One of the fundamental difficulties - perhaps the fundamental difficulty - confronting the human sciences today is undoubtedly that of interpretation. From whence and how can a thinker understand a text, an event, an object, or a discourse? From whence and how can that understanding be communicated? What assumptions are required to make sense of that interpretation? The splits that we see at work between so-called modernists and postmodernists, between Lacanians and Deleuzians, between all manner of methodological beasts, are in large part not splits caused by differences in reading for meaning, but rather differences in the methods by which interpretation and the subsequent production of meaning is possible. In other words, the theoretical assumptions that inform the interpretation determine the possibilities and final form that any interpretation will take.
I am, of course, not saying anything new. Gadamer called it "historically effected consciousness" (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein), the idea that one's ability to interpret is always already bound up with one's experience of language, wherein experience is structured by the conditions in and through which one experiences their being-in-the-world. For academics (broadly construed), trained in certain methodological proclivities, these theoretical frames shape the experience of a critical object, just as a reader's life experiences will shape their appreciation and understanding of a text. Gadamer is expanding on Heidegger's fundamental concern with the primacy of language, the so-called "house of Being," trying to explain the ways in which language structures experience and interpretation before experience and interpretation can take place. Gadamer even spends the closing chapters of Truth and Method trying to explain how verbal and written languages implicate differences in interpretive possibilities and thus help to explain the essence of hermeneutics, just as Heidegger spent his closing years lecturing on the dangerous differences between technological and poetic language.
This attention to the mediated structure of language is instructive, and at least hints at the importance that such mediations have in determining our historically effected consciousness, and thus their importance in determining the possibilities of interpretation. We know this. We know that television is different from cinema is different from a novel is different from a conversation. But the nature of this difference, and the role that it should play in shaping critical possibilities and theoretical frameworks remains murky.
It remains murky because, methods and perspectives and concepts being what they are, and the academic game of competitive publishing and productivity being what it is, a genetic privilege asserts itself in the act of interpretation, one that largely bypasses the hermeneutical concern about the discursive part and the mediated whole. Mostly for polemical reasons, I want to take as a case study the critical lens of psychoanalysis, wherein certain psychoanalytic frames (desire, the Real, the symptom, etc.) come to explain the meaning and import of whatever discourse or event is under consideration. The genetic privilege, just to make this obvious, comes from believing that, underlying the significance and/or formation of a particular discourse, there exists some psychic structure that can be explained by psychoanalysis. So an architectural discourse about Huey Long can be explained by recourse to hysteria, and the meaning of and discursive deployment of 9-11 can be explained by recourse to desire.* These things come to mean, the privilege tells us, because of concepts and critical tools provided to us through the language of pyschoanalysis, or put another way, psychoanalysis helps us to make sense of the world by explaining the structures that animate it.
But what if there are no underlying psychic structures? Or what if psychoanalysis got them wrong? Those are generic and oft-asked questions, and I have little interest in exploring them here, other than to say that these two question indict the validity of psychoanalysis independently of its genetic privilege, which is to say that they leave the question of interpetation's epigenesis untouched, and instead simply defer or defuse a particular expository frame. But what if we instead reversed the genetic privilege, and entertained the belief that psychoanalysis does not explain discourse or meaning or representation, but rather that these things explain psychoanalysis? More specifically, what if the Lacanian symbolic is the constitutive force of psychoanalysis rather than its taxonomic "discovery?" What if the theoretical frame that purports to explain the symptom is in actuality a symptom itself, generated by the problem of the sign and of representation, rather than the means by which the sign and representation are to be understood?
I think this reversal is justified for two reasons. First, according a genetic privilege to the psychoanalytic apparatus all too often means skating around critical difficulties and rhetorical nuance, in that psychoanalysis ends up short-circuiting the need to account for invention and/or persuasion, since the deep structures of the psyche explain the results. Retroactively, of course. Jodi's recent post on 9-11, which I linked to above, is a case-in-point. She deploys "desire" to understand how and why 9-11 means what it means, rather than working through the complex relation between the forces that control and produce mainstream televisual news, the importance of images, the specific discourse of those in Congress and the White House (and the specific discourses of those who questioned these official-esque narratives). Had the structures that disseminate the various attempts to assign meaning to 9-11 been different, the results might have been different, at least theoretically. And we know this difference is possible precisely because there was a divergence within discourses; and even if one set of meanings achieves hegemonic status, the mere existence of alternative meanings implies that desire, rather than being universal, is something that might be shaped at least as much as it shapes (if not more). Indeed, some of this polysemy remains, which is why 9-11 often functions sans explicit expressions of its meaning; like any good ideograph, different individuals will supply different valences and signifieds. My point here is not that certain tropes or topoi aren't more persuasive than others, my point is rather that the retroactive deployment of "desire" as the means by which to explain variations in persuasive appeal do little more than dress up what is contingent as being what is necessary. Theoretical reification, in other words.
