REVIEWS

Respect (or lack of it)

Peter Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998. viii + 246 pp., £45.00 hb., 0 7456 1655 0. Tim Hayward, Political Theory and Ecological Values, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998. viii + 196 pp., £49.50 hb., £13.95 pb., 0 7456 1808 1 hb., 0 7456 1809 X pb.

It is a commonplace assumption of environmental avoid being ʻunecologicalʼ – by which I take him to writing that human beings – or at any rate human mean irrelevant because disengaged from ecological beings in the West – need to rethink their ideas about realities. nature if they are to avoid ecological catastrophe. Yet Haywardʼs answer is that there are essentially two what bearing exactly do the attitudes of human beings aspects that have to be reconciled: that human beings to non-human nature have on the form of their inter- are a part of nature, and that they are not gener- action with the latter, and are changes in attitude a ally motivated to do what is other than in their own precondition of improved ecological practices? In any interests. One of the corollaries of this first premiss case, what counts as ʻimprovementʼ in this area, and is that our natural being places constraints on, but why, and how far, are what are deemed the ʻrightʼ or does not determine, what counts as good. (Hayward, ʻappropriateʼ forms of human response to nature con- rightly in my opinion, resists any form of naturalism ceived in terms of what is thought at that time to be that would derive our political or ethical values from ecologically desirable activity? Neither of these books nature, or look to non-human modes of being as ever quite directly addresses these questions, but both offering normative guides for human affairs.) Another are rich in the kind of discussions that provoke us to is that it places constraints on what is just and right. think further about them, albeit in contrasting ways. Distributive principles of justice cannot be developed In doing so, they help us to a better understanding of in abstraction from the fact that we are natural and the ways in which our current ecological dilemmas finite beings in a natural and finite word. A third are compounded. is that human beings are constrained in their deal- Tim Hayward continues to press his case for eco- ings with non-human nature. But it is only, Hayward logical issues to be made more central to the enterprise argues, with this third corollary – or through the idea of political theory. But whereas in earlier work Hay- of natural relations – that the idea of human beings ward has by and large been happy to go along with as one natural species among others properly begins the conventionally established opposition between a to figure for political theory. And it is with a view more radical ecologism (caring for nature for natureʼs to exploring how it can most defensibly do so that sake) and a more reformist environmentalism (caring Hayward devotes the first part of his book to criticism for nature for our sake), in this work he challenges of what he terms the ʻtwo dogmas of ecologismʼ: the core assumption of this framework: that there is the dogma that respect for ecological values requires a clear discrimination to be made between ecological commitment to the ʻintrinsic valueʼ of non-human values, on the one hand, and human interests, on the nature; and the dogma that it requires rejection of an other. Indeed, one of the opening moves of the book ʻanthropocentricʼ perspective. is to shift the focus of ecological consideration away The critique of intrinsic value is entirely sound, from the – well-nigh impossible – task of determin- although it adds little to others that have gone before ing what, in a world of myriad entities and multiple (except perhaps in respect of its point that denying processes, should count as ecological value, to the intrinsic value to the non-human is not denying some- more manageable, if still complex, task of determining thing we do grant to human beings, since it is not, how far our existing values can be maintained in the Hayward argues, in virtue of imputing intrinsic value face of ecological realities. This is further refined to to humans that we think them worthy of ethical prot- become the question of what aspects of being human ection). Hayward also skilfully distinguishes between must be accommodated if a political theory is to an unavoidable and even desirable ʻanthropocentrismʼ

36 Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) that recognizes that there would be no value systems or oneʼs physical, mental, and spiritual beingʼ, and that ethics at all were these to be unrelated to any human this underlies all enlightened self-interest; the other values whatsoever, and what he terms ʻspeciesismʼ, on being that enlightened self-interests can – and should the one hand (inflicting pain on other creatures for – include an interest that he elaborates as ʻwhole- ʻmorally arbitraryʼ reasons), and ʻchauvinismʼ on the hearted respectʼ in the good of non-human beings. other (prejudicially resisting all evidence that other The first argument, which is developed in the course creatures might possess those features or capacities of some lengthy and rather earnest discriminations deemed to be exclusive to human beings). He also between egoism, altruism and self-interest, is, to my offers a reasonable case for viewing both these pos- mind, undercritical of its central claim that the motive itions as wrong and eliminable, although by failing to for morality is the desire for social integration. Hay- say what counts as ʻunavoidable painʼ or as ʻmorally ward defends this against the objection that morality arbitraryʼ reasons for inflicting it on other animals, here is being identified with conformism to prevailing he invites us to think that the conceptual distinction norms by claiming that anyone (his example is a between speciesism and chauvinism is clearer and ʻconscientiousʼ Nazi supporter) who thinks oppressive more helpful than it really is. Spelling out what is or behaviour is appropriate towards certain outsiders, but is not morally arbitrary inevitably requires us to make not towards members of his own group, is suffering judgements about human species-specific character- from a ʻcognitive deficiencyʼ of a kind that pre-empts istics, and these judgements will always be open to personal integrity. But by invoking such an extreme challenge as being ʻchauvinisticʼ in Haywardʼs sense. example, Hayward avoids the much more awkward What would count, for example, as a ʻchauvinisticʼ (and in many respects more relevant) instances of rather than a reasonable resistance to someone making potentially oppressive interests in social integration. If claims for the linguistic or rational abilities of non-human animals? Haywardʼs distinc- tion remains too formalistic to offer any but the vaguest guidance on such issues. He also, in this same context, makes the very dubious claim that while biocentrism (defined as ʻgiving moral consideration to all living beingsʼ) is quite consistent with anthropocentrism, eco-centrism (giving moral consideration also to the abiotic parts of nature) is not. But either this means simply that any value accorded to the life, say, of the AIDS virus is ʻanthro- pocentricʼ because it is the value of a human valuer – in which case exactly the same can be said of any value accorded abiotic nature; or it means something like ʻgiving consideration of the right to life to any and every animate entity is consistent with respecting human values in a way that giving value to inanimate entities is notʼ. And this seems plainly unsustainable. In the second part of his book, Hayward is almost exclusively concerned with defending his claim that ecological values are consistent with the pursuit of human interests. His argument has essen- tially two steps in it: one which would persuade us that the most fundamental interest of humans is in integrity, under- stood as ʻwholeness, unity, and health in

Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) 37 we were to apply Haywardʼs arguments to the case of But I remained nonetheless unconvinced. Hayward men and women conforming to patriarchal norms in nowhere to my mind satisfactorily answers the objec- a pre-feminist culture, it would be odd to view these tion that if we respect rational beings more than, or as cognitively deficient (just as it would seem odd to differently from, non-rational ones it is because we view those who contested these norms as displaying recognize in them a source of reciprocal respect of our the exceptional heroic moral outlook of those who bodily and socio-personal integrity (and tend to respect assisted the Jews under fascism). Hayward does not them in fact only in so far as they do so reciprocate). sufficiently recognize that a society does not have to With the possible exception of some domestic animals, be fascist to establish its identity or coherence through this is not in any sense true of non-human beings, who dubiously moral forms of social integration. in many instances will sting, bite or otherwise invade When Hayward proceeds to extrapolate environ- human bodily integrity without compunction, and who mental norms from his claims about the nature and cannot but destroy the life of the other parts of non- foundation of enlightened self-interest, he offers much human being upon which they prey. A further serious subtle and instructive commentary on the pros and problem is Haywardʼs lack of precision both about cons of market-based versus deliberative approaches what counts as respect (how much care does it include, to this, and himself comes down in favour of a mix of for how long?) and about the constituency towards each mode. But it is not entirely clear that ultimately which we have the obligation of ʻrespectʼ. Hayward he makes a case for much more than allowing that writes as if respect is owing to all beings which can there will always be recognition of a distinction – and be viewed as having interests or a ʻgoodʼ or their own. conflict – between more immediate personal consumer But this would seem to include all biotic entities, both interests and interests in environmental welfare and animal and vegetable, the ivy no less than the oak, long-term strategies for ecological conservation. He the greenfly no less than the lion or the dolphin. Can defends his claim that ʻif after deliberations, citizens Hayward really mean this, and if he does, how does decide they have generalizable interests in preserving he justify it without sliding towards the naturalism he items attributed such values as existence value, aes- appears to want to resist, and without imputing to all thetic value and so on, then fine; if they do not then of nature something sounding very like the ʻintrinsic this is also fineʼ on the grounds that no one has a right valueʼ he has earlier rejected as dogma? to deny people their ʻvital economic interestsʼ. But Haywardʼs book reads as one whose thought has what is to count here as ʻvital economic interestsʼ? If evolved in its making, and its gives a sense, too, that citizens decide to include the interests of the capitalist some of its component arguments have been pressed enterprise in remaining profitable as well as those of into a service for which they were not quite originally workers in their livelihood, then Hayward might seem intended. This in itself is no criticism, but I did end up to be endorsing something very like the status quo, wondering how far the message of the later chapters with all its existing tendencies to sideline environ- remained faithful to the wisdom of the earlier. I also mental considerations. wondered whether there is not a certain vacillation More to the point, it is not clear how this even- running through the book between two related but handed line on policy-making coheres with his defence distinguishable positions: that which maintains that of the idea that humans not only have an interest catering to human interests is consistent with respect in promoting ecological values, but a moral obliga- for ecological values, and that which claims that tion to give ʻwholehearted respectʼ (i.e. an active those human interests are only fully realized where respect which includes care) to non-human beings they include a respect for the interests of non-human (beings which he appears effectively – without ever nature. quite acknowledging it – to identify with non-human If Hayward conceives human attitudes to ʻnatureʼ animals). Developing this position requires Hayward primarily in terms of their forms of respect (or lack to respond to all the usual Kantian and Habermasian of it) for other animals, Peter Coatesʼs tendency is objections to the extension of full moral consideration to focus on ʻnatureʼ as landscape and environmental to animals, which he does with the aid of Spinoza and resources. Although prompting many conceptual reflec- some very agile and thought-provoking lines of argu- tions, this is not a work of philosophy but a cultural ment of his own – all of them designed to persuade study of Western perceptions of nature conducted in us that there is no reason to have more reverence for the light of contemporary ecological concerns and human ʻrational natureʼ than for any other aspect of responses. A main aim is to debunk views of pre- nature. Enlightenment nature as benefiting, if not from overt

