spikenard

There was some interesting talk on the subject of disagreement during the week. One of the visiting speakers made the point that in order to disagree with something you have to understand it.

One could hardly practice academic philosophy without disagreeing with other philosophers and since we spend so much time disagreeing with each other, certain norms of disagreement have developed in the academy. These norms attempt, for better or for worse, to divide acceptable disagreement from unacceptable disagreement. What makes disagreement acceptable includes the satisfaction of what could be termed an epistemological requirement. This requirement can be understood as a burden placed on the person who disagrees to demonstrate that they know what it is that they disagree with and why it is that they disagree with it (which is not a bad tip for what you have to do when writing a philosophy paper).

Understanding and agreement are interlinked. To understand an argument means to accept that a particular conclusion is supposed to follow from particular premises and how this particular following is supposed to take place. The understanding of an argument always involves an acceptance of how it is supposed to work and this acceptance, no matter how transitory, is a type of agreement. If we can’t accept how an argument is (at the very least) supposed to work then we can’t really claim to understand it. If we just can’t imagine how an argument is even supposed to work then it remains opaque to us and we don’t understand it. Dis-agreement is in this sense the negation of a previous agreement.

Knowing, understanding, and hence some kind of acceptance or agreement of what it is that you disagree with is the only way you can defend your disagreement against others in an academic setting. Academic research is required to be defensible in this way but I don’t think that the epistemological requirement for predicating disagreement on agreement can be generalised outside of the academic context for ethical and political reasons.

Democratic systems can take many different forms and some are more democratic than others. Each form of democratic system stipulates its own criteria for what will count as a legitimately produced political decision. Each system for legitimation is self satisfying. This self legitimisation is not beyond questioning from outside the system but from within the system itself it cannot legitimately deny its own process of legitimisation. This means that a particular democratic system cannot cannot reject disagreement as illegitimate for failing to uphold some kind of epistemological requirement without denying its own definition of democratic legitimacy.

In practical terms this means that when the Irish polis disagreed with the proposal of the Nice Treaty referendum there is no resources within the stipulated democratic system for treating this as the wrong answer or an illegitimate response. Democracy, or any political system, implies a political immunity from an epistemological requirement for disagreement. This is not to say that we can’t disagree with the legitimation processes of a particular political system (I feel strongly that we ought to) but we cannot do so while claiming to operate within that political system.

Derrida writes of the democracy-yet-to-come and this is a democratic ideal that is never fully approximated in any particular democratic system. I think that Derrida would say that to be democractic we cannot content ourselves with the self satisfying legitimation of a system that never fully embodies democracy. We must orient ourselves towards the impossible ideal of democracy and within such an orientation we can criticise the legitimation of a decision within a particular democratic system as being undemocratic from some more ideal sense of what it means to be democratic. However this is not exactly the same as saying that the rejection of the first Nice Treaty referendum in Ireland was the wrong answer. Saying that the disagreement was wrong – on whatever grounds – is still far closer to being undemocratic than it is to being more democratic. Nor is Derrida’s notion of the democracy yet to come beyond the scope of strategic and rhetorical employment – in much the same way that majestic ideals have always been employed for less than majestic purposes.

From what little I know of Habermas I suspect that an affinity could be found in his work for the project of building some kind of epistemolgical requirement into the very structure of a particular democratic system. I am on uncertain ground here but I suspect that this could be understood as an attempt to place a barrier between the demos and the participation of the demos in democracy, a barrier that will divide the demos into the acceptable demos and the unnacceptable demos, a relationship to the demos that is itself undemocratic. Obviously I could be completely wrong in all of this but sometimes one feels compelled to act in spite of a certain degree of ignorance and it can be important to do so rather than to not act at all.

This blogpost is already massive so I’ll postpone a consideration of disagreement in relation to ethics for now (though the point has already been made implicitly to some extent).

Despentes is the author of baise moi and co-directed the adaption of her novel to film. Shes is a wonderfully scathing respondent in this interview over at the literary 3ammagazine. Here is the opening exchange:

3:AM: Virginie, I don’t want to talk about King Kong Theory right away, if that is OK with you – looking back, to Baise-moi, both the book and the adaptation, is there anything you feel you could or should have done differently?