This isn't Jodi's fault, and it's silly to expect too much from a blog post. Indeed, one of the great things about the academic blogosphere, and Long Sunday in particular, is that it is an ongoing conversation, a chance to test ideas, to react, and to grow. And certainly this post/reaction is meant in that spirit, and I am sure there's something I've done and got wrong here. But at the same time, the casual deployment of a perspective, of a theoretical matrix, as a means by which to make sense of an event does little without an underlying sense of the specific conditions of emergence and possibility that make that event or discourse significant enough to be an object of critique. This is a hypothesis that fails not because it's wrong in its conclusions but rather because the method retains a fundamental insufficiency - its own desire to seek explanation without specific interpretive work, or more accurately, to let historical actuality do the interpetive work for it.
I am not trying to discount psychoanalysis. On the contrary, I find the general body of work that falls under the rubric of "psychoanalysis" to be utterly fascinating and an endless source of insight. But I find this true only under those conditions in which it claims no genetic purchase. This, then, is my second justification, which we might jovially call "killing psychoanalysis in order to save it." As a symptom of particular cultural, political, and philosophical conditions, and as a means by which to question certain metaphysical assumptions (that have in turn often asserted their own genetic privilege - intentionality being the most obvious example), psychoanalysis is invaluable. But it is not expository.
So what might it be a symptom of? This is the question that returns us, almost full circle, to Gadamer. Surely it cannot be merely a coincidence that in a period of a century and a half, we have a litany of new philosophical insight into the nature of the sign: Nietzsche's mobile armies of metaphors, Heidegger's intense focus on representation and techne, Gadamer's fixation on the hermeneutic importance of written vs. verbal forms of language, Derrida's lengthy work on the sign (that ill-named thing), Lacan's splitting of the subject in accordance with the splitting of the signifier, Carl Schmitt's lexical repositioning of the political, and so on. What can account for a philosophical world that, starting with the latter half of the 19th century, suddently turns its attention to the problem of the sign? The Western world had seen roughly two and a half millennia of alphabetic thought, and yet only at the end did this alphabetic device, this "signifier," suddenly seem to provide such fertile ground from which rethink metaphysics, ontology, subjectivity, and so on. [Plato had his day and his debt to variations in media ecology to be sure, but his revolution pales in comparison.]
I am reminded of the Emporer in Return of the Jedi, frying Luke with his awesome Sith lightning blasts, saying "Only now, at the end, do you understand." The onset of the lingusitic turn coincides with the diffusion and subsequent death of the hegemony of the sign. Telegraphy started in the 1850s; radio, grammophone, and film revolutionized the early 1900s; and starting with the latter half of the 20th century, television and the Internet transformed and redefined the nature of media. These new media revealed the problems of the sign in a way that no mere philosophy could have ever done (and Hegel tried, to be sure), and without ever making these problems explicit. These new media devices produced a their own "historically effected consciousness," and with them new inventional possibilities. They killed the sign, like video killing the radio star. And so the wave of sign-based thought, of which psychoanalysis is an obvious symptom, should make perfect sense. The sign was dead, or at least dying, which is always the moment of obituary and eulogy. In that moment of passing, we neither condemn nor ignore the dead; rather, we celebrate and explain the meaning of their life. And so, just like family ancestors, the sign continues to haunt us through much of our theorizing, undead, governing our critical/interpretive devices (it's no coincidence that Freud and Heidegger, to cite two examples, spend so much time simultaneously addressing the spectral nature of the "uncanny").
The value in the reversal or perspective I am sketching here, which treats the explanation of language as the effect of changes in the nature of language proper, and thus awards genetic privilege to the form-content of language itself, is that it can explain a host of discourses through their common strictures, and do so precisely where psychoanalysis finds its most intense expository difficulty: the process of invention. The alternative - the genetic privileging of psychoanalysis - condemns what is most interesting in psychoanalysis to the burden of cause, in effect fetishizing the symptom and calling it insight.
[Well, it's a theory, at least.]
*Josh used to also have a page that hosted the full paper in question, the request for revisions, a show of the changes he had made, etc, though I think the link to it is now broken or missing after the site change. If he puts that back up at some point, I'll link to it.
