Re: Lyotard

I agree with Dylan's criticism that Lyotard's post-modernism is in itself a metanarrative. I think this is perhaps the most serious criticism against what he has to say. But overall I find this position very attractive, especially the argument that science had come to dominate our thinking without us realizing it. Intrinsically, we do place a lot of weight on proof, logic and reason, but as Lyotard said, proof (or science) cannot prove itself.Lyotard presents an interesting extention/elaboration of Wittgenstein's language games to show how the whole of "reality" as we know it is composed of games.A minor point that I either don't understand well enough or disagree with in Lyotard's book is his criticism of Habermas' idea of social consensus (which I share) alongwith an elevation of the concept of social justice. It seems to me that Lyotard is simply replacing with goal (consensus) with another (justice).

PoMo - Tastes Great, Less Filling

In examining Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, I've found it useful to read around the man and his theories a little - partly at the recommendation of Professor Jackson, and partly to give me a better, almost triangulated sense of where to fit these debates. Happily, this has given me three main areas of interest, and questions I would like to pose, beyond the 'game rules' comment in Professor Jackson's earlier post. Responses to any, or all, are keenly anticipated.

Firstly, and to kick off with the central motivation of Lyotard's work - the suspicion of metanarratives. Lyotard says that

'... the price to pay for such an illusion [i.e. the modernist project] is terror. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience...The answer is: Let us wage war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name' (pp. 81-82)

OK, so, we must break down - transcend, bypass - modernism and its metanarratives in much the same way as we should stay away from crystal meth and running chainsaws - because the're bad for us. Fine point as far as it goes, but it's a normative one, and we have no reason to adhere to normative constrains in the PoMo universe once all the metanarratives are gone. In fact, all we can turn to in such a world are the cold tenets of rational choice or Hobbesian anarchy. But that's neither here nor there as regards my first question, which is: how is the PoMo call to arms not a metanarrative in itself? It admits no counter-argument, it has universal ambitions, and it attacks not the output of competitors but (usually) their assumptions. Its usefulness is thus limited.

Right, moving along.

Sokal and Bricmont, in their Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectual's Abuse of Science (NY: Picador, 1998), have a variety of unkind words for Lyotard: specifically, that his grasp of science is shaky and that his use of physics to prove his gas-density argument amounts to a straw-man. I'm not enough of a physicist to pronounce on this, but one element of Sokal and Bricmont's argument intrigued me. There is the old joke that only a civil engineer could add two and two to get 'between three and five, whatever works'; Sokal and Bricmont point out that many of the so-called 'scientific revolutions' (quantum, chaos, fractals) that Lyotard pays lip service to are only likely to apply at arbitrary scales - the infinitesimally small (intra-atomic, or molecular) or the infinitesmally large (like butterfly wings 'causing' hurricanes). As for the rest of science - the 'human scale', as it were - clunky old Newtonian physics, fluid mechanics, and ke = 1/2mv^2 work just fine. My immediate response was something along the lines of 'and thus too in IR' - in other words, for me at least, the ostensible inability of positivist work to reliably explain events on the political equivalent of the subatomic level still needs to be convincingly problematized, given that the response of its proponents is likely to be 'What? It works fine.' And thus my second question: to what extent is arbitrary moves up and down the scale of examination problematic for the postmodern (or, post-structuralist) critique of mainstream/positivist work?

