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Wednesday, August 02, 2006
More Foucault and Enlightenment: the Tell-Tale Heart of the Present
Let me pick up where I left off in my last Foucault/Enlightenment post. Is it appropriate for Foucault to pass off ‘the attitude of modernity’ as an answer to the question ‘what is Enlightenment?’ His choice of Baudelaire as a paradigm modern is, as I said, rather provocative in this regard, because he is hardly a paradigm Enlightenment thinker. Baudelaire: "De Maistre and Edgar Poe have taught me to reason" (Intimate Journals, p. 57). Political reactionism, counter-Enlightenment and gothic literature. Also, "I am sick of France; chiefly because everybody is like Voltaire" (p. 35). Hardly an orthodox Enlightenment stance. Well, so much is obvious. So is this a problem for Foucault? Has he dodged his title question?
Foucault would probably turn the tables by suggesting that it is really Kant - not Foucault himself - who first changed the subject. Kant asked ‘what is Enlightenment?’ but he answered, in effect: modernity. Given how much ‘modernity’ may entail, this retroactively changes the sense of the question. So Foucault is following suit.
Habermas suggests something of the sort in "Taking aim at the heart of the present", his response to Foucault’s essay. Just for starters, he makes a few personal remarks that rather strikingly recall Baudelaire’s commentary on Poe’s contribution to the philosophy of reason - i.e. the distinctive ethos of the detective-hero: "Poe’s characters, or rather Poe’s single character, the man of razor-sharp perception and slackened nerves, the man whose burning and patient will hurls defiance at difficulties and whose gaze is fixed with the concentration of a sword upon objects which grow larger as he looks at them" ("Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Works", in The Painter of Life and Other Essays, p. 91). Here is Habermas on his one personal meeting with Foucault: "I can only relate what impressed me: the tension, which resists easy categorization, between the almost serene scientific reserve of the scholar striving for objectivity on the one hand, and, on the other, the political vitality of the vulnerable, subjectively excitable, morally sensitive intellectual. I imagine that Foucault dug through archives with the dogged energy of a detective in hot pursuit of evidence" (p. 103, in Foucault: a Critical Reader). Foucault as Poe-hero.
More substantively:
Foucault discovers Kant as the first philosopher, an archer who aims his arrow at the heart of the most actual features of the present and so opens the discourse of modernity. Kant leaves behind the classical dispute over the exemplary pre-eminence of the ancients and the comparable stature of the moderns. Instead he involves diagnostic thought - which acquires for him a new function - that turbulent process of self-assurance that forms the horizon of a new historical consciousness which has kept modernity in constant motion until the present ... The philosopher turns contemporary; he emerges out of the anonymity of an impersonal endeavour and reveals himself as a flesh-and-blood human being toward whom every clinical investigation of each individual contemporary period that confronts him must be directed. Even in retrospect, the period of enlightenment is still presented by the description it gave itself: it designates the entry into a kind of modernity which sees itself condemned to creating its self-awareness and its norms out of itself. (pp. 105-6)
Habermas goes on to ask: "how does such a singularly affirmative understanding of modern philosophizing, always directed to our own actuality and imprinted in the here-and-now, fit with Foucault’s unyielding criticism of modernity? How can Foucault’s self-understanding as a thinker in the tradition of the enlightenment be compatible with his unmistakable criticism of this very form of knowledge of modernity" (p. 106). Habermas is pushing his familiar crypto-normativity accusation against Foucault. Habermas thinks that Foucault will, in effect, be driven to retract or moderate certain earlier stances.
