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Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Anti-Essentialism
What do people in literary studies - and other humanistic disciplines - mean by ‘anti-essentialism’? Is there some place one can go to be provided with an argument, or arguments, for anti-essentialism? If so: where (would you say)?
Comments
I’m not sure if this is what you’re asking, but to me the cumulative effect of Foucault’s histories is highly anti-essentialist, in that a variety of ideological tools and social practices that we might have previously taken for granted as “human nature” are revealed to be historical constructs. This is true of the “soul” and the “subject” in Discipline and Punish, of “sexuality” in Foucault’s history of it, and of “order” in The Order of Things...but that is a very incomplete list.
I’m afraid I can’t help, John. I’m curious about this myself. It’s like, a few years ago I noticed people talking essentialism and anti-essentialism in the sort of way that led me to suspect the existence of some classic article or book as a point of reference. But I’ve never found it. Joseph’s reference to Foucault seems on point, though.
John, do you really expect the hapless lit people to step into your cunningly-laid trap?
John: in fairness, I think you will have to concede I’ve given them plenty of warning.
Joseph, just so you know: I’ve been reading several attempted accounts at what distinguishes ‘theory’ from what came before - ‘traditional humanism’ is the usual suspect - and ‘anti-essentialism’ keeps coming up as the thing that theorists uniformly get, that traditional humanism uniformly can’t wrap their naive minds around. So it seems reasonable and pertinent to inquire what the view in question is and whether it is, indeed, correct. One possibility is that people would try to say there is an overlapping consensus, as it were, that something like anti-essentialism must be correct. That is, if you don’t like Foucault, then Derrida proves it, and if you don’t like Derrida then Butler showed it beyond a doubt, and if she was wrong, then Nietzsche, and if Nietzsche turns out not to buy it, then Rorty, and so forth. But that still leaves the problem of formulating what it is. And this sort of projected retreat from position to position, if any given one should fail - which I think has to be what people would say - is still a highly distinctive form of argument. It deserves to be articulated. ‘Anti-essentialism’ is asserted in blanket terms with a great deal of self-confidence in a great many places. It is also strongly claimed to be a recent intellectual breakthrough. It seems that there should be some argumentative backing at least roughly comparable in strength to this degree of self-confidence. But so far I haven’t found anyone who says ‘here’s my argument for anti-essentialism, which I define thusly’. And footnotes are a bit thin on the ground. And I’m genuinely not sure where the term itself came in. It doesn’t come from Foucault, for example. Who made it a key word?
Before Foucault’s major works, Barthes’ Mythologiques argues that the “myth” is a form of thought that ascribes a natural essence to something that is culturally constructed. Anti-essentialism is the “de-bunking” impulse that takes something often construed as natural and demonstrates that it is in fact culturally contingent.
The esssentialist vs. anti-essentialist debate played itself out in feminism and Gay, Lesbian, Queer theory throughout the 90s. Also in debates surrounding concepts of race, nation, etc…
There was an argument for “strategic essentialism” at one point. In other words, though we don’t really believe in essentialism, and recognize its dangers, we can recognize that it is an empowering myth, and should stop accusing others of being too essentialist.
A question: I know that they are different, but how is anti-essentialism related to the anti-foundationalism that I have most recently seen referred to in Berube’s opera? Can something have an essence but not a foundation or vice versa?
Jonathan, it makes a lot of sense to say, as you suggest, that ‘anti-essentialism’ designates a debunking impulse that seeks to show that something that seems natural isn’t. But if that’s ALL it is, then this is a total catastrophe for all the passages I’ve been reading, more or less. Because then 1) anti-essentialism isn’t something we know is correct, but something that may turn out to be correct or not, depending on whether the impulse is warranted in a given case; 2) it’s certainly not going to be news to traditional humanists that sometimes people take things to be natural that turn out to be cultural.
It seems that anti-essentialism had better designate, at a minumum, a general metaphysical claim about the nature of reality which was not in wide circulation before about 1960, and for which powerful conceptual support has since become available.
