fear of reading

Tomorrow I am going to a reading group on The Production of Space, a book I haven’t looked at since my (frighteningly unsuccessful) dissertation and which I remember (frighteningly) little of. Fear.

Maybe this will be the thing that finally gets me to peek at the comments on said dissertation. Something needs to happen. (I nearly burned it on the fire at the sacrifice party the other weekend, but that seemed a little rude to those poor souls who spent time marking it.)

quick thoughts on arendt

Reading Arendt’s The Human Condition for our urbanism reading group tonight. We’re going to play it safe and have the group indoors, at Jay’s house, rather than anything more adventurous this time – the last couple of adventures escalated quite enough.

Initial thoughts:

- she’s thoroughly misreading Marx if she thinks the withering away of the state is in terms of a private/public distinction

- privacy isn’t opposed to the social, it is a part of the social – controlling who gets access to what information about you is a fundamentally socially-material process. This gets to the heart of the mistakenness of the phenomenological attitude when considering politics – Arendt’s phenomenological approach concentrates on poetic qualities such as ‘hiddenness’, rather than considering how privacy operates socially.

My Letter to Mdx Management

To:

Vice-Chancellor of the University, Michael Driscoll, m.driscoll@mdx.ac.uk;

Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research and Enterprise, Waqar Ahmad, w.ahmad@mdx.ac.uk;

Deputy Vice Chancellor Academic, Margaret House, m.house@mdx.ac.uk;

Dean of the School of Arts & Education, Ed Esche, e.esche@mdx.ac.uk.

Philosophy at Middlesex University

I write to you to today concerning the decision not to continue all programmes in Philosophy at Middlesex University. As a former student of the undergraduate programme and a current MA student I feel strongly that this decision is a mistake.

The department has performed consistently well in student satisfaction surveys and QAA assessments, as well as having an internationally renowned research department (rated highly by the RAE).

I wonder if you can explain to me the reason behind cutting the department? From what I’ve read, Philosophy is close to the target for contributing 55% of its income to the university, and with its growing international reputation could only be likely to grow in the coming years. Whether this economic contribution is considered significant, there is also the question of prestige (which may be difficult to measure, but is very real). It is important that academic disciplines such as Philosophy remain represented in universities, particularly new universities. A university that doesn’t care about academic excellence is no university at all.

Lastly, I should also let you know that I amongst others will be writing to the press to publicise the plight of Philosophy at Middlesex and to gather support from similarly affected and concerned parties should we not reach a satisfactory resolution to this problem.

Philosophy at Middlesex is too rich a resource to lose, and I hope you and the rest of the university management will reconsider your decision.

Yours sincerely,

Alice Moss

Shameful Closure of Middlesex Philosophy Department

Despite it being the top RAE-rated department in the university, and despite its successful programmes (for MA, possibly the most successful in the UK), Middlesex University management have decided to cut all Philosophy programmes.  Despicable.  If you think what the market offers you is choice, think again.  A university that runs only programmes that make the maximum profit to the detriment of its academic standing is no university at all.

Republished e-mail:

“

Dear colleagues,

Late on Monday 26 April, the Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities, Ed Esche,
informed staff in Philosophy that the University executive had ‘accepted his
recommendation’ to close all Philosophy programmes: undergraduate, postgraduate and
MPhil/PhD.

Philosophy is the highest research-rated subject in the University. Building on its
grade 5 rating in RAE2001, it was awarded a score of 2.8 on the new RAE scale in
2008, with 65% of its research activity judged ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally
excellent’. It is now widely recognised as one of the most important centres for the
study of modern European philosophy anywhere in the English-speaking world.

The MA programmes in Philosophy at Middlesex have grown in recent years to become
the largest in the UK, with 42 new students admitted in September 2009.

The Dean explained that the decision to terminate recruitment and close the
programmes was ’simply financial’, and based on the fact that the University
believes that it may be able to generate more revenue if it shifts its resources to
other subjects – from ‘Band D’ to ‘Band C’ students.

