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Thursday, September 28, 2006
Jameson on Zizek and Theory
Probably Adam Kotsko linked to this and I just missed it, but I notice Frederic Jameson reviewed Zizek’s The Parallax View for the LRB.
One thing catches my eye, in light of our endless sparring of yore - Theory/ theory and all that. Jameson assumes without argument the correctness of a simple proposition that I defended (and Scott defended, and Sean defended, etc.), but which was roundly dismissed as scurrilous polemic: namely, ‘theory’ is a name for a recognizable style of philosophy - a style that is, moreoever, antagonistic to philosophy as traditionally conceived. So it is not merely possible but to be expected that philosophers will be anti-theory. Here is Jameson:
This is why the dialectic belongs to theory rather than philosophy: the latter is always haunted by the dream of some foolproof self-sufficient system, a set of interlocking concepts which are their own cause. This dream is of course the after-image of philosophy as an institution in the world, as a profession complicit with everything else in the status quo, in the fallen ontic realm of ‘what is’. Theory, on the other hand, has no vested interests inasmuch as it never lays claim to an absolute system, a non-ideological formulation of itself and its ‘truths’; indeed, always itself complicit in the being of current language, it has only the vocation and never-finished task of undermining philosophy as such, by unravelling affirmative statements and propositions of all kinds. We may put this another way by saying that the two great bodies of post-philosophical thought, marked by the names of Marx and Freud, are better characterised as unities of theory and practice: that is to say that their practical component always interrupts the ‘unity of theory’ and prevents it from coming together in some satisfying philosophical system. Alain Badiou has recently coined the expression ‘anti-philosophy’ for these new and constitutively scandalous modes of intervening conceptually in the world; it is a term that Zizek has been very willing to revindicate for himself.
Now this is a Hegelian use of ‘dialectic’ and a tendentious - in fact, just plain wrong - characterization of ‘philosophy’. (Derrida is ‘haunted by the dream of some foolproof self-sufficient system ...’ - because he needs it around to kick around; Searle, by contrast, never bothers his head about such extreme forms of philosophical Rationalism. But surely Derrida is the theorist, Searle the philosopher.) All of which I take to be a glorious confirmation of my various pet notions and projects in this area. To wit: ‘theory’ is a name for a specific style that has only been around since about 1965. But really it should be regarded as an Anglo-American repetition of a French repetition of key themes and temperamental tics of German romanticism and post-Kantian idealism. In a sense this is obvious, and in certain moods those who ‘do Theory’ will simply admit as much. But all the standard moves for warding off the likes of Theory’s Empire require denials of this obvious truth - either through identification of ‘theory’ with thought, or with philosophy. So Theory’s self-knowledge is consistently sacrificed on the altar of its self-defense. (Notice how equivocal Jameson is about WHEN theory starts. With Hegel (dialectic); with Marx and Freud; it is something new and scandalous, associated with the likes of Badiou and Zizek.)
To be fair, something equal and opposite happens to the other side. The biggest problem with Theory’s Empire (which I meant to write about at the time but didn’t get around to) is a failure to be clear about the temporal scope of the ‘fashionable nonsense’ charge. There is no one intellectual tone to Theory’s Empire, but overall (and with encouragement from the editors) it tends to a sort of brusque, self-confident Enlightenment rationalism (but not Rationalism - not wild dreams of total, self-certain systematicity.) This sort of rationalism stands against not just Derrida and Foucault but Hegel and Schlegel and many others, going back to the start of the 19th Century. But you can’t refute the whole counter-Enlightenment on the cheap, surely, just because some latter-day excesses are readily mockable. You also can’t consistently keep a few Romantics you like - Coleridge, say - just because they don’t annoy you, if you’ve been banging your desk on behalf of ‘rationalism’. Consistency requires that you be consistent. Trying to do literary criticism in a consistently Enlightenment, rationalist, pre-Romantic spirit - as if Baudelaire never happened - would entail quite an ambitious turning-back of the critical clock. Otherwise we need some way of distinguishing the good irrationalist flights of fancy from the bad, lo these last 200 years.