38 Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) respect, at least from a benign neglect. Ecological in the post-industrial period relative to anything that destruction has always been with us, Coates wants to preceded it. insist, and if contemporary eco-romantics were only Indeed, the central conceptual weakness of the to become more historically informed they would book is that it nowhere properly discusses what is be rapidly disabused of their ideas about ecological meant by ecological ʻdestructionʼ, nor offers criteria innocence, whether conceived temporally (the period for distinguishing between benign and non-benign prior to the Industrial Revolution) or in terms of the forms of human interaction with the environment. Para- supposed eco-friendliness of particular communities doxically, therefore, given his historical sensibilities, or cultural outlooks (native American Indians, Eastern Coates here lends himself to those ahistorical ideas cultures, Buddhism, etc.). In support of his case, about what constitutes human ʻdamageʼ to nature that Coates assembles a good deal of relevant – if mainly are at work in the more naive forms of green romanti- secondary – evidence and discusses it in readable cism. Too often his argument against the historical ways. But much of the ground covered is now quite myopia of the latter develops only if we allow any well trodden, and subtle as some of Coatesʼs points human interference with the environment or use of its are, they are seldom pursued very far. One senses resources to count as ecologically ʻdestructiveʼ. But it a reluctance to engage with the implications of the is precisely this tacit equation of human interaction historical critique for any contemporary ecopolitical with nature with ʻcontaminationʼ of it that needs to agenda. Nor does Coates anywhere meet the objection be challenged if we are to avoid falling into conserva- of those who will simply point to the vast differences tive (in the sense of politically reactionary) modes of in the scale and quality of human ecological impact thinking about environmental conservation. Kate Soper

How we make knowledge in science

Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998. xiv + 336 pp., £37.50 hb., £13.95 pb., 0 521 44471 3 hb., 0 521 44913 8 pb.

In the last three decades, since the effective demise are ʻadvancesʼ, and the outcome ʻknowledgeʼ, but how of logical empiricism and Popperian fallibilism, the these came about – how they were constructed. There history of science has flourished as never before in the is still a dire need for philosophical reflection here, English-speaking world. Golinski charts that flourish- however, because of the confusion that surrounds the ing, aiming, in this book, to delineate the new histori- notion of narrative, and its relations to modernity and ography of science from which it has sprung. As a postmodernism. primer in that new historiography, it can hardly be Golinski notes that practitioners of the sociology of bettered. Key methodological issues are illuminated scientific knowledge have tried a variety of narrative by critical discussions of major recent studies in the experiments, but SSK has increasingly focused on the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). Golinski, specifics of one or another scientific controversy. This moreover, begins the long overdue and crucially predilection for micro-history retains a properly con- important task of repositioning epistemology in rela- crete focus, but it does mean, as he laments, that very tion to the historiography of science. His efforts only little examination has been made of the significance reveal, however, how important it is that philosophers, of the larger narrative of science in its wider histori- too, return to this topic, which is still subject to ritual- cal context, since Kuhnʼs groundbreaking work. The ized squabbles between ʻpostmodernistsʼ and ʻobjectiv- notion of a ʻrevolutionʼ has become commonplace, istsʼ – viz. the recent Sokal ʻscandalʼ in the USA. but, although it is plain, I think, that there is a ʻgrand Golinskiʼs title is wholly apt. There is no longer narrativeʼ to science, this narrative is quite unlike that any hope for the formulaic, prescriptive ʻmethodʼ of envisaged by the Enlightenment, or by Hegel, Marx or science long envisaged by philosophers. In its place their successors, for that matter. Despite embodying he sets out how complex are the considerations which progress, it is a narrative without a telos. bear on historians of science coming to understand It is a properly constructivist narrative – not a nar- the collective achievement of conceptual advance in rative of how something was revealed, was discovered science. The question examined is not whether these or emerged from a necessary, immanent dialectic, but

Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) 39 a narrative of how the intelligibility of the world was positivists and Popperians with the gleeful riposte ʻWe made for the first time, or invented. Golinski takes are the bogeymen!ʼ Thomas Kuhnʼs The Structure of Scientific Revolu- Of course, they were not. They were diligent seek- tions to be the watershed at which what he terms ers after knowledge, but a knowledge empiricism must ʻconstructivismʼ begins and the old epistemologies suppose not to exist. The implicit claim of Golinskiʼs bite the dust, along with the ʻWhigʼ view of the title is correct – the sociology of scientific knowledge history of science as a history of progress. The nar- is what the epistemology of science must be. This is rative of the emergence of the new history of science why, with benefit of hindsight, the debate has now itself is as good a case study as any if we want to splintered into multiple layers of irony, which entirely understand the philosophical significance of the rise belie the ostensible premisses of the original confron- of ʻconstructivismʼ. tation between relativism and objectivism. So: At the height of the initial ʻPopper–Kuhn debateʼ (a) Golinskiʼs book is a micro-history of a brief those who could no longer defend any version of interlude of controversy in the history of science in objectivist or foundationalist epistemology nonetheless which he bemoans the abandonment, by historians of felt they could still refute the wholesale relativism of science, of ʻmacro-historyʼ of science for the micro- their opponents (e.g. Feyerabend and proponents of the history of controversies. (The notion of ʻscience as ʻstrong programmeʼ) because the blanket denial that suchʼ is as problematic for relativists as the history any truth could be firmly established is self-contra- of science had been for objectivists.) dictory. Actually there was a double antinomy. Exist- (b) Golinski charts the history of the development of ing epistemologies implied that the history of science the historiography of science which effectively began could not itself be a body of knowledge (only, at best, in 1962, and maintains that, since the publication of a compendium of error). So it seemed that the history The Structure of Scientific Revolutions the history of of science, as a discipline generating an increasingly science as a discipline has made immense progress in interesting body of knowledge, could only do so if it uncovering the real bases on which science has been were to repudiate epistemology as such. socially produced, by decisively rolling back the Whig Two egregious non sequiturs lurked there. First, myth of progress. admittedly, relativism is not coherent. But demon- (c) The key contribution Kuhn made to the demise strating this does nothing to help empiricism escape of empiricism was to show that the programmatic arguments which show it too is incoherent. As a historiographies imposed on science by empiricist and response to their tormentors, then, the objectivistsʼ fallibilist epistemologies are decisively refuted by the self-refutation argument was hardly better than ʻStop empirical evidence. (The hypothesis that science pro- saying that or the bogeyman will come!ʼ Second, the ceeds by the empirical refutation of hypotheses has collapse of empiricism doesnʼt abolish the need to been empirically refuted by the evidence adduced by answer epistemological questions. Both sides (equally historians of science.) mistakenly) supposed empiricism to be epistemology, (d) The history of science is the history of successes. so their opponents, in effect, met the disconcerted It is too, as a discipline, in-creasingly a success, in so far as it makes scientific success comprehensible, yet it has at its heart the methodological precept (which Golinski calls the ʻsymmetry principleʼ) that all beliefs (those that fail just as much as those that succeed) must be treated impartially, as of equal worth. (e) The history of science only has a subject matter if we can equally truthfully speak of there being ʻscience as suchʼ and of its being ʻsocially producedʼ. These layers of irony are not self-refuting conundrums