Comments (14)
Ken, a provocative post indeed, and if I might evoke the patron saint of workin' it, Missy MIsdemeanor Elliott: "Is it worth it? let me work it i put ma thing down flip it and reverse it. Flip it and reverse it [backwards now]." You recognize, of course, there are no "underlying" structures in the sense of some sort of modernist "interiority," but rather, that the structures are--like the unconscious--"out there" -- retrojected too, as you note. Or at least this is where the Lacanospeakers seem to have placed psychical structures. Thinking topographically, at least, I'm not so sure your symptomology is a break here; that is, flipping it down and reversing it doesn't escape this Gadamerian horizon of mediation (there are no, as it were, "radical" breaks).
Heh, I gots to get ready for the last class of the session and must jet, but: I really don't find your polemics all that objectionable. What's unfortunate is that the audience for this discussion is--in "our" field--quite small. The "genetic privilege" consequently becomes the Trojan Horse for many, many years until the structuralist horses have had their play, and then and only then would one be able to use Gadamer to push through some flipping and reversals without having it immediately yoked to Leffian close textual readings.
For the bystander, I'm speaking in the often tiresome argot of Communication Studies. Ken is right to evoke the politics of publishing as the major stubling block to thinking theory through; one must blunt and blunt until all "nuance" goes the way of the doo-doo. Perhaps this is merely a fantasy of agonism (e.g., one must fight and fight and fight to have the "right" to speak on this or that), but if so . . well, it's not "mere."
Regardless: save this post! It's an excellent outline for a forum-type essay on psychobabble or something (as someone once mentioned for Philosophy and Rhetoric).
Finally, yeah, the chronicle of the Huey paper was moved to a new server. Typepad prevents embedded URI's, so hopefully this will print: http://www.joshiejuice.com/psycho_publish/psycho_publishing.html
Thanks for the bait! Off to teach . . . .
Posted by slewfoot | July 6, 2006 9:14 AM
Posted on July 6, 2006 09:14
Very fascinating post Dr. Rufo! Lacanian critique notwithstanding, it seems to me that your attempt to invert hermeneutics with a meta-hermeneutic (or praxis oriented) approach is similar to articulation theory, espoused by Greene, Grossberg, and Biesecker. Is not the premise behind Deleuze and other proponents of articulation theory that any hermeneutic approach negates the polysemic character of praxis by attempting to formalize a text within a particular code, which in effect reifies the latent ideologies which, paradoxically, the hermeneutic lens is attempting to unveil?
To that end, I find Greene's new materialism paradoxical in this sense because to me materialism IS a hermeneutic approach, one that inevitably relies on a distinction between form/content. Although it is clear that new materialism wants to collapse the distinction between form and content ( or base and superstructure) it seems like by claiming the mantle of materialism, a philosophy which obviously started as a hermeneutic lens, new materialism reifies the ontological divide between idealism and materialism.
I think you are pointing out an important paradox about Lacan which may help to demarcate whether he is truly a structuralist or poststructuralist.
And I agree with Dr. Gunn about the lack of theory in our discipline it really is a shame that theory is so marginalized. It all comes down to grants a think.
Posted by Josh Hanan | July 6, 2006 1:54 PM
Posted on July 6, 2006 13:54
Wow, a tale of two Joshes.
I'm not sure I'm trying to invert hermeneutics as much as I'm just noting that some of its basic vocabulary is fairly useful in trying to understand the critical enterprise in the academy. Truth and Method is written pretty much for this reason; it's not a handbook for hermeneutics, despite its reputation as being such, it's an attempt to explain what happens whenever interpretation takes place, by necessity. It's not always right, and many of the insights that Gadamer thinks are descriptive are in fact normative judgments on his part, something that Derrida exposes rather comically in his public debate/exchange with Gadamer.
But maybe you can say more about what you understand the common structure of articulation to be? I see Deleuze, Greene, and Biesecker to be saying rather different things, but then again I've never really invested myself in articulation theory, so I might be looking askew at a theory you view more directly.
And slewfoot-Josh, indeed, I have an argument that comes out of a reading of Das Ding in Lacan's seventh seminar that provides a more textually tethered form of this argument, which is what I was planning on finalizing and presenting at RSA up until daddydom asserted priority. Maybe I'll post some of that reading a bit later.
Posted by kenrufo | July 6, 2006 5:10 PM
Posted on July 6, 2006 17:10
Well the underlying element of articulation that I see is polysemy. As Biesecker showed in her critique of Vatz and Bitzer and Greene showed in his critique of Cloud and McKerrow, it is ill fated to view rhetoric as originating from any one totalizing hermeneutic origin (e.g., situation/speaker, materialism/idealism; notice the similarity). Instead articulation theory wants to “map” (as opposed to “generalize”) the way rhetoric circulates. As a result articulation seems to be concerned with praxis while all hermeneutic approaches seem to be concerned with form. This, I believe, is why Greene labeled his project post hermeneutic at that materialism panel you presented at (NCA 2005).
