A Better Grasp
I suppose this is just over-simplified for a mass audience? Or perhaps the editor simplified it? Because it is a tad misleading. A classic example of what Susan Haack calls the passes-for fallacy.
But for many contemporary academics, especially those who bought into postmodern theory in the last few decades, the idea of the “real” raises serious problems. Reality depends on those who are perceiving it, on social forces that have conditioned their thinking, and on whoever controls the flow of information that influences them…Both sides have a point here. No one could survive for a day if he or she really tried to live by the relentless relativism and skepticism preached by postmodernists, in which everything is shadowed by uncertainty or exposed as ideology. But it is also true that the media revolutions of the last century, while they hugely expanded our access to knowledge, created far more effective tools by which that knowledge could be manipulated.
But reality is one thing, and knowledge is another; reality is one thing, and our perception of it is another. Yes, of course, the mass media have created immense new possibilities for manipulation, distortion, opinion-shaping, subtle influencing, and so on; and that’s a hugely important fact; I’ve been obsessed with it myself for years; my shelves groan with the weight of books on PR, advertising, the media, and related subjects; but – but that does not mean that the mass media have done something to reality in general. They’ve done a lot to various particular realities, such as the popular understanding of a lot of things; but much of reality itself is impervious to media manipulations.
Which is not to say that there are no serious problems with ‘the idea of the “real”‘ – but that passage doesn’t state them very clearly. It conflates a problem with knowledge with a problem with the idea of the real. I’m sure Dickstein is well aware of that – probably the editor made him simplify for the purposes of a newspaper piece. But that just creates another problem of knowledge…Ironic, isn’t it. But I kind of like his last paragraph. It’s not unlike the way we end Why Truth Matters.
This is how most readers have always read novels, not simply for escape, and certainly not mainly for art, but to get a better grasp of the world around them and the world inside them. Now that the overload of theory, like a mental fog, has begun to lift, perhaps professional readers will catch up with them.
That’s it, you see. I think we all (or almost all) want a better grasp of the world around us and the world inside us. We also want things that fight with that – consolation, hope, relief – but we want that too. It’s a desire that ought not to be sneered at or patronized or called unsophisticated. It’s the most sophisticated thing about us.
Would Mr. Halasz please restate the foregoing in the form of a novel? – because, according to Morris Dickstein (an English teacher), novels are what most people read to get a better grasp of the world around them and the world inside them.
Yes, “reality” is. But reality isn’t. Yes, reality cannot be construed etc without frameworks and such, but that’s a separate subject. Reality itself – not “reality,” not what-we-take-to-be-reality, not what-we-call-reality, not what passes for reality, but reality – is what it is, however we construe it.
To my understanding, Charles Peirce found a way out of the “reality”/reality riddle when he took up the Scholastic understanding of object and paired it with the Kantian thing-in-itself. For Peirce, when a thing, so far unknown or undiscovered, is experienced (by a being, of course), it becomes objectively real, that is, it is now an object of the being’s experience. Because experience is idiosyncratic, species-specific, and culturally modeled, the thing will be variously experienced and thus will exist in various ways. That, of course, doesn’t mean that reality is relative, but that experience is. However individual, biological, or cultural the interpretation, it is always the interpretation (the experience) of a thing,regardless whether the thing is mind-dependent or independent.
Julio Jeha:
You’ll get no argument from me against that, (or, at least, any argument would occur much further on.) But one of the things I was trying to get at, but didn’t get around to saying, is that, of course, one understands the existence of a natural world that extends far beyond the human, precedes it and even underlies it, (though nowadays our experience of the natural world is remote, the latter having been distantiated, buried and insulted- in the medical sense- by our technological manipulations of it: “Technology is the art of so arranging the world, that we don’t have to experience it”- Max Frisch.) But one can not get at that reality by stripping away the socio-cultural world, neither by deconstruction, nor empiricism,- (and whereas empiricism derives from nominalism, deconstruction is an anti-empirical nominalism),- since what one would putatively arrive at would be so threadbare as to amount to a loss of reality. The scientific investigation of the natural world is itself a part and product of the socio-cultural world and feeds into other socio-cultural domains, concerns and processes. One gets at the reality of the natural world, not by flat-out assertion of its priority, in which case it’s unclear what should follow from that, but rather by attending to significant differences in our experience and the ways they effect us.
I’ll make one other comment, though, proximate to your source, coming via Whitehead. It’s that “nature-in-itself” does not exist “in-itself”, but rather is an effect or artefact of the intentionality of a for-itself, as its counter-position. If one reflects on the matter, then “nature-in-itself” would not be “in-itself”, but would rather be the sheer exteriority of a perspectivalist monadology.