Lastly, and drawing from Janice Bially Mattern's Ordering International Politics: Identity, Crisis and Representational Force (NY: Routledge, 2005) and specifically her section on Lyotard, we find Lyotard's views harnessed into a conception of the fundamental constitutedness of a real-world event: the Suez crisis. OK, so 'Actors produce language and language produces "reality"' (p. 92) and the purpose of language wielded as a weapon is to compel you to accept the discourse thus presented. To interact is thus to accept the terminology of your opposite (BTW, this is post-constructivism, as Bially Mattern would have it, because straight constructivism has reality jointly constituted). This opens the field to Lyotard's concept of the differand, because if you don't accept this constitution, you begin to fight from your respective islands. Now: can Bially Mattern's theory survive the withdrawal of this concept, though? If you disregard (as I do) the idea that contestations of narrated reality create the interactive environment rather than simply articulate concrete elements of it, how would she go about convincing you? And thus my third question: where is the main 'body' of the postmodern movement? Scientism, like it or not, is like the mythical hydra in that other heads (routes of inquiry) are always on call to strike at tricky problems (refer back to my cholera example from two weeks ago). But pomo theorists, divorced from meta-truths, cannot do any more than name-check their predecessors in a vague enough manner that hoaxsters like Sokal are easily admitted. Roadblocks become dead ends. Is this an affiliation worth nailing one's colors to the mast of?

And that's my post. As an after-dinner mint, consider this quotation from Stephen Weinberg's excellent review of the Sokal Hoax in the New York Review of Books (Aug 8, 1996):

If we think that scientific laws are flexible enough to be affected by the social setting of their discovery, then some may be tempted to press scientists to discover laws that are more proletarian or feminine or American or religious or Aryan or whatever else it is they want. This is a dangerous path, and more is at stake in the controversy over it than just the health of science. As I mentioned earlier, our civilization has been powerfully affected by the discovery that nature is strictly governed by impersonal laws. As an example I like to quote the remark of Hugh Trevor-Roper that one of the early effects of this discovery was to reduce the enthusiasm for burning witches. We will need to confirm and strengthen the vision of a rationally understandable world if we are to protect ourselves from the irrational tendencies that still beset humanity.

Don't put an ax in my head

I've been thinking about Dylan's suggestion in class on Thursday that "don't put an ax in another player's head" was a rule of the board-game Monopoly. I was skeptical about this to begin with, and have decided to spell out my skepticism a bit here on the blog as we continue to grapple with what Wittgenstein means by a "language-game" (and, heading into next week, whether Lyotard means the same thing by this term).

What do we mean by "the rules of Monopoly?" Those things formally written down in the instruction manual that comes with the game seem insufficient, since those strictures presume the ongoing presence of other practices (like "counting" and "reading"). The instructions that come in the box are thus in a sense subordinate to other social activities, and supervene on them.

At the same time, however, those formal strictures demarcate "the game of Monopoly" from other games (such as euchre, poker, or parcheesi). Most valid moves in euchre are simply nonsensical in Monopoly, because "ordering up a card" or "following suit" are literally meaningless in that context. You can't castle in Monopoly either -- but not because there's a formal stricture against doing so. There's a difference between not castling in Monopoly and refusing to follow the instructions on the Community Chest card that you've just drawn; the latter seems more like a "violation of the rules" than the former, even though neither are permitted by the strictures written down in the instruction manual.

"Don't put an ax in your opponent's head" seems closer to the former than it does to the latter. Nowhere in the instruction manual does it say "attempted homicide is not permitted in this game," and if a particularly incensed player did in fact try the ax strategy, it would be odd to penalize him for violating the rules of Monopoly -- although it would not be odd to penalize him for violating the rules of the civil order (presuming that we live in a society in which attempted homicide is illegal).

Where this leads me is to a distinction between the formal specification of the rules of a (language-)game and the tacit procedures that govern that (language-)game. Wittgenstein's point, as I understand it, is that no formal specification of the rules ever exhausts the tacit procedures in play; one cannot bring an entire form of life into a set of logically consistent and coherent statements. This might be more possible in some situations than it is in others, since some social situations are effectively closed systems of transaction that can be more or less exhaustively described in formal terms. Monopoly is a pretty open-ended situation, since it both clearly depends on other language-games and self-presents as "a game," i.e. as a small subset of social action rather than a totalizing set of procedures for living.