VD: Both novel and movie are perfect. I would not change anything.

3:AM: Both are pretty much top-shelf in the canon of Bad Girls in Dirty Pictures – of course it was more than just an exploitation tale, right?

VD: It is so pathetic that we still talk about “bad girls in dirty pictures” movies. How would you call the movies with bad boys carrying big guns and flirting with girls? Regular cinema? Entertainment? So one gender has to justify “that was not just an exploitation tale” and the other gender just take the gun, the violence, the sex – the greatest thing in cinema industry – and no one ever asks any questions about that prerogative. Fine. Baise-moi has nothing to do with “bad girls”, it is a low budget, punk, violent movie. Forget the tits and cunts, for one second. The key words here should be: gun, death, fake blood. Not “pussy pussy pussy”. We did not know people would be so amazed about the “pussy pussy pussy” angle. I don’t care those two characters have cunts. They are archetypes: violent outcasts. Should not be always defined by them having cunts.

this is an eight warhead multiple re-entry vehicle intercontinental balistic missile test. the newspeak paradox is peacemaker but i prefer man-made astrology. normally i wouldn’t use the phrase man-made. i hate it when people write man instead of human. even if you’re not a feminist that’s a straightforward conceptual mistake. man-made makes it sound like men own and control the means of production.

(an assertion that aproximates the truth but sometimes it’s worth avoiding the rider on assertions of apparent fact – that it is natural or intractable or to be tolerated through resignation. resignation isn’t an option for those that hold no position to resign from. resignation is just death and when it becomes both options – where to act is to fail, to fail is to succeed – life comes to know itself as slight remainder. madness and absurdity and desperate profound necessity. factual assertions are by definition tied up with the falsity they reject. they try to put ethics out of play. don’t lie to me. derrida writes that language is that which cannot be parenthesised. so this is the direction in which the truth of my explanation lies.)

but man-made seems strangely appropriate – even if only in this – the blue tonal palette of the long night exposure. the scale beyond scale. a parabolic symmetry streaking through clouds. how far have these arcs fallen to this nuclear horizon?

“astrology is a group of systems, traditions, and beliefs in which knowledge of the apparent relative positions of celestial bodies and related details is held to be useful in understanding, interpreting, and organizing information about personality, human affairs, and other terrestrial matters.”

thoughtless cerebral playing with stars. celebrity death match. careful crisis creation of european science; that god is death. “now i am become death, destroyer of worlds.”

“Oppenheimer was invited to take over work on fast neutron calculations, a task that he threw himself into with full vigor. At this time he renounced what he called his “left-wing wanderings” to concentrate on his responsibilities”

there was nothing wrong with your wanderings. turn the lights out. get lost. try to stumble a bit more. skin your knee. fuck yourself up. a little less precision. a little less concentration. what have you found, by losing  your loss, what responsibility did your uranium concentration rob from us robert?

power is like uranium. in the natural state its so widely distributed that its ill effects join the ambient cosmic difficulties. when man concentrates it, centralises it, he creates the self perpetuating violence of the state. the nuclear bomb is violence. not only the horror shimmer, hiroshima, but every test, every plan, every process of enrichment, every peace made diktat by peacemakers is violence. its a concentration of power that cannot be disposed of and cannot be defused. it is the existence of the threat.

it was only four years from the lost wanderings of 1941 to “now i am become death” in 1945 and only one year until 1946 when this photograph of all the smiling nazi rocket scientists was taken at an air force base in america where they had been recruited to continue developing hitlers second vengence weapon. just whistle while you work.

so when one states that auschwitz was liberated do we mean that the survivors of auschwitz were released or do we mean that auschwitz itself was set free? if they don’t tattoo it on our arm and let us keep our names will we still feel dehumanised when they give us our numbers? tax numbers, employee numbers, student numbers, mortgage account numbers, credit card debt numbers. if the barbwire fences are set far enough apart will we be able to tell when we’re between them? a single barb wire fence divides the global south from the global north and we are one half damned and the other half trapped within the camp it designates.

