ENG 640 2: From the Modern to the Postmodern; Lyotard, Bill Readings, and Richard Lanham

Today’s Plan

• Review Week One
• Discuss the Readings (Questions, Ideas, Passages)
• Break
• Vote / Discussion on Week 15 and 16 books
• On the Dangers of kNOwing / Becoming Brave Enough to Be Strong
• Prepping Heidegger

Reviewing Last Week

We began exploring the foundations of the Modern Enlightenment, which, for convenience, we’ll say starts in 1689 with Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” and runs through the end of World War II. I chose Kant’s essay as the centerpiece of the week’s reading, since, while short, it lays out a few of the fundamental assumptions of the Enlightenment. I buttressed that with Bill Readings’ descriptions of the two major German university approaches–one built on Reason, critique, and the search for Truth, the other built on the pursuit of Culture and cultivation of the Citizen Subject of the State. In these two universities lies the foundational metanarratives that Lyotard wants to critique.

Santos’ Reading Notes on Kant:

• Radical individuality
  • Freedom / autonomy at the core of Kant’s ethics and his politics
  • In America, via Emerson, the notion of “self-reliance”
    • Kant is skeptical of immaturity, places immaturity in distinction to progress (below)
    • Emerson, to an extent, praises immaturity (the young boy who offers opinions free of social restrictions). Civil disobedience. Working out of a Petrarchian/humanistic tradition that distrusts the human animal (Hobbes, Machiavelli, etc). 
  • Kant’s primary obligation is to Reason/Truth (secular, yet transcendental–a Platonic affair). Hence, deontological ethics. Using Reason to identify the right way to live. Working out of the optimism of Locke’s tabula rasa (all wo/men created equal). Hence, “think, but obey”
• University at the Intersection of Public and Private
  • “Think, but Obey”
  • Private Obligation: as a citizen/subject of the state, the subject is compelled to obey. 
    • Frederick’s place in late 18th century politics; Frederick’s desire for cosmopolitanism, his cultural rivalry with conservative and orthodox France. Hence, the livestock metaphors have significance for a ruler looking to modernize beyond an agrarian image
    • Interest in Scottish Enlightenment
    • Revolution in America; growing tensions in France
  • Public Freedom: as a scholar/participant in the great conversation of mankind, as a resident of Burke’s parlor. 
    • In front of the literate “public” sphere, Burke’s Parlor, the subject is called to “think,” to critique.
    • Think of Readings’s depiction of Humboldt; inspiration to Jefferson. 
    • Insists upon “public” freedom because of the belief in progress; our advancement toward the right way to live
• A Subtle Critique of Plato
  • Kant is not looking to create philosopher kings, but rather aims to make each (wo)men a philosopher. He knows full well that many do not have the inclination, determination, or aptitude to earn the title. However, he believes that knowledge can promote emancipation from our cave of ignorance
  • Cue Nietzsche: you see a will to knowledge? I see a will to power:
    • Those philosophical laborers after the noble model of Kant and Hegel have to determine and press into formulas, whether in the realm of logic or political (moral) thought or art, some great data of valuations—that is, former positings of values, creations of value which have become dominant and are for a time called ‘truths.’ It is for these investigators to make everything that has happened and has been esteemed so far easy to look over, easy to think over, intelligible and manageable, to abbreviate everything long, even ‘time,’ and to overcome the entire past—an enormous and wonderful task in whose service every subtle pride, every tough will can certainly find satisfaction. Genuine philosophers, however, are commanders and legislators: they say, ‘thus it shall be!’ They first determine the Whither andFor What of man, and in so doing have at their disposal the preliminary labor of all philosophical laborers, all who have overcome the past. With a creative hand they reach for the future, and all that is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a hammer. Their ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is—will to power. (“We Scholars” Beyond Good and Evil) 
    • Cue Foucault
• Progress Narratives
  • Hence the “slow” maturity
  • Hegel’s sense of history as a dynamic unfolding of Geist through the triadic process of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. From slavery, to rational, self-realization. Or, taken up by Marx, the gradual advancement of the proletariat’s unveiling of bourgeoisie control over the means of production. Etc. 
  • Cue the Lyotard. 