I would also be rather surprised if it turned out that the term only came in during the 90’s. But maybe that’s right.
Rich, it’s possible that someone might use ‘anti-essentialism’ as a synonym for Rortyan anti-foundationalism. I don’t think Rorty himself uses the term, but he might somewhere. One clue that there is a difference is that foundationalism is an epistemological position, whereas ‘anti-essentialism’ sounds metaphysical. (Not that this couldn’t be finessed, but it would need to be shown how. Is anti-essentialism a conclusion from anti-foundationalism, or vice versa?) It’s certainly the case that Rorty is against certain claims about essence. He’s against ‘Platonism’. But he’s also against Kantianism, and against attempts at offering reductionistic metaphysical explanations (that’s his Wittgenstein/Davidson side). And strong claims of social constructivism look to be strongly metaphysically reductive. And often anti-essentialism gets associated with social constructivism. So it could get dicey trying to make Rorty the posterboy for anti-essentialism if it’s these things. (This isn’t really an answer to your question: what is anti-foundationalism. One at a time, one at a time.)
I certainly don’t mean to suggest, in all this, that nothing that answers to ‘anti-essentialism’ could possibly be right. It’s just striking how often I have been running into claims that it has definitely been established, i.e. how often it is treated as the sort thing one can safely assume, for ordinary discussion purposes, because its denial would be prima facie absurd or naive.
John, I’d go back to Sartre, whose “existence preceeds essence” is, as far as I know, the beginning of this discussion in the form we’re having it here. Likewise, Sartre is where the term “totalizing” got its start. In each case, the roots are in the debates over phenomenology among folks like Sartre, Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and so on. ("Totalizing" is where Sartre’s existentialism meets his Marxism. See the awe-inspiring, book-length “Conclusion” chapter to Jameson’s *Postmodernism* for a defense of “totalizing.")
Well, in cognitive psychology and cognitive science, there is interest in how concepts have meaning. One notion, now known to be a/the “classical” conception, has it that a concept applies to some phenomenon if that phenomenon exhibits the necessary and sufficient conditions characteristic of that phenomenon. Those necessary and sufficient conditions define an essence. Starting in the early 1970s that notion ran afoul of some very ingenious psycholinguistic experimentation, much of it initiated by one Eleanor Rosch. I won’t go into the details, but you can find a few of them in a book review I did (and lots of those details in the book reviewed). It is now widely believed in the cognitive sciences that concepts are not defined by essences. Just how they are defined is under investigation.
And in biology we have something similar. “Classically” biological kinds were defined by necessary and sufficient conditions. And for certain purposes one proceeds as if that were the case. Is it a duck? Well, does it have feathers, a flatish bill, webbed feet, and so on through a suitable list. If so, then it’s a duck. If not, then it isn’t. But deep down biologists think in other terms, they think in terms of populations of organisms and how those populations breed and what gets passed from one generation to the next, and so forth. Just what biological kinds are in those deeper terms, that’s not so clear. But whatever those deeper terms are, they aren’t about essences.
Those two discussions are, of course, a bit older than the 90s. Now whether or not these parallel discussions have somehow managed to seep over the walls into literary studies, I don’t know. Among those who favor cognitive linguistics as a disciplinary ally an anti-essentialist view of concepts is standard. But these folks are not the feminists et al. that Jonathan was talking about.
If there’s any influence from cognition to feminism etc. on this score, I’d guess it went through Rosch. I just googled “rosch +feminism” and turned up with something entitled Deleuze and Guattari, Cognitive Science, and Feminist Visual Arts from 1996.
It’s funny, but for me “traditional humanism” means Montaigne, Erasmus, Rabelais, et al, and in my opinion they are all anti-essentialists.
Don’t anti-essentialism, anti-foundationalism, anti-Platonism, and relativism make up a “family resemblance” thingie?
Especially in lit studies,where everyone is completely muddled and confused about everything anyway already.
You can filter searches on google scholar based on publication date.
