On Marriage Equality

Although we haven't said anything about the elections that were going on this year, I'm sure my friends in the States heard something from some pundit or other about the Governor's races in New Jersey and Virginia, or the by-election for New York district 23, where Republican infighting created, until a few days before the election, a three way race between Doug Hoffman (Conservative Party, and endorsed by Sarah Palin and Fred Thompson), Dede Scozzafava (the Republican who supported marriage equality and abortion rights, and that is not a long series of typos), and Bill Owens (who is a pretty conservative Democrat). And, if you didn't know yesterday, by today we know that Republicans won in NJ and Virginia, and Bill Owens won in NY-23.

And we also know that plenty of pundits are going to pontificate about what this "means" for Democrats and for Obama. But we know, in the long run, not much. Democrats either field better candidates with strong progressive values, or their supporters stay home. "Bipartisanship" gets you nowhere when people want the majority party to act like they are in power and accomplish their agenda. If you dither all summer while your key players, or wanna-be key players get paid off by the insurance industry, your base, your activists, and 'get out the vote' people, are going to stay home, because they know. They read the blogs, or even the papers. They're better informed than the general electorate because they are active in politics.

The only election that matters to Obama's administration is the one with the most consequences in human terms: Question 1 in Maine, which challenged a bill passed by the legislature granting marriage equality to same sex couples. Unfortunately, the bad guys won, and we have yet another example of conservatives using the referendum process to prevent the implementation (or explicit denial) of civil rights. It's a victory for conservatives only insofar as they continue their politics of resentment, which hopefully will lead to the Republicans being reduced to a regional Southern party as they drive whatever moderates remain from the party.

But it's also, in that case, a pyrhhic victory. Because eventually marriage equality will win. Young voters overwhelmingly vote for marriage equality, while older voters vote against it. It's the most important demographic for understanding the future of equality, and it also means that, after a loss, as happened in California, progressives won't get distracted by blaming black or Latino voters for their loss. Not only is it bad politics (let the Republicans be the divisive racists, please), but it's false. When it comes to statistics, especially in the 2008 election, I depended on Nate Silver at Fivethirtyeight.com. He writes:

Certainly, the No on 8 folks might have done a better job of outreach to California's black and Latino communities. But the notion that Prop 8 passed because of the Obama turnout surge is silly. Exit polls suggest that first-time voters -- the vast majority of whom were driven to turn out by Obama (he won 83 percent [!] of their votes) -- voted against Prop 8 by a 62-38 margin. More experienced voters voted for the measure 56-44, however, providing for its passage. [...]

Furthermore, it would be premature to say that new Latino and black voters were responsible for Prop 8's passage. Latinos aged 18-29 (not strictly the same as 'new' voters, but the closest available proxy) voted against Prop 8 by a 59-41 margin. These figures are not available for young black voters, but it would surprise me if their votes weren't fairly close to the 50-50 mark.

At the end of the day, Prop 8's passage was more a generational matter than a racial one. If nobody over the age of 65 had voted, Prop 8 would have failed by a point or two.

So, do similar numbers hold up in Maine? Yes. Here's Adam Bink at Open Left, as the results were coming in (the No side equals for Marriage Equality):

Update 19: Final numbers are in from [University of Maine]-Orono campus- 81% No, 19% yes. In town of Orono itself, we won 73-27%.

And, overall, 47% of voters in Maine are fine with gay marriage. But, it's a lousy thing to say to my friends whose lives are more affected by this bill to say, "well, just wait, some day their will be marriage equality." Which is why I said that, at the moment, this is the biggest domestic electoral challenge to the Obama administration (I said 'domestic' because the election in Afghanistan is currently the biggest foreign election that the administration must respond to). It's time that Obama uses his abilities and office to change the national debate, which means no more excuses about 'too much' being on the agenda. Too many bigots can point out in bad faith that "it's okay to be against gay marriage because even Obama is." It's time to get serious (for a good start) about repealing the Defense of Marriage Act and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and he can drive these debates. Yet, it is not just Obama, it is the responsibility of equality supporters within the Democratic caucus to address the issue.

Of course, the "moderate" Democrat would say, this would cost the party some votes. However, I would like to point out, so will doing nothing. Democrats don't deserve votes just because they aren't Republicans. They "deserve" votes if they present some kind of progressive agenda, however limited, that aims at protecting people's rights and making people's lives better.

Update: A similar measure (although for domestic partnerships) was on the ballot in Washington State, and the good guys currently lead 51% to 49, with lots of votes still to be counted.

RIP Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)

Pioneering French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has died. He was 100 years old.

