There are few things which sorcerers share, indeed this may even be central to the very practice of sorcery itself. To this extent sorcery forms, almost par excellence, an example of the ‘minoritarian’. This concept, derived from Deleuze and Guattari, names a practice of deviation from a standard. It is distinguished from the merely minor, which is akin to a minority practice, by being instead the process of ‘becoming-minor’. Given a standard (‘I should get a paying job to support myself‘) there will be a majority that incarnate this standard and a minority who do not. The minoritarian, however, is neither the major nor the minor but the resistance to the fixation of any standard, major or minor. The minoritarian resists encapsulation and stasis and not out of a voluntaristic decision but precisely as an ‘impulse’ which is active and dominating, if not actually dominant. It is not that the minoritarian is a response to a pre-existing major position but rather it is a necessary companion or contamination of any major position. The minor might be a reaction to a major and capable of being understood only in terms of the major but the minoritarian is a necessary ‘coming along with’. It comes along with any major position. It is, in this sense, an unconscious of forces. If the major is the name we give to the coalescence of forces in a particular configuration, a stabilised set of values and norms, then the minoritarian is that set of forces which swirl on the edges and underneath the central major current. Sorcery, in this sense, is minoritarian – it has swirled its way through centuries and millenia of human practice and will no doubt continue to do so. Nothing, after all, speaks to its demise and everything to its continual existence. Read the rest of this entry »
The space of blogging is a particular instance of the space of writing and the space of philosophical blogging is itself a particular instance of the space of writing that intersects with a more general ‘space of reasons’. This last is the name given by Wilfrid Sellars to the particular realm of justificatory discourse, although it is sometimes taken to refer more broadly to the realm of any discourse whatsoever. For Sellars, ‘to know something’ is not a general fact which can be empirically tested somehow by checking a mental or neurological state of the entity claiming to know, it is rather to to identify an object that operates inside a particular ‘game of giving and asking for reasons’. This implies that if we characterise something as a knowledge claim then we are entitled to ask for reasons for the claim – how and why do you know this? That we’re entitled to ask for reasons doesn’t imply that we have to. We may well – and commonly do – accept a large number of claims that we take to be knowledge claims on the basis of a kind of trust, a default acceptance that operates until we are prompted to challenge the claim.
Some people want to extend the space of reasons to be co-extensive with the space of discourse itself. This is the move made in Kukla and Lance’s book, ‘ “Yo!” and “Lo!”: the pragmatic topography of the space of reasons’ (Harvard, 2009). Robert Brandom defines the space of reasons as a space of ‘inferential relations’, in which each participant occupies a slightly different perspective because of their variable observational position but is able nonetheless to engage with others, governed by ‘deontological score-keeping’. Both of these develop Sellars initial idea in interesting directions but the point of the original distinction was to distinguish a space of reasons from a space of causality, thereby enabling a kind of double-articulation theory which prevented radical reductionism. No longer would it be necessary or possible to reduce propositional, conceptual or intentional objects to physical, empirical or material objects. The space of reasons aimed to guarantee an autonomy to propositional, conceptual or intentional objects. These objects would be found in the form of claims of one sort of another.
If the space of discourse is co-extensive with the space of reasons then any mode of discourse is open to a call for justification. The nature of the justification, however, would still depend largely on the nature of the object. If the object is a knowledge claim then it calls for reasons but there is an ambiguity here. Some objects of discourse might be thought of as expressions of knowledge, others as expressions of an absence of knowledge. The latter would, it seems, no longer be subject to the call for justificatory reasons. If the expression ‘I don’t understand’ were responded to with the question, ‘well why not?’ then the ‘justification’ is likely to be entirely circular – ‘because I don’t’. Pedagogically these type of cases call for careful negotiation – a good teacher who is faced with a pupil who simply says ‘I don’t understand’ has a duty, owing to the social role they’re engaged in, to try and work out why there is an absence of understanding. Usually this might involve taking the pupil back to a position they’re happy with and feel they do understand and then slowly working forward again to find the gap or breach in the discursive network. Nothing, however, guarantees that this strategy is capable of success. In principle some things are simply not available to be understood by some understanders. To think otherwise would be to suggest that a complete coincidence of position can occur between two perspectives, which would be absurd since this would render the very ‘perspectival’ nature that prompts dialogue to be non-existent. Put another way, there is only a need to ask for reasons if there is a condition of difference between the claimant and the respondent and a ‘pure co-understanding’ by a respondent of the claimant would render communication and discourse no longer necessary.