As you may know, the University currently expects each academic unit to contribute
55% of its gross income to the central administration. As it stands (by the credit
count method of calculation), Philosophy and Religious Studies contributes 53%,
after the deduction of School admin costs. According to the figures for projected
recruitment from admissions (with Philosophy undergraduate applications up 118% for
2010-11), if programmes had remained open, the contribution from Philosophy and
Religious Studies would have risen to 59% (with Philosophy’s contribution,
considered on its own, at 53%).

In a meeting with Philosophy staff, the Dean acknowledged the excellent research
reputation of Philosophy at Middlesex, but said that it made no ‘measurable’
contribution to the University.

Needless to say, we very much regret this decision to terminate Philosophy, and its
likely consequences for the School and our University and for the teaching of our
subject in the UK.

· Professor Peter Hallward, Programme Leader for the MA programmes in
Philosophy,

· Professor Peter Osborne, Director, Centre for Research in Modern European
Philosophy,

· Dr. Stella Sandford, Director of Programmes, Philosophy”

and in further ranting

I’m actually really offended by the notion of The Delicious Miss Dahl. I mean, Nigella is after all a food journalist as well as being a bit saucy; it’s plausible you might watch it for the food; it’s not completely gratuitous. Sophie Dahl is a model, famous for being on an extremely sexually-charged perfume advert. …This kind of pornified programming has no place on the BBC. It also has an eye-hurtingly twee opening sequence necessitating switching it off without even getting to the recipes.

(When I calmed down a bit after the twee assault I skipped forward to try to look at her cooking, fearing I was being unfair if she is actually a good presenter – but she doesn’t look like she knows how to chop vegetables! Her movements are all incredibly tentative, as if afraid of the food, and make me wonder if she only learned to cook for the show).

a troubling incident

Buoyed by a tutorial full of lovely praise and encouragement, I had a splendid time at the Rochester Castle for M.’s birthday last night. The bell rang for closing time, and we cheerfully ignored it, as we always do. There were a contingent of Irish traveller folk in the pub, having a wake for one of their number. The atmosphere was fairly sombre, quiet chat and one lass was singing mournful songs. And the next thing we see is five police officers walking into the pub, to remove the travellers. I’ve been at the Rochester Castle several times at closing time and no police officer has ever asked me to leave, and in fact, was there last night and still wasn’t asked to leave – in fact, the police officers seemed apologetic that they were there, shame about the travellers ruining closing time for us nice, respectable folk.
I understand that removing forty travellers when you only have five bar staff is a bit daunting, and I’m not so naive as to think there is no reason to suppose there might have been bother, but the elision between ‘might be trouble’ and ‘treat them as if they’re trouble, even if there hasn’t been any trouble’ perpetuates the state of affairs, and makes change impossible.

From Structure to Rhizome conference (Part 2: Stella Sandford and Guillaume Collett)

Stella Sandford – ‘Sex’

Sandford considers ‘sex’ to be somewhat of a wild card in the set of concepts, the founding instance of which is in Le Deuxieme Sexe.  Afterwards this concept crosses the channel, and at this point we have to ask if ‘sexe’ translates as ‘sex’, and what do we do with the English interloper ‘gender’.

Stoller proposed a theory of ‘gender’, which was adopted by feminists because of its immediate political advantage.  This also had echoes of Wollstonecraft and Mill – the falsity of the proposition that state of woman is determined by nature.

When the English language operates, sex operates in opposition to gender.  For the French, and the different linguistic background, ‘sexe’ is not ‘sex’.  ‘Sexe’ has the connotation of la vie sexuelle, difference sexuelle, la difference des sexes; none of which exactly equate with gender.

In the Dictionary of Untranslatables, Fraise puns that ‘sexe’ is a ‘cache-sexe’ (lit., hides sex, but also a colloquial term for a g-string!)

‘Sexualité’ is to do with drives, pulsionelle, phantasmatic; neither physiological nor psychological.  There is an inability to think sex.  This may lead the philosophical concept of sex to become cut off from everyday usage.