Why am I reheating this old cabbage (as Descartes might say?) Because I’m starting work on turning our Theory’s Empire event into a book, that’s why.
Comments
So Theory’s self-knowledge is consistently sacrificed on the altar of its self-defense.
You mean Theory’s self-knowledge is always already sacrificed on the altar of its self-defense.
Oh, yes. That’s good! Thank you, David.
"Derrida is ‘haunted by the dream of some foolproof self-sufficient system ...’ - because he needs it around to kick around; Searle, by contrast, never bothers his head about such extreme forms of philosophical Rationalism“
Is this right, though? By this logic, Richard Dawkins needs belief in God in order to knock religious belief: but as a statament that inflects platitude (er, because if there were no belief in God it wouldn’t be there to be knocked in the first place, and Dawkins could devote his energies to something else) via a surruptitious, buried implication (a kind-of Freudian one, ‘he knocks religion because he’s fiercely repressing his secret desire to become a priest, ha! hahaha!‘). But what about the cigar that is sometimes being just a cigar?
What you say about Searle also looks a bit kooky to me. He “never bothers his head about such extreme forms of philosophical Rationalism”. ‘Bothers his head’ in the sense of trying systematically to work one out? But doesn’t he depend upon such a systematic and coherent world-picture to frame the various local problems that he is interested bothering his head about? Not ‘bothering his head’ about that starts to look like a dodgy compacency. And why is a coherent, consistent rationalist world view tagged here as ‘extreme Rationalism’? That looks a little like loaded phraseology. (My rationality is balanced, coherent and aims at self-consistency; yours is dangerous extremism. His is a rabid Fundamentalist barking rationality directly responsible for the holocaust and global environmental depredation.)
Apart from that, what you say here is right and clever. And hurrah to Jameson.
The problem with the word ‘haunting’ in this context is that Jameson is presupposing too stock and standard a story-line. The philosopher is ‘haunted’ because he is the canny man, to whom something uncanny is about to happen. (You know how it goes.) Some aporia is about to open up and swallow him, or he is about to get his beloved foundation kicked away, or his binaries deconstructed. Something. ‘Haunted’ implies a conception of philosophy as a highly specific failure about to happen. Dawkins would, of course, say he is not ‘haunted’ in the least. And, to look at him, I’d say he’d probably be right.
Likewise, Searle. One thing its critics consistently get wrong about analytic philosophy is that it follows from its piecemeal, small-problem-centered character that it is not really looking for any Grand System in which everything interlocks perfectly into its a priori place. Russell sets the tone early on when he rejects Hegel-style Big Ideas. The model is supposed to be the empirical natural sciences. That may invite a bad sort of scientism, but it isn’t going to invite any haunting dreams of System.
It may be that Searle is complacent in this regard, but that is just another way of saying he isn’t ‘haunted’ by vague, Hegelian dreams.
As to the rationalism/Rationalism point - I should probably do a post about this (and throw in historicism/Historicism for good measure.) Rationalism (with a capital-R) is a competitor to Empiricism (with a capital-E) but they are both forms of rationalism, in a larger sense. They both insist on consistency and coherence and truth and so forth. But Empiricism says all knowledge is gotten through the senses, whereas Rationalism says the mind has a powerful (perhaps perfect) capacity for pure rational knowledge, a priori, with certainty. Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz are all Rationalists in a strong sense. They are a priori system-builders. The Enlightenment thinkers thought this was nonsense, and an unfortunate throw-back to medieval forms of thought. (That’s why Voltaire makes Candide’s foolish tutor a Leibnizian, after all.) So the Enlightenment was rationalist but anti-Rationalist, by and large. I realize it may sound as though I am a maniac for drawing distinctions that I then mark only with a capital letter, but the rationalism/Rationalism is not my doing. It’s perfectly standard philosophy usage, and it gets mucked up all the time by the likes of Jameson, who sort of vaguely imply that the competitor of Theory is Rationalism, which leaves out of consideration the strong likelhihood that the competitor of Theory is, in fact, rationalism.
