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Friday, December 09, 2005
Something Resembling A Draft of That Thing I Keep Promising - or, hix dixerit quispiam on stilts
Here it is (PDF). Part II, to go with that Part I thing I posted a few days ago. Something resembling a history of Theory. And DANGER: Part II is 15,000 words. I shouldn’t even post it, but I keep rewriting part I, in effect - I’ve done it about 3 times, different ways; and I keep promising I’ll get to Part II and I keep getting distracted. So I’m just plain going to keep my promise. (I thought about dividing it into 12 pieces and setting them to post 1 a day, up to X-Mas - an advent calendar with a little mini-essay about Theory behind every little door. But I didn’t.)
Here’s the story, so you are warned ...
10 days ago I resolved to just pound out the contents of Part I and II and over 10 days I indeed wrote about 25,000 words. Plus I fed the blogs. Which is rather too much writing, even if a goodly bit of it is long quoted passages and semi-recycled stuff from old posts. And now I’m taking a break. I’m telling you this so you know better than to read the thing unless you want to read a long, baggy draft. I think it’s readable, but it sure is a mess. It doesn’t keep the contemporary critique and history separate the way I like it. It’s too overbearing at points, just because drafts always hit stuff too hard. It lists, it heaves, it sighs, it feels sorry for itself and wipes its nose, it perks up and heads off in a different direction. The only reason it might be worth posting, besides the fact that I said I would, even though it is sure rough, is that I’m sure quite a bit of it is wrong, or seriously incomplete. So I do very much welcome comments, even though I can’t honestly expect many people to slog through. Also, even at 15,000 words I didn’t get to F.R. Leavis, like I promised Adam Roberts. Oh, well. Another day. I do manage to start with Paul Ricoeur, and back during our TE event John McGowan sort of idly mused about Ricoeur’s relation to Theory.
One problem, I guess, is figuring out whether Habermas and Gadamer and Ricoeur are Theory or not. It would be funny to call them co-conspirators in Theory since they so resolutely set themselves against other figures who are always associated with Theory: Derrida and Foucault most notably. But it would also be funny to say that they are not involved in Theory. What name would you give to their work?
Sir, you shall have my answer. Oh, but I didn’t have time to finish my bibliography so you get page numbers and no titles, in places. And question marks. If anyone wants a reference, I’ll find it for you. Sorrysorrysorry.
I’m getting on a plane in about 12 hours, flying round the world, so don’t expect posts from me for several days. All these other superfine minds will amuse and edify you in my glorious absence. I will, in a few days, read any comments that may accrete, of course. I really could use the help.
Comments
It stops at page 46, if perhaps not in mid-paragraph, at least in mid-train-of-thought. Was that just as much as has been written so far, or was it a technical problem with the file getting truncated or my copy of Adobe or something?
I know that this goes against everything that you hold dear, and is undoubtedly highly old-fashioned as well, but you might want to consider writing your history with the events in chronological order. Some techniques that are perfectly fine as a general principle are dangerous for particular authors, because they reinforce their style rather than playing against it.
Everything continental is Theory, no? (Unless it specifically affiliates with analytic philosophy.)
As I remember, Ricoeur wanted to talk to Foucault but the feeling was not in any way mutual.
Habermas did talk to Foucault and spoke of him in a very respectful way, as he does of almost everybody, no matter how full of shit they are --e.g. Bataille. (That’s a quirk of Habermas’s communicative ethics, and not one that I would endorse.)
P.S. I think that there’s a limit for everyone on how long a web-piece they’re willing to read. My limit would be around 2-3,000 words. This is partly because scrolling to the beginning is harder than flipping back, if you want to refresh your memory of something. So I will print your PDF is I think I’ll read it.
Rich,
No the technical problem was with me. I got to p. 46 and realized the best thing to do was just stop rather than make it any worse. You are right about the chronology problem.