I take it this is the view that Craig objected to, in very heated terms, in comments to my previous post. I don’t know what I actually think about this Habermas line. But I don’t think it is as flagrantly dumb as Craig seems to think. Habermas is saying that norms must underpin the normative thrust of a certain ethos. So to assume the stance while denying the norms is a ‘performative contradiction’. There’s something to that, potentially. But Foucault can turn the tables in a predictable enough way: he can say his point is that a ‘modernist’ ethos in fact underpins the sorts of Enlightenment norms that Habermas champions, and bears a notably contingent relationship to them. From Peter Gay’s The Enlightenment: an Interpretation, vol. 1:
Philosophe is a French word for an international type, and that is how I shall use it in these pages. To be sure, it is right that the word should be French, for in France the encounter of the Enlightenment with the Establishment was the most dramatic: in eighteenth-century France, abuses were glaring enough to invite the most scathing criticism, while the machinery of repression was inefficient enough to permits critics adequate room for maneuver. France therefore fostered the type that has ever since been taken as the philosophe: the facile, articulate, doctrinaire, sociable, secular man of letters. The French philosophe, being the most belligerent, was the purest specimen (p. 10)
Obviously, Foucault is a facile, articulate, doctrinaire, sociable, secular, French man of letters. And belligerent. Recognizing that he shares an ethos with his philosophical enemies hardly obliges him to concede to them in point of rationalistic doctrine. Foucault scores a point by being the one to note the family resemblance, thereby showing that what was felt to be a necessary linkage - between an anti-establishment personality type and a rationalistic philosophy - is in fact historically contingent. Insert obligatory Nietzsche quote about how the drive is the thing, and the object it settles on is comparatively incidental.
I don’t think this is a terrible deep thought about Foucault’s essay, mind you. (I’m just jotting a few notes while composing a syllabus.) But do you agree that it’s a correct thought?
Comments
John - I think you are quite right: when it comes down to it, the dispute Habermas has with Foucault (not sure if Foucault, however, had a dispute with Habermas) is over the question of Nietzsche. (I was asked at my M.A. defense, “Why doesn’t Habermas like Foucault?” or somesuch. I answered, “Because he takes Nietzsche seriously.” The answer, apparently, wasn’t acceptable - “That doesn’t seem fair to Habermas.” Maybe it’s me, but on my recollection, the lectures in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity essentially say, “I don’t like so and so because they like Nietzsche.")
In a sense, a consistent position on Foucault’s side requires that the foundations of his approach remains an open question: Foucault is a far more consistent anti-foundationalist than Habermas and I think this is the cause of Habermas’ anxiety relative to Foucault - Habermas claims to be an anti-foundationalist, but he isn’t. Foucault, however, recognizes what Habermas refuses to recognize: when it comes down to it, there is no reason to prefer liberation to domination, freedom to slavery, equality to inequality. The preference is necessarily “constructed” and is necessarily “historical” - there is no ground or outside upon which to absolutely defend what amounts, essentially, to a preference. In a sense, Habermas is a poor reader of Kant: he’s descended into madness by trying to untie the antinomies, so to speak.
It is, by the way, the consistent and rigorous defense of anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism that pisses so many people off about folks like Foucault and Derrida. Their consistency reveals uncomfortable truths; truths good liberals don’t want to hear.
Of course, I know some Foucauldians who criticize the late Foucault for being too metaphysical.
(I still strongly recommend, by the way, Castoriadis and Lefort for your course if you’re serious about problematizing “contemporary continental philosophy” on the question of enlightenment - and modernity. Although not a philosopher by any stretch of the imagination, Pierre Clastres can hardly be ignored on this question.)
Although I don’t know much about Foucault (I’ve never really seen Foucault as a philosopher, more of a sociologist), I would say that Deleuze might hold some answers in terms of anti-essentialism.
Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence and ‘horizontal thought’ provides humanity with a chance to escape out of humanity as it were. To Deleuze same as Foucault, certain values like good, bad, feedom, equality, inequality should not be viewed as metaphyisical essential things and only relative within a network. The basic difference is Habermas wants to explain different things as the same but can’t and Deleuze/Foucault want to explain the same thing as different and get away with it quite consistently.