The first anti-essentialism reference in an article is 1968. “Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialism”
http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/(c3fdj345f2srzh45tais5s3k)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,2,9;journal,143,166;linkingpublicationresults,1:112178,1
I can’t read it but this 1974 article seems to use the term “anti-essentialism” in the way people do now.
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1974.0704_759.x
In 1980 Rorty says “Pragmatism is simply anti-essentialism applied to notions like ‘truth,’ ‘knowledge,’ ‘language,’ ‘morality,’ and similar objects of philosophical theorizing.”
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0065-972X(198008)53:6<717+719:PRAI>2.0.CO;2-I
As mentioned above by Jonathan, by 1989, people were warning about the dangers of anti-essentialism
http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/(mjce4t55jdn1ucmnhsyjv055)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,3,13;journal,69,73;linkingpublicationresults,1:101480,1
The wikipedia page on essentialism is pretty readable:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism
I think that “anti-essentialism” as used in recent decades has denoted an attempt to undermine belief in the existence of any thick human attributes that attach to humans qua humans and not qua members of a particular culture, as such attributes were understood and articulated in the Enlightenment. Hence, the move to anti-essentialism is not, I think, primarily directed so much against early humanists as against the conception of human nature associated (rightly or wrongly) with Hobbes, or Locke, or the Encyclopediasts. On this view, the anti-essentialist crowd should be understood as having bought into the arguments of those figures (Nietzsche and Foucault certainly among them) who contest especially the “Enlightenment subject"--whatever that is. This is not to say that the anti-essentialist movement is limited to these figures (Protagoras and Gorgias are both, I think, anti-essentialist) but only that, in literary criticism, this seems to be its dominant association. That’s my best guess, at least.
My impression is that people use “anti-essentialism” as a synonym for “anti-foundationalism”, or they mean it in a political context, such as “gender essentialism”.
I agree with John Holbo’s points 1 and 2 in comments above. Essentialism might be actually “correct” in some situation, and so it would not be advisable to be anti-essentialist “across the board,” in all cases, without making the relevant distinctions. I also think it’s true that traditional humanists have often been anti-essentialists--but that some have been essentialists too. Essentialism is a kind of “folk belief” in many cases. In response to poststructuralism some “traditional humanists” became more essentialist than they might otherwise have been, in reaction against a more strident and “across the board” anti-essentialism.
Back when I was in grad school, Diana Fuss’s Essentially Speaking had just come out and was recognized at the time as a sensible survey of the essentialism/anti-essentialism debates in feminism. Writing as a poststructuralist feminist, she tried to deconstruct the e/a-e binary. So it’s not exactly an argument for anti-essentialism and it’s not exactly recent, but it is something of an indirect answer to your question. And it might point you toward more direct answers.
Whether or not Rorty is violating his own principles by making a general claim about the constructed nature of reality, he is willing to make the claim nonetheless. (This contradiction is similar to other contradictions in Rorty’s thought, including the contradiction between his “pragmatic” irony and his clear preference for anti-essentialist attitudes.)
The de-bunking instinct does not go “all the way down” in Barthes, to borrow a phrase from Hawking’s wonderful story about turtles. This is partly because Barthes writes on such specific subjects (e.g. the mythology of plastic) and partly because he uses concepts like death and time unproblematically in some of his texts (such as Camera Lucida). He also uses the French word for bliss, jouissance, in a manner that suggests psychological essentialism.
The invention of the term “anti-essentialist” may have been a galvanizing coinage native to the second half of the 20th century, but the intellectual tradition to which the term belongs goes back at least to Nietzsche. Foucault considered his histories to be genealogical, and to be following in the footsteps of The Genealogy of Morals.
You are perfectly right that the “anti-essentialist” consensus is really a patchwork of different thinkers who had varying amounts in common, including on this very issue. For example, all discussions of the “will to power” in Nietzsche are strongly essentialist.
