Cotton Wool into Cannon Balls

On Tradition, or how stereotypes are bad for philosophy

2010-09-08T20:27:00.014+01:00

It was disappointing to hear A. C. Grayling perpetuating the old, jingoistic stereotype about "Anglophone" philosophy on the Today programme recently, during a discussion about Stephen Hawking's claims about the obsolescence of philosophical thought.

Now it might seem churlish and perhaps more than a little touchy to pick up on what was at most a throwaway, unconscious reference by Grayling, but given that it was made in the process of defending philosophy against Hawking's accusation of mysticism and irrelevance I feel there is nevertheless something to be noted.

Clearly Grayling had a thought in the back of his mind to the effect that only the "analytic, Anglophone" brand of philosophy can be considered legitimate. According to this generalisation, all so-called "Continental" philosophy stands accused of obscurantism. There is no need to retread the lines of this division in academic philosophy between the two traditions of "Anglophone" and "Continental" thought, which has been covered in easily-digestible form elsewhere. Nor do I want to want to enter into a debate about the validity of ethnically-specific names for intellectual traditions. Rather, what I'd like to attempt here is a defence of some of what is known pejoratively as "Continental" philosophy against the charge of irrelevance in a supposedly post-philosophical age of scientific maturity.

In order to set the terms for my claim that "Continental" philosophy continues to be relevant from the point-of-view of scientific knowledge I would like first to briefly sketch what I take to be the classical "Anglophone" - which is to say, analytical - position on the purpose of philosophy in a scientific age. Adhering to what Bernard Williams described as 'workmanlike' virtues, "Anglophone" philosophy assumes the role of handmaiden to science - 'responsible as opposed to frivolous' and working in the cause of 'truth', or at the very least 'knowledge'. Its principal methodological resource is "logical analysis" and its goal is, in the words of John Searle, 'the analysis of meaning'.

In light of this "Anglophone" paradigm, "Continental" philosophers often stand accused of a failure to engage with a universally valid scientific method for developing our knowledge that all scientists, and by extension all "Anglophone" philosophers, are believed to have adopted. Epithets such as "literary" and "theoretical" are often deployed to dismiss out of hand a wide range of approaches to "Continental" philosophy, from existentialism to deconstruction. In the more favourable version of this generalisation, "Continental" philosophers are said to oppose "scientism".

However, as Simon Critchley has recognised, what is at work here is a variation on the themes of C. P. Snow's defining 1959 lecture, The Two Cultures:

Literary intellectuals at one pole - at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension - sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can't find much common ground.

Yet anyone with at least a passing familiarity with the work of those labelled as "Continental" philosophers ought to be aware that there is ample evidence of active engagement with scientific concerns in their work, albeit not necessarily the same scientific concerns as those valued by Grayling and other "Anglophone" philosophers.

For example, in his short summary of twentieth-century French philosophy for the New Left Review, Alain Badiou identifies four 'moves' that characterise the approach adopted by French philosophers in the postwar period. One of these moves 'concerns science', as Badiou explained:

French philosophers sought to wrest science from the exclusive domain of the philosophy of knowledge by demonstrating that, as a mode of productive or creative activity, and not merely an object of reflection or cognition, it went far beyond the realm of knowledge. They interrogated science for models of invention and transformation that would inscribe it as a practice of creative thought, comparable to artistic activity, rather than as the organization of revealed phenomena.

No doubt this is a radically different conception of the scientific method to that proposed by philosophers like Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, but it is important not to see it as a rejection of science itself. Indeed, given that the analytical tradition has a tendency to reduce scientific practice to a set of empirical procedures, this creative conception of science could be said to open up greater possibilities for scientific achievement. In a sense, perhaps this is the true distinction between "Anglophone" and "Continental" philosophy, at least from the point of view of science - that "Anglophone" philosophers seek to rationalise and thus universalize the scientific method through logical analysis of its procedures, whereas "Continental" philosophers interrogate scientific practice in order to mine it for new ways of looking at the world (it would perhaps then be a question of whether this is simply a less eloquent way of making Snow's old distinction).