Deleuze is a bit of a weird one as he remains inherently poststructralist like Foucault, yet also he is a realist philosopher and hence a very constructive philosopher. Although he prizes the objective, and sees any subjective ‘human’ aspect of enlightenment as good as a livers subject (Body without Organs) he manages to turn this round with such theories as Double Becoming, Repetition (Nietzsche’s Eternal Return) and the Virtual/Actual/Virtual and present a coherent analysis of matter though time, he is a philosopher of time. In short random stuff happens we can’t control it, yet we sort of can if we look at in retrospect)
I would talk about Zizek and Badiou’s element in this but I’ve spoken too much and its impossible to summarise their work without surpassing stuff.
At the very least Baudelaire had the humility and intelligence to admit Poe’s genius and hyper-rationality: and indeed Master Poe’s quite a bit nearer to the top of Mt. Parnassus than are Foucault or Kant (better a detective, even a literary one, than a metaphysician anyways).
These sort of essays are interesting in how the central arguments of the men in question are generally not considered; one is no longer really doing philosophy in the sense of disputing some specific claim or point, but aestheticizing, positioning; Kant’s arguments (say in regards to the synthetic a priori and his ideas of space and time) are not really the issue; the issue involves arranging him properly in the anthology, in the canon: for academic philosophy, like literature, depends on a type of invented continuum of Great Minds struggling with the great themes. The idea that someone like Kant was wrong about a great deal (like the synthetic a priori) is not even an issue. Kant is a Beethoven bust on the bookshelf, unassailable: and the postmodernists are now reaching bust status as well , regardless if like most german idealism they hardly produced any idea or research which resulted in practical, useful, or measurable consequences.
Craig: But isn’t this supposedly deeply post-enlightment anti-foundationalism also perfectly Humean?
“there is no ground or outside upon which to absolutely defend what amounts, essentially, to a preference” is pretty much an exact paraphrase of Humean meta-ethics.
John,
I’m curious about why this essay is being so segregated from Foucault’s The Order of Things, which is surely the big work that asks the questions about seeming discontinuity between the Enlightenment and modernity—seeming because, as Foucault said in an interview, his real interest is in the fact that the discontinuity of attitude is, in fact, embedded in larger cultural continuities.
In the order of things, the line of change seems to be across the way in which the ‘classic age’ uses representation, while modernity is characterized, among other things, the shattering of that confidence in representation as presenting us with a mirror of the world. Such, at least, is the standard reading.
Chapter 9 is full of famous citations, so I’ll just quote this brief bit that seems to me to encompass Kant and Baudelaire:
“The threshold between Classicism and modernity (though the terms themselves have no importance – let us say between our prehistory and what is still contemporary) had been definiteively crossed when words ceased to intersect with representations and to provide a spontaneous grid for the knowledge of things. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, they rediscovered their ancient, enigmatic density; though not in order to restore the curve of the world which had harboured them during the Renaissance, nor in order to mingle with things in a circular system of signs. Once detached from representation, language has existed, right up to our own day, only in a dispersed way: for philologists, words are like so many objects formed and deposited by history; for those who wish to achieve a formalization, language must strip itself of its concrete content and leave nothing visible but those forms of discourse that are universally valid; if one’s intent is to interpret, then words become a text to be broken down, so as to allow that other menaing hidden in them to emerge and become clearly visible; lastly, language may sometimes arise for its own sake in an act of writing that designates nothing other than itself.”
The listing of the modes of approach to language seems to me to correspond to Baudelaire’s repertoire—the allegories of the Correspondences poem, the texts to be borken down of the salon work, and the modern hero essay—the Baudelarian dandy being composed of an interpretation of the fashion system, rather than being another fashion - and the act of writing that designates nothing other than itself the final bits of the journal. What unites the list is the notion that language is a separate and distinct system - or so I would think.
What is new, in the Enlightenment essay, is the periodization itself—the recognition that there was a distinct Enlightenment. This would seem to call for some explanation—is the Enlightenment underdefined by the grids of representation Foucault has traced? It seems to me that you keep assuming that Foucault has tacitly accepted that there is an Enlightenment like a normal intellectual historian—but his early work shows a distinct disposition to dissolve it into a larger period - the classical age, defined by the episteme of representation.