And historicism/Historicism - just to complete the thought - gets mucked up when analytic philosophers are described as anti-historical or ahistorical in their thinking, whereas in fact they are just not Historicists in some big fancy Hegelian sense. They study history, value it, but they don’t make it philosophically decisive in a certain strong sense. Scott Soame’s two volume history of analytic philosophy is a historicist work - it’s a history - but it’s not Historicist. Because Soame’s doesn’t have a Hegelian bone in his body, basically. Mostly what it comes down to is this: he would never consider that the validity of ideas or arguments was, in any interesting sense, historically relative. (Admittedly here the h-H is me insisting on confusing orthography again. But the distinction between having an interest in/knowledge of history and believing in a particular, quite strong philosophy of History is quite crucial not as well marked in these debates as it should be.)
OK, that’s very interesting, and I think I see what you mean about the rationalism/Rationalism. I think it’s right, too (although if one wanted to be devil’s advocate on Jameson’s behalf, one could say something about the weight of coincidence between the systems implied by small-r rationalism and big-R Rationalism validating what he says—which is to say, not wholly the same thing, no, but enough of the same thing to give some heft to, eg, Jameson’s points about the ambition towards self-sufficiency etc etc.)*
But I’m not sure I follow what you say about ‘haunting’. Probably my mind is too sluggish this London am. You sure you’re not eliding the vernacular sense of ‘haunting’ (ie the sense Jameson, I suppose, is using in the above quotation) and the much weirder ‘hauntological’ sense that Derrida developed? They have less in common, I’d say, than rationalism/Rationalism. But then again, what do I know?
___
*I’m not expressing myself very clearly here, I suspect. What I mean is that saying eg “so the Enlightenment was rationalist but anti-Rationalist, by and large” sets up rationalism/Rationalism as if they’re in an exclusive binary; when I wonder whether it wouldn’t be closer to the truth to say something like ‘So the Enlightenment was rationalist but didn’t take that rationalism further along the philosophical road to that point where it became Rationalism’. Which is to say, the commonalities (systematic coherence, logic, reason, positivist optimism etc) are what’s really important, and the question as to whethetr we’re dealing with a-prori or a-posteriori system-builders isn’t so big a deal as the fact that we’re dealing with, you know, system-builders.
By this logic, Richard Dawkins needs belief in God in order to knock religious belief . . .
But he really does need something to kick around, doesn’t he?
It’s one thing to argue against X Y or Z because you think they’re wrong. It’s something else to need that X Y or Z be wrong so you can argue against it forever and ever and ever fighting the fight of the righteous.
You may be right about the ‘haunting’. The problem is that if he’s using it in some vague and non-hauntological sense, then it’s WAAAY too vague to be the basis for the theory/philosophy distinction, which he is obviously drawing in an actual, serious sense.
As to the rationalism/Rationalism thing, I wouldn’t say that the Enlightenment ‘didn’t take that rationalism further along the philosophical road’, as if it were a case of having not yet explored the implications of an initial commitment. It’s more a case of having been down that road before and prudently drawn back. (This is true both of the Enlightenment, which knew all about the messes Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz got in, and Russell, who know all about all that plus Hegel, too. As his teachers were Hegelians.)