The space of blogging offers a curious example of this necessary failure of pure understanding which renders philosophical activity almost redundant if such activity is taken to involve the production of agreement, a kind of commonality akin to pure co-understanding. Occasionally philosophical bloggers produce arguments that are ‘stand-alone’ objects but more commonly they produce arguments in the more mundane sense of a disagreement. Here, in the disagreeable blog, the argument is a series of claims, with justifications, as to why X is wrong, bad, weak, incorrect or somehow or other in error, with a general view to reduce the value of the opponent in what presents itself as a zero-sum game, a trial of strength. There are occasionally ‘argument objects’ produced but these respond not to any specific opponent but rather to the demands of reason more generally. It is more common to find these argument objects within philosophical books, not least because of the mitigation of ‘call-response’ dynamics that are the condition of the space of blogging. It is, perhaps, for this reason that in general philosophical discussion in blogs is weak, limited and riven by a kind of personal politics that is amusing to watch but perhaps exhausting and unproductive to participate in. Philosophy and in particular the production of argument objects benefits less from discussion than might originally be thought. Perhaps this is why Deleuze seems to touch on something important when he decries the value of arguments in general – it is not that he doesn’t want to argue with you, rather that he wants to respond more directly to the demands of reason.
As a pedagogic device for working on NVC the suggestion I made to my students is that a series of ‘themes’ are identified which then provide a backbone for ‘indexing’ some of the content with a view to building up a ground for exegetical work. The idea would be to take each theme – or at least a selection of them – and find relevant passages within the text in order to then have a focused selection from the text to think about. Obviously these themes interlock but the need to ‘ignore’ some things to focus on others is a methodological tool, enabling us to gain some focus before perhaps expanding again. (This is not, by any means, a comprehensive list of the themes that might be extracted from NVC, nor even a list of the themes which might be thought to be the ‘most central’ or ‘most obvious’. It arises from a particular class and discussion and as such is located in that context is intended to be added to and improved through discussion). Read the rest of this entry »
If one of the first impressions on reading NVC is that something like a ‘psycho-analysis’ is being done then it is worth asking why this impression occurs and what relation to Freud exists. That it should be, in a sense, relatively uncontroversial to suggest NVC ‘reads like’ a psycho-analytic text comes from the emphasis of the biological, biographical and historical interpretation of ‘forces at work’ in Nietzsche, an emphasis on these bio-facts rather than on the texts that resulted. The texts are to be read as expressions of something underneath, something which we might encounter a little like we encounter the unconscious. Texts become symptoms to interpret, something with which to diagnose the ‘real’ or ‘important’ forces that are the ‘truth’ of Nietzsche’s work.
This, however, brings us close to one of the first difficulties. If we take a Freudian psycho-analytic interpretation to occur, as it were, from ‘outside’ the subject then close attention to Klossowski would suggest that the exact opposite is the practice of NVC. For example, in psycho-analytic practice / interpretation the relation of the analyst / interpreter to the analysand / interpreted is crucially important. The establishment of transference, the encounter with an ‘Other’ and the centrality of what i would call the ‘relation as revealing’ suggests a prime importance is given to a kind of sociality. We might say that for psychoanalysis, it is in our ‘being-with’ (mitsein) we find our being. The analyst / interpreter justifies their position on the basis that the addition of their position is necessary to establish this being-with which is a precondition of finding the truth of the analysand /interpreted. This sociality, this being-with, however, is a being-with of subjects and subjects are constituted as language speaking, meaning using beings. Being-with reveals being because it is a kind of ‘being with meaningful beings’. If this seems obscure then let me put it in more colloquial terms.
Take being-with to be ‘sociality’. The claim is something like ‘the way we are with others reveals the way we are’. Thus sociality is just this ‘being with others’ but it is in this ‘others’ that the presupposition can slip through, the metaphysical contraband. To see this think of the situation in which the others are animals, not ‘humans’. The distinction is important because it is as meaning using beings that we place ‘humans’ in a privileged and unthought position of social pre-eminence. Why is it, for example, that the dog you talk to or the cat you confess to cannot play the role of an analyst / interpreter? It is because they cannot offer this ‘mirror of meaning’, they cannot play the role of an analyst because they cannot talk. It is not what an analyst says, of course but the fact that they could say which enables them to play the role they do. It is not that the analysand talks which makes analysis the ‘talking cure’ but rather that the analysand talks to someone who can hear, by which we mean someone who can also talk (and talk back).
How, then, does NVC differ from psychoanalysis?