Hence: "don't put an ax in your opponent's head" is not a formal rule of Monopoly, although it is a formal rule of living in most contemporary liberal societies.

What do we do with something like "don't adhere to the letter of the convention on human rights while violating its spirit in numerous ways'?

[Posted with ecto]

Chasing Chimeras: Wittgenstein Unleashed

1. This is so cool.
2. This is totally ridiculous.
3. Am I missing something from the German? What the #&*$ is this guy talking about?
4. This is so cool.
5. Can I write my dissertation like this? How about pass my OQE's?
6. Wittgenstein breaks out of the "iron cage" of the perfectly logical binary/reductionist language of the Tractatus. He removes his dark helmet, disconnects the cyborg-gadgetry and decides once and for all that he's human, not a machine. Wittgenstein II is downright playful sometimes; the book is full of humor, of color, of emotion. It's not by coincidence he compares philosophical method with therapy (#134) and medicine (#255), and concentrates on the communication of pain (#244 among many others) --this book seems to have been Wittgenstein's catharsis. Is it science? Its greatest moments are much more like poetry.
7. The introduction, knowing that he died a few years later while this book was still a mess of papers on his desk, is heartbreaking.
8. I know you cynical bastards are mocking my sentimentality.
9. Does anybody remember our "truth-statements" from the first class? I said "If I staple my thumb, it hurts." I swear I didn't plagiarize it from #288.
10. Despite the literary genius of leaving everything a mess, the rawness, the blessed absence of editing, homogenizing, dilution--maybe you can't get inside someone's head, except by invitation--maybe this is a great work because he brings you so far into his thought process--despite the excitement of encountering these puzzles which were only partially solved and mostly scattered when mortality interrupted--I hate to ask this question because I think the work has so much value in stimulating thought--what are the implications of Wittgenstein's language games for game theory and the other methods we have (not) been trained to use? What does this mean for social science research? What would Wittgenstein do, if he were one of us, evaluating research methodologies?

"The fundamental fact here is that we lay down rules, a technique for a game, and that then when we follow the rules, things do not turn out as we had assumed. That we are therefore as it were entangled in our own rules."

What Would Wittgenstein Do? Is he a methodological anarchist? Can one support an existing methodology, any methodology from the ones we've learned, on the basis of any of the 301 separate post-its Wittgenstein left scattered on his desk for us to read? Or is he playing an entirely different game?

(TRIVIA QUESTION: Name the Pulp Fiction quote that just popped up in my head)

Damning the middle road

To give you guys something slightly different to talk to/at/about, I will be drawing specific comments from 'Objectivity' which relate to a topic I know we've talked about - both informally and more formally - through a Weberian lens. Hopefully this is thought-provoking stuff; I will admit that I found these readings surprisingly vital, and look forward to talking more about them on Thursday.

To crack the ice with a diagram, then:



Weber says that the practice of taking the middle road has exactly no place in serious objective endeavor. His exact phrase, on page 58, is 'The Archiv will struggle relentlessly against the severe self-deception which asserts that through the synthesis of several party points of view, or by following a line between them, practical norms of scientific validity can be arrived at.' Now. this prompts me to think about what exactly the difference between the process of fusing multiple explanations in the practical/social and empirical/scientific spheres. So far, my thoughts:

In practical/social inquiry, which poses questions relating to 'what should/ought to be done' and which rests on value judgments in Weber's conception, I am reminded of Eraine's well-loved tripartite anthropological examination model: you overlay what people do, what they say, and what they say they do and examine the areas where these concur and seperate in order to make your point or reach whatever peice of understanding is sought. This is illustrated above, under Figure 2. Essentially, in this case, the three foci of analysis are three different 'party positions', and by excluding outliers (or marginalizing them to isolate/draw attention to them, whatever) you reach an aggregate 'truth.' The utility of middle road techniques is thus a function of the usefulness, in social/practical analysis of multiple points of covergence.

