The Transcendental Turn: Kant's Critical Philosophy, Contemporary Theory, and Popular
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THE TRANSCENDENTAL TURN: KANT’S CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY, CONTEMPORARY THEORY, AND POPULAR CULTURE A Dissertation Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial FulFillment oF the Requirements For the Degree oF Doctor oF Philosophy in the Faculty oF Arts and Science TRENT UNIVERSITY Peterborough, Ontario, Canada © Copyright by Kevin Michael Mitchell 2014 Cultural Studies Ph.D. Graduate Program May 2014 Abstract The Transcendental Turn: Kant’s Critical Philosophy, Contemporary Theory, And Popular Culture Kevin Michael Mitchell This dissertation traces the concept oF transcendentalism From Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) to Michel Foucault’s historical a priori and Pierre Bourdieu’s field and habitus, with implicit reFerence to Deleuze’s ‘transcendental empiricism,’ and the influence this trajectory has had on contemporary theory and culture. This general conceptual Framework is used as the basis For a critical analysis oF a series oF examples taken From popular culture to highlight their transcendental conditions of possibility and the influence this conceptual paradigm has had on today’s theory. The examples include the NFL ‘concussion crisis,’ South Park’s problematiZation oF the discourse surrounding it, as well as the literature oF Charles Bukowski, as an exempliFication oF an immanent writer-written situation. It is Further suggested that, not only is transcendentalism an epistemological Framework for thought, but it also doubles as an ontological principle for the emergence oF a constitutively incomplete and unFinished reality. Key Words: Kant, Foucault, Bourdieu, DeleuZe, Simondon, transcendental, historical a priori, continental philosophy, NFL, football, South Park, Charles Bukowski ii Preface In my First year oF the PhD program in Cultural Studies at Trent University I took a seminar with Constantin V. Boundas – a philosopher and influential Deleuze scholar – on the philosophical precedents oF cultural studies. This Formative seminar addressed the ways in which philosophy is relevant for a well-grounded, historically- minded and selF-reFlexive understanding oF contemporary cultural theory, including post-structuralism, Neo-Marxism and deconstruction. Part oF Dr. Boundas’ instruction focused on the Kantian transcendental method, especially as interpreted by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his book Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. Although DeleuZe is not himselF a Kantian, his book on Kant sets the stage For the later development oF what he came to reFer to as “transcendental empiricism” – a mode oF inquiry that begins and ends with actuality instead oF possibility, as it did For Kant. Instead oF merely inquiring into the conditions For possible experience, Deleuze’s version of transcendentalism inquires into the conditions For actual existence. Dr. Boundas’ seminar theoriZed the boundary between philosophy and culture as a space oF exchange and mutual implication. I Follow this line oF reasoning and argue that the boundary between culture and philosophy is a site oF dialectical interaction and continual integration wherein the two are dependent on each other – philosophy does not happen in a vacuum, and culture is expressed in and through philosophy. In this way I consider it to be the case that a cultural studies without philosophy is blind (as to its own presuppositions), while a philosophy without a socio-cultural analysis is empty. iii This Fundamental insight has motivated and inspired the present work. Dr. Boundas reminded us that Kant's philosophy could be considered to be, before all else, a Form oF questioning. This questioning is epitomiZed by its critical inquiry into conditions. Instead of asking what a thing is (as did the Platonists and Scholastics of the past), Kant asked what is necessary For the thing to be the way it is, i.e., what makes it possible? In other words, Kant’s modus operandi is to interrogate the conditions of possibility for experience. In Kant’s own words: “I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode oF our knowledge oF objects insoFar as this mode is to be possible a priori.”1 Frederick Beiser characterizes the transcendental as a second-order operation that deals not with the immediate experience of objects, but with the experience oF experience, or an interrogation oF the conditions whereby experience is at all possible. Through this revision in the Form oF questioning (asking not what a thing is but what makes it possible), epistemological considerations become primary, and metaphysical speculations are demoted to a secondary status, if not bracketed or barred altogether.2 Further, Kant avoids Hume’s skepticism and the rationalism oF Descartes, SpinoZa and LeibniZ, by outlining the universal conditions for any and all experience, rather than falling into the solipsism of LeibniZ (with his windowless monads), and SpinoZa’s God-dependent Ideas. By Focusing on experience as his starting point, Kant incorporates empiricism into his analysis; and by focusing on the necessity and universality of thought by interrogating 1 Immanuel Kant quoted by Frederick C. Beiser in German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781-1801 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 169. 