What appeals to me about the conception of science as it appears in the French tradition identified by Badiou is that it is about more than a methodology, that it allows us to engage with science without the prerequisite of expertise in a particular field - we do not need to be theoretical physicists or epidemiologists or mathematicians to understand and value science. Moreover, this radical approach to science allows us to use scientific theories and methodologies to interrogate other domains of knowledge, and likewise to use other variations of the intellect to comprehend scientific concerns.

It is possible, as well, to go beyond Badiou's initial formulation and see this trend in "Continental" philosophy diverging into different tendencies, reflecting attention to varied issues within the scientific landscape.

First of all, there is the historical tendency, beginning (to the degree that any historical perspective can ever be said to begin) with the historical epistemology of Abel Rey, Léon Brunschvicg, Alexandre Koyré and Gaston Bachelard. From that cluster we can trace a line either to the major revisions in the history of science undertaken by Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos, largely under the influence of Koyré, or, through Bachelard's successor as director of the Institut d'histoire des sciences, Georges Canguilhem, to the (post-)structural philosophy of Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan.

Canguilhem was also significant for introducing biological and medical concepts into philosophy and thus for promoting a physiological as opposed to a physical understanding of the world. He defended the complexity of forms of life and the impact of environmental factors. However, as Foucault recognised in an essay on his old mentor, Canguilhem was never seduced by the idealistic tendencies of vitalism and remained a resolute defender of conceptual understanding against the subjective tendencies of his former classmate, Jean-Paul Sartre.

These conceptual schemas were taken up, under Canguilhem's supervision, by Gilbert Simondon, whose major contribution to philosophy was his theory of individuation. According to this theory, the individual is the contingent result of a process of individuation, rather than the reflection of a set of fixed reference points. As such, subjectivity was seen as an effect of individuation. In developing this theory, Simondon drew siginificantly on principles of metastability in complex dynamic processes, such as crystallisation.

At the same time, the influence of subjective philosophies such as existentialism and the new interpretations of Hegel proposed by the likes of Jean Wahl, Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hypollite had a significant impact on the work of the more widely celebrated of Canguilhem's students. In the case of Gilles Deleuze, these preoccupations were linked to a unique approach to the history of philosophy and contributed to perhaps the most radical transformation in our understanding of knowledge-formation introduced in France during the previous century. As I have already explained in an earlier post, Deleuze's chief philosophical inspiration came from the trinity of Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson, and as a result his approach to science can perhaps best be described as critical engagement. In Deleuze's work, science, alongside artistic endeavours such as literature or cinema, provides a series of case studies that are the leaping-off point for his chief philosophical task: the creation of concepts. As such, Deleuze was able to defend a specifically philosophical metaphysics against the imperial challenge presented by the physical sciences.

A similar defence of the validity of philosophical enquiry has been provided by Michel Serres, who studied philosophy under the direction of Bachelard. To a much greater extent than Deleuze, Serres defends the basic similarity of forms of knowledge-creation, whether scientific, literary or mythological. Moreover, what Deleuze did for the history of philosophy, Serres has emulated in the history of science, providing virtuousic accounts of a number of scientific subjects, including atomism, geometry, thermodynamics and information theory. For Serres, philosophy is an adventure, a chance to roam the many byways of our understanding.

The style of philosophy exemplified by Deleuze and Serres has been a principal influence on a subsequent generation of "Continental" philosophers, in intriguingly divergent ways. For Alain Badiou, it has provided a specific way of looking at the relationships between our forms of knowledge, culminating in a grand ontological synthesis based on set theory. In Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory (and beyond) there is a strong emphasis on ethnological studies of scientific practice and the social context of intellectual innovation. Likewise, Bernard Stiegler has used these principles to inform a set of wide-ranging studies of productive technologies and their impact on our comprehension of the world. Meanwhile, Manuel de Landa has adapted an expressly Deleuzian philosophy into a thorough-going theory of assemblages, with particular emphasis on the principle of morphogenesis - bringing us back almost full circle to the biological preoccupations of Canguilhem.