OK, now how is that different from scientific thought? I relate this to the use of multiple examinations of a particular phenomenon - to leave physics behind for a bit and talk about the less midlife crisis-y discipline of human biopathology, take the 18th and 19th century investigations which attempted to reach a 'truth' regarding the factual nature of cholera. In this case, illustrated by Figure 1. above, multiple positions - the output of chemical assays of blood composition, anatomical explorations of the state of the intestines, dietary analyses of pathogen intake, and so on, were useful not in terms of their overlap but in terms of successive inductive approximations of an overall shape, in this case the darker circle outlining all three smaller circles. So the point is less one of congruence of output than it is the meta-coherence of investigative boundaries. The 'aggregate' is not the zone of overlap, but the zone of exclusion.

Now, it appears that the existence of Grand Unified Theory studies in the natural but not the social sciences are a good example of this difference. In GUT, the sub-circles are entirely different branches of empirical natural science, and the larger truth which overlays and contains them all is being sought. In the social sciences, on the other hand, we rely on a pick-and-choose model: in the particular example of IR first theology, then international law, then economics, then anthropology/psychology/cultural studies are being plugged in to 'inform' our analyses, and we seek common ground rather than difference.

If I'm right, and I've understood ideal types correctly, then the reason why middle ground is not and should never be the focus of scientifically valid inquiry, and indeed why intellectual activists should be leery of having pretensions that they speak a universal 'truth' is precisely the inapplicability of ideal type construction to zone-of-exclusion analysis: i.e., that you cannot combine constructed, subjective, neatened-up, representative utopi-models into shapes which let you successivly approximate what is there.

Ideas?

Analyticism

Weber has a nuanced view of science -- he certainly believes in the contribution of science, but his idea of science seems very different from the predominant everyday usage of the word. In keeping with the common understanding of science, Weber holds that the contributions of science to practical life are in (a) giving technology to control life, (b) contributing tools and methods of thinking, and (c) attaining clarity ("Science as Vocation", pp. 150-151). However, his notion of science differs from most of the authors we’ve read so far in including the social sciences (historical and cultural sciences, sociology, economics, political science and jurisprudence). Also, by emphasizing the role of passion, enthusiasm and inspiration in the generation of ideas, Weber presents a quite different view of science from that of the logical positivists, falsificationists, and scientific naturalists. Further, he holds that scientific progress is only a fraction, though an important one, of the process of intellectualization (p. 138).

Religion and Science: In our discussions in class so far we’ve often used religion as a counterfoil to science to get at the meaning of science. Weber makes a forceful distinction between science and religion in that science is involved in rationalism and intellectualism while religion is based on “emancipation from intellectualism” ("Science as Vocation", pp. 142-143). How far is this distinction correct? It seems to me that religions can be quite intellectual, and that even though they are based on faith they need not exclude rationalism altogether. And in so far as science itself presupposes the value of the knowledge it generates and presupposes the validity of the logic and method that are its tools, is not science similar to religion?

Existential Knowledge: How correct is Weber’s view that there is a distinction between existential knowledge (knowledge of what is) and normative knowledge (knowledge of what should be)? – is existential knowledge as clear or obvious as he assumes? It seems to me that the “reality” that he takes for granted can be questioned. Is there in fact a reality independent of our ability to know it? Weber is taking the external realist (with-a-small-“r”) position here, and contrary to his own position that we must make explicit our hidden assumptions, he is not doing so by implicitly assuming an external reality.

Ideal-Types: Weber’s ideal-types are meant to be models – construction of reality, not reality itself. Ideal-types are meant to give us a clearer understanding of reality. To what extent are ideal-types value-free? Weber writes that ideal-types do not involve judgments of value, and thus there are ideal-types of brothels as well as of religions ("Objectivity in Social Science",pp. 98-99). But is it possible to have a concept that is value-free – doesn’t the ideal-type of capitalism involve the normative aspect of the debilitating effects of the division of labor?