The thing about system-building is interesting. I think analytic philosophers are, by and large, innocent as charged, where Systematicity is concerned. Because they are miniaturists and piecemeal specialists. (The fact that they were busy committing another crime, somewhere else, proves they are innocent of this charge, y’r honor.) But there is a sort of John Deweyan accusation that their scholastic fussiness amounts to a sort of systematicity in disguise. They presuppose that there must be a system, in which their piecemeal parts shall find their place. But this takes a bit of showing. It’s not a clear conviction, I think. And I don’t think this is what Jameson has in mind. I think he is just reflexively accusing everyone who doesn’t ‘do Theory’ of being a Rationalist. So I think he’s just got huge blindspots. Whole swathes of intellectual terrain - perfectly habitable, to all appearances - and he doesn’t see ‘em.
John: They presuppose that there must be a system, in which their piecemeal parts shall find their place.
Yes. That’s what I meant.
But this takes a bit of showing
Daresay it does.
Bill: “It’s one thing to argue against X Y or Z because you think they’re wrong. It’s something else to need that X Y or Z be wrong so you can argue against it forever and ever and ever fighting the fight of the righteous.“
This is true, of course; but also a little facile, certainly in terms of the opposition that a figure like Dawkins kicks up: what I mean is that religious types, angered or nonplussed by Dawkin’s attack on them, insist that Dawkins is arguing type (b) of your two types [ie, that something else is at stake other than ‘just’ the truth or falsehood of the case being argued] where Dawkins would surely say he’s arguing type (a). And the danger here is that, pace Freud, both the more you insist ‘I’m doing (a), not (b)’ the more people retort ‘as clear as case of (b)-denial as ever I’ve seen, obviously you’re doing (b)’ and if you don’t insist you’re doing (a) people assume you’re doing (b) anyway. Damned both ways.
Yes, Adam, sorta.
You see, I’m not religious, but it’s pretty clear to me that Dawkins is arguing type (b), as did Bertrand Russell before him, with even more wit—I dimly recall some bemused skepticism about a God who could see through the walls of a convent but not through the habits of the nuns within. As to just how I distinguish between someone who’s arguing type (a) vs. someone who’s arguing type (b), I suppose an analytical philosopher or a literary critic could figure that out by examing the texts, but that’s more than I’m up to at the moment.
Will no head case capitalize of the distinction between capitalism and Capitalism?
I don’t get the point of your (a) vs (b) distinction, or rather, I do, but I don’t understand why it’s important. Of course something is at stake other than the truth or falsity of religion in your example; Dawkins sees the effects of religion in society and doesn’t like them. In that sense, he might be unable to oppose religion if it could be proved to be true, but as long as that proof is missing, he’s not having only a theoretical true-or-false discussion. It’s also a political intervention.
Bill Benzon: “It’s one thing to argue against X Y or Z because you think they’re wrong. It’s something else to need that X Y or Z be wrong so you can argue against it forever and ever and ever fighting the fight of the righteous.”
If X Y or Z really isn’t wrong, but someone is attacking it anyway, they’re a crank. If X Y or Z is not really proveably right or wrong, then disliking a too-fervent attack on it seems like shorthand for an attack on the general stance of righteousness. This dislike seems to me to be an antipolitical attitude. In the area of the not proveably right or wrong, change often requires giving up easy, let’s-stay-cool dispassion. Of course it’s different if someone is recommending violent action, but no one in these examples is.
You read over this and wonder… since what seems to be going on is people just getting their rocks off, either singularly, in a tango, or a circle jerk, if we need theory or philosophy in higher ed at all… for a number of reasons: Why pay people to do it if they do it for free. People shouldn’t be doing certain things in pubic unless funded by a local arts organization or are part of a public awareness campaign. As well, there’s a danger that everyone will start wanting to do it; and nothing is so terrifying than a room full of mostly-males trying to show that they have made sense of the systems that someone made to make sense of… and we’re back to the circle again. Now, I like reading theory and philsophy as much as the next guy… especially the centerfolds of miss praxis, but in my dotage I’ve found a place for it. Berkeley and Derrida sit right next to Jarry and Blake in the little bookshelf in the bathroom… for those moments of calm and often sober reflection.