Through this third generation we begin to see the tradition of "Continental" philosophers engaging with science breaking across national boundaries and long-standing stereotypes. Badiou, Latour and Stiegler have all found sizeable audiences outside of France, particularly in the United States, and de Landa has become the principal proponent of this new speculative turn in metaphysics within the English-speaking world. As such, it seems high time for "Anglophone" and "Continental" philosophers to seek a rapprochement about the value of their discipline.

The Dark Knight of Chaos

2009-02-11T11:36:00.020Z

This post is the product of a certain serendipitous conjuncture: having recently re-viewed the excellent latest Batman film, The Dark Knight, and re-read David Pincus's intriguing blog on the implications of chaos theory in relation to it, I found myself noticing certain similarities with the ideas expressed in a chapter from Todd May's introductory text on Gilles Deleuze which deals with the debt owed by Deleuze to the earlier work of three philosophers: Spinoza, Bergson and, most significantly for my present concerns, Nietzsche.

My comments hinge upon the key scene at the end of the film (and at this stage I'm going to assume you've seen it and are unconcerned by the looming spoiler on the horizon) where the Batman convinces Commissioner Gordon to undertake a witch-hunt of the "Dark Knight" on behalf of the people of Gotham, who are led to believe that it was the Batman rather than Two-Face that had carried out the murders of Maroni and his co-conspirators, thus preserving Harvey Dent's status as "Gotham's White Knight" (the contrast between the methods of Harvey and those of Bruce Wayne having been manifest throughout the film). As Pincus knowingly observes, this setup paves the way for a potential future film dealing with the Batman's outcast status, but like him I see it also as the basis for a discussion of the interactions between the processes of Order, Chaos and Chance as embodied in the film by the characters, respectively, of the Batman, the Joker and Two-Face. However, where Pincus is concerned with the understanding of what he calls "Chaos Theory" in psychology, my interests, somewhat inevitably, lie in a more philosophical direction, hence the conjuncture with Deleuze.

Before getting ahead of ourselves, however, let's take a more detailed look at the observations which Pincus makes in his blog. In Part I, he focuses on Chaos Theory in general terms – ie. as a model for the advancement of scientific understanding – and seeks to assert that chaos be understood as existing within "a range." Thus, as Pincus goes on to explain in Part II, chaos can be both "good" and "bad", and this leads him to move away from Chaos Theory towards the "more successful" realm of "Complexity Theory", which – unlike Chaos Theory – deals with "the interactions of many different variables" and is therefore "creative" rather than "bounded". It is this aspect of Complexity Theory that for Pincus makes it better suited to a study of our "complex and fractal" "social interactions" and he explains that its effects are most prevalent in conflictual scenarios. Extrapolating from this insight, Pincus makes the intriguing assertion that "when we make an act of will, we choose along a fractal path" ("fractal" here referring to a branching movement). In direct reference to the film, Pincus writes:

The batman [sic] would be a prime example of a complex, yet integrated human being. And in becoming "The Batman" he is both constrained, but also supremely in charge of his own destiny and his place in the world.

In Part III Pincus moves on to consider how the three main characters in The Dark Knight are defined "through the different choices they make." The Batman, for example, "chooses according to his values", such as his refusal to kill. The Joker, on the other hand, "aims to obliterate structure" by "attacking integrity" (often by attacking the basis of that integrity in values) - even to the extent of undermining his own "identity". Pincus describes the Joker's chaotic brand of anti-structuralism as "anarchy", which is closely related to his sense of "bad" chaos from Parts I and II. From this scenario Pincus derives the "existential question" of how "an ordered system [can] expect to defeat a completely disordered system", to which the – fairly simple – answer is through adaptation (witness the Batman's embracing of "totalitarian" methods in his efforts to defeat the Joker).

It is at this point that I diverge from Pincus, albeit in a largely superficial manner. This compromise, it seems to me, is not the point at which the Batman overcomes the Joker's "existential" attack, as Pincus himself obviously realises when he refers to the fact that the Batman "resolves his inner conflict", which is what occurs in the scene with Gordon at the end of the film. In fact, this overcoming is only possible, it seems to me, in light of the stand-off with Two-Face, whom Pincus deals with, quite explicity, "as an afterthought". This is because the form of choice which Two-Face affirms is "chance", or "randomness", which Pincus considers to be "not actually very interesting." Here my divergence becomes more fundamental, and it is in the light of May's reading of Deleuze on Nietzsche that I can explain why.