Thanks Roger, that’s useful. In a previous thread I actually mentioned that I thought it would be useful to compare and contrast “Order of Things”, and I asked for suggestions about bits. (This led to violent objections from Craig, who denounced this plan as pedagogically irresponsible, on the grounds that it might be the cause of Habermas in others.) The bit you suggest sounds useful. I had in mind exactly what you mention: namely, an apparent shift from this early book to this late essay. I am recollecting the shift in more or less the terms you outline; namely, this early story about epistemes seems to have fallen away; so you get no argument from me.
My situation is: I’m teaching a 12 week survey class that isn’t just about Foucault, so I can’t afford to get too bogged down in any one figure. The last time I read “The Order of Things” was about 12 years ago, and I never really knew it very well. My impression is that it’s going to be pretty hard-going for undergraduates. And I’m not personally sure that I find Foucault’s story about ‘when words ceased to intersect with representations’ etc. to be philosophically impressive enough to risk bogging down in it. My recollection is that I found the philosophy of language implausible, and the attempt to do intellectual history in terms of alleged epistemological shifts to be likewise quite speculative and strained. It looked to me like a case of projecting certain intellectual fashions of the 60’s (structuralism) backwards on the 18th century. But I am officially agnostic about “The Order of Things”.
I haven’t been discussing “Order of Things” in these threads for the thoroughly dull reason that I haven’t gotten around to rereading it. In composing a syllabus for a new course, I’m pushing the envelope of my erudition. But it’s there on my desk. Like a brick.
John, I think it is a better book than you do. But in terms of simplification, I think the easy thing to say is: Foucault at one time maintained that, in a period extending from the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century, the rules organizing intellectual activity were such that no “science of man” could emerge - no anthropology, no economics, no linguistics, none of the things that we call social sciences. For that to happen, a fundamental “mutation”, as he calls it, had to occur - something that not only violated the rules, but that shattered and recast them. While this is a sort of stark view of change in intellectual history, in his latter works, Foucault seems to back away from this and return to a more classic notion of periodization.
But does he?
Then I’d take the passage in which Foucault actually talks about the way the human sciences begin in the Order of things as show how it is cast in Kantian terms—it is about the question of possibility, posed in four disciplines (economics, linguistics, and I can’t remember the other two)—and ask whether, in fact, Foucault isn’t again supposing a grid with fundamental rules even in the Enlightenment essay. Thus, Kant’s “transcendental critique” appears to give us a code to the sciences of man.
I don’t think that would be too hard for students who are advanced enough to read the Enlightenment essay. They wouldn’t have to read too much of the Order of Things, either - I think you could find two or three passages in Chapter 9, as I say. And it could organize and focus the idea that both Baudelaire and Kant are situated in a particular intellectual context, thus making their selection as representative figures a little less peculiar.
John - no wonder you are such a fan of comic books: reality and history and events are all very elastic for you! Clearly you still have not yet read my comments and it is abundantly clear that you never intend to do so.
Your gloss on my position is wrong: yes, I think you’re pedagogically irrresponsible because, on the one hand, you are proof-texting and, on the other hand, you are not familiar with the texts you intend to teach. (You’ve demonstrated, in the past, a great deal of ignorance about Derrida and, now, a great deal of ignorance about Foucault. How ever will you manage to teach Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari, Badiou or Althusser? How about Nancy, Lefort and Castoriadis? Let’s not even start with Husserl, Heidegger, or Merleau-Ponty!)
But, of course, I’m getting distracted. Foucault’s point, as Roger points out, is quite clear: certain things had to happen at the level of epistemology to allow “the sciences of man” to emerge. These sciences were impossible prior to these mutations. And, yes, this has everything to do with representation and language.