To return to The Second Sex, Beauvoir doesn’t theorise sex so much as define it as the site of a problem.  The book deals with man and woman, more than male and female – which is to say, it is an existential problem.  Not biologically, but existentially determined (which shows that a ‘sex’ assumption operated in French thought).

‘Sexe’ has no purely descriptive function, it is empircally inadequate.  The duality of it is in fact normative, prescriptive.

Sociological concepts of sex – Delphi, social relations in groups, material and ideological; Wittig, the political concept doesn’t overwrite the natural.

Any construction of a concept of sex must acknowledge social reality.  A single, transdisciplinary concept of sex would be anamorphic; containing the popular concept and its criticism.

The failure of Butler’s Gender Trouble was its dismissal of sex.  The source of this was a mistaken belief that the natural basis couldn’t be explained coupled with an inappropriate epistemological belief sex couldn’t be ‘known’ (in the sense of a Kantian thing-in-itself).

The discourse of sex has a transcendental subreption: substituting an illusion (which doesn’t refer to anything) for a real structure.  This can be understood in the sense of a ‘regulative idea’.

The possibility of a transdisciplinary concept of sex is already a homology – not a dispute to be settled, but part of the definition (a reflexive structure).

Guillaume Collett – ‘objet a’

Collett discusses objet a in two contexts – in the notion of the ‘gaze’ (from Lacan’s Seminar XI and XIII), and in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense.

The concept of objet a has an asymmetric transdisciplinarity, in that it imports its structure to the contexts it operates in.  It connects subject to structure.

In Lacan subject is constituted by structure, whereas for Deleuze it’s a self-causing univocity.

For Lacan, objet a comes to take the place of the phallus in his earlier work.  The phallus belongs to language, whereas objet a is a subjective object.  It inject subject into structure (and this structure is not opposed to physical reality).  In fact, it makes the real into reality; phallus was a point of lack, whereas objet a injects excess.  2 objects: 1. as cause and 2. as effect (phallus).  This cycle generates spatial reality, as you are lured and then rejected into space; it extends Cartesian space.  Its topological structure causes the non-extensive to become extensive through the Other’s gaze, as an included-exclusion.

The asymmetric transdisciplinarity operates in art history, in dialogue with Foucault, in Ruger’s ideas (space is immanently unified, then self-consciousness becomes excluded as a phallic stain and acts as a Kantian schematism).

Could structure generate space without a subject?  No, only humans have this understanding of space.  For most animals, space is composed by point-to-point parallel planes, organised by ‘bijection’.  Space is structure (Seminar XIII).

There is a semi-independent space on the part of the other (even though subject is constituted by space) – the figure-plane horizon depends on perspective, but it is the big Other’s gaze that structures it.  [There were diagrams from Seminars XI and XIII to guide this part of the talk]

For Foucault, structure is a structure of representation.  For Lacan, it’s ahistorical, an ahistorical subject of a drive.  Lacan uses various strategies throughout his work to distance subject from structure – linguistics, logic and topology, maths (knots).  As he progresses, abandons structure towards a theory of the subject.

In Deleuze’s Difference and Reptition and Logic of Sense the themes are genesis and structure, and laws of displacement (replacing univocity for the Cartesian subject).  In this schema 1. cause = nonsense and 2. effect = the event.

Nonsense is word = x to object = x (Kantian transcendental object).  Nonsense is only nonsensical when it becomes unified under the notion.

Libidinal entities are singularities – Deleuze’s theory never returns to the phenomenological subject.  Phantasms suture the acts of singularities on aeonic surfaces.  Sense = jouissance (as meaning travels in one direction).   Structure is naturally generated, the language of the stoics and physics.

Peter Osborne remark:  Psychoanalysis isn’t a discipline per se, it’s the science of a subject, not an object-domain.

