Our age is the age of criticism, to which
everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of
legislation, are by many regarded as grounds of exemption from the examination
of this tribunal. But, if they own they are exempted, they become the subjects
of just suspicion, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason
accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public
examination. (Immanuel Kant)
This introduction is about a
certain kind of writing, which has emerged in recent years with the force of an
independent discipline, without ever taking on the status that an independent
discipline normally achieves. You may
have heard of some of the names involved, certainly the key historical
references, like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, perhaps even the more recent
upstarts, like Kristeva, Foucault, and Derrida.
Though you may not have heard of these and you may have only a shadowy
knowledge of what arguments and influences they represent. You may have heard of certain developments
like structuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism, and you probably have a
fairly good awareness of some of the issues that hide away behind those words,
through many discussions in the media and through certain portrayals in books,
films and on television.
You may, on the contrary, know
quite a lot about Critical Theory,
whether or not you are or ever have been a student of the Humanities or Social
Sciences. This introduction does not presuppose any
special knowledge of the subject, just as the writer can have no special
knowledge of his reader. For those with
little or no knowledge of what the phrase Critical
Theory refers to, the introduction is designed as a guide through what is
an intrinsically complex field dealing with intrinsically complex issues. For those who have some knowledge, even a
lot of knowledge, about the field, the introduction will appear in the form of
an argument. In either case, it aims to
provide something like a framework for a field that in its most essential
moments is concerned with questioning and adjusting frameworks.
In that case the introduction
can best be described as a critical
guide to Critical Theory. It emphasises what is critical about the knowledge it presents. I will go on to explore these two key words,
critical and frameworks, in this preface.
There are many books, for both general and specifically academic
markets, that might easily be described as non-critical. What this means is that they present
knowledge that doesn’t require any complicated questions about its status or
role as knowledge. Books that tell you how to develop certain
skills and that provide an appropriate level of awareness require little more
than clear presentations of methods and facts.
For instance, successful organic gardening would require an awareness of
the appropriate techniques and materials necessary for practising good
gardening. And it would depend to an
extent on knowing how to cultivate an ecosystem in tune with the seasons, how
to produce fertilisers from natural waste and knowing about the cyclic nature
of a soil’s fertility. This knowledge
can be given without a lot of philosophising about the ethical preference for
organic gardening over gardening that makes use of chemical pesticides. There are in fact many books on organic
gardening that do present critical grounds for practising organic cultivation. The erosion of the global ecosystem, the
massive escalation of the production of non-reusable waste, global warming, and
the consumption of the human spirit by vast systems of commodity capitalism,
are grounds enough, some feel, for turning away from modern technics and
developing a more ecology-friendly technics of the earth. But you wouldn’t need to make those points
if you were writing a manual on organic gardening. Think of your market (the publisher
suggests): give them the skills and the knowledge they need, but don't bother
them with distracting philosophising. So
with or without the critical
awareness, the books on organics can sit happily alongside the books on other
types of gardening (in the “Gardening” section of your local B
This introduction is not about
growing tomatoes. But I could have
attempted to lay it out as if it was. I
could have presented an overview of the names and the thought associated with
them, the history of ideas within which ideas are produced and disseminated. I could have given short accounts with handy
examples of the methods, variously, of structuralism, deconstruction,
psychoanalytic theory, hermeneutics, stylistics, etc. While you will find this kind of knowledge
embedded in the following pages that is not the main concern of this
introduction. The guiding concerns of
this introduction are what certain German philosophers would once have called
the “Grounding concepts” (the Grundebegriffe). And rather than provide a framework through
which you may understand the multiplicity of critical forces out there, I have
drawn out a framework from what is consistently critical in what all these thinkers and writers do. The guide in other words does not aim to
simply provide knowledge and awareness of Critical
Theory. Rather it is intended to
draw attention to what provokes
critical theory. You will not find an
exposition of every important contemporary thinker in the field. Rather you will find a series of expositions
of the basic problems that concern us when engaging both with the tradition out
of which critical theory emerges and with contemporary thinkers too.
A critical preface to Critical
Theory would be expected to examine the meaning of its terms in their
intellectual context—just as a book on organic gardening would be expected to
explain what is meant by organic in
the context of gardening. The word critical involves a complex a web of
ideas so it is appropriate that we begin with an exposition of the term. Ordinary uses do not provide much of a
clue. If I were to observe that the
British electorate was critical of Harold Wilson’s cabinet during the 1960’s
I’d be using the ordinary sense of the word critical, meaning “inclined to
criticise severely and unfavourably.” In
fact critics get a bad name for the
way they are often too critical (in the ordinary sense) of artists, writers and
film-producers. The word critic comes from the Greek kritikos, which denotes the ability, or
even licence, to discern or to judge. A
critic is someone one who expresses a reasoned opinion on any matter,
especially involving a judgement of its value, truth, righteousness, beauty, or
technique. So in 1711 the poet Alexander
Pope, in his Essay on Criticism, was
able to admonish the many critics of the time for their failure to take
responsibility in their task:
'Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill
Appear in Writing
or in Judging ill,
But, of the two, less dang'rous is th' Offence,
To tire our Patience,
than mis-lead our Sense:
Some few in that,
but Numbers err in this,
Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss;
A Fool might once himself alone expose,
Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.
The
opening lines point out that while it is difficult to say whether bad writing
is worse than bad criticism, there is little doubt that bad criticism is more
dangerous because it misleads us, whereas bad poetry is only going to irritate
us. Furthermore there are many more bad
critics than there are bad poets. The Essay raises questions about
responsibility in judgement and attempts to answer them with some prescriptions
about the grounds for judging properly and responsibly:
First
follow Nature, and your judgment frame
By her just standard, which is still the same;
Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchanged, and universal light,
Life, force, and beauty must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of art.
