Bridging the epistemological dilemma?

What Habermas has done to hermeneutic philosophy is important nonetheless. He suggests that it has overemphasized the likelihood of fully mutual and consensual understanding of the spontaneous exercise of rational control. Actors are imbedded in social arrangements that systematically distort communication in ways of which they cannot be fully aware. On these grounds, Habermas argues that rational understanding must also be exercised, and often is, in a more self-conscious and less spontaneous way than through the exercise of understanding alone. This leads Habermas from hermeneutics as such -- even when it is rightly understood -- to a historically grounded advocacy of social science theory. In pursuit of theory, Habermas rephrases Gadamer's approach to traditional rationality in a manner that emphasizes its impersonality. Because `reflexivity and objectivity are fundamental traits of language,' he writes, hermeneutics is actually suggesting that `pre-understanding can be thematized.' Through self-reflection, `interpretive schemes ... are formulated in everyday language ... which both enable and pre-judge the making of experiences.' Self-reflection, thematization, and interpretive schematization are interpretive practices that will at some point be applied to themselves: `The rational reconstruction of a system of linguistic rules ... is undertaken with the aim of explaining linguistic competence' (1987: 177-9).

Derrida and Foucault supply the deep justification for such poststructural argument. Whereas Bourdieu seems blithely to exempt himself from his own relativizing strictures, Derrida (1981) has insisted that the knower is simply a literate bricoleur. Reality, in turn, can be nothing other than a text, a symbolic construction that is itself related to other texts -- not to history or social structure -- in arbitrary ways. Indeed, texts cannot themselves be accepted as representations, even of arbitrarily signified referents. Composed not just of presences but of absences, texts do not exist as complete wholes.

Foucault's second critique is an analytical one. In his later work he insists on the virtually complete identity of knowledge, or discourse, with power. In doing so, the very possibility of decentered experience is denied. The subject, Foucault is fond of repeating, is completely constituted by discourse. In this way, discourse becomes both the basis for power and merely its manifestation in another form. Because truth is relative to discourse, it is impossible to appeal to universalizing standards against worldly power: `Truth isn't outside power, or lacking in power.... Each society has its regime of truth, its "general politics" of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true' (Foucault 1980: 131). To set about rationally to evaluate the logical consistency, theoretical implications, or explanatory value of a given discourse is obviously a waste of time.


The simple and dangerous dichotomy is firmly set. The only alternative to the fallacy of absent reason, to positivism, is a thoroughly relativist sociology of knowledge, an archeology of the historical conditions of discourse.

 Alexander J.C. (1995) General Theory in the Postpositivist Mode: The Epistemological Dilemma and the Search for Present Reason by Jeffrey C. Alexander, in Fin de Siecle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction and the Problem of Reason. [by]  (Verso, New York, NY). pp. 90-127.



Alexander resorts to post positivism? to escape the  dilemma/crisis of materialism v absolute relativism

Is the dilemma a product of language games not of actual lived experience...
As all there are are language games...
Will language evolve in the direction of responsibility in a closer representation of the self similar complementary aspects of our multileveled nature... i.e. beyond the excluded middle...


Eagletons discussion of Ideology in  "What is Ideology?"   where he dismisses the deconstructionists attempts to avoid closure as not practical  gives us an insight into the problems with language and capital... some of us are getting paid to produce and move language , some are getting paid to produce and move objects ..(not necessarily the same amounts)
Yet it is clear that forcing closure can be an ideological tool used to repress and trap people into the instrumental when driven by an economic system detached from social needs. A response to this is derive.(Debord)..


Space for public discussion of rationality  (Habermas,) that includes, not excludes it's complimentary opposite 'limb' for example the derive (Debord)  *is an example of the  extension of rationality (Derrida) ( away from the imposed reductionist flat plane, a simplification convenient to the coders/coding of the  flat binary database**  and those who 'benefit' from their implementation), in the direction of the complimentary, self similar, natural...
the (extension of) the dialectic?
perhaps it could be argued the 'irrational'  inevitably finds its way through the logical exclusions and boundaries*(), but the well financed  efforts to construct walled enclosures around  various 'expert communities' perhaps suggest many believe otherwise...