Lévi-Strauss was arguably one of the most influential and important thinkers of the 20th century in terms of Western understandings of culture. Born to an artistic Franco-Jewish family, Lévi-Strauss studied philosophy before bringing a musician's touch to the subject of cultural anthropology. Cultures and cultural artifacts, for Lévi-Strauss, were like musical pieces. They were interpreted by him as unfolding objects displaying and betraying deep, in many cases cross-cultural harmonies in the juxtaposition of their basic elements.

Another, perhaps more pertinent way of putting it is that Lévi-Strauss read cultures as languages. Profoundly influenced by the structural linguistics of Saussure and Jakobson, the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan, and the sociology and ideology-critique of Marx and Engels, Lévi-Strauss interpreted cultures and cultural artifacts, such as myths, as displaying syntaxes tied to underlying paradigmatic structures. A given myth, on his view, is an unfolding in time of basic binary oppositions constituting nothing less than a worldview.

Lévi-Strauss viewed the heart and soul of archaic or so-called "primitive" cultures as a collective, perpetual activity of bricolage; a gluing-together of environmentally ready elements, much as a craftsperson or artist uses readily available materials in his or her studio. Myths will contain local animals and weather patterns; however, what the bricoleur builds out of these elements ultimately betrays something of the most basic, universal structures of the human mind. Myths from vastly separated cultures, on this view, can be compared with a view to distilling universals. To study myths and other cultural artifacts is, in other words, to study some of the structural properties human cognition.

Modern societies are also considered to be largely constituted via bricolage; however, Lévi-Strauss posited that another type of thinker/practitioner, the engineer - one who formulates and proceeds from rational/rationalized methods - emerges in such societies. It did not follow from this distinction, on Lévi-Strauss's view, that modern societies are superior; rather, he maintained a deep pessimism about the prospects of modernity. Among other things, the workable ecological sensibility he discovered in his fieldwork in Brazil and in reading ethnographies is distorted or almost nonexistent in our own society.

Much is made of Lévi-Strauss's "structuralism", and the arguably anti-humanist vision that emanates therefrom. Seeing him interviewed or reading his texts, however, one gets the impression of an essential, animating love of humanity. My own experience with his texts and ideas as an undergraduate was immensely gratifying; I got the impression that at bottom, he wished to include the whole variety of ways of human being in the same family.

A profound pessimist who cherished the radical hope of being proven wrong: perhaps this is a good way to remember Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Alberto Gualandi's "Lyotard"

I'm writing my doctoral dissertation on J-F Lyotard. That means I spend a lot of my time wading around in a body of secondary literature of vastly divergent quality. The problem is that Lyotard's corpus is so unruly; he's stylistically divergent, covers a wide variety of topics, consciously resists systematic readings of himself, and even seems on certain crucial points to maintain contradictory positions. This ensures that his commentators have their work cut out for them; it also ensures that those without much to add sometimes slip through the cracks and get a more serious hearing than might be expected. Granted, there are a number of texts which are supposed to introduce Lyotard to the novice reader and which, in my estimation, do a pretty darn good job; on the other hand, however, I've read my share that I think risk creating further confusion. How exactly does one introduce a thinker who at bottom stood for the inability to sum things up?

Alberto Gualandi, in my view, does an admirable job where many others have failed. He reads Lyotard against the ancient distinction between the philosopher and the sophist, ultimately concluding that Lyotard occupies an ambiguous position between - or rather, that he shows how the distinction is perhaps drawn a bit too neatly in the history of philosophy. This reading, fleshed out by Gualandi, helps ease the reader into the strangeness and originality of Lyotard's corpus. It's also interesting when considered against Badiou's reading, wherein Lyotard is taken to be a sophist, but therefore an indispensable discursive partner to the philosopher (and therefore, not due to be expelled from the ideal city).

Most importantly, perhaps, Gualandi takes care not to speak in Lyotard's language (or something resembling it too closely). As far as possible, he gives a clear, concise, roughly chronological account of Lyotard's main contributions to philosophy, without falling into the trap of assuming "the master's" discourse and methods.

I should also add that Gualandi's book is in French. If you can read the language, count this as a good introductory source.

An Interview with Todd May: Ranciere, Deleuze and Anarchism

In 2006, Todd May came to the University of Ottawa for a graduate student conference organized by the journal De Philosophia. He delivered the keynote address, “Difference and Equality in the Thought of Jacques Rancière,” and and was kind enough to spend some of his time afterward giving an interview conducted through email. It was originally published in De Philosophia, Volume 19, n. 2, pp. 1-4. May's most recent books are The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière and Death.

Devin Zane Shaw: In 1994, you published The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, a book which has taken on a life of its own. Anarchist circles took to the book because of the connection you draw between 19^th century anarchism and the concerns of French post-structuralism, despite their avowed political differences (for instance, Foucault rejects anarchism in the final lecture of Society Must Be Defended). However, the book does not stop there; it also proposes an ethics drawn from post-structuralism emphasizing innovative practices instead of the various ethics proposed in other philosophical circles. In retrospect, this book appears to have launched your trajectory of inquiry into creativity and innovation. Has the reception of this book influenced your subsequent line of inquiry?