Nature—which
is another extre
Metaphysics
The
prefix meta- (meaning on or about) when added to the word physics
denotes a realm of determination or conditioning. If I pay my taxes on time my behaviour may be
determined by a number of things. They
would include the laws laid down by my government as well as my desire to obey
the laws, which may perhaps also be conditioned by my belief that the taxes
will be used for the benefit of my society (i.e., paying nurses and removing my
trash etc.). Each of these conditions
themselves have a number of conditions that can be said to determine them, like my government’s desire to
stay in power or the s
Pope’s metaphysical
notion of nature asserts that the source (or the condition) of art remains invisible. We only know it is there because of its
effects (beautiful pictures and poems, in analogy perhaps with beautiful
natural phenomena like mountains, lakes, flowers and trees). The real worry here is the plethora of bad
critics (in analogy with an unjust world).
The trouble is that taste, or good judgement, requires a certain art
itself—it is not self-evident or simply given.
So the art of criticism requires a developed sensibility that goes
beyond mechanical means (as Pope goes on to argue in his poetic Essay).
So against the everyday notion of criticism (an act of harsh judgement)
the more refined notion is considerably more complex, involving serious
questions about the nearly always unstable criteria for analysing, evaluating
and appreciating works of art. Art thus
signals a problem concerning unconditioned origins. The problem calls on, or provokes, theory (if
not an all out metaphysics).
In the most basic sense,
then, Critical Theory would offer
some principles upon which criticism might responsibly proceed. Pope’s Essay
can thus be regarded as a form of critical theory, with his particular reading
of the concept of Nature playing a decisive role. Notice that it has to be a decision because Nature, in his conception, remains
apart, withdrawn, from the “effects” we come across as evidence for its
existence. There are beautiful works
thus their source in a transcendent wellspring called art-in-general can be
securely inferred. We ought to be able
to see already that the responsibility of judgement can rely on nothing but its
own resources—responsibility and judgement—in order to arrive at the decisions
that constitute criticism. When standing
in the National Gallery gazing at one of the respected great masters, like John
Constable’s The Haywain, on what
grounds can we make an appreciation of it?
The fact that it is in a major institution for displaying great artworks
perhaps says something about its greatness.
But does that fact alone determine our experience of its great
grandeur? It might do. Then our decisions are already to a large
extent made for us, by historical art institutions and established criticism
etc. Does the professional curator’s
judgement, then, guarantee all our tastes?
Art history has proven that anybody’s judgement may be called in to
question, no matter how much institutional authority they have been
granted. Yet, on the other hand, we do
find that we like, even love, without clear criteria, certain artistic
forms—though not necessarily generally accepted ones. What is it about Megadeath’s latest
album? What is that je ne sais quoi that makes us love them so much we beat our heads
against the PA system until our ears bleed?
Where does our appreciation come from?
At what point can we say that our individual judgements constitute
responsible criticism?
The word criticism comes
from a Greek word (as do so many of the words we use), krinein meaning to decide. And it does look as if the work of criticism
requires some form of decision. If I
think Constable’s Haywain is a
magnificent work of art, I have made a decision. Or I might have done. The curator, of course, might have already
made it for me, so in this case I don’t have
to decide. Everyone knows it is
great. It is in the National Gallery,
not to mention adorning the walls of countless semi-detached living rooms and
chocolate boxes, endlessly and cheaply reproduced for sale in markets and
department stores. When people say, “I
don’t know much about art but I know what I like,” they often turn out to have
the same taste that millions of others also have. How do you decide to like something?
One answer would be to say that beauty, in its most refined sense, is
something objective, inherent in beautiful objects like trees and
artworks. This would be an attempt at a
metaphysical explanation. Metaphysics
requires a range of abstract concepts that cannot ever be experienced as such, but must somehow be deduced
from the evidence of experience. So
because there are beautiful things there must be the eternal quality that
informs things with greater or lesser amounts of beauty. However against this, as the phrase “beauty
is in the eye of the beholder” suggests, people have noticed that there is
little agreement, certainly nothing of a universal kind, about what beauty
is.
Perhaps what we like or
what we find beautiful says more about us than the thing perceived. Another way of saying this is that beauty is subjective. It is a wonderfully reassuring thought for
those who come to being in what we now call the modern world, or Modernity. Modernity, as I will explain in a different
chapter, roughly outlines a broad historical process and a set of fundamental
attitudes that help to structure specific kinds of interpretations of the
world. Most decisively (there’s that
word again) modernity involves a tension, sometimes even a contradiction,
whereby the emphasis on observation
and scientific models of research is compensated for by the relegation of
subjective experience to the realm of aesthetics. The contradiction roughly marks out the
separation of experience into objective and subjective realms. So science is objective and aesthetic experience is subjective. Why is this
separation reassuring? Historically
science tends to discredit explanations derived from religions and mythologies,
with a corresponding de-centring of the place of mankind in the universe. If it was once thought that man on earth was
the single most important creation of an eternal and infinite god, scientific
knowledge provides strong evidence against this belief. The lack of grounds for criticism, then, or
at least the apparent lack of universal grounds for judging aesthetic
experience, provides some compensation for the objectification of the world in
the subjectification of the person. A
person can now be thought of as an independent, free thinking individual,
unique in himself (and later herself) and distinguished from others. Modernity thus implies the individuation of
the members of the collective called Man.