putting a man on the moon is the same level of rocketry required to land a nuclear missile on russia – on those that kept wandering and ended up so far away that the urgent truth of the mistake must be sent after them with as much advanced primitive precision as possible. one small step for man, one giant fuck up for all humankind. we keep wandering and they keep tracking us by satellite.

so was armstrongs footprint planted in lunar dust or in the promised fallout dusting moscow four inches deep? was the american flag planted in the sea of tranquility or in the ashes of hiroshima? shall the meaning of the event be constructed as facts or as morality?

blue astrology makes me crash my bike.

“when i was young my mother told me never to stare at the sun. so one day i did.”

the greeks had an elaborate system of myth to contextualise and determine their culture. one might wonder how the greeks ever believed in the fanciful stories of their own myths but this is like asking how the greeks ever believed in their own culture. the culturemyth is – but also is not – a matter of mere belief.

now the greeks are themselves a kind of myth used to contextualise and determine european society. the undecidability of the relation of the culturemyth to belief is concealed in the distinction between myth and history. this is the distinction that allows one to doubt the reality of the greek myth while making it possible to take for granted that european society is culturally derived from greek society. this is now no longer possible.

consider also how culture is reified in the present – how the myth of polis that denies its own status as myth creates the reality of politics. to rework the myth in a way that undoes the old myth through a new myth: the birth of the city state in ancient greece is also the birth of urbanism – the daily encounter of the stranger or, rephrased more pointedly, the domestication of otherness – is the end of the very polis that greece is credited with having initiated. it is the impossibility of the inoperative community. this is the premythology of politics.

there is something strange about education, about actually studying history rather than just assuming it. the more you learn about the culturemyth the more insubstantial it seems. when you read hegel, marx, derrida and these figures become determined and lose their cultural mystery – their cultural mythstory – then you approach the boundaries of thought within the culturemyth. you meet the delimitation of the culturemyth. encountering this limit is encountering the radically unknowable, the radical absence of all knowing and consciousness, it is the ecounter with the prospect of death. without being able to really think the outside – because the real outside is the outside of all possible thought (at least all of our possible thought as individuals) – you realise the reality of the outside. this is just a reiteration, or remarking, of death as the only certainty.

when you seize the culturemyth as such – when you attempt this reduction – you encounter the reality which is nothingness. i have made this elaborate approach to a single [feeling or intuition or experience or negotiation of the text] that through this approach i have tried to give some specificity or communicability: there is nothing beyond the culturemyth.

i’m honestly interested in whether i am alone in this. can you feel the outside too? can you feel the hollowness of all the theories you have absorbed? can you look out at the world and see the great nothingness of it all? can you marvel at the people going places where they think they need to be? can you see all the buildings built for nothing? can you think all the thoughts thought for nothing? the absence of society, the polis, the police? the reality of the crisis.

breathe – its ok. in the nothingness of all theories of reality is the reality of nothingness and the coincidence of the two. the nothingness is really there. imagine the invisible tree behind the phenomenon of the tree behind the theory of the tree reflecting photons. imagine being the stranger walking beside you in the street experiencing you walking beside them in the street as they experience walking in the street in a way that isn’t quite the same as your experience of walking in the street beside them – an experience that is both just a few feet parallel to your own and radically, unknowably, different – and how here in the possibility and limitations of imagination you experience the reality of the difference, the reality of nothingness, and that’s it!

there is nothing [else!]