Todd May: Certainly. Since the book's publication, I have gotten a number of invitations to speak in anarchist or anarchist-inspired venues. Most of these venues are intellectually exciting, in part because anarchism doesn't have the rich theoretical tradition that Marxism does, which leaves it more open intellectually. Perhaps foremost among the places I have been able to speak and converse is the annual Renewing the Anarchist Tradition in Plainfield, Vermont. In any case, the discussions at these events have been unfailingly fascinating. I've had my ideas challenged, extended, and twisted in unexpected ways. My work now on the thought of Jacques Rancière is a result of these discussions. I'm trying to use his work to help develop areas of radical democratic thought that were not addressed in the earlier book. In particular, I want to be able to frame a positive conception of egalitarian politics that is informed by the healthy skepticism of thinkers like Foucault.

Devin Zane Shaw: Before moving to your recent work on Rancière, we would like to raise a few related questions about the well-known representatives of French thought, such as Foucault. One criticism often addressed to such thinkers as Foucault or Deleuze, is that they lack a normative or positive conception of political action. For instance, it was noted in a recent review (in De Philosophia v. 19, n.1, by Stephen B. Hawkins) of your Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction that Deleuze's emphasis on experimentation, despite its exhilarating possibilities, could also lead toward a resignation “to the endless production of monstrosity.” I take it that the shift toward the thought of Rancière aims to remedy these problems regarding how to evaluate political actions?

Todd May: Exactly, although we need to be careful here in keeping the proper distinctions alive among different thinkers. Deleuze has a normative view. In fact, my book argues that his view is largely normative. It not only commends experimentation with the possibilities the virtual offers, but also and more deeply seeks to design an ontology that responds to his larger normative orientation. The problem cited by the reviewer, and I believe it has political bearing, is that Deleuze does not distinguish among those experiments or give any criteria for distinguishing the better and the worse. By contrast, Foucault's writing, while normatively inflected, does not offer an overt normative view. However, critique is all over the place in his writings, particularly the genealogical ones. Foucault was always reticent to speak in openly normative terms. I think this is because he worried about becoming another Sartre, addressing the world from on high. (My book on the moral theory of post-structuralism argues that this reticence is misplaced.) However, if one looks into his normative orientation, I think one will find that it can be taken in a direction of the kind Rancière articulates. Foucault's politics, in short, is radically egalitarian. What Rancière has accomplished is to think that egalitarianism through more rigorously.

Mark Raymond Brown: In the conclusion of French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Gary Gutting observes that the concern with individual freedom as a concrete lived reality has, more than anything else, maintained the distinctiveness of French philosophy throughout the twentieth century. This is certainly a debatable claim, but for the sake of argument I'd like to pose the following questions to you: as diverse as the thought of Sartre, Foucault, and Deleuze may be, the one thing that united them was their political activity, as on several occasions they found themselves involved in political protests. On each occasion they were protesting against the state. Yet, with these thinkers, aside from implicit or explicit criticisms of the state, one does not find any concrete political outline for a social organization that would foster individual freedom. Is such a proposal possible, or even necessary? Or can the idea of individual freedom be used only as a tool to critique existing social policies? Related to these queries is another: is there any positive relation between twentieth century French philosophy, as concerned with individual freedom, and democracy?

Todd May: I'm hesitant to introduce the idea of individual freedom as a goal of political activism for several reasons. First, in Deleuze's case, the concept of the individual as a centerpiece of politics is put in question. Deleuze's ontology has among its central purposes to make it a point of indifference whether to address organization at the level of the individual, pre-individual, or supra-individual. Foucault is less concerned with the individual per se than with the subject. One can read him as seeking to return from the subject to individual freedom (Pierre Hadot does), but I'm not sure that's an accurate interpretation. Foucault does speak of freedom, but the contexts in which he does so seem to focus as much on a collective creation as on individual freedom.

The question of democracy is a distinct one altogether. It makes a central appearance in Rancière's thought, although not so much in that of Foucault and Deleuze. I believe the latter two thinkers probably seek to avoid it because of the amount of baggage that concept brings with it, while Rancière instead takes as his project a redefinition. I mentioned above that I believe Foucault can be thought in terms of a Rancièrean democracy, although I would hesitate to say as much for Deleuze.

Devin Zane Shaw: Here I think it is appropriate to ask: how would you frame a positive conception of egalitarian politics through Rancière's redefinition of democracy? As Rancière frames it, democracy is not a particular regime, but an egalitarian presupposition which underlies any particular regime such as parliamentarianism.