With Descartes the distinction to be made is between Descartes and Cartesianism, since Descartes (unlike Locke and most Enlightenment thinkers) was a hands-on empirical scientist.
I fully agree that analytic philosophy’s “piecemeal, small-problem-centered character” implies that “that it is not really looking for any Grand System”. In fact, analytic philosophy is barely able to be sure that we know that other minds exist and are not just brains in bottles, and some of them find the million-rat-orgasm problem to be a real moral dilemma. The problem with analytic philosophy is not System, but fragmentation into increasingly tinier and more intractable arguments, with the ultimate effect of making coherent discourse impossible. Analytic Philosophy is a very strict censor, not a dreamer.
I disagree with the argument of Brian Leiter and others that analytic philosophy is just philosophy itself and not a distinct school, and I think that it’s bad that it domninates philosophy. I also disagree with the idea that the most important adversary of analytic philosophy is “Theory” or Continental Philosophy. Continental Philosophy is Hamilton Burger or the Washington Generals—born to lose.
Jason, you are welcome to our little circle. But please keep that sort of thing to yourself.
I’m not sure where you’re going with this Rich:
In the area of the not proveably right or wrong, change often requires giving up easy, let’s-stay-cool dispassion.
We’re in the not-provable. But we want change, for whatever reason. Since proof isn’t available to us, righteousness is all we’ve got. Is that it?
Bill: Not quite, but close. Certainly righteousness is an important, perhaps vital, component of the most influential public advocates of some societal change. I don’t think that this really maps to Theory-vs-philosophy debates, because very little is at stake societally, but people did bring Dawkins up as though the cases were similar.
Regarding what Rich said, progress (change, evolution) is always a venture, an experiment, a bid, or an enterprise. You don’t work out the details perfectly first (perhaps using analytic philosophy principles) and then snap the fully-validated, rational new order into place. If there’s not real uncertainty, it will not be progress.
Yep. And it takes a certain attitude to undertake this venture. Not many people do it and preserve decorous too-cool-to-care dispassion throughout.
A lot of political disagreement is about the default position or null hypothesis to accept in the absence of certain knowledge. “Framing” to an extent amounts to asserting or assuming a default position. If you accept an opponent’s asserted default position, he can sit back and force you to prove he’s wrong, and you almost always lose.
Liberals and centrists of the academic sort, in the guise of skepticism and scrupulous rationality, often subject all proposed positions (in the name of self-criticism and intellectual integrity) to such a rigorous scrutiny that no strong position can possibly be taken. I call this defeatism perfectionism—all imperfect psoitions are rejected. This effectively amounts to allowing the status quo to be the default, and increasingly the status quo is Bush-conservative.
I come towards this from a slightly different angle than John (Emerson). There is a constellation of belief, which can show up in academia but which is also present all the way down the culture chain from middlebrow centrism to street cool, that anyone who believes strongly in anything is therefore wrong. Therefore, the conservative religious believer is wrong, but the atheist Dawkins arguing against religion is also wrong, because he’s not doing it as though he doesn’t really care.
You often see this in condemnations of “righteousness” that are unhooked from any particular content of what someone believes that they are righteous about.
In lesser form, it’s what sometimes slightly annoys me about Holbo’s writing, or Bérubé’s, despite the fact that I both substantively agree with them about many things and think that they are often good writers. It’s the inability to ever get out of the comic, witty mode. Why? Well, because that wouldn’t be cool. It’s politically self-limiting.
And it takes a certain attitude to undertake this venture. Not many people do it and preserve decorous too-cool-to-care dispassion throughout.
Let me make a remark about this in the context of Theory. As I have noted here and there, though I was educated in the bosom of (pre-)Theory, I walked out on it. To some extent that was a matter of mere stylistic preference; I wasn’t interested in writing criticism clotted with self-referential irony. But there was an epistemic side to my walk-out as well; I feared that mode of thinking was a dead end.
