First off, with respect to Socrates, his death is the exact measure of his thinking. You’ll remember, of course, that while his was found guilty of the charges by the narrowest of margins, he was condemned to death by an overwhelming majority. Folks were more willing to put him to death than they were to convict him in the first place. And the reason for this was Socrates’ response, when asked wht he thought a just punishment would be. Simply put, Socrates goaded his judges into executing him. He chose death. And hi did so in faithful obedience to both irony and dialectics.

As for your comments concerning the dissatisfaction with the humanities prior to ‘68, as expressed in various literary works, I can only agree with you. But, as Rob noted here, I did exaggerate a little. However, the examples you give are artistic, lietterary works, not specifically works of theory or of the humanities. Ultimately, though, I’m siply splitting hairs, and it doesn’t really matter to much. The point I was trying to make, in sum, was something like, prior to ‘68 there seems to have been, among those inhabiting the Academe, a rather naive conception of the relationships between thinking and actin. That is, one gets the feeling, say from Sartre, that one can intervene easily by protesting this, voicing one’s objection against that, etc. With the failure of the academic world’s direct engagement, something rather different happened. We see a certain kind of withdrawal and questioning of the relevance of theory in general. It was this element I wanted to discuss (and which Adorno and Horkheimer got right decades earlier — and which led Adorno to locate, as critical moments of resstance, both literature and theory.). In short, I don’t disagree with what you’ve said. I just think that if we take your last comment as an objection, we wil start talking to each other at cross-purposes. To that extent, I take the fundamental contradiction (in the productive sense of the term), to be perfectly expressed in the following remark of yours,

for a scholar who never, ever knows how his writing will be used, and who is writing specifically political theory, self-forgiveness may not be justified in the same way. How can one simultaneously expect to be read for one’s political insight, and exempted from the exigencies and responsibilities of the political sphere by one’s academic position?

It’s precisely this problem that requires theorization. An it is precisely this issue that I wanted to frame as reorienting the political/ethical disvision, according to a horizonal conception of the good, which requires us to rethink the grounds of our guilt/responsibility in order to transform, or move past them.

First I’ll indicate two things that I really want to get back to, but won’t touch on at all today, as they really need a more thorough treatment that I can provide – I’m listing them here for my own benefit, as I don’t want to lose track of them, even if I can’t address them now:

(1) Alexei’s questions about the relationship of theory to social movements (and, perhaps more tacitly, the implied question about whether there might be downsides – ethical and practical – to orienting theoretical work around transformative movements); and

(2) Joe’s questions (from the other thread) that relate to details of my own theoretical work – the relationship between the kind of theory that I’m doing, and the broader transdisciplinary interest in recursive systems and metaphors of recursion, and also the questions on how I might thematise issues related to uneven development.

Both of these questions are at a tangent, I think, to where the discussion has gone – I list them here because I don’t want to lose track of them, and as a promissory note that I still intend to get back to them in some way once I can find the time.

In terms of the current discussion, it seems to me there are four potentially separable issues running through the conversation (and apologies in advance that I don’t think I’ll quite “hit” what I’m trying to say here – writing on borrowed time – please don’t hesitate to correct what I’m trying to express here):

a. the practical/political value of pedagogical practices – either within the institutional space of the academy, or more broadly;

b. the practical/political value of particular forms of written expression – and whether popular accessibility is the most appropriate measure of practical/political value;

c. the question of responsibility – expressed in Alexei’s interventions in relation to the issue of “guilt”, and in Joe’s interventions in relation to the issue of whether we are responsible for the consequences that flow from our academic interventions, particularly if we make political claims for those interventions; and

d. what I take to be a sort of overarching question – particularly, if I’m not misunderstanding, motivating Alexei and rob – of what function is being served by the attempt to bind theoretical work back to the normative or moralising ideal that such work must be “practical”.

I am personally particularly interested in this final issue. I am actually happy for elements of my work to be questioned on the grounds of whether they are practical in an everyday sense, because I pitch elements of my work that way. I am not so happy to see the norm of practicality used to shut down forms of work that cannot be seen to have an immediate “practical” impact – particularly where the concept of “practical” is taken to mean “popular” or “large-scale” or “everyday”. I am concerned that this kind of normative ideal risks participating in a broader populist/conservative assault on intellectual activity (an assault, I should note, that itself exists in a complex historical relationship to the critique of technocracy that unfolded in both left and right variants in the 1960s and 1970s, and that lent a voice to quite reasonable criticisms of the abuses of the postwar state – although with perhaps insufficient insight into what might step into the breach opened by such a critique).