Todd May: Rancière argues that the egalitarian presupposition does underlie all political regimes, but he also say something else that's important for understanding his thought. Political regimes tend both to presuppose and to deny the presupposition of everyone's equality. They presuppose it when they assume that people will be able to understand and carry out their orders; they deny it through the creation and maintenance of hierarchies that give orders in the first place. That helps offer a clue as to the redefinition of democracy. If political regimes--Rancière calls them police orders--are based on hierarchies, then democracy is based on the presupposition of equality, a presupposition that is expressed rather than denied. Taking matters this way, it can be seen that the creation of equality is a matter for the people, for those who find themselves at the wrong end of hierarchies. This does not mean that any particular class of people is the people. Just as a society has different hierarchies--racial, economic, gender--so it can have different democratic movements and different peoples. In Rancière's view, these democratic movements form communities, but they cannot form institutions without betraying their democratic character. I'm not sure he's right about this, but I'm not sure he's wrong either. He seems to think that as a matter of principle democracies cannot form institutions. I tend toward thinking that the question of democratic institutions can only be answered by experimenting with them and seeing what turns up.

Devin Zane Shaw: In your presentation at our conference, “Difference and Equality in the Thought of Jacques Rancière,” you expressed a hesitancy regarding Rancière's use of the concept of the speaking being. Unlike many of the other authors who appear in your work, and who we have already mentioned above, who are reticent regarding the 'speaking being,' Rancière engages this concept-- often associated with the work of Lacan-- to twist it in a new direction. This connection of political actors to language as speaking beings is central to the argument of Disagreement. Elsewhere, Rancière goes so far as to state that “Man is a political animal because he is a literary animal who lets himself be diverted from his 'natural' purpose by the power of words.” (The Politics of Aesthetics, 39) By downplaying the role of speech (and I mean this in a broad sense, including both speech and writing), don't we lose something integral to Rancière's approach?

Todd May: It depends on what is meant by downplaying. If I were to say that speaking is not important, I would certainly be doing harm to Rancière's thought. My idea is to embed speaking into something wider. People are capable of creating meaningful lives in concert with others. This requires speech, but is not reducible to it. In the quote you offered above, if we replace the term literary with creative, and see the power of words as a centrally important way in which we are diverted, then I think we arrive at the point I'm trying to make. I don't want to reduce language and speaking to something else; I want to avoid a reductionism to language and speaking.

Devin Zane Shaw: Finally, I would like to return to your comment about democratic institutions. You have emphasized the role of experimentation, but I wonder how experimentation and institutional practices can be compatible. Yet, I would like to add, I don't know if radical approaches to politics can continue to insist that democratic practices must remain inimical to institutionalization. To put this in blunter terms, does not the constant emphasis on resistance accept that capitalist-parliamentarianism is the name of the game?

Todd May: I have this concern as well. If we define resistance in such a way as to preclude institutionalization at the outset, which Rancière seems to do, then resistance becomes in a strange way parasitical upon what it is resisting. This does not mean that things can't get better, but the horizon of their improvement is always the dominant political and economic structure. However, I don't think experimentation, on the other hand, is inimical to institutionalization. We can experiment with institution-building, seeking to discover what kinds of institutions under what kinds of conditions maintain the presupposition of equality. One can't say in advance what those institutions would look like; that's the point of a democratic politics. Democratic institutions must emerge from the political activity of those involved in struggle. But I don't see why they should be precluded at the outset. We don't know what they are going to look like and how or even whether they will work. If they do arise, what is important is that we maintain a Foucaultian vigilance about them: watch where they are going, what they are giving rise to, what other practices and institutions they are intersecting with and with what results.

The Pynchon Review

There's nothing like an extra hour of sleep, unless it's catching up on the last week at Notes Taken, which includes Matt McLennan discussing Andrea Dworkin and Martha Nussbaum, and the second part of my lectures on Schelling's period of absolute idealism (and part one is here). I don't know how Matt's lecture went, but I can say that first year students are not prepared for absolute idealism. Including Schelling in the course can only indicate how foggy my head was in those final days of the dissertation. However, adding Rousseau seems to have been a good choice. Maybe we just should have read Zizek on ideology or Paul Mason talking about his favorite books.

The funny part about writing the Sunday review is that it seems to take on a theme whether I like it or not. This week, it just ended up being about Thomas Pynchon.

• Here he is, on whether or not it is ok to be a luddite.
• Re: Pynchon: on the Simpsons.
  
• Also re: Pynchon: I'm not sure whether or not Little, Brown and Co. understand the humor in posting a silhouette in the place of Pynchon's photo on their underdeveloped website. Note that the possibility of viewing his books, on this page, are 'coming soon!' No wonder P-chon published his latest work with Penguin. Inherent Vice even has a 'trailer.' The voice? It's his. And there's a soundtrack?
  