2 Opposed to this, it is possible to read the transcendental operation as a metaphysical- ontological feature of reality, which I invite the reader to do in the first chapter of this dissertation. iv the a priori structures it requires, he incorporates objectivity, necessity and rationalism. It must also be pointed out that Kant rejects intellectual intuition3 in all its variants outright, and therefore, in his view all knowledge is related to experience in some way.4 This dissertation will argue that this notion oF reality – as constitutively unfinished because it is without a foundation – lends itself to a version oF politics that remains open to change and novelty. Since reality is unFinished, political circumstances are also unfinished, and thereFore are always underway. This means that change is the rule rather than the exception. 3 Intellectual intuition is the idea that it is possible to by-pass the senses and gain direct access to a higher being as in Plato’s hierarchical levels of being where the highest form of knowledge does not rely on the senses at all. In 1766 he published a small text called Träume eines Geistersehers (translated as Dreams of a Spirit Seer) polemically attacking the mysticism of Immanuel Swedenborg because of its rampant idealism and upholding of a non-empirically based intuition. 4 In one way or another his entire career was devoted to refuting Idealism. v Acknowledgements I would like to thank ProFessor Alan O’Connor for the inspiration, encouragement and exceptional support he has graciously oFFered throughout this process. My committee Dr. David Holdsworth and Dr. Liam Mitchell provided me with productive feedback. Dr. Amelia Angelova For her guidance with chapter one. The many grad students, with whom I have spent endless hours arguing. And the Cultural Studies program For its critical and experimental edge. vi Table of Contents Abstract and Keywords / ii Preface / iii Acknowledgements / vi Table of Contents / vii Introduction / ix Overview oF Chapters / xxxii Chapter 1: The Transcendental Turn and Correlationism 1.1 Introduction / 1 1.2 “Metaphysical Exposition oF the Concept oF Time” / 19 1.3 The argument For why time is actual without being real / 28 1.4 Conditionality / 34 1.5 Not only epistemologically but actually real / 37 1.6 Appearance is Reality / 43 1.7 Time/Temporality distinction, or, time taken out oF time / 55 1.8 Status oF a “subject” as both inheritor and generator oF time / 58 1.9 Implications oF the third interpretation oF noumena: Žižek’s “Correlationism and its Discontents” / 59 1.10 What is called finitude? / 62 1.11 What, then, is Correlationism? / 68 Chapter 2: Mediation and Cultural Transcendentalism: The NFL Concussion and South Park 2.1 Introduction / 75 2.2 The Concussion as a symptom oF the need for ‘cultural change’ / 78 2.3 Games, Rules and praxis / 81 2.4 Foucault’s Discursive Formations and the Historical a Priori / 94 2.5 Transcendental Culture / 110 2.6 The Football World as Transcendental-Cultural ArtiFact / 123 2.7 Cultura violentia / 125 2.8 Exemplarity / 130 2.9 Hegemonic Masculinity: ‘Manning up’ and ‘Care’ / 142 2.10 South Park’s Transcendental Disruption of the Discursive Formation / 152 2.11 Critical Irony / 164 2.12 Gournelos’ Three Tactics / 170 2.13 Self-Consciousness and Auto-Criticism / 176 2.14 “Sarcastaball” / 182 vii Chapter 3: The Transcendental Dimension oF the Everyday: Charles Bukowski 3.1 Introduction / 205 3.2 Bukowski as subject/object: the critical juncture of the writing and the written / 213 3.3 Obscenity: the obverse oF the ‘seen’ / 217 3.4 Bukowski’s Position (Situated in the “Happening”) / 228 3.5 The immanence oF Bukowski’s writing-written situation / 234 3.6 Life as Art; Art as LiFe / 246 Conclusion / 268 Bibliography / 275 viii Introduction This dissertation works with an expanded version of the original Kantian conception oF transcendentalism to include Hegelian-Marxian variants of critical theory with historically-mediated dialectical materialism, a Foucaultian-inspired notion oF the “discursive Formation,” and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory oF the habitus and the “field” oF literary production. This version oF transcendentalism is materialist and immanent while not being empirical. There is a mediation between the particularity oF a given Form oF existence, and the conditions that allow For it to exist. Put simply, what I mean by transcendentalism is (an analysis oF) the conditions oF possibility for any given phenomenon – e.g., an idea, a political situation, an event, an object, and so on. The work of Charles Bukowski, whose poetic and literary output I investigate in the third chapter, is unique in that he reflexively interrogates the conditions of possibility For itselF as mediated by his own existence, as well as the particularity oF his situation – living at a particular time and place with a particular liFestyle, etc.