The common sense propositions of the day are perfectly capable of being wrong, and often are. Of course, the fact that any one of these thinkers did not adopt the term “anti-essentialist” as a prerequisite for their thought does not make their revelations of constructedness any less interesting or valid. I’m actually glad that they did not ground specific points about prison discipline or gender performance in a much larger, and probably indefensible, universal claim about essence.
I’m just gonna iterate my first response by quoting a ridiculously long excerpt.
All below from Sartre, “Existentialism As a Humanism” (1946 lecture), full-text at:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm
***************
The question is only complicated because there are two kinds of existentialists. There are, on the one hand, the Christians, amongst whom I shall name Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, both professed Catholics; and on the other the existential atheists, amongst whom we must place Heidegger as well as the French existentialists and myself. What they have in common is simply the fact that they believe that existence comes before essence – or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective. What exactly do we mean by that?
If one considers an article of manufacture as, for example, a book or a paper-knife – one sees that it has been made by an artisan who had a conception of it; and he has paid attention, equally, to the conception of a paper-knife and to the pre-existent technique of production which is a part of that conception and is, at bottom, a formula. Thus the paper-knife is at the same time an article producible in a certain manner and one which, on the other hand, serves a definite purpose, for one cannot suppose that a man would produce a paper-knife without knowing what it was for. Let us say, then, of the paperknife that its essence – that is to say the sum of the formulae and the qualities which made its production and its definition possible – precedes its existence. The presence of such-and-such a paper-knife or book is thus determined before my eyes. Here, then, we are viewing the world from a technical standpoint, and we can say that production precedes existence.
When we think of God as the creator, we are thinking of him, most of the time, as a supernal artisan. Whatever doctrine we may be considering, whether it be a doctrine like that of Descartes, or of Leibnitz himself, we always imply that the will follows, more or less, from the understanding or at least accompanies it, so that when God creates he knows precisely what he is creating. Thus, the conception of man in the mind of God is comparable to that of the paper-knife in the mind of the artisan: God makes man according to a procedure and a conception, exactly as the artisan manufactures a paper-knife, following a definition and a formula. Thus each individual man is the realisation of a certain conception which dwells in the divine understanding. In the philosophic atheism of the eighteenth century, the notion of God is suppressed, but not, for all that, the idea that essence is prior to existence; something of that idea we still find everywhere, in Diderot, in Voltaire and even in Kant. Man possesses a human nature; that “human nature,” which is the conception of human being, is found in every man; which means that each man is a particular example of a universal conception, the conception of Man. In Kant, this universality goes so far that the wild man of the woods, man in the state of nature and the bourgeois are all contained in the same definition and have the same fundamental qualities. Here again, the essence of man precedes that historic existence which we confront in experience.
Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man or, as Heidegger has it, the human reality. What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism. And this is what people call its “subjectivity,” using the word as a reproach against us. But what do we mean to say by this, but that man is of a greater dignity than a stone or a table? For we mean to say that man primarily exists – that man is, before all else, something which propels itself towards a future and is aware that it is doing so. Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or a cauliflower. Before that projection of the self nothing exists; not even in the heaven of intelligence: man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be. Not, however, what he may wish to be. For what we usually understand by wishing or willing is a conscious decision taken – much more often than not – after we have made ourselves what we are. I may wish to join a party, to write a book or to marry – but in such a case what is usually called my will is probably a manifestation of a prior and more spontaneous decision. If, however, it is true that existence is prior to essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders. And, when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men. The word “subjectivism” is to be understood in two senses, and our adversaries play upon only one of them. Subjectivism means, on the one hand, the freedom of the individual subject and, on the other, that man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity. It is the latter which is the deeper meaning of existentialism. When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better; and nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all. If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves. Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole. If I am a worker, for instance, I may choose to join a Christian rather than a Communist trade union. And if, by that membership, I choose to signify that resignation is, after all, the attitude that best becomes a man, that man’s kingdom is not upon this earth, I do not commit myself alone to that view. Resignation is my will for everyone, and my action is, in consequence, a commitment on behalf of all mankind. Or if, to take a more personal case, I decide to marry and to have children, even though this decision proceeds simply from my situation, from my passion or my desire, I am thereby committing not only myself, but humanity as a whole, to the practice of monogamy. I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself I fashion man.