So, let’s boil the Enlightenment down to a three principles:

1. Autonomy
2. Universality
3. Progress

One reason I assigned the Ong last week was to suggest that the desire for abstraction, universality, individuality, and even [linear, narrative] progress are at least in part engendered by the development of writing as a technology. Writing leads to particular kinds of thinking, to particular kinds of values, to particular ideas about how humans gather, communicate, relate, and desire.

Discuss the Readings (Questions) /

The first question I want to discuss tonight is:

• Disregard the first few pages of Lanham and then explicate for me the difference between the strong and weak defenses of rhetoric.

After that, let’s move to Lyotard and paralogy:

• What does Lyotard mean when he writes that “to speak is to fight” (p. 10)? What doesn’t this phrase mean? [hint: how does Lyotard think through the term agonistic?] [Also, I’ve not been able to locate a copy of that page/phrase in the original French–I’m particularly curious about whether the term in the original french is combattre or disputer]
• How does Lyotard’s notion of paralogy complicate traditional notions of invention (creativity, the development of ideas, etc), especially from a modern / neoliberal perspective/desire? What is paralogy?
• In what ways does the strong defense of rhetoric resonate with Lyotard’s paralogic practice?

Okay, with that done, let’s discuss Lyotard’s ontology and epistemology (what is real? and what is knowledge):

• How and why does Lyotard reject the idea that the goal of scientific research is consensus (see 65-66)?
• How does Lyotard frame postmodern knowledge? What is/n’t it? What are the implications for the relationship between Reason, society, and the state?

Okay, I have saved my favorite for last:

• Take a swing at explicating what Readings does and doesn’t mean by “thought.” How does he take steps to ensure that thought doesn’t become another metanarrative–that it isn’t Reason?
• How does Readings’ concept of dissensus relate to Lyotard? What is the connection there? BONUS: Why, if dissensus cannot be institutionalized (p. 167) does Readings think it can operate as a new metanarrative for the University? Or, um, why is it important to Readings that disenssus cannot be institutionalized?

And, the final question that I never went back and rewrote: imagine a conversation between Lanham and Readings. On what would they agree? Where are the fault lines between them? [i.e., how do the concepts of thought and dissensus compare to the strong defense and an architectonic rhetoric?]

A quote from Quintilian, responding to the argument that the study of rhetoric should be avoided since it can be used for manipulation and deception:

Under such a mode of reasoning, neither will generals, nor magistrates, nor medicine, nor even wisdom itself, be of any utility; […] in the hands of physicians poisons have been found; and among those who abuse the name of philosophy have been occasionally detected of the most horrible crimes. We must reject food, for it has often given rise to ill health; we must never go under roofs, for they sometimes fall upon those who dwell beneath them; a sword must not be forged for a soldier, for a rubber may use the same weapon. Who does not know that fire and water, without which life cannot exist, and (that I may not confine myself to things of earth,) that the sun and moon, the chief of the celestial luminaries, sometimes produce hurtful effects? […] And so, although the weapons of eloquence are powerful for good or ill, it is unfair to count as evil something which it is possible to use for good. (Institutes of Oratory II.xvi.9- 10)

Readings’ Thought and the Dangers of kNOwing

Lyotard argues that Modernism referred to a particular progress narrative, and to Western Civilization’s investment in narratives. We always live in a (progressive/Idealist) story, one that looks to the future. This is called a reliance on meta-narrative. According to Lyotard, the (Left) investment in meta-narratives is irrevocably shaken. Marxism once worked toward a utopian future, after the holocaust and the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, utopian narratives seem impossible. Hegel’s idea that history is a rational progression seems naive and/or duplicitous. The universal desire and drive of modernity is particularly problematic. =