OB:
I’m not in the habit of chasing after gossp-mongers’ tales, and, of course, people say all sorts of silly things, whether they “mean” them or not, so one never need run out of ammo, if ammo is what one is looking for. But whatever confusions might arise, it doesn’t follow that even with “postmodernists”, there might be some “serious” issues and problems being addressed behind their lack of “seriousness”, which can be clarified, even if the pomo approach is not the most perspicuous, nor effective, (and granting that postmodernists are not all created equal). (And why should “seriousness” be equated with attention to reality? Is it that reality is necessarily painful? Why someone jokes, does that mean they are necessarily not being serious?) “Argument” is ambiguous, meaning both a presentation of justificatory reasons and a verbal fight, and I don’t think that ambiguity can be entirely eliminated or separated out, for the simple reason that something more is always at stake, being “justified”, than the topic at hand. But rather than rising to the bait of postmodernist provocations, based on a polemicism itself rooted in extreme Nietzschean presuppositions, and thereby getting entrapped in furious rigor mortis or reduced to stuttering, wouldn’t it be better to actually clarify and address some of those issues,and show up some of the actual defects of the postmodern “hollow men”/strawmen, rather than just pointing at it uncomprehendingly and asserting dogmatically and obtusely whatever the opposite would be? Truth is never a simple matter,- (and least of all can it be defined ostensively, though the same is true of any abstract noun),- and, being as much an “intentional” (or, if you prefer, “intensional”) as a referential property, is itself a complicated and mixed referential structure, even leaving aside the need to differentiate truth from other normative domains and concerns. And, though I did make plain that it is always a “transsubjective” matter, (though that would not be my preferred term, since it makes appeal to the problematic notion of “subjectivity” in the first place), strangely enough, it does involve decisions and appeals to a “who” that accompanies and delimits it, even though it’s not an individual matter. (That’s a Wittgensteinian and not a postmodernist point, the “decision” being always collective and “prior”, though existential, belonging to belonging to a collective and evolving form of life.) So, for example, if confronted with the claim, “understanding is always misunderstanding”, one is confronted with a decision, as to how to take it. Taken flat-out, such a claim would seem to obliterate the very notion of understanding. Taken proleptically, as a philosophical warning, there might be a valid point there. The hermeneutic claim is that all understanding occurs within a tradition,- (and, yes, the Enlightenment is itself such a tradition, that can be variously delimited, which matter itself belongs to Enlightenment)- such that all understanding is precedented, which does not mean that it merely repeats the past, but rather that being a re-application always also transforms what it understands in the situated process of understanding it. One of the concerns of postmodernist writers is to provide precedence for the unprecedented, such as with , e.g., “gay rights”. I don’t think that’s actually how such things occur or gain legitimation, and certainly the notion of “performative nomination” is a sloppy one, that licenses all sorts of perposterousness. But even there, negatively, there is a real point, since though saying something obviously doesn’t make it true, sometimes whether something exists or not depends on whether or not some things are said. The upshot is that, if much of what postmodernist “say” is objectionable,- (and they certainly don’t have a monopoly on objectionable things),- then simply pointing at what is objectionable, whether in mockery or fury, does nothing to clarify the issue, legitimate alternatives, nor even carry through the objection.
Sometimes I think OB, with her resolute refusal to see anything problematic in the notion of the “universal”, is rather like Plato, who looked at the world with googles on and thought he saw “essences”, when really what he failed to see was googles.
john c. halasz:
I wouldn’t change a iota of what you said. AFter all, what is more cultural than nature?
“whereas empiricism derives from nominalism, deconstruction is an anti-empirical nominalism”
The empiricism-nominalism connection is clear to me, but the deconstruction bit isn’t. Could you elaborate on that, please?
Julio Jeha:
It’s a bit hard to elaborate. The anti-empirical part is obvious, going back to Lacan’s notorious claim that psychoanalysis is an “anti-empirical science”. The roughly shared problematic of that group of French thinkers that American academics label “post-structuralist” has a third-order ultra-transcendental cast. Roughly, Husserl attempted a refined first-order transcenental account through investigating the conditions of possibility of objects of experience through examination of specific intentionalities toward them, and the later Heidegger’s thinking was a second-order transcendental account, investigating “Being” as the condition of possibility of meaning in general, which is then the condition of possibility of specific intentionalities. The post-structuralists then claim that the condition of possibility of meaning in general is the differential play of an unconscious “infrastructure” material signs, hence a third order transcendental claim, though, given that that specification is a “material”, hence empirical, condition, they are playing a game with a transcendental paradox, that the empirical is the condition of possibility of the transcendental, which purportedly “constitutes” the empirical. The other part of their schtick is to provide transcendental reconstructions of one-time-only formations or complexes, which they tend to call “singularities” rather than universal conditions of knowledge in general. This leads on to highly particularistic “readings” of particular “infrastructures” and to apparent theses, such as the notion that meaning is the “effect” of the deployment of material signs in particular contexts. And then there is the oddity of an extreme, libertarian emphasis on individual freedom that goes together with their “anti-humanist” denial of human agency. I would take these particularist features as nominalistic, that is, as emphasizing the sole reality of particulars against universal forms,- (and it is the concept of “metaphysical form”, from Plato to Husserl and beyond, as involving an idealization of meaning that underwrites the adequation of “subject” and “object” that is the principle target of Derrida’s “critique”, in particular). I’ll just add that “nominalism” was the code-word that Adorno used to discuss the disintegrative/crisis tendencies of late capitalist modernity, though he presumably had no awareness of the post-structuralist tendencies that were just getting going across the Rhine at the time of his death. Needless to say, I don’t exactly go along with all that mishegaas. As something of a Wittgensteinian, I would take the basically constitutive nature of the rules of language and the nature of language as a rule-governed activity to obstruct not just post-structuralist, but nominalist accounts in general, at least with respect to meaning and understanding, if not reality itself.
Again, off-topic; again, please take it to email. John, if you want to set up as a lecturer, do it on your own site, not here.