Man
Up
until the mid nineteen sixties the generic name for the human race was always
“Man.” Two developments in critical
thinking have put this name into question and so it is rarely used now. A famous international conference in Paris,
France, titled “The Ends of Man” featured a number of thinkers who are
considered to be instrumental in contemporary critical theory, including Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida and others. In
drawing attention, in various ways, to the historical perspective in the use of
a supposedly general term, thinkers like these have loosened its generality and
it is now seen as an historical index of attitudes. The title of the conference plays on the word
end, which can mean to finish, even to die out as in come to an
end. Or, as a noun, an end can be a purpose. So the reasons
for learning (the ends of learning)
can be variously considered by students as, a) a qualification, b) increased
knowledge, c) better ability to respond to complex situations. Most students would not assume that the end of learning (that is, its reason)
was at the same time the end of
learning--bringing learning to a full stop so that no more learning goes
on. But the history of modernity does
seem to involve a paradoxical formulation such that the end of man is the end of
man. Man’s purpose is to finish himself
off. The most radical voices suggest
that he has practically succeeded. Good
old man (whoever he is). The other development, perhaps easier to
focus, has been the various critiques understood collectively as feminism. The critique of man follows both a linguistic and ideological path. Language and
ideology can be seen as mutually supporting systems, such that the language we
use more or less supports the most fundamental attitudes we adopt when interpreting
our experience of the world. Feminism
involves a powerful critique of what
we call patriarchy, in which a
system of social relations that privileges the masculine as opposed to the
feminine is supported by habitual patterns of language use (e.g., the generic
use of Man for the human race). However,
the critique turns out to be yet more powerful, for in dissolving the
comfortable reliance upon a universal term to cover a universal being it puts
into suspense, by extension, the concept of the human and all the metaphysical qualities that are attached to it as
its predicates. Metaphysical notions
like truth, goodness and nature have often been associated with the special
domain isolated as the human (e.g., in the phrase human nature). Much critical
theory involves breaking down deeply held assumptions associated with an
uncritical humanism, which was
especially prevalent throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the
twentieth centuries.
So the human subject turns out to be yet another
metaphysical repository for values that we have inherited historically, as modern subjects. And the subjectivity
of the subject is finally guaranteed
only by freedom of decision, and thus exemplified in aesthetic judgement. However so long as this subjectivity remains
bounded within fields of aesthetic experience, the hope remains that other
dimensions can be brought under the governance of the ever more powerful
resource called objective judgement. The physical sciences are modernity’s great
paradigms for the power of objectivity.
But the ideals of objectivity have never been fully realised in the
fields that deal with actions and relations (ethics and politics). It seems that wherever objective criteria are
not available a decision of some kind is called for. Decisions must be made, whether in the field
of ethics or in politics. Should I visit
my parents for Christmas and make the family happy or should I stay at home and
work, thus pleasing my university?
Should we tax the rich, thus incurring their wrath, or should we
continue to tax the poor, maintaining our wealth and continuing their wretched
state. The easiest decisions are the
ones that meet with least resistance.
What this normally means is that they are not decisions at all but forms
of acquiescence to established norms and expectations. If only I could use the certainty I have
about the beauty of the new Megadeath CD to help me decide what to do for the
Christmas (hey! does anyone know if they are playing at Christmas?). Critical evaluation, because it is so much a
question of taste, offers perhaps
some hope that an equivalent mode of judgement might be used in domains other
than the aesthetic. But why do we need
this hope? The answer rests with yet
another derivation from this powerful Greek word, krinein, that is crisis.
Crisis
It is still fairly common to
observe that we (whoever that is supposed to be) live in a time of great social
and cultural change. The observation is
undoubtedly correct but there are few moments in the long evolution of the
human race when anxieties about rapid change have not been voiced. We would thus take most interest in the
nature of the specific changes and what they mean for the future. Phrases of the kind “the present crisis”
indicate that something has gone badly wrong.
After 1933, with the rise of Adolph Hitler and the National Socialist
Party in Germany, politicians and journalists throughout Europe and America
used the phrase “the present crisis” regularly.
Everyone knew what it meant.
Everyone feared for the future--many referred to the time as “this dark
time,” or “in these dark days.” Their
fears were justified of course—beyond their worst imaginings—but it seems that
conditions of crisis are nearly always at the point of threatening any community
with an uncertain and fearful future.
Memories of those “dark days” still live, vicariously in the generation born after the so-called Second World
War but actually for those that lived
through it and live on with specific memories of the time, as its
survivors. The name “Hitler” often gets
used as a kind of moral touchstone in debates and arguments about ethics, power
and politics. And names like Auschwitz,
Nagasaki and Dresden have the power, like so much of the past, to haunt us with
dark premonitions of the future. The
point here is that a crisis doesn’t just come to us like a rent, a great rip,
in the otherwise solid fabric of the present, but it dogs us like some
tenacious ghostly embodiment of someone long dead, but who refuses to go away. There seems never to have been a time without
crisis or at least the threat of crisis.
It is worth noticing then, that even without the negative connotations
attached to the term when we think of Hitler and National Socialism, crisis is
almost always associated with rapid social and cultural change. Distressing events may happen such that names
can then be given to what may actually be more like a permanent principle of
existence. In fact, the rise of National
Socialism, according to a most complex history, can be partly attributed to a
certain way of identifying and responding to the so-called National Crisis that
Germany faced in the early 1930s, which manifested in widespread social and
economic disaster. Hitler’s party was
able to exploit a number of scapegoats as a way of claiming certain
causes--most notoriously, and with horrifying consequences, Judaism and Jewish
business interests, but also communism and what at the time was called
“degenerate” culture, which included, by no coincidence, the works of the
radical avant-garde.
So rather than see the rise
and popularity of National Socialism as itself the embodiment of a crisis it
may be more accurate to see it is a response
to crisis generally. In the early years
of the Third Reich many Germans were thrilled with optimism for a future
imagined in contrast to a wretched recent past.