…then, of course, you pick up another book and it turns out that the thinker you thought you already understood is always richer in detail than you previously believed and the details change the understanding you thought you had. that the encounter with the outside was really just the encounter with your own ignorance. it’s like the mental image you have of a place before you get there and the reality of how the place actually looks when you do. there is always more concrete and more bricks that you expected in your minds eye. the facticity of it overwhelms my presumption. as i move from a historical sense to actual history it is revealed to me that the limits of my stupidity are the limits of my world.

nietzsche writes that the prophet zarathustra comes down from the mountain and announces “god is dead”. nietzsche doesn’t really explain the significance of this announcement. it seems to be just an empty assertion put forward without argument or evidence to support it. perhaps most strangely nietzsche isn’t just advocating atheism or agnosticism because he states that god is dead and this implies that god was alive.

nietzsche’s statement that god is dead would not be very interesting if he actually did explain the significance of this phrase, assume it as a merely philosophical position, argue for it with mere logic, provide it with mere terrestial grounds of persuasion and it would be historically naive if he simply stated that god had never been. the genius of “god is dead” is that the assertion is furnished with nothing to encourage agreement. its genius is that it is throw away nonsense of the crudest sort.

the genius of “god is dead” is that it is announced prophetically, that is, in the mode of what it negates. the written motif of the prophet coming down from the mountain with a message for the people. a message that can be believed or disbelieved and in either case is just a matter of faith and as flimsy and as intense as all matters of faith are. if faith was not flimsy it would not be faith. the intensity of conviction is required to make up for the absence of [what can never be] sufficient evidence.

a scientist might say that arguments for or against the existence of god would always be nonsensical. that the atheist looks everywhere and sees god nowhere. that the theist looks nowhere and sees god everywhere. that there are no facts at all one way or the other. that it is radically beyond human knowledge to assert that god does or does not exist.

pity the poor scientist because the theist just re-inserts god into this very being-beyond-human-knowledge. this beyond human knowledge is implied by the very delimitation of human knowledge in science. by the very theological claim to know exactly what we can know and hence [k]no[w] more. the concretion of anything effects its own conclusion, its own delimitation, it’s own limitation, and hence its own overcoming. to think a boundary is to think both sides of the boundary so when we try to think of the limits of human knowledge we invariably think about what is beyond human knowledge and hence invent god as that which is beyond it: negative theology. science and religion busily construct each other their shared delimitation.

nietzsche avoids this boundary trap by not opposing god from outside. nietzsche does not state that god does not exist, that god is not real. such statements would just be attempts to construct the boundaries that construct god.

to agree with “god is dead” is as nonsensical as it is to disagree with “god is dead”. this is key. it’s the logic bomb that makes “god is dead” so compelling. the status of “god is dead” as prophetic announcement is just as valid and just as invalid as the prophetic announcements that supposedly announced “god” in the first place. all that remains is an undecidable differance between “god” and “god is dead”. each succeeds or fails with the success or failure of the other. both is as profoundly meaningful and meaningless as the other. there is nothing between them except this undecidable differance.

“god is dead” is only what nietzsche calls “that ghastly paradox of a ‘God on the cross,’ that mystery of an unimaginable ultimate cruelty and self-crucifxion of God for the salvation of man?” nietzsche believes exactly what christians believe.

this is why it is only so much confusion to speak of being a humanist or of being against humanism. humanism is what it is and only what it is. all its strengths and, after nietzsche, all its weaknesses are only too plain and yet we remain; human all too human.

i first read of wyndham lewis when researching a paper on robin hood that lead me to a completely irrelevant text called The Solitary Outlaw by bruce powe. this book hadn’t been checked out of the library in over a decade and i took pity on this piece of obscure ephemera despite the fact that it had absolutely nothing to do with robin hood and absolutely nothing useful for the paper dealing with outlaw themes in middle english that i was desperately attempting to resource at the time.  i’ve a fetish for the impractical so i read it from cover to cover. it is in powe’s book that i first read of someone named wyndham lewis who clearly had a weird obscurity of their own going on:

“will you be my efficient chimpanzee for keeps?”

- wyndham lewis

lewis is most famous for his journal BLAST, being one of the cofounders of the art movement vorticism, and a complete turn around (or failed attempt to completely turn around) in relation to hitler and anti-semitism in the thirties. in the early thirties lewis became notorious for promulgating anti-semitic tropes in his (frankly awful) novel Tarr and proclaiming hitler a man of peace.