The simplest way to think about the chronology of the piece is: Ricoeur (1962), Cunningham (2002). From euphoric dream to higher eclecticism. The question: how to get from one to the other? And: are they really one thing, in any meaningful sense? I try to answer both questions with my Hesse noodling. There are two 1982 halfway points: Culler and Miller. Culler indicates how the breadth of Theory was achieved. Miller how the canny/uncanny thing is supposed to work.
That’s probably enough for starters. John, I wouldn’t say everything continental is Theory. The problem, to begin with, is there are plenty of analytic philosophers on the continent, so it gets confusing fast. But never mind about that. Continental philosophy is much broader, if only because it’s clearly older. (But actually for other reasons as well.) Heidegger does not ‘do Theory’, because Theory is a post 1960’s thing. Which is, of course, Heidegger influenced.
From page 17:
What I am interested in, which is related, is the question of how euphoric dreams of systematicity turn into songs of the body eclectic, scientificity into anti-scientificity, while somehow preserving a sort of intellectual identity: as Theory.
I think this is a very interesting and important question. For which I do not have an answer.
In my own case, I have to say that, in some sense, my dreams of systematicity are in place. More or less. But I have (willingly) given up a lot in the process. I’ve given up a desire to ascertain the meaning of this or that text, or body of texts, in favor of trying to understand how texts work.
Distinguishing between the two ends—meaning vs. mechanism—is very difficult. No reason to believe I am fully successful in my most recent practical criticsm. But that’s a long and complicated story.
But I do think that dreams of system and a desire to grasp the meaning of texts are in conflict. Sooner or later you’re going to loop around and, snakelike, see your own tail wagging before your eyes.
As for Greenblatt, try this out—I’m just making this up as I type. Say the object is to find patterns in literary texts. One way to do that is to apply some theoretical “engine” to the text. In doing this, of course, you run the risk to simply finding your own tail, as it is tricked out and disguised by your choice of engine. Rather than run that risk, Greenblatt chooses old literary texts and indicates the patterns in them by finding examples of the same or similar patterns in contemporary texts of rather differents sorts. So the pattern emerges to view in this juxtaposition process, but no theoretic engine has been invoked.
Hence you can’t possibly be chasing down your own tail.
QED
JH: “The simplest way to think about the chronology of the piece is: Ricoeur (1962), Cunningham (2002). From euphoric dream to higher eclecticism. The question: how to get from one to the other? And: are they really one thing, in any meaningful sense? I try to answer both questions with my Hesse noodling. There are two 1982 halfway points: Culler and Miller.”
I think that I understood that. (I did read through the whole piece, even if my eyes did glaze a bit at times).
Here’s where the lack of chronological order hurts the piece (well, it also makes it more confusing). Wrestling with Theory is like defining a fog bank etc., and your detractors will always say, contrary to the common use of the term by almost everyone, that Theory does not exist as an entity—it’s like a plant that unfolds under the warm glow of approving regard, curls up and disappears under the harsh glare of hostile scrutiny. By mixing up the Theory of 1966 with the Theory of 1982 and the Theory of 2002, you’re helping them with this criticism. Even if, as you argue, the Theory of these three times is really connected as part of one coherent academic-philosophical-aesthetic movement, *in detail* the three are different. As time goes on, new thinkers are added to the eclectic stew, others become unfashionable and drop out (though never entirely). I think that you need more intervening times and little notes on the new components of the eclecticism of each time in order to show how the differences in detail are the same in kind.
Also, I realize that a philosophical synthesis requires this to some extent, but maybe your quotations could be a bit more chronologically ordered as well. The appeal of the ahistorical greatest-hits mashup is a large part of the Higher Eclecticism, and by adopting the same style ("Look, I can quote Ricoeur! And Hesse! And some guy’s 2005 unpublished notes! And then mention Bentham and Mills!) you run the risk of the Neitzschean “when you hunt monsters, take care that you yourself do not become a monster” thing. If the idea of an intellectual history is to trace out why people thought particular things at particular times, bringing in quotes from times past the time under discussion is—not quite cheating, exactly, since people later on may understand the past better than contemporaries of the time did, but something to be carefully used.
p34: “There is a sort of pun on ‘strong’ that comes into play here.”