In so far as crisis refers to a situation that causes anxiety, it may be
that there is no situation without at least a little cause for anxiety, though
people are perhaps happier when they don’t have to think too much about things
that make them anxious. So anything that
promises to remove a cause of anxiety may in certain circumstances achieve
success and popularity. That is one
reason why self-help books are so popular, and regularly break bookstore sales
records.
There are many kinds of crisis
in the sense I’m teasing out here. I
don’t just mean major kinds that seem to affect whole swathes of the globe’s
population (exaggerated in fictions like Star
Wars as the universe oppressed by an evil empire). The Asian economic downturn, the great
depression, global warming, can each be thought of as a major crisis. We must also consider the apparently more
minor kinds, personal crises, which each of has to face from time to time. Among the earliest of these may be that first
moment when a hungry baby finds the mother absent, when hunger is met by the
absence of a sustenance that had never before been an issue. The trauma and panic accompanied by this
discomfort are perhaps echoed by later incidents where expectations are dashed,
needs not supplied and desires not fulfilled.
Society often codifies, even naturalises, our anxieties by naming them
and giving them likely stages of onset, like personality crisis, mid-life crisis,
etc.
It is clear that
coping-strategies, both in individuals and groups, are extre
Critique
One
common complaint made today is that there is a crisis in knowledge. But it seems that, whenever knowledge
attempts to establish itself in the field of human experience, it faces
crisis. The key source for today’s use
of the name critical theory is the
work of the German eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant uses the word critical to describe his mature philosophy. The three main texts that make up the
critical philosophy answer broadly to three pressing questions. The first is the question of what we can know
(epistemology) and is treated by The
Critique of Pure Reason (The First
Critique). The Second Critique makes up the so-called practical philosophy,
dealing with questions of morality and ethics (what should we do?). The
Third Critique, embodied by the extraordinary Critique of Judgement, was intended by Kant to bring his “entire
undertaking to a close.” If the first
critique deals with knowledge (what can be known as necessarily the case—the
necessary laws of nature) and the second critique deals with the freedom of
human action, the Critique of Judgement
was supposed to reconcile the two otherwise opposed realms (nature and
freedom). Tellingly, the third critique
is focused on questions of pleasure and judgements of taste contrasted to the
kinds of judgements that can be called objective. It would be impossible to overestimate the
importance of the third critique for the critical tradition since Kant, though
this is not the place to explore it.
I
got the quotation that I began this section with from the preface to the First Critique. Let’s have another look:
Our age is the age of criticism, to which
everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of
legislation, are by many regarded as grounds of exemption from the examination
of this tribunal. But, if they own they are exempted, they become the subjects
of just suspicion, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason
accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public
examination. (Immanuel Kant)
Criticism puts all grounds for knowledge into crisis. Even religious authority and state law, must
be tried in the law courts of reason.
Readers of Kant quickly note how important the metaphor of law, and
legality, is for him. Accordingly the
word reason is to be understood as a
kind of law. In this sense it is not
unlike the concept of nature as we
found it used in Alexander Pope’s poetic Essay
on Criticism (and it is not by chance that Pope was one of Kant’s favourite
poets). Notice how he puts it: by
submitting to the tribunal, even state law and religious authority can win
their right to sincere respect and may then be free of suspicion. It is a positive action--as long as these
authorities pass the test. The gesture
is designed as an attempt to save traditional authority but will also put the
notion of authority into the gravest danger.
Kant’s preface evokes the warlike state that knowledge finds
itself in. He tells a story full of
violence about the battle for the right to legislate over the relationship
between experience and knowledge. At the
center of the battlefield, he
says, is a queen named Metaphysics:
In the beginning,
under the administration of the dogmatists,
her rule was despotic. Yet because her legislation still retained
traces of ancient barbarism, this rule gradually degenerated through internal
wars into complete anarchy; and the
skeptics, a kind of nomads who abhor all permanent cultivation of the soil,
shattered civil unity from time to time.
But since there were only a few of them, they could not prevent the
dogmatists from continuously attempting to rebuild, though never according to a
plan unanimously accepted among themselves. (CPR 100)
There is much at stake for Kant in this graphic account of the history
of philosophy. The antagonism and the
lack of legal authority for knowledge suggest both a crisis and the promise of
its resolution. The story is now a
canonical history of ideas. It tells of
a century long battle between rationalists like Christian Wolff and empiricists
like John Locke. For Kant, neither had
been able to defend metaphysics from the nomadic (ho
The main issue rests on the status of Reason, given that the aim of establishing a critical tribunal
implies a position of judgement that remains free of suspicion. For this reason the Critique of Pure Reason must establish the grounds of reason
through reason alone, and we see reason turning back on itself in a pattern
that comes to inform the critical attitude since Kant. However Kant has been criticized for
insufficiently putting this self-critical approach into operation. We thus find some of the most powerful
influences on critical theory supporting what is truly critical in Kant’s
philosophy while expressing skepticism regarding the residually dogmatic
aspects. Most famously, G. W. F. Hegel
shows that there is no available position from which something like reason can
criticize itself. Later on Karl Marx,
followed Hegel in his dialectical thinking, but criticized him too for
idealizing his own concept, Geist (or
spirit) without sufficient
self-criticism. In Marx’s own phrase, it
is necessary to extract “the rational kernel” from the “mystical shell” of
Hegel’s philosophy. Perhaps somewhat
surprisingly several brands of Marxist, or Marxian, thought often fail to
maintain a critical attitude to the writings of Marx, who, as it has been
argued, also falls prey to certain lapses that can yield to dogmatic
ideas. Friedrich Nietzsche too, whose
influence on critical thought is difficult to overestimate, was highly
skeptical of Kant’s attempt to
establish the tribunal of reason. And
during the twentieth century, critique has become synonymous with a constant
critical vigilance such that thought should never be allowed to ossify into
dogmatic presentations of ideas, as if fixed in place for all time.