If I am reading your reading of Gadamer correctly, however, you seem to be saying
that anytime we attempt to understand a phenomenon (praxis/content) we by definition generalize (form). Therefore you are arguing that the Lacanian understanding of subjectivity is itself a form of generalization which, nonetheless, attempts to account for phenomena that exist only in praxis.
I tend to agree with this Gadamerian perspective which is the main aspect of Greene’s project I critique in my MA thesis. Without any epiphenomenalism (i.e., hermeneutics) it seems impossible to make any claims about anything. In other words, it seems “pragmatically” impossible to abandon the distinction between form/content and concurrently base/superstructure. If one does there in Derridian territory where there is NOTHING outside the text. And yet abandoning the base/superstructure is exactly what new materialism/articulation does even though as I noted earlier, materialism, by definition, entails a hermeneutic assumption (that materiality precedes ideas). For this reason I doubt Derrida would agree with Greene’s (2002) postal system). Greene seems torn between Althusser and Derrida, but the two hold entirely different assumptions.
Posted by Josh Hanan | July 6, 2006 6:15 PM
Posted on July 6, 2006 18:15
Hmm, I must admit I get confused by your use of terms, Josh. I don't know if I'm just starting to segue out of academic-speak and so am already atrophying or if it's that your use of terms often assumes a stability and coherence to terms that I am not sure is there. For example, I'm not sure what praxis entails here (or actually, I'm not sure what praxis wouldn't entail, but whatever). As for my own perspective, I'm pretty Derridean, I guess. At a minimum, I don't see much in my earlier post, nor in my presentation at NCA that isn't consistent with my reading of Derrida (even if, in the latter instance, I'm explicitly critiquing Derrida).
My difficulty with Greene's project thus far is slight and largely occurs at an operational level. I understand that he's trying to provide a way of thinking discourse/rhetoric without recourse to a grounding or a priori ontological matrix, but to me, language always already contains an ontology (and with it, a politics) determined by the media substrate through which it exists. Hence my affection for Kittler's work, which I'm alluding to in the above post.
Posted by kenrufo | July 6, 2006 6:49 PM
Posted on July 6, 2006 18:49
Hey y'all, I'm pretty much brain-dead on this last day o' summer class in the Austin heat-bake, but: Ken, I really would enjoy posting/engaging you more on the Kittler tip re this post; I just picked up Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter for my summer reading and, while it doesn't directly bear on this discussion, I may hit you up with some questions once I start wading through. This is scatteed--sorry.
Also, I wanted to say: just because I don't respond to your posts don't mean I don't read 'em; I'm often here on a daily basis and glad to see you're back. Gee: Daddydom! Tsk tsk. :-)
Third: I think the project of re-introducing the usefulness of Gadamer--sans close texualism--is a waaaay cool project.
Fourth: sorry, no clash today, if only because--aside from post-happy hour last day of classness--(a) you're persuasvie; and (b) I think you may very well be right (e.g., what if those structures are, well, pure shit?). One should, nevertheless, find some comfort in the psychoanalytic tradition if only because no one agrees about any goddamn thing except that (a) repression is dynamic; and (b) the uncs. exists. Oh, and that psychoanlaytic explanations provide a useful and "rings true" framework for answering the age-old question of why people invest in their own unhappiness. For me, just knowing that this second category, this off-place or non-place of the unconscious, exists as an explanatory mechanism is helpful enough.
I couldn't follow the Josh H. and your thread exactly; I don't see how all the p-words can be lumped together, but I'm a little fascist in the end, all about boxes and taxonomies, you know? Call me a structuralist.
Finally: we should hit up our boy and then the Castrating Mother in a few months about that forum idea. Perhaps having three essays "ready to go" and completed will be most persuasive? Again, only via end-runs on peer review does one get these kinds of discussions into the disciplinary imaginary . . . unless, of course, one can hock nepotism.
Posted by slewfoot | July 6, 2006 7:53 PM
Posted on July 6, 2006 19:53
Praxis is the world of action. It is a phenomenon in all its minute particulars. I tend to view praxis as analogous to content. I also associate with the Marx’s understanding of the base or production.
Form is the world of generalizabilty, it is a way of categorizing phenomena. Language (since Saussure) is by definition formal (e.g., representative). Hence a historical materialist (hermeneutic) would view language as contingent upon action, which for Marx was economics.
Again if we were looking at praxis/form from Saussure's understanding of the sign, the signified would be the praxis and the signifier would be the form. Hence representation IS always already formal. Which is why Saussure explains Derrida perfectly.
