Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 19:28:45 -0500
Subject: A Witch's Brew of Physics and Metaphysics 


Reasonably intelligent women and men who have trained themselves within the
Marxist tradition in a thorough and undogamtic way, such as those of us on
this list, tend to be rather wide-ranging in their intellectual interests and
expertise. I think of us in the form of a Venn diagram, in which there is a
great deal of overlap at the center, but also considerable areas which are
unique to an individual or group of individuals. This makes very interesting
and stimulating conversation possible, dialogues from which I, for one, could
learn, but it also presents some real challenges. There are different
linguistic systems and codes which are operative in these areas, and we need
to find ways to translate them to each other. Since we share a great deal in
the form of an appreciation for the Marxist tradition (even from this
post-Marxist, when my position is properly understood), this is a viable goal
-- but it will require some effort on the part of each of us. Each of us
brings something special to the conversation with our specific interests and
expertise, but this promise can only be realized if we can make that
knowledge intelligible to those who do not share our specific expertise.

I offer this perception of things by way of a preface to a response to the
discussion over various issues raised in the Problematize This! thread and
its various progeny. Rahul is right, I believe, that it is presumptuous for
those of us who know little about the field of physics to deliver
generalizations on it, or on 'hard' science in general, but he should also
realize that his expertise in the field leaves him with an obligation to make
clear the relevance of that knowledge to our common concerns. (And the same
could be said about each of us; for some reasons peculiar to my intellectual
biography, I am rather well read in the field of medical ethics, and insofar
as I bring that knowledge to bear on our exchanges, I have an obligation to
make intelligible to others. Maybe because I teach high school, I believe
that you haven't really mastered a body of knowledge if you can't "teach" it
in this way.) This view of things is why I posed a particular challenge to
Rahul's formulation in the form of "I am not sure that I understand precisely
what he means by this term, but I suspect..." In some ways, that was meant as
an invitation to Rahul to correct what may very well be a problem of my
linguistic competency in the codes of 'hard' science, although he seems to
have misread my intention and seen it as a way to smuggle in an uncharitable
view of his position. It is my view that the core group of us on this list
have
enough respect and trust for each other (forged over some time) that we can
admit that we have not mastered all fields of human knowledge (despite the
fact that the vanity of such mastery is a not uncommon presumption in the
Hegelian and Marxian traditions) and that we are not about to do so in this
lifetime, and draw upon each other's insights.

So I am happy to see that Howie has joined our discussions (the end of the
term is near, brother), and pleased to be engaged in dialogue with the
intelligent and reasoned/ reasonable folks from Marxism 1 -- we are like the
emigre intellectuals of the New School for Social Research having fled the
cyber-equivalent of Europe in the 1930s.

To move this discussion forward, I believe that we need to concede that no
one on this list takes the position of either naive absolutism (there is a
single, fixed meaning to an historical event) or naive relativism (there is
an infinity of equally plausible meanings to an historical event). Rather,
our positions -- despite their real differences -- have much more subtle
grasps of the issues under debate. What we need to do is to draw out those
positions, and the differences among them, so that we can better understand
the terms of dialogue. It is easier, no doubt, (but also considerably less
intellectually chanllenging), to argue against the naive poles of the debate,
but it ain't taking us anywhere.

Without denying the significance of this particular illustration, I would
like to offer as an example of an historical event the production of a
particular text, and play out my view of history on that stage.  
To begin, it is important to realize that the authorship of a
text is a social practice, and like all social practices, it takes
takes place under general objective constraints: the author is
never a pure subject, simply realizing his/her intentions in the
text. Rather, the author writes (acts) with unacknowledged
conditions of action, both in unconscious motivations and in
tacit and practical, but unarticulated, knowledge; moreover,
he/she has an incomplete knowledge of the world in which he/she
writes/acts. As a result, his/her writing (action) has unintended
or unanticipated consequences (meanings).