Critical Theory
The phrase critical theory was
adopted most famously by a group of philosophers now known as The Frankfurt
School, and is associated particularly with two major twentieth century
thinkers, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno.
Writing from the nineteen twenties their work represents a vital
contribution to the field. Benjamin (who
died by his own hand at the border of France and Spain while fleeing from the
Nazis) leaves a large number of extraordinary texts that are often difficult to
categorize. Adorno emigrated from Germany
to the United States and with his colleague Max Horkheimer contributed
significantly to the theorization of modernity, technology, and mass
culture. Most importantly his critical
rethinking of the notion of the aesthetic (and thus the place of the artwork)
since Kant has become increasingly more relevant.
Postmodernism and
Critical theory
A
number of contemporary thinkers have contributed to the problem of
knowledge--what guarantees its truth, its rightness, its importance, etc. Two in particular have been influential, the
French philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard and the sociologist of knowledge Jean
Baudrillard. Lyotard’s 1983 book, The Postmodern Condition, argues that assumptions about civilisation,
human progress and the ideals of liberation are rooted in assumptions that take
the form of what he calls Grand
Narratives. A narrative is a story, like a fairy
tale or popular myth. In the western
world assumptions about the progress and virtual completion of the human race
through technology and civilisation are no longer credible. Totalitarian regimes in politics that attempt
universal control and the extermination of all outsiders (most markedly the holocaust of the Nazi regime under
Hitler) can be compared with regimes in knowledge that aspire to universal
truth. Such systems tend to manifest
impulses like the annexation, containment, expulsion or extermination of any
knowledge that lies outside or contests the norm. Thus the allegorical evocation of mystery and
death we find in literature and art, especially in the avant-garde, can be contained in an enclosure called “the
aesthetic” where it is valued for its strange beauty in a way that does not
threaten the bland and complacent promise of technological knowledge. “Let us wage war on totality,” writes
Lyotard, in a famous battle cry of postmodern theory, echoing, of all people,
Winston Churchill, standing alone against appeasement and the Nazis.
The
work of Jean Baudrillard focuses on the role of the image in the mass media and
he joins others in seeing at the end of the twentieth century a culmination of
the logic of capitalism in consumer society.
He suggests that in the past humanity was able to make a sure
distinction between a “real world” and its forms of representation in books,
paintings and other signs. But now signs
have become detached from their function of representing a world and have
instead become the postmodern world
of floating images and simulacra,
that is, copies with no originals.
Four Stages of
Simulation
1. The image reflects reality (a naturalist
painting like Constable’s The Haywain).
2. The image “masks and perverts a basic
reality.” The impressionist paintings of
the nineteenth century draw attention to the
way of seeing as a style rather
than to the objectivity of representation.
The way of seeing masks what
is seen by perverting it.
3. The image “masks the absence of a basic
reality.” This stage probably
corresponds to the modernist period in art, where faith in the possibility of
any actual objective reality falls to
an all time low. The image seems not to
represent at all, rather it produces
what it makes visible, like the paintings of Paul Klee or Pablo Picasso.
4. The image (in its manifestation in
postmodernity) “bears no relation to any reality whatsoever.” Watch a TV ad. Is there anything that could honestly be
called a “basic reality” represented there?
Baudrillard’s arguments have
contrubuted to the way we understand the status of a certain notion of reality or the real in contemporary life (i.e., it is a mythical object that has
disappeared). But it may be that he is
in danger of letting us fall into a mythical notion of the past. Human experience was always a construction
and a function of institutions organised in complex ways. Certainly the mass media constitutes a
profound (and profoundly new) way of organising experience. But it seems that ways of organising were always governed to an extent by modes of
signification, interpretation and institutionalisation. The following section is intended to explore
these modes in a preliminary way.
Some
say you can learn a lot from books
Thrill ride to
second hand living
Life
is just as deadly as it looks
But fiction is
more forgiving
(Richard Thompson)
The lyrics above repeat a distinction that has become so
commonplace over centuries that it seems fundamental. But the distinction between books and actual
life takes such an extraordinary range of different forms that just thinking
about it too much can make you dizzy.
The distinction changes each time one considers one of the many
different kinds of book. History books
relate to life in ways that differ from how fairy tales or works of fiction
do. The
Bible and The Koran relate to
life rather differently too. A biography
would be at least subtly if not markedly different from an
autobiography—especially if they each relate the “same” life. The workshop manual for my Citroen Avantage relates to life in an entirely
different way again.
Perhaps it is a little worrying that these distinctions also
imply differences in meaning for the word life. The
life of a man or woman who is the subject of a biography or autobiography
is not exactly what is meant by life
as recorded in history books. The
relation between my workshop manual and my car is one of book to life too but
does that mean my car lives? Why
not? When I finally junk it for the
obligatory 25 pounds scrap value I’ll probably tell my friends that it
died. I am using a metaphor of
course. The difference between fiction,
which is often dense with metaphors, and real life implies a rather different
meaning of the word life as well—though none of these meanings are
unrelated. It is possible to speak of
life generally, the life of nations,
villages, communities as well as animal and plant life or the life of the
planets in the universe, and to speak of a particular
life, the life of a man or a woman like Napoleon, George Bush or Madonna. Perhaps, a little oddly, it is easier to talk
of a particular life when it’s over—when its subject is dead. With a living person the life is felt to be
unfinished, it is yet to be fully determined.