When applied to truth and method, truth would be praxis (something in all its minute particulars) and method would be formal (e.g., method is a hermeneutic, a way of reading phenomena). You can read Bush from a materialist perspective, an idealist perspective, or a realist perspective, etc. Yet none of these explain the ideology of Bush perfectly (which is exactly why Lacan ontologically separates the real and the symbolic)
Of course the distinction between form/content breaks down (as Brummett demonstrates in rhetorical homologies), which to me is the main point of poststructuralism.
Poststructuralism takes us full circle in a sense. While in the days of Augustine praxis meant reality in its Real sense (even thought he never used the word praxis). In the argot of poststructuralism praxis is always already form (it’s the difference between Being, being, and becoming)
But I think what your saying about Gadamer is that all interpretations immanently distorts reality and, as a result, Lacan's attempt to explain a phenomenon indicative of the human experience cannot represent exactly what it intends to represent for the very reason that representation is the foundation of Lacan's understanding of the unconscious. In other words, because Lacan himself is representing he paradoxically cannot explain what he is attempting to explain.
Finally, I don't disagree with your materialist project. I'm just saying that to me a project that attempts to abandon dialectics entirely (like Green's) wouldn’t take the mantle of materialism or idealism. It would be neither.
Just like something that critiques the idea of an outside wouldn’t presume to be inside because to be inside assumes that there is an outside. Isn’t this Derrida’s point?
Therefore
Form/content
Theory/praxis
Materialism/idealism
Inside/outside
Base/superstructure
Truth/method
Signifier/signified
All break down
They collapse which is what I see articulation theory attempting to explain through an emphasis on polysemy.
Finally, I actually love Greene's materialism and find it much more fascinating than traditional renditions (I veer toward poststructuralism) but to me coupling posthermeneutics with materialism seems like a contradiction but I’d be more than happy if I am missing something here.
Posted by Josh Hanan | July 6, 2006 7:56 PM
Posted on July 6, 2006 19:56
A'ight, Ken, I've had time to read more closely your argument here. I regret this kind of engagement won't be common ☹
Ok, let me see if I get this correctly. You argue—somewhat hyperbolically—that psychoanalysis is a false art or techne that is better read as a symptom of a larger, epistemological shift that has occurred (and presumably is still occurring) in the wake of the death of the sign. Psychoanalysis is better understood as a sort of epiphenomenal repetition compulsion, a symptom of the demise of the logic of the symptom. What has blinded its proponents to its failures as a true, explanatory discourse is this "genetic privilege" that eclipses any consideration of its necessarily mediated preformation as a discourse, a chief insight of Gadamer on the hermeneutical process. Have a got that right? If so, I agree.
Where I might disagree, appropriately enough, is in the stuff you use to get there. Let me see, again, if I follow you correctly: the problem for the human sciences in general is that of interpretation, and [rhetorical?] scholars have yet to seriously reckon with this problem because of a tacit, ontotheological tendency to assert one's perspective as the center. For example, you use psychoanalysis. You say that psychoanalysis presumes underlying structures, so if one does not believe in such underlying structures, or finds such structures false or misnamed, then validity can go out the window. That works for me too. Some stuff is persuasive, while other structures are really hard to see (such is the problem of the unconscious, aka, the "self-sealing" argument). But you say that you're more concerned with genetic privilege here. So far, then, your set-up is that too little attention is given to the preformative conditions and particularities of a presumably interpretive discourse, and psychoanalysis is the poster boy of this sort blindness. Right?
Ok, so your creative move here is to reverse the privilege between representational preformation ("epigenesis") and psychoanalysis—if we read psychobabble as a symptom. Once you make that provocative move, you can then claim psychoanalysis registers the death of the sign. You offer two "justifications" for this move: (1) psychoanalysis "dresses up" contingency as a necessary, underlying structure; (2) it's really not expository, but reactive. Alright, now: your justifications are not really that, unless you show us the money. I know, I know, you're on the polemic tip, but, ya know, Lacan writes all over the place about the relation of contingency and determinism and makes room for the former and so on (and yes, retrospection is the gesture of necessity; how can that move be thunk otherwise?). Your second claim would require some explanation of what you mean by explanation. If explanations are merely translations, the use of one label to refigure another, then psychoanlaysis is fundamentally a descriptive, rhetorical enterprise of shifting names and terms for insight. It's truths are poetic, and its poetry (at least so it is claimed) help people live better lives, get along with their parents, and so on. That doesn't mean psychoanlaysis is not a symptom. So, too, is McLuhan's work a symptom of the cathode ray.
Still, I say like yesterday I don't have much to quibble with here. Indeed, what discourse isn't a mediation of some sort? And who would dispute the basic, Gadamerian understanding of the horizons of interpretation (as well as its limits) as a gesture? Or perhaps as Nietzsche put it, we always operate "on the backs of things," and that means there is no un-mediated access. Thinking through this earlier today (and apparently in my sleep), I would add, however, a number of responses.