40 Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) but real aspects of a problem which need to be rec- tingent, and its impact has already been radically to onciled. The notion of scientific progress (and of modify human ends in ways that were not immanent ʻscience as suchʼ) does not require any teleology to in human activity prior to those discoveries. The be imputed to its history if it is only possible to see great merit and value of Golinskiʼs book is that he an episode as ʻprogressʼ after the event. The fact that convincingly conveys the concrete richness of the we cannot, in advance, prescribe a rational decision enquiries of the sociology of scientific knowledge, procedure for the resolution of scientific disputes does and the impossibility that old-style epistemological not mean that their resolution has to be irrational prescriptions could do justice to the growth of science and cannot constitute progress. Who would suppose as such. But philosophers need to go beyond the fas- that the way to solve technological problems could cinating Coda to Making Natural Knowledge, on the be prescribed in advance? No one suggests that the topic of narrative, to elaborate a non-teleological model social production of technology (how else should it be of narrative which provides an epistemic description produced?) could possibly compromise the fact that it of the production of the intelligibility of the natural works (if it does). world. We do not ʻdiscoverʼ the sense the world already Embedded in the narrative of scientific/technical makes; we make whatever sense it contains. progress must be such diverse facts as what happens Roger Harris when one does this (look at Faradayʼs experimental work), why someone should have thought in this way at that time (look at the background to Darwin in the political economy of the time), the power and Rorty’s ghost relevance of such and such a mathematical technique (look at the work of Maxwell, Boltzmann or Einstein), Morris Dickstein, ed., The Revival of Pragmatism: and the development, dynamics and funding of par- New Essays on Social Thought, Law and Culture, ticular kinds of institutions (from the Royal Society Duke University Press, Durham NC, 1998. x + 464 through the modern university to the Manhattan pp., £47.00 hb., £15.95 pb., 0 8223 2245 5 hb., 0 8223 Project, NASA and Silicon Valley) – just for a start. 2228 5 pb. Golinski has excellent chapters devoted to the diverse kinds of historical facts which must be relevant to the This substantial, carefully edited and thought-provok- appreciation of scientific activity and its outcomes: ing set of essays (deriving from a 1995 conference at disciplinary identity, the ʻfieldʼ and the laboratory, the the City University of New York) is not well served by development of forms of rhetoric and discourse, the its title or subtitle. The subtitle studiously omits any roles of experiments and models, and the relation to reference to the revival of pragmatism in philosophy, the wider culture. a phenomenon more than adequately represented by The progress of science can be decoupled from the bookʼs opening group of essays, in which hith- theories of progressive social change. The practice erto-unpublished work by Rorty, Putnam and Cavell of science may flourish in certain kinds of polity, and appears, and which will therefore be of real interest you could suppose, for instance, that there is more to many philosophers. The title, with its use of the than a fortuitous connection between Nazisʼ anti- definite article and two singular terms, suggests that semitism and their failure to develop atomic weapons. the various movements of thought in philosophy, social Nonetheless, what emerges from successful scientific thought, law and culture examined in each of the practice – that is, what atomic weapons do – has the collectionʼs four main sections should be thought of same contingent connection with any social narrative as aspects of a single, unified intellectual system or as the assistance that measles and smallpox gave the method; but as the editorʼs introduction declares, and Conquistadors. Just as they could, like H.G. Wellsʼs the essays themselves make clear, it is very difficult Martians, have been wiped out by the diseases they to see anything more than the most general kinds of found in Mexico, so science and technology could well family resemblance between what is called ʻprag- end up abolishing humanity rather than scarcity. matistʼ thinking in each of these departments of the In short, scientific progress, like technological pro- contemporary American academic scene. gress to which it is allied, is still possible even if no Nevertheless, it has to be said that anyone who teleology governs the outcome of scientific activities, chooses to read through the collection from beginning and/or no prior decision procedure can be prescribed to end will feel that its various elements maintain a to resolve scientific disputes. What it unearths is con- certain kind of coherence; but that is primarily because

Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) 41 many of the participants feel the need to orient their the one hand, and Emerson (and Wittgenstein), on contributions by reference to – and hence reveal that the other, and by demonstrating this through giving they associate ʻthe revival of pragmatismʼ with – the careful attention to the very different uses to which work of one particular writer: Richard Rorty. This the same words are put in the relevant texts. In its realization makes the collection as a whole seem rather company, the other essays in this section can seem more perspicuous or surveyable; but it heightens oneʼs all but oblivious to the contrast between their shared puzzlement as to why the bookʼs title and subtitle tendency to restate pragmatist theses about attentive- make no reference to the section in which Rortyʼs ness to experience in a more linguistic key and the work actually appears, and hence to the intellectual form or manner in which the words of their restate- project from which the phenomenon it studies takes ments actually work. its departure. In this respect, Cavellʼs essay exemplifies a sub- The collectionʼs implicitly Rortyan architectonic is stantial link between the bookʼs opening section and not, however, obvious from its opening section, entitled that with which it closes, by introducing both the ʻWhat Difference Does Pragmatism Make? The View primary concern and the familiar method of the essays From Philosophyʼ. The essays which appear there tend concerned with ʻPragmatism, Culture and Artʼ. Here, more towards Putnam than Rorty as a contempo- Emerson is at least as important a point of reference as rary reference point; and the debates they survey and James or Dewey – perhaps most clearly so in Richard continue (primarily concerning the relations between Poirierʼs short but dense and challenging essay on the experience, language and the world) float pretty much differences between Emersonian and Rortyan visions free of those encountered in the collectionʼs other three of poets as minters of ʻnewʼ vocabularies. These dif- sections; largely because they stay far closer to the ferences, it seems to me, survive Louis Menandʼs concerns of two (or at most three) of the four classi- ultimately unconvincing attempt, in his response to cal sources of the pragmatist movement in American Poirier, to smooth them over. This section of the book culture – James, Dewey and to a lesser extent Emerson also includes an essay by Ray Carney on Eakins as (Pierceʼs name appears more than once in these and a pragmatist painter, in a sense of ʻpragmatismʼ sup- other essays, but he receives no substantial attention posedly common to Emerson and James. It contains anywhere). some interesting readings of specific paintings (partly Rorty devotes his essay to arguing that Deweyʼs in the wake of Michael Friedʼs recent work), but its tolerant attitude to religious faith is perfectly com- general thesis is vitiated by its apparent assumption patible with his pragmatist commitments, and proposes that any interest in the idea of mind and body meeting that his own neo-pragmatism can perfectly happily in labour amounts to a commitment to a pragmatist accommodate religion on similar lines – by consigning vision of life. such matters to the sphere of private self-development, The literary interest in pragmatismʼs vision of strong which must (so he has argued elsewhere) be sharply poets is itself very different from the focus of the legal distinguished from the public realm of projects of theorists whose work is represented in the bookʼs third social co-operation. We are encouraged to hail this as section, on ʻPragmatism and Lawʼ. There, a pragmatist a major softening in Rortyʼs hitherto resolutely hostile judge is defined and defended by Richard Posner as attitude to religion; religious believers might be for- one who feels no duty to render judgements that are given for thinking that accepting such an offer would consistent with those established by other officials in unacceptably soften the very idea of faith, understood the past. On such a definition, it is pretty plain that (as as embodying humanityʼs salvation. Thomas Grey argues in his essay) legal pragmatism Putnamʼs essay combines the suggestion that needs no philosophical support from James, Dewey Rortyan anti-realism is incompatible with Jamesian and Emerson; but it is also plain that it barely deserves pragmatism with an Austinian critique of the Jame- the label ʻpragmatistʼ at all. As David Luban demon- sian notion of pure experience, in order to engender a strates, such a view of best judicial practice could be plausible form of pragmatist direct or natural realism. the conclusion derived from any number of different But this intriguing sketch of an argument can hope legal and philosophical perspectives. And Rortyʼs brief to carry real conviction only when it receives the intervention into this debate – primarily to contest more lengthy backing that Putnam claims he will in his familiar way Lubanʼs further claim that legal provide in a forthcoming book on the topic. Cavellʼs disputes sooner or later always raise questions of essay stands out from the others, both by focusing ethical and metaphysicial import – does nothing to on the differences between James and Dewey, on reduce this sense of conceptual attenuation.

42 Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) In the bookʼs other section, ʻPragmatism and the A final puzzling aspect of this collectionʼs structure Remaking of Social Thoughtʼ, the essays discuss two returns us to the difficulties with which we began. main issues: the connection between philosophical Despite the fact that, if any single thinkerʼs work pragmatism and democracy, and that between philo- haunts these pages it is that of Rorty, Stanley Fish sophical pragmatism and critical cultural theory. is assigned the task of drawing together the threads Kloppenberg, Westbrook and Bernstein disagree over of the collection in an Afterword. His contribution is the claim, whose most famous defenders are Putnam entertaining, managing to respond to specific aspects and Rorty, that Dewey was right to see a connection of many essays in the book, but saying very little that between pragmatismʼs science-based conception of is new about his own perspective on these matters. inquiry as the open-ended intellectual labour of an But the role assigned to him exemplifies the editorʼs egalitarian community and the political practices of strangely divided attitude towards the broadly philo- Western democracies. Only in the concluding essays sophical roots of the neo-pragmatist revival with which by Alan Wolfe and John Patrick Diggins do we get the collection is concerned. Why declare, in the bookʼs any sense that Deweyʼs idealized vision of demo- introduction, that it ʻis not primarily concerned with cratic institutions paid no serious attention to their philosophyʼ, if the only thing that holds together the dependence upon and vulnerability to economic and very varied understandings of pragmatism on display in political forces whose impact typically has decidedly its four main sections is Rortyʼs attempts to refashion non-egalitarian consequences. Essays by Fraser and aspects of the work of Dewey and James for his own Posnock bring the further issues of culture and ʻraceʼ purposes? Perhaps this is an implicit acknowledgement into this already complicated picture; but their general of Rortyʼs own divided attitude about his preferred force is vitiated by a focus on individual theorists location within the academic intellectual economy. (Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois respectively), and If so, it may be worth remembering that justifying a by their implicit assumption that any theorist capable Rortyan dismissal of philosophical discourse requires of seeing that concepts of race and ethnicity can be rather more convincing philosophical work than Rorty given a genealogical account might usefully be cate- himself has yet managed to accomplish. gorized as a pragmatist. Stephen Mulhall

