary intellectuals enjoyed a broad audience and a could boast a confidence in the social relevance of their interventions (on a related matter, Michael Bérubé has recently offered the helpful observation that, apart from a blip of unusually high enrollment in the 60s and 70s, the percentage of students majoring in the humanities has held steady at around 8% for most of the postwar era, and yet observers from all corners endlessly invoke the decline of enrollment as if it were breaking news; I would think the persistence of this theme suggests that a narrative of decline and fall has become in some way ideologically necessary within and more generally with regard to the humanities, irrespective of actual measurable trends).
Of course, Nietzsche already diagnosed the various "nihilisms" at stake here – scientific
materialism, radical socialism, moral relativism, skepticism, pessimism – as sibling symptoms of the same civilizational decadence, so we are not onto anything new here. But what exact kind of siblinghood are we talking about here - rival siblings, estranged siblings? How do the two "casual nihilisms," which we might just as well call "anti-humanisms," relate to each other? A few observations:
1) The prevalent operative ideology - essentially, a mechanistic worldview hostile and contemptuous to all but quantitative forms of knowledge - Benway has dubbed "casual nihilism" in the form it takes within the culture of the medical profession but which we could probably find manifesting itself similarly across the culture of the natural sciences (as evidenced by the work of people like Dawkins and Dennett, who have taken pains to position themselves as the organic intellectuals of their class) has not changed significantly in its basic assumptions and prescriptions since the eighteenth century. Further, it emerged and gained intellectual and institutional ascendancy at more or less the same historical moment that traditional humanism was enshrined (I am oversimplifying this story, but may attempt to return to it in a more nuanced manner at a later point). The two, positivism and humanism, were by no means always mutually antagonistic in the nineteenth century, that great era of armchair scholars who researched plant reproduction in the morning, studied Hindu mythology in the afternoon, read Virgil and Goethe in the evening, and gazed through their powerful telescopes at night, and could indeed be understood at the time to be involved in a collaborative effort on behalf of the universal progress of civilization, the natural sciences supplying the material basis for that progress and the humanities providing its concrete contents qua grand récit. When this partnership fell apart, or whether it ever fell apart in practice, is debatable, but various developments like C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" thesis suggest that it ceased to be particularly plausible in over the first half of the twentieth century for a number of reasons that need not occupy us now. The point is that while we now tend consider the tasks and modes of inquiry dominant in the sciences and the humanities to be at least somewhat at odds or in tension, this was clearly not always the case; an investment in quantitative modes of inquiry, for our average nineteenth century educated gentlemen, would by no means entail a lack of curiosity about or lack of conviction in the importance of studying, say, Milton's syntax.
2) The second "casual nihilism" that concerns us here, that of contemporary anti-foundationalist humanism, developed largely out of a critique of the complicity of the institutionalized humanities with white male bourgeois hegemony, a complicity already alluded to above; it should be evident from the preceding remarks that these same institutionalized humanities, should also be understood as functionally, economically, and ideologically complicit with, in the modern era, the U.S. military-industrial complex, albeit in a less direct manner than the "hard sciences." But in any case, in the postwar era that saw both the explosion of technoscience in direct or indirect service of the burgeoning military industrial complex and a significant rise in enrollments in the humanities (the subsequent reduction of which accounts for the emergence of the narrative of decline mentioned above), the various disciplines under consideration here all operated to some degree as fellow "handmaidens of empire," to recall Nebrija's phrase.
3) The institutional critique of this partnership, which emerged as a cause célèbre in the 1960s, was itself subsequently absorbed and institutionalized within the humanistic disciplines, resulting in the current configuration described above, in which a displaced anti-institutional radicalism has paradoxically become the operative ideology of the humanistic institution itself. The sciences, meanwhile, have remained comparatively impervious to the critiques leveled at them in this same period, be they epistemological (Kuhn, Feyerabend) or ethical-political (Chomsky, Foucault, Illich). In fact, my admittedly somewhat anecdotal impression is that the traditional "positivist" account scientists give themselves of the basis and value of their work has become somewhat more hardened and less nuanced, even as the traditional "humanist" framework which we saw to be its historical contemporary has come to be seen as somewhat embarrassing by those obliged to rely on it duplicitously when challenged to justify their continued employment at institutions of higher learning (the "science wars" of the 80s and 90s, of course, pitted the unapologetic positivism of advocates of the natural sciences against the anti-foundationalism and relativism of anti-humanist humanists). Nevertheless, and somewhat paradoxically, one of the notable trends to emerge out of the institutional critiques of the 60s has been the growth of areas such as "medical humanism," understood as an attempt to move beyond mechanistic scientism and situate medical practice within its social and cultural contexts, under the rubric of a traditionally humanist ideology of the integrated, self-contained individual (hence the invocation of "understanding the whole person," etc.). To summarize my point, in the past several decades, curiously, institutional critique in the humanities has generally taken the form of "anti-humanism," while institutional critique in the sciences has generally taken the form of "humanism."
4) With all this in mind, it is possible to observe a certain parallel in the insufficiency of both critical anti-humanism in the humanities and critical humanism in the sciences as forms of struggle against power. On one hand, the capitalist hegemony that traditional humanism collaborated with, propped up, supplied grand narratives to, always contained within itself forces powerfully antagonistic to humanism, viz. the instrumental rationality at the core of its agenda, for which such grand narratives are mere window dressing, a position now openly adopted by the university administrators abolishing humanities departments for budgetary reasons or the current U.K. government, which intends to essentially defund the humanities; therefore, the institutionalization of the critique of traditional humanism, although initially directed at the complicity of the latter with bourgeois hegemony, has indirectly and unwittingly aided the more blatantly leveling agenda of instrumental rationality at the core of the project of capitalist modernity in its effort to phase out obsolete relics of a now-quaint "high capitalism" to the benefit of a more ruthlessly totalizing order. In the meantime, the introduction of a more "humanistic" outlook into the sciences, by itself, simply incorporates into the sciences themselves a set of ideological frameworks which always accompanied the sciences throughout their modern existence as a kind of supplement, supplying the contents and rhetorical frames of the grand narrative of material progress that emerged along with modern scientific institutions.
5) The foregoing may account in part for a curious symmetry in the relationship between ideology and praxis in the contemporary humanities and the sciences, respectively: whereas humanists have trouble taking seriously the traditional account of the value of their vocation (character-building, the development of humane sensibilities, critical nuance, and the capacity for aesthetic judgment) which nevertheless remains the only cogent pragmatic rationale for their activity, as revealed by their strategic reliance on it when threatened with defunding, natural scientists are adamant in their defense of the traditional version of their activity (the disinterested pursuit of objective truth) even as the material incentives symptomatic of the incorporation of most areas of scientific inquiry into the networks of global capitalist technoscience render that account spectacularly implausible even on a superficial level.
I will leave this final observation as a starting point for the continuation of this discussion, which I fear has been hazardously unspecific and speculative thus far.