Q: how wrong can an intellectual be?

stand back – I’m going to try history!

lewis eventually repented these earlier stupidities and wrote against anti-semitism in the late thirties in a book titled The Jews, Are They Human? in light of his personal history i am car-crash-fucking-fascinated with what is necessarily the worst possible title that he could have chosen for what was the most necessary book for him to write.

a title that puts into question the humanity of jewish people is a question that is fundamentally anti-semitic in operation. it is anti-semitic to introduce a question that operates at this level of consideration. a question that is capable of being answered in the way that this question can possibly be answered. it is a question that prompts the possibility of an anti-semitic response. it places the burden of proof  at a locus where it can never be ethically placed.

it is the kind of question that one would expect of someone who defended hitler in the early thirties to ask as an anti-semite not as someone writing against anti-semitism but lewis is actually asking the question as someone criticising anti-semitism and expecting us to answer: well yes, of course jewish people are human. the problem is that though lewis intends the question to be rhetorical in this way it is incapable of avoiding the ambiguity of appearing rhetorical in the other way. it is a rhetorical questions that introduces a polemic but it is ambiguous as to whether the polemic is for or against the humanity of jewish people.

lewis was attempting to engage with the anti-semitism of his past and his contemporary time – to oppose it directly – but in doing so lets what he opposes dictate the locus and the logic of his discourse. his opposition is trapped within the operation of what he opposes. the question is both too ironic and too genuine a question – its rhetoric is too rhetorical or not rhetorical enough. it risks an ambiguity which demonstrates that he does not risk enough – that the possibilities of how the question can be interpreted will never sting him to his very soul. that lewis is not jewish.

no risk – privilege – no risk.

there is something tragic about lewis trying not to go to his grave the same bigot he once was and failing in his opposition to himself; in his inability to efface who he used to be and the history of his time. the title of his apologia is so awful that it will never be reprinted. his repentance will never be disseminated and will remain ephemeral. i once gained access to a library’s special collection to handle a first edition of this text just to see for myself that all this tragedy is actually real – that he really was trying to write against anti-semitism.

is lewis human? is this a personal question or a racist question? is it a genuine question or a rhetorical question? can there be a genuinely rhetorical question? can we avoid trying to escape when all attempts are doomed to failure? is it impossible to be ethical for some?

ironies false landescapes.

Yep, I’m pretty heavily involved in pro-choice stuff. I suppose one major difference between the two arguments is that the pro-life argument focuses on when life begins, and the pro-choice argument focuses on a woman’s reproductive freedom. In that way, the two sides often miss each other completely, and don’t address the same points.

My pro-choice feelings come from a strong belief that the person in the best position to make a decision about whether or not to continue with a pregnancy is the person who is pregnant. There is no situation I can think of where a politician or a judge or a priest will be in a better position to make that decision than the woman herself. There’s an issue of respect here- there is no woman who takes the decision to have an abortion lightly. I cannot possibly be in a better position to judge a woman’s situation than she is herself.

I find a lot of the time the abortion debate gets tied up in abstract ideals or hypothetical scenarios. I suppose my politics are of the more practical kind. When we look at Ireland’s position on abortion- sure, no one likes abortion! Let’s not have that. But when we think about what that means- if a woman has an abortion in Ireland, she is a criminal, and the current sentence for having an abortion in this state is life imprisonment for both the woman and the doctor who performed the abortion. I can’t see them doing this, because there would be uproar. But that’s the legal situation as it stands. I support the de-criminalisation of abortion.

As for when life begins, I’m not to know. Hmm, I see foetuses as potential babies, I suppose. I don’t believe that a baby is alive at conception. On an aside, it irks the shit out of me when people think a 4-week abortion is murder but are happy to take the morning after pill 3 days after conception. It strikes me as incredibly blinkered- I’m glad everyone has the choice to take the morning after pill in Ireland. I think they should be more generous in how they view other women who make the choice not to remain pregnant, but who didn’t find out til two weeks later.