I see others have made this comment a bit redundant, but here are my two cents anyway.
“Essentialism” sounds to me like a sort of platonistic realism, to be found e.g. in Kripke and reaching back to Aristotle and, well, Plato. It is, if anything is, a “general metaphysical claim about the nature of reality,” so its negation would be too, I imagine. But as you say, John, “anti-essentialism” so construed is hardly new (nor, alas, is it universally accepted); and as even Rorty points out, it hardly provides a license to kill w/r/t particular generalizations about “human nature” (re: sexuality, say).
My guess is the same as what I take yours to be: that we have two claims here, which people are running together. If I say that humans are monogamous “by nature” (or “essentially” monogamous), then it may be that that claim depends on an “essentialistic” metaphysics. But it may not; and in any case once the metaphysical anchor is removed, you still have to provide some more wind in order to move the ship. Of course people are going to claim victory re: the harder task simply by pointing to a purported consensus re: the easier task. It’s human nature (*cough*).
On the other hand, I certainly hope that w/r/t the properly metaphysical claim, I can safely assume, for ordinary discussion purposes, with purported Wittgensteinians at any rate, that its denial is indeed “prima facie absurd or [at the very least] naive” (and that our concern in such discussion would be with what exactly we would be thinking of “establishing” in order to manifest our understanding of our rejection of “essentialism” in this sense). And I see this as the “trap” you and Emerson are trading knowing looks about: maybe people will commit to some overly ambitious claim in advance of the discussion our own scruples require. Yet if you are right about the passages you are reading (which I see you have not identified) then it’s a “trap” they have set for themselves.
I think this looser usage is closer to “monothetic,” or “substantive,” than to “essentialist” as employed by philosophers. The first two don’t have the desired pejorative sense, so people borrow a term for something similar that’s been widely discredited in philosophy. It doesn’t get much more precise than that, as far as I can tell.
Either that, or the person invoking it is seeking to do away with the category so labeled--gender, nationalism, whatever. I would think, though, that total skepticism of that kind would be impracticable, since it’s a pre-condition of discourse that one has to use some set of terms or other, with rules defining them.
Fussy correction: I wrote “substantive” where I should have written “substantivist.”
. . . . it’s a pre-condition of discourse that one has to use some set of terms or other, with rules defining them.
Well, one must use terms, but just how those terms are defined, that’s what the cognitive scientists are not at all sure about. And they’re talking about relatively simple things such as birds and furniture, not such things as quarks and mana. It is not at all obvious just how such things are “defined” in the mental lexicon. Depending on just what you mean by “rules,” there’s a great deal of research that says its not rules at all.
I mean, if you are using “rules” to mean something like “general conditions of usage” without an particular committment to what those conditions might be, then of course there are rules. But that’s not where the game is at in cognitive science these days. They’re concerned about whether or not the conditions of usage take the form of “prototypes,” “exemplars,” or “theories,” or maybe any one of those, depending on the case.
But I suspect that this is rather far from the usage John is concerned about.
Bill Benzon: I mean, if you are using “rules” to mean something like “general conditions of usage” without an particular committment to what those conditions might be, then of course there are rules.
You’re right, my point was just as obvious as that.
I must have entered the discussion at the wrong time, as I don’t have anything to say about the cognitive specifics of this. What I was getting at was that you’re always using some array of concepts, and so you can’t invoke a skepticism toward knowledge-in-general as a means of discriminating between them. I gather that a lot of work in cultural studies ( to give one example) tries to do just that.