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(Notes primarily for the use of my 3rd year undergrad students on the Nietzsche and Modern European Philosophy course, terms 2 and 3, in which we’re studying Klossowski’s ‘Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle’ and Deleuze’s ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’ and exploring the problematic of post-structuralism. Page references to the Continuum impacts edition of NVC).
The intention here is to follow a ‘reading strategy’ in which we acknowledge that the style of thinking that occurs within NVC (and perhaps more widely within post-structuralist thinkers) is that of a weave or tapestry, in which words and concepts are introduced without explicit definition and these words are then employed (used) within a line of thought. The meaning of the terms within the text is to be produced through the work of the text, such that the book will constitute its own context within which key terms can be thought through rather than simply argued about. This is not to say that argument is irrelevant, not at all, but rather to emphasise something like a principle of ‘meaning is use’ that underlies much of NVC. Structuralism itself made use of ‘binaries’ in order to begin its analysis with structures and not elements (employed/employer: man/woman: expert/amateur etc), for the simple methodological fact that a single term would be an element and if we are to begin with structures then this must mean, in terms of language and conceptualisation, beginning from relations between words or concepts (what for ease I will simply refer to as ‘terms’). Post-structuralism, then, will continue its emphasis on structures, and as such will continue to find much of interest in the technique of using binaries or pairings of terms although it will not want to presuppose a final and definite order that can be produced from such an analysis. Our reading strategy, then, works on the basis of trying to identify interesting ‘key-words’ that we then try to understand conceptually by examining their oppositional terms. Concretely this begins from finding something that we can identify as a claim and then working backwards and forwards within the immediate context in which the claim is made to try and clarify the relations at work in a particular space of the text. These ‘partial analyses’ will then enable us to begin to reconstruct something like a ‘line of thought or argument’ that is made by the text (or perhaps, better, one of many lines of argument that will be made by the text).
Beginning at the bottom of page 8 and going onto page 9, we find some of the central questions within the first chapter, ‘The combat against culture’, sitting at the head of a short (3 paragraphs) line of argument. Here, as part of that partial analysis just mentioned, I want to pick out four ‘key-words’: reciprocity, idiosyncracy, culture and objectivation.
I’ve been watching some of the YouTube videos posted by the TED group, including one presentation by Murray Gell-Man (he of The quark and the jaguar). Most of the presentations at TED seem short and sweet, not a lot of technical detail but a good – if broad – explanation of an interesting concept enabling people to gain something like a ‘lay of the land’ within intellectual life.
One of the things Gell-Man was saying in his presentation which really struck home, however, was the role of accidents. “The history of the universe is … co-determined by the basic law and an unimaginably long sequence of accidents (outcomes of chance events)” (Time: 4.59). He re-emphasises this point at various places during the presentation, that accidents are crucial co-determinants of reality together with any basic law that exists.
For a long time I’ve been fascinated by a short and simple point made by Deleuze. “It will be said that the essence is by nature the most important thing. This however, is precisely what is at issue: whether the notions of importance and non-importance are not precisely notions which concern events or accidents, and are much more ‘important’ within accidents than the crude opposition between essence and accident itself.” (DR, P189, Athlone edition)
In a post on Marx’s dialectical method and Deleuze, Steven Shaviro makes the interesting claim that it is Deleuze’s pluralism that is transcendental. It is the theory of relations that Deleuze has which underpins his pluralism and this theory of relations, presumably, would be the place to look for a transcendental structure in the sense of a ‘condition of possibility’-type argument (Shaviro makes it explicit he’s referring to a Kantian transcendental when talking of Deleuze’s ‘transcendental pluralism). Indeed this is plainly the case for Shaviro, since the article begins from the differences and similarities between dialectics and Deleuzian thought in terms of their theory of relations. He suggests a strong commonality around this area of theory of relations, arguing that:
"There are definite commonalities. (1) Both the Hegelian/dialectical language of negativity, and the James/Bergson/Deleuze language of virtuality, insist that all those things that are omitted by the positivist cataloguing of atomistic facts are altogether real. (2) Both locate this reality by asserting that the relations between things are as real as the things themselves, and that ‘things’ don’t exist first, but only come to be through their multiple relations. (3) Both construct materialist (rather than idealist) accounts of these relations, of how they constitute the real, and of how they continually change (over time) the nature of what is real. (4) Both offer similar critiques of the tradition of bourgeois thought that leads from Descartes through the British empiricists and on to 20th century scientism and post-positivism. (numbers in brackets inserted)"