The same might be assumed for history too—it is surely easier to write a
history once the period in question is over and done with. The implicit association of death with
writing seems almost as fundamental as the distinction between books and
life. Despite this, as far as history,
biography and autobiography especially are concerned, the eyewitness account is
valued above second or third hand accounts, as being that much “truer” to
life. The value, of course, remains
idealistic, for the eyewitness is well known to be chronically vulnerable to
lapses of memory, mistakes, misperceptions, skewed perspectives, projections
and unnoticed assumptions and presuppositions.
So one always requires a more objective and thus removed commentator to
sift through the welter of conflicting evidences. That’s life.
If our perspectives on life
are as unstable as they so often seem to be, then a similar condition holds for
our varying perspectives on books. When I read The Bible I read a very different text to the one that is read by
the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who knock on my door at 11.00 on a Friday morning
(just in time for coffee) to tell me “the good news.” For them The
Bible is the revealed truth; for
me it is a complex, often contradictory, text with a peculiar historical
status. So a book relates to life in
different ways depending upon who reads it, as much as anything else. That is, between
the book and the life lies a complex if only ever partially perceptible realm in
which a number of structuring principles and conditions combine to organize our
experiences and actions generally. These
principles and conditions include memories, histories, desires, other books
that have had an influence (of whatever kind), as well as, most importantly,
the variety of institutions that govern both readings and lives. By institution
one should understand, family, school, church, university, workplace, village,
town, city, nation, etc., and also the genres we put books into, the
expectations we bring to them, the functions we assume they play and the ways
in which we assume they relate to life. That is, a kind of book, whether theology,
history, fairy tale, poetry, biography, fiction or philosophy (and there are
many missing from the list) is thought to serve some function for the people
who read it. It might be entertainment,
edification, identification, consolation or instruction. Whatever, this function concerns the ways in
which the book in question relates to life.
The function is often that of teaching—the book is supposed to provide
the reader with some knowledge or understanding that he or she did not have
before, about history if it is a history book or about someone’s life if it is
a biography, or about how to fix that darned carburetor if my car won’t start
in the morning. The Bible, if you are
Christian child, contains knowledge of the one God and tells you how to
act. Because this knowledge is only
obscurely accessible from the text itself, a whole industry of (sometimes
conflicting) commentaries exists, to tell you how to understand it. In each case, a single notion explicitly or
implicitly governs the sense of value we generally have regarding the book in
question. That notion is called truth.
The institutions we discussed above also govern the meaning
of the word truth. The Latin adequatio captures the notion rather
well. It means a making equal, an
adjusting or adapting. It is this notion
of truth—adapting or adjusting something to make it equal to something
else—that comes to dominate western notions.
You can see how this works with history and biography. Is the account adequate to the life? That is the key criterion. If there were a false account of the Citroen Avantage carburetor in my workshop
manual I’d never get to work in the morning.
With the Bible, on the other hand, things are rather tricky. If the account is measured against something
existing we are all at sea. Nonetheless
many (like my Friday morning visitors) assume that some truth is there behind the text.
But let’s have another look at the word truth. Where does it come
from and what else might it mean?
When you define a word as
important and as powerful as truth it
is never enough to just look it up in a dictionary. It is often helpful to look for its
etymology. An etymology is the history
of a linguistic form (i.e., a word), which can be shown by tracing its
development since its earliest recorded occurrence in the language where it is
found, or by tracing its transmission from one language to another, by
analyzing it into its component parts, by identifying its cognates in other
languages, or by tracing it and its cognates to a common ancestral form in an
ancestral language. By applying this
deep form of analysis, we are already departing from the “making equal” notion
of truth, which would have had to assume that the true meaning of a word is what
it is equal to. Rather, in this way, we
are likely to open the meaning of a word to a wider range of
possibilities. The word truth seems to have developed from the
Middle English trewthe, which is a
development of the Old English treowth. Treowth meant something like fidelity and it is clearly akin to the
Old English treowe, which meant
faithful. Because the word meant
fidelity and was used to describe a character—i.e., someone who could be
trusted to remain constant in their loyalty and, by extension, someone who was
sincere—it also comes to mean what we understand by it today, that is, the
state of “being the case.” The words fact and actuality refer us to the body of real things and events. These things and events that make up what we
call actuality (or more colloquially life)
become the measure of truth in its
new sense—does your account fit the facts?
If so then it is true. This kind
of truth, in so far as it can be tested, would be considered as empirical truth, the truth of
experience. Truth, however, with “a
capital T” would be a transcendent
fundamental or spiritual reality. A
reality that is transcendent cannot
be tested by experience (rather obviously) so it becomes rather difficult to
provide proof of it in the sense that is demanded by adaequatio (making equal).
However it is not difficult to see that if adequatio just is truth
then you don’t need to prove The Truth,
which gets another name: God. God, then,
by association with Truth, is the name for that which allows us to make things
equal (like books to life). Though this
“making equal” is going to get very complicated.
If we go back to the etymology briefly we find some further
links (this is like following a “clew” in an old mystery). The Old English treowe (faithful) is directly linked to the Old High German gitriuwi, also faithful, the Old Irish derb, meaning sure, and very probably to
the Sanskrit daruna, which means
hard, from daru for wood. What is certain is that the words true and tree share their early etymologies.
So if to be true is to be steadfast, loyal, honest, even just in certain contexts, and rather
centrally to be consistent (as in
“he’s true to character”), then this is probably on the analogy with the deep
roots and the firm trunk of those tall woody arboreal plants called trees. How true is true to tree?