Viva la Revolución

We’ve been watching mostly revolutionary cinema of late. First The Battle Of Algiers the other week, then Che (Part 1) and The Baader-Meinhof Complex in the last couple of days. How much fun it would be to be in a revolution!
The Baader-Meinhof Complex is an uneven film (too much to fit into one film, really; lots of terrible dialogue to move to plot on faster) but very acutely displays the reasons and ideals of the RAF in a warm light without making them look nice or heroic (Andreas Baader, particularly, comes off as an immature manipulative womaniser, which is apparently historically correct). It is quite extraordinary that Ulrike Meinhof was a grown-up journalist before she got involved with it all. One thing particularly well portrayed was that they’re all a bit rubbish at the whole stealthy part of being a terrorist – Meinhof wouldn’t have been wanted as a criminal if she could have kept her cool and not run off with the others during the prison break, and they all look twitchy and suspicious as anything when staking out locations. Chris: “What do you expect? They’re like a bunch of Manics fans with guns.”

One of the funniest scenes in the film is, after a spree of stealing things, including cars, their car is stolen. Baader completely loses his temper. Compare this with Che, which ends with him barring his men from driving a stolen car to Havana. Probably a nicer way to go about it, although while I was watching it I was thinking how I would have let them.

From Structure to Rhizome: Transdisciplinarity in French Thought 1945-Present (Part 1: Peter Osborne and Etienne Balibar)

The conference is set, appropriately enough, in the ruins of the Institut Francais (currently undergoing a refurbishment to commemorate their centenary). I must begin with a criticism, I’m afraid – no coffee was allowed in the auditorium. What kind of philosophy conference does not allow coffee in the auditorium?!
Peter Osborne opened the conference with an explanation of the more mysterious half of the conference title, ‘Transdisciplinarity in French Thought 1945-Present’. The key references were noted to be post-’68 French thought (for Eric Alliez) and the German critical tradition (for Osborne himself), and these references have a twofold structure: the ‘bad’ concept of transdisciplinarity (in its policy-bureaucratic incarnation) and the ‘good’ concept of anti-disciplinarity, the political-theoretical, engagement. So far, still quite mysterious, but it’s interesting to track how the different speakers incorporate the concept into their papers.
The first speaker is Etienne Balibar on Structure. His understanding of the threads between structuralism and transdisciplinarity is that they are a result of the undermining, delegitimizing impulse of structuralism and transdisciplinarity (and that, in some way, structuralism is always already post-strcutural). As transgender deconstructs the gender, so transdisciplinarity deconstructs the discipline. His talk is to be organized around what he terms ‘points of heresy’, to borrow Foucault’s terminology from Mots et Choses. He tips his hat to Jean-Claude Milner’s Le Structuraliste Methode et Subversion des Sciences Sociale for proposing this subversive, autodestructive conception of structuralism.
Structuralism is considered historically as the concept that allowed a ‘third way’ out of dichotomies, e.g. reductionism vs hermeneutics, or subjectivism vs objectivism. This stems from a primacy of object over method, of formations always-already considered as relational, allowing for an immanent theorizing. Structure is, then, the formal structure of a concrete system (functioning if not entirely functional).
The background to the development of structuralism were advances in mathematics (Hilbert) as can be seen in the heir to structuralism’s ontological and epistemological problems, Alain Badiou. The mode of inheritance of these problems revolves around whether the terms (or individuals) can be considered as concretion of structures, or should they be considered with a residual element (Badiou) or a line of escape (Deleuze) taken into account as disruptive element.
This anti-reductionism is inspired by previous epistemological breaks – for instance natural/human; a species of thought that can cross these boundaries. Galileo is the classic example of a theory. It also includes a ‘literalisation’ – primacy of the letter. The typical program of structuralism is to find a necessary explanation, in the form of an enlarged calculus.
Balibar insists that none of these characteristics could be carried on harmoniously – permanent splitting, dilemmas. It recognizes that there are at least two competing ways of realizing, and endless internal division.
Regading structures and subjectivation, the fundamental shift is from a constitutive to a constituted subject, and from there from subjection to subjectivation (a relative autonomy).
Is this movement disruptive? In Deleuze’s 1967 essay, How Do We Recognise Structuralism? we are urged us to look at the lack or defect of structures rather than looking on them as complete. They are both real and inconsistent, and no longer to be associated with the Kantian empirical-transcendental schematization. The key point of break is in Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, where the subject ceases to be inhabited by the universal.
Two forms of structuralism were Althusser, with his epistemological break, and Levi-Strauss with his view from afar – both a distantiation from the obvious and a disruption of the hermeneutic circle. Alterity becomes a prerequisite of knowing (in the mode of conflict from Althusser, and decentring of the observer for Levi-Strauss). Structuralism deals with how to speak from the place of the other (and the symbolic violence this entails). Balibar at this point tips his hat to Patrice Maniglier’s writing in Les Temps Modernes about Levi-Strauss.
Balibar understands structuralism as (1) a movement, in the sense of an adventure – deconstructing its own prerequisites, and (2) a new ‘French’ episode in controvery of content of philosophical anthropology, and in this a move away from the Kantian background of Heidegger and Cassirer.
In being a philosophy it is an anti-philosophy, which is to say it considers its problems immanently (the plane of immanence, consciousness appearing as a surface effect); ‘there’s no such thing as a meta-language’ and ‘theory will disappear in its effects’.
Balibar’s next contention is that there’s no such thing as poststructuralism, as structuralism always-already contained a post-structural move, and the structuralist question continues under other names. Structuralism is concerned with the limit idea of what deconstructs it – the line of flight, the point of impossibility, points where it becomes a disjunction rather than a conjunction, oscillating between lack and excess.
Levi-Strauss and Althusser are named by Balibar as the key figures of two kinds of structuralism (L-S as formalisation, Althusser as a heroic attempt of crossing border into a scientific but not quite positivist nondialectical theory of production).
Balibar considers the events of ’68 to be evidence of a ‘death drive’ of structuralism, pushing the subjectivities of the protagonists of structuralism towards the abyss. This is evident in Lacan’s descent into strings of puns towards his final collapse.
Structuralism contains a latent ontology which makes language (as sign) into the ultimate fabric of the real.
To return to Milner, certain constitution of disciplines is a given. This is because certain academic structures are the only possible structures for the development of science. Against this, Balibar insists that tendencies and countertendencies which are intrinsically division demonstrated hyperbolic extension always already implied in arbitrary disciplinary boundaries. The only discipline that corresponds to the structuralist view is critical anthropology.
[in response to a question] Structure is, precisely, not a representation. Structure is real (and thus incomplete).

