The So-Called Report on the Conference...

For somebody who defended his dissertation last November and who successfully landed a contract to turn it into a book, I probably over-scheduled the last academic year. In November, I presented a paper on Sartre at the North American Sartre Society, and just recently participated in a panel on Marx, Heidegger, and Benjamin at the CPA and gave a paper on Badiou and Heidegger at the EPTC. For the next academic year, I've already got an abstract under review for the Radical Philosophy Association's meeting, which, if accepted, would make it the fourth time I will have gone to one of their meetings.

Now, I don't have a very extensive report to give on the conference(s). I was in Montreal for two full days, Tuesday and Wednesday, and spent three hours each day participating; Tuesday at our panel, and at  the  EPTC for three papers the next day, each related to my participation or a friend's: Wes Furlotte commented on a paper, I went to see what Chris Nagel, professor at CSU Stanislaus, was up to lately, and then I gave my paper. So, in total, six hours at the Humanities conference. Which isn't very much. At the last NASS meeting, I think I spent a majority of my time watching papers, commenting, arguing, schoozing, etc. 

From whence the question: why?

I've been thinking about this for a few days. There are a few answers I could possibly give, but I think it's related to the professional politics of large conferences. Nevertheless, I have two very different impressions of the CPA and the EPTC. Let's start with the CPA. I get the general impression that it's an analytic philosopher's  game. It's difficult not to get that impression when reading the schedule; and it's even harder not to get that impression when you start your panel on Tuesday morning at 9am and nobody's there. Yes, you read that correctly: Matt, David and I had no audience until perhaps 9:30am (and only 3 people passed in or out). Now, it was raining on a Tuesday morning, which is a strong motivator for somebody not to jump up and rush to a conference, and other panels didn't seem to runneth over in attendance. 

 

But let's put it this way: at some point you've got to make decisions about where to present your work, because these events cost money, and require a significant time commitment. So it's probably best to present work where you will get helpful commentary, suggestions, polemics, and contacts from people who have some familiarity with the subject matter (and you might learn a thing or two at other talks). Now, if the CPA is an analytic philosopher's game (and this might not be true in all cases), then it might not be the place for continental papers. However, even if it's not an analytic philosopher's game, the non-thematic orientation means that any response that you may get will be fairly broad. I didn't used to think like this because I was writing on Schelling, and almost anywhere you go, few people have any familiarity with his work.

However, I've started working on more contemporary figures, so my expectations have changed. Next year, at least, I will only be sending a paper to the EPTC. Not just on the response my paper received, but because I've had two good experiences with them. And rather than my rushed schedule this year, I can spend a few days at a few panels, participate a bit more. I know that this might not be the strongest reasoning, but it's the impression I've been trying to work out for the past few days.

So on to the Badiou paper: it was about the differences between Badiou and Heidegger on mathematics and technology. It's been a cursed paper. I wrote it about 3 and a half years ago, and the EPTC is the only group to take it; it was full of set theory formulas, and then it was intentionally polemical, talking about how Badiou's work disproves Heidegger's 'oracular proferring' on technology (the phrase is from J-L. Nancy). The commentator, Jonathan Blair, caught the rhetorical gambit behind the paper (the insistence on the opposition of Badiou and Heidegger), and pointed out how in some ways Badiou does not get beyond some possible Heideggerian objections, and that at some point, a decision is behind their differences. Which is the set up I expected. But this kind of objection leads us to a different set of problems (which we didn't actually get to because chaos broke out during the Q & A that had very little to do with my paper). 

 

The most important problem, I think, is that if a decision is the basis of ontological procedure, then ontology itself is a strategic discourse, and is not 'first philosophy.' I think the very problem is the idea of first philosophy itself; that rather than fetishizing the 'proper' beginning as securing philosophical discourse, we need to return a method of thinking totality in media res (which is why I'm not doing something like Derrida; in addition, this is going to have something to say about political economy...), without collapsing the distinction between philosophy and politics. One of the strong points of Badiou's philosophy is how he organizes a way of thinking that seeks to avoid the "passion of the real," which distinguishes his work from the 'oracular proferring' of Heidegger.

Historical Opportunity: Marx, Heidegger, Benjamin

Two of our contributors will be participating in a round-table at the Canadian Philosophical Association's annual meeting next week. Matt McLennan, Devin Zane Shaw, and their colleague David Tkach (also completing his PhD at the University of Ottawa) will be discussing "Historical Opportunity" in the works of Marx and Marxism, Heidegger, and Benjamin. We've included a partially updated version of their panel description below (the original is here in PDF format):

The collapse of Communist regimes in the late 80s and early 90s seemed to have offered a stark choice between two competing philosophies of history. On the one hand, grand narratives of progress and emancipation were claimed to have definitively foundered, leaving in their wake a plurality of individual viewpoints and social micro-histories (Lyotard). The collapse of Communism was also read in precisely the opposite way, as heralding the triumph of a grand narrative of historical progress, specifically that of liberal democracy (Fukuyama).