• Re: re: Pynchon: from Corey, a link to an interpretation of Against the Day, if not all his works.
• Re: re: re: Pynchon: there is a Pynchon wiki. Kill time at your own risk.
  
• And the non-Pynchon bonus: Dave Eggers reviewing a posthumous anthology of Kurt Vonnegut's work.

Paul Mason Reviews Vineland

Well, not really, but Mason hits the nail on the head. They may as well print this on the back cover of the next edition of Thomas Pynchon's Vineland:

If you sat down and free-associated the history of American popular culture, while simultaneously trying to explain the defeat of the 1968 generation and the fatal attraction of the Washington elite, smoking dope and watching a DVD box set of the early Star Trek, you would be in the place where Pynchon begins this book. I am haunted by his satire of idealism and betrayal, kung fu, postmodernism and grief.

I don't know if I could summarize it any better. It's also worth reading Mason's other seven 'desert island books.' The website is called Red Pepper, and just from this one page, it looks like it's worth checking out.

Zizek on Health Care and Ideology

Just having acquired First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, I found, via Verso UK's blog, an interview with Slavoj Zizek. I've found some of his latest work to be somewhat uneven. Read, for instance, his list of demands at the end of In Defense of Lost Causes, and try and figure out how these points are supposed to be implemented. Lately, however, Zizek has returned to analyzing ideology, which is always his strong point. For all the right reasons, he states (see also the comments of this co-star of The Examined Life):

This is was the point of my big fight with Simon Critchley. I think it's too easy to play this moralistic game - state power is corrupted, so let's withdraw into this role of ethical critic of power. Here, I'm an old Hegelian. I hate the position of "beautiful soul", which is: ""I remain outside, in a safe place; I don't want to dirty my hands." In this ironic sense, I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn't afraid to dirty his hands. That's what I miss in today's left. When you get power, if you can, grab it, even if it is a desperate situation. Do whatever is possible. This is why I supported - ok, my support doesn't mean anything, but as a public gesture- Obama. I think the battle that he is fighting now for healthcare is extremely important, because it concerns the very core of the ruling ideology. The real core of the anti-Obama campaign is freedom of choice. And the lesson, if he wins, is how freedom of choice is something beautiful, but works only against a very thick background of regulations, ethical presuppositions, economic conditions and so on. This is the problem. As I like to emphasise here in the States, there are freedoms of choice which I am glad to renounce. I like to do a parallel between healthcare and water and electricity. Yes, you can say I don't have a choice in choosing my water provider. It's imposed by where I live. But, my god, I gladly renounce this choice. I prefer to have some basic choices made by society - water, electricity, and some elementary healthcare.

What Zizek doesn't mention is that the Democrats seem to be the only people who don't understand the debate over health care to be an ideological battle.(of course, some of them have been well paid off by the insurance industry). The Republicans know that, which is why they have spent so much time trying to defeat it. The very core of conservative ideology is that, with the exception of the military, the government is bad, and that it should (although they don't say it like this) force public property into private markets. The very basic step of fighting this position is to show why water, electricity and health care are public goods that need to be distributed in a regulated and more egalitarian manner. If there were disagreements between my friends and I on the left during the election season, it was about whether Obama being elected mattered. They said no. I still say that, with a few of his legislative plans, his administration can overturn the ideological coordinates that have dominated American political life for 40 years. This is a positive step. It is still capitalism with a human face, but it is also a failure on the left to not show how civil and cultural struggle is also connected to economic struggle. And on this point, I agree with Zizek: it's not only a practical failure but also a theoretical failure. Which is why I started reading up again on economics.

Which is also why we should question the expectation that the legislative process can accomplish this without popular support. Recall that Jim Clyburn called health care a civil right. The comparison is apt, because Clyburn is really saying that if people want change, it cannot be fully accomplished without popular demonstration. The precise point: history is made from below, not by politicians. We didn't have civil rights legislation in the 1960s because politicians felt like they should be more egalitarian, we had civil rights legislation because people were out in the streets showing that the system oppressing African Americans could no longer function without open and explicit violence. But Clyburn also noted the the backlash is going to be ugly, as it was in the town hall disruptions over the summer.

Now there is a limit to the comparison, but the point is that the public option rises or falls on people's involvement. The good part is that people have been getting out to convince others that the public option is the key component of making it health care reform and not insurance industry reform. Not only in practice, but in theory.

Schelling: Absolute Idealism and Art

The following is the second part of my reading of Schelling's System of Philosophy in General and Philosophy of Nature in Particular. The first part, in which I discuss the first principle of Schelling's absolute idealism, or identity-philosophy, can be found here. Unlike the first post, which is primarily the lecture notes that I give to students, I've expanded this post to include more information about Schelling's philosophy of art in general, and a footnote about the use of quantity and quality in his deduction of the finite world within the absolute. I will spare my class the discussion on the categories.