* similar to the way the bWo (Deleuze) mirrors the 'oWb' that is a culture driven by the hegemony of instrumental rationality (See notes on this post)
**a simplification but the tendency towards classification via binary categories is an issue  with potentially serious consequences in the context of fixing (arbitrary and profitable) oppositional subject positions...
*** Eagleton (ibid) offers a discussion of those theorists who believe discourses have boundaries and those (Lacal and Mouffe) who do not....?

Open Systems - Assemblage

The key for me is the notion of the “consistency” or 

“assemblage” (a flexible, open system, what Manuel calls a “meshwork”). 

Traditional systems theory, as well as its cousin cybernetics, was fixated on the 

notion of homeostasis, which measured a system’s ability, via negative feedback 

loops, to return to a set point after environmental shocks. The key point here is 

“stability”: how much of a shock can the system withstand and still return to 

“normal”? An open system, on the other hand, possesses “resilience”: the ability 

to form new patterns and thresholds, either as the result of an environmental 

shock or as the result of endogenous “evolutionary drift”, to use the term of 

Francisco Varela. What’s great about Deleuze and Guattari is that they give us a 

wide-ranging and nuanced ontology with which to think about the difference 

between such systems. And this ontology seems to resonate with the latest 

science. Stuart Kauffman’s latest work in Investigations, in which he talks about 

the expansion of biospheres into “the adjacent possible” seems to me to fit right 

into the DeleuzoGuattarian notion of an open, expanding, creative, multiverse. 

Deleuzian Interrogations: A Conversation 

with Manuel DeLanda, John Protevi and 

Torkild Thanem 

Manuel DeLanda, John Protevi and Torkild Thanem 

De Landa, Manuel. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory And Social Complexity. Continuum. November 14, 2006.

Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization 

Science (www.tamarajournal.com). 

Normalisation of Discourse - Deleuze

"The various forms of education or ‘normalization’ imposed upon an individual consist in making him or her change points of subjectification, always moving towards a higher, nobler one in closer conformity with the supposed ideal. Then from the point of subjectification issues a subject of enunciation, as a function of a mental reality determined by that point. Then from the subject of enunciation issues a subject of the statement, in other words, a subject  bound to statements in conformity with a dominant reality"

— Gilles Deleuze (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Deleuze - Systems Theory and Complexity theory

Deleuze has a history of research into Systems Theory and Complexity theory, which explains why I noticed him using different language to bring up systems properties, of emergent organisation: BWo, Univocity etc.. Why? I assume to avoid being catagorised with the Hard Systems Movement.   associated with Rand and the Military ..  (See Checkland for a History) (for good reason?) in the Humanities

The "body without organs": Deleuze... an interpretation

Deleuze has promoted the term "body without organs"  in relation to creative potential...

"When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom. ^[1]"

 there have been many interpretations of this


For me the "body without organs" is a term that brings to light the reductionist bias in naming... that labels the part while ignoring the whole.... it counters this by labelling the whole while ignoring the part (the parts are still there, they are just labelled as the whole)

is the hand just a hand or is it the body ? of course it is both! 

and likewise,  are we an individual or are we humanity? of course we are both!? ...

why is this so difficult to grasp the second  while the first is obvious? are we being programmed to deny that...?

Foucault intro to Anti Oedipus

• Develop action, thought and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.

Dont rationally impose it/ plan it let it emerge... via Random Expressive Flow experiments...

• Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and  an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangement over systems. Believe what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

Get over your critical barriers  allow flow of expression...

• Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable
• .Enjoy the process

• It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.

authenticity

• Do not demand of politics that it restores the “rights” of the individual as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to “de-individualize” by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The groups must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.

Allow Dynamic self organisation to occur

• Do not become enamored of power.