I have begun to learn Ancient Greek, using an Open University course. Transliterating and translating classical Greek stories is strangely soothing and rewarding! I’m only 15 lines down the page and already I can mostly remember the alphabet, and have picked up some vocab. Slow work, though.

Saturday was mostly park-based, breaking only to go to the Mexican restaurant for James’s birthday. Saturday night went to the pub for a bit, and then watched And God Created Woman, which is an extremely depressing film about how everyone’s lives are ruined by sexism and not a sexy sixties chortle at all.
Sunday we had an accidental lie-in, and then a wander in Stokey. The Fox Reformed had an extremely effective advert in the window that merely said ‘Garden Open. Drink Pimm’s’ and so we did, while playing backgammon in their garden. I won! That never happens. Then we went home and I figured out how to use EndNote and pretended to do my essay while Chris cooked paella. We tried to go to the cinema to see No One Knows About the Persian Cats but I looked up the listings wrong and it wasn’t on, so we watched The Battle of Algiers at home (a fairly extraordinary film, featuring few professional actors and people playing themselves; a brutally naturalistic production). Col. Mathieu: “What were they saying in Paris yesterday?” Journalist: “Nothing. Sartre’s written another article.” Col. Matthieu: “Will you explain to me why the Sartres are always on the other side?” Journalist: “So you like Sartre, Colonel?” Col. Mathieu: “Not really, but I like him even less as an adversary.”
I was pleased to note I could understand nearly all of the French, and some of the Arabic (and many Berber loan-words; I hadn’t realised Algeria was so Berber). Possibly because it was an Italian production and so the speech wasn’t delivered at native speed!