Our answer to that would concern the kinds of meanings that
the words true and truth are used in place of when
translating from Greek and Latin. We’ve
already looked at adequatio, “to make
equal,” but we also find that truth
can be used in relation to the odd word allêgoria,
allegory, that is, a figurative representation of a thought or of an abstract
truth (literally “to mean something other than what is said”). An allegory uses symbolism or imagery in a
way that consistently—or cumulatively—carries what is symbolized through from
beginning to end in a speech, or a poem or story. The notion of constancy or consistency is
helpful here, of course, but I’m not sure the adaequatio aspect is sufficient to account for truth in the allegorical sense.
The word vêrus, on the other
hand, which means true in the sense of real, actual, genuine, etc. and is
therefore opposed to falsus, false,
seems closer to our sense of adaequatio. However vêrus is also conventionally opposed to fictus, which means feigned,
false or counterfeit and is derived from fingo,
meaning to mold, imagine, compose, suppose, form, shape, invent, contrive. Not only is it impossible to imagine a
fictional truth (as in “that story seems very true to life”) or figurative
representation without this fingo but
also the very possibility of adapting something like a narrative or an account
or adjusting it so that it is “made equal” to the facts would disappear
too. There would be no adaequatio without the possibility of fingo.
There would be no truth without the possibility of fiction.
My conclusion to that little diversion into etymology
implies that the meaning of the word truth (and the institutions that govern
it) hides the fact that it is based upon a notion (fingo, the figure of the counterfeiter) that is radically excluded
from the meaning. The meaning of the
word truth—in its hidden historical dimension—is a lie (on its own terms). This doesn’t, of course, mean that ordinary
senses of the word “true” are no longer usable for people like me. On the contrary, if my workshop manual is not
adequate in its representation of the carburetor in my Citroen then I won’t get
to work this morning and I’ll be serving coffee again to the Jehovah’s
Witnesses, while they attempt to convert me from my stubborn atheism. Rather, I now understand that the very
possibility of constructing a workshop manual in the first place—apparently
stripped of all fictional or figurative aspects as an ideal historian might
aspire to do with his or her account of history—is the possibility of
fiction.
If we now return to the lyrics with which we began this
section, we find some characteristics attached to our opposed categories, books and life. To “learn a lot from
books” is qualified by the line, “Thrill ride to second hand living.” Books are, thus, life at one remove, a second
hand as opposed to first hand life. If I
read the life of Napoleon or Madonna I live their lives second hand in some
simulated form. If I read about the
Battle of the Somme I couldn’t say I was actually there at the battle. In the same way, if I read about some
fictional character, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlow as he pursues the answer
to some mystery set in the mean streets of 1920s Los Angeles, I am living a
life second hand—but it is a second hand life that was never lived first
hand. There is something intrinsically second hand about books,
whether they emulate a first hand life or just evoke a fictional one. Fiction, we learn in the fourth line of the
quotation, is “more forgiving” than “life,” which is described (with
characteristic relish) as “deadly.”
There’s no doubt about this, of course, life is, at its most basic and
essential level, deadly. The truest
(most consistent) aspect of life is that it comes to an end, usually
unpredictably. It is unforgiving in that
sense. It is also unforgiving in another
sense. In the sense of its never giving
up on its throwing unexpected contingencies under your feet—I mean how was I to
know that the carburetor would fail this morning, and now this knock on the
door?—life consistently excludes our attempts to calculate it. Fiction, on the other hand, can be remarkably
comforting in its well-formed and consoling patterns, its tidy oppositions and
structural consistency. We judge our
allegorical reading not by its adaequatio
to actual life, which let’s face it can be a mess, but by its internal
consistency. Fiction can give us the
sense that there are laws and rules to the game, while in actual life events
and organizations seem arbitrary and often unfair. Like fiction, history, philosophy, theology
and other types of book that attempt to address the absence of system and order
in life do so by supplying one where it is actually
lacking. Even discourses that adhere to
the narrowest (strictest and thus most true) criteria of adaequatio, the empirical sciences, do so at the cost of
considerable exclusion. An empirical
science must deal only with what is possible and actual and must do so in a way
that produces maximal predictability.
These criteria provide a very powerful resource in the development of
knowledge but the cost has been a vast blindness to the conditions that make
such resources possible. Until
scientific theory can cope with a wider and less stable notion of truth, until knowledge can build
unpredictability into its understanding of existence and knowledge, it will
remain blind to its own conditions. The
only way forward is one that can engage seriously with what has always been
regarded as the second hand nature of
books (regarded as a particular
example of representation generally) in relation to life. It is easy to see that
life too tends to be governed to a
very large extent by structures—governments, families, schools and other
institutions, which are more often characterized by their own internal
consistency—rules (“the rules of this house”), laws and just the ordinary
etiquette of conventional habits (leading people to say things like “it just
doesn’t seem right” when they are transgressed), than by anything outside them
that might be considered as, say, natural.
I have already pointed out that between the book and the life we may explore a complex if only
ever partially perceptible realm in which a number of structuring principles
and conditions combine to organise our experiences and actions generally. These structuring principles and conditions
take the form neither of an unfolding life yet to be represented in a memory or
an account, nor of a finished book, words on a page or set in stone. That is because they are the principles upon which we understand our lives and
books. But as soon as those principles
are brought into the open—that is, communicated or written down in some form or
another—the communication or writing is already a second hand version, to be
interpreted and thus subject to the rules of interpretation, whatever they
happen to be (and adaequatio is not
much help here). It seems always
necessary to have passed through some second hand structure (whether thought of
as fiction or fact, fingo or verum) in order to arrive at either the
book or the life. The structure or
possibility of memory must precede the life to be remembered. Otherwise we’d remember nothing. What that means is that the life appears to
us only within the structures of representation, which make further
representations possible. Furthermore,
we cannot reduce these structures of representation to the historical
institutions that so seem to govern them—the family, school, church, state,
nation etc. for they too are governed just as much by the unpredictable life
that they seem set in place to manipulate and tame.