Don’t Abandon this mutual emergence in exchange for security of  knowing =‘position’

Non violent? Univocity ? Love?

Univocity - Deleuze

http://users.rcn.com/bmetcalf.ma.ultranet/

http://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2009/08/03/deleuze-spinoza-and-univocity/


(deluze is not always clear about it - no surprise there ....)
this relates to emergent natural (public) resources and constructed private structures (property)...

Deleuze: Colebrook

Why read him?

~human as imposed image
real as including but being beyond language
art as effect eternally new
philosophical creation of concepts that resist complicated exchange and recognition

Ideology get pepole to act againstr interests  hide oppression
eg m,arket forces are the only option
romance novels and patriachy
trancendental method?
historical composition of terms sucha as 'man' from intensities

eg desire is not repressed by politics - (ideology)
it is coded
eg coitus coded in marriage
p93

Liberation cannot appeal to underlying interest such as emancipation of 'man'
man is formed from specific and singular effects
release desires from interests

Ideology assumes dece[ption by power

Desire is power  a power to produce and become

one source univocal flow  p94
power

one plane of becoming

Foucault - Concepts

episteme  (Order of things c.f. wholism, system)


 Foucault argues that these conditions of discourse have changed over time, from one period's episteme to another. (Aside: Jean Piaget, in "Structuralism" (1968/1970, p. 132), compares Foucault's episteme to Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm


 >Systems of thought and knowledge (epistemes or discursive formations, in Foucault's terminology) are governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period.


Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy


Foucault maintains that the great “turn” in modern philosophy occurs when, with Kant (though no doubt he is merely an example of something much broader and deeper), it becomes possible to raise the question of whether ideas do in fact represent their objects and, if so, how (in virtue of what) they do so. In other words, ideas are no longer taken as the unproblematic vehicles of knowledge; it is now possible to think that knowledge might be (or have roots in) something other than representation. This did not mean that representation had nothing at all to do with knowledge. Perhaps some (or even all) knowledge still essentially involved ideas' representing objects. But, Foucault insists, the thought that was only now (with Kant) possible was that representation itself (and the ideas that represented) could have an origin in something else.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/




OT
We must remember this is written in 1970, during F's "political turn." He's backing away from archaeology, hence he will limit his claims about its scope. He lists 5 points.
    1) his object, the "soft sciences," had been neglected; they were error-ridden and evidence of mere "world views"; F's wager: what if they were rule-bound, even in their errors, as well as in their truths?
    2) here is a notorious backpedalling: F claims he is only doing a "regional study," yet he tosses around terms like "Classical age" or "Western episteme" quite freely. See 168 ("only one episteme for all knowledge"). he also mentions here his critique of history of ideas, which looks for "precursors": this is continuist history, of which Bachelard and Canguilhem had disabused F by insisting on a history of concepts, which distinguishes different experiences under superficially similar terminology.
    3) here F defines "archaeology" as different from history of science, which goes after scientific cness, and its negative unconscious, what eludes it. F goes after positive unconscious: underlying productive rules to "define objects, form concepts, build theories." Again, here we see Bachelard and Canguilhem. object = data produced by experiment (e.g., Galileo: same speed of different weights); concept = interpretation of that data that allows questions of how to explain it (Galileo: point mass: center of gravity); theory = attempt to explain the data (Descartes: vortices; Newton: gravity). thus concepts are "theoretically polyvalent."
    4) F asks that the book be read as an "open site", that is, as posing questions and problems rather than as setting forth a doctrine. F mentions three problems: change, cause, subject.
        a) change: F proposes three levels which must be respected:
            i) w/in individual science;
            ii) appearance of new fields of study;
            iii) overall shift in relations between sciences.
    b) causality: F brackets this question, claiming to have addressed it earlier in MC and BC.
    c) subject: F does not contest validity of study of scientific cness in intellectual biography, but doubts it's enough to account for the "immense density"of scientific discourse: he asks about the rules that determine the "situation, function, perceptive capacity, and practical possibilities" of individual scientists: what rules did they have to fulfill to be recognized at the time as scientific discourse of a particular type? Here F explicitly rejects phenomenology as theory of "transcendental consciousness" (central active point responsible for all meaning and historicity [as reactivation of sedimentation]) in favor of a "theory of discursive practice."
    5) F sharply rejects the term "structuralist", though he admits there may be "certain similarities." As we will see, ever since Classical times, the recognition of similarities is only the start of analysis that leads to knowledge; if left by itself, such recognition leads to error (this seems also part of modern episteme).