1. The "Double Life" of the Individual

In the last lecture, we left off with Schelling’s first principle as it is found in the System der gesamten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere (the Wurzburg Lectures of 1804). As we have seen, Schelling argues, through an indirect proof, that the only possible presupposition for philosophy is that knower and what is known are the same, or identical: God or Reason is only the self-recognition or affirmation of all things as One. All other presuppositions, he argues, lead to either an absurdity or contradiction.

However, by arguing that the first principle of all philosophy is the identity of the One, Schelling is left with the difficult task of showing how finite things, like plants, animals, and you and I come to be. The ‘bridge,’ as I have called it, from the infinite to the finite, is what Schelling calls life. Schelling, over the course of 1801-1806 gives various different answers to this problem, and this time, his solution is a kind of life-force in the universe that each particular being takes part in. Now, of course, this sounds like some kind of new age philosophy, but Schelling is not opposing some mystical ‘force’ to Reason; for him there is no difference between God and Reason. Like Spinoza, this leads people to read Schelling as both an idealist with mystical tendencies and as materialist (so on the one hand, he spiritualizes matter, or on the other, he reduces all ‘divine’ ideas to material explanations). I think Schelling is trying to show, however problematically, that there is no difference between the two. As a contemporary of Schelling’s states, “Schelling is reproached with almost always being in suspense between idealism, realism, and even materialism.” Suspense, which I have emphasized here, probably says it best.

To deduce life, Schelling argues that a particular being is the negation of its Idea or archetype. Life is the middle point between being and nonbeing. I will begin by summarizing his argument (which is primarily on p. 177/6: 190).* Schelling wants to show that “the universe, by virtue of containing all forms, is none of them in particular but also that, precisely in containing all of them, it is none of them” (p. 170/6: 181). The language already determines the direction of Schelling’s argument: the absolute is all, but it is not one of them. A particular being is not in-itself, it is only in-the-absolute. As Schelling argues, each particular is a concrete individual that exists between being and nonbeing. Here is his argument:

1. The absolute is everything.
2. Particular things are not the absolute.
3. But nonbeing cannot be outside the absolute (or else it would exist outside), so nonbeing can only be relative.
4. Thus relative nonbeing implies relative being.
   
5. Therefore particular things are a mixture of reality and negation.

This argument attempts to show that particular things are a limitation of their universal idea or archetype. Then, the question is how do individuals exist between being and nonbeing? Schelling’s answer is life. Through the absolute, the particulars of the universe

are granted a double life, a life in the absolute– which is the life of the idea, and which accordingly was also characterized as the dissolution of the finite in the infinite and of the particular in the universal– and a life in itself– which, however, is only proper to the [particular] merely to the extent that it is simultaneously dissolved into the universe, [for] in its separation from the life in God the latter is a mere semblance of life […] the particular attains an absolute life […] though only to the extent that it is in the universe (pp. 174-175/6: 187).

Schelling goes on from here to argue that particularity implies multiplicity. While the absolute is one, all limitation involves a plurality of beings.** While absolute life is One, particular life is one of the many. So individuals can only be as a multiplicity. But, each individual expresses part of the whole:

The individual human being, for example, is such an individual not by virtue of the idea but, rather, because he is not the idea but its negation. Being can only be One, whereas the Nonbeing is indeterminably multiple. The infinite reality whereby the idea of man is linked with God always achieves but a partial expression in each individual human being, i.e., it [involves] negation” (p. 178/6: 191).

So, to summarize, through philosophy, that is, ideally, Schelling has shown (however problematically) how the identity of the knower and what is known is the first principle of all philosophy, and how it is possible to demonstrate how the finite world comes to be; that is, finite beings live between being and relative nonbeing. Yet, Schelling is also interested in showing how the absolute can account for life in its totality; or, in other words, how the individual human being lives in relation to the absolute.

2. The Philosophy of Art

After dealing with philosophy in general and his nature-philosophy, Schelling turns to humanity as it lives theoretically, practically, and creatively. In other words, how people have knowledge (theoretical philosophy or science), how they act (in history and in religion) and how they create (the philosophy of art).

As I have mentioned, I wrote my dissertation on the topic of Schelling’s philosophy of art. There are three conditions for his philosophy of art, and they are all present in the Wurzburg Lectures:

1. What philosophy constructs in the ideal, art produces in the real. Thus artistic activity is the highest human vocation (Bestimmung) because practical philosophy can only approximate its object, which is the moral law.
2. While both the natural organism and the artwork embody the same identity of real and ideal, necessity and freedom, the work of art overcomes these oppositions through the identity of conscious and unconscious production, whereas the organism’s activity is unconscious.
3. Artistic production has a socio-political task: it aims to overcome the fragmentary condition of modernity through a new mythology and artistic renewal.

