geriatric truth: or miscorrecting the miscorrection (r. dawkins, deleuze & postmodernism)
Recently, I encountered Richard Dawkins’ ‘Postmodernism Disrobed’, a book review that originally appeared in Nature and later in his book, A Devil’s Chaplain. (The article is also online, and can be googled by title.) [The referenced quotes are now cited at the end of this post.] In it, he justly trashes the baroque postmodernist pseudo-speak, citing materials from the reviewed text, obviously a far more extensive and pointed attack on the same phenomenon. But I was fascinated to see that the first two quotes cited in fact involve a fairly explicit and legible approach, although largely buried in the pseudo-orderly rubbish that marks so much of postmodernist intellectualism. He quotes Félix Guattari, a follower of Gilles Deleuze, and then he quotes Deleuze himself. In both cases, what is apparently being discussed or advocated is the possibility of a multilateral or non-linear system.
Since I am not aware of the contexts of the quotes (and am not particularly interested), the inferences I draw are inherent in the selected pieces. Guattari speaks, with apparent distaste, of the ‘bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing’ and opposes this to the ‘multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis’, which (apart from the ‘machinic’, which I suppose to be an adjectival form for ‘machine’) presumably implies a larger viewpoint, and therefore preferable. Now, of course, the language is not simply stilted hyperbole; it is artificially inflated mind-speak. But the first phrase should translate fairly directly as ‘a two-perspective viewpoint that determines linear links between spoken values, the classical rationality of historical expression.’ And the second phrase could be translated, ‘the systematic complex of a functional synthesis’, although I must say that I actually like his ‘multireferential’ and ‘multidimensional’, even if my word program wants me to hyphenate the first.
He identifies the orientation of the first phrase as ‘ontological binarism’ and says that the second
‘remove[s] us from the logic of the excluded middle’. In other words, he is saying that the dualism of traditional linear thinking not only precludes us from investigating given items or values in terms of organic or global systems, but in fact commits us to rigidly dualistic interpretations of ‘reality’ or ‘being’ itself. Simultaneously, he is saying that the larger view cannot be approached by the classical, linear rationality, in which identity and contradiction predetermine what we can and cannot say about any phenomenon and its context.
Guattari’s references and arguments may be more explicit or specific, but I cannot determine that from the brevity of the quote.
The Deleuze reference is harder to decipher, since it is obviously embedded in a more specific argument and involves an intentionally individualist language. But the basic intention appears to me to be very similar to the Guattari quote. Deleuze, it would seem, is involved in defining ‘event’ against ‘system’, and in that respect the brevity of the argument suggests that this is a momentary by-play or grounding definition of axioms. What makes a system a ‘system’? If we take a linear perspective, a system is in fact a congeries of linear series. But how can we relate the series if we have to define them as series or as separable? As such, we can only arrive at ‘system’ by assuming that the confluence of the series in part defines ‘system’ of itself. And, in this case, the system is neither specifically ‘stable’ nor ‘unstable’. Therefore, it is ‘meta-stable’ – something that has temporary but real validity. The event itself is part of the binding force. At the same time, from the perspective of the congeries, even if the event to some extent defines it, the event also appears as ‘aleatory’, that is, as a function of ‘chance’.
Dawkins goes on to cite real garbage quoted in the text he reviews, material misapplying and misinterpreting science or simply nonsense of its own accord, written in the high-flown pseudo-poetic, pseudo-intellectual twisted prose of the postmodern. But the question has to be, Why does Dawkins choose precisely these two quotations to begin his review? Granted, Deleuze is of that generation of French thinkers who formally introduced this mode of intellectual grok-speak. And Dawkins, in his zeal to debunk the whole phenomenon, would obviously love to take down Deleuze, discrediting his work altogether. He all but says as much. But, instead, he has chosen two pieces of writing that not only actually have an internal coherence and explicit point, but also propound one of the central themes that grounds the relatively small portion of the postmodernist verbal bravura which not only makes sense but also advances philosophy.
What is an event? What is a system? How can we emerge from the linear, which – apart from the involuted sphere of the professional logician – has little or no bearing on the realities of the world, and begin to engage meaning as it appears in the world, not at the tip of a binary moment of sameness and difference, but as a factuality at the core of a multidimensional, multireferential complex, an organic and global ‘reality’? Not only does traditional logic have no answer to this question, as I have said, logic itself determined, by the mid-20th century that it actually had nothing to do with this – nothing to do with these issues of verity and validity and so forth. As a consequence, the ‘analytical’ philosophers claimed to have ‘proven’ that these are not ‘real’ questions. But anyone standing outside the narrow initiatory confines of logic might have a different opinion, might say, in fact, ‘Perhaps logic was the wrong tool.’