Perhaps your problem with OT is that you are unfamiliar with the eighteenth century. Have you read much philosophy (or any other texts) written between, say, 1680 and 1740? Compare, if you will, Spinoza and Leibniz to Montesquieu and Hume - for one, Spinoza and Leibniz persist in organizing their epistemologies and ontologies in accordance with the scala natura; Hume and Montesquieu do not. This is the point Foucault is getting at.
Craig, are you joking?
No, John, I’m not. Like many others, I see no point in pursuing any form of discussion with you in the future - you are dishonest and uninterested in discussion and, it seems, the only thing you are able to discuss with any degree of seriousness is comic books (which no doubt colours your perception of everything else: there’s only stereotypes and caricatures in your eyes).
Put another way, I don’t discuss Searle or Austin or Wittgenstein or Rawls - and there is a reason for that; I don’t understand them and I don’t think it is possible for me to understand them. Your relation to continental thought is parallel. And, to be clear, I’m not kidding and I’m not joking; some of us (incidentally, like myself and I’m not a philosopher) take thought seriously. A sure sign that philosophy is dead.
“France therefore fostered the type that has ever since been taken as the philosophe: the facile, articulate, doctrinaire, sociable, secular man of letters”
Indeed, but instead of taking the supremely rational polymaths, scribes, and skeptics such as a Voltaire, or Condorcet, or even Rousseau as models, the contemporary French secular man of letters appears more akin to like a successful thief or pimp who in his spare time manages to imbibe a great deal of Hegel (or worse, Heidegger). It is difficult to conceive of a Voltaire--influenced mostly by Locke and Newton-- lending his support to any sort of Hegelianism, which more or less carries forth the continental scholastic “logic”; nor would Voltaire or the encyclopedists have had much positive to say about the politics of a prussian professor who repeatedly praised the roman emperors, Machiavelli, and Luther--
Postmodernism often appears to be nearly Thomistic in its attempts to preserve metaphysics and avoid making statements about observable behavior: it’s mostly sort of re-iterations and re-combinations of Descartes and the res cogitans ghost, but Ghost’s in re-hab and on like xanax, and doing his damndest to stay away from the bathhouse, if not La rue....
Craig, with all due respect, you are being about six different kinds of silly at once.
First, your mode of intervention in this little discussion space has been to make wild personal accusations against me. I have attempted to deflect those with jokes. You have then accused me of being uninterested in discussion. I think that’s a funny way to behave.
Looking at your site, you seem like a serious academic, so - frankly - your behavior surprises me. On the Habermas point, it sounds like you were pretty lucky to pass your qualifying exam (I know my qualifying committee would have looked askance at abusive polemic, offered in lieu of serious interpretation of a given figure.) When you sobered up, you basically agreed that my reading of the dispute between Habermas and Foucault sounded right. So where is the evidence that I am proof-texting?
Next, exactly where have I “demonstrated a great deal of ignorance of Derrida”? (Please don’t give examples where you just disagree with my interpretation of Derrida. That’s not the same thing.) Why am I now too ignorant of Foucault? (Just because I haven’t read “The Order of Things” for a decade? I’ll bet lots of people haven’t read it for a decade, who still feel qualified to discuss the man.)
And this comment is just ludicrous: “certain things had to happen at the level of epistemology to allow “the sciences of man” to emerge. These sciences were impossible prior to these mutations. And, yes, this has everything to do with representation and language.” Well, of course ‘certain things had to happen’, knowledge-wise, in order for there to be a change in knowledge; and of course it ‘has everything to do with representation and language’. Who thinks changes in knowledge happen except by means of thought and/or talk? It doesn’t even begin to follow Foucault has provided a satisfactory account in “The Order of Things”.
As to the question of whether I have studied the 18th Century & etc. Well, I’ve taught Spinoza, Leibniz and Hume several times each. Read a spot of Montesquieu in my time. I happen to have read A.O. Lovejoy on the Great Chain of Being several times. That’s sort of old-fashioned stuff, but it pretty much excludes me being insensitive to attitudes towards the Great Chain of Being. I just finished an 800-page history of the Enlightenment (Peter Gay) so I would have a bit of fresh history under my ribs going into the current teaching project.