A majority of the literature on Schelling’s philosophy of art overlooks the fact that there is a philosophy of art in this text despite the fact that it completes the system of the Wurzburg Lectures. By completion, I mean that artistic creation is the realization of the ideas of philosophy in the real world. Art expresses the highest stage of freedom and the highest stage of social life. First, artistic production is the synthesis of freedom and necessity in the work of art, but second, and more importantly, art aims to create a new mythology to unify a people under a common set of ideas. Finally, art is the intuition of beauty, which completes the system because the “highest bliss of humanity lies in the intellectual intuition of beauty” (§324). Beauty in art is the realization of the divine idea of the absolute.

In the Würzburg Lectures, Schelling presents the state as the ultimate realization of science, religion and art. His remarks on art are brief, and are oriented toward his conception of a public sphere. As Schelling states, the modern world lacks a proper Symbolik (6: 571), which, in German usage, is “not only a system of symbolism but also a coherent doctrine of faith.”*** As mentioned in the Philosophy of Art, the modern condition has only created partial and fragmentary mythologies, such as in the work of Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Goethe (6: 572). The diagnosis, according to Schelling, is that a truly public sphere can bring about a truly organic state:

Where all public life collapses into the particulars and dullness of private life, poetry more or less sinks into this same sphere…But even mythology is not possible in the particular; it can only be born in the totality of a nation that as such acts as identity [or] an individual. In dramatic poetry, tragedy grounds itself in the public law, in virtue, religion, heroism– in a word– in the holiness of the nation. A nation that is not holy, or which was robbed of its holy places, cannot have true tragedy…the question of the possibility of a universal content of poesie, just as the question of the objective existence of science and religion, impels us to the highest itself. Only in the spiritual unity of a people, in a truly public life, can the true and generally valid poesie arise– as only in the spiritual and political unity of a people can science and religion find its objectivity (6: 572-573).

The political unity of a people arises organically in the nation-state, not in the private pursuit of individual right within a state. Instead, the state develops organically, through the development of religion, science and art, into their highest expression. As Schelling recognizes, this state has never existed, but he is here giving a prescriptive account of a future state. Although he gives very little indication of how this state is to come about, he claims that the relationship of reason to the universe is analogous to that of philosophy to the state: just as reason realizes itself in the universe, philosophy realizes itself through the public life of the state. As Schelling concludes, “Philosophy, which is no longer science, but rather becomes life, is that which Plato called the politeia, life with and in an ethical totality.”

As we will see, later philosophers will directly challenge the idea that the state is like an organic totality. As Marx will argue, a position like Schelling’s obscures, or mystifies, relationships of domination and inequality by normalizing or de-politicizing human relationships by thinking them like natural relationships (so the state is like an organism). While I think it is correct to dismiss the idea of the 'organic state' or community, I don’t think it is a reason to dismiss artistic production as an important aspect of human life or politics.

Footnotes

*All page references are to the English translation, and then the pagination of Schelling’s Sämmtliche Werke. Where only the latter appear, the translations are my own. In the tradition of German idealism, I had to use my notes for preparing the text, so a few quotes run the risk of paraphrase.

**On the categories: Schelling denies, during the period of absolute idealism, that there can be any transition from infinite to finite in terms of quality, because a difference in quality implies a difference in respect to essence or substance (p. 169/6: 179). Hence he argues that there is a quantitative difference between the infinite and finite, between the unity of the One and plurality (which form a totality). However his quick reference to the difference between the One and multiplicity cannot obscure the fact that his argument relies on the categories of quality: individuals, as limited, are a mixture of reality and negation. The problem? The absolute, for Schelling, does not admit negation. This is his significant difference with Hegel.

***The reference to the role of the Symbolik comes from George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 336, n. 35.

Further Reading:

For the importance of the aspect of the public sphere, aside from its less salient political features, see Manfred Frank’s Der kommende Gott: Vorlesungen über die Neue Mythologie. Vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982), 188-216.

For the metaphysics, see Manfred Frank, Eine Einführung in Schellings Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 118-132.

For a stronger reading of Schelling as a naturalist, see Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781-1801 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard: 2002).

Finally, I cannot recommend too highly Jean-François Marquet’s excellent Liberté et existence. Second Edition (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2006).

Andrea Dworkin and Martha Nussbaum

I'm delivering a lecture on pornography to my intro ethics class this week. Though I intend to be as "devil's advocate" as possible with regard to competing positions on the topic, I'm currently brushing up on my abolitionist, anti-porn feminism. Scoping Andrea Dworkin's Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) in particular. The arguments are well-worn, but not for all that irrelevant or necessarily "extremist" in our always intensifying climate of pornographic "tube" websites, sexism/infantilization in advertising, etc.