But the authorship of a text is also a particular type of social
practice in that it assumes a linked social practice -- that of
reading. The two practices are both moments of a single circuit,
and each assumes the other. Like the author, the reader is not a
pure subject; there are unacknowledged conditions and unintended
consequences of readings, as well as of writing. There are
inescapable reading contexts which bind the interpretative act,
just as there is a context to the authorship of the text. Moreover,
in written discourse, there is a necessary distance, an unavoidable
difference between the social practices of authorship and reading:
the basic fallacy of the much interpretation is the tenet that this
difference can be, at least in principle, collapsed into a single
identity, that the reader can assume the position of the author,
that is, acquire a full and complete knowledge of the intentions
of the author. A proper theory of reading thus involves a double
hermeneutic, a dual interpretative problem of understanding the
conditions of both authorship and reading.

If authorship and reading should be viewed as social practices,
then the text, rather than being understood as pure object,
should be conceived as a subject-object duality, a particular
social structure which, when reproduced/transformed through time
and space, constitutes a discursive tradition/paradigm/problematic.
Like all social structures, the text is both the outcome of social
practices (the objective result of the circuit of authorship and reading)
and a medium of social practice (a means through and by
which the author and the reader construct themselves as subjects).
When the text is understood in this fashion, as a medium as well
as an outcome of social practice, it becomes clear that there is
no one objective or intrinsic meaning contained within it, but a
range of possible meanings at the points in which the author and
the readers intersect. Thus, all readings are interventions in
the text, or more precisely put, moments in the continuing
production of the text.

But given this theory of reading, is there any basis for the
evaluation of competing readings of the same text? Yes. All that
this theory eliminates is the possibility of establishing one
true reading of the text; all that it removes is the privileged
vantage point from which a final, closed reading of the text
could be made. Gone is an absolute, completely objective standard
for readings, but this loss by no means eliminates all standards
of evaluation and criticism. Since texts are to be understood as
social structures and instances of the discursive tradition/
problematic/paradigm, and therefore as subject-object dualities,
there is an objective component to them, and all readings must
take this component into account. To cite one obvious manifestation
of this rule: only an extremely strained, implausible reading could find
a libertarian politics in Hobbes. (But constrained by our conditions of
readership, we far too often read texts too narrowly: on the face of it,
for example, there is little in common between Hobbes' spartan
prose of analytical logic and the mystical Blake which Ralph has
been analyzing for us. Yet I have been engaged in a study of why
Hobbes chose the biblical figure of the Leviathan as the title for
his greatest work of analytical prose, the meanings of leviathan
in various Jewish and Christian discursive traditions, and how those
meanings shaped various readings of Hobbes' leviathan. And who
appears as a moment in this discursive tradition of the leviathan/
behemoth, but Blake in his writings and drawings on the Book
of Job. Any thoughts, Ralph?) The range of meanings which can
be attributed to a text is thus practically limited by the objective
component in that text. Moreover, some readings can account
for more facets of the text, and explain the structure of the text
in more depth; this provides us with a basis for evaluating their
relative value. To the extent to which various readings can thus
be compared with each other, it is possible to determine which
of the readings provides the fuller, more comprehensive account
of the text. By another not unimportant criterion, we could also
evaluate different readings in terms of their productivity -- that
is, their ability to stimulate further, useful work in the field.

(I want to say, parenthetically, that this view of authorship and
reading is rooted not only in the 'post-modernist' work of Derrida and
Foucault, but also in the hermeneutics of a Gadamer and a Riccoeur.
Some of it even goes back to that biblical exegesis Rahul cited as fun.)

Like the text, history is made not simply in the production of the
event itself, but just as importantly, in the readings of the event. Speaking
in what he incorrectly said was the voice of Hegel, Marx provided that
famous formula that men make history, but not as they please, they
make it under the conditions inherited from the past; employing the
metaphor of theatre (Marx himself like the image of history as text), he
he concluded that Hegel had forgotten to note first time as tragedy,
second time as farce. What Marx himself forgot to note was that drama
is itself a continuing production, and that history was remade with each
generation.



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