Dave, I don’t think it’s right to say that Wittgenstein is an anti-essentialist, at least on some likely understandings of what the term means, because it ends up denoting not some sort of pragmatic escape from metaphysics, but a highly speculative metaphysics. Specifically, it becomes a species of linguistic idealism. Our culture, our language is like a screen between us and the world. One of Wittgenstein’s purposes, as I read him, is to show that this sort of scheme/content distinction is unwarranted. (Obviously I just put the point in a Davidsonian way.) To put it really simply: Wittgenstein is opposed to metaphysical realism, but idealism is just metaphysical realism standing on its head. So he’s not an idealist either.
This is a point of Wittgenstein exegesis on which reasonable people may differ, so it’s Wittgenstein’s own damn fault if people get him exactly wrong.
Thanks to everyone else for participating helpfully in the thread. Luther, it’s interesting to trace the line back to Sartre for a couple reasons. 1) No one today would say that everyone in literary studies agrees that Sartre is obviously right. 2) Largely that is because of Sartre’s individualism. This thread hasn’t talked about it so much, but often anti-essentialism has ‘death of the author’ overtones. That is, the autonomous integrity of the subject is supposed to be exposed as an illusion. Sartre’s anti-essentialism, by contrast, was predicated on a strong assertion of such autonomy. Curious.
Okay, if the “anti-” in “anti-essentialist” means what it does in “anti-realism”, then I agree: Wittgenstein is not one, and neither am I. That’s why I demanded instead the denial of essentialism (which we can call “non-essentialism” if you like). I never use these terms myself, except in explicitly Aristotelian (or Kripkean) contexts. Joeo is right that Rorty does, though.
Hmmmm, let me just thank Luther again for the Sartre quote. That turns out to be very helpful to me for reasons I can’t really go into just this second.
Dave, do you think Rorty’s foot slips? Is that why he uses the term?
Thanks to joeo for the references, too.
By ‘foot-slips’ I mean: officially Rorty should find idealism just as unattractive as realism. But personally he’s much more attracted to the former and this somewhat distorts his presentation. He is torn between rejecting idealism and trying to reform it in some linguistic, nominal, pragmatic way, although it is in fact clear - and he would admit it - that he should go for the former option. I think this is true of Wittgenstein as well.
John, I think you’re right about Sartre’s individualism. One reason I think I like Fredric Jameson is that even at his most Marxist, there’s that element of Sartrean humanism always present (no doubt because Jameson wrote his dissertation and first book on Sartre, and he came to Marxism via Sartre’s own dialectical materialist shift).
I first read “Existentialism as a Humanism” in a freshman seminar my first semester of college, for a course called Literature and Ethics. It was my first taste of Sartre. And the selections we read from Marx were my first taste of his work. I think I’ve always approached them since then from an position from ethical philosophy.
Back to Sartre and Jameson: Jameson’s own clear sadness throughout *Postmodernism* concerning the “death of the author” and his critique of postmodern theory very much come from a Sartrean/modernist angle. I cannot recommend too highly that long “Conclusion” to *Postmodernism*. The entire work—from his critiques of pastiche, the postmodern sublime, identity politics, New Historicism, and poststructural “textuality,” to his defense of the base/superstructure model and his vision of cognitive mapping—still rocks, still feels true.
I just thought of a different way of putting one of my first points, above. It is pretty clear that the strong sense conveyed by the things I’ve been reading - ‘everyone with any sophistication knows that anti-essentialism is the right position to take’ - is a function of a sense of an overlapping consensus. That is, a wide variety of respected figures seem to have stumped for something in this area (insert somewhat vague wave in the direction of an area - looks sorta metaphysical over there.) But the defensibility of anti-essentialism, in this broad sense, is more or less inversely proportional to its usability. It’s like a wobbly 15-legged stool: very hard to overturn, decisively, but not usable furniture. Because the view supported in this way is too vague and ambiguous to warrant any claim of the form ‘anti-essentialism is correct, therefore ...’
What if it’s impossible to locate the essence of anti-essentialism? Perhaps a great literary inside joke or, on a grander scale, a rift in the very fabric of a strongly socially constructed reality; a concept which is indefinite and yet precisely self-descriptive, both fully immanent and transcendent.