Let me take a swing at summarizing Lyotard on language games. His theory of language games and paralogy is indebted to analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who critiqued philosophy’s misappreciation for the complexities of language. For Wittgenstein, meaning isn’t tied to ontology or a dictionary–words don’t mean things abstractly. Rather, the meaning of words is regulated by their use in specific contexts and conversations. This is often referred to as a kind of semiotic pragmatism–that the meaning of words is caught up in everyday life and social situations. We can’t ever articulate THE rules for language because it is always a bit random and–this is Lyotard’s stress–evolving as players make new plays. At some point something was bad which meant bad but then for a while things were bad which meant they might have been edgy and cool but then that stopped. Furthermore, language doesn’t provide a concrete or direct relation with thought or reality as much as it offers a medium through which we can encounter and negotiate with language itself (language as a messy thing that tries to provide access to thought and reality but certainly doesn’t do so without friction and noise–what Derrida will come to term “play”; Lyotard’s “games” are running with the idea of Derridean play which we will talk about later in the course).

Lyotard thinks “big picture” when it comes to language games and offers us 2 modern approaches, two ways about conceptualizing and practicing language:

• The Denotative language game. Denotative language is the language of science; its aim is to determine truth and falsity. It forefronts rules such as reliability and validity (which aim at universality–if I can repeat an experiment, that means it is more true). Although things like validity and reliability might be social constructions (that is, human), the status of Truth in a denotative game is more “transcendental,” beyond human, in that it transcends subjective declaration. The rose is red whether or not a human says it is red. The subjective elements of a statement are its “connotative”; and Lyotard reads the mission of science, and its denotative game, as the elimination of connotations, of human judgment. Hence why high school students cannot use “I” in their papers. One way to better understand the denotative/connotative divide is via Aristotle’s ontological approach to metaphysics (his categorical way of trying to define and understand reality/being and its relation to the beyond being). Aristotle’s ontological method tries to define something by identifying its essence and distinguishing it from its “accidental” elements. Denotative language can be understood as a commitment to identifying essence and skepticism toward accident. Lyotard stresses in several places that the denotative game is skeptical of anything mythic, mystical, or mysterious. It is this disdain toward myth that Lyotard posits leads to its own unraveling, since Science remains incapable of positing a denotative ground for its own existence.
• The prescriptive language game, rather than seek true/false, concerns justice in terms of “good/bad.” Here is the rift that leads to the collapse of the denotative universal University project: no amount of denotative fact can “prove” an absolute prescriptive value. In terms of last weeks readings, the denotative game belongs to the University of Reason and the prescriptive to the University of Culture. Both, however, see the grund of their projects as transcendent and universal (as metanarratives as well–aims that justify the operation of the whole system).
• Deep into The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard posits a third, emerging language game, one that rises out of the ashes of the scientific and emancipatory metanarratives: the technological game. This game operates around a buried prescriptive value–one that emerges from deep within the other games: not true/false, not good/bad, but efficient or inefficient. I am sure we will talk more about this with Heidegger next week.

Lyotard offers us paralogy as a potential countermove, counterattack, to efficiency. Paralogy in service of “justice.” I will wait a few weeks to address what I think justice means here–until we discuss Levinas.

I want to think a bit about the last question I presented to you: to compare Lanham and Readings. Both, I’d argue, create binaries about how we see and think about the world (ontology and epistemology). Lanham divides thought into two camps–a “weak” camp that discovers Truth and then uses language to communicate it, and a “strong” camp that believes truth to be the product of human encounter. The better we structure our encounters, the better truth(s) might emerge. One treats Truth as universal and certain. The other, as contingent, fragile, and always already in need of correction. What makes rhetoric “good” in the strong defense is that it is an engagement with a public and its problems–it is an attempt to productively purpose human energy and attention on our world.

I think it is harder to pin down the binary/binaries working in Readings. Certainly, there is the difference between the University of Excellence and the University of Thought / Dissensus. I am imagining that we will have already talked about that a bit before I read this. “Thought is an addiction from which we can’t break free.” I think this is true for those of us who have experienced the euphoria of a brush with Thought, the trace of an idea that couldn’t possibly come from “me” because “I” am not smart enough to think it. But I also think–like Kant–that not everyone has the courage to confront Thought, to dance with it, to loosen themselves from their foundations, to invite the other and the questions they carry.