Dworkin, "the Malcolm X of feminism", died in 2005, after a difficult life and an intellectual career as a radical in the second wave of American feminism. She is often derided for being a shrill, man-hating, sex-hating harpy; certain critics, moreover, can't resist making snide remarks about her weight, her appearance, the fact that she was Jewish. More sober responses to Dworkin's controversial theses - notable among which is the idea that consensual vaginal intercourse between a man and a woman counts as rape or at least some form of coercion to the extent that it occurs in a culture of patriarchy - usually suggest that she had a difficult time tempering the understandably extreme emotional aspect of her subject matter with a more desirable cool, rational approach. Those who continue to hold Dworkin in high regard are generally radical abolitionist feminists and, paradoxically on first glance, anti-porn crusaders on the religious/patriarchal Right.

I think that Dworkin shouldn't be ignored; she should continue to be read and discussed, and the arguments she advanced should be respected as worthy contenders in a controversial field. That having been said, her analysis of pornography closes itself off to some radical alternative models of feminist organizing which, while recognizing the harmful state of the current porn industry, fight for female and worker control of porn, rather than its legal abolition. A critique of porn divorced from a critique of capitalism (and to be fair, Dworkin does proffer an embryonic anti-capitalist critique) risks largely ignoring some of the most directly feasible ways of protecting pornographic workers - namely, unionization with a view to collective worker control.

The best engagement with Dworkin that I have read to date is by Martha Nussbaum in her stellar collection Sex and Social Justice. What makes Nussbaum's engagement with Dworkin so compelling is that, first of all, she takes her seriously where scores of others do not. Secondly, Nussbaum reads Dworkin as a philosopher rather than a propagandist, which is both fair and refreshing. She reconstructs Dworkin's ethical philosophy as an extreme (if sometimes inconsistent) moral Kantianism, especially as regards the means/end distinction. As regards Dworkin's thoroughgoing critique of the objectification of women in pornography, Nussbaum argues that Dworkin fails to provide a sufficiently nuanced account of objectification; she doesn't, for instance, take into account legitimate cases of objectification that occur on a daily basis between equals (if I rest my head in my partner's lap, I am objectifying her, but not in the sense that I would objectify a throw pillow). Nussbaum suggests, moreover, that Dworkin's concept of sexual/social justice needs to be tempered by mercy, and that her abolitionism risks narrowing the already narrow scope of employment options open to poor women. In short, Nussbaum takes a more careful approach to a field she admits is problematic for many of the reasons cited by Dworkin.

Ultimately, Dworkin conflates "pornography", which she defines as intrinsically violent, with any graphic depiction of sexuality under patriarchy. This rules out the possibility of feminist pornography and erotica; in our climate, they are all violent. The fact that half-measures can often do some good where full measures are not yet possible is lost here; so is the possibility that porn, which currently trains young men to view women as disposable sex objects, could perhaps be used to teach them sexual equality and openness.

Sunday Blog Edition

It has been a good week here, beginning on Sunday, when Matt McLennan reviewed, from Verso's Revolutions series, Simon Bolivar and the Bolivarian Revolution, and Jason Smith discussed the origins of sustained growth. On Monday, Jose Saramago called the Bible a manual of bad morals. Tuesday I posted a reading list, and on Thursday I reviewed Roberto Bolano's The Skating Rink. It's actually the first review I've ever written about a work of fiction. Then, later that afternoon Matt shockingly revealed that his mom is reading Alain Badiou's The Century. Which is a worthy read in my humble opinion.

Finally, on Friday, I posted my first lecture on Schelling. I can't say how the class felt about it, but they now know what speculative philosophy is like. The second part will be up on Tuesday.

Until then, it's time for the Sunday review. This week is a special edition, dedicated to the blogs I read. To tell you the truth, it's not that many, and they don't usually talk about book reviews. One is the Tao of Stieb (written by a friend of mine), which is dedicated to all things Toronto Blue Jays, (and I'm no Jays fan...) and the other is Doc Nagel's All-new Life and Times. Doc is currently a prof at CSU Stanislaus, and he directed an independent study for a few of us, many years ago, about Hegel. I don't know what happened to the other two students, but something tells me that they didn't write their dissertations on German idealism. I also read Verso's blog to keep up on the news about their books. Here's a link to each:

• Doc Nagel talks the politics of CSU Stanislaus, and that public universities are a good thing.
  
• Tao of Stieb, from a few months ago, talking about the depressing state of baseball journalism. It includes a damn cool photo.
• And Verso discussing how their sales have increased 33% in the first half of 2009. Part of their success is attributable to books like this one.
• Occasionally, I also look at the Ottawa Film Review.
• And, one review: David Hadju reviews R. Crumb's The Book of Genesis in the New York Times, even if the last paragraph reveals how Hadju misunderstands Crumb.
  

And, what is more important, is I want to know what other people are reading. Let me know in the comments.