Seriously though, when I encounter the term I generally take it as a something related to a kind of anti-Platonism, though perhaps a little stronger in certain ways. I typically understand it as consisting of one or both of the following claims:
A) Our concepts are not embedded in reality but are instead interpretive structures.
B) Things, particularly complex ones like culture, gender, etc., cannot be truthfully summed up or described in a simple way. That is to say that no category is “fully useful”. Kolmogorov complexity is a good mathematical analogue (which is what I’m writing about right now.) This is sometimes understood as a consequence of A.
In my mind this goes, along with resistance to “grand narratives”, a certain way towards why “nontraditional humanist” types seem so fixated on the complexity of things and on describing particularities. I read anti-essentialism as the stance of taking one or both of these things very, very seriously in all cases, as a perspective in itself and not a tool to be occasionally used.
As for the claims that it has definitely been established, I can’t say much about that without seeing the claims involved. I’d very much like to see what inspired these questions. Communities of discourse manufacture positions of certainty that are questionable to various degrees. It may be like how a scary proportion of creationists believe that science disproves evolution, or it may be a kind of implicit “my audience is anti-essentialist so I can treat it as established” thing.
I could reasonably be accused of being anti-essentialist, though I wouldn’t like it much as I’m naturally hostile to these types of descriptions because I think they often confused or not fully worked out. Case in point, this discussion, particularly with reference to anti-foundationalism, which I’ve always understood as a methodological thing along the lines of “what Descarte types were trying to do is no good.”
I would sooo buy a fifteen-legged stool. That would look just splendid in my study. I could balance a precarious pile of books upon it, or maybe some papers.
Hmmmm, you may have a point. A Seussian folly of sorts. Actually, it’s more like the 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins - with myself as the irritated king and Bartholomew as the poor innocent theorist, and the hats as anti-essentialism. (What a villain I am!)
LB’s Sartre quote: “When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. “
Is Sartre really writing from a more individualistic position than contemporary anti-essentialism here? I think that no one would now say that an individual can choose for all people. The less radical would say that each individual generally chooses what seems right for them, and there is no necessary connection between what is right for them and what is right for humanity. The more radical would say that individual difference is so pronounced that individual choices can’t help but be particular, even if the chooser would rather that they not be.
I think that this shift may be why Sartre seems not much referenced anymore, at least as “theorist” or literary “continental philosopher”. The text above now seems like an attempt to graft a social conscience onto anti-essentialism; in contempory terms, the celebration of difference takes its place.
But the hats of anti-essentialism are hats all the way down.
Maybe. And maybe they get fuzzier and fuzzier until they loose all sense of shape and simply become a blob of undifferentiated essence-substance.
Foucault’s first work was a critique of Kant’s “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View”, referenced at the end of the “Order of Things”:
“Michel Foucault concludes The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by welcoming the dissolution of modernity’s “invention” of the anthropological subject: “man” will be washed away, says Foucault without regret, like “a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea” (387). For Foucault, the end of the eighteenth century marks a change in what he calls the “fundamental arrangements of knowledge,” a change that makes it possible for the figure of “man” to appear in the discourses of the so-called human sciences (386-87). With the anthropologization of modern thought, however, philosophy enters into what Foucault characterizes as a deep “slumber,” from which he insists it now ought to awaken (340)"
John E.: I think it’s important to recall how folks like Barthes, Foucault, Levi-Straus, and, later, Derrida, all wanted to be the successor to Sartre in French intellectual life. The shift from Sartrean humanism to structural and poststructural anti-humanism is both a paradign shift in the classic sense as well as a power play to displace the huge success of the existential movement.
Rich: I’d say that Sartre’s position is more authentically individualistic, in the modernist sense of both terms. This is big I Individualism, bordering on the Nietzschean egoism of a Pound or (fictional) Dedalus. This is individualism over against the effects of an emerging consumerist economy of fetishism.