Rather than arguing against me, Craig, when you think you disagree with me, you simply accuse me of not having read things. This isn’t really a very mature way to engage, intellectually. I guess at a rhetorical level, it might work as a ‘so, are you still being your wife’ strategy. Make me say: but I HAVE read Hume. (As though everyone doesn’t read Hume in graduate school, at the very least. Philosophers DO read this philosophy stuff, you know.)
And all this because I say I’m agnostic about “The Order of Things”, having not read it for a decade? You infer that I could only have vaguely critical memories of it if I haven’t actually studied the 18th Century myself? Where’s the sense in that? This is completely intellectually absurd.
In short, you accuse me without evidence. You attack Habermas with crude polemic. You defend Foucault with irrelevant trivialities. I would say you should get your own house in order before accusing other people of taking a comic book approach to philosophy.
Beating your wife, that is. (Are you still being your wife? would be a more metaphysical, monistic strategy. Spinoza would have approved.)
Suppose a philosopher prof with a known affinity for the continentals was teaching a survery of contemporary analytic thought and wrote this of her preparations for the course:
My situation is: I’m teaching a 12 week survey class that isn’t just about Kripke, so I can’t afford to get too bogged down in any one figure. The last time I read “Naming and Necessity” was about 12 years ago, and I never really knew it very well. My impression is that it’s going to be pretty hard-going for undergraduates. And I’m not personally sure that I find Kripke’s problem with mind/body monism to be philosophically impressive enough to risk bogging down in it.
What are the odds the analytic faithful would be on her like stink on shit?
Now maybe I’m being naïve and plenty of faculty teach stuff they haven’t read since their graduate days and never had a good handle on even then. But that doesn’t justify it either.
What are the odds the analytic faithful would be on her like stink on shit?
Pretty damn low, I think. Maybe this is a significant sociological difference and maybe it isn’t, but I’m pretty sure that the most vigorous reaction that the professor could expect is a defense of the significance of the mind-body problem and a sales pitch for the pedagogical value of “Naming and Necessity.” Which is not to say that everyone would defend its pedagogical value.
Craig is absolutely right. You simply aren’t worth engaging with, John. That your familiar arrogance and lack of professionalism evidenced by these Foucault posts may be widespread does nothing to excuse it.
Hmmmm, my crime is supposed to be that I haven’t read “The Order of Things” for a decade - although I do still obviously know it well enough to correct Craig when he offers an erroneously trivial defense of Foucault. I am not sure whether I want to teach it in my survey class. But I want to consider the option, since it seems like a work I maybe should teach along with “What is Enlightenment?”. (I was the one who raised this possibiity. Craig was the one who objected to the proposed comparison/contrast of early/late Foucault.) My recollection is that it is a difficult work, as well as long. So I solicit suggestions from readers as to which sections would be readily extractable for my purposes. I can - and will - figure this out for myself, if necessary. But one thing that’s nice about blogs is that readers sometimes have good suggestions, as indeed turned out to be the case in this case.
This is supposed to demonstrate professional irresponsibility?
Honestly, if you can’t find anything to object to in what I’ve written, just say so.
It absolutely demonstrates professional irresponsibility. It’s nothing less than the Lay/Skilling model of corporate governance translated to humanities scholarship: like you, they would figure out the actual doings of Andrew Fastow, the energy traders, et cetera, if necessary.
Your students deserve better than this.
Matt and Craig: Then don’t engage. We would all be happier. This is a rare instance of what economists call a Pareto optimal outcome.
Hmmm, so I take it you can’t find anything specifically objectionable in what I have said or in what I intend to teach, et alia. (Otherwise you would have said so, instead of reaching in frustration for wild, abusive analogies.)