How can you do something new if you’re always and ever criticising something either old or now? Bringing Theory down is one thing, but when you’ve done that, what then? Do you revert to the older ways or do you do something new? If you want to do something-new, how do you do it now that you’ve spent half your career writing polemics against Theory?
And so I waded into the cognitive sciences and so forth and spent very little time and energy arguing against Theory, or even pre-Theory. I published a letter in PMLA in which I responded to Hillis Miller’s “woe is deconstruction” presidential address, but that’s pretty much it until quite recently. I’ve spent most of my time trying to figure new ways of analyzing literature, etc.
Some times it’s best to walk away.
It’s not clear that Jameson’s definitions in this paragraph match Zizek’s. (See, for example, Zizek’s discussion of the social location of philosophy in Parallax View or Organs without Bodies.) Jameson may very well define Zizek as a theorist (as opposed to a philosopher), but Zizek pretty clearly positions himself as a philosopher (or to use theory as a synonym for philosophy, reflecting the disciplinary locations where what most counts as philosophy in Zizek’s eyes gets done).
Far be it from me to critique Fred Jameson—but I also think this paragraph is symptomatic of the general tendency to erroneously conflate Zizek and Badiou.
(This semester, Jameson’s Postmodernism, a book I’ve always meant to read, is on the syllabus for one of my classes, so perhaps in a few months I will return as a radical Jamesonian. Until then, however, here I stand, etc.)
Bill, your response has to do with the intersection of economics and politics. Certain areas are amenable to the production of something new without the displacement of something old, and certain areas are not. That generally has to do with whether there is something scarce, i.e. economical, about the situation.
In your case, you’ve essentially dropped out of academia, so you are no longer in personal or communal competition for tenured positions, journal inches, or even really the attention economy of people within those tenured positions. Like most artists, you can create what you want, and you need not sweep away prior art to do so.
In politics, that’s almost never the case.
To me, the rent-seeking methodological-paradigmatic intellectual monopolies deserve to be attacked, just because they’re occupying valuable turf. Sure, I’m thinking of $$$$ and fighting for turf, but my point is that that’s what they’re fighting for too. Certain points of view have an enormous influence on hiring, firing, and promotion. I would hope for a less monopolistic system, and failing that, different monopolists.
Actually Rich, that’s not quite how I see it. I may not be in competition for a tenured slot - because I’ve decided not to compete for them - but I am certainly in competition for journal inches (or kilobytes) and attention. I never stopped publishing in the formal literature and I do interact with academically-employed scholars, both electronically and in-person - and I’m not just talking about The Valve here.
The fact that I’m not academically employed means that it’s easier for me to resist the temptation to publish the same idea three times a year in slightly different form, etc. But I still have to publish and in places where my work will be seen and respected. I go to conferences and present papers.
I may not be making my living in the standard academic community, but I can’t just blow it off. Why? Because it is still the institutional center of intellectual life. Some people in my position use their outsider status as “proof” that they’re ideas are right. Their reasoning seems to be something like this:
1. Ultimately valid innovations are often neglected.
2. My ideas are neglected.
3. Therefore my ideas are valid innovations and will ultimately prevail.
The inference, of course, is not valid. That way lies madness.
So I seek community here and there and get on with my work as best I can. I don’t spend much time inveighing against the ideas of tenured mediocrity (or even tenured brilliance as the case may be) because I don’t see that it will accomplish much. In particular, it won’t deepen my understanding of the world.
But, in a few cases I’ve taken it on myself to publish some pretty high class intellectual invective, against neuro-memetics and against Darwinian literary criticism.
Like most artists, you can create what you want, and you need not sweep away prior art to do so.
Well, I do have to eat, so I do have to make money, and I don’t do it with my intellectual work. And it’s not at all obvious to me how much polemic is necessary within the academic world either. Some is certainly necessary. But in Theoryland, a lot of that argumentativeness seems rather self-indulgent to me. Counter-punching isn’t a means to an end; it’s become the point of the enterprise.