According to May, Nietzsche is the "Holy Ghost" in Deleuze's philosophical "trinity". While Spinoza, through his unveiling of "immanence", represents "Christ", and Bergson, as the thinker of "the temporality of duration", is "the Father", it is "the spirit of Nietzsche, of the active and the creative affirmation of difference without recoupment into some identity, [that] pervades the entire project" (p. 26). When in the final part of the chapter May comes to discuss Deleuze's relation to Nietzsche, he describes the latter as both "the philosopher far ahead of his time, pointing the way toward philosophy's future" and "the threat of nihilism and relativism that any true philosophy must avoid" (p. 57) – definitions with more than a passing relevance to the events of The Dark Knight.

May begins his sketch of the Deleuzo-Nietzschean "niche" by considering "the eternal return", which Deleuze – in contradistinction to many of Nietzsche's critics, who have seen in it a mechanistic circularity – described in Nietzsche & Philosophy as "a thought of synthesis, a thought of the absolutely different" (p. 43 – I refer here to the Continuum Impacts edition). The eternal return is thus, as May reasserts, "the affirmation of difference" (p. 59). For Deleuze, in a Heraclitean sense, "Return is the being of becoming itself, the being which is affirmed in becoming" (NP, p. 23). So the Deleuzo-Nietzschean niche comprises a philosophy of "becoming"; it is futuristic. With Deleuze and Nietzsche we say much the same as with Pincus and Chaos/Complexity Theory: that life and existence is a process, it is fractal.

Nevertheless, this futural philosophy, as May explains, leaves what is ahead "outside of one's control" (p. 62). Yet Deleuze's reading of "the dicethrow" as it appears in Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra offers an example of the future – as eternal return – in action. The throw of the dice is a double affirmation of both "chance" and "necessity". "Good players", as May puts it, "give themselves over" to this relationship. As Deleuze explained:

To affirm is not to take responsibility for, to take on the burden of what is, but to release, to set free what lives. To affirm is to unburden: not to load life with the weight of higher values, but to create new values which are those of life, which make life light and active. There is creation, properly speaking, only insofar as we can make use of excess in order to invent new forms of life rather than separating life from what it can do. (NP, p. 174.)

Clearly Two-Face does not live up to this creative ideal (although I would argue that Harvey does). In the "confluence of forces" that makes up the character of Two-Face (and the metamorphosis, just as in the case of the Batman and the Joker, is crucial) the "active" forces are corrupted by the "hatred" embodied in the "reactive" forces. Active forces, as May explains, can be both creative and "destructive", but in both cases they act "out of the joy of going to the limit"; reactive forces, meanwhile, "decompose" and "stifle" active forces (pp. 66-7). In the film, it is from the Batman and the Joker that these forces arise, as is clear from the Joker's explanation of their symbiotic, "Yin-Yang" relationship: "Kill you? I don't want to kill you. What would I do without you? Go back to ripping off Mob dealers? No, you... You. Complete. Me." Yet, as Pincus recognises, "randomness is important." In his terms, "complex adaptive systems need randomness" (he equates it to "white noise"). In other words, following the Deleuzo-Nietzschean niche, one cannot affirm necessity without first undertaking the affirmation of chance.

This is why the character of Two-Face is so important, because without him we don't get to that final scene between Gordon and the Batman. The Batman's superficial, pyrrhic victory over the Joker is not the film's moment of resolution, as is made quite clear in the film itself:

You didn't think I'd risk losing the battle for the soul of Gotham in a fist fight with you? You've got to have an ace in the hole. Mine's Harvey.

