Sometimes I miss that, and someday I might go back and do more of that, but for now, it is the shoot-from-the-hip stuff of blogging that I enjoy the most

All those finer distinctions wrought in careful argument, of course, are as important to philosophers and cultural theorists as, say, the distinction between the way certain kinds of cells operate to a neurobiologist. You wouldn’t want to confuse seratonin for dopamine, though both are interrelated and the complex nature of their functioning is still under investigation. The devil is in the details.

Or to put it another way — we wouldn’t want to confuse Posturetalk for Powertalk. If one did, one is probably Clueless.

Heck, if you can stomach Husserl you can stomach the evolution of philosophy’s language games. My apologies for overdoing the parenthesis parade. The blog is often writ in shorthand. I’ll try to sidestep the pomo whenever possible. But at least when talking about Autonomia, to engage in the discussion, one needs to use the language terms in which the game is already being played. This becomes especially true when one is writing between different languages, where terms have accepted English translations from Italian and French.

best indeed / tobias.

I am not very well informed on these matters, but I’ll take your word for it that class isn’t a construct PoMoers like (though for whatever reason the more superficial PoMoers I’ve met seem to be very Marxist too…and unreconstructed-Freudian to boot)

Darwinism… if you don’t like the proper name, let’s just say “evolutionism.” I think when evolutionists make the ‘blank slate’ critique (first leveled at Skinner, but then extended to most of the humanities beyond psychology), they mean that humanities analysts tend to look for complicated accounts of human stuff when near-trivial evolutionary-biological explanations exist, but offend the moral politics of PoMoers (for example, gender differences is a big and obvious and undeniable conclusion from evolutionary thought, but many of the more Marxist-oriented PoMoers insist on “genders are mentally the same” as a starting point of analysis). It is still a force in academia; witness Larry Summers getting fired as president of Harvard thanks to humanities lashback against biologically well-motivated conjectures about gender differences.

Posted a follow up on ribbonfarm, incl. a short discussion of your ‘exodus’ stuff.

I read a summary of Husserl’s stuff back when I was really interested in consciousness and philosophy of mind. Never got deep into it though.

Thanks for interesting conversation. Been too long since I left grad school, and I do miss it on occasion

In any case, the political economy I am working with has somewhat side-stepped much of what is characterized as PoMo in terms of relativism, subjectivity, and otherness as ethical object. As for the language, indeed it is only because I am, again, seeking to translate your concepts into a particular discourse with the usual conceptual abbreviations that it perhaps comes across as PoMo. It’s simply the aim of this particular bit of research.

That said, I should probably note that I find all kinds of discourses difficult to read, and often have to retranslate into a language I find makes sense to me. Once I do, like you, I often find much to absorb, think on, and analyse, whether it be by contestation or acceptance. And to this I think we can shake hands. If we take the Gervais Principle seriously enough, then we have to realise that we are both working within certain language-games. It all gets very Wittgenstein.

In terms of Other-orientation in this Autonomist discourse, the notion of the Other does not arise in the sense I think you suspect. Indeed, the sense of alterity is thought through the multitude, which is seen as the assemblage of all human differences bound by language and technology. While someone like Toni Negri puts a Marxian spin onto it (the multitude is the new global proletariat), a thinker like Paola Virno, whom I value greatly, thinks multitude as form without content, meaning that while the network exists, it does not necessarily mean that its human content is good, or determined toward a particular outcome (ie some quasi-socialist good state etc via revolution and all that). I am more or less interested in Virno (though Negri’s analyses are brilliant), as I think while particular forms of human association have arisen through what Autonomia calls cognitive labour, they do not gesture definitively in any particular direction for human society as a whole. Which is why I particularly enjoy your analysis of the Office, because the Losers, for example, can contain both Clueless and Sociopaths; another way of talking about Losers, perhaps, is talking about the multitude — the great lumpenclass at the bottom that holds both potential and disaster in one fell swoop. And the ambiguity you discuss between good/bad Sociopaths is, in this sense, oh so very postmodern.

Foucault is a worthwhile read btw — his work on disciplinary structures is well known, but the Panopticon as model of society is the easiest fruit to pick from the tree. His lectures on biopower, security, territory, population and governmentality from the 1970s at the College de France might be of interest to you. He is fundamentally a historian who pursued questions of a rigorously epistemological nature concerning the production of historical knowledge itself.

As for Darwin, I am not sure what makes one a Darwinian, though the tracing of evolution seems the basic platform of scientific understanding today. I would rather not be branded anyone’s follower nor follow anyone’s proper name. How Darwin’s research accords with what the old philosophers called free will — the general problem of translating Darwin’s work into what has been called ‘social Darwinism’ — or what the relation might be between oneself and one’s genes, might better be thought, well, in terms of something from Freud that takes into account whatever one wants to name the Unconscious. In this respect, and to be very brief, all the work of Derrida/Lacan/Zizek, among many others (Kristeva, Klein, Guattari), offers much potential in thinking how Darwin might relate to the human condition. In much of this work, the ‘Other’ is thought as an incorporated alterity, an other-subjectivity residing within, which means that one’s actions are never wholly one’s own, but always in a process of complex communication with the loops of language and technics that construct (active) perception/interpretation in the construction of (a) world.

This might sound a bit heavy, as it comes from a reading of Husserl’s phenomenology — the study of consciousness and the perception of objects in consciousness — but I think it makes sense to say that, following Darwin, I as a human am not wholly in control of what I am or where I am going; there is something else involved that is not only ‘out there’ but ‘in me’ and this bit in me that I know not what makes me ‘me’. But to say that this is a gene and that this gene knows something I do not is not quite right, and simply instills the gene with the old power of the religious deity and anthropomorphizes it. Indeed, the relation between genes (or what psychoanalysis calls Drives) and the Unconscious is one that Zizek often exploits to great effect by analysing film, and I would highly recommend checking out (if you haven’t) his -Pervert’s Guide to Cinema-. I would tend to think that Darwin would laugh along — and would give much thought to what has followed in his wake.

Thanks for writing. And thanks again for your incisive & witty work.

All the best/ tobias.

While I do speak PoMo well enough to understand most of what you wrote, I have to admit, I am overall very wary of this particular analytical lens, even (and perhaps especially) if the conclusions appeal to me. This is primarily, I think, for two reasons. First, I am pretty much a complete Darwinist, while most humanities-origin discourses begin with what Pinker and others have characterized as the blank-slate assumption (I just finished ‘The Red Queen’ which has some relevance to this conversation, as well as broader points to make about blank-slate-based analysis). Second, I find that most discourses also have a consistently Other-oriented politics. All discourses are political discourses of course, but I don’t trust a domain where they are all too similar

That said, once I recheck/reanalyze the conclusions of PoMoers through a Darwinist lens (which generally confirms them, and yields simpler language), I do find value.

Someday I might even read Foucault.

Thanks for adding to the lively debate. I’ll link to this post the next time I do some sort of roundup on the GP series. I don’t agree with all your conclusions/representations, but we are roughly, directionally, aligned.

Venkat