Subject: re: Lois reading..etc
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 97 01:51:20 +0100
From: Giles Peaker <G.Peaker-AT-derby.ac.uk>



Dear Lois (et al) 
The problem with making a general comment, such as the ones I made in 
that post as something of a position statement in response to Hugh's 
statement, is that when asked to expand, or elucidate, one has to open up 
a very large and very active can of worms. I'll try to keep the worm 
content here to a minimum, but some parts might have to be lengthy. (I 
have just finished, it is very, very, lengthy. My sincere apologies).
On 8-6-97, you wrote:

>Giles, I'll get back to your other note later, but I wanted to ask you a 
>question about this comment below.  You outline one of your "worries".  
>Is this a worry based on something you have read in Lyotard?  If so, 
>would you show us where he says such a thing.  I bet together we could 
>discover a and more credible interpretation of what he is saying in that 
>context.  
>
>The point in your note that I am referring to is:
>
>> One of my worries is that, whilst the the self (or any consciousness) 
>> cannot just be an object (and sod psychology), Lyotard moves to the other 
>> extreme, and says, in effect, because we cannot know the self (or others) 
>> fully, we cannot know the self (or others) at all. 

As far as I know, Lyotard does not say this anywhere, which is why I said 
'in effect'. Let me point to some various elements that might lead to 
such a conclusion on my part. Most of this overlaps with the other part 
of our discussion, indeed is something of a rephrasing of that second 
part we haven't reached yet. Can this stand in the place of that putative 
exchange?

Let me begin with the period of Economie Libidinale and the question of 
pure present intensity. I parody, but only very slightly, if I say that 
here consciousness appears as the domination on the general over the 
particular; the denial of instantaneous jouissance by its 
(consciousness') organisation of sensation in terms of parts of a whole, 
of a localised instant of the general, and of cause and effect.  Against 
this totality (or gestalt) of the body is posed the "eternal recurrence 
of sterile detonations of libidinal expenditure" (actually from Des 
Dispositifs pulsionnels. p56, my trans. (from old notes, alas.)). Here is 
not just a denial of self knowledge, but a rejection of 'self' per se as 
a totalisation and deferral of the immediate - an imposition of bounds on 
the body. (Despite the reference, this is beyond Nietzsche; although it 
is perhaps the logical conclusion of Nietzsche's animal forgetting). The 
result is that the 'eternal recurrence' of specific and incommensurable 
libinal events means that they are, in effect, all the same. No relation 
can be drawn between them and there is no basis on which to draw them 
into relation. Therefore they cannot be distinguished. They have no past 
and no future. (As an irrelevant aside, I think that the critique of a 
Marxist analysis of capitalism in DP is ludicrous in that it pictures 
Marxism as arguing for the 'true nature' of the thing as opposed to its 
equivalence with others in capitalism- this is claptrap, but also another 
conversation).

Certainly, Lyotard moves on from Economie Libidinale. In part, I would 
surmise, through his reading of Kant. (Alright - an illict inference. Let 
us just say that his change is in part articulated through Kant). But 
here there is a priviledging of the third Critique over the other two 
(and specifically 'practical reason') because in the third Critique Kant 
"cures himself of the disease of knowledge and rules in passing to the 
paganism of art and nature" (Instructions paiennes. p.36. trans Bill 
Readings). Given what I have already argued about Kant and the Third 
Critique, you can guess how I would disagree here, but I can see 
Lyotard's point; particularly as it is then expanded in Just Gaming to 
become the basis of indeterminate judgement. For Kant, the aesthetic is 
the moment that nature appears to spontaneously concur with reason, in 
that it presents itself as obeying its own self-determined law as an end 
in itself, without being 'deduced' by human reason (see my other post). 
For Lyotard, this is an 'indeterminate judgement' - necessary when faced 
with the event, which exceeds (established) reason. The element he drops 
is the 'spontaneous concurrence' with reason. ( suggested in Just Gaming 
p17) Indeterminate judgement is judgement without reference to 
established criterea (hence key to paralogy). But, by removing the link 
between the aesthetic and reason (vital for Kant), such a judgement 
becomes an intution. This is a loaded term, and a lot hinges on how one 
defines intution, but I would suggest that it is not only not reflexive, 
but incapable of reflection. I.e. it is not a judgement which can be 
questioned, even by the judger, because the 'reasons' for that judgement 
are inaccessible to reason. So, and this is a crude paraphrase, we can 
know that we have made a judgement, but the basis for making that 
judgement is unavailable. However, this, for various reasons addressed in 
The Differend, is the only ethical judgement. One is giving one's assent 
to 'something' (which is also giving it form), without passing through 
established criterea for judgement. All else is frankly delusion (albeit 
a generally necessary one). Although this might seem to be my point about 
'self-unknowing', I would go along with this to some degree. Certainly, 
as Schleiermacher argues:

"we do not see how the person who put the whole together moved from one 
proposition to another. The art of invention [discovery] is different 
from what has been invented [discovered]; the connection and the way that 
one has got from one to the other is not at all the same". (Dialectic 
1833. p74. trans from A. Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity. Manchester 
Uni. Press).