McLennan, Tkach and Shaw begin from the intuition that each option, starkly posed, misses something vital: a proper assessment of the concept of historical opportunity. Events since the collapse of Communism (the rise of religious fundamentalisms, the current crisis of capitalism) fuel the suspicion that we have neither reached the end of the era of grand narratives, nor properly accounted for the power of competing micro-histories. For theoretical and practical reasons, the present historical conjuncture renders a critical re-visitation of the “happy 90s” of utmost importance.

Matthew McLennan

Presenting a grand narrative of historical progress alongside an emphatic insistence on the importance of human agency, the works of Marx contain fascinating material for the philosopher of history. The seeming tension between determinism and freedom at the heart of his work has led to widely divergent interpretations of Marx, from the more or less deterministic, evolutionary historical picture of German Social Democracy and the Second International, to the voluntarism of Lenin, Luxemburg and Guevara. McLennan begins the proposed roundtable by arguing that Marx‟s philosophy of history is not only consistent, to the extent that the tension between determinism and freedom is only apparent, but also that it better lends itself to interpretations tending towards voluntarism. More specifically, after showing to what extent Marx was able to square his notion of the end of history with his emphasis on human agency, McLennan offers an argument that the Leninist notion of historical intervention, of “hitting upon the right moment”, was a more faithful application of Marx in its day than was that of the evolutionist faction of German Social Democracy and the Second International; this will set the stage for Shaw and Tkach‟s contributions by suggesting that Germany missed its opportunity to grasp the concept of historical opportunity, at least in the way Marx intended. Finally, tentative reflections will be offered with regard to the question of how such an interpretation of Marx might figure in an approach the present historical conjuncture.

Update: Matt adds a more recent abstract:

Matt McLennan surveys the development of Marxist philosophies of history, providing a schematic interpretation. Weighing in on where he thinks the emphasis of a properly Marxian philosophy should lie with respect to the question of historical opportunity (i.e. the "right moment" for revolutionary or militant activity) as well as that of eschatology or "the end of history", he argues that the most important advances in recent Marxism come from David Harvey. The notion of historical opportunity is enriched via Harvey to include a necessary spatio-geograpihical dimension; essentially, historical opportunity is interpreted as meaning that there is a "right space-time" for revolution.

 David Tkach

David Tkach's paper is a close reading of several sections of Heidegger's Being and Time, conducted in order to outline the problem of 'historical opportunity' in relation to the understanding of political action derivable from that work. In light of the book's three interrelated concepts of historicity, freedom, and the eschatological understanding of death in relation to Heidegger's understanding of a people [ein Volk], the result for the purposes of the round table is ultimately to call into question any possibility of political action that is directed toward a better situation for everyone. Thus, in contradistinction to certain attempts to rehabilitate aspects of Heidegger's book for ostensibly 'progressive' political purposes, Tkach concludes that it is at least problematic, not to say impossible, to do so.

Devin Zane Shaw

Shaw argues that class struggle is central to Walter Benjamin's concept of history. It is Benjamin's solidarity with the oppressed class that drives his critique of progress, and that orients his discussion of the legibility of dialectical images. It is only when an image is recognized as an image of emancipation that the history of its transmission becomes legible. Thus history is not the site of realizing Progress (Soviet Marxism), nor is it the site of a recovery of a past or heritage that has been covered over by an inauthentic understanding of history (Heidegger). History can only be written by blasting the events of the past out of the continuum of linear (or as Benjamin states, "empty, homogenous") historical time. Only then is it possible to clearly evaluate the documents of culture as both redemptive and barbaric.

BE prepared to get up bright and early; the panel is on Tueday, June 1st, from 9:00 ­ 12:30 in MB ­ S2-455 -- which we hear is the John Molson School of Business building.

In addition, Devin will present a paper at this year's meeting of the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, on Wednesday, June 2nd, from 3:40-4:50pm at EV 2-204. He will be presenting:

"Cartesian Reversals: Badiou and Heidegger on Mathematics and Modernity"

This paper examines the relationship between philosophy, ontology (or onto-theology) and mathematics an in the work of Martin Heidegger and Alain Badiou. Despite Badiou's praise for Heidegger's 'subtraction' of truth from the domain of epistemology, he attacks Heidegger's equation of mathematics with the essence of modern technology. Against Heidegger, Badiou shows that mathematics thinks ontology, because it must decide on what is. He does this by drawing the philosophical consequences of the continuum hypothesis. I argue that these consequences undermine Heidegger's connection between poeisis and ontology and his claims about the essence of technology. If mathematics is a thought, it cannot be essentially a projection of calculation into being or equated with the essence of technology.