The other pages on this website chart arguments that have in
recent years attempted to engage with what I have called this in between realm which structures our
experience both of books and life. The
history of philosophical thought has always attempted to locate its first
principles in some more stable realm, a transcendent one very often, where
truths remain unchanging and eternal.
There have been numerous attempts to outline the rules and the law of
such a realm, in metaphysics, logic, mathematics and theology, to name a
few. It is not until very recently that
thinkers have turned to the medium—the between
of the two poles of human experience, life and representation, to locate what
was formerly regarded as being beyond experience, that is, the truth of life
and representation. However this turn to
mediation as the fundamental ground could not have taken place without a systematic
re-reading of the tradition, a re-reading that refuses to extricate the logic of philosophical thought from its historical evolution. The consequences of this refusal include
radical rethinking about both logic
and history. What we find is not development, as such, but
repetition. The classical notion of truth is repeatedly broken into two opposing parts—truth and its
representation, which can thus only be measured according to the making equal
or adaequatio of representation with
that which is represented—the original life, or presence. However,
representation will not be so tamed, as we shall discover in the chapters that
follow. Instability, always excessive to
adaequatio, consistently makes
trouble for the equation. This is
especially the case where whatever is supposed to be represented has departed
the coop (a god or a benevolent monarch).
Sometimes the departed thing (res
or “something” in Latin) has never in living memory been present yet a
representation must nonetheless be made.
Somehow the structure of representation can do this (witness any number
of mythologies in world history). But
not without an unstable excess that is always and unavoidably “more than” just
re-presentation. The “more than” can
always be regarded as superfluous, yet it is the superfluous aspects that make
representation possible in the first place (or second place if we are
strict). So representation (already in
opposition to truth, which governs the relation between representations and
things or books and life) has to be divided into two again. There is representation governed by truth—adaequatio—and representation excessive
to truth—or fingo. The Greeks, for instance, used two important
words that characterize the repetition of this distinction between truth and
representation. They opposed logos to mythos. The first is a kind
of discourse or account and is consistently connected to notions of truth, not
to mention logic, which gets its name from the logos along with all the sciences that take the logos as their suffix: geology,
sociology, psychology, etc. The second
means plot or story and is consistently associated with the fictions that take
their name from mythos, the myths or
stories that speak the truth only by allegory.
One of the most famous statements in world literature is
found originally in Greek. The first
sentence of St John’s Gospel is as follows: “In the beginning was the Word, and
the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
The Greek sentence runs like this:
en arch hn o logoV kai o logoV hn proV
ton qeon kai qeoV hn o logoV
In the beginning (arche)
was the word (logos). We still do not know how to interpret
this. Logos is a very complicated word itself and doesn’t just mean word
in any simple sense. The Latin
translates logos as verbum, which is supposedly divided
between word and idea. The idea remains the
same (presumably) while different forms of the word are used (logos, verbum, word, idea) to denote
it. If not then translation would be
impossible—but it is possible so something must remain the same. The sense that “something remains the same”
supports the argument (and 2000 odd years of Christian teaching maintains this)
that “the word” means the truth, in the transcendent sense, and that this
transcendent truth is God. However the
distinction implicit in the word (verbum)
between word and idea repeats the form of the distinction we started with—that
between book and life or representation and actuality, and it does so on the
basis of an implicit notion of adequatio. The implicit notion is made explicit in that
St John’s Gospel (as with each of the other three) is an account of a concrete
event, the crucifixion and resurrection of the Son of God (a kind of
biographical history). But this is a
fragile point because St John is writing 150 years after the event is supposed
to have happened and, as an apparently Gnostic and allegorical writer (see his Revelations for the really wild stuff),
may not be writing in as historical a style as some have believed. If the word must be “made equal” to the idea,
then the trouble here is that we have no idea.
All we have is the word, and that might mean anything (other than making
equal, which would just be a tautology—making “making equal” equal to
itself). If by “word” (logos) we chose instead to understand the structure of signification (rather
than the thing signified) then we’d make better sense of the otherwise
enigmatic statement, “In the beginning was the word.” Before everything else was the ability to
represent—representability. Word is divided between the visible or
audible word and “something signified.”
The “something” now must rather obviously be left open, at least to a
certain extent, or we’d never be able to use any words at all in any of the
ways we always actually do—to mean particular things in particular
circumstances. The price we pay for
meaning is that we must be governed to a large extent by the powerful
institutions that regulate it. These do
not just govern particular meanings but rather they govern the frameworks of
meaning. In fact because they don’t
govern particular meanings very tightly we have a relative independence with
respect to them, which allows me, for instance, to debate the meaning of St
John with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Critical theory is consistently marked by attempts, which
are very often contradictory, to draw attention to the frameworks of both
meaning and action. Why are these
attempts so contradictory? Well you might ask this, impatiently, and quite
right too, why should things be so
undetermined? The point is this: in
keeping what is undetermined in focus (though never literally “in sight”) we
bring the more determined structures into view.
One of the most influential attempts to do this belongs with the German
philosopher Martin Heidegger, who, between the late 1920s and into the 1970s
brought a singular way of questioning to bear on the intellectual world. His method was to concentrate almost
exclusively on the word being.
A being is something that exists, something that is.
The word is a noun produced from a verb that says nothing more of
something than that it just is (the
verb to be). The very least that we can say about anything
at all is that it is. And that is not yet saying very much, if
anything. But we must assume at least
that before we can say anything else about it at all. So beings
denote things that are. And, thus, it can be said that beings have a
relation to their being. This last term is both absurdly trivial and
extre