Take 3

Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, Verso, London and New York, 1998. vii + 143 pp., £11.00 pb., 1 85984 222 4. Reading Perry Andersonʼs recent book on post- his discourse on postmodernity, within the established modernity momentarily recuperated for me the narrative but under the sign of the traditionʼs ʻculmina- experience of sitting through Hollywood sequels like tionʼ and ʻconsummationʼ. Despite its kinship with the Halloween and Alien (I, II, III). Both are devoted Hollywood sequel, Andersonʼs follow-up manages to to keeping the story going. This seems to be con- provide an almost too coherent account of the history sistent with a postmodern spirit that distrusts and of the idea of postmodernity. discounts narrative as a condition of churning out With Jamesonʼs complex but critical assessment of one episode after another. The difference is that the postmodernity – the designated successor to an earlier Hollywood blockbuster, which now punctually invades modernism embraced by Marxists – Western Marxism, our summers, is interested only in making money according to Anderson, has left its constrained geo- while Andersonʼs sequel is committed to rescuing a dis- political compound to be comfortably at home now cursive tradition he has called Western Marxism. With with a world it had once denied, at the precise moment this most recent chapter of the itinerary of Western the West has lost its dominance (though if the West Marxism in the twentieth century, continuing two includes the North America that Anderson has identi- earlier books on the same subject, he is concerned with fied as Jamesonʼs platform, it is still a long way from resituating the texts of Fredric Jameson, principally losing its hegemony). By changing its address and

Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) 43 relocating in another neighbourhood, modernist Marx- Marxism and its redeemer, he commits himself to a ism renewed its lease on a life it had once known, and logic of analogy that may well exceed both Jamesonʼs acquired a new but ambiguous identity. Part of the own purpose and the histories that produced two ambiguity of this narrative stems from the uncertain different moments. status of the postmodern itself: whether it is merely At the heart of Andersonʼs narrative is the role a chronological marker in some ongoing, unfolding played by political defeat as a condition of discourse political and cultural history of (Western) capitalism or in the two conjunctures. Yet despite his penchant for a claimant with epistemological aspirations that seeks symmetry, it still remains a question whether the to exceed its geopolitical location. (This is a problem recognition of the political defeat of the interwar also dogging its contemporary competitor, postcolonial period is analogous to that experienced in the late theory.) While Jameson clearly is convinced that it is 1960s. For one thing, the range of activity in the 1960s both, depending upon which texts one is consulting, was distributed over a good part of the globe, while Anderson is less decisive and plays to his strength as the setbacks of the 1930s were restricted principally a historian by supplying the chronology of a marker, to Europe and possibly Japan. However disappoint- which is somewhat different from assessing its status ing those failures in the late 1960s were, it is still as a referent and/or theory of knowledge. problematic to put them on the same footing with But the real problem with this book lies in its those in the interwar period or to think of them as devotion to rescuing a narrative structure focused on having constituted some sort of unity. For another, the the tradition of Western Marxism, which, according political opposition of the prewar period derived its to Anderson, moved analysis in the interwar period identity and unity, in large part, from the presence of a from the political-economic to the cultural (except- common enemy in fascism, while the various political ing the lone figure of Antonio Gramsci), once it was movements of the 1960s often pursued different goals recognized that the state was not going to wither from each other, despite the loose cohesion offered away and political defeat was a certainty. The logic by opposition to the Vietnam War. They lacked an of Andersonʼs narrative necessitates finding analogies analogue capable of supplying the ground for a unified between the two moments of the 1930s and 1960s that political identity. will secure the kind of repetitious history Jameson is In order to demonstrate how Jamesonʼs inter- made to enact. As a result of the political defeats of the vention fulfilled the desire of Andersonʼs narrative, 1960s in France, Italy, Japan, Germany and the United and revitalized Western Marxism, it is necessary to States, accordingly, Jameson recombined the great show how his account of postmodernity was inspired texts of Western Marxism (especially in his brilliant by a ʻlogic of capitalʼ that was empowered to move and, I believe, most important theoretical work, The analysis from the ʻsectoral to the generalʼ. This opera- Political Unconscious), reconfigured its relationship tion entailed a magnification of Western Marxism to modernism, and remobilized them in the discourse that would make possible its reception in the great on postmodernity. In Andersonʼs enthusiasm to situate metropolitan centres of the globe. With this ʻbreak- Jameson as both the inheritor of a moribund modernist outʼ from the West, Anderson proposes, Marxism, as

44 Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) re-emplotted in Jamesonʼs theory of postmodernity, politics, despite the unevenness of the relationship, is ʻis no longer restrictively Westernʼ. But not entirely the necessity of a critical practice that must evaluate so. Even though we must be grateful to Jamesonʼs artworks and discriminate the political conduct of genuinely laudable interest in the world outside of states. Euro-America, it is still the case of a Marxist from Although Jameson has rejected the emptiness of the West bringing Western theory to Europeʼs outside. mere ʻdenunciationʼ and appeals to morality as forms Among major theorists of our time, there are pitifully of purposeful political action, he has, nonetheless, few like Jameson who have actually sought to engage always engaged the materiality of real struggle even the world outside of Euro-America. In that sense, when he was accused of retreating from it. Yet this his ecumenicity is far more expansive and profound form of political intervention has always initially than either the earlier modernists who flirted with derived from the problematization of cultural prod- motifs from China, Japan, Africa and Mexico or the uction, which, with the postmodern, has expanded current postmodernists who have simply presupposed to the degree that it virtually coextends with the the assimilation of the outside into an expanded Euro- economy to raise rightly the question of the proper America. posture of the critic. For this reason Jamesonʼs politics But what Anderson fails to recognize in his eager- must always be seen in the practice of intervening ness to analogize and assimilate Jamesonʼs programme in culture, which has always been his vocation. But, to the modernist Marxism of the prewar period is by the same measure, how are we to account for that the 1960s was a time of ʻcoloured Marxismʼ, a Andersonʼs own politicality, which warns against the Marxism that was being mediated by the experience hazard of ʻconjur[ing] up renewed dangers of fascism, and aspirations of the Third World, which often had a lazy exercise of right and left alike todayʼ, in view little to do with the diverse defeats in the industrial of the sentiment he ascribes to Jameson, whose ʻvoice West and Japan. If he allows himself to remind us has been without equal in clarity and eloquence of its (and Jameson) gently that Gramsci is missing in this resistance to the direction of the timesʼ? Perhaps it is combinatory, we are entitled to add, significantly, that only in a world of interminable sequels like Halloween Mao is missing from Andersonʼs thinking. While that one imagines the existence of horrors greater than Andersonʼs interest in the Third World seems restricted the renewed dangers of fascism today and envisages to publishing a memoir about his fatherʼs service in exercises more meaningful than dredging up spectral the imperial Customs Union of China during a turbu- fears that seem to have been safely put to rest in the lent time, Jameson has, in the Political Unconscious, same completed past as Western Marxism. rethought the experience of cultural revolution in Harry Harootunian China at another troubled moment as a mode of cul- tural production to be applied elsewhere. Although Western Marxism revealed the sign of failed promise with its fateful decision to move analysis Smoking to the cultural/aesthetic domain, these considerations were still never far from the economic categories Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method, Verso, London enlisted from Capital which gave cultural theory its and New York, 1998. viii + 184 pp., £19.00 hb., 1 direction. Recovering the trace of this coupling from 85984 809 5. this ruined landscape, Jameson, who was convinced that Marxism was less political philosophy than a set Published at the fag end of Brechtʼs centenary year, of political practices concerning the economy, was 1998, Brecht and Method will be perceived by cigar- able to rejoin political economy and aesthetics in smoking observers and good sports alike as one of the the 1970s, which had remained until then as distinct most significant contributions to have been engendered spheres among the Left, by working Mandel, Arrighi by Bertʼs birthday festivities. Brecht and Method is and Harvey into his cultural analysis of postmodernity. to be welcomed as one of the few recent books on Still, Anderson rightly wonders, what happens when Brecht to make full use of the new Brecht edition the postmodern is sandwiched between aesthetics and – the Große Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe – and economics? Missing in this mix is ʻa sense of culture it cites much previously untranslated material, though as a battlefieldʼ that divides claims into a field of readers without German (and Verso publishing house) contest, which ʻis the plane of politics, understood should be aware that about half of its new translations as a space in its own rightʼ. What links culture and are misleading or inaccurate. Jamesonʼs essay consists

Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) 45 of twenty short, numbered segments configured into standing and revolutionary practice. From the early five larger units: a Prologue and Epilogue, and three 1930s onwards, these are core questions for Brecht main parts entitled (i) Doctrine/Lehre, (ii) Gestus, also, which might have set the agenda for subsequent and (iii) Proverbs/Sprüche (this in itself is indicative criticism and scholarship: does Brecht ultimately of Jamesonʼs perspective on Brecht, in that one could presuppose the primacy of dialectical – rather than equally well have chosen Science and Laughter as materialist – thinking? How, precisely, does Brecht major categories). The bookʼs construction is, perhaps, construe the relationship between theory and praxis, in surprising, in that for Jameson ʻBrecht is modern first both political and cultural/theatrical terms? Is Brechtʼs and foremost by way of his discontinuities and his ʻmethodʼ, with its typical gestures of inversion, internal deeper fragmentationʼ. Despite Jamesonʼs focus on dislocation, and hostility to metaphysics, logocentrism estrangement/Verfremdung in his account of Brechtian and individualism, fundamentally deconstructive? Or aesthetics, the overarching structure of Brecht and is that method always embedded in a broader and Method, with its gesture towards the well-made play deeper sociological and political project? which Brecht travestied and anathematized, is hardly It is not always clear where Jameson stands on decentred through montage techniques or narrative these issues (to be fair, the same point can be made disruption (though Jamesonʼs text is strongly marked about Brecht), though he does evince a tendency to by the rhetorical figures of digression and circum- prioritize dialectic over materialism, and method over locution). substance. It might also be claimed that any attempt Jamesonʼs primary goal in Brecht and Method is to identify a unifying preoccupation in Brechtʼs work to establish what is distinctive about Brechtʼs work. is misguided. We have already seen that Jameson He argues convincingly and correctly that this goal himself notes Brechtʼs predilection for discontinuity cannot be achieved either by attributing a unique and fragmentation, and Brecht and Method could implicit subjectivity to Brechtʼs work or by subsuming perhaps have been more cognizant of contradiction, not it under standard categories of cultural and literary so much as a substantive feature of Brechtian thinking criticism. Jameson wonders, therefore, if there might than as a fissure that runs through it. After all, what be a distinctively Brechtian mode of thinking or even if Brecht did not have a coherent and consistent grasp a distinctively Brechtian doctrine that could bring of such categories as dialectic, (historical) materialism, together the various strands in his output from the modernity and (contemporary) capitalism? What if the mid-1920s through to his untimely death in the mid- incompatibilities of Brechtian thinking were in fact a 1950s. Unsurprisingly, Jameson lights upon Marxism necessary condition for Brechtian pedagogy, as Jame- as the most likely reagent to synthesize Brechtʼs son so aptly describes it? ʻTeaching is thus showing ostensible disparities and discontinuities, noting that … ; the dramatic representation of teaching is the Brechtʼs Marxism was somewhat idiosyncratic with showing of showing, the showing of how you show its inflections of Vienna School logical empiricism, and demonstrate.ʼ What if, ultimately, the Cainonical American pragmatism and Karl Korsch. Indeed, fairly mark of Brechtʼs modernity is a sceptical Giddensian early on in Brecht and Method the key weapons in reflexivity, self-conscious to the verge of that corrosive Brechtʼs philosophical panoply come to be pragmatism self-doubt objectified in the sardonic encomium ʻIn (hence Jamesonʼs foregrounding of usefulness/Nütz- Praise of Doubtʼ? liches) and inversion, which turns out to be Brechtʼs Pedagogical notions such as representation and variant of dialectical reversal. showing were, of course, at the heart of Jamesonʼs So far, so good. Although antiquarian schools of own theoretical endeavours in the 1980s, culminating Brecht criticism might by now have turned their backs in his proposal of a (Brechtian) aesthetic of cognitive on Jamesonian heterodoxy, and revisionist fudges of mapping. The most suggestive and stimulating sections the ʻsex for textʼ variety would be frustrated by his of Brecht and Method are those where the allegori- sequestration of sleaze, there is a strong case for cal strategies of reading expounded in The Political arguing that Brechtʼs reception of the critical realism Unconscious are reprised in detailed explorations of of Karl Korsch does indeed provide an appropriate specific texts: on the one hand, the most popular works starting point for any attempt to specify the sub- such as Life of Galileo, and on the other neglected clas- stance of Brechtʼs theoretical position. Korsch had sics such as Me-ti and The Threepenny Novel. These famously argued that Marx and Engels were primarily commentaries alone call out for sustained attention dialecticians, rather than materialists, as evidenced to Brecht and Method by Brechtians and anti-Bre- in their advocacy of the unity of theoretical under- chtians alike. At the same time, and notwithstanding

46 Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) their fulgurating brilliance, Jamesonʼs meditations on legacy). Unfortunately, Jameson does not have the representability and capitalism in Brecht retrace the space to examine this aspect of Brechtʼs impact in theoretical dilemmas delineated in his own mid-1980s the detail it undoubtedly merits, and he ends, perhaps accounts of abstraction and postmodernism. Jame- tellingly, by gesturing towards a properly Brechtian sonʼs discussion of representability in Brecht begins modernism. Here too, though, Jamesonʼs account of by acknowledging the latterʼs critique of photographic Brecht presupposes a theoretical perspective which realism in The Threepenny Lawsuit. But Jameson does is, arguably, misplaced. Brechtʼs modernism is said not elaborate on the theoretical bases of that critique to be fundamentally different from ʻthe canonical and, when he moves on to discuss Brechtʼs substantive aestheticizing typeʼ, but the historico-cultural environ- representations of capitalism, tends to concentrate on ment of Brechtʼs encounters with – and practice of the embodiment of capitalism in specific personages, – artistic modernism was dominated not by aestheti- whether they be members of the lumpenproletariat or cism, but by those activist modernisms from Italian individual proto-capitalists. Futurism through to revolutionary Expressionism and This, though, is to miss the point. The crux of Bre- anarcho-Marxist Dada. Perhaps the real lesson to be chtʼs critique of photographic realism – and, indeed, of learned from Brecht – the demonstrable ʻusefulnessʼ all modes of mimetic illusionism – is that the realities that prefaces Jamesonʼs investigation – is that all the of capitalist modernity can no longer be represented canonical and cultural-philosophical categories of the on the basis of the direct experience of individual past three decades need to be radically dismantled and subjects. Like Piscator, Brecht construes capitalism in then reassembled, in a Galilean process of ʻcomplex structural and relational terms, so that it can only be seeingʼ which will render contemporary ʻtheoryʼ truly grasped – and aesthetically mediated – via processes of pre-Copernican. conceptual abstraction. Jameson, however, still appears Steve Giles to conceive of artistic representation in iconic terms, much as he had done in the mid-1980s, in a manner reminiscent of Althusserʼs Letter on Art: ʻart makes us “see” “conclusions without premisses”, whereas The other side of knowledge makes us penetrate into the mechanism which produces the “conclusions” out of the “prem- language isses”.ʼ Brechtʼs position is more complex, but equally problematic. While the artistic techniques associated Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery, Imagining Lan- with estrangement/Verfremdung are meant to enable guage: An Anthology, MIT Press, Cambridge MA the spectator to ʻpenetrate into the mechanismʼ so as and London, 1999. xx + 618 pp., £38.50 hb., 0 262 to produce political conclusions out of sociological 18186 X. premisses, Brecht also propounds a philosophical and aesthetic ethos of making visible/Sichtbarmachen that It is a platitude to state that literary theory in the is sustained by his commitment to social behaviour- last twenty years has been mainly preoccupied with ism. Hence, the V-effect aims to estrange a societal deconstructing the notion of literature. The theory gestus which underlies historical processes, yet is wars, the move towards cultural studies, the Holy simultaneously the palpable expression of the nexus of Trinity of class, gender and race have done their best societal relations in which individuals in a particular to enlarge, replace or discard the old canon. All those epoch are located. deconstructive attempts, however, still have something Given that Jamesonʼs own reflections on abstrac- in common with the antiquated, essentialist, human tion and representation were provoked by the need to nature view of literature: a representative conception. theorize postmodernism, it is not altogether surprising By which I mean nothing so simple as a mimetic that he concludes Brecht and Method by reminding us theory where the text ʻrepresentsʼ real or imaginary of Brechtʼs seemingly forgotten role as a progenitor entities; rather the idea that author, characters and of much contemporary theory, whether it be anti- readers are representative of a group or groups (of foundationalist, anti-essentialist or poststructuralist. gender, race or class) – the largest of such groups The mediating link between Brecht and contemporary being humankind. theory is, Jameson avers, Roland Barthes (though some Hardly anyone (and certainly not this reviewer) might argue that Althusser played an equally impor- regrets the demise of the quasi-religious concept of tant part in establishing and transmitting a Brechtian literature, from Arnold to the New Criticism; although

Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) 47 the practice of close commentary at least taught inter- tion (from the traducson of Swiftʼs Anglo-Latin letter pretative techniques now sadly lost. But this does not to ʻscientificʼ mnemonics or translation), mystics (and entail (and certainly not for this reviewer) an adherence that includes Khlebnikov, the Russian Futurist poet), to the dogma of representativity. The problem with that cryptographers (like Francis Bacon, with his double dogma is that, focusing on the contents of the work, it cypher) and spelling reformers (from President de separates literature from language (best left in the care Brosses to George Bernard Shaw). And, last but not of ʻscientificʼ linguistics): the materiality of language is least, a hodge-podge of authors who reflect on the a fit subject of study for technicians and scientists, not materiality of signs (from Jean-Pierre Brisset to Fen- for the likes of us, who float on the clouds of ideology nolosa) and philosophers of the clinamen as applied to and social and political intervention. language and literature, from Lucretius to Serres. But the dogma of representativity has always- This list seeks to do justice to the main quality of already been contested by another tradition, where the anthology: its anti-systematic profusion. The book language and literature are inextricably mixed, a tradi- is obviously a labour of love, collected over many tion which rejects the idealist postulates on which not years. True, some names are missing, like Wolfson and only representative literary theory but also the science Perceval (but these 600 odd pages are only a selection: of linguistics are based (the transitivity of language the material that might have been included is infinite), on the one hand, the calculability of langue on the and one can detect a certain hostility to the Lettrism other hand). This is the tradition not of Saussure of Isidore Isou. True also, the presence of others is the linguist, but of the other Saussure, the demented bizarre and perhaps undeserved (I am not impressed seeker of anagrams: the tradition of the materiality, by John Riddellʼs ʻHʼ, which is quoted in extenso). corporeality and intransitivity of language as the stuff But the sheer bulk of what is there is overwhelming, literature is made of. in an entirely positive sense. Not least because from This ʻtraditionʼ, however, has so far failed to become this construction of another tradition for language and one, in spite of the rich and various nature of the texts literature, a number of conclusions may be drawn. that might belong to it, for lack of an authorized (a) There is such a thing as a practice of imagining corpus. With Rasula and McCafferyʼs anthology, such language. Hence the ambiguity of the title: ʻlanguage is a corpus, in all its diversity, is at our disposal at last. captured at the moments when it imaginesʼ – language And it makes exhilarating reading. Not least because does not only speak in its own right, it has flights of of the ʻmethodʼ of the anthology, which reminds me of fancy – versus ʻit is a recognised literary and theoreti- a Deleuzian rhizome rather than the systematic paths cal practice for a writer to imagine languageʼ. At its of a scientific treatise: mysterious titles (ʻOralities, most timid, this attitude implies that the writer plays Rituals and Colloquiesʼ, ʻLost and Found in Transla- with language; at its boldest, that she recreates lan- tionʼ) and a labyrinthine criss-crossing of references. guage from scratch, even if this is notoriously impos- For this is a wonderland of a book, for a falsely naive, sible (poets and fous littéraires, même combat). Alice-like reader to meander through. She will meet (b) The practice is immemorial, and found in all characters every bit as exciting as those of Lewis cultures. Even as the seminal study by A. Liede (Dich- Carroll: poets that play with language (like Morgen- tung als Spiel, de Gruyter, Berlin, 1963) on games stern), modernist novelists (Joyce or Gertrude Stein), authors play covered the whole earth and went back students of social or racial dialect (from Whitman on to the remotest antiquity, this anthology has texts by slang to Zora Neale Hurston), practitioners of sound Aristophanes, a third-century kabbalist, and includes poetry (from Aristophanes to members of Oulipo), a medieval Arabic mystical alphabet, and a Rongo- glossolalists and false prophets (from Swedenborg to Rongo from Easter Island. And this is not a return to Helen Smith), literary creators of invented words or a WASPish universalism of human nature; this is a tongues (from Rabelais to Carroll), madmen whose recognition that whenever humankind speaks (and it symptoms are linguistic and whose delirium is some- is a defining characteristic of the species homo that it times metalinguistic (from Judge Schreber to Luriaʼs is loquens), they imagine language, or are imagined patient, taking in the poetry of Christopher Smart), by it. serious jokers who extract meaning from the text by (c) The practice is so pervasive that it crosses the tampering or subtraction (R. Johnson and his clipped usual barriers between language-games and genres, version of Milton, Bob Brown and his pornographic between the ʻaestheticʼ and the ʻrationalʼ, for instance, censorship, Tom Philipps and his Humument, ʻa treated or the playful and the serious. The result is a mixture Victorian novelʼ), assorted practitioners of transposi- as heady as the mixture of races and nationalities on

48 Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) the Great Trunk Road in Kim: as we run along, we language, by insisting on the arbitrary character not meet poets and painters (and even architects), phil- of the sign, but of the text, on its capacity to develop osophers and social scientists imbued with a spirit independently of any authorʼs intention, to construct of universal benevolence, mystics and madmen and its own meaning through automatic devices or mere hoaxers (like George Psalmanazar, the eighteenth- semantic chance. Language in those texts exploits, in century ʻdiscovererʼ of Formosan) – all the language- the sense of Grice, its own rules and potentialities. games that humankind has ever practised seem to be Hence the excess that pervades all those texts and affected. accounts for their profusion: the excess involved in (d) As a result of all this, the achievement is letting language speak, but also in letting a perfectly considerable. Seen from the vantage point of the rational method (for the improvement of spelling, for anthology, the whole landscape of the imagining lan- instance) acquire a momentum of its own and escape guage tradition (like the chess-board in Through the its inventor into the production of délire. Looking-Glass) enables us to understand the appar- I cannot too highly praise the anthology: it will ently scandalous links between high poetry and folie provide a breath of fresh air to all those who, like me, littéraire, even madness tout court, between epiphanic have their doubts about the current doxa of identity. encounters with God and hoaxes. What the anthology Jean-Jacques Lecercle captures is, if not the essence of the literary, as there is no such thing, at least the fount from which our ever renewed desire for literature springs. There is a darker side to language, and this darker side is infinitely His last bow attractive and productive, and it is forever haunting the clearer side, which attempts – sometimes with success Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. – to construct identity and convey information. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, Verso, London In a way, all this is already known (a host of French and New York, 1998. lvi + 221 pp., £14.00 pb., 0 86091 614 6. theorists are quoted in the introduction to the various sections, to comfort the philosophy of language that This is his final book, published in France in 1993, underpins the anthology). For this is not only a col- two years after the appearance of What is Philosophy? lection of quaint and curious texts: the book defends (the last product of the long collaboration with Félix both a literary and a philosophical position. Guattari), one year after Guattariʼs death and two The literary position (hence my incipit) concerns years before Deleuzeʼs suicide. In 1991, Deleuze and the going back to modernism as the model of liter- Guattari sounded an autumnal, almost valedictory, ariness. The current doxa is very much centred on note when they remarked that ʻwhat is philosophy?ʼ narrative fiction, as Angela Carter is better at identity is a question to be asked late in life, when the time construction than Gerard Manley Hopkins (and she has at last come to speak concretely. The tone here is helps us to reinterpret the poetry of Hopkins, or any less melancholy, yet there is a sense that something is poetry, as a form of identity construction). What the already over. Deleuze remarks that part of the great- anthology does is displace narrative from its central ness of the Critique of Practical Reason stems from position and go back to poetry as the model for lit- the fact that Kant embarked upon it at an age when erature. This is an attitude that, in spite of a number great authors rarely have anything new to say. Kant of celebrated modernist novels, modernism shares; was fifty-four when he wrote the second Critique; at at least this brand of modernism, where Eliot is of the time of writing, Deleuze was sixty-eight. And it more importance than Woolf. The consequence, of is true that there is little here that is radically new. course, is a retrospective construction of a tradition: Of the eighteen essays included in this volume, eight it is therefore a tradition, in the classic Eliotian sense are revised versions of pieces published from 1973 that is presented to us. onwards, and a lot of the new material deals with The philosophical position is based on the concept familiar topics. It is as though Deleuze were talking of clinamen, a term the eternal return of which about old friends, or visiting a familiar library. Even organizes the criss-crossing of reference between the the title has a retrospective feel to it; ʻcritical and various sections. The concept, of course, goes back clinicalʼ might have been the watchword that inspired to Lucretius. As applied to language and literature, it the collaborative work of the philosopher, and the produces a rationale for a theory of the other side of psychoanalyst and psychiatrist.

Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) 49 In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari As in the great Anti-Oedipus, psychoanalysis is described philosophy as the creation of concepts, and rebuked for its reductive tendencies and its insistence philosophers as the friends of ʻsigned conceptsʼ such that everything is, in the first and last analysis, about as Descartesʼs cogito and Leibnizʼs monad. Concepts ʻmummy-and-daddy-and-meʼ. Marthe Robert is singled are not, however, created by philosophy alone, or by out for criticism: her Origins of the Novel reduces the philosophers alone. As Jean Hyppolite would have whole of Western literature to the family romances argued, philosophical thought always works with the of the Foundling and the Bastard. The stress on the non-philosophical. Concepts emerge from philosophyʼs definite article betrays the mania for the personal and engagement with science, medicine or the law. In the the possessive that translates ʻA child is being beatenʼ essays collected here, the zone of engagement is with into ʻMy father is beating me.ʼ As Deleuze, obviously literature, or at least a certain literature. The engage- an observant father, notes in his appealing essay ʻWhat ment has been a longstanding one. Deleuzeʼs study of Children Sayʼ, children do not play at being ʻthe horseʼ Proust appeared in 1964, and the Deleuze–Guattari or ʻmy fatherʼ. They play at being ʻaʼ horse, at becom- essay on Kafka in 1975. It was in 1967 that Deleuze ing ʻaʼ father. Yet Deleuze does seem still to share began to ask how it is that Sacher-Masochʼs novel something of psychoanalysisʼs vision of the literary, in Venus in Furs eventually gave birth to the clinical that he does ground it in childhood. Fantasy and play concept of masochism. Here, he returns very briefly are forms of ʻbecomingʼ, and so too is writing. to the same question. A writer such as Sacher-Masoch Writing is a question of becoming, always is not a patient, but rather a physician who makes a incomplete, and always going beyond lived experience. diagnosis. And what he diagnoses is the world; he In Moby-Dick, Ahab finally becomes the white whale assesses the chances of health, the chances of the birth he has been pursuing and, in striking the whale, strikes at himself. Deleuze then immediately departs from of a new man. For Deleuze, a writer such as Sacher- any form of psychoanalytic orthodoxy by insisting Masoch is a symptomatologist whose literary works that ʻwe do not write with our neurosesʼ. Neuroses describe or isolate a ʻmasochisticʼ mode of existence, do not mark the passage of life; they are states in which can then be named ʻmasochism.ʼ which the process of life is interrupted, plugged up The authors in the library are familiar, and perhaps and blocked. At times, Deleuze does seem to lapse they are Deleuzeʼs familiars: Raymond Roussel, into an almost apocalyptically romantic vision of the Melville, Beckett, Whitman, Lewis Carroll, Jarry and artist as outsider. Kafka and Beckett, a Czech writing Louis Wolfson, the ʻstudent of schizophrenic lang- in German and an Irishman writing mainly in French, uagesʼ whose first book he prefaced in 1970. The demonstrate that great writers are always foreigners in ʻsucking stonesʼ of Beckettʼs Molloy were one of Anti- the languages they use, even when they are their ʻownʼ Oedipusʼs desiring machines; Deleuze now savours languages. Literature is ʻan enterprise in healthʼ in them again in a particularly good essay on the suitably that the writer explores things that are too strong for Beckettian theme of ʻThe Exhausted.ʼ Deleuzeʼs famil- him (sic), too big for him, and ʻreturns from what he iars constitute a personal avant-garde working at the has seen and heard with bloodshot eyes and pierced limits of language, making it stutter with frustration eardrums.ʼ This sounds uncomfortably like anti-psy- as it encounters its own inadequacies and boundaries. chiatryʼs old hymns to the virtues of schizophrenia, The tone too is familiar, at once highly intellectual and Deleuze and Guattari were among the singers of and slightly arch, and at times very funny. Just what is those Siren songs. The comment that we do not write one to make of the piece on Alfred Jarry? His putative with our neuroses recalls, however, that those partners ʻpataphysicsʼ (the science of imaginary solutions) is in schizanalysis were also marked by the clinical-criti- supposed to extend as far beyond metaphysics as meta- cal tradition that views mental illness as absence of physics extends beyond physics, but does this really freedom: we do not and cannot do anything with our make him, as Deleuze suggests, an ʻunrecognized pre- neuroses, but only against them. cursor to Heideggerʼ? Serious or not, the comparison There may be little here that is new to any long-term does open up the truly intriguing, and not unattractive, student of Deleuze, but there are so many pleasures possibility of a Heidegger-with-humour. And what to be rediscovered that this is no real criticism. These would a conventional Spinoza specialist make of the essays are perhaps too brief and fragmentary to serve claim that the Ethics consists of two books: the ʻriver as an introduction to Deleuze, who seems to assume bookʼ of the definitions, axioms and postulates which that his reader is already familiar with his concerns, ʻdevelops its courseʼ, and the ʻsubterranean book of and the 1977 Dialogues with Claire Parnet (published fireʼ of the scholia? in translation in 1987) provide a much better starting

50 Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) point. The broad overview provided by Smith in his discrepancy as wavered between the two poles of ʻIntroductionʼ does, on the other hand, provide a good society/individual.… This tension points to other presentation of Deleuze, and thus gives the translation difficulties.… Giddens does not develop a strong theory of culture and its role in shaping cul- a much broader audience than the French original. ture.… [J]oining these theoretical problems is the David Macey more concrete discounting of class issues.

If these are seen as crucial by Tucker, why is Giddens Schopen for Giddens important? The answer is that his theory is not insular, and, contradicting what has just been said, it ʻdis- Kenneth H. Tucker, Jr, Anthony Giddens and Modern penses with old dualisms such as structure and agency,ʼ Social Theory, Sage, London, 1998. 240 pp., £45.00 and has a ʻstrongʼ commitment to ʻmoral and politi- hb., £14.99 pb., 0 8039 755 3 hb., 0 8039 756 1 pb. cal actionʼ. In other words Giddensʼs theory has no Stjepan G. Mestrovic, Anthony Giddens: The Last intrinsic importance. Modernist, Routledge, London, 1998. x + 242 pp., The book by Mestrovic attempts to rescue sociol- £45.00 hb., £14.99 pb., 0 415 09572 7 hb., 0 415 ogy from Giddensian modernism. It is expressly not 09573 5 pb. a ʻcritiqueʼ of Giddens. It aims to be a contribution These two books occupy the opposite ends of the spec- to postmodern pessimism, to a tradition which moves trum in the assessment of Anthony Giddens. Tucker from Schopenhauer towards Durkheim and Mestrovic, tries to present a balanced account; Mestrovic with for the sociology Giddens represents is a heresy com- no qualms uses Giddens as a vehicle to pronounce his plicit with a new tyranny and totalitarianism. Mestro- own views on the postmodern world. vic provides successive confrontational discussions Tuckerʼs book is divided into two parts. The first of Giddensʼs theory, method, agency, politics, and deals with ʻThe Reconstruction of Social Theoryʼ modernity; but above all Mestrovicʼs concerns are not (classical theory, Giddensʼs new rules of sociologi- intellectual matters but the basic emotions of the heart. cal method, and structuration theory); the second At the same time Mestrovic emphasizes that Giddens with ʻSocial Change and Modernityʼ (the state and is not an easy target, but ʻis really like quicksilverʼ capitalism, the culture of modernity, democracy, and and ʻdifficult to follow in generalʼ but seems to be feminism and identity). The chapters all have the offering his readers the consumer equivalent of ʻBud same format: Tucker first runs through a quick survey Liteʼ – that is ʻrationality lite, social control-lite, and of other sociologists on the issue, and then presents other lite versions of modernismʼ. Giddens is seen to Giddensʼs view. Some of the chapters are thus wildly offer ʻcomfortʼ to the perplexed of the postmodern imbalanced; this is truly Giddens and modern social world. theory. The writing style is flat and unvaried: in the The risk Mestrovic takes is the same as that faced pages in Chapter 7 which do actually discuss Giddens, by Tucker: merely to juxtapose one set of dogmas for example, there are 24 paragraphs, 17 of which against another. The temptation in this book is to begin ʻGiddens believesʼ or ʻGiddens arguesʼ, etc. – a denigrate Giddensʼs work in every way possible while simple juxtaposition of ʻwhat Giddens thinksʼ with presenting it. If this is to be avoided some elementary what has been already summarized. The book looks methodological constraints would appear to be called as though it is a compilation of card indexes strung for. Mestrovic, however, will have none of this and opts together in no particular order. A mind-numbing for honesty: my work, he says, will be dogmatic and experience. This might be explained by the fact that repetitive. Appealing to the readerʼs good nature, he Tucker disagrees fundamentally with Giddens on just says, simply, at the beginning of the book: much here about every subject, but instead of providing a critique is redundant, but ʻit could be that my own redundancy, parades other theorists as alternatives, as if ʻmodern already evident in this introduction, is meant to be social theoriesʼ were goods on a supermarket shelf. a somewhat reflexive ironyʼ. This is no careful and Tucker concludes: scholarly critique of Giddens. This book advocates Giddensʼs proposal for a new politics points to the superior dogmatics of Mestrovicʼs postmodern an interesting tension in his work. He recognizes sociology against the modernism of Giddens. The that damaged solidarities must be repaired, but only irony found here is that of the fruit trader who they can only be (re)constructed on the basis steps on a banana skin. When Mestrovic hopes ʻto of the autonomous, Promethean self.… Despite Giddensʼs attempts to overcome the structure/ enter into a dialogue with the reader in imagination agency duality, he has not so much resolved this and to provoke discussionʼ he already has both feet off

Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) 51 the ground: there is ʻa third wayʼ in theory, ʻbetween is a state of unlimited desires. Mestrovic takes as one modernism and post-modernism, namely, the engage- of his key illustrations the cognitive problem of anomic ment of the passions to overcome the bias toward division of scientific labour: scientists are in a state cognitionʼ. He thus sees modern sociology as polarized of anomie ʻwhen they focus so exclusively on “some between Giddensʼs ʻtrite and superficialʼ modernism propositions which have been definitively proved” that and Baudrillardian postmodernism, and both are too they lose sight of the sacredness of their taskʼ. There is cognitive (though Baudrillard has uncovered some a ʻclear allusion to the Bibleʼ in Durkheimʼs discussion, ʻvery real and disturbing tendenciesʼ. Yet Mestrovic he says. Actually there is no allusion to the Bible and will not say what his position is: ʻI do not specify my none to the sacred or to unlimited desires or to emo- theoretical alternative … [a] separate volume would tions. This is precisely the moment when Durkheimʼs be requiredʼ. sociology explicitly both arises and departs from that So how does Giddens betray sociology? By neg- of Comte, not Schopenhauer, with the key formulation lecting the basis of Durkheimianism in the thought of of the political problems of solidarity, government and Arthur Schopenhauer. The not inconsiderable problem the emergence of (abnormal) forms of the (intellectual) here is that not only is this link absent in Durkheimʼs division of labour. Any attempt to throw the division own explicit discussion of his sources, but he expressly of labour back into, or to regulate from, a (pseudo- disavowed it. Mestrovic, unabashed, cites evidence that sacred) primitive unity would be, says Durkheim, a Durkheimʼs students were reported to call Durkheim totalitarian disaster. Giddens realizes this. Mestrovic ʻSchopenʼ. But how is Durkheim misread by Giddens? and indeed Tucker do not. This is why the urgently Mestrovic finds Giddens has not recognized the required critique of Giddens does not begin in the Schopenhauer genealogy through Wundt. Mestrovic vacuous books under review. notes Giddensʼs awareness of Durkheimʼs discussion Mike Gane of Wundt, but Giddens misrepresents the significance of the German school of Volkerpsychologie for the ʻestablishment of sociology as the science of moral- Dutch ityʼ seen as ʻthe true origins of the social sciencesʼ. The problem here is that Giddens always writes with great accuracy on the texts of Durkheim. When faced Étienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, Verso, London and New York, 1998. xxiv + 136 pp., £14.00 pb., 1 with the argument that the ʻGerman input is over- 85984 102 3. whelmingly preponderantʼ, Durkheim insisted that Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Ques- this was ʻcompletely without foundationʼ. Indeed, he tion of Jewish Identity, Yale University Press, New even went so far as to say that the most important Haven CT and London, 1997. xvii + 270 pp., £11.50 strand of his work ʻhas no trace of anything Germanʼ. pb., 0 300 07665 7. The significant influences, he repeated, were French (Comte and Renouvier) and English, adding, ʻit is Both these books are about Spinozaʼs politics. Both useless to point out at length the tendentious nature pay a lot more attention to the Tractatus Theologico- of such a line of reasoningʼ. Politicus than to the Ethics. In Steven Smithʼs case But how does this arcane point impact on other this is a question of subject matter: the title accurately issues? What Mestrovic holds against Giddens is that reflects the bookʼs contents. In Balibarʼs it involves he refuses to expose ʻthe hypocritical, oppressive, a claim about the whole of Spinozaʼs work, even and defunct aspects of the Enlightenment projectʼ. his metaphysics. Balibar aims to ʻinitiate the reader Paradoxically forgetting about his third way stance, into Spinozaʼs philosophy through his politicsʼ. This Mestrovic presents Baudrillardʼs writing on Bosnia as approach, which has already been attempted at greater a salutary alternative. As with the mutual unawareness length by Lewis Feuer in his Spinoza and the Rise between Weber and Durkheim, there is now, he claims, of Liberalism, is a possible one, but carries with it a problem of the ʻmutual unawareness of Giddens and the dangers which are shown by Balibarʼs remark Baudrillardʼ (not aware himself that the two have that ʻthe dilemma which would have us distinguish appeared on the same platform and are very mutually between “speculative” philosophy, on the one hand, aware). The whole issue hinges on Durkheimʼs concept and philosophy “applied” to politics, on the other, is of religion and anomie: Giddens mistakenly defines not simply meaningless, it is the principal obstacle to this as a state of normlessness, but, says Mestrovic, it achieving wisdom.ʼ This is far from the truth. Surely

52 Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) we should have learnt by now from the many atrocious heading of ʻpositive libertyʼ.) And despite the com- attempts to read metaphysical positions politically that mercial character of the Dutch Republic, there was such readings are unprofitable. For while metaphysical also an anti-commercial strain in Spinozaʼs thinking, propositions can indeed enter into political arguments, for instance in the preamble to On the Improvement they can only lead to political conclusions along with of the Understanding, and as evidenced by his friend- empirical propositions, and will lead to quite different ship with the communalistic Collegiant sect. Smith by conclusions in conjunction with different empirical contrast reads Spinozaʼs evaluation of the commercial propositions, so that every metaphysical position, if it life as in a wholly favourable light. is considered politically at all, is radically politically Spinoza, Liberalism and Jewish Identity does good ambiguous. In fact this is not only true of metaphysical work in showing us Spinozaʼs politics and their bearing arguments: even political arguments will lead to on the question of the place of Jews in modern Europe. diverse political conclusions according to which other But as with Balibarʼs book I am left with the feeling arguments they are united with. This is illustrated by that, while Spinoza was an important stepping stone the relation between Hobbes and Spinoza, which this between the political philosophies of Hobbes and book gets wrong. Hobbesʼs central argument – for Rousseau, he was not the equal of either; he was one the legitimacy of any effective de facto sovereign of the four or five greatest philosophers of all time, – does not lead to monarchism, but to submission to but because of his metaphysics of the human mind, the powers that be, whether monarchic, aristocratic or set out in the Ethics, not because of his praise of his democratic. Hobbes has separate reasons for prefer- native Amsterdam or his giving a democratic twist to ring monarchy, but these cut no political ice, since on Hobbes. His time and place are mainly of interest to Hobbesʼs view a preference for monarchy cannot lead us because he transcended his time and place. you to attempt to change any non-monarchy into a monarchy. One could accept Hobbesʼs arguments for Andrew Collier submission, but differ in preferring a democracy, and that is just what Spinoza does in the Political Treatise. He is no more favourable than Hobbes to the attempt Greek dreams to change monarchy into democracy, as his comments on contemporary English politics illustrate. Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Having said all this, Balibarʼs book is surpris- Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece, ingly good for one with such a flaw in its project. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1996. 303 pp., It documents clearly, and brings to life, Spinozaʼs 0 8047 2725 2. peculiarly ambivalent response to the position in the Is the nation a real and historical social formation, Dutch Republic: a liberal, but not democratic, bour- a text, a discourse, a figment of our imagination, a geois republic, crushed between the millstones of a narrative, or what? Stathis Gourgouris answers that monarchist gentry and a monarchist proletariat united Dream Nation by Calvinist fundamentalism against the (more or the nation is ʻa dreamʼ. is a persuasive less secular) commercial republic; a state in which critique of the positivism that still lingers in some of Spinoza, for all his democratic sympathies, was bound the most pre-eminent studies of nationalism. Informed to throw in his lot with the liberal oligarchy who at and inspired by the works of Freud and Castoriadis   least defended free thought. and in dialogue and discussion with ZiZek, this study Steven Smithʼs book gives an account of Spinoza in comparative literature directs our enquiries to as the first liberal democrat, which, in these days unsought sources in the study of nationalism. In fact, when liberal democracy is a stultifying orthodoxy, Gourgourisʼs book can be read as a critical reading of is a little disappointing. Nor is it completely true: post-structuralism, to the point where the notion of ʻa Spinoza defended his native Dutch Republic, which sourceʼ for the study of nationalism is put up for grabs, was liberal without being democratic, while advocat- be it an institution, a text, or a discourse informed ing on philosophical grounds a republic like Rous- by texts. The author weaves through the fields of lit- seauʼs (see Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, chapter erature, Hellenic Studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, xvi), which could be described as democratic without and anthropology in order to avoid the essentialism being liberal. (Some recognition of this last point is of disciplinary boundaries. Gourgouris argues that the given by Smith, though under the rather unhelpful nation escapes analysis; that there is no ʻsourceʼ for

Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999) 53 it (in the positivist or disciplinary sense), because ʻitʼ does not exist. Therefore, instead of proposing another ʻwhereʼ for the nation, Gourgouris turns his gaze, in his formulation, ʻelsewhereʼ. But what does it mean to study the nation as a dream? Gourgouris places the dream within social- historical conditions. He studies dream-work as the infrastructure of Greek nationalism. ʻGreeceʼ is a dream, but it works to bring about reality. For Gour- gouris, the dream is a driving force in the making of modern Greece. It is argued that ʻthe cultural image of a modern Greece was put into production with much greater urgency than was a political economic infra- structureʼ. Crafting a story of nationalism that moves further than the linear logic of capital, Gourgouris studies the ʻdreamʼ of Greece as part of the ʻproductive forcesʼ that operated in its making. ʻThe dreamʼ is located in the zone of a literary author, poet or fiction writerʼs creativity: between the conscious and unconscious thinking processes, between the states of sleep and waking. Freud coined the term ʻsecondary revisionʼ for the segments of dreams which are akin to conscious rationalization. Gourgouris studies the writing of national literature and national history as ʻsecondary revisionsʼ. The nation is neither here nor there, but emerges out of the in-between of dream-work. Dream Nation makes a powerful contribution to the theory of nationalism: it guides us down a fresh avenue of thinking, beyond the sociology of ʻ imagined communitiesʼ. It is also a challenging reading of so- dreamed Greek literature. At the time of a nightmare in Kosovo, when such dreams are assuming genocidal proportions, one is left, in reading Gourgourisʼs book, rightly fearful of the dreadful reality, the terror and violence, that is forced out by such a ʻdreamʼ. Yael Navaro-Yashin

54 Radical Philosophy 98 (November/December 1999)