[have someone read the passage aloud]. Before the laughter dies down, F asks us to specify the otherness: what is the impossibility here, since each category by itself makes sense? In fact, F shows that there is no categorial miscegnation here; what is unthinkable is that they are all in the same series, on the same level, in an impossible "common ground." What Borges destroys is the "site," the "mute ground upon which it is possible for entities to be juxtaposed."

Here F touches on a profound philosophical point. The impossibility of Borges' encyclopedia is the impossibility for a certain thought to think difference in itself, with no relation to identity: in Hegelian terms, diversity with no relation to opposition, contradiction and finally ground. Deleuze and D/G will pursue just this difference: D in DiffRep; D/G in the heterogeneity of desiring-production, the weird collisions on the plane of consistency, "where a mustache collides with a differential equation..."

Rather than describing diversity positively, F concentrates on its disturbing of identity thought: he calls it the "heteroclite" and the "heterotopia," and connects it to aphasia: loss of what is common to place and name: Atopia. Shifting gears, F cites the place of China in W cultural imaginary: "the privileged site of space": the frozen culture, the place of tables (orders) different than ours.

F now moves to thematize the "pure experience of order." F begins with the table as a "grid of identities (Classical), similitudes (Ren), analogies (modern)": a coherence that is neither a priori and necessary, nor based on immediate perception. This coherence is that of "a system of elements": 1) definition of elements to be compared; 2) types of variation to be noticed; 3) thresholds of difference, which is needed for the simplest "order."

F now locates the "pure experience of order" (the il y a de l'ordre ) between the 1) "empirical" realm, the things exposed to the "already 'encoded' eye" (coded by the fundamental codes of a culture): e.g., the difference between human and animal, between animal, vegetable and mineral, between living and dead; 2) philosophical reflection on order: its origins, utility, laws, etc. The pure experience of order occupies the "middle region" between these two "extremes of thought," between perception (non-reflective use of ordering codes) and logic (reflection on order itself).

http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Spinoza/Texts/Foucault%20-%20Order%20of%20Things%20I.htm

Performative <> Representational

The issue of performativity<>representation, and performativity<>empathy

re Power in a discourse, to "tell the truth" can be seen as limiting your position and giving any assumed opponent/critique a fixed target c.f Barthes (IMT) , De Certeau 

Also Earth as a performative actor (Whole System) c.f Morphogenetic -Matter Deleuze (Thousand Plateaus)

c.f Game is limited by rules and endlessly mutable? c.f Nomic, Huizinger

Hypothesis of Colonisation of the "Performative Lifeworld" by Instrumental Rationality

Critique (Structural?)


Limitation/Colonisation of the "Performative Lifeworld" by Instrumental Rationality -


The public Discourse on Creativity (potential ideal speech situation) (Habermas) ... is subject to mystification and colonised by instrumental rationality in the form of capital/institutions/ expert interests in the form of language games and norms...


Re male bonding limited to competition/production/consumption?




Positive Response? (Post Structural?)


Although it may seem these systemic/structural  influences are rife and dominant there is always the potential opportunity for tactical responses and creative liberating acts...