My great concern is that the appeal to “practicality” – particularly when the concept of the “practical” carries associations of “popular accessibility”, “immediate impact”, and “large-scale significance”, may literally function to keep certain pivotal questions from even being asked – let alone answered.

My reaction here may be overdetermined because I’m situated currently in a planning area, but, to move the issue out of our current discussion about the humanities: I am intensely conscious of how important scientific work, for example, can come to be criticised as impractical or obscurantist because you need substantial background to understand it – it’s not only the humanities that suffer under the presumption that everything worth knowing must be amenable to immediate, intuitive, non-academic forms of analysis. I want to be careful here: a great many anti-democratic ills can hide beneath the cloak of academic expertise, and I understand the temptations and dangers of expertise for any field – my point is simply that there are also dangers in the rejection of the need for any kind of “technical” or “esoteric” knowledge: this seems to me to pre-dictate the sorts of questions that would be valuable to ask, to limit us to those questions amenable to simple investigations whose form and results translate easily into mass communication – and to bracket any sort of work whose object might be such that quite complex analysis and long preparatory training might be intrinsically required to bring the question into view.

This isn’t even going into the fear of how the focus on “practicality” could close off exploratory forms of work that might bring unanticipated (and perhaps unanticipatible) possibilities into being.

And the tacit question I hear (hopefully not too incorrectly) behind some of Alexei’s questions, which is whether the standard of “practicality” – imposed on so many different levels of social practice as a coercive ideals – might itself have a strong implicatedness in the reproduction of things as they currently are.

Just to be clear: I am not at all suggesting that Joe is coming from a vision of “practicality” that would be implicated in the sorts of things that are worrying me here. I share Joe’s concern with some of the unsavoury dynamics that can enact themselves through particular instantiations of academic expertise. In the current (broader) political climate, though, I think there is likely to be more value in the (self-critical and nuanced) defence of more “intellectual” work, than can be found in joining the fray wanting to hold the academy “accountable” to a vision of “practicality”, when this term itself sits at the centre of a quite important contemporary political flashpoint over whether certain kinds of questions can be legitimately asked.

Simone de Beauvoir and Noam Chomsky are both thinkers who worked hard to reach a wide audience. At the very least, if one is going to speak about the role of the thinker in making an idea public, one has to think actively about the public. An idea isn’t really public merely because it is thought, or said, or written, or even published. In many ways, the combination of Jacques Derrida’s style, the nature of his own academic circle of intimates, and the practices of his wider readership have prevented him from being public and broadly effective in the ways that once might have seemed destined.

Interesting, Joseph, that you raise the question of “the public” in relation to the combination of factors that prevent Derrida’s from being public. In a fabulous interview with D. published in an off-shoot of Le Monde (republished in The Other Heading), called “Call It a Day for Democracy”, Derrida interrogates (albeit somewhat obliquely) this idea of “public”, i.e. as “the public”, as “public space”, as “public opinion”, etc.

Although he doesn’t go far down that path, his speculations appear to me to call for the questioning of the idea of “publicness” (or publicity?) underpinning what you’ve said above about “making an idea public” and about intellectuals reaching a “wider audience”. To put it in a crude formulation, are we certain that “the public” (hence “the public sphere”, “public opinion”, etc.) exists as such — or at any rate pre-exists the event in which (hence processes by which) some thing becomes public? Is it not more likely that we have always to deal with multiple publics, of varying types, proportions and scales (Derrida, e.g., speaks sometimes of the “quasi-private”) which are constituted on the basis of a broad, heterogeneous array of communicative techniques, etc.?

Please excuse me for being presumptuous when I say that I suspect you would answer in the affirmative to that last question — which begs the question: are these different forms of quasi-public not more or less powerful in different contexts? Mightn’t the relative effectivity of such quasi-publics change according to factors that aren’t entirely predictable, such that the most obscure forms of thought, etc., might suddenly become widely deployed and debated (or, as D. puts it, “untimely developments that escape [a media institution's] grid of intelligibility might one day take over without any resistance at all” (p.104)) Is it necessarily the case that any one particular form of publicness or publicity (I cite the words together so that we might not forget to remember the extent to which publics are constituted on the basis of commercial marketing techniques as well as modes of political-intellectual address, among other things) and one particular form of making-public — “I would be perfectly happy if theory began to reform itself not by raising its stakes or swallowing larger mouthfuls of metaphysics, but simply by taking up a clearer, more inclusive style” — must be privileged over all others in order to address the question of Theory’s apparent “disconnection”?