More fogging amongst the mathematical/logical meanings of ‘strong’, ‘rigorous’, and ‘robust’ that’s evident elsewhere. (Something about instrumentalism also seems to lurk nebulously behind all this; but the modern/pomo split shouldn’t be so vague: just a question of whether it’s command or command structure that’s being fragged.)
p37: “The announcement of social constructivism—in Theory—is an Event:: the decisive overturning of all the tables in the temple where haggling might take place. This overturning is, simultaneously, an explosion of, say, a Cartesian view of the subject (round up the usual suspects.) If everything blows up on schedule. And there will be no upsetting the schedule with a lot of noise about how, looked at in some ingenious way, constructivism couldn’t possibly be true after all.”
Empson’s note on the line Christ stinks of torture who was caught in lime. from the villanelle Reflections from Anita Loos:
The lime is meant to be birdlime (also hanged criminals are buried in ordinary lime). I had better say some more about the line, as many readers may find it merely offensive. Anyway the religion of love produced appalling cruelties when made a government institution, but it seems arguable that the ideas of Jesus himself got fatally connected under the stress of persecution with the official and moneymaking cult of blood sacrifice, which he had tried to combat. That he drove out of the temple the doves that were being sold for sacrifice just before he became one is an awful irony in his story. The way earlier societies seem obviously absurd and cruel gives a kind of horror at the forces that must be at work in our own, but suggests that any society must have dramatically satisfying and dangerous conventions; and people can put up with almost any political conditions, either because they are lazy or because they are ambitious.
The ending bit refers to the last stanza:
It gives a million gambits for a mime
On which a social system can be based:
No man is sure he does not need to climb,
A girl can’t go on laughing all the time.
(Wasn’t Romanticism always cognizant of all the inherent ironies of its position?) Anyway, a social construct:
how little we know of each other
how little we know of ourselves
so how much we need one another
to make sense of what little we know
how little we know of the world
how little the world that we make
to make sense of what little we know
so much as we make of each other
how little we know what we’re made of
as little as how much we make
so much as we make of each other
so little we know of ourselves
Just a minor point.p5: You may be confusing Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Criticism (which contains no ‘confident acronyms spelling out how we are moving toward a grand theory’) with his Criticsm and Ideology (which does).
Thanks Mark, I’ll check that. You’re probably right. While on the subject, I probably should have included a specific note in the draft to the effect that all quotes should be rechecked, in case anyone is minded to recirculate them for any purpose. I not only haven’t compiled a bibliography, I haven’t rechecked that the text of quotes is correct. (Not that I think I was so sloppy, but getting misattributions into circulation would be highly pernicious.)
Rich, you are right about the eclecticism, which I don’t defend as any kind of virtue. I have to prune the thing like hell. That said, it may be that my goal - a fairly high altitude history that explains the unity of Ricoeur and the Higher Eclecticism - is in some way misconceived. It may be that my eclecticism is just a way of dancing around the fact that I’m spinning deep unities out of anecdotes (’resonant fragments’, as Greenblatt calls them.)
nnhyav, thanks for the Empson. Could you do me the favor of sending me the whole thing?
"Rich, you are right about the eclecticism, which I don’t defend as any kind of virtue.”
Well, in examining eclecticism, you have to be eclectic. All I was saying is that it would work better as an organized eclecticism. In particular, you have three kinds of quotes: quotes illustrating what people thought at a particular time, quotes that summarize the past, and quotes that illustrate a general principle or narrative. I’d keep the first chronological, use the second carefully, and really think about the third. Argle and Bargle, while amusing, don’t really belong in your history, though they might appear in a previous chapter where you generally set out the problem. Using Hesse as an organizing story—I’m not sure about it. Proof by analogy to a novel isn’t proof, but it could be illustrative. It’s just that if what you say about Theory is true, it has to be true even for people who have never read Hesse. It might be a useful exercise for you to try to explain what you mean without reference to this ready-made story, and then put it back it later.