Look, I’m pretty sure we’ve gotten to the point where my critics aren’t even fooling themselves any more. But let me just say for the record: we all know what it’s like to prepare a new syllabus for a new course. You are pulling together stuff you know very well, and rereading stuff you sort of know, but have never taught; and you are reading a few things for the first time. And you are consulting other people for advice, shuffling papers in a rapid manner and carrying stuff to the library to be put on reserve. Attempts to pantomime shock and horror and the mere thought that I am (gasp!) teaching a new course - with all that entails - will be met with good-natured mockery from me. (Honestly, who do you think you are fooling? Most of the people who read this blog are academics.)
et alia, I hate to be the token pragmatist here, but seriously, there’s always a conflict between your research and what you’re expected to teach. For instance, my dissertation will confront such figures as S.W. Mitchell, Winston Churchill (v. American) and T. Dixon ... but I’ll be expected to teach Twain, Melville, &c. I’m sure my students would be better served by having a Twain or Melville scholar teach the class, but really, given the knowledge I have, if I spend a few weeks surveying the critical landscape, I can lean on my pedagogical skills and do a damn fine job teaching Twain and Melville to undergraduates.
I seriously think that you’re applying standards which apply to graduate seminars to undergraduate surveys. Were I to write something to the effect of “Can some of you Melville scholars make sure that my general introduction to Melville isn’t insane?” no one would think the less of me. I would’ve spent a couple weeks re-familiarizing myself with criticism I haven’t read in a while, but really, if I reproduced a crucial debate in the field--i.e. like the distinction between early and late Foucault--would you really call me professionally irresponible? I don’t think so.
In other words, I think you’re letting local commitments blind you to the necessity of teaching surveys. I’m not defending John’s reading of Foucault per se, but I’m damn sure defending his approach here:
He asked for advice to assuage the insecurity teaching any survey class necessarily engenders. I really think you, Matt and Craig are holding John to unreasonable standards given the necessities of the profession. Sure, it’d be 100 percent better if we were all intellectually untainted, but sadly, that’s not the world working academics live in.
X-commented with John, who says what I said in about half the words.
re: Holbo at 9:03
Well, excuse me, but as far as I can see, John, you haven’t corrected Craig on anything. You *have* repeatedly misrepresented his comments and you *have* repeatedly refused to clarify when he asked you to. His suggestions meanwhile, in the thread in question, seemed, to me, accurate, patient and generous to a fault.
As for your responses, well. Perhaps the less said the better at this point.
By the way, are you teaching “Derrida on the Enlightenment" as well, I wonder.
nb. Lest the obvious still require stating: of course teachers are sometimes pushed (or choose to push) outside their comfort zones. And of course there is a popularly, generally identifiable thread relating to “the enlightenment” running through continental thought. I’m sure there are others, but when it comes to invocations of the obvious one simply has to be forgiven for not always thinking of everything in advance (and pretty soon it spirals into a realm of blogelativity, as they say, anyway).
Sorry, I’ve responded to the proof-texting thing. Craig simply misunderstood one comment I left to that initial thread. He assumed that I was interested in assigning early Foucault, to counter-balance late Foucault ONLY because I wanted to tell some Habermasian story he disapproves of. In fact I am not a Habermasian and have no intention of pushing that particular story - although I do intend to read some Habermas. So that’s that. End of proof-texting worry. This really shouldn’t be necessary but [holds hand over tell-tale heart]: I promise that the idea of teaching both early and late Foucault was only to raise the issue of a shift in his thought, not to presuppose some view about the shift that Craig thinks is wrong.
OK, I just had my moment of clarity. I’ve clearly succeeded in deeply annoying someone - a person somewhere in this world, about whom I know next to nothing except that his name is, apparently, ‘Craig’. Is this hard-won result worth the considerable time and effort it must have taken me to pen all those comments he painstakingly quotes and links? Clearly not.
But he insulted me first!
Well, yes, that’s the way it seemed to me, too. But that’s hardly to the point. If I were as grown up as I pretend to be, I wouldn’t allow myself to get dragged into these things. So I should pretend harder. In fact, what the hell: I apologize to Craig. Sorry for causing you all that grief, Craig. Sorry for my behavior in these threads. I should know better.