When the scientist fails to answer a question using the tools and approaches he has, he does not say, ‘The problem is insoluble.’ He looks for different tools and approaches.
But the problem confronting the generation of French intellectuals who began to come into prominence in this country during the 60’s was two-fold. On the one side, there is the failure of logic. And, on the other, there is precisely the ‘success’ of the analytical philosophers at the worldly level of determining the language and decorum of discussion within the arenas of philosophy – largely regional – that they controlled. The French intellectuals viewed themselves as insurrectionary; and in context they were. For the analytical philosophers – from the American metaphysical club through the English rationalists and Vienna circle and their expanding faction of academic heirs – precisely the ‘clarity’ advocated here by Dawkins was the standing watchword. And to some extent that dictum of ‘clarity’ camouflages a specifically metaphysical thrust or force. I would not need to be aware of Dawkins’ atheist tracts to be able to define his worldview. He is, in fact, one of the pseudo-scientific ‘philosophers’ who are the direct heirs of the analytical philosophers in their more explicitly ‘materialist’ wing.
The academic success of the analytical philosophers largely precludes any simple statement of a general principle. Even the continental philosophers, with their alternate traditions of neo-Nietzscheanism and phenomenology, would necessarily fear the self-evident speculative statement, since it would inevitably be the short stick that provokes the viper. It was only natural, in that environment, to perpetuate and extend the often abstruse statements necessary to propound the inclusive and systemic viewpoints of the neo-Nietzscheans, with their emphasis on a global frame that embraces ambiguity and contradiction, and the various phenomenological promulgations that embody some of the core paradoxes of the Idealists in the context of modern ‘factualism’.
These jumping off points were valid, and undergird much of the validity of the early postmodernist thought. At the same time, when we look at the roots of analytical philosophy, we find precisely the source traditions that the analytical philosophy triumphed over, at least in the public sphere, in establishing its own dominance. Idealism was a washed-out echo by the end of the 19th century. But recent research begins to reestablish the validity of Idealism as a contemporary possibility, in part by referring back to the core paradoxes of the important central figures in the movement. The analytical watchword of ‘clarity’ began almost explicitly as a backhanded rejection of Idealism. Logic died as a functional answer to the traditional philosophical questions because it cannot embrace paradox and contradiction – unlike life. But today we have ‘scientists’ who continue to insist that clarity means non-contradiction, in the face of their own basic vocation which now, in the substance of quantum physics and relativity, has discovered and ‘rationalized’ the absolute paradoxes and self-contradictions inherent in ‘matter’, in the real, empirical evidence provided by the ‘material’ world.
As a philosopher, I should not have to make these points about science. Fellow scientists should be telling their forward compatriots to hush. For a scientist to deny God is as much an arbitrary expression of personal prejudice as for a logician to assert God. Science does not establish rules of causality. Nor does logic. But causality governs the one directly and the other indirectly. Therefore, one would think that there could be someone in the world who might be interested in the question, Whence causality? And if the answer lies neither in science nor in logic, that is not at all surprising, since both science and logic are derivative of it.
But the experience of causality itself, and our ability to abstract it as a principle, tells us that there are things we can say about it that have nothing to do with science and logic, but with the nature of our consciousness, in itself, and its functions in terms of our experience.
The problem with the generation of French thinkers that includes Deleuze is equally the problem of approach. Granted that we must begin to think in terms of multidimensional, multireferential systems or global or organic frameworks, we cannot attack the problem directly. The same difficulties that arose with phenomenology – the question of defining an event or phenomena – becomes the problem of how to define the system as a whole, precisely the problem that Deleuze is grappling with in the quote. This is the same problem that immediately trips up consciousness studies. What is consciousness? What is a ‘qualia’, a phenomenon of consciousness?
As with logic, if the question is wrong, the answer will be wrong. We cannot approach consciousness by phenomena or by system, but only by consciousness. What is the function of consciousness? Do we witness structure in consciousness? These are in fact questions that are answerable in fairly simple terms. But God forbid that we should make a simple general statement. In this morass between the postmodern and the analytical, we are between the assassin's knife and the pressing-stone.
What I like most, however, is the analytical philosophers’ reverence for Wittgenstein. Granted Wittgenstein seemed to write, for the most part, in fairly clear, if sometimes convoluted, declarative sentences. But the power that the disciples ascribe to his writing is precisely the gnomic sequence. Wittgenstein himself savaged Russell every time he presumed to understand the texts. And Russell was no mean intellect. No one dares to say that Wittgenstein’s thought was basically simple.
Ah, for clarity.
[4/20/2009 : Dawkins is reviewing the English version of Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.
The Guittari quote :
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, mutli-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all of these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.
The Deleuze quote :
In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather 'metastable', endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed. [. . . ] In the second place, singularities possess a process of of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast.]
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