First, theory is a name game. Insofar as I buy into the transcendental argument (call me Kantian or Derridian, but there is no access to the outside; we're stuck "in here," if by "in" we mean, basically, an enfoldment of the outside/socious too), the critical task of thinking is, well, critical: what names work and what names to not, and what are the consequences of this name "Fred, as opposed to that one, "Bob?" I wish I could make recourse to some meta-theory to better illustrate the case, but, I regret this was in part Lacan's understanding of "discourse" in the technical sense: most theory, philosophy for certain, is a "master" discourse that necessarily asserts what you is calling "genetic privilege." I mean, isn't your diagnosis, pretty much, that psychoanlaysis is a master discourse (Lacan's argument to the contrary)?
Second, insofar as any discourse has its particular "Real" to pontificate about and assume is there/not there, the "genetic privilege" of psychoanalysis is no different from any other interpretive discourse insofar as it speaks in the name of authority. Why? Because I would gamble the analytic meaning of interpretation entails authority/mastery: All interpretation presumes the object being made meaningful (primary) is not self-transparent, but requires another, secondary discourse—requires utterance about it--to ferret its truth. Insights into the truth of the object, however, always entail a certain blindness, a blindness to the preformation of its own interpretive procedure. Another way to put this is that every discourse, most especially that of a master, requires an "off scene" or, if you want, an ob-scene. We sometimes call it the unconscious.
Third—seeing that I agree with you at the level of the epistemic here—such observations imply even media-ecological (is that a word?) approaches to cultural objects, such as reading the psychoanalytic discourse as a symptom, will suffer from its own brand of blindness. Since I'm just learning the literature of that discourse, I'm not so sure what that might be at the moment, but I would hazard a Missy Misdemeanor Elliott "flip it and reverse it" gesture by suggesting media ecology's own libidinal investment in the gadget (the central object of all group psychology) blinds it to the agency of the signifier. If psychoanalysis is fundamentally mournful (and I think it is), then media ecological approaches are too joyful (with apologies to Baudrillard and Virilio).
Fourth, instead of a reversal, why not an equalization or some perspectival—or gasp, dialectical--form? This seems to me to be precisely the project of the work of Larry Rickels, who plays media-ecological and psychoanalytic discourse off one another, fundamentally to avoid reifying either as a master discourse (see, for example, the massive Nazi Psychoanalysis series).
Finally, in my reading of the psychoanalytic discourse—colored, admittedly, by Lacanian folks—the whole enterprise is not so much to make the world meaningful, but to explain how be comfortable with a certain degree of ineffability, to discern the limits of self-knowledge, to be more dialogic, and so on (it's like Martin Buber, only better!). Like I said, it's all a name game, in the end. Perhaps the fundamental issue that you point up is really the one of determinism: if transcendentalism is our problem and our plight, then perhaps the banishment of mastery is our goal? Still, I don't disagree with the major point of your argument: the assertion of mastery entails a certain degree of blindness. For me, the best issue to consider in adopting this or that perspective is the consequence of its particular blindnesses: does that blindness get people killed? Fortunately, most university discourses do not (with apologies to Gramsci).
Good, provocative stuff Ken.
Posted by slewfoot | July 7, 2006 2:37 PM
Posted on July 7, 2006 14:37
I want to take some time to respond to these last two comments in more detail in a bit, but I want to quickly note:
First, university discourses on psychoanalysis do not normally get people killed, though of course, university discourses that included Hayek and Strauss, to name just two really obvious examples, do. And to be honest, I'm not so sure that Zizek, if taken seriously, wouldn't endorse a certain amount of killing in order to better coordinate the revolution (not necessarily in the name of it, but rather because more piecemeal responses - to things like lynching, the death penalty, health care, end up sacrificing the universal).
Second, I agree with you about media ecology's disciplinary blindness. Though I find them more mournful than you do, but probably because you've been reading Kittler and/or McLuhan of late, both of whom play massive expository roles within media ecology, even while the prescriptive force still seems to belong primarily with Postman, Innis, Ellul, etc. Of course, this probably just means that mourning and celebrating are different sides of the same coin, which I'm very fond of as an argument, since I make that argument in my dissertation.
More later, especially on the second point, and some comments on the other Josh later, who I still am unsure I understand at present. In the meantime, Josh H, perhaps you can explain what you understand Greene's project to be? And just to make sure, are you saying that "not taking the mantle of materialism or idealism" is the same as "being neither"?
Posted by kenrufo | July 8, 2006 10:59 AM
Posted on July 8, 2006 10:59
What Dr. Gunn articulates is all I was referring to earlier when I used the label polysemy. Polysemy means multiple interpretations which is why I felt it is fitting for conveying the underlying essence of your blog entry.