Back to the practical situation in Ireland. In the 1994 referendum, Irish women were granted the right to travel for an abortion (before this, there were several cases of pregnant women being prevented from leaving the country at ferryports and airports) and the right to information about abortion. I think for a lot of people I know, the situation is sorted as far as they’re concerned. Sure can’t a woman just hop on a plane if she wants an abortion, no need to be bringing it in here. But it’s not sorted. Immigrant women who cannot leave the country have no access to abortion. Working class women who already have kids and can’t afford the €1,500 it costs to travel, have the procedure and pay for accommodation, as well as finding childcare for the children they already have do not have this option. The idea of seeing a rise in back street abortions in Ireland terrifies me. Women will always have abortions, it’s just whether they’re safe and legal.

My pro-choice feelings have nothing to do with religion. I don’t found my morals on them being the opposite from the church. Hey, the church supports charity, right? I’m not outside Concern protesting. I am vehemently opposed to the catholic church because I am vehemently against homophobia and misogyny. It’s not the other way around (i.e. I’m not anti-homophobia and misogyny because I don’t like the church…). I think it’d be really weird to have the church or a book as the basis of your morals- it just strikes me as an irresponsible lack of critical thinking.

If I can take a brief swing back to the ideals level of the debate again…I think it’s a mistake when pro-life and pro-choice are seen as the opposite poles of the abortion argument. If we have a pole here, on one extreme is the opinion that a woman should be forced to continue with an unwanted pregnancy. On the other extreme pole would be the position that abortion should be forced on all pregnant women. Ban abortions Vs enforce abortions. The pro-choice position is smack-bang in the middle of this ground as far as I’m concerned. All we’re saying is, hey, why don’t we let the pregnant woman decide whether to remain pregnant? Who else is in a better position?

Some of the stuff you might see me involved in is trying to shut down the rogue crisis pregnancy agency on Dorset Street. I suppose I should make it clear why we’re doing this. We have absolutely no problem with pro-life pregnancy counselling services. That is totally cool. Pro-life women have the absolute right to go to a clinic that refuses to discuss abortion as one of their options. We aren’t standing outside picketing them, that would be horrendous. The agency we’re picketing is a large lie. It advertises in the Golden Pages as a pro-choice pregnancy counselling service, where they will discuss all of your pregnancy options with you. The agency, though, is run and funded by the christian solidarity party, based on the American model of rogue agencies- that is, advertise to women who are considering abortions, then lie to them, manipulate them, breach their confidentiality- anything to keep her pregnant.

I went into this agency, not in a crisis pregnancy, but because several pregnancy counselling organisations had had a quiet word with us about them, and we wanted to find out what they were telling people. I was made to hold a model of a feotus in my hand during the entire interview. I was made to name my baby. I was told that abortion causes cancer (not true), infertility (not true), suicide (not true), promiscuity, child abuse, and sighing (wtf??). I was told it is impossible to get pregnant from a rape. This is fucking dangerous disinformation. I was told that it is impossible to have an abortion before two months. Again, they’re messing with medical misinformation here. The list goes on. The agency justifies itself by claiming that by lying, it’s saving women from abortion. I just believe we deserve better than that.

Wow, this has been a very long insight into my pro-choice feelings. In the end, I suppose it comes down to the fact that I can’t tolerate a situation whereby the state has the power to actually force a woman to continue an unwanted pregnancy through to birth. I respect women a lot more than to think that anyone makes the decision lightly. Nobody likes abortion. But banning it is about more than an ideal, it means a lot of practical shit to the 17 Irish women who travel to England for an abortion each day, and to rest of the women who can’t afford or can’t leave the country to do this.

One final thing is that I think it’s important to remember how many women we know who have had abortions. Granted, it’s not something people tend to share, but a fairly good amount of our friends and colleagues have gone through an abortion. Knowing these women makes it even more important to me that they feel supported, and are not criminalised, as is currently the case.

Ooh, and a final final point is that- hey, let’s see fewer abortions! I’m ALL about the sex education and classes around the issues of consent and reproductive control.

*phew*!

Anyway, I’d love to hear what you think.

Sorry if this was a bit rambley and not very structured, I’m not used to writing about these things!

Love