Conceptually (creating new concepts (memes) (Deleuze) ).
Physically(setting up free dance spaces etc) and
Socially (social spaces/public groups)


c.f stratagy <>tactics Certeau

opposition to dialectical opposition - Deleuze Derrida

In his eulogy for Deleuze, Derrida listed among their exemplary points of agreement 'the [thesis] concerning an irreducible difference that is in opposition to dialectical opposition, a difference "more profound" than a contradiction (Difference and Repetition)., a difference in the joyously repeated affirmation ("yes, yes"), a taking into account of the simulacrum' (Derrida 200la, 192-3). 

Patton, Paul(Editor). Between Deleuze and Derrida.

London, , GBR: Continuum International Publishing, 2003. p 4.

http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ulincoln/Doc?id=10224763&ppg=17

Inner voice <> historical narrative - Deleuze

The history of philosophy plays a patently repressive role in philosophy, it's philosophy's own version of the Oedipus complex: "You can't seriously consider saying what you yourself think until you've read this and that, and that on this, and this on that"' (Deleuze 1995b, 5). He explains how he freed himself from this repression and 'found his own voice' through a kind of depersonalisation, learned from reading Nietzsche: 'It was Nietzsche, who I read only later, who extricated me from all this. . . . He gives you a perverse taste . . . for saying simple things in your own way, in affects, intensities, experiences, experiments'. Deleuze explained that it was in this manner that he began to write in his own name: It's a strange business, speaking for yourself, in your own name, because it doesn't at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject. Individuals find a name for themselves, rather, only through the harshest exercise in depersonalization, by opening themselves up to the multiplicities everywhere within them, to the intensities running through them. A name as the direct awareness of such intensive multiplicities is the opposite of the depersonalization effected by the history of philosophy; it's depersonalization through love rather than subjection. (1995b, 6-7) 

Patton, Paul(Editor). Between Deleuze and Derrida.

London, , GBR: Continuum International Publishing, 2003. p 3.

http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ulincoln/Doc?id=10224763&ppg=16

Post Structuralism and atomised postition

What about positions that acknowledge universal aspect to self

eg Deleuze (Based on Wilhelm Reich)

c.f universalising truth claims?

preemptive, stereotyped c.f. provisional (Kelly)

Deleuze: response to the linguistic turn Expression-Dreams-Realism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By-SPWKK0pg&NR=1

DeLanda

Realer than Real The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari

REALER THAN REAL 

The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari 

Brian Massumi.  

From Copyright no.1, 1987, pp. 90-97. 

There is a seductive image of contemporary culture circulating today. Our 

world, Jean Baudrillard tells us, has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of 

postmodern apocalypse. The airless atmosphere has asphyxiated the referent, 

leaving us satellites in aimless orbit around an empty center. We breathe an 

ether of floating images that no longer bear a relation to any reality 

whatsoever.1 That, according to Baudrillard, is simulation: the substitution of 

signs of the real for the real.2 In hyperreality, signs no longer represent or refer 

to an external model. They stand for nothing but themselves, and refer only to 

other signs. They are to some extent distinguishable, in the way the phonemes 

of language are, by a combinatory of minute binary distinctions.3 But 

postmodernism stutters. In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground 

them, images accelerate and tend to run together. They become 

interchangeable. Any term can be substituted for any other: utter 

indetermination.4 Faced with this homogeneous surface of syntagmatic 

slippage, we are left speechless. We can only gape in fascination.5 For the 

secret of the process is beyond our grasp. Meaning has imploded. There is no 

longer any external model, but there is an immanent one. To the syntagmatic 

surface of slippage there corresponds an invisible paradigmatic dimension that 

creates those minimally differentiated signs only in order for them to blur 

together in a pleasureless orgy of exchange and circulation. Hidden in the 

images is a kind of genetic code responsible for their generation.6 Meaning is 

out of reach and out of sight, but not because it has receded into the distance. 