The work of Larry Rickels which Dr. Gunn described would be an example of polysemy. The man is using two different hermeneutics (or reading strategies) (media ecology and psychoanalysis) to explain a single phenomenon. Because interpretation (e.g., method) is always a representation of reality all hermeneutic/structural/epistemological approaches are partial (including Lacan’s). In other words ontology in the realist classical sense does not exist. There is no an objective reality removed from representation. The signifier is always already signified.
To me this thesis is very poststructuralist because it recognizes that it is impossible to truly describe any given phenomenon (whether it be hermeneutics, structuralism, ideology, or realism). This of course is the thesis behind the “politics of representation” a term commonly employed in Public sphere theory (see Asen). This assumption was also apparent in the panel you and Greene presented at NCA. Greene labeled his project post hermeneutic because he recognized that no single hermeneutic can truly explain things (which is exactly the point of Lacan’s psychoanalytic project (e.g., the ontological divide between the real and the symbolic), if I am correct).
To me, then, it seems like from your post (and Gunn’s) the most productive strategy would be to take several hermeneutical approaches and put them in dialectic with one another. Frentz and Rushing do this with Jameson and Jung. And doing so can perhaps get us closer to the exogenesis of hermeneutics you are talking about.
I’ll attempt to outline my reading of Greene, but I just don’t have the time to write for too long.
The most elaborate articulation of Greene’s materialism can be found in his 1998 article “another materialist rhetoric.” In this article Greene attempts to formulate a new theory of materialism that can account for how a governing apparatus programs reality
Greene argues that there are two predominant understandings of materialism in contemporary rhetorical studies the logic of influence model (e.g., historical materialism) and the constitutive model (e.g., the materiality of discourse thesis, Charland). Greene argues that Althusser’s conceptualization of materialism provides a way of rethinking materialism. Such a rethinking views materialism as existing in “different modalities.” It is this distinction which I believe is tenuous if not untenable. By claiming that materialism exists in different modalities (e.g., language and physical forces) he collapses the distinction between a base and its superstructure. Yet a materialism with out dialectics (or a base/superstructure) fails, in my eyes (and clouds), to be materialism. The fundamental thrust behind materialism is to create homologies which ascribe (reduce) various phenomena to more parsimonious material origins and conditions. In other words, materialism is reductionist and causal by definition. Traditionally this has worked by claiming that ideas and/or discourse are dependent upon material conditions (which Charland of course challenges)
Yet if discourse and materiality (in the traditional sense) are both modalities of materialism, materialism no longer maintains its causality or reduction. Instead polysemy (and articulation) becomes the norm because they are better adapted to “map” the way ideology (?) functions. But I don’t think materialism can be polysemic because it is a hermeneutic approach which entails a particular set of assumptions. The most predominant of these assumptions is parsimony (see McGuire, 1990). Granted we can say that race, gender, and class are all aspects of production (in contrast to just class), yet if we place everything on the cannon of production (which Greene (2004) wants to do) there is no longer any tension between a base (production) and its superstructure. No tension means no homology, no homology means no parsimony or reduction. If everything is material than materiality cannot exist. Materialism has to be juxtaposed to idealism if it is to remain a tenable concept.
Basically it seems to me that an idealist could do the same thing Greene is doing and call it new idealism. He could say that ideas exist in different idealistic modalities, thereby achieving the same result (e.g., material entities are really ideas in a material form). Greene’s attempt to go beyond hermeneutics is noteworthy and, from my current knowledge I think I agree with him. Yet I’m not certain you can be a materialist and go beyond hermeneutics.
To summarize, I see materialism as being commensurate with structuralism, both desire to reduce phenomena to particular origins of production.
Poststructuralism is not reductionist. It abandons dialectics and causality entirely.
Greene is definitely a poststructuralist.
Perhaps I am wrong and perhaps I am sticking to Cloud’s reading of materialism. I still like poststructuralism but to me materialism and poststructuralism are incommensurate.
Finally I think its hard to lump poststructuralism in one category and I think that Althusser is at the nexus of structuralism and poststructuralism, whereas Derrida truly epitomizes poststructuralism (but I haven’t read “post card” yet, which, from what I hear, provides a more foundational way to read Derrida.)
I appreciate you taking the time to humor me Dr. Rufo and I know I have a lot to learn still. I consider you one of the finest thinkers in the discipline so I take what you have to say very seriously..
Ultimately, I think I am trying to deconstruct Greene’s materialism, but perhaps I have failed.
PS: I read DeLuca and Peeples’ “Public sphere to public screen “and really dug the media ecology element of it. Very, very interesting (did you study under DeLuca?). Can you recommend a good beginner’s book on media ecology aside from McLuhan.