One could extend this and say this this movement is also opaque to the 
discoverer, which would seem to put us firmly in Lyotard's space. 

My argument about the opaqueness of the subject to itself in Lyotard 
follows from the difference (?) between Lyotard and Schleiermacher. I 
realise I am on thin ice here, but it seems to me that the 'event' (or 
the moment of paralogy?) is something which occurs 'outside' language - 
or rather it is 'something' which confronts established meaning with its 
limits. It occurs (for us) as the sublime, the unrepresentable appearing 
as an absence in language (or a failure thereof). Is this an acceptable 
definition? 

I will discard as irrelevant, for the moment, the argument that there is 
a (Nietzschian) metaphysics at work here (to claim that the world is an 
unknowable excessive flux is a metaphysical position - metaphysical 
because because how would one know?). 

If we accept this version of the event, and the related understanding of 
petite narrative, then one is left with the incommensurable. Not 
determinate negation - Hegel - nor negotiation. With reference to The 
Differend. I quote:

"Incommensurability, in the sense of the heterogenetity of phrase 
regimens and of the impossibility of subjecting them to a single law 
(with the exception of neutralising them), also marks the relation 
between cognitives and prescriptives and interrogatives, performatives, 
exclamatives... For each of these regimens, there corresponds a mode of 
presenting a universe, and one mode is not translatable into another." 
(Le Differend p128. Trans. Bill Readings, slight changes by me from my 
notes).

The trouble I have with this, and what marks the impossibility of self 
knowledge (in whatever limited, impermanent and downright 'tangled' 
fashion), is that it poses the supposed homogenity of a phrase regimen. 
I.e. that they are internally homogenous and that therefore their own 
contradictions do not allow one to glimpse both their 
fragility/positionality and thereby project a self beyond the appearance 
of the 'actual' (see Hegel quote below). This appears impossible because 
it takes an act of reason to recognise the contradiction, yet this reason 
has no 'established criterea' to recognise the contradiction, inasmuch as 
its criterea stem from the phrase regimen, which is homogenous. This 
might seem like an extreme 'take' but, from Just Gaming, we find:

"these are games that we enter into but not to play them; they are games 
that make us into their players, and we knw therefore that we are 
ourselves several beings."[I.e. proper names 'given' in the workings of 
the games, in my reading]. (Just Gaming. p51)

So, there is no 'self' outside of the position of the proper names of the 
Games. Or rather, there is, but this is the intution which Lyotard 
considers as justice. This can offer the momentary insight that one's 
'self' is bounded by the Game (or phrase regimen) but can offer no 
knowledge of self beyond the moment of excess of 'what is', which is no 
knowledge and no place. Again, Lyotard's adoption of Kant drops reason as 
a transcendental act, and thereby drops the moment of self-knowledge, 
which is self-transcendence. Not, I might add, that I am arguing for a 
Kantian position, (again, see the Hegel quote below), but Lyotard seems 
to render impossible both the Kantian transcendence of reason (quite 
rightly) *and* also the realisation of positionality by experience of the 
internal contradictions of a language game (phrase regimen) - because 
there is nowhere to experience those contradictions from and realise them 
as such. To add a little Brechtian plumpes denken, this would 
problematise the politicisation of a worker (or their family) on a 
strike, because it would just be a move from one regimen to another.  

This is where I come over thoroughly Hegelian Marxist and say what if it 
is not a question of moving from one phrase regimen, via the event, to 
another, but of dwelling in and thinking, in a thoroughly implicted 
fashion, the contradictions of the regimen you are in? I.e. not seeking a 
false transcendence (false in Lyotard's terms as well, I hasten to add) 
or seeking a local, contingent, settlement, but dealing with thinking the 
contradictions of 'what is' through the very terms of 'what is'. This is 
a form of self-consciousness because it involves thinking one's own 
positionality, and by doing so transcending it, but not into a 'something 
or somewhere else' or by being 'propelled' into the intutionism of the 
event. In recognising the 'givenness' of one's thought through the forms 
in which it is 'given', one holds both specificity of place and a 
(contentless, non prescriptive)utopian promise of commonality at once. 
However, they cannot be made the same thing. This probably makes little 
sense, but whilst on this topic, I'll move briefly on to Hegel.