I, too, am quite happy for academics to attempt to “do” theory in “a clearer, more inclusive style”. But I am at the same time very suspicious of attempts to turn that possibility into an imperative. So I wonder, if we are to think about theory as a practice that might sometimes have effects outside the context in which that practice seems most at home, is it necessary or even desirable to imagine the possibility of such effectivity in terms primarily of “making ideas public” or of reaching the “mainstream”? Is that the only way in which Theory might have effects (political or otherwise) outside the contexts of its academic application?

When I mentioned the problems of disconnection (being “out-of-touch”) and obscurantism, I wasn’t suggesting any sort of doubling of theory. Rather, I would be perfectly happy if theory began to reform itself not by raising its stakes or swallowing larger mouthfuls of metaphysics, but simply by taking up a clearer, more inclusive style. That is the sort of change that would enable us to do the work of awakening conscience more effectively.

While I’m all in favor of us forgiving ourselves for being scholars, rather than revolutionary leaders or agitators on a picket line, the question about our scholarship remains. By all means, let some Dickens scholar labor in the dusty corner of an archive, modifying the historical record of Little Dorrit, and although there are people starving in Africa, let her have a good conscience about doing it. That scholar can predict how a reasonable person will use his work: to understand and interpret Little Dorrit more sensibly and well.

On the other hand, for a scholar who never, ever knows how his writing will be used, and who is writing specifically political theory, self-forgiveness may not be justified in the same way. How can one simultaneously expect to be read for one’s political insight, and exempted from the exigencies and responsibilities of the political sphere by one’s academic position?

Broadly speaking, guilt and anxiety within the humanities, both about one’s debt to one’s fellow men, and about one’s own personal significance, did not begin in 1968. You can trace angry reactions to this same debate in Yeats’s poetry, in Joyce’s writing, in the agit-prop American writing of the 1930s, and in Thomas Mann’s novels and essays.

There is a very good reason why training people to have a conscience is a vexed question: because it is possible to have a conscience just for show. That possibility does not invalidate every open-ended project of pedagogy, naturally, but if it makes pedagogy a self-searching, anxious discipline, perhaps that is to the benefit of the students.

A man’s being put to death is not the measure of his thought, or of the possibility of his thought. The fact that Socrates did not accept exile or respond more humbly to his accusers may not be something you or I would do under the same circumstances, but Athenians put him to death, not irony or his faithfulness to the process of dialectics.

So, to move on from this story, I take your point about the immediate ineffectuality of certain tendencies of theory. And I also recognize that, for those around who are coming from Literary studies and Philosophy, or perhaps even from Anthropology and Sociology, there’s always a guilty conscience attached to our precise social position: we can study only within a system, but the price of being able to study is effectively the renunciation of any direct, practical activity. We don’t build bridges, or even dig ditches. We don’t save lives, or even make them ‘better’ (or maybe that’s just me and my relationship to my students). And since there are only 24 hours in the day, and some of us are profoundly lazy, we simply can’t be as directly engaged as we think we ought to be. Being an academic these days amounts to a guilty conscience precisely because we are aware of our paradoxical situation. We rely upon a system we wish to change andsimultaneously insulate ourselves from this very system in order to pursue our academic — and generally impractical in the short term — studies. More than anything else, I think that the burgeoning guilt of being an academic (in the Humanities) accounts for the politicization of various fields in the humanities.

Now, I’m certainly not claiming that this is a bad thing. I would, however, like to point out that no one, prior to, say, May ‘68, would have ever thought that the humanities were somehow ineffectual. And it’s this shift that needs to be investigated. What changed between the (perceived?) imminent danger that intellectuals posed to totalitarian regimes, which required them to be deported, sent to the gulag, ‘disappeared’, or killed, and our current worries about the non-activist, non-interventionist nature of our profession? Why is it that mathematics students — who are just as nerdy as any English PhD, and make just as many pop culture references — don’t worry about the practical import of their work, as much as we do? And why don’t we see the neo-con attack against ‘leftist’ faculty and the attempt to curb our academic freedoms as a sign that we’re doing something right? Why hasn’t the argument been made against Horowitz et al. that his attempt to protect students from their professors’ biases (a) infantalizes them to the point where they are incapable of acting for, or defending themselves, and (b), to exaggerate for the sake of effect, differs from the Leninist-Stalinist academic purges only insofar as it has been unsuccessful?