I spend lots of my time grumbling about various sorts of SOBs. I do other things too, but frankly, cursing the darkness has had a bad rap. I may be the only one who sweeps theory and analytic philosophy into the same bag, though.
1. Ultimately valid innovations are often neglected.
2. My ideas are neglected.
3. Therefore my ideas are valid innovations and will ultimately
prevail.
The “therefore” in #3 might be replaced by a “maybe”. For a lot of people the choice is between being cranks and just hanging it up.
I’ve actually thought (independently of this exchange) of gathering a little collection of cranks who actually had a lot on the ball. Van Gogh, Musorgsky, Erik Satie, Charles Sanders Peirce, and William Blake are on the list already, and I haven’t even started looking. And yes, they were all verifiably cranky.
Philip Mirowski compiled a list of mentally ill logicians. Goedel and “Beautiful Mind” Nash were on it, but there were about five or six others, including Zermelo and Turing.
Ah, but there is a world of difference between “therefore” and “maybe” in that slot.
Sure, but maybe you misconstrued what their reasoning “seems to be”.
Nope, the examples I’ve got in mind take their outsider status as proof-positive of genius. I’m not saying that all outsiders do that, but some do. I have no idea whether or not any of the folks you’ve mentioned, for example, have in effect made the wrong syllogism. I certainly didn’t have them in mind.
There’s a difference between being a crank and being a narcissistic fool.
I completely agree with you, John: theory is something that began in the second half of the twentieth century. I’m slightly confused about your stance towards Jameson. Tell me if this is right: Jameson helps confirm your suspicion about the specificity of “theory” (as opposed to philosophy), while perhaps doing too much to justify theory and separate theorists from philosophers.
I continue to use the word “philosophy” to describe much of what I study, and would like to do, while reserving theory for those who describe themselves that way.
I’m not sure I agree that the relationship between Romanticism and rationalism is as hopeless as you maintain. I’m not as familiar with Coleridge’s prose as I would like; however, I am curious why your modern-day rationalist would need to throw out the imagination, or the love of the beautiful, or the sympathetic response to Nature. Not of all these things are inherently rational, but my appreciation of Tintern Abbey does not make me incapable of deciding a question of logic. In fact, Candide ends with an injunction to “tend your garden,” hinting at the Romantic “simple life,” just as Zadig implicitly valorizes romantic love.
I do think that philosophers like Derrida have a great interest in portraying themselves as the logical end-point of Romanticism: “all roads lead to me.” That hardly proves their worth. As in the discussion of Rationalism yielding to rationalism, one need not always unbalance the system by exaggerating its component phenomena into absolutes (which at that point certainly do challenge the tenets of ordinarily reasoning).
bill, I was just sent by the Crank Union to put a little muscle on you. Nothing personal.
Umm . . . Errr . . . Before you put any muscle on anyone around here you gotta’ get permission from the boss. Otherwise you’ll be banished to meat space.
I’m having some trouble here with the idea of “haunting.” It could mean: one is obsessed by the idea of System ("a set of interlocking concepts which are their own cause") and is committed to the possibility of same (and to working out its actuality), as a foundation to end all foundations. But surely the poster child for this is Hegel—yet Jameson tells us that “the dialectic belongs to theory rather than to philosophy,” where it is the *latter* that is so “haunted.” Huh.
On the other hand, my immediate reaction to the idea of “haunting” was this. To be “haunted by [this] dream” is not to dream it yourself—or at least, to be deceived by it qua dream—but instead to see it *as* a dream—a dream, which (alas) is difficult to dispel, even in oneself. Imagine someone continually shaking himself awake while surrounded by dreamers (isn’t there a Star Trek: Voyager episode like that?). That person might be better described than the others as looking “haunted”—even if that’s less because he’s dreaming than because he’s not getting any sleep, and starting at half-seen afterimages out of the corner of his eye. Such a person is also not likely to be satisfied with confident assertions by his fellows that “yes, those people are dreaming, but I am fully awake; and by the way, you look awful, old chap—what’s wrong?” especially if he sees his former self as making precisely that mistake.