My gut take is that Readings is a bit more weary of pragmatic action than Lanham. Lanham sees it as a way of purposing our intellectual activity, so that scholarship doesn’t become mere abstract play. A former colleague of mine, with whom I was quite close, used to refer to theory as “self-indulgent navel gazing.” So, Lanham wants to ensure that we don’t slip into that.

But Readings would argue that the critique of theory as self-indulgent, or impractical, grows out of the demand for profit and efficiency that Lyotard describes. Where, he wonders, is a place for thinking–and specifically, a kind of thinking that cannot know what it might think, or where it might arrive? A kind of thinking open to the possibility that it cannot occur. A thinking that cannot be mastered or assured. How/can we construct a syllabus about the possibility of (a) Thought? How/can we sell an idea of education as experiencing the frustration that Thought’s capriciousness and unpredictability engenders? One cannot make art happen. Art arrives on its own schedule. Teaching is an art.

[Lack of transition because I have 10 minutes]

I’d like to think a bit about one of the quotes in Readings that has always shook me:

To believe that we can know in advance what it means to be human, that humanity can be an object of cognition, is the first step to terror, since it renders possible to know what is non-human, to know what it is to which we have no responsibility, what we can freely exploit. (p. 189)

Knowledge, Readings writes, is an “alibi” from responsibility. To know a fact is to ignore a person–how that fact might speak them, command them, own them, negate them.

On our first night, I read the syllabus. It included a quick summary of Vitanza’s investment in W-R-I-T-I-N-G, which is somewhat akin to Readings’ Thought. I want to point to another Vitanza line tonight, from his book Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric. Here, Vitanza is arguing the the dialectical way in which philosophy tends to define a thing by identifying what it isn’t:

The negative—or negative dialectic—is a kind of pharmakon, and in overdoses, it is extremely dangerous. (E.g., a little girl is a little man without a penis! Or an Aryan is not a Jew! And hence, they do not or should not—because in error—exist) The warning on the label—beware of overdoses—is not enough; for we, as KB says, are rotten with perfection. We would No. That is, say No to females, Jews, gypsies, queers, hermaphrodites, all others. By saying No, we would purchase our identity. Know ourselves. By purifying the world, we would exclude that which, in our different opinions threatens our identity. (12-13)

To claim to kNOw something is also to say “no” to its autonomy, to its ability to speak its own existence, to have dimensions that eclipse our knowledge. It is to assert mastery over something, to speak for it. Like Plato’s Socrates in The Phaedrus, it is to claim to know the other/thing better than it can know itself. And that is dangerous terrain. Think of Lyotard’s resistance to consensus and Readings’ critique of community–the potential tyranny of the “we” (185, 188).

I think a powerful link between Lanham’s strong defense and Readings’ Diversity is a willingness to invite and let others speak. One might make sure an offer as part of a public negotiation. The other as a radical act of listening to invite the experience of the aporia of Thought (yes–to invite an experience that makes us uneasy about what we thought we knew). Either way, such speaking isn’t just setting up a refutation, part of a debate, or even a move toward synthesis (where each of us gives up something to arrive at a new whole). It is an invitation to work and be together, to work together and still be different. (In)essential values so needed in divided times. We have to learn to listen otherwise. To repress the urge to find the comfort of certain knowledge. To relinquish a claim to mastery, and to interrogate our desire for it. To be responsible for creating the space in which the other may speak.

Reading Homework

Three things:

• Heidegger, “The Questions Concerning Technology” (30 pages)
• Worsham, “The Question Concerning Invention” (46 pages)
• Levinas, “On Heidegger” (5 pages)

Prepping Heidegger

For next class we will be reading Heidegger’s 1953 essay “The Question Concerning Technology.” As I have indicated, this is an extremely challenging essay in part due to the painstaking care Heidegger invests in moving slowly through his topic (repetition is a key stylistic choice here), in part due to the obscurity and difficulty of his vocabulary, and in part due to the complexity of the idea he is attempting to express.