I take it that what we do, joseph, is train people to think, to be aware, and hopefully to be concerned. That is to say, we train them to have a conscience. WHy isn’t that a direct enough engagement? In sum, I don’t think we need more or less Theory than we had before. We’re not, for god’s sake, Gambling. We just have to come to terms with our guiltiness, and — in the hegelian movement par excellence — forgive ourselves, suck up the immediate loss, and soldier on, while remembering what, exactly we have lost.

As for your comments about Aristotle and Plato, let me say that, like you, mos of my formation was through Plato. And I think that Plato is far more a Political Philosopher than he is a Metaphysician — for reasons that are too complex to elaborate here, I think that everything he wrote amounts to a manifesto for virtuous living within the Polis. This said, however, Socrates presents us with a truly impossible position: his Irony demands that the only way to be right is to be wrong. And this is the lesson of the Apology. The only way he can successfully defend himself against the charge of sophism (corrupting the youth) and Impiety, is to fail to successfully defend himself; to be, as it were a lamb (Hence Kierkegaard’s claim to the effect that Socrates and Jesus are identicial through their differences). There’s not much that can be salvaged from such a position, save that it cleaves certain sophistical claims from truly wise ones, even though it can’t by any means connect wisdom with praxis.

Aristotle, on the other hand, does present precisely sh a relationship, and for that reason (among many others) he tends to be a productive place to begin thinking through he relationship between ethics and politics, without falling into the Ideological trap that there is a realm of illusion and a realm of eternal truth, which the common man must be harmonized with through some ‘noble lie.’ Ah but now I’m really rambling, s perhaps I should go to bed. cheers

I’m thoroughly happy with your quantum version of the work of theory. I appreciate that it is a gentler, less apocalyptic figure, without foreclosure.

I worry about what has become of theory in the last forty or so years; I look back on the 50s and 60s as a time when theory could operate with a good conscience. Even its bleakest utterances, such as the pessimistic texts by Adorno, arrived at a time when theory itself, pessimistic or not, did not know how it would affect the world it described.

At this point, it seems to me that theory has to change its course; that much of what passes for politically-minded critical theory, especially in terms of the larger academic audiences and conversations (that go beyond the usually-interesting book by Derrida or whomever, the thing-in-itself) is both Hamletizing and helpless. It teaches students that the world is deeply in thrall to an oppressive and protean system, while simultaneously engrossing itself in techniques of reading (particularly painfully “close” readings) that have no hope of reaching the mainstream. The academy appears out-of-touch, and it is; it appears obscurantist, and it is.

I apologize for rehashing here some of the commonest arguments “against theory” — I do so only to emphasize that when I chose the perhaps melodramatic metaphor of the theft, I did so to emphasize that the work of teaching, writing, and publishing is affected down to the level of the word by the fact that there are real antagonists out there. I don’t mean bad or evil people; I just mean people with vested financial interests who oppose the continuing study of Marx, oppose systemic change, and even oppose the study of the humanities for their own sake. In my view, the academy has adapted itself to this pressure by, through a series of very indirect “moves,” removing itself from the public sphere, and that the history of theory in this decade may well turn out to be a series of invisible concessions and conciliations.

Therefore, a more dramatic version of what happens, and the responsibility of the contemporary theorist, may be the only way to make visible a battle that is going on regardless. Furthermore, while it may seem self-evident to fight the winnable fight — that is, to center direct political involvement on the preservation of academic freedom — I believe that doing so invites precisely those sorts of compromises that produce a politically meaningless freedom: freedom without funding, freedom without media coverage, and so forth.

My experience with Aristotle has been an unusually conflicted one. He was not a significant part of my early education; I read the Ethics as a freshman in college, but the emphasis of my reading before and during college was on Plato. Plato was also the primary figure for other thinkers I read in volume, like Nietzsche, even where Nietzsche sided with Aristotle’s sensibleness. Aristotle, at least the Aristotle of the Poetics, is one of Aldous Huxley’s major antagonists in Brave New World, because of the conservative implications of audience catharsis.

All in all, I have been surprised by the omnipresence of Aristotle as a model of good sense inside the academy, and around the blogosphere. While I certainly delight in Aristotle’s emphasis on education, self-formation, and moral reflection, I am bound by my feeling of urgency to Socrates’s more caustic irony, and his more disturbing presence in Athens, while the complacency of the “we” marks every page Aristotle writes on the good man: “So we are inclined to call the man who gives too much a spendthrift, and the man who gives too little a miser…”