In this sense our paradigmatic haunted man is Investigations-era Wittgenstein (and note that both Searle and Derrida fit equally, if in different ways, into the third category, that of those making unconvincing assertions of wakefulness). But Wittgenstein too is considered by most philosophers to be proposing “a recognizable style of philosophy - a style that is, moreoever, antagonistic to philosophy as traditionally conceived.” Naturally, it all depends on the scope of “traditionally conceived.” But in my experience most philosophers think of those of us with Wittgensteinian tendencies (in this sense) to be misguided and possibly neurotic philosophers rather than “theorists” or other aliens. After all, the worst Brian Leiter ever says about John McDowell is that he is “unclear” (though Rorty seems to Leiter to be some sort of fifth-columnist, and thus increasingly irrelevant at best—not like I’m a big Rorty fan anymore myself).
Now I quite agree with the final paragraph of your post, and we must indeed be careful about what goes into the ideas of R/rationalism and S/system. Obviously Wittgenstein isn’t worried about Hegel. And neither is Searle entranced by Hegel. Yet (as others have said, if I’m reading them right) the “bad sort of scientism” toward which you seemingly grudgingly allow that Searle may be “complacent” isn’t *so* different from the Hegelian mirage.
On yet another hand (that’s three, I think), it’s interesting to note (again, think McDowell here, though I wish he would explain further so I wouldn’t have to read my own views into his texts) that once you look to Hegel not for an impossible System but instead for an all-purpose dualism-smashing slicer-and-dicer, then he looks less like the apotheosis of the Rationalistic nightmare than an ally in a pragmatic/therapeutic escape from even the medium-sized-r version of same (i.e. from the thing I see in Searle but you seem not to—bizarrely, by my lights, but having seen him lecture I know Searle sounds much saner in person than he does on the page, and you went to Berkeley; so maybe that’s it). So maybe that’s what Jameson means by “dialectic”—the “good Hegel,” not the “bad Hegel.” But like I said, me ‘n’ Wittgenstein are philosophers, not “theorists.” And notice again that in these terms both Searle and Derrida end up on the business end of our dualism smasher (as the former as well as the latter retains the dualism simply in order to beat the other pole with a stick—after all, materialists are dualists too).
But we need to hear more about your attitude toward Romanticism and the counter-enlightenment. Surely some Romantics are indeed on my side (I’m still not sure I should say “our side,” which disturbs me)? And it would help me as well if you would say something about Cavell, who is clearly relevant in this context. So that’s your homework.
My tuppenceworth: I seem to remember that this metaphor, of ‘haunting’, is a recurrent one in Jameson’s writing; though please don’t ask me to trawl through the ‘Ideologies of Theory’ for proof. I have always taken its repetition to be an oblique and self-reflexive reference to the famous beginning of Marx’s Capital on Jameson-- ‘A spectre haunts Europe’. Which would, I guess, make the statement Jameson makes above ("philosophy… is always haunted by the dream of some foolproof self-sufficient system") a typically Jamesonian case of the unexpected inversion or dialectical reversal. The Gothic metaphor at the beginning of Capital demands a reflexivity about Capitalist narratives; here, Jameson seems to demand the same of philosophy.
As for theory, I once had an excellent tutor who began my postmodernism theory course by saying something simple that I take as read, now: “One way of thinking about postmodernism-- perhaps the best way-- is of understanding that it’s an ongoing conversation about what postmodernism is, and that this conversation is somehow a product of a thing we are still trying to grasp-- postmodernity”. I suppose this is a pragmatic line on theory, but then even Jameson takes Rorty to be a foundational figure in Anglo-American theory.
Hope my bit of woolgathering sounds, er, coherent…