Ignoring Keith M. of Sorrow for the moment, I want to push John’s point about course-building one step further:
I’ve sometimes deliberately chosen texts I’ve only a vague knowledge of or haven’t read in years. Why? Not because I’m out to proof-text anyone, but because I want to engage in a serious re-evaluation of a given work in the context of the course. The thing that Matt, Craig and et alia ignore is that there’s no necessity to that decision--and even if there is, texts don’t always conform to your expectations and/or memories of them. I’ve had such decisions throw me for a loop when works confound my expectations...and that’s a good thing. For all you know, John could’ve re-read The Order of Things, realized that his distant memories of it didn’t quite conform to his current thinking about it, and had to rethink his approach to compensate. That’s just as likely to have happened as the alternative, in my experience.
There is some comfort in the thought that, no matter how bad the thread gets, the Troll of Sorrow can always make it worse. (That is his gift, and his burden. Until you delete him.)
How do you always know that it’s the Troll of Sorrow? After experience, I can sometimes tell, but I had no idea that Keith M. was he.
Scott, just to be clear. My point was that obviously Craig and Matt and et. alia don’t really believe I am proof-texting. They’ve probably all had the experience of designing a course themselves. Which means it is absurd to get dragged into these debates. And, by the same token, obviously Craig knows perfectly well that ‘notions of Enlightenment’ is a reasonable theme for a module on continental philosophy, so it is absurd for me to respond to an absurd allegation by making absurd counter-allegations, as though two wrongs make a right. I hereby resolve to stop debating past the point where there is actually a debate going on.
As to the ToS. Every comment by the troll gives you that special ‘he’s got two comments in him, and he just wrote the third’ feeling. That’s how you know it’s him.
Walt, because he’s been saying the same thing, day in and day out, for the better part of two years. Minor variations crop up. For example, in this thread, he championed the Foucault of Discipline and Punish—or, in keeping with his faux-hipster variations, “Dis. and Punish"—because it contains gestures towards the radical empiricism he so desperately espouses.
Plus, he keeps using the say URL, email and IP addresses, sometimes even engaging in debates with himself. I’m almost surprised Keith M. and Peter Sanderson didn’t start criticizing each other before agreeing that each thought the other much smarter than any of us Valve or Long Sunday people. It’s been known to happen. How he can sleep at night knowing we know he does this, I don’t know.
My point was that obviously Craig and Matt and et. alia don’t really believe I am proof-texting.
I think you’re probably better off taking them literally at their word, if you want to understand what just happened.
Let me offer two quasi-sociological hypotheses about how people of good will could be mutually insulted by the exchange.
1) The charge against you was not just ‘proof-texting’ (really, where’s the crime in that--people do it every Sunday) but taking an insufficiently scholarly attitude towards The Order of Things and the surrounding literature. In particular, it pissed Craig off that you didn’t show any inclination to read Castoriadis or Lefort. I think that a lot of what gets produced by Continental philosophers who aren’t of the first rank is commentary on philosophers of the first rank. It counts as malpractice among Continentals to teach a material on a Continental figure without knowing the commentary on that figure in a way that it doesn’t count as malpractice to teach an work by an analytic figure without knowing the secondary literature on that figure.
2) Craig is plainly not the product of a philosophy program. Otherwise he you wouldn’t have written, “Perhaps your problem with OT is that you are unfamiliar with the eighteenth century. Have you read much philosophy (or any other texts) written between, say, 1680 and 1740?” You took the question as an insult, since you can’t get a Ph.D. in philosophy without reading Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume any more than you can get a Ph.D. in French without being able to read French. I’m sure that he was sincere. Continental philosophers think that analytic philosophers don’t know anything about history. Moreover, continental philosophers tend to read historical figures through the eyes of the first-rate continental philosophers in a way that’s alien to more analytic historians of philosophy.