And who is Kittler ?
Posted by Josh Hanan | July 9, 2006 12:49 AM
Posted on July 9, 2006 00:49
So Josh H, a few things. I think I'm starting to understand your position, but I can't say I agree with it. One of the operations at work in articulation is, if we look back at Biesecker's infamous piece on the rhetorical situation, that the subject comes into being through the discourse (and ideas) themselves, and that contrary to popular wisdom, there isn't an a priori "substance" that can precede the formation of ideas. Now it looks like you're saying something slightly different here in later comments than you are at the beginning, but what Biesecker is highlighting - or at least hinting at - is the problem with believing that objects, persons, and events (material history/context) produce rhetoric because of their situation or themselves; rather any response to objects or events brings into being the entity that makes the response. I say "hinting at" because she's obviously saying this in the context of a rhetor and a rhetorical situation that calls that rhetor to action, but the same argument is equally true when it comes to academic, critical readings of an object. Method and critic are articulated (brought into existence) through the act of critique. From this, it's impossible to claim that the materialist/idealist split has much objective legitimacy. It is, rather, something that one cannot escape; but it is also something to which one cannot return. As I said before, I like Greene in this context, even if I don't fully agree with his assessment of the important operational variables.
But I disagree with the idea that if everything is material or materialist than nothing is. I've never liked the structure of this claim, and to be honest, I just think there's very few subjects for which such a statement would be true (political and sacred work, but I can't think of many others). With materiality, I would suggest the opposite is true, actually, that if anything wasn't material, materiality wouldn't or couldn't exist in the senses we deploy the term. Now I think your claim only comes close to working if you believe, like Cloud, that discourse and social formation is determined by objective class relations and that these class relations are determined by a logic of production that should be called materialist. I find this claim demonstrably untrue and utopian, so it's not one I entertain much, but I understand that in this sense, material functions homologously to political, and so maybe it all works. But works for what? What do we know now that we know any of the assumptions or arguments that comprise the claim? Not much, imho.
As for media ecology primers, there are a few, but I recommend just looking at the Media Ecology Association's website's list of recommend readings. There's a link to it from Ghost's main page, near the bottom right column.
One other thing, Josh. You don't need to butter me up. I'm hardly one of the finest thinkers in the field - there are days when I'm barely a functional thinker; we're just folks having a conversation, which is what this sort of bloggity, academicy goodness is all about.
Posted by kenrufo | July 9, 2006 8:12 AM
Posted on July 9, 2006 08:12
Though on the other hand, if you (or anyone else) is trying to butter me up, I do need donations to get the Progressive Commons 2.0 project off the ground. The old page, which is sporting the in-progress new design but not new content, is viewable at http://progressivecommons.org/.
Posted by kenrufo | July 9, 2006 9:07 AM
Posted on July 9, 2006 09:07
Well perhaps I'll offer a more elaborate reply later but I just want to clarify that I am not buttering you up. I simply feel that from the work I have read (and seen) by you thus far, you are a very sharp thinker and have a good grasp on poststrucutralism, which, in my opinion, is very difficult to have. Moreover, I find the majority of scholarship in rhetoric boring which is why when people like you and Gunn write I find the subject matter extremely interesting and well thought out (Hence you may not be a Rod Hart, but his work imo is boring). Interpret my comment as you like but being humble is different from brownnosing.
In brief reply to you article, it is the latter understanding of materialism (e.g., class relations are determined by a logic of production that should be called materialist)which I think has to be maintained at least to some extent. The whole point of Marx’s historical materialism was to differentiate between production and the superstructure. To me collapsing this distinction just seems oxymoronic.
I think Greene's more recent stuff particularly his recent reply in P & R gets around this issue. I certainly agree that money and speech are inseparable, a fact especially apparent in the academy.
I’m looking forward to reading some Hardt and Negri.
Posted by Josh Hanan | July 9, 2006 1:01 PM
Posted on July 9, 2006 13:01
BTW I read articulation a bit differently than you. To me it seems like what you are describing is the constitutive model, expressed most eloquently by Charland (1987) and McGee (1975). The constitutive model is what views discourse and ideas as existing prior to real physical objects.
I interpreted Biesecker and Greene's move to articulation as the premise that you cannot bifurcate the objective and the discursive because the distinction between the two is untenable. Vatz wanted to place agency in the rhetors discourse whereas bitzer wanted to place agency in the situation (e.g., material). I thought articulation was a polysemic critique of this binary arguing that the networking between the two (object and discourse) has to be map in all its particularities (content) and cannot be generalized (form).
Are you framilar with actor/network theory?
Posted by Josh Hanan | July 9, 2006 1:16 PM
Posted on July 9, 2006 13:16