It might help here to understand Heidegger’s phenomenological method, developed in his early masterwork Being and Time. This itself is a momentous task, so I will try and condense Horrigan-Kelly et al.’s article down to a few paragraphs: To understand Heidegger’s method, and why it was so radical and transformative, one has to understand the fundamental dualism that underwrites Western philosophy: that is, that I am a subject that perceives objects. There is a strict division, distance, separation, between the subject who sees (and is) and the object that exists. Rather, for Heidegger, the subject exists in and among the world, its existence and awareness of its existence is always enmeshed in the world. The subject cannot be separated entirely, extracted from the world nor can the world be defined or rendered independent of the subject. This messy sense of non-dualistic subjectivity, of being-in-the-world, Heidegger labels Dasein.

Rather than anaylze the world and Dasein‘s relation to it abstractly, Heidegger sought to analyze how we navigate the world, how we encounter and interact with the others in it, how we often unconsciously enact cultural values, how we feel our way through it, how we can operate in the world without necessarily be thinking about it. In our everydayness, we simply “are with” others and the world. We act, and often that acting is something that “they” (the others, the world) have “given” us, what Heidegger would call a passive or inauthentic existence. Philosophy, phenomenology, for Heidegger is an active attempt to interpret how the world comes to us, how it “feels” us, how it directs us, it attends to the world and brings what is normally “at hand” (what we can use without thinking about it) to mind, laid before us to contemplate and question. Phenomenology is a critical analysis of our existence in the world (Levinas, for instance, conducts a phenomenological analysis of insomnia to ask “who isn’t sleeping, who doesn’t desire sleep, in order to interrupt our belief that we are ultimately masters of our body”).

Given its complexity, let me direct quote their explication of Heideggerian “care”:

Heidegger thus presented the structure of care as the “existential totality of Dasein’s ontological structural whole” (Heidegger, 1927/2011, p. 237). In its most simplest form, Heidegger’s care structure exposes what is of most consequence or importance to the human being. It exposes what the human being is concerned with or cares about. In Heideggerian terminology, it exposes the human being’s circumspective concern and angst. In particular, this is exposed through the human being’s future directionality or indeed their future aims, goals, desires, or ambitions.

Okay, so with that as a basis, we will be reading Heidegger’s critique of “technology.” This critique will focus on how technology reshapes human experience of the world, how it changes the way we see ourselves, others, and the world itself. Moreover: Heidegger will argue that technology reshapes what it is we care about and value.

Some tricky terms from the essay. Without giving away too much, I’ll say that Heidegger is interested in two different ways that “making” stuff orients us toward the world. We might call this the “handmade” and the “industrial.” Heidegger doesn’t use those terms, I offer them as a scaffold. For Heidegger, both are technological (in the sense of the Greek “techne,” which means “art, craft, culture, skill, making”). In the Gorgias dialogue, Plato argues that philosophy is a techne for making aletheia (Truth), while rhetoric is a knack for manipulating fools.

• Revealing: bringing-forth into the world.
• Revealing as poesis (p.317) vs. revealing as enframing (p.325). Poesis keeps us more in touch with Aristotle’s “fourfold” causality. Enframing tends to amplify one of the causes, but it also misrepresents it, transforms it: causa efficiens
• Enframing (p. 325): “Enframing mean the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.” Pay attention to the feel and thrust of words like challenges and ordering.
• Enframing can lead to destining, which in turn amplifies the will, desire, demand, to enframe.

Worhsam–Worhsam is writing in the mid-1980’s. At this point, invention in R/C is largely driven by heuristics, guides to thought and creation. Aristotle’s topoi. Pike’s tagmemics. Young’s topology. Invention is taught in terms of these systems to create thought. Worsham, invoking Heidegger, wants to challenge the idea that invention, creativity, thought, can be systematized and taught.