It is because the code has been miniaturized. Objects are images, images are 

signs, signs are information, and information fits on a chip. Everything reduces 

to a molecular binarism. The generalized digitality of the computerized 

society.7

Advanced capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is reaching a 

new transnational level that necessitates a dissolution of old identities and 

territorialities and the unleashing of objects, images and information having far 

more mobility and combinatory potential than ever before.26 As always, this 

deterritorialization is effected only in order to make possible a 

reterritorialization on an even grander and more glorious land of worldwide 

capital reborn. But in the meantime, a breach has opened. The challenge is to 

assume this new world of simulation and take it one step farther, to the point 

of no return, to raise it to a positive simulation of the highest degree by 

marshaling all our powers of the false toward shattering the grid of 

representation once and for all.  

This cannot be done by whining. The work of Baudrillard is one long lament. 

Both linear and dialectical causality no longer function, therefore everything is 

indetermination. The center of meaning is empty, therefore we are satellites in 

lost orbit. We can no longer act like legislator-subjects or be passive like 

slaves, therefore we are sponges. Images are no longer anchored by 

representation, therefore they float weightless in hyperspace. Words are no 

longer univocal, therefore signifiers slip chaotically over each other. A circuit 

has been created between the real and the imaginary, therefore reality has 

imploded into the undecidable proximity of hyperreality. All of these 

statements make sense only if it is assumed that the only conceivable 

alternative to representative order is absolute indetermination, whereas 

indetermination as he speaks of it is in fact only the flipside of order, as 

necessary to it as the fake copy is to the model, and every bit as much a part 

of its system. Baudrillard's framework can only be the result of a nostalgia for 

the old reality so intense that it has difformed his vision of everything outside 

of it. He cannot clearly see that all the things he says have crumbled were 

simulacra all along: simulacra produced by analyzable procedures of simulation 

that were as real as real, or actually realer than real, because they carried the 

real back to its principle of production and in so doing prepared their own 

rebirth in a new regime of simulation. He cannot see becoming, of either 

variety. He cannot see that the simulacrum envelops a proliferating play of 

differences and galactic distances. What Deleuze and Guattari offer, 

particularly in A Thousand Plateaus, is a logic capable of grasping Baudrillard's 

failing world of representation as an effective illusion the demise of which 

opens a glimmer of possibility. Against cynicism, a thin but fabulous hope--of 

ourselves becoming realer than real in a monstrous contagion of our own 

making.  

Deterritorialization, Performative Identity :Ana Mendieta

‘‘[m]y art is grounded in the belief in one Universal Energy which runs through everything from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy’ (Viso, 2004:35), she refered to the fluidity of becoming. The body transformed into earth, water and fire is the aesthetic embodiment of becoming in Mendieta’s art.

In this paper, the works of a woman artist who got inspiration from nature, body and myths have been analysed in the light of some philosophical concepts. Butler’s approach to gender was useful to understand Mendieta’s drag performances. Blocker’s interpretation of Butler’s performative identity was reconsidered with a new look through the glasses of Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming (becoming minor/

molecular/woman/animal/plant). The relation between deterritorialization, becoming, and lines of flight in Mendieta’s art helped us expose the liberating elements. Deviating from Rogoff’s approach to deterritorialization in a cultural and historical perspective, deterritorialization was taken to a conceptual and existential level as the concepts of body, woman and land were also deterritorialized. In addition, Mendieta’s exile was analysed with Kristeva’s understanding of foreigner and the uncanny. It was demonstrated how the uncanny can lead to freedom using Deleuzian terminology of line of flight and becoming. As a result, besides going beyond Blocker’s and Rogoff’s analysises, we displayed how Mendieta’s works transformed the idea of a fixed and coherent identity of the West in the light of Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari. It is a typical question of hybridity forming a bridge between cultures; however, identity itself can be deterritorialized in a continuous process of nomadhood. In that respect, even today Mendieta sets a good example.

International Congress of Aesthetics 2007 “Aesthetics Bridging Cultures”

Deterritorialization, Performative Identity and Uncanny Representation of Woman‟s Body in the Works of Ana Mendieta

http://www.sanart.org.tr/PDFler/83.pdf