The later individualisms you describe, with their sense of radical difference, is exactly what Jameson describes in *Postmodernism* under the equation: postmodern form = “difference relates.” We’ve gone beyond the modernist Self, which could construct fragments into montages and collages. Now we’ve got the postmodern “schizophrenia” or pastiche, a set of fragments stretched out on a field of pure textuality. As Jameson argued long before Walter Benn Michaels, poststructural individualism is all about reducing the self to discourse, to a “heteroglossia” of discourses. And as Jameson writes, discourses cannot disagree; only selves engaged in arguments or positions can disagree.
So the shift from Sartre to Rorty, or Sartrean individualism to “Just Do It” individualism, is very much about the shift from modernist selves to postmodernist discourses. From modes of production to modes of reproduction.
(Yes, I’ve got it bad for Fredric Jameson and that ain’t good.)
John asks: “Dave, do you think Rorty’s foot slips? Is that why he uses the term? By ‘foot-slips’ I mean: officially Rorty should find idealism just as unattractive as realism. But personally he’s much more attracted to the former and this somewhat distorts his presentation. He is torn between rejecting idealism and trying to reform it in some linguistic, nominal, pragmatic way, although it is in fact clear - and he would admit it - that he should go for the former option. I think this is true of Wittgenstein as well.”
Hmmm. Rorty’s official line is that “representationalism” is the common assumption of realism and anti-realism, so that when we reject it, we move past that dualism. And that would indeed be a decent line with something other than “representationalism” as Rorty conceives of it. As it is it’s a weird conflation of platonistic realism (good to reject) and common sense, or at least pragmatically necessary regulative ideas (bad to reject), so his own view ends up being a weird conflation of Wittgenstein-inflected pragmatism (good) and positivist-inflected anti-realism (bad).
“Anti-essentialism” in Rorty I actually take to be just what I called “non-essentialism” and thus not exactly a slip (although he never calls his view “anti-realism"). In any case it doesn’t bother me; I don’t remember him putting that label on any of his characteristic positive views (same with “nominalism,” which he also endorses). Again, that’s what “anti-representationalism” does. Of course none of the labels would matter if he got the substance right, which, time and time again, in his better writings, he almost does – and then slips back into his characteristic jargon. So near and yet so far. (I’m almost done with the Rorty post btw. Today or tomorrow.)
And I agree that Rorty’s visceral rejection of realism can result in more of a recoil into anti-realism than in a workable non-realistic position. I actually think one should be torn between trying to reform idealism and rejecting it. But I think the same of realism as well. After all, if the “reforms” work, why complain? That is, if we get where we want to be, does it matter that we got there by “reforming” idealism (or realism)? And is such a thing really impossible? Our gripe is surely not the very idea of such a pudding, but that coming out of Rorty’s kitchen it doesn’t taste right (but neither does Putnam’s reform of realism). It even helps to try to do the same thing – that is, get to the same place – in different but (let’s hope) complementary ways. One’s “reform of idealism” (what would it take to bang Hegel into shape?) might very well be illuminated if you also took it to be a “reform of realism” as well – or a rejection of both. As I quoted Wittgenstein just the other day (Culture and Value): “I find it important in philosophizing to keep changing my posture, not to stand for too long on one leg, so as not to get stiff.”
Perhaps some of your posts are too generous in that they strive hard to make sense of nonsense?
As I understand it, the monolithic consensus on the essential correctness of anti-essentialism, at least in literary studies, is mainly ideologically motivated in the form of wishful thinking (if there is no human nature, then we can change everything at will!) and dependent on a false dichotomy between depraved and reactionary essentialism/biologism/etc and insightful, progressive anti-essentialism/constructivism. In my experience, the thinking doesn’t go much deeper than that.
Even someone like Terry Eagleton--hardly the least radical of literary theorists, and once a supporter of poststructuralist dogma--has come round lately: as he puts it, anti-essentialism “is largely the product of philosophical amateurism and ignorance.”
As usual, one is shocked and awed by the human capacity for self-serving self-deception.