>I must say that I am captured by you metaphor for the Hegelian 
>dialectical development of self in the following passage:
>
>>In part, the point I 
>> am trying to make is that we are caught in the position of knowing and 
>> not knowing - tangled in Hegel's curtain. 
>
>I like the notion of beig "tangled in Hegel's curtain" and would like to 
>know what you have in mind a bit more.  Is it that the "curtain" 
>metaphorically speaking, prevents the master from being self-conscious 
>before the slave, in the famous slave-master passage?  That might be 
>interesting, as well as poetic.  Would you elaborate it a bit?

Thank you, but it wasn't originally my metaphor - the metaphor of the 
curtain I stole and elaborated. Its source is a friend of mine, who has 
done and is doing some quite brilliant work on negation. Actually, it 
wasn't Lord and Bondsman that I had in mind, although some of the 
question of work that I turned to is there in that section (i.e. in para 
194-5  of Phenomenology of Spirit. Miller/OUP trans.) It was rather a 
following section - the Unhappy Consciousness (para 207 onwards) -  that 
I was thinking of. I quote from para 217:
"Just as, on the one hand, when striving to find itself in the essence it 
takes hold only of its own separate existence, so on the other hand, it 
cannot lay hold of the 'other' as an *individual* or as an *actual* 
Being. Where that 'other' is sought, it can *not* be found. When sought 
as a particular individual, it is not a *universal* individuality in the 
form of thought, not a *Notion*, but an individual in the form of an 
object, or an *actual* individual; an object of immediate 
sense-certainty, and for that very reason only something that has already 
vanished. Consciousness, therefore, can only find as a present reality 
the *grave* of its life. [....] the [actual] presence of that grave, too, 
is merely the struggle of an enterprise doomed to failure".

(Hegel's poetics are usually more impressive, or at least dramatic, than 
mine!)

 As an aside, I wonder if the sections that precede the unhappy 
consciousness, those on 'scepticism', might be interesting to read in 
relation to Lyotard? Just a thought.

>But I am puzzled that you think Lyotard is oblivious to Hegel and that he 
>withdraws into a kind of solipism of not-knowing.  I just haven't read 
>anything in Lyotard that leads me to that reading.

I certainly don't think Lyotard is oblivious to Hegel, although I suspect 
that he emphasises too much the closure of teleology and the presence of 
the absolute spirit, and not enough the movements of negation. One 
doesn't have to believe that the absolute spirit came to self-knowledge 
in the Prussian state of 1830 in order to consider Hegel seriously - see 
for instance Adorno's 'Hegel: Three Studies' (trans. from MIT Press). But 
even Hegel's totality is a constant, negationary, movement between 
particular and the 'Unchangable'. In a related spirit (ha ha), I raised, 
both here and in an earlier post, Schleiermacher as a critique of Hegel 
and of particularism. I don't want to be repetitive, but he really is 
worth considering - particularly in relation to The Differend. His 
approach to language and 'communication', in all its contingency, is 
wonderful.

>> I suspect that this will remain so until we recognise that the world is 
>> not separate from us (to be known) but is something that we infuse with 
>> ourselves as we work on it, whilst it shapes us at the same time. This is 
>> something which is impossible in the way we encounter the world at the 
>> moment, and it is a question, I think, of work and the organisation of 
>> work.
>
>Could you be more specific as to page numbers?

Actually, this was me (in late Hegelian Marxist mode). It has, as far as 
I know, nothing to do with Lyotard. Page numbers, no; books, yes? Well, I 
would recommend Marx & Engels, The German Ideology. (By the way, if you 
want a Marxian reading/translation of *work* in 'Lord and Bondsman', the 
section on commodity fetishism in ch1 of Capital goes some way there. An 
interesting comparison).

> That is, after all, the primary way we encounter and transform the 
>> world and gives rise to the way we think of it. But then, I'm an old 
>> dialectical materialist. I'm rereading some of Lyotard's discussion on 
>> work in The Differend with interest. Perhaps something for a future 
>> discussion, if anyone would like.
>
>Yes.

Thank you, I'm pleased and look forward to that. I am still reading, and 
am still, despite the above, intrigued and bemused.

yours

Giles


Giles Peaker
Historical and Theoretical Studies
School of Art and Design, University of Derby, Britannia Mill, 
Mackworth Road, Derby. DE22 3BL (U.K.)
+44 (0)1332 622222 ext. 4063    G.Peaker-AT-derby.ac.uk
Editorial Collective:Detours and Delays. 
An occasional journal of aesthetics and politics