At this stage, with Two-Face holding Gordon and his family hostage it seems that the Joker has won, that he has corrupted Dent by turning him away from the power of active forces. Yet when he arrives at that final showdown what the Batman says to Two-Face is quite illuminating. He explains that Rachel's death was not the result of fate, of pure chance, but rather their choices: "We are all responsible for the consequences." Unlike Two-Face, the Batman does not regret his choice, and is thus able to affirm not only chance – the throw of the dice, the flip of the coin – but also necessity – the eternal return. Deleuze:

It is in this sense that the second moment of the game is also the two moments together or the player who equals the whole. The eternal return is the second moment, the result of the dicethrew, the affirmation of necessity, the number which brings together all the parts of chance. But it is also the return of the first moment, the repetition of the dicethrow, the reproduction and reaffirmation of chance itself. (NP, p. 26.)

This also serves to explain why the Batman convinces Gordon to help preserve Harvey's reputation, because it was Harvey who was the beacon for their hopes and the hopes of Gotham. There is no point lamenting Harvey's loss, Two-Face's "corruption". This was how Harvey himself reacted to the death of Rachel, and it led him only to bitterness and alienation: "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." Better instead to affirm, to follow the creative impulse, which is exactly what the Batman does by embracing his outcast status – he reinvents himself by reasserting what he is of necessity: "it's what needs to happen."

The Death of American Radicalism

2008-11-03T20:48:00.010Z

As I expect have most of a properly historical mindset, I have watched Simon Schama's most recent series for the BBC, American Future, with great interest. It has always been a source of great disappointment to me that academic historians have tended to be so sniffy about Schama's popular output, given not just his impeccable credentials but also his broad appeal. Sadly, history departments, much like many other cultural institutions, are more often than not excessively elitist in their approach to the dissemination of knowledge and the interpretations based upon it. However, it is not a diatribe about the close-mindedness of the academy that I would like to pursue here, but in fact an attempt to engage with one small element of Schama's analysis.

In the third of his four programmes, American Fervour, Schama assesses the development of religious faith in the United States since the times of the Founding Fathers and raises what to me seems an absolutely essential question: how is it, he wonders, that in a place where religion and politics were originally defined in such radical terms has conservatism come to predominate? In Schama's view, which, unfortunately, he never explicitly delineates, the answer to this conundrum is the passage of time - a fairly comprehensible conclusion for a professional historian to make, no doubt. However, from my own perspective this answer provides too little insight into the process by which radicalism seemingly disintegrates into conservatism; it is too glib, too little defined, too much (of course!) like cotton wool (it is accepted that a more extensive assaying may be provided by Schama in the book which inevitably accompanies the series, but I am not yet in possession of a copy). At a time when the American people are apparently on the verge of electing their first truly non-white President, in an electoral year defined by aspirational rhetoric, it seems incumbent that, like Schama (and going beyond him), we seek out a satisfactory response to this historical lacuna.

Whereas Schama searches for a particular answer to his almost rhetorical question in the specificities of historical events, I would prefer to deal with broader, possibly abstract generalities (I am not an Americanist and would prefer to evade the ire they might turn upon me for any attempt at ill-informed interpretation). Therefore, I would like to question what it is about radicalism itself, what it is that inheres within that concept, which makes it so susceptible to corruption, to its turning away from its apparent origins. The explanation, I believe, is twofold. Radicalism, by its very nature, is a dangerous state, one which threatens life and livelihood, and this is something which, quite naturally, society resists as a means of preserving order. Moreover, radicals shake this established order, demanding change and working unflinchingly to carry it through (Schama's film provides ample evidence of the commitment at the heart of the radical mindset, from Charles Finney to Fannie Lou Hamer). Yet, once the radical's goal is achieved, what then is left? Radicalism is only a finite force - teleological, if you will - directed towards a particular end point, but once that ideal is realised then radicalism begins to dissipate. Thus, radicalism both inspires a reactionary conservatism and creates the ground upon which a settled conservatism (might we call this liberal?) grows up.

This apparent contradiction between the idealised goals of radicalism and its actual outcomes is a manifestation, I believe, of what Jacques Derrida described, in a variety of contexts, as "auto-affection". "All living things are capable of auto-affection," he argued in Of Grammatology (p. 165). "Auto-affection is the condition of an experience in general." (Derrida also discussed auto-affection in Speech & Phenomena, his 1967 text on Husserl - in which it is a question of "hearing-myself-speak" - as well as in the later works which discussed ideas such as "the secret", "denial" (dénégation) and "perjury".) What this means in simple terms, although one wonders how much simpler it could be in the first place, is that "auto-affection" is the name for our ineluctable betrayal of ourselves and, therefore, of our developing awareness of others. As far as radicalism is concerned, like all other kinds of conscious activity it is guaranteed to betray its original purity through its opening up of a space for the recognition of alternatives, of other ways of being. The individual radical gesture is "always already" (that is to say, structurally) corruptible, mutable or iterable - open, as Simon Schama recognised, to the very passage of time. It is also exactly what Derrida refers to in his discussion of the tension between "spirit" (Geist) and "specter" (Gespenst) in Specters of Marx (p. 134), to give an example.

The point is that radicalism must constantly remain open - "to come", in Derrida's terminology - in order to avoid the pitfalls of sterility and assimilation. In practice, this involves a commitment both to exegesis, such as that provided by Schama in his programme, and to renovation, such as that which Schama suggests might be provided by an individual like Barack Obama.

On Naming: Michel Tournier

2008-10-27T21:20:00.004Z

The title of this blog is a bastardisation (or buggery, to be more accurate) of a comment attributed to the French novelist Michel Tournier about the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who is one of a number of French "thinkers" who will cast a not-inconsiderable shadow across my musings. Here is Tournier's recollection, taken from Mary Bryden's Deleuze & Religion (Routledge, 2001) via the Wikipedia entry on Deleuze:

The ideas we threw about like cottonwool or rubber balls he returned to us transformed into hard and heavy iron or steel cannonballs. We quickly learnt to be in awe of his gift for catching us red-handed in the act of cliché-mongering, talking rubbish, or loose thinking. He had the knack of translating, transposing. As it passed through him, the whole of worn-out academic philosophy re-emerged unrecognisable, totally refreshed, as if it has not been properly digested before. It was all fiercely new, completely disconcerting, and it acted as a goad to our feeble minds and our slothfulness.

Tournier describes Deleuze's role as that of sharpening and moulding the thoughts of others into clear and precise concepts (in the book What Is Philosophy?, written with long-time collaborator Félix Guattari, Deleuze in fact described the goal of philosophy as exactly that: "creating concepts"). He gave the impression of being able to take a material as fragile and delicate as cotton wool and turn it into something not just "hard and heavy" but also concrete and inexorable. Given Deleuze's status as a poststructural or postmodern philosopher, this observation ought to give pause for thought, and it will be one of the aims of this blog to overturn some of the caricatures of what characterizes poststructural/postmodern thinking, particularly of its French forms.

What intrigues me about Tournier's imagery, however, is that, despite the ostensible tribute that is paid to Deleuze, it marks a certain ambiguity or reservation. What I mean by this is that to talk of turning cotton wool into cannon balls is to talk not merely of the construction of clearly-defined concepts from "loose thinking", but also to suggest the transposition of the peaceful and protective into something dangerous and potentially explosive. Here we have the radical impulse of Deleuze's philosophy (and, I would suggest, of all of what I would tend to call poststructuralism - from Deleuze to Derrida), its adoption of what Deleuze himself called enculage (buggery) as its primary exegetic methodology: embracing the work of past thinkers in a manner thoroughly out of keeping with philosophical traditions for the purposes of rethinking their insights - "thinking otherwise", as Deleuze put it.

Yet while this approach is undoubtedly creative and full to the brim with potential, it also runs a great risk, the risk of doing violence to its founding ambiguity, because while turning cotton wool into cannon balls guards against "slothfulness" it also has the potential for blowing everything to smithereens and replacing old certainties with new replicas. It is important, in other words, to not allow radicalism to become a totalitarianism, and it is for that reason that turning cotton wool into cannon balls is a two-way process. Not reversible, as that would be sterile, but one which can nonetheless be turned back, to create further possibilities.

What this means, in the present context of this blog, is a combination of serious and playful strategies, not allowing the philosophy to become a millstone that weighs down upon the world it seeks to explore, but likewise not allowing the world to dissipate in the atmosphere. This combination is reflected in the title of today's post, which is a play on another title which fellow followers of post-modernism/structuralism will hopefully recognise... with any luck.